The price of redemption, p.28
The Price of Redemption, page 28
“Lieutenant Merryweather is settin’ her lads against t’other galleys, sir!” Bell barked. “Shall we steer to her aid or bear on?”
“Bear on!” Nath cried. “Bear on with a will. Merryweather will make quick work of ’em and we’ve more than enough men left for the Redemption!”
The men let out a hoarse cheer and the pinnace surged forward as they bent to their oars with enthusiasm. Enid spared a glance back toward Merryweather’s boats and was rewarded with the sight of one of the gunboats vanishing in a sudden gout of fire and noise as a grenado hurled by a marine found her powder stores. Staccato gunfire punctuated by howls of pain and fury drifted toward her from the general melee unfolding as Merryweather’s other boats closed on the two remaining gunboats, which soon found themselves locked in a knot of struggling men and shattering oars as the Albions sought to overwhelm them. Even from a distance, she could discern the gunboats carried far more men than the Alarum’s gig and cutters, but what Merryweather lacked in men she made up for in energy. Her encouraging shouts were plain to hear over the roar of gunfire and screams of men dying and doing others to death. Enid saw the cutter nearest Nath’s squadron turn toward Merryweather’s aid, but the lieutenant shouted him off with a strident cry of, “To Captain Nath! We have it in hand here! To Nath!”
Enid turned her face forward, expecting to see another wave of gunboats rushing toward them and finding instead a rather serene panorama. The lights of Puerto Galeno still glistened calmly in the distance, apparently unconcerned by the sudden fury of combat that erupted not so far off her shore. Nearer, surprisingly nearer, loomed the Redemption herself, her tall masts cutting black lines against the starlit mass of Mount Ybarre.
She glanced up worriedly at the fortifications on the mountain’s shoulder, half expecting them to vanish in a cloud of flame and smoke as their two hundred guns belched iron and fire. Instead, she was treated to the oddly peaceful and undeniably beautiful sight of a pair of illumination flares soaring skyward, trailing soft lines of vermillion smoke behind them before bursting high in the air to release a cloud of brightly glowing orbs that hung suspended on charms designed to slow their fall to a feather’s pace. Shouts drew her attention back to the Redemption, whose deck was seized by a sudden paroxysm of frantic activity. A series of sharp retorts rang out and Enid ducked her head reflexively.
Nath elbowed her lightly in the side and muttered sternly, “Do not flinch from fire, Magister. It is terrible for the people’s morale.” He flashed a quick smile and leaned closer to observe, “And that was not fire, but merely the clatter of firing ports being opened briskly. Ah. Look. They’re running the guns out now.”
She turned to look, marveling at the way he could say “they’re running the guns out now” with the same equanimity he might say “my cigarillo has gone out.” Her cheeks burned slightly at being chided for flinching, and she vowed she would never allow her reflexes to compromise her dignity again.
The blunt, black muzzles of the cannons emerging from their firing ports were clearly visible in the light of the illumination flares and Enid found no comfort in the sight of them. The guns’ black maws seemed to grow with each sweep of the boat’s oars. When they were large enough to accommodate the entire pinnace with room to spare, she heard a single Naveroñian word shouted from somewhere aboard the Redemption. A sailor seated near her apparently spoke Naveroñian and muttered sardonically, “For what we are about to receive…” She was about to ask Nath what the fellow meant when the world was suddenly filled with a ragged roar of tangible sound. The night was instantly banished by an actinic flash that, combined with the fearsome thunder that preceded it, left her momentarily blind and deaf.
When her vision returned a heartbeat or two later, she stared dumbly into Nath’s laughing face. He was pointing toward the Redemption’s smoking guns with a broad grin and shouting. She shook her head and whispered a restorative cantrip that succeeded to the extent that she could hear his words as from a great distance and overlaid with the buzzing of swarms of angry bees.
“… held off too long and let us get too close! They’ll never get another broadside off before we’re over her side, not as sloppy as their gunnery is! Not that we’d have aught to worry about judging by past performance! A whole bloody broadside and not a ball struck a thing save water!” He half rose and shouted, “Pull ’round to the loo’ard, lads! Even if they have their battery ready, we’ll be too close for ’em to bear! To the loo’ard and up and at ’em!”
