"Sound the alarm!" Garric said. He didn't know what was going on, but he drew his sword with no more than a whisper against the iron lip of the scabbard.
Cashel was running sternward, so the danger wasn't in the bow. Garric turned, looking past the high, curving sternpost. The hundred and twenty-seven ships of the royal fleet were arrayed behind the Shepherd in order as good as that of so many soldiers at drill. He didn't see any danger, neither in the water foaming past in the oar-thresh nor in the sea to the horizon or the clouds above it. Rain perhaps, but from this sky it would be warm and slow, not gusts with lightning slashes.
There was danger somewhere. The warning must have come from Tenoctris, and she didn't make mistakes.
The trumpet and coiled horn on Admiral Zettin's Queen of Ornifal blew together, the raucous call that signaled fleet action. Zettin was commander of the fleet just as Lord Waldron commanded the royal army: Garric could give orders to either man and expect them to be obeyed before they were fully out of his mouth, but the prince didn't get involved in the mechanics of maneuvering ships or battalions.
The prince had other matters to take care of. At the moment, the most important was learning what was the matter.
"Clear the yards, you stupid scuts!" Master Lobon shouted to the sailors who'd gone aloft for show. "Action stations, don't you hear!"
Wiping his face with the end of his red sash-of-office, he snarled—to the gods, not to any of the humans nearby, " Sister take me, the mast's raised! Won't that be a fine thing if we have to ram?"
King Carus took in the world through Garric's eyes, but he analyzed what he saw with the mind of the foremost man of war who'd ever ruled the Isles. A glint on a hilltop that Garric assumed was merely a quartz outcrop was to Carus a possible ambush; the tension in a courtier's posture might precede an assassination attempt. Carus had personal experience of those threats and a thousand more—
But he saw nothing of concern in the surrounding seascape.
"Your majesty—" Zettin called through a speaking horn from the stern of his flagship. Water spewed up as his oarsmen laid into their looms with renewed vigor, trying to close the gap they'd allowed to open between them and Garric's ship.
"Your majesty?" called the captain of the Blood Eagles aboard the Shepherd. He held his men in a double rank facing both sides of the ship. Their spears slanted forward, the points winking, and their left arms advanced their shields slightly.
Lerdain was saying something also, though Garric couldn't hear him through the racket of the gong he hammered. Garric pointed at the youth and bellowed, "Enough! Let me think!"
Lerdain froze. Garric knew he wasn't being fair—the lad was only doing what he was supposed to—but there wasn't time to worry about that. The gong continued to vibrate on a note that drilled all the way to Garric's marrow. He tore it from its mountings with his left hand and hurled it into the sea. Water danced briefly as the bronze block sank through the waves.
Cashel hopped onto the quarterdeck, brushing the end of the rail as he went past; it broke. "Tenoctris says you're in danger but she doesn't know what from!" he said, turning to face outward. His hands were on either side of his quarterstaff's balance, ready to swing or stab, whichever the situation called for.
"Well, at least I know where I stand!" Garric said, turning so his back was to Cashel's.
With my friends, and with a sword in my hand. What better place was there?
He and the warrior king in his mind laughed amid the shouts and the horn signals.
The gong's rich note echoed between sea and sky. They could hear it in Barca's Hamlet, Ilna thought, and didn't chide herself for exaggerating as she usually would've done.
As the first note sounded, Chalcus began to survey the horizon. He didn't unsheathe his sword or razor-sharp dagger, but he was as tautly poised as a drawn bowstring.
"Ilna, what's the bell?" Merota said, only a child again as she tugged on Ilna's outer tunic. Merota had seen a great deal of horror in her short life. She'd come through it, and given a moment to compose herself she'd come through this as well; but the sudden clanging shocked her into panic. "What's going to happen?"
Chalcus spun and pointed his left index finger at the child's face. "You!" he said. "Crouch under the sternpost behind Glomer, that's as safe a place as there is. Now!"
"Yes, Chalcus," Merota said, scuttling past the frozen helmsman to obey. When she'd huddled behind the flutist who blew time for the oarsmen, she began bawling her eyes out.
