Off Armageddon Reef (99 page)

This time,
Corisande
's mast went down.

Captain Myrgyn's ship slammed alongside
Royal Charis
with a rending, grinding shriek of timbers. Grappling irons flew in both directions; matchlocks, wolves, and cannon thundered; and men screamed and died. Haarahld's flagship had replaced her original broadside falcons with carronades, and the carnage they wreaked splashed
Corisande
's decks with blood.
Royal Charis
' Marines had been issued the new flintlocks, as well, and a deadly volley added its share to the butchery.

For a moment, it looked as if the battle had been decided in that single cataclysmic moment, but then Black Water leapt up onto the aftercastle bulwark, drawn sword flashing in his hand.

“
After me, lads!
” he bellowed, and a savage roar of anger went up from
Corisande
, overpowering even the screams of the wounded.

The duke leapt across the gap between the two ships, landing all alone in an open spot where one of
Corisande
's own guns had heaped the Charisians in a mangled pile of bodies. His boots slipped on the blood-slick deck, and he sprawled backward, which undoubtedly saved his life. The closest Charisian Marines were still turning towards him when the rush of additional boarders from
Corisande
swept over him.

His surviving soldiers and seamen abandoned their own ship, hurling themselves across onto Haarahld's flagship, half-crazed with terror, desperation, and a fiery determination to reach the man whose standard
Royal Charis
flew. They slammed into the defenders like a human tidal wave, and even Charisian Marines were forced to give ground before such fury.

The attackers drove clear across
Royal Charis
' waist, then most of them turned aft, fighting their way towards the aftercastle, while the remainder tried to hold off the Marines counterattacking from the forecastle.

The battle swayed desperately back and forth for several endless minutes, but
Corisande
's people had taken too many casualties before they ever closed, and Charisian Marines were simply the best in the world at this sort of fight. They regained the momentum Black Water's reckless gallantry and courage had won and drove the Corisandians steadily back.

And then, suddenly, the Corisandian galley
Sea Crest
came crashing in on
Corisande
's disengaged side, and a fresh tide of attackers flooded across Black Water's flagship, using her like a bridge, and hurled themselves into the fray.

Cayleb Ahrmahk's face was a mask of grim, savage determination as
Dreadnought
drove into the rear of the disintegrating Corisandian column. He could see the tangled knot of intermixed Charisian and Corisandian galleys coming up quickly on
Dreadnought
's port bow, but at least three more enemy ships had evaded the massed melee. They were charging down on his father's flagship, already engaged with two opponents.

There was no need for him to exhort Captain Manthyr to greater efforts. That was Cayleb's father up there, but it was also Gwylym Manthyr's king, and Merlin, standing behind the two of them, could almost physically feel Manthyr leaning forward, as if to add his own weight to the wind driving his ship.

Yet they could only move so quickly, and
Dreadnought
's guns blazed on either broadside. The only way to reach
Royal Charis
was directly through the Corisandian ships in front of them, and Manthyr took his galleon in among them under full sail, as if she'd been a ten-meter sloop at a racing regatta back on Old Earth.

Guns fired at ranges as low as twenty yards. Flintlocks barked, swivels banged from the fighting tops, and return fire came back from Corisandian wolves, matchlocks, and cannon.

At that range, even the slow-firing Corisandian artillery could inflict dreadful wounds, and one of
Dreadnought
's maindeck guns took a round shot almost directly on its muzzle. The entire gun and carriage flew backward, the gun tube flipping up like a terrestrial dolphin standing on its tail. Then it crashed down, like a two-ton hammer, crushing the members of its crew who hadn't been killed outright by the round shot into gruel.

A section of hammock nettings flew apart as a charge of grapeshot blew through the tightly rolled hammocks stowed there to stop bullets and splinters. Those hammocks had never been intended to stop grapeshot, though, and the deadly missiles killed six Marines and three seamen and wounded five others. Screams told of other casualties, and a round shot chewed a splinter-fringed bite out of the mainmast, but
Dreadnought
's gunners ignored the carnage around them. It wasn't simply courage, nor training—it was also exhaustion. They'd been reduced to automatons, so focused on what they were doing that nothing else was really quite real.

“Fall back!
Fall back to the aftercastle!
”

Captain Tryvythyn's desperate order cut through the chaos as yet another Corisandian galley, the
Doomwhale
, surged alongside
Royal Charis
. His ship was bigger than any of its opponents, with a larger crew and more Marines, but no less than five of the Corisandians had managed to get to grips with him.

The enemy had completely overwhelmed the defenders of
Royal Charis
' forward third. Perhaps half his Marines and a quarter of his seamen were still on their feet aft of the forward hatch, but they were being driven back, step by bloody step, by an ever mounting flood of enemies. Dynzyl Tryvythyn watched their stubborn retreat, and his eyes were desperate. Not with fear for himself, but for the king who stood behind him.

“Hold the ladders!” he shouted. “Hold—”

A musket ball from one of
Doomwhale
's embarked musketeers struck him at the base of the throat. It flung him backwards, and he went down, choking on his own blood as the boots of desperately fighting men stamped all about him.

The King
, he thought.
The King.

And then he died.

Dreadnought
passed down the leeward side of another galley. Her guns savaged the fresh target, and she shuddered as more shots slammed back in reply. Her fore topgallant mast quivered as its shrouds were shot away, then toppled slowly forward to hang like a broken cross, canvas billowing. But then she was past her enemies, her gunports streaming smoke, as she bore down on the galleys grappled to
Royal Charis
at last.

“Lay us alongside!” Cayleb snapped, drawing the sword Merlin had given him, and his eyes blazed coldly.

Duke Black Water stared about wildly. The crews of his galleys were hopelessly intermixed. All unit organization had disappeared into the indescribable confusion of savage hand-to-hand combat, but he found himself briefly behind the battle driving steadily aft.

He didn't understand why he was still alive. His breastplate was battered and scarred from blows he scarcely remembered, and his sword was red to the hilt with the blood of men he hardly recalled killing. He could hear the ongoing thunder of artillery even over the screams and shouts around him, and as he turned to look up into the north, he saw Cayleb's galleons bursting out of the smoke and confusion at last.

They hadn't fought their way through his entire fleet unscathed. He saw missing topmasts and sails pocked and torn by splinters and round shot, saw broken rigging blowing on the wind, saw shot holes in bulwarks and sides, saw bodies lying across hammock nettings and hanging in their fighting tops. But they were still there, still intact, their gunports still streaming smoke, and he bared his teeth in hatred.

He snarled, then began pushing his way through the men about him, elbowing them aside as he forced his way towards
Royal Charis
' beleaguered aftercastle.

A musket ball screamed off Haarahld Ahrmahk's breastplate as he leaned on the half-pike for support with his left hand. He grunted and staggered under the ribsnapping impact, but the ball whined away, leaving not even a dent, only a smear of lead, on Merlin's gift to mark its passing. He held his feet, and his right hand drove his sword into the chest of a Corisandian seaman trying to claw his way up the ladder from the maindeck. The man fell back with a bubbling scream, blood spraying from his mouth and nose, and Haarahld grunted at the fresh stab of pain from his bad knee as he recovered.

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.