by David Weber
Sergeant Gahrdaner dropped his own opponent with a two-handed blow and then shoved the king unceremoniously aside, taking his place at the head of the ladder. Haarahld grimaced, but he knew better than to argue, and he fell back, panting heavily as he watched his bodyguard's back.
The aftercastle was an isolated island of resistance, and it couldn't hold much longer. Haarahld hadn't seen Tryvythyn die, but he'd seen the captain's body, along with those of at least three of Royal Charis' lieutenants. Midshipman Marshyl was down, as well, lying across the body of Major Byrk, the commander of the flagship's Marines. Gahrdaner was the last of Haarahld's guardsmen still on his feet, and the knot of defenders around the king was contracting steadily under the unremitting savagery of their attackers.
Midshipman Aplyn stood beside him, his face pale and tight with terror. Yet the boy's eyes were determined, and he clutched a seaman's cutlass in both hands, like a two-handed sword. He hovered there, as if trapped between the compulsion to fling himself forward and the desperate need to live, and Haarahld released his grip on the half-pike to grip the boy's shoulder, instead.
Aplyn jerked as if he'd just been stabbed, then whipped around to look up at his king.
"Stay with me, Master Aplyn," Haarahld said. "We'll have work enough soon."
* * *
Dreadnought smashed into the tangle of grappled galleys. Gwylym Manthyr wasn't worrying about damage to his ship—not now. He refused to reduce sail until the very last moment, and wood splintered and screamed as he drove his ship squarely into Doomwhale's starboard side
Dreadnought's bowsprit loomed over the galley's waist, driving forward until her jibbom shattered against Royal Charis' taller side. Her cutwater sliced into Doomwhale's hull, crushing timbers and frames. Her entire foremast, already weakened by the topgallant mast's fall and two other hits, just above deck level, toppled forward, crashing across her target in an avalanche of shattered wood, torn cordage, and canvas. The Marines and seamen in the foremast fighting top went with it, and the main topgallant mast and topmast came toppling down, as well.
Men stumbled, fell, went to their knees, as the impact slammed through both ships. Others were crushed by the falling masts. But then every one of Dreadnought's surviving Marines was back on his feet. They stormed forward, dodging through the broken spars and rigging, muskets firing, and crashed into the backs of Corisandian boarders still pushing towards Royal Charis. Gleaming bayonets thrust savagely, then withdrew, shining red, and Marine boots trampled the bodies underfoot as they drove furiously onward.
Even as the Marines charged, Merlin went bounding forward along the starboard hammock nettings, katana in one hand, wakazashi in the other. Cayleb, Ahrnahld Falkhan, and the prince's other bodyguards charged on his heels, but they were merely human, and he left them far behind.
Most of the wreckage had gone to port, and the two or three seamen who got in his way might as well have stood in the path of a charging dragon. They went flying as he slammed past them, and then he launched himself in a prodigious leap across at least twenty-five feet of trapped water, churning in the triangle between the two locked hulls.
He landed all alone on Doomwhale's deck amid a solid mass of Corisandians. Three of them had seen him coming and managed to turn around in time to face him . . . which made them the first to die.
* * *
Sergeant Gahrdaner went down with a pikehead in his thigh. He pitched forward to the maindeck, and the swords and boarding axes were waiting as he fell.
Howling Corisandians stormed up the ladder he'd held, and the remaining handful of Charisians fell back to the after rail, forming a final, desperate ring around their king. For a fleeting instant, there was a gap between them and their enemies as the Corisandians funneled up the two ladders they'd finally taken.
Haarahld had lost his helmet somewhere along the way, and the wind was cold on his sweat-soaked hair. He and Midshipman Aplyn were the only officers still on their feet, and he heard his last defenders' harsh, gasping exhaustion. He looked at their enemies, and for a moment, he considered yielding to save his men's lives. But then he saw the madness in the Corisandians' eyes. They were in the grip of the killing rage which had brought them this far; even if they realized he was trying to offer his surrender, they would probably refuse to accept it.
I ought to come up with something noble to say. The thought flashed through his brain, and to his own amazement, he actually chuckled. Aplyn heard it and glanced up at him, and Haarahld smiled down at the white-faced boy.
"Never mind, Master Aplyn," he said, almost gently. "I'll explain later."
And then the Corisandians charged.
* * *
Merlin Athrawes crossed Doomwhale in an explosion of bodies, then vaulted up onto Royal Charis' deck and charged aft, killing as he came.
The Corisandians who found themselves in his path had no concept of what they faced. Very few of them had time to realize that they didn't.
He was, quite literally, a killing machine, a whirling vortex of impossibly sharp steel driven by the strength of ten mortal men. His blades cut through flesh, armor, pike shafts, and cutlasses, and no one could face him and live. Bodies and pieces of bodies flew away from him in spraying patterns of blood and severed limbs, and he went through his enemies like an avalanche, more hampered by their corpses than by their weapons.
But there were hundreds of those enemies between him and Royal Charis' aftercastle.