"Mistress?" Chalcus said softly; his eyes on Ilna's, his muscles rigid as iron but not moving, not yet. Trumpets and horns called; the oarsmen looked up through the ventilators in frightened surmise, and half the sailors on deck were shouting something to someone or everyone. Captain Rhamis tugged Chalcus' tunic much as Merota had done Ilna's, and for much the same reason.
Ilna looked down at the cords she'd been knotting and in their pattern saw the answer to the question Chalcus hadn't put in words. Even strangers could have read the coarse fabric, though they'd have called it a feeling, an impression. To Ilna there was no more doubt than there was in the direction of dawn.
"From there," Ilna said, pointing northwest with her outstretched left arm. She hadn't woven the pattern consciously, but a part of her mind had provided the information she was going to need. "An enemy, coming for Garric. Fast!"
Chalcus' gaze followed her arm. Ilna herself could see only swells and troughs; the sea was a little rougher than earlier this morning before the clouds darkened. The sailor shaded his eyes with his hands stacked, looking through the narrow slit between left palm and the back of his right hand.
Chalcus turned to the helmsman. "Bring us along the Shepherd's side," he ordered crisply. Then, loud even against the clamor all around them, he shouted, "Glomer, play a sprint!"
Glomer was the flutist. Ilna had marveled to see that within a day of boarding the Flying Fish in Donelle, Chalcus had known the name of every sailor aboard the vessel. Indeed, she was sure he could give an appraisal of each man's strengths and weaknesses as clear as she herself could've done about the folk of Barca's Hamlet where she'd lived all her life.
"Hawsom—"
The stroke oar, a swarthy man with huge shoulders and an opal the size of Ilna's thumbnail in the septum of his nose.
"—every man of you on the benches, put your backs into it like never before! We're going to save our prince, that's what we're going to do!"
He pointed to Glomer, seated where the upper bank of oarsmen could see him. The men down in the belly of the ship had little enough air, let alone a glimpse of the outside world; they took their cue from the men above them. "Play, I said!"
The flutist had been sounding a dirge as the fleet proper marked time while Garric's ship drew ahead. Now he swung into a jig; the high notes from the double-flute's short right-hand pipe syncopated the lower tones of the left. Together the rowers breathed deeply, then drew back on their oars with the deliberate motion of men well used to hard work and willing to continue till they dropped.
The ship moved ahead. It didn't leap like a kid in springitme, for though small compared to the quinqueremes it was still a massive object, but it accelerated noticeably.
"No!" cried Rhamis, reaching out to grab the flute. "Our orders are to keep back from—"
Chalcus caught the captain by throat and swordbelt. Rhamis barely had time to squawk before Chalcus flung him over the side.
"Row!" Chalcus cried to the oarsmen. "It's not your lousy lives you're saving, it's Prince Garric's!"
A coil of rope hung from a post on the afterdeck; it had something to do with the sails, now furled, Ilna supposed. She lifted it, judged her distance, and made sure one end of the rope was still attached to a cleat. Finally she spun the coil toward the floundering captain. It opened as it flew through the air, then splashed in the water in front of Rhamis; he had just enough presence of mind to seize it before it and he both sank.
Ilna turned again. The captain would've been no great loss; but small goodnesses were worth doing, if they didn't get in the way of larger ones... like saving Garric.
"Pull, you sailormen!" Chalcus called over the flute's skirl. "There's a devil from Hell after your prince, but we'll have something to say about that!"
Ilna stepped into the far stern, behind Glomer's stool, and offered her left hand to Merota huddling there. By squinting to the northwest she could see but a seeming oiliness on the surface, the track of something moving swiftly underwater toward Garric's huge vessel. The Flying Fish continued to accelerate, but the other thing would be there ahead of them.
"Pull!" and the men pulled with the strength of the damned grasping for salvation; but it would not be enough....
Cashel waited, ready but not really tense. If there'd been more room on the Shepherd's stern, he'd have given his quarterstaff a few trial spins to loosen his joints; there wasn't, so he'd make do when the time came.
