The Ruling Sea (70 page)

Understanding spread across Neeps’ face. “You’re right. You must be! He’s reeling that Admiral Kuminzat in. But what happens if he falls for it? We’re not as lame as all this, but they really can outgun us two to one.”

A shout from the quarterdeck: Rose himself was beckoning them near. When they had raced up the ladder the big man bent level with their faces.

“You both climb well,” he said. “I need you aloft the spankermast, now, and clewing up the topgallant.”

“Captain,” said Pazel, “we’ve never worked your sails. We don’t know the spanker rigging.”

“Exactly,” said Rose, “you’ll look like perfect imbeciles up there. Climb!”

The boys glanced at each other. Pazel’s theory was apparently proved, but they took no satisfaction from it. “We might do some harm up there,” Neeps protested.

“See that you don’t,” said Rose. “Find a line that’s bent to the topsails and foul it up, that’s all—not badly, just plain to see. And keep worrying it till nightfall, unless I call you down.”

“Or we’re shot down,” said Pazel. “You wouldn’t mind that at all.”

Rose struck at him with his massive fist. But the thousand blows Hercól and Thasha had landed on him had not been in vain. Just in time he leaped backward and found himself in fighting-stance, almost without conscious thought. It was the same pose that had so amused Drellarek, moments before the Turach died.

But Rose was not at all amused. “You offal-brained Ormali layabout,” he said. “I’m the captain of this ship! What if I’m not mad, eh, and we survive this engagement? Do you know how many ways I can make you
wish
you’d been killed? Get up that mast!”

There was no help for it: Rose was sincere in his threats, if in little else. Once more the boys took to the shrouds, bare feet on the decrepit ratlines, hands on the sturdier ropes. This time the ascent was horrifying. The topgallants rode a hundred feet above the quarterdeck, and before he’d climbed thirty Pazel began to suffer fantasies of falling, flying, letting go. The wind was like a frigid hand trying to claw them from the ship; the rain flew at them horizontally in a ceaseless, biting spray. Over and over the ratlines snapped, letting them half drop through the shrouds, feet kicking wildly. And now the
Jistrolloq
was close enough for him to see the fire leaping from her chaser-guns.

Don’t clench your hands!
Captain Nestef had taught him.
If you squeeze the blood out of ’em they’ll soon be too tired to hold on. That’s one of the fifty ways fear can kill you
.

But Pazel was afraid—he was cold and dizzy and scared to death. Neeps’ skin was pale; he looked as if the wind were trying to melt him down to bone. Up and up they went, like a pair of deranged hermits scaling a cliff in the Tsördons, going to meet the gods. At ninety feet Pazel looked down and saw Thasha pointing up at them, arguing with the captain. Then he saw Alyash grin and gesture at the stern as the largest wave yet passed like a moving hill under the vessel.
A sixty-footer
, thought Pazel, and vomited into the storm.

When they reached the topgallant yard the array of snapping ropes and heaving wheelblocks was a perfect mystery. Neeps groped to Pazel’s side and shouted in his ear. Pazel could not make out a word.

Out along the yard, feet on the clew line, arms over the huge wooden beam. They flailed from rope to rope, hauling at each to see where it led. But the wind’s strength so completely outmatched their own that they could barely move the thick hemp lines.

Half a mile between the ships. The
Jistrolloq
was firing selectively now. She would not have to wait long for point-blank accuracy.

Was Rose committing suicide? The
Jistrolloq
was as good a target as she would ever be, until she began to pass and rake them with her own huge array of cannon. Pazel knew for a fact that a dozen guns could fire from the
Chathrand’s
stern—thrice as many as could be wielded from the enemy’s sleek bow. Yet still no guns fired from the
Chathrand
save the beleaguered nine on the starboard quarter.
He’s risking everything to lure them closer. What in the Nine Pits for?

Keep breathing. Think of something else. Strategy, tactics. What had Rose been going on about in his cabin? Motives, that was it. What had driven Kuminzat to take his vessel even this little distance onto the Ruling Sea? What did he want?

Revenge, of course, for his daughter and the Babqri Father. But Rose had clearly believed that something else was at stake for the man. Hope of glory? Love of country? Proof of Arqual’s deception?

The mast shuddered. A ball from the White Reaper had punched a hole in the spanker mainsail.

