Queen of Demons (22 page)

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Authors: David Drake

BOOK: Queen of Demons
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“And don't ever argue with my orders again!” the false Nonnus. added in the real man's voice but not his manner.
Sharina went over the railing in a clean dive and stroked for the volcanic island. Nothing she'd seen there looked edible. There might not even be freshwater, but she had to get away.
Her tunic dragged at her. She would've alerted the false Nonnus if she'd removed the garment before she dived, and she didn't dare struggle in the water at the vessel's side while she stripped it off. She didn't think the crew would shoot arrows or javelins after her, but one of them might well have knocked her silly with an oar.
The thin wool fabric wasn't a serious impediment. Her powerful crawl stroke had brought her most of the way to shore before the men could organize their response.
The real Nonnus swam like one of the seals he'd hunted as a youth on the islands north of the main archipelago. The man who wore Nonnus' semblance only shouted orders while the coxswain bellowed a conflicting set. Both men were trying to turn the vessel after the escaping girl, but they were going about the process in different fashions.
Few sailors could swim. If one of the oarsmen had been the exception, and if he'd had the initiative to dive over the side after Sharina, well—
She had memories of how Nonnus coped with danger. And she had his keen-edged Pewle knife as well.
Because Sharina lifted her face between strokes only enough to gasp a mouthful of air, her fingers touched the shore before she saw it. She scrambled out of the water on all fours, dodging lobelias as she ran uphill. Her tanned limbs and the wet brown wool of her tunic were invisible against the background in this light, though her blond hair would be a beacon once the moon rose.
Sharina stayed below the crest as she worked to the left
around the island. The shrubbery didn't have thorns. Basalt fractured with sharper edges than, say, limestone, but Sharina's feet hadn't been in the water long enough for her soles to soften.
She'd have run across knife blades if that was what it took to escape from the monster wearing her friend's face.
The dispatch boat was a dark mass between two lines of oar-foam. It had turned in its own length and was putting in to shore. The false Nonnus was ordering the crew to fan out across the island as soon as they grounded.
When Sharina saw open water to the north she realized that the island was a narrow spine rather than the quarter-mile circle she'd hoped for. The twenty oarsmen could form a sufficiently tight cordon to find her by sweeping from one narrow end to the other.
They'd have to get organized first, of course, but the false Nonnus had shown he was capable of intelligent planning. And he was a wizard as well … .
The dispatch vessel grated onto the island. They must have touched parallel to the steep shore instead of driving straight in. For the sake of speed, the vessel's hull and frames were as thin as possible. Sharina had hoped they might break the ship's back when they landed, but she knew better than to expect that from a trained crew.
“Brace her to starboard!” the coxswain cried. “Use your oars!”
What Sharina expected was that she'd be recaptured. They'd carry her bound in the bottom of the vessel the rest of the way to wherever they were going.
The only chance she saw now was to get away from the island. Swimming outward would probably be suicide, but if she had a float of some sort for support there was at least a chance that she could reach another miniature landfall unseen in the gathering darkness. By now only the stars distinguished the sky from the sea below.
As the shouting sailors formed a line on the other side of the island, Sharina began to comb the northern shore for driftwood. The groundsels grew within a few feet of
the water, though the lobelias seemed to be less resistant to salt. Fleshy leaves brushed her like dead men's fingers. She jogged through them, bent over to scan the ground more closely.
A figure stood in front of her. Her first thought was that a basalt outcrop had gotten to its feet, but it was a man—a huge man, holding vertically a spear whose blade was a hand's breadth wide. A weapon like that would let a victim's life out as swiftly as the heart pumped.
Sharina had the Pewle knife in her hand. She slashed upward. The big man's right foot moved in a smooth arc to meet her wrist, spinning Sharina away. Her forearm was numb, but she didn't drop the knife.
Sharina hit on her right side, half-cushioned by a giant groundsel. She twisted to get her feet under her as she tried to take the knife in her left hand.
The man planted the steel-capped butt of his spear in Sharina's solar plexus, paralyzing her diaphragm. She doubled up, unable to breathe.
She tried to hold the knife, but the man knelt beside her and plucked it from her fingers. He wore garments of leather with an unfamiliar, reptilian smell.
“Where'd you come by a Pewle knife, missie?” the man asked as he examined the weapon. His tone was conversational, but he pitched his voice too low to be heard more than a few feet away.
Sharina still struggled to breathe. “From a man who'd have you for supper if he were still alive!” she gasped.
The big man chuckled. “Then he was a right good man,” he said without rancor. He handed the knife back to her, hilt first.
“My name's Hanno,” he went on. “Now, it doesn't seem to me that the folks on the other side here are any friends to you. Is that so?”
“I'll die before I let them take me again,” Sharina whispered. She put the Pewle knife back in its sheath, though she had to use both hands to do so. She trembled from exertion and the shocking blow to her abdomen.
“Now, missie,” the stranger said. “I'm on my way back to Bight from Valles where I sold my horn. If you don't choose to stay here, you can come with me—but I warn you, you'll be living in a hunting cabin and I won't make another trip to Valles for six months or better.”
“Let's go,” Sharina said as she tried to stand. “One of the men's a wizard.”
Hanno picked Sharina up in the crook of his left arm and strode down the shore. A twenty-foot dory, slimmer but otherwise similar to the two-man fishing boats that put out from Barca's Hamlet, was drawn into a notch in the basalt. Hanno set Sharina aboard, laid his long spear beside the crossed oars amidships, and shoved the vessel out to sea with a lurch and a grunt.
