The Gentleman Bastard Series (135 page)

“Well, fine,” she muttered. “You’ll be rendering your courtesies soon enough.”

The small dark shapes of crew rushed about on the flute, now just a quarter mile distant. Her sails were shuddering, her hull elongating in Zamira’s view—were they running? No, just killing momentum, turning a point or two to starboard, aiming to get close but not
too
close. She could see a pump-and-hose team at work amidships, shooting a stream of water upward to wet the flute’s lower sails. Very sensible, when coming anywhere near a fire at sea.

“Signal party,” she said, “stand ready.”

“Aye, Captain,” came a chorus of voices from within the smoke-shrouded portion of the quarterdeck.

Her own boats were cutting the waves between the two ships. There was Ravelle in the lead with his parasol, looking a bit like a thin silver mushroom with a soft white cap. And there was Valora, and there was Ezri … damn it. Ezri’s request had given her little choice but to acquiesce or look foolish in front of the scrub watch. There’d be words for that little woman … if the gods blessed Zamira enough to send her lieutenant back alive.

She studied the flute’s officers, who’d moved from the bow to the larboard rail. Wide fellows, it seemed, a bit overdressed for the heat. Her eyes were not what they’d been twenty-five years ago.… Were they prodding one another, looking more intently through their glasses?

“Captain?” asked a member of the signal party.

“Hold,” she said. “Hold …” Every second closed the gap between the
Orchid
and her victim. They’d slowed and turned, but leeway would bring them closer still … closer still. One of them pointed, then grabbed the other by the shoulder and pointed again. Their glasses flew up in unison.

“Ha!” Zamira cried. Not a chance they could slip away now. She felt new zeal lending strength to her every step and motion; she felt half her years seem to fall from her shoulders.
Gods
, the moment they realized just how fucked they were was always sweet. She slammed her spyglass shut, snatched her speaking trumpet from the deck, and hollered across the length of the ship.

“Archers ready at the tops! All hands on deck! All hands on deck and man the starboard rail! Stifle smoke barrels!”

The
Poison Orchid
shuddered; seven dozen hands were pounding up the ladders, surging out of the hatchways, armed and armored, screaming as they came. Archers stepped out from behind the masts, knelt on their fighting platforms, and nocked arrows to their gleaming bows.

Zamira didn’t need her glass to see the shapes of officers and crew running about frantically on the flute’s deck.

“Let’s give ’em something that’ll really make ’em piss their breeches,” she shouted, not bothering with the speaking trumpet.
“Hoist our crimson!”

The three yellow pennants streaming above the quarterdeck shuddered, then plummeted straight down into the gray haze. From out of the last of the black and boiling smoke rose a broad red banner, bright as the morning sun looming above a storm.

8

“WITH A will,” shouted Lieutenant Delmastro, “with a will!” As the bloodred flag rose to its full prominence above the stern of the
Orchid
and the first of the horde of maniacally cheering crewfolk began to crowd her starboard rail, the three boats surged across the waves.

Locke shed his parasol and jacket, tossing them overboard before remembering that they were worth quite a bit of money. He breathed in excited gasps, glancing over his shoulder at the fast-approaching side of the flute, a sheer wooden surface that loomed like a floating castle. Dear gods, he was going into battle. What the fuck was the
matter
with him?

He bit the insides of his cheeks for concentration and held on to the gunwales with white knuckles.
Damn
it, this was no grand gesture. He couldn’t afford this. He breathed deep to steady himself.

Locke Lamora was small, but the Thorn of Camorr was larger than any of this. The Thorn couldn’t be touched by blade or spell or scorn. Locke thought of the Falconer, bleeding at his feet. He thought of the Gray King, dead beneath his knife. He thought of the fortunes that had run through his fingers, and he smiled.

Steadily, carefully, he drew his saber and began to wave it in the air. The three boats were nearly abreast now, slashing white triangles of wake on the sea, a minute from their target. Locke meant to hit it wearing the biggest lie of his life like a costume. He might be dead in a few moments, but until then, by the gods, he was the Thorn of Camorr. He was Captain Orrin
fucking
Ravelle.

