Shallows of night, p.28
Shallows of Night, page 28
Ronin made his laborious way towards Moichi, through forests of warriors. He thrust straight ahead and his blade shattered the breastplate of a warrior. He jerked it free and, in the same movement, arced it violently backward, severing the jugular of an advancing warrior to his rear. He slammed headlong into two more, scattering them in a flutter of feathers. He swung right, then left, his bulging arms sticky and running with moisture.
Before the mast he fought, as the decks were piled high with corpses and the footing became treacherously slippery. He was aware of a tall figure near him, hewing at the warriors, the man’s long blade just visible on the far periphery of his vision, shearing through a plumed head. He swung again into a mass of avian warriors then he was on his knees, coughing and shaking his head. Lights danced in front of his eyes. He tried to focus and could not. Just the hint of a blurred shadow, blossoming. He tasted blood and gore, still warm and moving as if alive. He spat, attempting to rise, slipping in the slick muck on the deck. His vision cleared. Severed head of a plumed warrior staring at him accusingly from the deck. Hit me, he thought dazedly. Who threw it?
He blinked back the mingled sweat and blood running down his scalp. Looked up, stared into the twisted face of the first mate.
Indeed there was no lower jaw. White scars, livid and pulsing, were raised from the otherwise sunburned flesh like the hideous distended veins of the dead. They ran from the twisted upper lip across the gouged bridge of the nose onto an island of scar tissue pooled under the right eye.
The first mate laughed, a strange susurration, and slashed out with his boot. The plumed skull flew into Ronin’s chest. And in that moment Ronin knew, saw the swift flash of white as the light caught the sheen of the artificial left eye, and abruptly he was hurtled back in time to twin feluccas flying across a vast, uncharted sea of ice, locked together, one now to the howling, chill wind, as two powerful figures fought, one for control, the other for freedom, darkness and light, a vicious battle. Ronin had fought Freidal then, had felled the Security Saardin of the Freehold with a brutal blow to his face.
He had thought Freidal dead, his sadistic torturings and murders of Ronin’s old friends avenged at last as the two ships parted with only the Saardin’s ever-present scribe left standing, immobile and mute, aboard the helmless vessel as he had cut it away.
Ronin twisted away so that Freidal’s next kick only grazed his ribs instead of breaking them, as the Saardin had intended.
He regained his feet and lifted his sword.
‘Come to me,’ hissed Freidal, his misshapen mouth giving his words a distorted, leaden quality. ‘Come and meet your death.’ He raised his own blade. But it was he who advanced on Ronin. Their swords clashed.
‘And where is Borros? He too I must seek out and destroy.’
The blades swung away, sliced through the air.
‘Dead and buried long ago. Free at last of his terror and beyond your blade.’
Freidal lunged, in and down, and Ronin turned, parrying.
‘Do you expect me to believe that? Traitor! You have spat upon the Law of the Freehold and there is only one penalty for such a transgression.’
‘After seeing this world, you still cling to the Law of the Freehold?’
Swords flashing, the panting of hot breath, muscles locked and straining, eyes seeking an advantage.
‘This world only validates the Law; if you were not such a fool, you would understand that. All is chaos here. War, death, and the dying lying broken in streets of mud and filth. We of the Freehold are beyond all that. The Law is our mistress; it is what sets us apart from this scum. We set the Law above all else, thus are we to remain men. But this is something that I do not expect you to understand. You had already reverted to the animalisms of the Surface world while in the Freehold. You were never one of us.’ He lunged again. ‘You flaunted the Law; now you must die.’ With a grunt, he swung hard into Ronin’s side, twisting his blade in an attempt to evade Ronin’s block. But Ronin felt the excess pressure and leaned away from it instead of fighting it and they were at a deadlock, their faces only centimeters apart.
‘You thought me dead,’ whispered Freidal, ‘but I survived our last encounter, your traitorous blow. I clung to life, I would not die, for my mission was not yet complete. The strength of the righteous flowed through me and, as the cold days and nights passed, my scribe opened his veins to me. He knew his duty. He fed me the warmth and the life from his own body so that the Law might be served, so that I might seek you and Borros out, so that justice might be done.’
Freidal broke away, feinted, then swept in the opposite direction, saying: ‘Law must ever be the victor against chaos!’ He cut in under Ronin’s defense and the edge of his blade sliced through cloth and skin. Then Ronin’s blade was up, breaking the momentum of the blow and he would not retreat.
‘Agh!’ screamed the Saardin. ‘What sort of man are you? Coward! Why do you not attack?’
The whisper in his ear: a soft susurration with a core of steel. Ronin heard again the Salamander, his Senseii, talking to him as he took Ronin through Combat practice on one of the high Levels of the Freehold: ‘It is not just the strong arm, my dear boy, which wins in Combat. Let your eye judge your opponent. Stand your ground. Do not attack, yet neither do you retreat. Be the rock upon which your opponent throws himself, thus will you see his weaknesses. And then, dear boy, when his frustration turns inexorably to rage, his reactions will suffer and, if you are most clever, you will find the proper path to victory.’
Thus he stood upon the unquiet deck, in the shadow of the looming obsidian ships, their strange avian sails dominating the sky, and repulsed all that Freidal threw at him. He parried the powerful horizontal strokes, he turned aside the vicious oblique cuts, he blocked the swift vertical strikes, all the while gauging the feints and false movements, the careful counterbalancing of Combat that made it such a complex art, that lifted its finest executors into a realm far above a mere warrior’s. And in this Ronin recognized the truth within the distortions the Saardin mouthed: The Freehold’s Combat system had made him a superior artist in weaponry. Knew too, on an instinctive level, just how dangerous Freidal was. His belief in his righteousness, in the iron fastness of the Law, could not be shaken. He was no mercenary, proficient but easily dealt with. His fanaticism was his power, would feed him deep reserves of strength and will. Thus at last did Ronin recognize his evil as the Freehold’s.
Freidal feinted another blow, threw his sword at Ronin instead, and in the same motion, slammed his balled fists into Ronin’s throat. His knee lifted and smashed into Ronin’s stomach. Ronin fell against the starboard sheer-strake, his breath gone and his eyes watering. He gagged, willing his lungs to do their work. Freidal’s good eye gleamed as he swung from the hips, slamming his fists alongside Ronin’s head. He watched the other sink to his knees.
Freidal looked down and, grinning wolfishly, bent and picked up Ronin’s fallen sword. Languidly, almost lovingly, he tested its weight and judged its balance. Ronin’s head came up and the Saardin swiped at the face with the back of his hand.
Now he held Ronin’s sword with both hands and slowly lifted it high above his head. It gleamed all along its length, a bolt of stiff lightning that too soon began its blurred descent.
Ronin tried to focus but all he could see was a dark shape looming over him, a streak of white light that hurt his eyes. The world drained of color: two polymorphous black entities, two shards of bitter ebon will, linked by a slashing line of white.
His fingers like lances, stiff as steel inside the Makkon gauntlet, his body already moving without conscious volition as something bellowed darkly inside him, echoing on a torrent of wind filled with animal scents. Bright and unbidden, the Hart, stately, black, fearsomely atavistic, shook his antlers within a deep pine glade.
Something coalesced within him, with the motion. The rushing of the white blade, his forked fingers rising upward, Freidal’s cruel gloating hideous face, confident of victory, upward and downward, the weapons crossed in an ‘x’ pattern, the Saardin’s incipient surprise as the fingers plunged into his eyes. Black and white; white and black. Whistle of the impotent sword blade, a dying insect beside his ear.
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.