* * *
Cayleb couldn't follow Merlin's leap. No one could have, but he and his bodyguards continued their own charge along the hammock nettings. Faircaster managed to get in front of the prince somehow, and the burly Marine led the way onto Doomwhale. The Marines already aboard the galley recognized the prince and his bodyguards, and they redoubled their efforts, fighting to stay between him and his enemies.
They failed.
Cayleb, Faircaster, and Ahrnahld Falkhan were the point of the Charisian wedge hammering its way across Doomwhale to Royal Charis, and the sword Merlin had called "Excalibur" flashed in the crown prince's hand as it tasted blood for the first time.
* * *
The Corisandians hit the thin ring of Marines and seamen protecting Haarahld. For a few incredible moments, the defendeus held, throwing back their enemies. But then one or two of them went down, and Corisandians flooded through the gaps.
The Charisians gave ground. They had to. They broke up into small knots, fighting back to back, dying, still trying desperately to protect the king.
Haarahld braced himself against the after rail, bad knee afire with the anguish of supporting his weight, and his sword hissed. He cut down an attacking seaman, then grunted under a hammer-blow impact as a Corisandian soldier swung the spiked-beak back of a boarding ax into his chest with both hands. That awl-like spike was specifically designed to punch through armor, but it rebounded, leaving his breastplate unmarked, and the Corisandian gawked in disbelief as Haarahld's sword drove through his throat.
He fell aside, and for a moment, there was a gap in front of the king. He looked up and saw a Corisandian with a steel-bowed arbalest. Somehow, the man had actually managed to respan the weapon before he leapt up onto the aftercastle bulwark. Now he aimed directly at Haarahld.
"Your Majesty!"
Hektor Aplyn had seen the arbalest as well. Before Haarahld could move, the boy had flung himself in front of him, offering his own body to protect his king.
"No!" Haarahld shouted. He released the after rail, his left hand darted out and caught the back of Aplyn's tunic, and he whirled, yanking the midshipman back and spinning to interpose the backplate of his cuirass.
The arbalest bolt struck him squarely in the back and screamed aside, baffled by the battle steel plate. He felt its hammering impact, then gasped with pain as something else bit into his right thigh, just above the knee.
At least it's not the good leg!
The thought flashed through his mind as he turned back towards the fight. The Corisa
ndian seaman who'd wounded him drew back his boarding pike with a snarl, shortening for another thrust, but Aplyn hurled himself past Haarahld with a sob. The slightly built boy darted in below the pike, driving his cutlass with both hands, and the Corisandian screamed as the blade opened his belly.
He collapsed, clutching at the mortal wound, and Aplyn staggered back beside the king.
They were the only two Charisians still on their feet, and Haarahld thrust desperately into the chest of a seaman coming at Aplyn from the right, even as the sobbing midshipman slashed at another Corisandian threatening the king from his left. The boy cried out as a sword cut into his left shoulder. He nearly fell, but he kept his feet, still slashing with the heavy cutlass. A sword cut bounced off Haarahld's mail sleeve, and the king slashed that seaman aside, as well, yet he felt himself weakening as blood pumped down his right leg.
* * *
Some instinct warned the Corisandian soldier at the top of Royal Charis' starboard aftercastle ladder. His head turned, and he had one instant to gape at the bloodsoaked apparition which had suddenly vaulted all the way from the deck below to the bulwark beside him. Then he died as a battle steel katana went through his neck in a fan of blood.
"Charis!"
Merlin's deep voice boomed the battle cry, cutting through all of the other noises, and then he was onto the aftercastle itself. One or two of the men facing him managed to launch defensive blows of their own. He ignored them, letting them rebound from his armor as he hacked his way towards the king.
"Charis!"
He carved a corridor of bodies through the Corisandians, sapphire eyes merciless, katana and wakazashi trailing sprays of blood, and panic spread from him like a plague.
And then, somehow, he was through the final barrier between him and Haarahld. He whirled, facing back the way he'd come, and for a long, breathless moment, not one of the forty or fifty Corisandians still on the aftercastle dared to attack.
Behind him, Haarahld went to his left knee, sword drooping, and Aplyn thrust himself in front of the king.
"Take him, you fools!" a voice shouted, and the Duke of Black Water shouldered through the frozen ranks of his surviving boarders.
His armor was hacked and battered, and he bled from half a dozen shallow cuts of his own. His sword's point dribbled tears of blood, and his eye were mad, but his hoarse voice crackled with passion.
"Take him!" he bellowed again, and charged.
His men howled and followed him, hammering straight at Merlin, and Merlin met them with a storm of steel. He never moved. His feet might have been bolted to the bloody planking, and his eyes never blinked.
Black Water had one instant to realize he faced something totally beyond his experience, and then he, too, went down under Merlin's merciless steel. At least a dozen more of his men fell to the same blades. Most of them never even had the chance to scream. They were like a stream of water, hurling itself against a boulder only to splash from its unyielding strength.
No man could enter Merlin's reach and live, and after ten shrieking seconds of slaughter, the survivors drew back in terror from the breastwork of bodies he'd built before the wounded King of Charis.
