CHAPTER TWELVE
The King’s eyes were alive and bitter by the time the sun had been down two hours; they were bloodshot and a little inclined to wander, as he lay on the cushions downing cup after cup of unwatered wine, but his voice was only slightly slurred. The air of the chamber was thick with incense, with attar of roses and patchouli oil from the courtesans who danced and sang and drank with men on their cushions, with the smells of wine and sweat and ointment on bandaged wounds. Light flickered from the lamps on the gilded plaster of the ceiling, worked in sea monsters and figures from legend, and on the pale stone of the walls and their lapis inlay of flowers and trees.
“A toast!” the King of the Isles said, glaring at the Emeralds where they sat halfway down the great municipal banqueting hall of Preble. The dull roar of conversation died, except for snatches of drunken song from those too far gone to care. “A toast to my son, the shining warrior, Prince Tenny!”
“Prince Tenny!” the hall roared back.
Casull threw the cup to one side, and the priceless Vanbert glassware shattered. A servant shoved another into his hand.
“And another toast! To the bastard son of a whore, Esmond Gellert, who lost the battle by running amok without orders!”
Esmond stood, graceful and tall in a plain tunic and swordbelt. His hand fell unconsciously to the place where a hilt would have been, if men could feast armed before the King. The guardsmen leaning on their great scimitars tensed slightly; a fighting man like the Emerald was never entirely disarmed. Before he could speak, Adrian rose beside him, bowing:
“O King, your kingdom’s heart bleeds with you in your honorable grief for Prince Tenny, fallen like so many others on this day of sorrow!” he said, the trained rhetor’s voice filling the chamber without straining. “Yet even in grief, a King remembers justice!”
The red-veined eyes turned on him. “You speak of justice, bumboy?” he grated.
“Indeed, Lord King,” Adrian cut in, smoothly enough that it did not seem to be an interruption—one art both the Grove’s school of rhetoric and the lawcourts of Vanbert taught. “It would not be just to punish the only squadron commander in your fleet who today sank his own numbers in Confed vessels, and brought as many more behind him, towing them in victory to lay at your feet.”
That brought Casull to a halt for a second, his mouth open. Adrian swallowed, his own so dry that he was insanely tempted to stop for a drink; his temples pounded, and his body dragged with the weariness of the day’s fighting. He flogged his brain into functioning, as merciless to himself as he’d been throwing grenades into the oar decks of Confed galleys.
“And indeed, he did so on my urging,” he went on. Casull’s eyes narrowed. “Not that I, a mere artificer, would have dared to put my word against the King’s! May the King live forever! We are as dust beneath his feet. No, my own wisdom is only wise enough to know that I should never interfere in such matters. Yet before the word of the shining Prince Tenny, the hero and heir, what could I do but obey?”
“What is this?” Casull said, visibly trying to gather his wits. He didn’t need to be sober for the sort of temper-fit he’d had in mind, or to give the necessary orders afterwards. He hadn’t expected to be engaging in the elenchos of the Grove.
“In this very harbor, while I showed him the ship Wodep’s Fist, Prince Tenny commanded me on pain of his utmost wrath that any Confed movement towards Preble must be stopped—since the Royal garrison would be on shipboard for the great battle. Thus I saw Confed ships break away towards Preble, and thus I laid the commands of the Prince upon my brother. What could he do but obey, my lord King? What could I do? We were as dust beneath his feet. And see the wisdom of the Prince’s commands; the walls of Preble stand, a strong base for our next attack!”
“Next?” Casull roared, shaking a fist. “You want me to lose my whole fleet, and see the Confeds sacking Chalice? Are you in their pay?”
“Ah, my lord pleases to jest! See how I laugh, taken by his wit! My lord will have noticed today, that our triremes—those that carried, as I advised, many arquebusiers, rather than spreading them about in small numbers—could devastate the slower Confed ships from a range that neither catapult nor bow could match. Thus were five sunk, and five captured, with hardly any loss. Next time—”
“Get out! I’ve had my belly full of your lies, and my son is dead, and I must beg the Confed commander for his body. Get out, before I kill you!”
“The King commands,” Adrian said, bowing again.
“What are these things?” Helga asked, fascinated, touching one gingerly but trying to make it seem as if it was to steady herself against the gentle rocking of the anchored ship.
