Demontech: Onslaught (3 page)

“Let’s go.” Spinner put a hand on Haft’s arm and guided him from the room. “Thank you,” he said back into the darkness of the room. The door closed on them.

“What?” Haft demanded. “It’s not dawn yet. We paid for the entire night, and the morrow’s breakfast as well.” If they weren’t being attacked, he felt he was being cheated.

“Quiet,” Spinner snapped softly. He pulled on the rest of his clothes.

Haft didn’t know what the urgency was, but his friend’s voice held an edge that made him obey the command. His clothes barely rustled as he pulled them on.

Without consulting, both men pulled their cloaks close around them, green side out so they could slip through shadows with lesser likelihood of being seen.

Dressed, they stood on the small landing outside the garret chamber for a moment and listened. The faint street noises that came to them through the walls of the inn were unexpected at that hour of the night. They crept down the narrow stairs, willing the treads not to creak.

The public room of the inn loomed huge in its darkened emptiness, appeared far larger than it had when filled with boisterous men. It seemed to have hidden recesses where an enemy could lurk until ready to spring an ambush. Spinner ignored the skin-crawling sensation of eeriness that the darkened common room caused. Haft held his belt knife as though it were his axe, prepared to fight off any ambush.

Faint starlight barely filtered through the glazed, unshuttered windows, but it was enough for them to make their way to the door without knocking anything over. They stood at the door and listened to the street outside. The unexpected noises were clearer, but none sounded on the street outside the inn. Haft released the catches that held the door bar secure, and Spinner lifted the bar from its brackets and set it aside. They eased the door open and slipped out, leaving the door ajar behind them. It didn’t bother them that anyone could walk right in to the now unsecured inn; the noises they heard, unmuffled now by walls, told them that barred inn doors would be battered down. Better the innkeeper didn’t have to replace his door because it resisted the people coming his way.

Cries rang out in the night; some triumphant, some fearful, some death rattles. Here steel clashed against steel, there a ram battered down a barred door. The noises were coming closer. Haft clenched his hand so tightly on his knife that his knuckles almost glowed white in the night; he wished they had proper weapons, so they could better defend themselves if they had to fight. Spinner was glad they had
only
their belt knives—better armed, they’d be more likely to get into a fight, and he didn’t want to fight without knowing more about what they were up against.

“What are the Jokapcul doing? Why are they here?” Haft whispered.

“Two ways to find out,” Spinner replied.

Haft nodded; he knew the two ways. The first way, to walk openly toward the street noises, was too risky. They took the second way. They ran toward the corner closest to the approaching noises and peered cautiously around it.

Forty yards away was one of the many squares that dotted New Bally. It was ringed by fifty or more torches held by soldiers. They wore the dun-colored summer uniforms of the Jokapcul light infantry. Another fifty of the dun-clad soldiers formed a second ring inside the ring of torches; the soldiers in that ring brandished swords and spears at the mass of men they encircled, and barked commands at them in the harsh, unintelligible language of the Jokapcul Islands. Some of the men who were prisoners wore the scarlet uniforms and plumed helms of the New Bally Guard. Most of them wore the tatter-rags of the sailors of a score of nations. While Spinner and Haft watched, more guardsmen and sailors were roughly brought and shoved into the square.

Spinner nudged Haft and pointed. One of the prisoners wore the same green-side-out cloak they did. “Rammer,” he said.

Haft nodded. Rammer was their commander, the sergeant of the Frangerian Marine contingent aboard the
Sea Horse
, their merchantman.

Before either could give voice to the question each held—how to rescue Rammer—he looked directly at them and his mouth shaped the single word “Go.”

The two looked at each other and saw nothing but deepest shadow, and wondered how Rammer, even with his legendary sharp vision, could have seen them. Without further thought, they obeyed their commander’s order and quietly sped to the nearest alley leading away from the square, its guards and their prisoners. They knew they had to get back to the
Sea Horse
and join up with any crew members who might still be aboard and free. They wanted to free Rammer and the other prisoners in the square, but they were essentially unarmed. Before they could do anything, they needed weapons and manpower. They headed toward the docks.