The helmsman at the port steering oar looked seaward instead of keeping his eyes on the sailing master for orders the way he should've done. He suddenly screamed and lunged away from the railing, slamming into Cashel and bouncing back as though he'd run into the mainmast.
"Here we go!" warned Cashel, bringing his staff around in front of him despite tight space. He clipped the shoulder of the helmsman, now scrambling away on all fours. The fellow yelped, but the contact didn't slow the staff's motion—which was all that mattered to Cashel at the moment.
The creature came straight up from the water with its huge jaws open. The pointed head was two double-paces long, ten feet as city folks would put it. The teeth were longer than Cashel's middle fingers. Those at the front of the jaw were pointed, while teeth farther back became broadly saw-edged.
"A seawolf!" Master Lobon cried, but Cashel had seen seawolves, great marine lizards, when they came ashore on Barca's Hamlet to snatch his grazing sheep. This creature had a smooth hide instead of a reptile's pebbled skin; and besides, this thing's head was as long as a big seawolf's whole body.
This was a whale, but not one of the sluggish, comb-toothed monsters which browsed on shrimp at the edge of the Ice Capes. This was a meateater like the seawolves, only much, much bigger.
Still rising, the whale twisted to angle its gaping jaws toward Garric. The railing splintered. Instead of striking as he'd have done with a smaller opponent, Cashel stuck his staff vertically into the beast's maw.
He acted by instinct, but his instinct was correct—as it generally was in a fight. The whale's jaws slammed down but not shut, because the thick hickory didn't flex at the creature's bite. Its bunched jaw muscles only drove the staff's iron ferrules deeper into its own tongue and palate. From its throat came a hiss like a geyser preparing to vent.
The whale started to slip back into the sea, dragging Cashel with it. He wrapped his legs around the stanchion to which the steering oar was attached, continuing to grip the staff with both hands.
The quinquereme listed, dragged over by the weight of the whale. Blue fire rippled through Cashel's muscles; he wasn't sure whether human strength or the wizardry that sometimes filled him allowed him to keep his grip, but he knew that if he let go the monster would find another, better way to attack. Cashel would anchor the whale so long as his staff held and his strength held, and neither one had ever failed him yet.
Garric hacked twice, leaving bone-deep cuts in the whale's jaw, but the creature's head was so large that a sword couldn't do it real damage. Instead of a third cut he stabbed, slanting his long blade through the underjaw and out through the black-veined tongue. Cashel saw the tip of pattern-welded steel glittering in a spray of blood, but even the blade's full length was unable to reach the monster's vitals.
A Blood Eagle hurled his spear into the whale's skull, just behind the eye. It was a good cast, but the point stuck less than a finger's length into dense bone; the spear fell into the sea. Three more spears drove uselessly into the whale's shoulder.
The whale's nostrils were on the top of its head, in front of the rear-set eyes. They voided a miasma of stale air and rotten flesh, then drew in a fresh breath with the roar of a windstorm.
Cashel was hanging over the sea as the oak stanchion creaked between his legs. Huge as the whale's head seemed, it was small in comparison to the snake-slim body. Far in the depths, Cashel saw the creature's flukes lashing in an attempt to pull itself away from the staff it couldn't spit out.
Very soon the quarterstaff would break, or Cashel would lose his grip on it, or the post would tear loose from the ship's hull. Whatever happened after that would no longer be the concern of Cashel or-Kenset.
Sharina let go of Tenoctris and rose to her feet. The old wizard still sat cross-legged, but she'd reached up to grip the bow railing to steady herself. Now that Sharina's hands were free, she reached under her loose-fitting court robes and drew the Pewle knife she wore concealed under the silk.
The knife's blade was heavy and the length of her forearm. The back was straight but the cutting edge had a deep belly. It was the knife carried by Pewle Island seal hunters, a weapon and every sort of tool all in one package. The knife and her memories were all Sharina had left of Nonnus, the man who'd guarded her through the fringes of Hell and who had died still guarding her.
