First Lord's Fury (Page 77)

Demos nodded laconically and gestured to the bosun. He started bellowing sailors down out of the rigging. Though they often went about armed with knives, today Demos’s crew were all wearing armored jacks and carrying blades and other instruments of martial mayhem. Demos ordered the sails furled, taken down, and stowed, so that they would not become victims of combat. He’d also ordered the decks wetted, and the crew had been slopping laboriously melted water over the entire ship for the past quarter of an hour. Despite the wind and cold air from the north, the temperature was not quite sufficient to refreeze the water on the deck, and the Slive’s timbers soaked it up as if the ship herself was thirsty to return to the sea.

Marcus could hardly fault Demos’s caution. Firecrafting could be dangerously unpredictable in a battle, even when used by experts. If the captain had decided to try his hand at it, Demos’s precaution was entirely sensible. They had just finished when one of the sailors cried out, "Here they come!"

Marcus turned his head to see the group of vordknights alter course and go into a steep dive toward the motionless ship. As they came down, perhaps a score of them split off from the main body, diving ahead of the rest to engage Antillus Crassus and his Knights Aeris.

Tribune Crassus made a broad circling motion over his head with his left arm to gain his Knights’ attention, and flashed a quick series of hand signals. Half a dozen of the Aleran fliers streaked up to meet the contingent of vordknights, falling into a v-shaped formation as they went. The others, including Crassus, remained behind to guard the ship.

Marcus had time to see the enemy vanguard engage the Knights. The six men of the First Aleran simply bowled through their more numerous opponents, with the lead flier diverting his windstream, slewing it around in wide arcs that scattered the vordknights like dandelion fluff. The two men on either side of the leader closed in to catch his arms and prevent him from falling, while the other three struck at a number of vordknights whose efforts to regain control of their flight had brought them within striking distance of a weapon. One of the Alerans’ blades struck home, and a vordknight went spiraling off on an odd angle, leaking a spray of green-brown blood, a severed wing fluttering down more slowly above him.

Then the main body of the vord drove through the Aleran vanguard to fall upon the ship.

At another signal from Crassus, tempest winds suddenly howled, and vordknights began to veer off, forced away from the ship by the violence of the gale. The first thirty or forty of the enemy were driven off, but there were simply too many of them for the Knights Aeris to reach them all. A few managed to wing down through the winds, and as the attack went on, the vord forced away earliest began to circle and fall upon the ship from every direction. Weapons flashed in the light, and someone screamed.

A vordknight landed on the deck not six feet from Marcus, and sent a lightning flash of terrified energy through his body.

The enemy was a few inches shorter than he, and roughly man-shaped. Its body was covered in chitinous armor, layered in bands that almost seemed to resemble a legionare’s lorica. Its head was roughly the shape of a helmeted Aleran’s though there was no opening where the mouth should have been – only smooth skin. Its eyes were multifaceted and greenly reflective, like a dragonfly’s, an impression echoed by the four broad, translucent wings upon its back, now slowing from the blurring shape they had been in flight and folding in upon the vordknight’s back.

Those alien eyes turned to Marcus, and the vord rushed him. Both of its arms ended in scything blades rather than hands, and its weapon-limbs were upraised and ready to strike.

Marcus sidestepped the first double blow of the deadly appendages, drawing his blade as he did. His first stroke clove into the chitin on the vord’s shoulder, and was nearly trapped there as the vord’s momentum carried him past. Marcus managed to jerk the weapon clear in time, leaving an ugly wound hacked into the vord’s flesh. The weapon came away stained with green-brown blood.

The vord spun to return to the attack – but there was a flash of steel and angry scarlet sparks, and the vordknight’s head jumped up off its shoulders as if propelled by the blood that jetted up in a fountain behind it.

The headless vordknight turned in place as if the blow had done nothing to inconvenience it, blades slashing. Captain Demos, long blade in hand, was forced to leap back from the foe, though his sword spat angry scarlet sparks again as it met one of the enemy scythes, and cut it cleanly from the vord’s body. Demos regained his balance, hacked the vord’s other scythe away with casual efficiency, then stepped forward and drove his heel into the thrashing creature’s belly. The kick sent it tumbling over the side of the ship.

Two more of the vordknights landed on the aft deck, rapidly followed by a third. Demos raised his left hand and made a twisting motion, and the railing around the stern side of the deck suddenly bowed, as if made of a supple willow switch, and snared one of the vordknights around the ankle.

Marcus charged the other pair before they could orient themselves and attack. He drove his blade into a gleaming eye, released it, and shoved the wounded vord away with all his strength. He ducked beneath the second vord’s blow and came in low, hitting the thing around the waist and getting his own body in too close to the vordknight’s to allow the creature to use its scythes on him. He was heavier than the vord by a very great deal. It weighed no more than a large sack of meal, and as his armored body slammed the vordknight to the deck, it crunched audibly.

He heard Demos’s light steps as the ship’s captain went past him, and sparks flared several more times somewhere at the edge of his vision. Marcus concentrated on the vord beneath him – the creature was tremendously powerful, easily more than a match for his own physical strength, and Marcus could not enhance it with furycraft this far from the earth beneath the ship, even if it hadn’t additionally been coated in six inches of ice.

Marcus stayed atop the vord, relying upon his weight instead of his strength, keeping as close to the vord’s body as possible, denying it any small bit of leverage with which it could employ the full power of its body. Marcus began to slam his helmeted head against the vord’s, one blow after another. After several such strikes, his own ears were ringing, but the vord’s struggles had lost cohesion.

A second later, Demos’s blade hissed somewhere near Marcus’s back, and red sparks fell all around his head and bounced up from the vordknight’s face. Marcus rolled to one side as swiftly as he could and looked up to see Demos behead the scytheless vord. He carried Marcus’s gladius in his left hand and shifted his grip upon it to offer it back to him. Marcus took the sword with a nod and looked around, his heart pounding.