Shallows of Night - 02 (36 page)

Freidal was screaming, a loathsome, shivering sound filled with pain and fear. His head drew back, instinctively seeking release. But the terrible weapon lanced forward, inexorable as metal, the alien hide inimical to human flesh. Impaling him. Then the fingers curled, ripping at the soft viscera, digging with enormous strength, and with a herculean jerking motion, they broke through the cheekbones, stripped the flesh from the Saardin’s face.

The sounds came again, ceaseless, like waves of fire, an envelope of agony, a hot tomb closed by the final smash of the gauntleted fist into the center of the broken face, shattering the skull. Teeth sprayed like cracked nuts and the body collapsed, the stench overpowering as the sphincter muscle relaxed.

Never had death been so satisfying.

The din of the battle surrounding him came back gradually and at length he became aware that Moichi was calling his name. He turned his head, saw the navigator beset by plumed warriors who sought to stop him from severing the snaking lines from the other obsidian ships. He plucked his stolen sword from the nerveless fingers of the bloody Saardin lying at his feet and turned, grinning. Slammed his blade through the corselet of an oncoming warrior with such force that the armor flew from the creature’s body. He swiftly decapitated it and, swinging his sword in great arcs, forced his way further aft, towards the navigator.

Hurling the plumed warriors from him, Ronin at last made Moichi’s side and, together, back to back, they fought the oncoming tide. Clearing away the warriors momentarily, they began to work feverishly on the grappling lines which sang with tension as the sailors aboard the obsidian vessels heaved mightily and the black hulls, crystalline, repulsing the sea water, dancing above the waves, looming near to starboard.

They hacked at the ropes as Moeru, having cleared the poop of the enemy, worked her way down the aft companionway to the main deck, leading a complement of sailors across the port sheer-strake and onto the decks of the first obsidian ship.

Onward the plumed warriors came and Ronin left the cutting of the ropes to Moichi while he turned and met the attack, his sword a bright, bloody arc, reaping a red, hot harvest of flesh and bone.

Abruptly, he felt the trembling of the deck. The
Kioku
heaved in the water. More lines hissed over the starboard sheer-strake. He looked up as the deck rolled violently but the sky was filled with harmless, puffy clouds racing before the unsteady following wind. Mauve and gold, the world readied itself for sunset. Yet the ocean below them swelled and sucked as if a storm were raging.

Higher and higher the swells tossed them until, with a great rending, the lines binding the
Kioku
to the surrounding obsidian ships split and broke asunder. Like a great wild stallion, the
Kioku
raised her bow high above the troughs of the waves.

Free.

Ronin, clinging to the starboard sheer-strake, risked a glance overboard. All about them the seas were black and glossy, humped and agitated, as if in reaction to the ascension of a creature of incalculable size. The deep was alive with motion and potency.

The
Kioku
bucked forward on the inexorable tide of another enormous wave, which, cresting violently and unpredictably, capsized one of the obsidian ships. With a great roar, it disappeared beneath the heavy sea. Onward the
Kioku
was hurled by the churning swells and at last Ronin looked about the ship.

‘Moichi!’ he called. ‘Where is Moeru?’

The battle aboard the
Kioku
was all but finished. Still, Moichi fought the last of his foes, dispatching him with a ferocious thrust. He turned to Ronin, wiping at his sweating brow. Blood and gore streaked his arms and his shirt clung wetly to his caked chest.

‘The last I saw of her, Captain, she was leading a detachment of men onto an enemy vessel.’

Ronin raced along the deck, leaping the mounds of the corpses and the wounded, calling to her in his mind, thrusting aside clumps of still fighting sailors and plumed warriors, heedless of friend or foe. Until, at length, he was certain that she was not on board, not even among the piles of the dead or the coughing, spitting maimed. The silence in his mind echoed like a tomb.

He ran back to Moichi, who was calling to the men.

‘We must turn the
Kioku
around,’ he cried. ‘She is still on one of the enemy ships.’

Moichi turned to him, his hazel eyes grave and watchful.