Slowly, cautiously, they made their way through the alleys of New Bally, always careful to avoid stumbling through the middens or stepping into piles of slops. When the street noises and their route threatened to converge, they changed direction to avoid meeting the noise-makers. They went this way and that and sometimes the other, but always they wended toward the docks. The straight-line distance from the inn to the docks was less than half a mile; what with their innings and outings and roundaboutings, it took them more than an hour to travel the distance.

By the time they reached the mouth of an alley that opened onto the docks, dawn was drawing a line of light over the hills of the eastern headland. But they didn’t need to see the color of the uniforms, or the narrow-billed, peaked caps of the soldiers standing guard on the ships, to know they were Jokapcul. Even if they hadn’t been able to see at all, the guttural, doglike barking of the sergeants would have identified the soldiers as Jokapcul. The sight of the enemy soldiers on the ships’ decks told them they wouldn’t find any of their shipmates alive or free on board the
Sea Horse
. They edged back into the deepest shadows of the alley.

“We’ve got to get to the ship,” Haft whispered hoarsely. “We need our weapons.”

Spinner nodded. After a brief moment he whispered, “This way,” and headed back and around until they came out again near the end of the docks, where there were no guards. An ancient shed nearly blocked the entrance of the alley they were in, so that from the dockside it might be possible to look at the shed and not realize there was a passageway behind it.

By then dawn was a glow that covered the lower quadrant of the sky. Stars faded away as the glow spread higher.

They slipped unseen into the shed, then Spinner dropped his cloak and started stripping off his uniform. “What are you doing?” Haft demanded.

“Getting us to the ship. Strip.” When he was down to his pants, the legs of which reached barely below his knees, he redonned his belt with its single cross-body shoulder strap—his knife was scabbarded on the belt.

Haft looked curiously at Spinner, then realized what he had in mind and likewise stripped down. They bundled their clothes and hid them behind a crate in a corner of the shed.

“Watch your step,” Spinner whispered as he pointed ahead.

Haft looked, and barely made out a darker place on the floor where there were no boards, just a narrow hole. He heard the gentle lapping of water.

Back outside, hidden by the night that still lay over the docks, they lowered themselves into the water between the last two ships along the dock.

Ships don’t go straight down to the water; their hulls curve down and in. Even when nuzzled together, bumper to bumper at deck level, there is a wide space below their decks at the waterline. In the predawn, the darkness between the ships was stygian. The two paddled blindly through the dark, hands groping for anchor chains, mooring lines, low hanging bumpers, and the flotsam that always accumulates around ships in port. They made noise; they couldn’t help it. But the washing of the harbor’s water against the hulls masked their sounds from the guards on the ships above.

They didn’t try to swim centered between the ships, but swam along them so they could keep track of where they were and where they had to go. They counted the bows and sterns they swam by; the
Sea Horse
was berthed the fourth row out, on the flank of the massed ships. When they were past four ships, they turned right and swam to the very end of the line, to where they were no longer under and between the ships. The sky was by then bright enough that they could make out the curve of the bay’s western shore as it bent away from them.

Haft silently cursed the light. Spinner didn’t waste thought on it. He held himself steady in the water by grasping the bow anchor chain and looked up to see the best way of boarding the ship. The most obvious was to climb the chain, then use the hawsehole as a step to climb over the rail, but that would leave them briefly silhouetted. Then he saw, a few feet aft of the hawsehole, a darker spot on the hull—someone had left a porthole open below the forecastle, in the hold that was the crews’ quarters. He poked Haft to get his attention and pointed at the open porthole.

Haft looked, nodded, and immediately clambered up the chain. At the top he grabbed the edge of the hawsehole and swung himself to the porthole. In a trice he pulled himself through it. A few seconds later his head poked back out. Spinner was nearly at the top of the anchor chain, so Haft reached out to help him through the opening.

“Trouble,” Haft whispered. “Smell.”

Spinner sniffed. The crews’ cabin held the odor of death.