* * *
Hektor Aplyn felt something touch the back of his leg.
He whirled, cutlass raised, then froze. It had been the king's hand, and Aplyn's eyes widened in horror as he saw the steadily spreading pool of blood around him.
"Your Majesty!"
The boy fell to his knees, eyes searching frantically for the king's wound, but Haarahld shook his head. The motion was terrifyingly weak.
"I'm sorry, Your Majesty," the bleeding young midshipman sobbed. "I'm sorry! You shouldn't have pulled me out of the way!"
"Nonsense," the king said. His voice was weak as his life flowed out of him with the blood still pumping from the deep wound in his thigh. "It's a king's duty to die for his subjects, Master Aplyn."
"No!" Aplyn shook his head.
"Yes," Haarahld said. It was amazing, a distant corner of his mind thought. There was no pain anymore, not even from his knee. Not physical pain, at any rate, and he reached out an arm which had become impossibly heavy and put it around the weeping boy rocking on his knees beside him. About the child who had become so important to him . . . and for whom he might yet do one more service, as a king should.
"Yes," he whispered, leaning forward until his forehead touched Aplyn's. "Yes, it is. And it's a subject's duty to serve his new king, Hektor. Can you do that for me?"
"Yes," the boy whispered back through his tears. "Yes, Your Majesty."
"It's been . . . an honor . . . Master Aplyn," Haarahld Ahrmahk murmured, and then his eyes closed. He slumped forward against Aplyn, and the boy wrapped his arms around him, put his face down on his armored shoulder, and sobbed.
APRIL, YEAR OF GOD 892
I
Royal Palace,
Tranjyr
King Gorjah III's expression was stony as Edymynd Rustmyn, the Baron of Stonekeep, stepped into the council chamber.
"You sent for me, Your Majesty?" Stonekeep said calmly, keeping his face expressionless, despite the other two men already waiting with the king. Baron White Ford sat on Gorjah's left, but the Earl of Thirsk sat to the king's right, in the place of honor.
"Yes, I did," Gorjah said, and his voice was much colder than Stonekeep's had been. "Be seated."
The king pointed at the chair at the far end of the council table, and the tall, silver-haired Stonekeep seated himself in it, then cocked his head interrogatively.
"How may I serve you, Your Majesty?" he asked.
Gorjah glowered at the man who was both his first councillor and the man in charge of his own spies. Under normal circumstances, Stonekeep was one of the very few men who enjoyed the king's near total confidence, which made him far too valuable to sacrifice. But these circumstances were far from normal, and Gorjah wondered just how clearly the baron understood that.
"I've just been discussing certain matters with Earl Thirsk," the king said coolly. "In particular, he's been kind enough to share with me what Prince Cayleb had to say to him. Just before he put him ashore on Armageddon Reef."
Stonekeep simply nodded silently, but his eyes were intent. Thirsk's arrival in Tranjyr was hardly a secret from him, although the rest of the court had yet to discover it. King Gorjah's senior councillors had known for almost two five-days, ever since White Ford's King Gorjah II had limped back into port, that Cayleb had managed to intercept the combined fleet off Armageddon Reef with disastrous consequences. Stonekeep had argued successfully in favor of keeping that news to themselves until they knew precisely how disastrous those consequences might have been.
Apparently, they'd been even more disastrous than Stonekeep had feared from White Ford's initial reports.
"Cayleb," Gorjah continued, pronouncing the name as if it were a curse, "took and destroyed every ship remaining under Earl Thirsk's command. It would seem the six galleys which have so far returned, and the single store ship upon which Earl Thirsk sailed to Tranjyr, are the only survivors of the entire combined fleet."
This time, despite all of Stonekeep's formidable self-control, he blanched.
"The question which exercises my mind at this particular moment," the king said, "is precisely how Cayleb and Haarahld managed this miraculous interception of theirs. Would you have any thoughts on that subject, Edymynd?"
White Ford simply looked at the first councilor thoughtfully, but Thirsk's eyes could have bored holes in a block of stone. Which, coupled with the fact that the Dohlaran was present at all for what was becoming an increasingly unpleasant conversation, warned Stonekeep that things were about to get ugly. Or, perhaps, more ugly.
"Your Majesty," he said reasonably, "I'm not a naval man. The deployment and utilization of fleets is far beyond my own area of competence. I'm sure Baron White Ford or Earl Thirsk is far better qualified than I am to suggest answers to your question."
A slight flicker in White Fo
rd's eyes, and the tightening of Thirsk's mouth, suggested he might have chosen a better response.
"Interestingly enough," Gorjah said, smiling thinly, "Gahvyn, the Earl, and I have already discussed that point. According to them, Cayleb couldn't possibly have done it."
Stonekeep considered that for a moment, then looked Gorjah straight in the eye.
"Your Majesty, I can only assume from what you've said, and the fact that you've said it to me, that you believe I may have been in some way responsible for what happened. So far as I know, however, I had virtually nothing to do with any of the decisions about the fleet's organization or movement. I'm afraid I'm at something of a loss to understand how I might have contributed to this disaster."