Demansk frowned at his daughter, but it wasn’t really a formal occasion where it was grossly improper for a woman to speak. Most of the Confed force’s commanders were asleep in their tents, and so were most of the surviving men. Only a few aides and some troopers to hold torches were with him on the deck of the captured Islander quinquereme.
He peered at the bronze shape that lay on a carriage of oak with four small wheels, amid a cat’s-cradle of ropes and pulleys. A smell hung about it, of hot metal and sulfur. Death farts from the Lord of the Shades, he thought sardonically.
“It’s like those arquebuses, only much bigger,” he said. “Look, there are the stone balls it threw—or those sacks of lead ones. Hellpowder down the muzzle, the ball or bag on top, set fire to it, and out it goes—smashing ships and men.” He shook his head. “This changes the whole face of war, forever, do you understand?” His anger was distant, muffled. “We can’t keep it secret, now—not with the Islanders still having more. If they use these things, we must too, and . . .” His voice stopped with an enormous yawn.
“And you can curse Adrian more tomorrow, Father,” she said. “I still think you weren’t recovered enough for a battle—even if you did destroy the iron ram all by yourself.”
Pride glowed through the sarcasm of her words, and Demansk felt himself swelling a little. Well, it was something of a feat . . . perhaps enough for a triumph in Vanbert? Perhaps even the Speaker’s chair; there was so much that cried out to be done, to make safe the State.
And I’m out on my feet and getting delirious, he told himself severely. “Back to camp.”
The captured quinqueremes were with the surviving capital ships of the Confed fleet, tied up to bollards at their bows, sterns out into the artificial harbor. They couldn’t be drawn up like the dozens of triremes beached on either side, but they were secure enough here. More than secure, Demansk thought. The rock-filled merchantmen that made up the breakwaters reached well out into the ocean, defining a rectangle five hundred feet by a thousand; out at the entrance, two wooden forts rested on two large cargo carriers each. Flaming baskets of wood reached out on poles, to show the boom of chain-linked logs that sealed the entrance against raiders. The forts had archers and slingers and catapults, and they were well within range of each other. Shoreward were the dockyards and the whole Confed camp, still sixteen thousand regulars and as many auxiliaries—they’d even had time to run up timber barracks and housing, while the fleet was being made ready.
He glared out towards the dim lights of Preble, just visible on the southwestern horizon. The battle had been about even, which made it a Confed victory—and next time they’d have had time to study the new weapons, come up with countertactics of their own, and they’d still have the weight of men and metal on their side. Next time . . .
“The King was angry,” Adrian said judiciously.
Esmond drank and wiped his mouth. “The King was ripshit,” he said. “The King may have us all impaled before morning, if he doesn’t pass out first—he may regret it when he sobers up, but that won’t help us.”
probability of execution in the next 6 hours is 67%, ±7, Center said helpfully.
To be fair, Raj said judiciously, Casull really doesn’t understand the new weapons. He’s a fair to good commander with what he does understand.
Adrian looked around the small rooftop platform; he and Esmond, and their seconds-in-command, plus a scattering of Striker officers . . . Nobody was looking too cheerful. Frankly, I doubt anyone here is in the mood to be particularly fair, he thought.
“We’re the only ones who kick Confed ass, and we’re in line to be buggered by the Oakman,” Donnuld Grayn said. “Ain’t no justice in this world, not if you’re a hired soldier. Fuck all Islanders, anyway. If Lord Gellert’d been in command today, we’d be drinking Jeschonyk’s wine.” He grinned with a friendly malice. “And Lord Adrian here would be back diddling Demansk’s daughter.”
Adrian flushed. How that news had gotten out, the Gray-Eyed alone knew. Although letting it do so was more in Gellerix’s line, if you listened to the old stories.
“Esmond would have done better,” he agreed neutrally.
Because he’d listen to you, Raj said. I think that left to himself, he’d make a battle plan and then use the new weapons in it, not build the plan around their capacities. Of course, he doesn’t have Center to lean on. He’s a better than middling commander, with the weapons mix you have here—very good indeed.
There were times when the sheer objectivity of his invisible companions could get a little wearing, even to a Scholar of the Grove who’d striven for detachment all his days. All things in moderation, even moderation.
And we want the new weapons to make a difference, he observed.
correct, Center said. to break this planet from its stasis, the innovations must be shown to be decisively superior. it must be shown that the future is qualitatively different from, and superior to, the past—an essential shift in overall paradigm.
“The question before us now,” Adrian said aloud, reverting automatically to the elenchos of the Grove, “is what course of action can save us from being . . . ah, buggered by the Oakman.”