They skirted under the Redemption’s bows, the air singing with spell-lock balls from above. The marines aboard Nath’s pinnace raised their own carabines to return fire, but their sergeant shouted for them to hold their fire. “Wait till we’re aboard her, lads, then we’ll stand and deliver, line and volley!”
Enid was nearly thrown to the bottom of the boat as the pinnace lurched to an unexpected stop. Coxswain Bell’s fluent profanity filled the air until Nath shouted him to silence. He stood and shouted at the other boats of his squadron, “We’re tangled in the bow lines! Shift your positions aft and we’ll take the fo’c’sle! Lieutenant Harcourt, pray pass by and take the quarterdeck! Yeardly, get you to the waist!”
Once the other boats were safely past, Nath took stock of the situation. Enid saw his expression grow grim as he took in the boarding nets hanging in limp tendrils above the bulwarks. The loose netting served to entangle anyone who sought to scramble over them, slowing boarders long enough for a defender’s pike to find their vitals. The netting had not been hung earlier and such preparations proved that the Redemption expected an attack. Nath doubted the Naveroñians had either the foresight or energy to hang them at dusk each day, but he could see no other explanation.
As spell-locks began to poke through the netting and grenados came sizzling over the side, Nath shrugged and shouted, “Mr. Bell! Grapples away! Boarders away! First men over to cut down these bloody nets!” The words were barely out of his mouth before the air was filled with grapples and the flying forms of men leaping for handholds on the frigate’s beakhead. “Wait for us here, Magister, until we’ve won the fo’c’sle. No use risking your person in brute work.”
Enid had never seen such a uniform, focused ferocity in her life. Even the bloodthirsty mobs of Arden lacked the singularity of purpose possessed by these Albion sailors. Howls of determined fury on their lips, they threw themselves at the Redemption’s bulwarks with abandon, each carrying an assortment of knives, clubs, hatchets, and spell-locks thrust through their belts or hanging from lanyards around their wrists and necks. She could not imagine that anyone could stand before such a savage onslaught and, indeed, it seemed at first that the ferocious Albion tars would swarm over the nets in a trice. She was searching for a place among the sailors to insinuate herself when the assault failed.
The Naveroñians, momentarily taken back as much by the volume of the Albions’ battle cries as by the savagery of their assault, recovered under an officer’s harangue and the Alarums found themselves facing a veritable forest of thrusting pikes. Combatants voiced battle-cries and cursed as the iron points found soft flesh. Although the shouts of pain were as much Naveroñian as Albion, the tide was finally turned and Enid had to scramble back to avoid being trampled by a wave of retreating Alarums, many of them bleeding from minor wounds and at least one crumpled up around a mortal wound to his abdomen. Nath was among the last off the nets, a mad look in his eye and blood streaming from a deep gash in his left cheek.
When Alston attempted to dab the blood away from his wounded face with a surprisingly gentle hand, Nath brushed it aside with a snarl.
“There’s no time for that!” He turned his bloody face on the men in the pinnace as spell-lock balls whistled through the air around him and struck splinters off the boat’s inner gunwales and deck with dull smacks.
“Once more, Alarums! Once more, and they are ours! Damn their nets and damn them if they think they’ll keep us from what is ours! Now, at them! Every other man to fend off the pikes and the rest to climb the netting or else cut a hole through it!”
The second assault, though carried out with the same vigor as the first, was also thrown back, this time leaving a woman dead in the netting, three more men wounded, and Nath slowly pulsing blood from a deep stab wound through his right biceps. Unintelligible jeers rained down on the retreating Alarums, along with a spell-lock ball that struck Alston in the foot, carrying away his smallest toe, which set him cursing like a cutter and dancing in tight, agonized circles. The spectacle brought more laughter, insults, and missiles cascading down on the pinnace and its bloodied, grim-faced occupants.
Nath winced as one of his topmen tied a bandage around his wounded arm to the accompaniment of a steady stream of profanity from his steward. He was about to speak when there was a sudden cry and scramble to clear the center of the deck. The dead woman, shoved free from the netting by laughing Naveroñian pikemen, landed with a dull thud in the cleared space. She lay there, staring up at the Redemption with a pained expression frozen on her features.