It was too dark in the cabin for them to see, and they didn’t dare light a lamp, but in seconds their hands found the source of the smell. Three corpses were dumped in a corner of the cabin. One had multiple knife wounds, as though he died fighting. The others had their throats neatly cut. Their clothing had the feel of sailors’ tatters rather than Marines’ uniforms.

“The sailors left on fire watch.”

“Poor squids.”

A moment’s blind searching revealed no weapons—not that they expected to find any in the crew quarters. The Marines kept their weapons on their persons or secured in their quarters. Weapons that might be issued to the sailors in an emergency were kept in a locked chest in the bosun’s cabin amidships. The sailors each had a utilitarian knife that was of less use as a weapon than the belt knives carried by the Marines. To get weapons, they had to go aft, to their own quarters, hard by the captain’s cabin. The main passageway was nearly a hundred feet long, with who knew what in between.

Spinner listened at the hatch. When he heard nothing, he undogged it and eased it open. Three dim watch lights spaced evenly along the passageway that ran from the crews’ quarters to the captain’s cabin gave a feeble illumination, just enough so two men approaching from opposite directions wouldn’t bump into each other. He opened the hatch far enough to step through and signaled Haft to follow. Haft closed the hatch behind himself but didn’t dog it—they might have to come back that way in a hurry.

They ran silently on the balls of their feet toward their own cabin, and pulled up short while still a few yards from it. Directly ahead, at the end of the passageway, was the captain’s cabin. Just out from it was another hatch on each side of the passageway. Those hatches led to the Marines’ quarters, small, inboard cabins, each of which was shared by six men. The hatch on the right—their cabin—was open, and a low glow came from it. Scuffling noises came from inside the cabin. Someone was there. But who?

They slipped closer to the hatch. When they were just outside it, they heard chinking, as of coins being dropped into a pile, and a low, guttural humming. Whoever was in the cabin almost had to be a Jokapcul soldier. But was there only one or were there more? They drew their knives.

Haft stepped away from the bulkhead. Splash light showed him to Spinner. He tapped his own chest and made a gesture. He pointed at Spinner and made another gesture. Spinner nodded. They made ready, then Haft bolted through the hatch and twisted to one side; Spinner followed on his heels and spun the other way.

“Gwah?”
A Jokapcul soldier who hunkered over one of the cabin’s hammocks stood up at the noise of their entry and looked around. His slitted eyes popped wide, he dropped the coins he was tumbling from hand to hand, reached for the knife at his belt, and opened his mouth to cry out. Neither his hand nor his voice made it before the two were on him.

One hand clapped over the soldier’s mouth while a knife point sliced up through his diaphragm to pierce his heart. Another blade slashed though his larynx, and an arm around his chest prevented him from falling to the deck. The two men held the body up until its legs quit kicking, then they dumped it onto an empty hammock.

“He was robbing us!” Haft said indignantly.

“He didn’t think we’d be needing our money, I guess,” Spinner said dispassionately. The individual chests of the Marines were all broken open and their contents strewn about. Coins and other valuables were dumped on one hammock, personal weapons were piled on another. Other usable items were stacked on a third. The remaining three hammocks were empty. “Let’s move fast, his friends might come looking for him.”

Frangerian Marines were issued sabers. Haft found his and hefted it, thought for a moment, then put the saber aside. Like many of the Marines, he used the saber mostly for parade and ceremonial duty; he had another weapon he preferred for fighting. “Ah, here it is.” On the hammock filled with weapons, he found the axe that gave him his name. The axe’s two-and-a-half-foot-long haft was made of ironwood. A half-moon blade projected a foot beyond the end of the haft and an equal distance down its length. A thick spike opposite the blade tapered to a sharp point. A rampant eagle adorned the face of the blade. Haft swung it in a short arc.

“Watch that!” Spinner jumped out of the way of the swing.

“Sorry.” Haft didn’t sound sorry, but he lowered the axe. He slipped his hand through its wrist strap and let it hang free. He picked up a crossbow. “This one always was better than mine,” he said. He slung it over his shoulder and opened a belt box of quarrels; it wasn’t quite full, so he opened another and jammed as many of its quarrels into the first as would fit.