like demons, as you can see — even my passengers fought — ah, how they fought-”
“Passengers?” I had found a length of red cloth wound about the body of a dead man — evidently one of the passengers the merchant skipper was speaking of — and I wrapped it around my waist and drew the end up between my legs and tucked it in. The brave scarlet color cheered me. “Yes — a strange lot. The men fought like men possessed. Look, Pur Dray — there is one now, dying, and yet still he thinks he fights.”
Hauled out of the way beneath a varter a man lay dying. What the skipper said was true, for he kept opening his arms wide and closing them again in the rapier and main-gauche drill known as the “flower”
although his right hand was empty. He wore long black boots and a snug-waisted brown coat which flared wide over his hips and up to his shoulders. He wore no hat, but I could guess what sort of hat he would own. In his left hand he carried a bejeweled main-gauche with which he kept up his laborious flow of passages at arms.
I knelt by his side.
“You were with Vomanus?” I said. I spoke as gently as I might, but my words cracked harsh and impatiently for all that.
“Vallians,” said the merchant skipper. “A strange lot.”
“Sterncastle,” gasped the dying man. Blood dribbled from his mouth. I looked up at the broadship’s captain.
“Alas, my Lord of Strombor. The men of Vallia were insistent that every care should be taken of the passengers and so on my orders they were shut up in the Sterncastle, for safekeeping. But the fall of the mainmast, and the ferocity of the attack — we could not get them out. I fear they are doomed.” I was puzzled. Granted that Vomanus had shipped aboard this vessel now sinking into a chank-infested sea, I couldn’t understand my not seeing him. He would never be shut up in a safe place when there was a fight brewing. The Vallian was young, handsome, with a long brown moustache and neatly trimmed beard. He tried to speak, spat blood, tried again, managed to blurt out: “They must be saved!”
“There is no saving them now,” said the captain, with a grim nod at the decks of his ship about to submerge beneath the water and the twin fins of the chanks circling nearer. “My old ship is taking them to their grave, may Ta’temsk smile on them.”
The dying Vallian opened his eyes and there was reason in them. He had stopped his ghastly phantom swordplay. I took the dagger from him, gently, respectfully. Blood gushed from his mouth as he burst into an impassioned and mortal shout.
“You must save her! She is trapped, drowning, doomed — you must! The Princess Majestrix of Vallia!
Princess-”
The blood choked him. I felt — I thought — I -
Delia! My Delia!
Chapter Six
I have no memory until I stood before the doors to the broad ship’s aftercastle with its hideous tangle of wreckage blocking them off, tearing at them with my bare hands, the dagger naked in my clenched teeth. It was all a long time ago and four hundred light-years distant, a drama played out on a distant sea beneath the lurid fires of the twin suns of Antares; and yet — and yet!
Water slopped about my thighs, pouring in an ever-thickening flood over the gunwales. I heaved timber aside, used the keen dagger edge to slash through water-soaked ropes. I reached the door and now I became aware of the yells and shouts from the swifter.
“It is too late!” “Come back!” “You will be drowned!” and — “My Lord — the chanks!”
I ignored the jabbering.
A stubborn balk impeded me and I put my shoulders to it — those shoulders that had been the despair of my ever-sewing mother — and heaved up until the blood seemed to compress all my brains and threatened to burst from my eyes and nostrils. My muscles rippled and bunched and I heaved — how I heaved!
With an abrupt screech the balk slid aside and I lurched forward into the doors. I used that lurch -
there was no time to draw back — and smashed solidly into them. I heard metal snap. Water roiled around my waist now and I felt the ship wallowing and lurching like a drunk staggering from The Fleeced Ponsho in Sanurkazz.
I kicked the doors in and a frenzied woman was in my arms, all dark hair about my face like damp laundry, and softness against my naked chest, and a screaming mouth and fiercely clawing fingers. A voice yelled in my ear.
“Pass her back!”
“Here, Seg.”
I knew it was him, and there was no time for my gratitude. He was no seaman, he could probably swim with a dog-crawl; he was risking more than I here, on the deck of this sinking ship. I plunged into the cabin.
The whole ship shuddered and the ominous roar of thousands of gallons of water suddenly victorious pouring into her told me she was gone. Water smashed me forward and I swirled around in the sudden green gloom.
With the dagger between my teeth again I held my breath.
And then-
Delia! My Delia of the Blue Mountains, my Delia of Delphond was once more in my arms and I held her dear form to me in that water-choked cabin of a sinking ship. I felt her waist as lissome and as lithe as I remembered, and I swung around and struck out for the door. Timber and cordage and canvas floated like octopuses with groping tendrils, seeking to ensnare us and drag us back. But we pushed through the door and the gloom decreased. Light struck down from above. I kicked with a savage exultant fierceness and we rose upward.
I could see the whole extent of the deck of the broad ship with only a few bubbles bursting from her shattered hatches and all the miserable aftermath of the battle. And, among those twisted shapes of corpses, hunting like ghouls, the long sinuous shapes of the chanks nosed in from all sides. We broke surface.
The swifter’s proembolion had nudged off the sinking merchantman. She moved now some distance away. Nearer to us swam the little muldavy in which Seg and I had escaped from Happapat. We had to reach that before the chanks reached us.
I looked down.
Too late. . The chank was already here, was nosing up with that characteristic shark-like belly roll to expose all his corpse-white underbelly. I thrust Delia away from me, took the dagger into my right hand.
“Swim for the boat, Delia!
The breath I drew in scorched my lungs. I dived. The chank saw me coming and half rolled. I went with him. I would not grasp his pseudo-scaled skin for those scales would lacerate my own human flesh like rasps.
As he rolled so I rolled with him and nicked aside so that his gape-jawed attack sliced water. As he went past I thrust the dagger in as hard and as fast as I could. Blood poured out to roil in a thick cloud-like mass in the water. He went on and slowly began to roll, his tail seesawing. A quick look around showed me no more ominous shapes immediately in my vicinity and I kicked hard after Delia. The water was limpid clear, with the surface, the exotic silver sky, all rippled and chiaroscuro-shot with color.
I caught Delia around the waist and heaved her up into the muldavy. I had to be sure.
I ducked down and, sure enough, another chank was circling in. He would razor off my legs before I could scramble into the boat. As I went under again I headed straight for him. He moved aside, those immense jaws gaping, then straightened and headed for me, trying to roll sideways at me. Chanks only need to roll over to seize their prey when it is above them on the surface. Otherwise they are quite capable of gulping a man down from any position.
I went with him, then scissored my legs in a frantic explosion of energy, scythed around his thrusting snout, and buried the dagger six times into his belly. Blood streamed out like a wake. He went on, turning slowly, and I glared up against the radiance. The curved wedge-shape of the muldavy’s bottom showed like a balloon against that silver sky, water-rippled. I shot up stiff-legged, burst from the water, hooked an arm over the gunwale, and