What proof would the Sizzies have, though, if they sank the
Chathrand
out here in the Nelluroq? And if killing them was glorious, wasn’t it ten times more so to expose a plot that could destroy the Mzithrin Empire?

They must have wanted to take us alive. Some of us, at least. But thanks to Diadrelu’s warning we made it out of the Black Shoulders without a scratch. And now they’re settling for slaughter
.

A quarter mile. The
Jistrolloq
was pitching wildly now, and her mainsails fell limp for three or four seconds at the bottom of each trough, the wind cut off by the waves towering above her. She was slowing, she had to be: but not enough for the
Chathrand
to pull ahead.

There was a scream of fire. A blazing thing like a comet streaked from the
Jistrolloq
and exploded against the Great Ship’s foremast.
Dragon’s egg!
men were howling. Everyone had heard of the weapons, but Pazel had never met a soul who had lived to describe them firsthand. Now he saw why. Deck and mast were suddenly engulfed in a dripping blue flame; and hideous to behold, so were the men, leaping from the ropes, tearing at their oilskins in a frenzy. In blind agony the fire-drenched figures scattered on the deck, as luckier men hauled desperately at the pumps and hoses.

For once the rain was their ally: the fire did not spread, not even on the tar-coated rigging. But the men at the blast’s epicenter had lost control of their sails. The huge forecourse swung disastrously to leeward, tearing at the standing rigging, and the
Chathrand
heeled in the same direction, her bow diving and her stern lifting like a bucking mule. Pazel locked his elbow around a brace as his feet were torn from the clew line, and for a moment his body lifted away from the spar like a scrap of canvas. When the ship righted he crashed down painfully against the timber. He glanced over his shoulder, and a prayer of joy welled up inside him: Neeps was still there.

The
Chathrand
was yawing, rolling, and it would be minutes yet before the fore-topmen came to grips with the chaos of the sail. Pazel looked down and saw six men at the wheel, Rose among them, fighting to keep the ship from turning sidelong to the waves. And now the
Jistrolloq
was racing toward them, chaser-cannon firing one after another, and teams on her forecastle running out the hull-smashing carronades.

Another terrible crash, and the roof of the wheelhouse was blown to pieces. At nearly the same instant the mizzenmast tilted leeward with a groan: a wooden ballista-spear, dragging a kite’s tail of iron barbs, had ripped through her starboard shrouds.

Pazel looked at Neeps and made a jerking motion:
The hell with this. It’s over
. Neeps understood, and nodded. His lips formed one word:
Thasha
.

Pazel caught his meaning instantly.
Go to her
, Neeps was telling him,
while there’s time to say goodbye
.

They were creeping back toward the mast when something inside the
Chathrand
roared. Pazel looked down and saw black smoke boiling up and over the quarterdeck, and around both sides of the hull. They had run out the stern cannon at last.

The
Jistrolloq’s
bow plating was tempered steel, but four square openings pierced it: one for each of the chaser-guns harrying her enemy. It was those four cannon, Pazel saw now, that Rose had targeted, and with devastating results. Two of the guns were utterly destroyed, splintered like bottle-stems before his eyes. The other two were blown backward through their ports and out of sight. The
Jistrolloq
herself was all but unblemished, but she would not get another shot at the
Chathrand
until she drew up alongside.

Except for those two grim carronades on the forecastle. Such weapons were absurdly inaccurate, being roughly shaped like whiskey barrels, but they threw shot so enormous that one hit at short range could stave in a hull, dropping a ship to the seafloor in minutes. Even now the Mzithrinis were taking aim: Rose’s strategy had left them wide open. Pazel thought of the gun-teams on the
Chathrand
, reloading as fast as humanly possible. It would not be fast enough.

Then, somehow, fire leaped again from the Great Ship. It was a different sort of smoke plume, ragged spokes instead of a single billowing cloud. And Pazel remembered: the grapeshot guns in Rose’s cabin. They too were best at point-blank range, for they riddled a wide space with iron pellets: useless for damaging a ship, but deadly against flesh. Pazel could see the proof of that: Mzithrinis dead or squirming in their blood or crouching in fear behind the carronades. One of the guns, already loosed for firing, disgorged its knee-high iron shot onto the forecastle. The ball raced aft, catching a man by the heel and crushing him instantly; then it changed directions with the pitch of the ship and smashed through the starboard rail. Pazel could only watch, sickened and stunned.
All that with one cannon’s grapeshot
.