Hanno was carrying six months of supplies with him. The dory's hull fore and aft was packed with parcels wrapped in oilcloth and fastened securely with a web of horsehair ropes. Sharina could only guess at the weight the big man had just shifted into the water, but it must be on the order of three or four tons.
Hanno splashed after the boat for several paces, then climbed in over the upswept stern when they were out far enough that his weight didn't ground the keel. Sharina had her breath back. She squeezed aside as Hanno walked over the cargo and dropped onto one of the two thwarts amidships. The dory continued to bob away from the shore.
Hanno was an agile man—not just “agile for his size.” Sharina didn't remember ever having met a man bigger than this hunter. He was taller than Garric and almost as massively built as Cashel.
He set the oars in the rowlocks. Sharina pinned them before Hanno could do so himself. He nodded in approval and perhaps surprise, then stroked outward.
“They have a twenty-oared ship,” Sharina said in a low voice. She could hear sailors calling to one another and the false Nonnus trying to shout orders to all of them.
“They do for now,” Hanno said. He sounded amused
rather than concerned. He turned the dory parallel to the shore. His oarstrokes were powerful, but they made no more sound than the ordinary slap of water against itself.
They were far enough out that Sharina saw the island as a black mass rather than a place. Lights began to bloom on the other side of the spine. The false Nonnus was passing out rushlights, pithy reed stems soaked in wax and ignited. They gave a pale, flaring illumination.
Sharina hunched instinctively. Hanno chuckled and said, “That's just made us safer. Them lights won't show anything beyond arm's length and it'll waste the fools' night vision besides. If they knew what they were doing, they'd spread out and hunker down to listen for you moving.”
He chuckled again. “Of course, that wouldn't help them now neither,” he added.
Hanno turned the dory. They'd rounded the tip of the little island and were headed back up the south side, staying about a bowshot from the shore. Sharina could tell land from sea only by the faint margin of foam where the two met.
Hanno rowed effortlessly, maneuvering by backing water with the one oar while the other took a full sweep. The dory didn't have a mast or even a mast partner on the false keel. He must row all the way from Bight to Ornifal and back … . Perhaps he set a triangular boat sail in the bow to run when the wind was dead astern.
A line of rushlights winked across the spine and over it. The lights began to move together toward the east end of the island, leaving the west for a second pass if necessary.
The crew had lit a small bonfire on the beach, just inshore of the dispatch vessel. Sharina saw one man or perhaps two tending the fire before the vessel's long hull blocked her vision.
Hanno grunted and pulled the dory's bow toward the island again. Sharina watched the hull of the silhouetted dispatch vessel loom past the oarsman. She could hear the
voices of the men ashore, but only rarely was a word intelligible.
Sharina rubbed her aching abdominal muscles, then rested her fingers on the hilt of the Pewle knife. Starlight gleamed faintly on Hanno's teeth as he grinned at her.
Only at the last moment did Hanno glance over his shoulder. He backed water with one oar, then both, and brought the dory alongside the stern of the grounded dispatch vessel. He shipped his oars and touched a finger to his lips for silence. Sharina nodded curtly.
The false Nonnus' ship was tilted with the keel in the water and the port side lying along the shore. Because the ground sloped upward, any kind of a breeze could have flopped the vessel to starboard and possibly capsized it, but the air of the Inner Sea was normally dead still at sunset and sunrise.
The anchor hung from a rope stopper in the dispatch vessel's stern. The stock was iron, but the shank and arms were cypress wood bound with lead hoops for weight.
Hanno stood. The dory quivered, but the big man kept his weight centered. He gripped the anchor with one hand and severed the salt-encrusted stopper with a thrust of his spear.
The anchor's weight—as much as Sharina or perhaps even a man of middling size—dropped into Hanno's hand. The dory bobbed furiously, banging its starboard gunwale against the larger vessel's hull. Sharina held steady, knowing that if she tried to damp the oscillations she'd interfere with Hanno's own adjustments. The big man knew what he was doing.
A sailor on the other side shouted. “I'll take the spear!” Sharina cried.
Hanno slammed the anchor's lead-wrapped crown through the dispatch vessel just above the keel. The planks were pine and thin for a seagoing ship but were still two fingers' breadth thick. They splintered like glass hitting stone.
Hanno tossed the spear sidearm to Sharina. She was
braced for the weight, but it still felt like she'd caught a falling tree. The seven-foot shaft was oak, and a long steel butt-cap balanced the weight of the broad head.
A sailor carrying a rushlight came around the stern of the dispatch vessel and gaped at them. “What are you doing?” he shouted. He wasn't armed.
Sharina waggled the spear, holding it with both hands. “Get back!” she said. She had no quarrel with the sailors; they were obviously hirelings, not enemies for their own sakes. If the false Nonnus had stepped toward her …
Hanno dragged the anchor out of the hull, then swung it again into the siding like a mace. Frames as well as planking broke at the impact. The dory splashed like a whale broaching, but her beam and the weight of cargo kept her from going over.
The steersman stepped around the dispatch vessel. He carried a short, stiff bow with an arrow already nocked. “Hold the light up!” he ordered the other sailor.
Hanno threw the anchor at him. There was a wet crunch. Man and missile tumbled out of sight. The cable reeved through the anchor ring followed like the body of a striking snake.
Hanno took the oars, facing now toward what had been the stern. Sharina anticipated him, clambering out of the way without losing the big spear. The dory was double-ended and had neither rudder nor sail to impose a direction of movement.
They got under way gradually, the way a rock begins to fall. The weight of cargo made the vessel too massive for even Hanno's strength to accelerate quickly, though fewer than a dozen paired strokes were enough to get them out of sight of the shore.
Rushlights clustered around the dark line of the ship. Sailors shouted. Once Sharina thought she heard the voice of the false Nonnus. She smiled grimly. If he repaired the dispatch vessel's damage in less than a day, he was a wizard indeed.

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