When Sharina knew him, Nonnus had been a hermit dedicated the Lady; earlier as a mercenary soldier he'd done things he never spoke of, but which Sharina had heard others whisper of him. She kept the Pewle knife for his memory; but in times like this, it was also a weapon that the bravest enemy would think twice before facing.
Garric's platoon of black-armored bodyguards had rushed to put themselves between their prince and the monster which had leaped toward him from the sea. Small chance of that: Garric stood firm-footed on the sloping deck, using both hands on his sword hilt to hack at the huge head.
The soldiers' weight made the ship list even more; water was gurgling through the lowest oarports, and the commotion below decks meant some of the rowers were about to abandon their benches. The sailing master was screaming at the sailors on deck to run out on the starboard wale to balance the load before the ship foundered.
Sharina had been hearing the click of ratchets against pawls from the fighting tower behind her, but it wasn't until the captain of the balista crew shouted, "She's ready! Swing her round!" that she realized the sound was capstans drawing back the balista's arms. She looked up.
The crewmen were rotating their weapon to point back over the Shepherd's deck. Even with the sail furled the mast and cordage would interfere with their aim, but some part of the monster rising like a gleaming black crag beside the vessel should be clear.
The captain stooped to aim, disappearing from Sharina's viewpoint on the main deck. The bolt's bronze head, cross-shaped to smash instead of stabbing cleanly, winked as the captain adjusted the weapon's bearing. Instead of shooting, he rose with a troubled look while his crewmen waited expectantly.
"Shoot!" Sharina screamed. "Shoot or it'll pull us under!"
Over the shouts and clash of metal, Sharina heard the deep groan of the ship's timbers working. The monster's weight was twisting the hull like a bad storm.
"Mistress, I can't!" the soldier cried in agony. "Mistress, I might hit the prince!"
The fighting tower's notched crenellations were eight feet above the deck, higher than Sharina could reach but well within reach if she jumped. She sprang up without thinking further, catching the lip in her left hand and swinging her legs over the upper railing. Her robes got in the way, but that didn't stop her.
There wouldn't have been room for her on the narrow platform if her muscular body hadn't slammed one of the crewmen aside. The Pewle knife was still in her right hand.
"Is it aimed?" she shouted to the captain, his face only inches from hers. He stood with the release cord in his right hand. ""Will it hit the thing?"
"Yes, but mistress—" the man said.
Sharina jerked the cord out of his hand. She started to whisper a prayer to the Lady, but the Lady brought peace and good harvests; she had no place here. Instead Sharina murmured, "Nonnus, help me and help my brother...."
She didn't bother bending so that her eyes could follow the line of the bolt; she didn't have the skill to second guess the captain, nor the time either. She pulled the release cord.
When the trigger claws released the thumb-thick bowcord, the balista's arms slammed forward against the leather-padded stops on the frame. The double Bang! shocked a cry from Sharina; she'd seen balistas and catapults in use before, but she'd never been so close to one when it loosed.
A crash like that of a wedge splitting oak rang on top of the balista's release. Sharina looked toward the stern. The bolt was buried to its wooden vanes in the monster's head where the left eye had been. The impact had distorted the whole long skull like the hull of a rammed warship.
Garric staggered backward, unharmed. None of the thronging soldiers had been touched. Nonnus, may the Lady show you the peace you did not find in life.
As her eyes took in the scene, the patrol vessel with Ilna aboard drove into the monster's body alongside the Shepherd. The bronze ram bit deep with a sound like an axe chopping into a hog's carcase, but so much louder that it overwhelmed all other noise.
The creature's nostrils spurted a mist of blood high in the air. The patrol vessel's mast cracked and tilted forward, breaking some of the decking ahead of the mast step. The Shepherd shook violently; Sharina might've stumbled over the wooden battlements if a balista crewman hadn't steadied her.
The patrol vessel continued to slide forward, pulling the monster along with it. Timbers crashed and the Shepherd rolled upright with a shudder. The great jaws spasmed open as the carcase rolled onto its back.
Cashel was flying through the air, still holding his quarterstaff and gripping a broken post with his legs. Sharina didn't have time to cry out before he landed in the sea thirty feet from the quinquereme's stern.