The Great Rift (11 page)

Blays' mouth quirked. "Do you have to put it like that?"

The planks were slick with water, scarred with scorches, and prickled with arrow shafts. Dante hadn't been belowdecks in a couple days and the stench of sweat was thick as mud. Torn-apart yurts scattered the floor. Clansmen loaded their arms with swords and spears and thudded upstairs. Dante found his sword in a chest near the rear and returned to the surface. Arrows whispered from the norren archers, who'd relocated from the larboard railing to that on the back of the aftercastle. Others hid at the aft's base, the wooden rise sheltering them from enemy fire, and emerged to batter down any fresh flames with their furs. Blays was there too, along with Mourn, who carried a curved, single-edged blade.

"You might want to get belowdecks," Dante said.

Mourn glanced up from rubbing his sword with a rag. "Why would I want that?"

"To avoid anything unpleasant. Such as dying."

"I would rather die than hide downstairs to listen to the screams of my clan."

"That's the kind of thing that sounds a lot less noble when you're moaning in the blood with a sucking chest wound."

Mourn cocked his head, meeting Dante's eyes. "I'm not trying to be noble. I would literally prefer to die fighting for my friends and blood-family. Why would you suggest I wouldn't? Do you think I would enjoy crying in the dark?"

"Forget it." Dante climbed the steps to get a glimpse of the
Ransom
. It was closing rapidly, oars circling through the water while the
Boomer
relied on currents and a rather slack wind. Not that they were trying to outrun the Bloody Knuckles, so far as he knew. In fact, he had the impression that appearing to flee at full sail was a mere ploy to keep their would-be predators on the hunt. To avoid the ram too, he supposed. He was no admiral.

The next few minutes were confusing ones. Dante waited behind an open door while the archers fired and crew strained with the rigging. Three men jogged down the aftercastle steps bearing a grimacing norren, an arrow projecting from his ribs.

"Lay him on the deck!" Dante rushed into the open deck. The men stopped, glancing between each other as if he were a stranger in the street. Dante circled in front of them. "Put him down, gods damn it."

They stretched the wounded man on the damp planks. Dante knelt, stripping the norren's shirt away from the arrow buried in the side of his furry chest. Blood slid to the wood. The man's eyes were open and moving, but he did no more than grimace as Dante tested the arrow, then yanked it wetly from the wound. Dante slung it aside and clamped his hands to the bleeding. Within moments, the blood stanched, scabbing.

Dante rose, wiping his hands on his pants. "Get him below."

"Will he be okay?" one of the clan warriors asked.

"He's less fit to fight than a dropped baby bird, but he'll be fine."

The norren knelt to offer the wounded man his shoulder. They limped towards the stairs. On the castle, men shouted. The
Ransom
loomed above the railing, oars pulled in as it swung alongside the smaller craft. Hooks and grapnels arced from the pirate vessel, clunking into the
Boomer
's planks and rails. Sword-bearing norren charged to the railing to hack at the ropes drawing the two ships together. Arrows whisked from above, dropping two warriors and driving the others back.

Men with knuckles wrapped in red cloth vaulted down the eight-foot rise between the ships. The norren met them, heavy swords hammering the pirates to the deck. Sabers and short swords flashed in the enemy's hands. Norren dropped along the line. Blays charged a tall, ragged-haired man, intercepting the enemy's incoming thrust with his left-hand blade, flicking his wrist and elbow in an upward snap. The parry deflected the pirate's sword past Blays' shoulder; Blays' right-hand weapon buried itself in the enemy's gut. Dante moved to Blays' flank. A spear jabbed at his ribs. He battered it down with a clumsy strike, then thrust out his empty hand. The nether punched straight through the spearman's neck. He collapsed into the railing.

Nether speared down from the upper vessel, knocking three clan warriors from their feet. Blood pattered the deck. Above, a man in a long coat with a single stripe of hair atop his shaved head raised his hand in an eagle's claw. Dante fell back from the clanging melee, lashing a bolt of shadows at the chest of the man in the coat. The sorcerer's face blanked in shock. He jerked backwards, blasting raw nether at the incoming force, dashing it into the night. His gaze snapped to Dante. A rush of piercing energy followed. Dante knocked it aside with a wedge of shadows. They struggled this way for some seconds, needles of nether twining around one another and boiling away into nothing.

