He looked up, just as surprised as his opponent, and met the man’s eyes. No fear this time, no moment of futile hope and extinguished life. The pirate stared at him with eyes that could reflect nothing, the blow having come too swiftly to grant him even the privilege of a horrified death.
He mouthed, ‘No fair.’
And fell to the deck.
The numbness did not flee from Lenk’s limbs, but rather seeped into his body, as water disappearing into the earth. He felt suddenly weak, legs soft under a body suddenly unbearably heavy, breath offensively warm and jagged in his throat.
Slowly, he staggered to his feet. Slowly, he felt the sun again, heard the din of battle. But the warmth was faint, the sounds distant. He could feel the chill, he was aware of it as he was of his own shadow. It seeped away, dissipated into blood that began to run warm, leaving only a single thought given a voice behind.
‘
More.
’
‘What?’ he gasped, his own voice suddenly alien to himself.
‘
More.
’
‘I . . . I don’t—’
‘MORE, YOU IDIOT! THERE’S MORE COMING!’
Argaol’s roar came from the helm with desperation. Lenk glanced up to see four sailors locked in combat with a pair of Cragsmen, desperately trying to keep the blade-wielding pirates away from their captain with their staves. The dark man himself looked directly at Lenk, pointing to the railing.
He shrieked, of course, as he usually did when addressing the young man, but Lenk didn’t hear him. He didn’t need to as he saw two more tattooed men leap from a boarding chain onto the deck. Instead of rushing towards the battle to aid their fellows, they instead cast wary looks about, hungry eyes and bare feet immediately setting off for the companionway.
Evenhands.
‘Damn, damn, damn, damn, damn, damn, damn,
damn
.’
A curse for every step as he charged after the boarders. Ironic, he thought absently as he pushed his way through the melee, that moments ago he was ready to leave the Lord Emissary to die. Then again, it was hardly surprising; so long as he had been hit in the face once today, he might as well get paid for it.
Which wasn’t likely to happen if his employer was gutted below decks.
‘Protect the charter, boys!’ Argaol roared to his own crew. ‘Protect the Lord Emissary! The Gods demand it and smile on us for it!’
Lenk’s pace was quick as he leapt over bodies, side-stepped brawls, darted around stray blades. The battle raged with no clear victor; he passed corpses both familiar and tattooed. But the sailors held, the Cragsmen had not overrun them yet, and the two boarders were not as swift as Lenk was. For a moment, he felt a rush of victory as he drew closer.
For a moment, he thought that maybe the Gods
did
smile upon him.
That belief died with the sudden twist of an ankle and a shriek as he recalled that the Gods loved irony far more than they loved their servants. He hit a patch of red-tinged seawater, his boot slid out from under him and he went sprawling, sword clattering to the deck.
There was barely enough time to spew out a curse before he lunged to his feet, seizing his weapon. Too late; he saw the two boarders vanish into the shadows of the companionway, laughter anticipating the impending looting ringing in their wake. Once inside, they would easily lose any pursuit in the maze of cargo holds and cabins, chopping up passengers at will, cutting and pillaging in a few breaths. And he was too late to stop it.
Too late, too late, too late, too late, too—
Stop it! Stop
, he scolded himself as he forced his boots into a run.
Fight first, fear later.
Just as the darkness of the companionway loomed up before him like a gaping maw, he was forced to skid to a halt. Something squirmed in the shadows. Someone screamed.
He threw himself to the side just in time to see the body of one of the invaders sail through the air, landing limply on the deck with his neck twisted at an angle at which necks clearly were not meant to twist.
‘G-GET AWAY FROM ME!’ the remaining pirate squealed from inside. He came shrieking out of the gloom, weapon lost, mouth gibbering. ‘MONSTER! THEY’VE GOT A GODS-DAMNED DRAG—’
His scream died in his throat, his feet torn from the deck as a great red arm ending in a set of brutal claws reached out from the darkness to wrap about his neck. The hand tightened, the sound of bones creaking between its massive fingers. Lenk cringed, but only for a moment. He knew the smile that then spread across his face was unwholesome, but he could hardly help himself.
The sight of Gariath brought out all sorts of loathsome emotions in people.
The dragonman emerged from the companionway, holding the writhing pirate aloft with an arm rippling with crimson muscle. He surveyed the battle through black eyes, his captive a mere afterthought.
The expression across his long snout was unreadable as he swung his horned head back and forth. The ear-frills at the side of his head twitched in time with the leathery wings folded on his massive back, as if stretching after a long nap.
‘I thought you weren’t coming up,’ Lenk said.
Gariath looked down at the young man, who only came up to the lowest edge of his titanic chest. He sneered, far more unpleasantly than either Lenk or Kataria could ever hope to, baring rows of sharp, ivory teeth.
‘It was stifling below,’ he grunted. ‘I came up for air and find humans dying.’ He glanced over the melee. ‘I can’t say I’m not pleasantly surprised.’
He became aware of the captive pirate thrashing in his hand, pounding at the thick red wrist wrapped in a silver bracer. His scaly eye-ridges furrowed as he turned to the companionway.
His snarl was short and businesslike as he slammed the pirate’s face against the wooden doorframe, staining it red. His roar was loud and boastful as he drove it forwards again, bone fragments splintering with the frame. His snort was quick and derisive as he crushed the pirate once more, reducing a formerly grisly visage to featureless red pulp. Already bored with his now-unmoving prey, the dragonman dropped him to the deck, raising a clawed foot to rest upon his head.
‘Who needs to die?’ he asked.
‘Pirates,’ Lenk replied.
Gariath ran his obsidian glare from one end of the ship to the other in long, patient stares.
‘Which ones are the pirates?’
