The Reformer

iron like a scale cuirass. Hobnails won't grip. Feet will! There are men inside, and I intend to kill those men.'

'Yes, sir!'

The man strode off, bawling at his command. Demansk caught a strong whiff of the smoke boiling out of the iron ship as his trireme heeled and turned; honest woodsmoke, right enough.

If there are men inside, and not monsters-he thrust an image of claws on treadmills aside-then they have to be steering from that little boxlike thing in front of the tubes. So they can't have a very good view, looking through slits like a close-helmet, and with all that smoke.

He gave a quick, unaccustomed prayer to Wodep and Allfather Greatest and Best that he was right. His life and the Confederacy's western provinces both depended on it.

'Ramming speed!' he ordered. The iron ship was swelling with frightful suddenness.

* * *

'That's discouraging them,' Esmond said.

Another Confed trooper on the beach staggered three steps backward and dropped, arms flung wide and shield spinning away. An arquebusier beside one of the Revenge's steering oars chuckled and stepped back, letting his assistant and loader work. They moved in a coordinated dance, automatic now, grinning past the powder smuts that turned their faces into the masks of pantomime devils. Esmond's galley rose and fell with the surf, but the gunmen on it and the rest of his squadron were keeping the hundred-odd Confed troopers on shore from interfering.

'Line's hitched!' a sailor said, climbing over the stern naked and glistening wet.

Esmond nodded. 'Take her out.'

The oars had been poised, waiting. Now they dipped, driving deep; there was a unanimous heaving grunt from below, and again, and again. .

'She floats!' the steersman said, letting his oar pivot down into water deep enough for it. 'We've got her off!'

Esmond looked about with pride; five of his six ships were towing captives, the enemy ships coming after them oarless and sternfirst, the traditional sign of victory at sea. The other five triremes of the Confed squadron were burning hulks, or sunk. One was sticking out of the waves, its bronze beak planted firmly in the sandy mud of the shallow coastal waters. Wreckage floated past with the tide. .

. . an awful lot of wreckage. Esmond looked seaward, losing the diamond focus of commanding his own small section of the battle, and shaped a soundless whistle.

'Wodep!' he blurted.

The neat lines had vanished-he looked up at the sun and blinked astonishment-in only an hour. Instead there was a melee that stretched from here to the edge of sight, and almost to within catapult range of Preble's walls. Galleys were burning and sinking everywhere he looked; as he watched, a Confed quinquereme went nosedown and slid under the waves, shedding what looked like a coating of black fur at this distance, and that he knew was men clinging desperately to a life that sank beneath them. A little further off an Islander capital ship fired its four cannon directly into the deck of a Confed trireme, shattering the marines clumped to board into an abattoir mass of blood and torn meat, and punching through the deck into the crowded oar benches beneath. Even as it did a Confed quinquereme ranged up along its other side, and the boarding ramps slung up by ropes crashed down to link the ships, driving their iron beaks into the lower deck of the Islander vessel. Marines launched a volley of their weighted darts, and then swarmed across like implacable warrior ants. Here, there, a confusion no eye could take in. .

'Where's the ram?' Adrian was half-shouting, his eyes wild. 'What has that donkey-fucking idiot done with my ship?'

* * *

'Allfather!' Demansk snapped.

The shock of impact threw him to his hands and knees on the deck, driving bits of armor into his flesh. He pulled himself upright again, watching with savage glee as the deck of the enemy vessel surged backward and the wheel beat itself to flinders on the bronze-sheathed timber of his ship's ram. Splinters rained back, as dangerous as flying knives, but he ignored them. Then the remnants of the wheel froze, and an odd muffled screaming sound came from within the. . Iron Monstreme, Demansk thought. The monster-chuffing breath ceased abruptly.

'Follow me!' he roared. 'Whatever it is, we hurt it! Now we finish it off!'

The boarding ramp fell. The iron spike penetrated at least a little, and Demansk ran down it. The iron plates felt strange beneath his bare feet, but skin gripped-the only problem was that it was just short of painfully hot. He crouched, holding his round officer's shield out for balance, and ran up the low curve towards the square blockhouse forward of the smoke cylinders. He could hear men following him, and one despairing scream as somebody slipped and slid into the water on his way to the bottom, and then they were crouched around the blockhouse. It was iron plates on timber, the same as the rest of the strange construction, but steam was leaking out of the slits-oddly like a bathhouse.

A hatchway on top of the blockhouse opened, and a man stumbled up and out, wavering, pawing at his crimson face. A dart landed in his gut with a wet thwack that was all too clear at this range.

'Prisoners!' Demansk shouted. 'I want prisoners!'

Men clambered on to the roof of the blockhouse, and one of them gave Demansk a hand. The hatchway proved to be about the size of an ordinary door, but the space beyond was a ghostly mass of steam and vague thrashing figures.

Like an orgy in the steam room, Demansk thought, dazed. Whatever he'd been expecting, it wasn't this.

'We surrender!' a voice coughed, hoarse and rough, an Islander accent. 'Let us out, for the love of the Mother!'

'Come out with your hands empty,' Demansk called down.

A man came up, showing empty palms; one side of his face was a huge blister. 'Spare us, lord! Mercy!'

'Who are you?' Demansk barked. 'And what is this thing?'

Even as he spoke, he realized the futility of the question. Whatever this was, it probably couldn't be explained by a wounded man at assegai-point.

'Sharlz Thicelt,' the man said. 'Water, lord?' Demansk nodded, and a man handed over a canteen. The Islander drank, gasped, coughed, drank again. 'I'm skipper of the Wodep's Fist-or was.'

He spat some of the water on the corpse of the first man who left the hatchway, and tore off his turban in a gesture of pure rage, revealing a long shaven skull. The gold hoops in his ears bounced with the vehemence of his motion as he threw the turban after the spittle. Demansk thought that if the footing had been better, he'd have run over and kicked the corpse as well.

'And that was Prince Tenny, may the Sun God reincarnate him as the blind bastard of a pox-ridden half-arnket whore. The gods-forsaken little sodomite lost us the battle.'

* * *

'Lord King!' Adrian said.

The King of the Isles was still wearing his gilded armor, hacked and battered and blood-splashed. That took some courage, in a small launch. There was no need to ask what had happened to the flagship; it was not a thousand yards off, with two battered but still floating Confed quinqueremes lashed to either side.

Casull stalked to the quarterdeck, his eyes travelling over the chaos that reigned on this stretch of reddened ocean. 'I do not abide by a plan that has failed,' he grated. 'We'll retreat.' He looked at the Revenge's steersman. 'Set course for the nearest ship still in our hands. We'll have to arrange a rearguard, if we're to get to Preble in one piece.'

He looked at Esmond then. 'Where is my son?'

Esmond met his eyes. 'Lord King, the enemy holds the Wodep's Fist. Beyond that, I do not know.'

Casull sighed, his eyes dull. 'If he lives, we'll hear before sunset; demands for ransom, enough to leave the kingdom poor. If not. . if not, we'll drink his spirit home to the Sun.'