Dante eased his resistance, falling back a step as the other man's dark tendrils wormed forward. The man in the coat smiled. Dante lashed out for the
Ransom
's railing instead, pelting the man with a hail of hard splinters. His focus collapsed. Dante drove forward, lancing the man's heart with a bolt of raw force.

To his right, a blade flicked at his face. Blays intercepted with crossed swords, scissoring the enemy weapon into the planks, then rolled his forearms, swinging his blades through a tight circle and snapping them into the attacker's jacket-padded collarbones. As the man staggered, Dante took him under the ribs with his sword.

Humans and norren flopped and bled. No member of the Bloody Knuckles remained standing on the
Boomer
. The norren warriors sheathed their swords and clambered up the ropes marrying the two vessels, archers covering them from below. Dante climbed up, too, but the
Ransom
's topdeck was nearly empty. As two small skirmishes broke out, a handful of men with red-wrapped knuckles fled belowdecks or leapt off the side.

"Think you've got this?" Dante said to Blays.

"Considering I've got thirty sword-wielding norren monsters on my side, I'm going to say yes."

Blays raced to catch up with the pursuing norren. Dante slid back down the rope to the barge, treating the wounded until his commandhe nether faltered and the shadows refused to venture from their crannies. His nerves felt as raw-scraped as a fresh hide. By the time the battle finished, the five surviving members of the Bloody Knuckles matched the total number of Nine Pines dead. Their original numbers had been roughly equal, but that was the nature of armed conflict, particularly in smaller scale, where an advantage in strength, size, and the sudden removal of the enemy's nethermancer could be exploited for an overwhelming victory. The man in the long coat had been the cornerstone of the Bloody Knuckles' terror. There were likely just a few hundred men and women in all of Gask with any real talent in the use of nether or ether, and mere dozens with the skill to match the dead man's. Combined with the pirates' willingness for stark and sudden violence, it was no wonder they'd terrorized the local waterways for over a decade.

Orlen's response to the pirates was no less violent. The few who tried to hide among the oar-slaves were quickly ratted out, then just as swiftly executed and flung over the side of the galley. The five survivors were brought to the
Boomer
, where the deck was still being cleared of bodies and swabbed of blood. A man with a shaved head and a bleeding, smashed nose was forced to kneel in front of Orlen. The norren chief's heavy sword hung from his hand.

"I'm going to ask once, because the question is so simple failing to understand it will tell me you have no brains to spill. One month ago, you took possession of a group of norren of the Clan of the Green Lake. Where did you take them?"

The man hawked blood on the planks. "Their rightful owners."

Orlen's sword flashed in the torchlight. Pink matter spattered the deck. Orlen blinked at his sword in surprise.

"Oh. Brains! I was wrong." He beckoned to two warriors, who thrust another pirate to his knees. Orlen stepped forward. "Where did you take the norren of the Clan of the Green Lake?"

The man tried to wriggle away. He toppled, crashing to the floor. "Dollendun. One of the beefers there. Uglier than dysentery. Name's Perrigan. Don't know from there."

"Thank you," Orlen nodded. He slit the man's throat. The man gaped at him, eyes bright with betrayal. While he bled out, the warriors took their blades to the other three survivors, dumping their remains into the river.

"Seems wrong," Blays muttered.

"I know," Dante said. "Should have at least interrogated them properly."

"I'm talking about the part where they were butchered like hogs. Treasonous hogs. Hogs who tried to stick their hog noses up the farmer's daughter's skirt."

"They were murderers."

"We don't know they
all
were. There must be
some
good pirates. Maybe we executed the guy who wanted them to change their wicked ways."

Varlen cleared his throat. His face was haggard and sooty. "We got a few things to figure out before weighing anchor. The
Ransom
, for instance—"

"Will be scuttled," Orlen said.

"Hold on a minute. That thing is a proper galley of war. You could threaten a barony with it. You taken a look at the old lady you're standing on?" He gestured to the
Boomer
's slashed sails, its torched canvas and smashed rails and bloodstained decks. "I'll be lucky to break even from what you paid me. The point of pirate-busting is to thrust your hands into their deep and jingly pockets."