“Well, we could bring the whole Confed fleet back for the King to roast prawns over,” Esmond said morosely. “And all the captured ships, and all their cannon and hellpowder.”
“Gunpowder,” Adrian corrected automatically, and then froze. He was conscious of the others looking at him, but within his skull there was a blinding light; it was not unlike the near-orgasmic ecstasy of having an insight, but multiplied by three and with the resonances of three separate personalities added in.
“Wait, wait!” he said, holding up a hand. “Look, it’s a longshot, but it beats being impaled. Here’s what we’ll do—”
When the words stopped tumbling forth, the other four men were staring at him with the stars reflecting in their wide eyes.
“Suicide,” Esmond whispered.
“Oh, no,” Adrian said. The thought of what he proposed to do stopped him for a moment, and his smile was a trifle ghastly. All men are initiates of the mysteries of death, he reminded himself sternly. “Waiting here for the King to decide we’re to blame for his son getting killed, that’s suicidal. This is just risky.”
Grayn rubbed his chin. “Couldn’t we just run off and take up piracy?” he said.
“That’s slow suicide, with all the people we’d have pissed off at us,” Adrian snapped back. “Confeds and the King of the Isles after our asses? I don’t think so.”
The mercenary nodded. Adrian looked at Simun. The grizzled little man shrugged. “Well, you’re the lord, sir, so whatever you order’s fine with us.” He sighed and heaved himself erect. “Better go get the men ready, before they’re too deep in the jug or dipping their wicks—makes a man grumpy if you interrupt him, and sleepy if you don’t. Been a long day . . .”
His voice trailed off as he trotted down the stairs. Grayn was staring at the stars. “Getting out of the harbor, that might be a bitch,” he said thoughtfully. “Got the chain boom up.”
It was Esmond’s turn to smile. “And we’ve got squads with the militia in the towers either side of the harbor mouth,” he said. “Prince Tenny, bless him, didn’t rearrange that—and I suppose the King hasn’t had time to look into details.”
“So, all we’ve got to worry about is the Confeds,” Grayn said, rising and gathering up sword and helmet, and fastening the clasps of his armor. “All twenty-fucking-thousand of them, and a couple of hundred of us. Wodep, I should have stayed home and farmed olives with my brothers.”
“Wish I was going with you,” Esmond whispered as Adrian put his foot on the rope ladder over the side of the Revenge.
Whispering was unnecessary; they were well beyond hearing distance from the Confed harbor, far enough away that its watchfires were simply a dim glow in the distance, a glimmer that might have been phantom lights chasing each other across a man’s closed eyelids.
“I’m glad you’re not,” Adrian said. “There has to be somebody out there to haul my ass out of the crack, big brother.” Seriously: “May the Gray-Eyed Lady of Wisdom hold Her shield above you tonight, brother.”
“And over you—you’re her favorite.” Then he snorted laughter.
“What’s funny?”
“King Casull. He’ll just be getting the news we’ve deserted!”
Adrian grinned back at him and dropped the last foot into the launch. There was a glimmer of white, a slow chopping shssshhhh as the trireme and its companions pulled away northward and west, looping out from the coast.
“Let’s get going, then,” Adrian said, when the ships had vanished in the moonless dark. He turned his head, and a glowing arrow painted itself across his vision.
“Yessor,” Simun agreed; he and a nephew were acting as Adrian’s loaders and rowers tonight, at his gentle insistence—he was a fisherman’s son, as he pointed out, and as at home in small boats as any.
“All right,” the older man went on to his relative. “Now lay out—row dry, ye dickhead, and row soft, or this oar’ll cob you. Show no white on yor blade when it cuts the water, now. Row soft.”
The soft glow grew ahead of them as they angled in to the northeast. A half-hour, and Simun and his nephew were breathing soft and deep; he could smell their sweat in the warm summer night. A touch of mist lay on the water, low curls of it; that was helpful. It was quiet enough that the occasional plop of a jumping fish was distinct and sharp through the darkness. Now square shapes cut the night, blotted outlines against the frosting of stars on the eastern horizon.
Adrian’s vision brightened with Center’s passionless certainty. Now he could see the fire-baskets out on poles from the wooden forts at each end of the artificial harbor, and diffuse fire glow from the vast Confed camp beyond. And smell it, the rank odor of so many men crammed together. The fires above the water had died down to dull glows.