‘Whatever unnatural thing parted us from the obsidian ships saved our lives, Captain.’ He turned his gaze out across the starboard sheer-strake, across the high black water. ‘Look there, Captain. D’you see? We cannot return.’ The tetrahedral sails with their fiercely grinning avian insignia were fast dwindling aft. ‘Neither tide nor winds govern the
Kioku
now. A force from the deep hurls us onward and for the moment you must face the fact that, for as long as it may last, you are not captain and neither am I navigator.’

‘Moichi—’

‘My friend’—a large hand gripped his shoulder, the hazel eyes noted the pain in his face—‘use your eyes. Think with your head, not your heart. We are powerless.’

Alive or dead, drowned beneath the tidal wave, captured by the plumed warriors, he had no way of knowing. Moichi’s raised voice came to him: ‘Overboard, lads! Cast them all into the sea! Clear the decks of this mess!’

Ronin wiped down his bloody sword on a corpse and sheathed it. He went carefully across the humped deck, mounted the high poop. His hands gripped the stern sheer-strake, his arms as rigid as stone, watching the black sea foaming and geysering, laced with luminescence, the flora of the deep. He heard the heavy splashes behind him as the
Kioku
’s load was lightened, as the dead meat swirled and sank beneath the dark creaming waves.

They were far away now, those forbidding obsidian vessels, foundering above the unnatural seas, and all at once it seemed to him that the setting sun dimmed, though no cloud passed before its orange face and, straining his ears, he thought that he could hear a peculiar high keening, inconstant and thin, away and away and what is she to me anyway—?’

‘Captain.’

Moichi called to him and he turned and went down the companionway to help tend to the remaining men.

Some of you are avenged now. Freidal’s death will not bring you back, Stahlig; it will not shorten your journey, Borros. But—he turned from the silver and blue-green face of the sea to watch Moichi’s hawklike features, feeling again the pressure of the wide hand upon him, the warmth it conveyed—I must not deceive myself, whether or not the dead are past knowing, this revenge was for me. The big man moved away for a moment. Yet somewhere I suppose that I believe that they are not yet past caring. Farewell now, my friends.

Still for him, he knew that revenge was far from over. The hate which continued to burn within him like a raging fire would never be slaked until he faced the Salamander once more. For the pale perfect face of his sister K’reen, dead by his own unknowing hand, still haunted him and only his former mentor’s blood would ease the torment he felt at the fiendish trap the shrewd hunter had set for him. Scarred but undefeated, having pried apart the serrated jaws of that trap, he now wished to stalk his hunter so that, one way or another, the last account should be settled.

The decks had already been cleared of the bulk of the carnage. Over half the ship’s crew had died in the battle but, Moichi told him matter of factly, nearly one and half again the number of corpses of the plumed warriors had been cast into the sea. Now sailors were casting down wooden buckets into the cool green depths, hauling up sea water, spilling it along the wide decks until the scuppers ceased to shed the blood of man or beast.

The residue of the great black tide pushed them onward, almost due south, and was soon joined by a stiff following wind out of the eastern quarter. At first, they had tried to tack away from it but even furling the t’gallants had not slowed their flight and, in the end, Moichi had shrugged and said to Ronin: ‘We must be patient and ride it out. We cannot fight the elements.’ And Ronin, who had learned long ago to bend before forces which he could not control or understand, reluctantly agreed.

For a time he had stood quite still, with the salt wind whipping his stained sea cloak about his body, calling silently to her. Then he had cleared his mind of all thoughts, a waiting receptacle for communication.

Silence. Deep and unremitting.

For much of his life, death had settled all about him, enwrapping those closest to him, rending them from him. Yet he now found it difficult to reconcile himself to Moeru’s passing. Her scent, her voice in his mind like a taste, refused to fade or blur. But survival, he knew, was impossible amidst the warriors of the obsidian ships, for they had shown no interest in the capture of Ronin and the crew of the
Kioku.
Death was their only objective.

At last he turned from the taffrail.

Better by far for the black, turbulent sea to have taken her.

The days and nights passed swiftly or slowly, depending on his mood. He spurned his cabin, pacing the decks in the warm starlight while the men lay awake in the stinking fo’c’sle, listening to the heavy tramp of his boots over the planking.