"Thrust away. The ship itself was a vessel for killers and slavers, who can continue to enjoy it as their tomb."

Varlen rolled his thick lips together. "You hairy bastard. This is dumber than a cotton bottle."

Dante wasn't surprised. As a whole, norren tended to treat wealth with indifference or disdain, particularly the clans, who were perfectly able to fend for themselves. When it came to the galley slaves waiting below the
Ransom
's decks, however, he had no idea which way Orlen would break. He could see the norren chief, without a whiff of hypocrisy, ordering their slaughter as accomplices; just as likely, he would treat them as his most honored guests, leading them by the hand into the daylight and striking off their chains.

Instead, Orlen went to bed, leaving Vee, Varlen, Dante, and Blays to hash out an agreement that the slaves be freed and offered the option to sign on with the captain's crew; he'd lost three men to stray arrows. The families of the dead crew, meanwhile, would be compensated with whatever was found on the boat, minus half to be divided among the former slaves to give them a chance to make it once the
Boomer
made port in Dollendun. It was the kind of compromise that left both parties mad. Vee was talked out of whippings for the slave (she considered the lashes cleansing, for the slaves' own good). Meanwhile, Varlen demanded all the
Ransom
's wealth; Blays reminded him he'd had more than a little help wiping out the Bloody Knuckles, the most-hated local raiders of the last generation, and that by the way, greed had been the Knuckles' chief motivation, too.

By the end, Dante was frustrated, impatient, and exhausted, but helped search the captured ship anyway, both to ensure the agreement was honored (the ship's crew was noticeably more sullen than before the battle, giving the norren long looks of barely-concealed resentment) and to make a personal search of the captain's cabin, where he overturned drawers, smashed open chests, and knocked on walls for secret compartments until Blays asked him what the hell he was doing, which took several minutes longer than Dante expected.

"Somebody knew something." Dante stepped back from a bolted-down desk, surveying the scree of papers, gold-plated trinkets, and strings of what he suspected were knuckle bones hanging from the wall. "If the
Ransom
just attacked every ship heading downstream, the traders would have dug themselves a new river years ago."

"Think somebody tipped them off?"

"Unless Josun Joh is playing both sides, how else would they know to attack the
Boomer
?"

"So you're looking for evidence of this little theory," Blays said.

"Yes."

"Hard proof that someone told them we were after them and let them know how to find us."

Dante set down a curved ornate knife and stared at Blays. "Why the hell else would I be tearing the room apart? Should I go try yelling at their corpses instead?"

"Oh, just thought you might be interested in this."

Blays passed him a thick, grainy piece of paper, folded twice. Inside was a sloppy, almost childish drawing of a barge, wide and single-masted. It could have been any of the cargo vessels plying the river, but its prow extended into a figurehead of an owl, wings swept back, preparing to launch into flight.

"What are they doing with a drawing of the
Boomer
?"

Blays nodded. "And who drew it?"

There was, of course, no signature. No words whatsoever. The only way to determine the sketch's authorship would be to force everyone in a 500-mile radius to draw another barge and compare the output to this child's scrawl on a fuzzy sheet of pulp. In practical terms, that plan was only slightly better than attempting to snag the sun in a net and putting it in his pocket so Dante could have toast wherever he went.

They found nothing else of interest. The galley-slaves, a mixture of norren and human men, were transferred to the suddenly crowded
Boomer
. The
Ransom
was made to drop anchor. Clansmen piled the bodies of the Bloody Knuckles in its hold, spilled oil over them, and splashed its topdeck to boot. The grapnels joining the two ships were severed. The
Boomer
weighed anchor, letting the current carry it away. In the first light of dawn, a woman of the Nine Pines ascended the steps of the stern, bent her bow, and sent a flaming arrow winging toward the
Ransom
. It snapped into the topdeck, fire dwindling until it looked like it would wink out completely: then an orange wall flared across the former slaver. Thick white smoke roiled into the sky.

Dante emerged from his cabin late that afternoon. Mourn quickly informed him both Orlen and Lira were waiting to speak to him. Dante drank some tea, stretched the soreness from his muscles, and went to see Lira. Her cabin's scent had the moist, mushroomy pall of the wounded, but she looked better already, a touch of pink to her broad cheeks.