Careless, he thought. They should be kept bright with pine knots the night through.
They’ve had a hard day too, lad, Raj said. It’s hard keeping men up to the mark when they’re that exhausted. Although you’re right; I’d have the rank-tabs off any officer I caught letting this happen.
“We’re coming up on the boom,” Adrian said softly from where he knelt in the bows of the small boat. “About a thousand yards. It’s just barely awash. Big logs.”
“Eyes like a cat, sor,” Simun grunted, looking over his shoulder as he rowed. “Suppose it comes of bein’ favored of the gods, like.”
“Rest easy,” Adrian said, clambering between them into the stern of the boat and carrying the big net of clay jars with him; that tilted its prow up, nearly out of the water. “All right—fast as you can!”
“Row!” Simun called softly to his nephew. “Fast now, boy, stretch out—rapppiipai! Rapppippipai!”
The two men leaned into their oars, rising and falling with breathy grunts of effort. Adrian waited, poised, while the towers loomed on either side like the gates of the land of the Shades—only the giant three-headed hound was lacking, and there were watchdogs enough in the towers, and in the camp behind. I am insane, went through him. This has all been a delusion, and I’m completely fucking insane—
Center’s vision showed him the floating barrier of logs ahead. He waited; then the boat’s keel ground on the rough wood with an ugly crackling, crunching sound.
“Forward!” he called, and leapt into the bows, using the shock of impact to power his jump.
The two at the oars followed him, and the stern came out of the water. The boat teetered, wavered . . . and then slid forward with a splash that sounded to Adrian’s ears like the launching of a quinquereme down a slipway, with a flute and drum corps in accompaniment. Even his own breathing was like a bellows, and he slowed it with an effort of will, hissing the others to silence. The boat drifted, the oars loose on the thongs that secured them to the muffled oarlocks. Simun scrambled back on his hands and knees, swearing softly and checking the bottom of the boat with his fingers for the welling leaks that might show a cracked strake.
Nothing; no shouts, no blazing lights. The towers were looking for bigger fish . . . if they were looking at all, and not just dozing. Adrian sat for a moment controlling his breathing, feeling the slowing of a heart whose pounding shook his chest.
“All right,” Simun said, his voice low and fierce. “We did it, sor!”
“ ‘Well begun, half done; half done, not begun,’ ” Adrian said, quoting an old Emerald folk saying. The founder of the Grove had been fond of it, too; it was whispered that he’d been a stonecutter and the son of a peasant himself. “This way.”
The artificial harbor was as rectangular as men could make it, in the Confed style. They hadn’t straightened the beach at the inner end, though; that was a half-moon, turning the whole affair into a U-shape. The low irregular line of the rock-filled ships loomed on either side, five hundred feet apart, with waves breaking on the outer sides and throwing a little white foam over the bulwarks. This arrangement would never survive a series of winter gales, but it only needed to last as long as the siege of Preble . . . and there at the base of the U were the ships.
Center’s lightening of the darkness intensified; Adrian felt as if an invisible line were being wound tighter and tighter around his forehead. Then it eased, and a strobing arrow marked their course.
the four captured quinqueremes, Center pointed out.
Adrian looked up. “It’s after midnight,” he said. “Nobody’ll be around.”
“Deck watches, sor,” Simun pointed out, nodding towards a dim lantern on the stern of one of the Confed vessels.
“But nobody on the captured ships, not yet. Take us in, but keep as near the middle as you can; beach her right next to the left-hand quinquereme of those four. When these”—he tapped the clay jugs—“start going off, things are likely to get a bit hairy, so be ready to push off when I get back.”
“Bit hairy, sor.” Simun chuckled softly. “Take yor time, but by Gellerix’ cunt, don’t linger, eh?”
The oars bit, and Adrian—slowly, cautiously—loaded one of the jugs into his staff-sling. The jugs held a mixture of fish oil, sulfur, naphtha oil that oozed out of rocks, and quicklime. Experiment had shown they’d burn like the heart of a forge fire and couldn’t be put out. They were also fairly fragile.
“Coming up on the shore,” he said. The darkness grew more absolute, as they ghosted into the shade of the captured quinquereme; it had the faint sewer stench a rowing vessel always did, even if the bilges were pumped regularly. “Lay on your oars.”
The two men did, and Adrian hopped over the side. His sandals grated on pebbles and sand, and he reached back in for the sack of what Center, for some reason, called molotovs.