Nath stepped forward and pointed at the dead woman.
“See her? Hear their laughter? Do we require any further reason to take this ship?”
Rather than shouts of enthusiasm, this time his words were met with a low, animal growl. They marshaled themselves again, silently readied their weapons, and waited for their captain to give the word. Enid took a place next to Nath. He frowned at her and began to speak, but she cut him short, announcing loudly, “I have prepared a formulation, but I must see the Naveroñians to target it. When I shout, everyone must close their eyes tight for a heartbeat! Remember! Shut your eyes fast when I shout!” Nath and the nearest Alarums, already taut as bowstrings in anticipation of mayhem, nodded jerkily in acknowledgment.
Silence settled suddenly over the pinnace, as if her exclamation had killed all sound as the firing of cannon was purported to slay the wind. Every Alarum’s eye was on Nath, she realized, waiting for him to give the signal. She was mortally aware that spell-lock balls still sizzled through the air around her, that Naveroñian sailors still shouted challenges and taunts from the fo’c’sle above, facts her senses resolutely denied. She wondered if the same insulating veil surrounded the rest of the Alarums or whether the unnatural reticence of her ears to hear was a singular symptom of her barely sublimated trepidation acting in synthesis with her fierce effort to maintain concentration on her hastily prepared formulation. Would they hear her shout of warning? Perhaps she should have proposed a hand signal, such as the one Nath used now, his arm spearing straight into the air and then falling in a swift, forward arc.
And then she was in motion, her body moving of its own accord, a mote caught up in a gale of bloodlust and determination. She saw Nath leap and grasp one of the grapnel lines left uncut by the overconfident Naveroñians and followed his example. Her soft-soled boots scrabbled on the timbers of the Redemption’s tumble home as she pulled herself up the rope. She stared dumbly for a moment when confronted by the boarding net at the end of the knotted grapnel line. Through the loose, dangling loops of the net, she saw a file of fierce-looking Naveroñian sailors and soldiers armed with pikes, cutlasses, and spell-locks. Their pikes thrust through the net slowly, as if forcing through some thick, transparent substance just beyond the bulwarks. Poisonous yellow smoke blossomed languorously as a dozen or more spell-locks spat .75-caliber balls toward the Alarums struggling to hack through or climb over the netting.
Splinters thrown up by one of the balls stung her left hand, and the glance down at her smarting fingers nearly caused her to miss the Naveroñian sailors’ charge. They ducked beneath their mates’ pikes, cutlasses, and belaying pins, poised to strike as soon as they were within reach. She filled her lungs and shouted for the Albions to look away but doubted if she would be heard—she could not hear her words herself, after all. A pike head shoved into her shoulder but the charms on her hunting tunic turned a forceful lunge into a gentle nudge. Ignoring the distraction of the impact, she closed her eyes, opened her mind, and released the formulation.
The world flashed red through her eyelids, the brightness apparently shocking her ears back to life as they were suddenly filled with murderous howls, shrieks of pain and fear, and the vicious bark of spell-locks. She opened her eyes upon a scene of bedlam and carnage.
The Naveroñian line across the fo’c’sle was reduced to a milling mass of staggering sailors, some of them clawing blindly at their smoking eye sockets, the more fortunate among them blinking rapidly in confusion and uselessly rubbing their intact, but temporarily blind eyes. A heartbeat later, her view of the Naveroñians was blocked by the backs of a half dozen Alarums who had bested the net. Nath was among them, a pistol in his left hand and a graceful hanger in his right. More men followed, some rushing to join in the short, one-sided melee against the Redemption’s foreguard, others turning to quickly hack the boarding net down with their hatchets.
Enid ducked beneath the now-loosened lower edge of the boarding net and scrambled on deck. She was shoved unceremoniously forward by Alarum sailors and marines as they surged onto the fo’c’sle themselves. To her amazement, Alston was one of the men who shoved past her, his face fierce and eager despite the blood seeping through the hastily applied bandages around his injured foot, which stained the deck with blood as he advanced with a limp.