Some days he slept in the lee of the mizzenmast while the shadows and sunlight wheeled slowly about him. On others, he was up and about, carefully sharpening the double edges of his blade or climbing the shrouds, staring at the unbroken horizon for hours. He drank little, ate even less, and would not listen to Moichi, who did his best to engage him in conversation.

Gradually, the seas became greener, luminescing just after sunset. The sun grew stronger during the days so that the nights became warmer and almost as humid as the daylight hours.

They began to see flying fish, silvery and acrobatic, swooping alongside the ship’s bow, pacing her course for entire mornings or afternoons on end only to disappear for long periods before resurfacing; or perhaps they were different schools each time. It was a good sign, Moichi said. Ronin ignored him, sunk deep within his black arcane thoughts.

Seven days after first sighting the flying fish they spied a column of water off the starboard side perhaps half a league ahead. A great black shape lifted itself with both a heaviness and a certain grace from beneath the waves like a shivering, glittering bridge. Enormous blue-black flukes waved in the air for long moments while time and gravity seemed suspended. Then the sea crashed over the last of the shape and it was gone in a bouquet of silvery spray.

Later that day, they sighted a bird, the first one they had spied since the morning they had sailed from the port of Khiyan, on the western shore of the continent of man, more than ninety days ago. It was a gull, quite large, its wings purple-gray and white. It circled twice about the mainmast t’gallants, wheeled and flew off into the east.

Moichi called to the helmsman to set course after it.

They came up on it during a night that was dense and black with racing clouds, obscuring all traces of the horned moon which had hung before them, the centerpiece in an immense, spangled sky. He was aware of it only because of Moichi’s keen nose; the lookouts were blind.

Sometime later, those few still on deck could just make out the aching cries of the gulls as they wheeled over invisible cliffs.

Land!

Ronin stood beside Moichi in the closeness of the darkness and the heat.

‘Is it Ama-no-mori?’ The first words he had uttered in days.

‘We have sailed in the right general direction, Captain. I have tried to correct as best I know how but—’ He shrugged into the night.

‘Then the chances are that it is not.’

‘What we have before us, Captain, is an uncharted island. Ama-no-mori is an uncharted island.’

‘That is hardly sound logic.’

Again the massive shoulder lifted, fell.

‘Unfortunately, my friend, that is all that is left us.’

He gave the order to heave to.

At first light, with pink staining the flat sea behind them and all the topsails furled, they sailed in.

It was a humpbacked slice of land, shimmering emerald green, seemingly all jungle, dense and entangled. Great blue rocks jutted in a naked headland just to port over which sprays of gulls wheeled and cried. Directly ahead, a wide beach swept away to starboard.

Ronin gazed in fascination. Could this crescent of verdant land rising from the ocean’s depths be Ama-no-mori, home of the fabled Bujun? Could this be his journey’s end at last?

The shore loomed up at them and Moichi called for the ship to lie to. Men raced through the shrouds. He ordered the first sounding.

The sea was mottled: now gray-green, now blue-white, and perhaps this is why the lookouts failed to give the alarm. In any event, the ship would not heave to; perhaps she was caught on a tide. They heard the crashing of the breakers abruptly close and Moichi yelled to the helmsman: ‘Hard aport!’ It made no difference. The helmsman dragged at the wheel but the
Kioku,
following some more powerful tenant, leapt straight ahead. Ronin saw Moichi running towards the helmsman to help him but it was far too late.

A moment later, the
Kioku
careered madly on to the jagged, saw-toothed spine of the coral reef lying barely a fathom beneath the creaming waves. It reared up like an animal in pain as the living mass ripped away its keel and rent its hull. The vessel shivered and splintered with such suddenness and force that men scrambling to get out of the way were impaled by flying shards of wood and metal.

In the ensuing explosion, the restless sea engulfed them all. Men were flung headlong onto the cracked spine of the reef, their bodies ripped to shreds by the impact with the natural bulwark.

Ronin sank into the sea but as he did so he relaxed his body, willing himself limp despite the screaming in his brain. All about him were flailing lumps, dark and jagged, haloed by churning bubbles, but he forced his eyes to remain open, alert for debris which might pin him to the sea bottom by its weight, searching for the first sign of the spiked coral which would flay him alive.