Another of the four guns boomed, killing an officer as he stood to rally the surviving carronade gunners. A third erupted when relief gunners tried to swarm up the ladder onto the forecastle. Pazel realized with a sense of awe that the team in Rose’s cabin would be able to reload the first of the four guns before the last had fired, and that such a relay could go on indefinitely. The
Jistrolloq
had given up her forecastle, and
Chathrand’s
twelve stern cannon would soon be ready to fire again.

He’s going to sink them. He’s going to kill them all, right before my eyes
.

Whether that indeed was Rose’s intention Pazel never learned, for at the height of the next swell the
Chathrand’s
foremast tore her stays, ripped free her starboard shrouds; and then the whole towering mass of spars and sail and rigging crashed down over the portside rail.

Dead!
thought Pazel, as the
Chathrand
heeled terribly sidelong and cables snapped around him. The dangling, half-submerged mast would drag their bow under as surely as a hold full of seawater; it was unthinkable that they would have enough time to cut it free. The
Chathrand
wallowed backward down the wave; he saw the nine open gunports being wrenched shut in a panic, and a row of mailed Turachs falling like dominoes, and two sailors vanishing overboard into a cauldron of white froth. He saw Neeps struck in the chest by a flying wheelblock; they would not last another five minutes on this spar. But would the ship herself fare any better?

Even as he framed the thought, they rolled: the following sea had caught the
Chathrand
straight across her beam. The mast where they clung with locked limbs dived toward the sea, while beneath them the crown of the breaking wave swept right over the waist of the ship, making her quarterdeck and forecastle look for a moment like two rafts separated by eight hundred feet of white water. In that torrent men clung to ropes, rails, cleats, anything that did not move, and still many were carried away.

Pazel had a blurred impression of the White Reaper at a hundred yards, as perfectly in control as they were perfectly flailing, her bowsprit pointed like a sword at
Chathrand’s
tilting flank. Dauntless, her gunners were making a third charge onto the forecastle. No grapeshot would drive them off this time, and if they managed to fire those killer carronades they could hardly miss with their eyes shut.

But then the
Chathrand
righted. Pazel could not believe what his senses were telling him. Had the foremast gone by the board? How, how had they done it? But there was no doubt, they were righting, and as he flew skyward with even more sickening speed than before, Pazel caught a sound he had only heard once before in his life—the day Rose had destroyed the whaler in a rippling broadside.

All along the starboard hull, gunports had flown open again: not just the earlier nine, but thirty, forty perhaps; and bow to stern they belched fire and smoke, straight at the
Jistrolloq
, across the trough between the passing wave and the next. Then just seconds before the wave reached them the doors were yanked shut again. Once more the Great Ship rolled.

Now at last Pazel caught a glimpse of their saviors: the augrongs, Refeg and Rer. Waist deep in foam, the creatures were even now taking axes to the last of the foremast rigging, while teams of men strained at the harnesses they wore, struggling to keep them from washing into the sea.
Bless their hides
, thought Pazel,
those brutes could part a halyard with one stroke
.

This time it took far longer to rise—who could say how much water had flooded the ship, or by how many routes?—but when they did at last Pazel knew it was over. Horrible, horrible sight! The
Jistrolloq
had lost her own foremast to the
Chathrand’s
guns, and her main was torsioned hopelessly to windward. But it was not the canvas she had lost that had doomed her; it was the canvas that survived. Like the
Chathrand
, the Mzithrini warship had slewed round, and the great power of the surviving squaresails was now pressing down on her bow, like a torturer’s hand forcing his victim’s head underwater, deeper, and deeper still. The next wave caught her broad on the starboard quarter, a blow the smaller ship could not absorb. Over she went on her beam-ends, masts slapping the waves, so close to the
Chathrand
they seemed almost like bridges her men might run across to safety. As the wave passed she tried to right herself, but a hundred thousand tons of water on her sails could not be shed in an instant, and the next wave buried her completely. By then the Great Ship had veered downwind just enough to ride the wave out, and Pazel felt the monstrous sidelong lurching come to an end. He and Neeps gained the shrouds, and as he began his descent at last Pazel looked for the enemy and saw nothing, nothing at all—and then a twisted length of white sailcloth, one proud red star in the corner, moving like the specter of a whale beneath the surface, only to reach some absolute decision, and dive.