“Orchids! Orchids!” He made a statue of himself at the bow of the boat, thrusting with his saber as though he meant to ram the flute and punch a hole in her side all by himself. “Pull for the prize! Pull for yourselves! Follow me, Orchids!
Richer and cleverer than everyone else
!”

The
Poison Orchid
slipped ahead of the last of her smoke, streaming gray lines from her quarterdeck, as though evading the grasp of some godlike ghostly hand. The teeming crewfolk at her rail cheered again, and then fell silent together. The ship’s sails began to flutter. Drakasha was tacking, with haste, to bring the ship sharply around to starboard. If she pulled it off she would snug up, on the larboard tack, right alongside the flute at knife-fighting distance.

The sudden silence of the Orchids allowed Locke to hear noises from the flute for the first time—orders, panic, arguments, consternation. And then, over everything else, a tinny and desperate voice shouting through a speaking trumpet:

“Save us! For the love of the gods, please … please get over here and save us!”

“Shit. That’s a little different than what we usually get,” said Delmastro.

Locke had no time to think; they were up to the flute’s hull, bumping hard against the wall of wet planks on her lee side. The ship was slightly heeled over, creating the illusion that she was about to topple and crush them. Miraculously, there were shrouds and a boarding net within easy reach. Locke leapt for the net, sword arm raised.

“Orchids,” he cried as he climbed the rough, wet hemp in an exaltation of fear. “Orchids! Follow me!”

The moment of truth; his left hand found the deck at the top of the boarding net. Gritting his teeth, he swept upward with his saber, clumsily and viciously, in case anyone was waiting at the edge of the deck. Then he heaved himself up, rolled under the rail—he’d missed the entry port by a few yards—and stumbled to his feet, screaming like a madman.

The deck was all chaos, and none of it meant for him. There were no razor nets, no archers, no walls of polearms or swords waiting to receive the boarders. Crewmen and -women ran about in a panic. An abandoned fire hose lay on the deck at Locke’s feet like a dead brown snake, gurgling seawater into a spreading puddle.

A crewman skidded through that puddle and slammed into him, flailing. Locke raised his saber, and the crewman cringed, throwing up his hands to show that they were empty.

“We tried to surrender,” the crewman gasped. “We tried! They wouldn’t let us! Gods, help us!”

“Who?
Who
wouldn’t let you surrender?”

The crewman pointed to the ship’s raised quarterdeck, and Locke whirled to see what was there.

“Aw,
hell
,” he whispered.

There had to be at least twenty of them, all men, cast from the same mold. Tanned, stocky, muscular. Their beards were neatly trimmed, their shoulder-length hair bound in rattling strings of beads. Their heads were wrapped with bright green cloths, and Locke knew from past experience that what looked like thin, dark sleeves covering their arms was actually holy verse, tattooed so thickly in black and green ink that every trace of the skin beneath was lost.

Jeremite Redeemers. Religious maniacs who believed that they were the only possible salvation for the sins of their wicked island. They made themselves living sacrifices to the Jeremite gods, wandering the world in exile groups, living polite as monks until someone, anyone, threatened them.

Their sacred vow was to kill or be killed when offered violence; to die honorably for Jerem, or to ruthlessly exterminate anyone who raised a hand against them. All of them were looking very, very intently at Locke.

“The heathen offers a red cleansing!” A Redeemer at the head of the group pointed at Locke and hoisted his brass-studded witchwood club. “Wash our souls in heathen blood!
Slay for holy Jerem
!”

Weapons high, they rushed the quarterdeck stairs and surged down them, fixed on Locke, all the while demonstrating just how madmen
really
screamed. A crewman tried to stumble out of their way and was swatted down, his skull cracking like a melon beneath the club of the leader. The others trampled his body as they charged.

Locke couldn’t help himself. The spectacle of that onrushing, battle-hardened, completely insane death was so far beyond anything in his experience, he coughed out a burst of startled laughter. He was scared to the marrow, and in that there was sudden, absolute freedom. He raised his one useless saber and flung himself into a countercharge, feeling light as dust on a breeze, hollering as he ran. “Come, then! Face Ravelle! The gods have sent your doom,
motherfuckers
!”

He should have died a few seconds later. It was Jean, as usual, who had other plans.