‘What do you mean, “Which ones are the pirates?”’
‘You all look the same to me,’ Gariath grunted, folding his arms over his chest. ‘Ugly, stupid, smelly.’
‘So look for the ugliest, stupidest and smelliest ones and give it your best guess,’ Lenk replied. ‘Are you going to help or not?’
The dragonman’s thick red legs tensed. His weight shifted to the foot resting on the pirate’s skull. Lenk winced and turned away at the sound of something cracking, the sight of something grey and sticky oozing out onto the blood-soaked deck. Gariath snorted.
‘Maybe.’
Contrary to what her elders had said of the teeming race, Kataria didn’t find humans entirely awful. The only thing that truly annoyed her about them was their grossly underrated ability to adapt. It was a subject of routine discussion amongst those few shicts who grew old enough to stop killing their round-eared foes and start theorising about better ways to kill them.
‘
They’re just monkeys, of course
,’ it had often been said. ‘
They spend their whole lives searching for food and, when they don’t find it, they just run around in circles, smelling their fingers and eating their own scat.
’
In the year since she had followed a silver-haired man out of the woods, she had been keeping track of her own addenda that she might someday offer by the fire. And, as the possibility of her living that long quickly began to dwindle, she thought, not for the first time, that the elders’ description neglected to mention that, when faced with food, humans proved particularly motivated.
And the Cragsmen surrounding her proved to be particularly clever monkeys.
Should’ve stayed in the rigging
, she told herself,
should’ve climbed back up. Easier target for hatchets, sure, but you could’ve shot more of them.
She had hardly expected them to figure out what arrows were
,
much less corner her against the railing. But they had adapted; they had found her, pursued her, showing the extreme discourtesy of not giving her enough room to shoot them.
And now a trio of them surrounded her, their eyes locked on the gleaming arrowhead that drifted menacingly from body to body.
One shot. One arrow was all that kept them at bay, each one hesitant to rush, to force her to choose him to plant the angry metal seed in. After that, they would be upon her faster than she could pull another one free of her quiver.
Her ears twitched, recalling the threats and declarations they had inflicted upon her from the safety of their ship. Those same threats, that same hunger lurked behind their eyes now, dormant for fear that she would see them in their gazes and extinguish them with an arrow.
The sea roared behind her; the terror of humans was an invitation for her. It would be better that way, she knew, to kill one and then hurl herself into the froth. She would die, certainly, but it was infinitely better than the alternative, better than submitting to the human disease.
A bit late for that, isn’t it?
she asked herself, resentful. She forced that from her head, though, determined to think.
Options were unsurprisingly limited, however: shoot and die in the sea, shoot and die in the arms of a human . . . skip the third party and just shoot herself?
‘
Get down, Kat!
’
She heard Asper’s voice first, Dreadaeleon’s second. The instant she recognised the alien babble emanating from the boy’s mouth, she fell to the deck as her assailants looked to the source.
Then screamed.
Fire roared over her head in a wicked plume, the smell of stray strands of her own hair burning filled her nostrils. The stench of burning flesh, however, quickly overpowered it, just as the angry howl of flame overpowered the shrieks of the Cragsmen. She could feel the deck reverberate as feet thundered past her, carrying walking pyres over the railing to plunge into the water below with a hiss.
She got up, patted her head for any stray flames, then looked at the fast-fading plumes of steam rising from the sea.
That works, too.
‘Are you all right?’ Asper’s voice was joined by the sound of bronze on wood as she dragged Quillian to the shict’s position. ‘One moment. I can check you over as soon as—’
‘Oh, yes, sure, be certain to check her over.’ Dreadaeleon wore a look of ire as he walked beside her, one hand folded neatly behind him, the other flicking embers from his fingers. ‘I mean, it’s not like I did something incredible like
conjure fire from my own body heat
.’
‘Like
that’s
hard,’ Kataria growled. She pointed out to sea. ‘Those don’t count, by the way.’
‘Don’t . . . what?’
‘Only kills you do yourself count. Wizard kills aren’t real kills.’
‘
Real
kills?’ Asper looked up, disgusted. ‘These are human lives we’re taking!’
‘
We?
’ Kataria asked with a sneer. ‘What did you do aside from try to choke me with moral indignation?’
‘I . . .’ The priestess stiffened, looking down with a frown. ‘I can fight.’
‘Don’t waste your breath on a reply, Priestess,’ came a mutter from the deck, ire unimpeded by her barely conscious stagger. Quillian rose to her feet on trembling legs, turning a scowl upon the shict. ‘One can hardly expect in-humans to understand things like mercy and compassion.’
‘What? Your sword is just for show, then?’ Kataria asked, smiling.
Quillian did not smile back, did not even offer a reply.
Perhaps it was the clarity that the hatchet blow had robbed her of that caused the Serrant’s mask of contempt to crack, or perhaps it was that she simply didn’t want to bother keeping it up anymore. But in that moment, the displays of righteous indignation and palls of virtuous disgust fell away from Quillian’s face.
Hate remained in abundance.
It was a pure hate that Kataria had seen before, albeit rarely, a hate that flowed like an ancestral disease. Quillian hated Kataria, hated her mother, hated her father, hated everything with pointed ears as she hated nothing else, not even the pirates swarming about the deck.
‘Go!
GO!
He’ll kill us all!’
Or running, anyway
, she thought as a tattooed blur rushed past her.
The moment of tense readiness collectively and quickly faded into befuddlement as the Cragsmen rushed towards the companions and then, without even looking, right past them. Precious steel was forgotten, wounded men were ignored, terror shone through every inked face. Kataria watched, baffled and wondering whether shooting them in the back counted.