It wasn’t, in truth. The rush of fear and anger and bloodshed had dampened the Messah’s ears to the uproar on deck. Savage and metallic, the clangor of combat, grunts and curses and weird words that he could not discern. An alien tongue and one familiar.
“Sodd’n Gaut-Dogs!” called a voice from right outside, and in the next breath a single-edged blade erupted red through the cabin door. The brothers of Babylon and the girl Magdalynn gawked in horror. Awestruck, they hardly flinched as another sword penetrated the door, nor did they recoil when the wood flew wholly off its hinges as far as the smuggler’s table while pinned with a corpse. It was Luigi, dead and broken—impaled in two places—his wounds still bleeding, still staining his shirt and his Tsaazaari silk vest.
Then entered their uninvited guests, a man and a woman: thin eyes, sallow faces, and dead black straight manes. Both were gaily clothed, him in flowing purple pants and painted leather jack, brass bands, brazen bangles, and a fortune in gold from lands unknown riveted together in a scaly cuirass. He wore three swords as well, narrow Gautaman sabres, their jewel encrusted scabbards secured at his waist. Two were empty—and the third blade he drew while strutting the floor with his bloody boots for the first mate—or rather, for the swords stuck in Luigi’s corpse. All the while, his partner clogged about the room in absurd wooden sandals curtailing her every move so as not to trip on her robe of violet silk with its snow fox fur collar and the sword at her hip: another single-edged sabre, but longer and thin, a delicate razor when she took it in hand.
Adam gaped in amazement.
The raider vaulted the table, retrieving his sabres, hurling his blade as he came down on the other end. One fluid action. The sword soaring for the half-blood, he ducked but could not escape. The assailant was on him, cleaving left and right and high then low, always cutting, always lunging. The witch’s son would parry one, but the next would nick a wrist, split a shoulder, slice a forearm, bloody a thigh, slash his chest. Shallow wounds, like those from a switch.
This was a game, Adam realized. Cat and mouse, and they were the prey. The woman pirate, his predator, pawed the floor with a wooden clog, poised to pounce, paused, then bolted forward. A wide slice for the Messah’s core that he slipped out of distance by the skin of his instincts, yet that left Magdalynn abandoned between the Gautaman and himself. The violet pirate smiled. She’d seen his mistake, and before he could raise his sword, she’d taken the girl hostage—placed a blade to her throat.
Time froze. Sweat clung cold on the nape of Adam’s neck. His friend stood behind him, pushed back to the corner and wounded. Soon, he’d be there as well, then they’d both be dead men and Magdalynn would be taken again as a slave. The thought of it brought a burning to the side of his neck. The Crest of the King, he remembered his promise when from the heavens came a blast like thunder but louder and so close the very boat seemed to convulse. And even the raiders were shaken—the woman so taken, she released Magdalynn just long enough for Adam to charge, headlong, wrong by everything his father ever taught him. Aggressive and defenseless, his whole body behind this one mad thrust that left them both aghast as the blade sank deep into the center of her breast.
Death took her at once, and after came the rancor, her partner’s roar in every corner of the cabin. Adam did not look back. He knew better than to expect another Godsend—whatever that blast had been—and would take his chances on the open deck. He only hoped Adnihilo would follow after him, or that the pirate might forget his friend long enough for the half-blood to run off on his own. God save him, Adam thought, and he dropped his sword stuck in the woman’s corpse as it tumbling toward him. It hurt, like losing his father all over again to desert the weapon, but he needed his hands. They snatched up Magdalynn still numb with consternation and carried her.
Outside shone the black of night—the lumen of the ocean, the pale face of the moon—a light dew on the surface of the deck and the ropes and the rain-catchers, the sails and the masts, and the masses of dead men piled around the hatch and hanging over the balustrade. And the bishop, in his blacks and reds, a silhouette visible by the gold-thread cross on his chest, stood at the center of it. Something in his arms, large, heavy; and he was wheeling it around to aim at the aftcastle just as Adam came racing out.
He’d made it. Fifty paces carrying the girl, and now only a few more steps and he’d be free beneath the hatch. The prospect of safety set his heart at ease. His breathing slowed, and with it, the tempo of his feet. At that speed, the world reformed around him, revealing details unseen: He noticed the bodies were almost entirely foreigners—Gautaman by the look of them—yet there was something bloated and swollen about their faces, as if each man had been pricked beneath the chin and the wound left to fester till the skin tinged pink as rash or bruised green. Seeing them made his stomach roil, and he nearly stopped dead passing a particular corpse whose head had been blown open.
Adam lingered on the body a moment too long. The result: a fulmination sharp as steel shot through his leg. He crashed mid-stride, turning as he fell to protect the