The Jeremite leader bore down on Locke, twice his weight worth of murderous fanatic, blood and sunlight gleaming on the studs of his raised club. Then there was a hatchet where his face had been, the handle protruding
from the shattered hollow of an eye. Impact, not with the club but with the suddenly senseless corpse, slammed Locke to the deck and knocked the air from his lungs. Hot blood sprayed across his face and neck, and he struggled furiously to free himself from beneath the twitching body. The deck around him was suddenly full of shapes kicking, stomping, screaming, and falling.

The world dissolved into disconnected images and sensations. Locke barely had time to catalog them as they flashed by.

Axes and spears meant for him sinking into the body of the Jeremite leader. A desperate lunge with his saber, and the shock of impact as it sank into the unprotected hollow of a Redeemer’s thigh. Jean hauling him to his feet. Jabril and Streva pulling other Orchids onto the deck. Lieutenant Delmastro, fighting beside Jean, turning a Redeemer’s face to raw red paste with the glass-studded guard of one of her sabers. Shadows, movements, discordant shouts.

It was impossible to stay next to Jean; the press of Redeemers was too thick, the number of incoming blows too great. Locke was knocked down again by a falling body, and he rolled to his left, slashing blindly, frantically as he went. The deck and the sky spun around him until suddenly he was rolling into thin air.

The grating was off the main cargo hatch.

Desperately he checked himself, scrambling back to his right before he toppled in. A glimpse into the main-deck hold had revealed a trio of Redeemers there, too. He stumbled to his feet and was immediately attacked by another Jeremite; parrying slash after slash, he sidestepped left and tried to slip away from the edge of the cargo hatch. No good; a second antagonist appeared, blood-drenched spear at the ready.

Locke knew he’d never be able to fight or dodge the pair of them with an open grate behind his feet. He thought quickly. The flute’s crew had been in the process of shifting a heavy barrel from the main-deck hold when the attack had come. That cask, four or five feet in diameter, hung in a netting above the mouth of the cargo hatch.

Locke lashed out wildly at his two opponents, aiming only to force them back. Then he spun on his heels and leapt for all he was worth. He struck the hanging cask with a head-jarring thud and clung to the netting, his legs kicking like those of a man treading water. The cask swung like a pendulum as he scrambled atop it.

From here, he briefly enjoyed a decent view of the action. More Orchids were pouring into the fray from the ship’s larboard side, and Delmastro
and Jean were pushing the main body of Redeemers back up the quarterdeck stairs. Locke’s side of the deck was a tangled swirl of opponents; green cloths and bare heads above weapons of every sort.

Suddenly, the Jeremite with the spear was jabbing at him, and the blackened-steel head of the weapon bit wood inches from his leg. Locke flailed back with his saber, realizing that his suspended haven wasn’t as safe as he’d hoped. There were shouts from below; the Redeemers in the hold had noticed him, and meant to do something about him.

It was up to him to do something crazy first.

He leapt up, holding fast to one of the lines by which the cask was suspended from a winding-tackle, and dodged another spear thrust. No good trying to cut all the lines leading down from the tackle. That could take minutes. He tried to remember the patterns of ropes and blocks Caldris had drilled into him. His eyes darted along the single taut line that fell from the winding-tackle to a snatch-block at one corner of the cargo hatch. Yes—that line led across the deck, disappearing beneath the throng of combatants. It would run to the capstan, and if it was cut …

Gritting his teeth, he gave the taut line a good slash with the forte of his blade, feeling the saber bite hemp. A thrown hatchet whizzed past his shoulder, missing by the width of his little finger. He slashed the line again, and again, driving the blade with all the force he could muster. At the fourth stroke, it unraveled with a snap, and the weight of the cask broke it clean in two. Locke rode the barrel down into the hold, his eyes squeezed firmly shut. Someone screamed, saving him the trouble of doing so himself.

The cask struck with a resounding crash. Locke’s momentum smacked him down hard against its upper surface. His chin struck wood and he was tossed sideways, landing in an undignified heap on the deck. Warm, smelly liquid washed over him—beer. The cask was gushing it.

Locke climbed back to his feet, groaning. One Redeemer hadn’t moved fast enough, and was splayed out beneath the cask, clearly dead. The other two had been knocked sideways by the impact, and were feeling around groggily for their weapons.