“Back in a minute,” he said casually, and walked up the beach.
The rams of the quinqueremes almost glowed with Center’s unearthly vision, serrated bronze catching faint starlight. Off somewhere a man’s voice raised in song, then ended in a squall—probably a wakened sleeper hitting him, Adrian thought distantly. He walked casually: if you looked as if you belonged, you’d shed a casual glance—people saw what they expected to see. Turning, he took his stance and aimed. Left to right, he thought.
Swing, swing, throw.
The jug arched out, wobbling a little as the liquid within shifted. It struck the first quinquereme right on the forecastle, on the timber square added to bear the weight of the guns. Crash. Not very loud, but distinct amid the wave lap and insect buzz of the night. A flicker of light, as the air found the quicklime. Crash. One more, to make sure. Crash. Crash. Crash. Crash. Crash. Crash . . .
Fire on every one of the four captured ships. Enough to brighten this stretch of beach quite perceptibly; paint and rope and dry pinewood caught easily. Now all he could do was pray.
probability of optimal outcome 51% ±3, Center supplied hopefully. in this instance, “optimal” requires the survival of adrian gellert.
I’ll still pray, Adrian thought, jogging back to the boat.
“Good to see ye, sor,” Simun panted.
They shoved off and began rowing, not so quickly as to attract attention . . . he hoped.
“Uh-oh.”
A horn winded through the night, and then an alarm drum. With the gathering light from the burning ships, the harbor looked much smaller than it had in darkness. Much smaller, and the fire baskets on the entrance forts suddenly blazed, as they were swung in and then out again with a fresh load of pine knots. The huts nearest the beach held the deck crews of the Confed warships; men were swarming down to the shore, wading out and climbing up the sides of their vessels. Already officers were beginning to warp them away from the burning ships—excess caution, really. They were close, but not that close, and without rigging or sails aloft it would take more than heat and sparks to set them alight. Confeds might have been able to extinguish the fires on the captured ships if they’d gone straight there, Adrian mused—anything to distract his mind from what might happen, and what he couldn’t do a thing about. They had no chance at all once they’d finished seeing to their own ships, but trained reflex was stronger than thought in an emergency. It had to be.
Flames licked higher from the prows of the ex-Islander warships. Adrian suddenly felt like a bug on a plate, his head whipping to and fro as he tried to see in all directions at once. Simun and his nephew were cursing in antiphonal harmony as they dug their oars in madly, like the chorus at a Goat Song festival play. Men were crowding onto the parapets of the wooden forts—archers. A six-oared launch put out from one of them, and the officer in the bows was pointing at him. More and more men ran down to the shore, and the growing buzz from the Confed camp was like some great beast awakening, grumpy and angry from its winter sleep . . . and growling.
Sisst. A flight of arrows came slanting down out of the dark, into the water off the skiff’s bow. Sissst. Closer now, and the raiders’ own efforts were driving them further into range. The light grew ever brighter, as well. He could see quite plainly now, for several hundred yards; see the crew manhandling a catapult around on the tower top, a dart-thrower that could skewer a man at a thousand feet, much less the four hundred that separated his own tinglingly vulnerable body from it.
His head whipped back to shore. There were other small craft there; men were shouting and pointing at Adrian’s skiff, and launching the boats. All men are initiates of the mysteries of death, he repeated to himself. And: Helga. Damn it . . .
The world ended.
“What’s that?” Donnuld Grayn gasped.
“That is my brother,” Esmond said, throwing up a hand and shouting.
He needed to do both. The Strikers had been creeping up toward the Confed encampment in the dark, their ships lightly beached behind them to the north. For a moment the night turned bright as day, a huge globe of fire rising to silhouette the rear of the camp’s wall where the magazines of the captured Islander quinquerimes had exploded. Streaks and ribbons of fire shot up from it, and huge burning timbers pinwheeled through the sky. When they fell, whatever they landed on burned as well; the other ships in the harbor, the long sheds above the shoreline crammed full of pitch and tar, turpentine and rope and boards and sails, the warehouses of olive oil and grain, the rough pine barracks the Confeds had raised . . .
One of the wooden towers along the landward wall was blazing, too; a twenty-foot baulk of pine flaming like a torch had dropped out of the sky on it. Men swarmed along the parapet, frantically tearing at the burning wood and dashing futile buckets on it.
“Fire!” Esmond called, startled out of his wonderment. “Fire, and save your lord!”