The marines, seeing that the sailors had the blinded Naveroñians well in hand, began to form up around their sergeant, incidentally shielding Nath from any fire from abaft.
“Put a volley into those rascals,” Nath shouted in a voice that carried clearly over the din of battle. “Let us clear a way for Mr. Yeardley to come aboard!”
Sergeant Garrick snapped a series of commands at his men that culminated in a blast of spell-lock fire delivered in such precise unison that it seemed more the roar of a single weapon than that of a little over half a dozen. The effect of the smallish volley was remarkable.
A group of Naveroñians, sensible of the turn of events in the fo’c’sle and determined to reverse matters, found their determination shaken as two of their number dropped dead on the spot and a third let out an ear-splitting shriek as a ball shattered his arm just above the elbow. Their resolve for bloody deeds dampened by the sight of their own blood, the Naveroñians were left off balance, moving about indecisively and glancing this way and that for someone to spur them on or give them the command to withdraw. Nath saw no reason to allow them time to regain their composure and let out a blood-curdling shout that his people immediately recognized as an invitation to charge the hapless Naveroñian soldiery crowded into the Redemption’s waist.
And crowded they were, too. There seemed to be hundreds packed in among the cannons below and nearly as many jamming the catwalks that connected the fo’c’sle to the quarterdeck. Perhaps the Naveroñian numbers would work against them in such close quarters now that the Alarums had a foothold aboard the Redemption, Enid thought as she found herself instinctively following Nath into the fray, her viscera apparently dominating whatever reason the shock and clamor of combat had spared her.
She rushed after Nath as he hurled himself at the Naveroñians holding the larboard rail against Mr. Yeardly’s boarders, dimly aware that the Albion lobsters were charging down into the mass of sailors, soldiers, and marines that filled the main deck from stem to stern.
She saw Nath parry a cutlass slash at his face with an indolently precise movement of his own blade and reply to the affront by shoving the muzzle of the pistol in his left hand into his attacker’s face and discharging one of its two barrels. She had the leisure to observe the little Albion captain dispatch two more Naveroñians, one with an elegantly lethal lunge that confirmed her earlier impression of his familiarity with the salle and the second with an almost absent-minded flick of the tip of his hanger across a hatchet-wielding sailor’s throat before her own situation demanded her full attention.
A burly Naveroñian sailor loomed suddenly before her, his fiercely mustachioed face screwed up into an equally savage scowl. His ham-sized fist waved a thick-bladed cutlass as if it were a willow wand. Enid’s own weapon, a fine small sword from the famed forges of Mittelsohn, came on guard as if of its own accord.
Her weapon surged forward an instant later as her opponent cocked back his arm for a powerful overhand slash. The hulking sailor collapsed to his knees on the deck, one nerveless hand clasped over the crimson fountain that sprung from his chest and the other pinned to the deck by the hilt of a sword he no longer possessed the strength to lift. Another Naveroñian leveled a spell-lock pistol at her body, but he was near enough that it took less than an instant’s focus to fix the ball in place so that when the powder ignited the pistol exploded and left her attacker staring in white-faced shock at the bloody ruin of his hand.
She saw a woman she assumed was a Naveroñian marine based on her uniform, far more elegant and overtly martial than the slops worn by the raggedly dressed sailors, strike down one of the Alarums with her sword and bound over his body to rush toward Nath’s unprotected side. A peculiar sound that combined a laugh and a snarl escaped Enid’s lips as she leapt forward herself, covered the intervening space with two long strides, and drove her Mittelsohn through the base of the Naveroñian woman’s neck.
Nath seemed utterly unaware of his close brush with mortality, or at least utterly unconcerned by it. He pressed ahead, beating a pike aside here and slashing at the eyes of an axman there. She was at his side, her own sword dancing red in the night, flashing to interrupt the metronomic cutlass drill of a scar-faced man whose eyes glinted with confidence until his routine was interrupted by several inches of cold steel through his wrist. They pressed forward together, Alarums crowding in behind them and fighting at their sides where the narrow breadth of the catwalk would allow.