The arquebuses of Adrian’s men began to bark with a methodical eagerness. And on the wall of the Confed fortress, men began to die.
Oh, shit, Adrian thought, as he pulled himself up.
His ears hurt, and his head when he shook it to clear his vision of the spots strobing across it. When it did clear, a grin spread over his mouth despite the pain. Half the harbor was burning, and half the camp beyond—and most of the men there were far too occupied to be concerned with the small boat they’d spotted a moment before. Make that three-quarters, he thought, as another Confed vessel began to blaze out of control, and its deck crew scrambled ashore or over the side.
Sisssht. More arrows plowed into the water around the boat; this time two stuck in the thwarts, humming like bees.
“I’d be afraid if I had the time,” Adrian said quietly. Louder: “Row for the north bank of the harbor—that ship there!”
He pointed to one of the sunken merchantmen, just within sling range of the north tower. Then he stood, trying to compensate for the pitch and roll of the little skiff with his knees, sling dangling from his hand. The enemy launch was quite close now, close enough to see the firelight glitter ruddily on the spears of the men between the rowers.
Swing. Swing. Throw.
His hand moved in blank obedience to Center’s direction, fingers releasing the thong when the red dot blinked. The firebomb—molotov—arched out with a steady, inevitable trajectory. He could hear it shatter against the breastplate of the officer in the launch, and hear the man’s scream as the flames took him even more clearly. Luck—Adrian’s, not the man’s in the launch—pitched him forward into the arms of his men, to spatter fire among them, lighting hair and tunics and the wood of the craft with impartial ferocity.
“Row, gods condemn you!” Adrian roared to Simun and his nephew.
The towers had seen what was happening, and worse, where he was going. He felt at the burlap sack; three more molotovs. Arrows fell around them, and more stuck quivering in the wood of the skiff. One passed by his ear, close enough for the feathers to sting; two inches left, and the last sound he ever would have heard would have been that one crunching into his brain.
Shock of impact; the prow of the boat was level with the railing of the sunken rock-filled merchant ship. The wood was splintery under his hands as he vaulted aboard, the deck wet and unstable underneath his feet. Two ships down, a party from the tower was clambering towards him, shields up and assegais out. Their faces were red with the light of the burning camp; he must be a black outline to them, a figure out of darkness and night.
“Behind you!” he screamed at them. “Your tower’s burning too, you velipad fuckers!”
Swing. Swing. Throw.
The molotov whipped out, not at the soldiers but at the wooden fortress behind them. Heads followed it, and saw where it left a streak of red fire on the wood.
Swing. Swing. Throw. A sharp pain in his leg, above the knee, and the limb threatened to buckle. The pain was distant, and he ignored it. Ignored the weakness, forcing the muscle rigid. Swing. Swing. Throw. A last crackle against the wood of the tower.
One of the troopers clambering towards him bawled in panic and threw away his shield, leaping into the sea; not quite total madness, since he hadn’t had time to don his mail shirt. He struck out for the other side of the harbor with a clumsy threshing stroke. As if that had been the first rock of an avalanche, men began to throw themselves out of the tower into the water.
Adrian felt a great tension drain, and his strength along with it. The leg gave under him, and he found himself somehow seated on the deck, staring without belief at the black-fletched arrow through the fleshy part of his thigh. Then the pain struck, and he bit his lip to hold back a moan.
Simun was bending over him. “Not serious, sir. Head’s right through, clean. Here, I’ll break it off and pull this out—”
“Nnnghg!”
“There we go, m’lord, right as rain when I tie it up—”
“Uncle.”
Simun looked up, and saw the last two Confed troopers clambering onto the prow of the merchantman. “Well, fuck me, some people don’t know when they’re not welcome,” he said, scooping up Adrian’s staff-sling. He scrabbled in his own belt pouch, came out with a lead bullet the size of a small plum, and dropped it into the cup.
Crack. The first Confed pitched backward, with an oval hole in his forehead and his eyes bulging with hydrostatic shock from the blow that had homogenized his brain.
Simun dropped the sling and drew his sword, unhooking the small buckler from his belt. “Spread out, Davad,” he told his nephew.
The two Emeralds did, and the Confed began backing up—he had shield, helmet and assegai, but not his mail shirt.
“And hurry up,” Simun said, moving forward, light on his feet. “We’ve got to get the boat over this whore of a hulk and out to where Lord Esmond’s waiting for us. The commander ought to get to the surgeon, too.”