The man spluttered as he came up, spitting out inhaled water and wheezing. “You think of anything else?” Regnus asked, but he didn’t give Thaddeus time to respond.
He dunked the man again. “Sir,” one of the soldiers said, looking a little queasy. “If you don’t mind my asking, how do you know all this?”
Regnus grinned. “I got captured by the Lae’knaught during a border raid when I was young. But we don’t have the time to use everything I learned from them. Up.”
“Wait!” Thaddeus Blat cried out. “I overheard them saying that Hu Gibbet’s next deader was the queen. Her and her daughters. That’s all I know. Gods, that’s all I know. He’s going to kill them tonight in the queen’s chambers after the banquet. Please don’t kill me. I swear that’s all I know.”
They had promised Kaldrosa Wyn a man-o’-war and put her on a sea cow instead. The Sethi pirate hadn’t been able to say no to the money. Damn the mother who whelped me, why didn’t I say no? Looking over the port side, she barked an order and men scurried to adjust the sails to catch another cupful of wind. Sails? Bedsheets, more like. The sails were too small. The ship and its sister were too fat and ungainly to outrun a rowboat piloted by a one-handed monkey. In short, the Cenarian warships would be on them in minutes, and there wasn’t a damn thing Kaldrosa Wyn could do about it.
“If you’re going to do something, now might be a good time,” she told the circle of wytches sitting on the barge’s deck.
“Wench,” the leader of the wytches said, “no one tells a meister his work. Understood?” The man’s eyes didn’t rise from her bare breasts until the last word.
“Then to hell with ya,” Kaldrosa said. She spat over the side, not betraying the queasiness that rose in her at the touch of that wytch’s eyes. The bastards had been staring at her breasts for the entire trip. Normally around foreigners, she’d have covered herself, but she liked making the Khalidorans uncomfortable. Wytches were another matter.
Kaldrosa reefed the sails and had the men below decks start rowing, but even that was hopeless. Khalidoran craftsmanship. They’d even designed the oars poorly. They were too short. Even with the hundreds of men she was carrying, she couldn’t translate their strength into speed because not enough men could man the oars at once, nor was there room below for full sweep. She cursed her greed and the wytches—quietly.
In minutes, the three Cenarian warships were on them. It was a shame. In all the ocean, Cenaria couldn’t have had more than a dozen ships in her navy, and Kaldrosa had found the three best ships of it. In her Sparrowhawk or any Sethi ship with a Sethi crew, she’d be safe.
The wytches finally stood as the first Cenarian ship drew within a hundred paces. They were going to ram her sea cow at an angle and sheer off the oars. Eighty paces. Seventy. Fifty. Thirty.
The wytches had their hands twined. They were chanting and it seemed darker on deck than it had been a moment before, but nothing was happening. The sailors and soldiers on the Cenarian ship were shouting to each other and at her, getting ready for the collision and the battle to follow.
“Damn you,” she yelled, “do something!”
Out of the corner of her eye, she thought she saw something immense pass by, under the ship. She turned to brace for the impact, but instead only got a face full of water. There was a tremendous crack, and when her vision cleared, she saw pieces of the Cenarian ship flying through the air. But not many pieces. Not enough to account for an entire ship.
Then she saw the rest of the ship through the shallow blue waters. Somehow, it had been sucked down in an instant. The flying pieces were merely what had broken off the decks and the sails as the water broke over the ship.
The sea went black, as if a thick cloud had passed in front of the sun, but it undulated. It took Kaldrosa a moment to realize that something enormous was passing beneath her ship. Something absolutely immense. She saw the wytches chanting, more than their hands intertwined now. It seemed as if the black tattoos that all of them wore had torn free of their hands and were holding each other, pulsing with power. The wytches were sweating as if under tremendous strain.
Water swelled as if an immense arrow were passing just under the surface of the sea—and then stopped as it reached the second Cenarian warship. The men on its deck, fifty paces away, were shouting, shooting arrows into the water, brandishing swords, the captain trying to turn the ship.
For five seconds nothing happened, then two gray massive somethings slapped against the Cenarian ship’s deck. They were too big for Kaldrosa to even guess what they could be for a moment—each one covered nearly a quarter of the ship’s hull. Then the ship bounced ten paces out of the sea, straight up, and Kaldrosa saw that they were fingers of a massive gray hand. Then the hand went down and the entire ship disappeared under the waves, bursting apart as the water closed over it, throwing splinters in a wave.
Then the black shape was moving again. It was too big to be real. And this time, the men on the last Cenarian ship were screaming. Kaldrosa heard orders being shouted, but there was too much chaos. The ship drifted, even though it had closed the distance with her sea cow while the other ships had been being destroyed, and was now almost touching it.
The sea swelled again, but this time there was no pause. The leviathan swam beneath the Cenarian ship at incredible speed, rising high enough in the water that spines from its back rose thirty feet in the air.
The spines cut the ship in half and two flicks of a gray tail smashed each half into the ocean. The Khalidoran soldiers who’d crowded the deck—Kaldrosa hadn’t even noticed them emerging—cheered.
She was about to begin ordering them back to their places when the cheering suddenly stopped. The soldiers were pointing. She followed their gaze and saw that swell rising again, this time pointed straight for them. The wytches were sweating freely, open panic on their faces.
“No!” a young wytch shouted. “That won’t work. Like this.”
Something rippled out from the wytches toward the leviathan. It met the oncoming beast, and nothing happened. The soldiers cried out in horror.
Then the huge shape turned and went out to sea.
The soldiers cheered and the wytches collapsed on the deck. But something wasn’t finished. Kaldrosa saw that immediately. Even as she ordered the oars pulled and the sails raised once more, she kept an eye on the wytches.
The leader was speaking to the young man who—if Kaldrosa guessed correctly—had taken control and saved all of their lives. The young man shook his head, staring at the deck.
“Obedience unto death,” she heard him say.
The leader spoke again, too low for Kaldrosa to make out, and the other eleven wytches gathered around the two men. They laid their hands on the young man who’d saved them all, and Kaldrosa saw his tattoos rise from below his skin. They swelled and swelled until his arms were black, and then they burst—not outward, away from the wytch’s body, but in, as if they were veins that had been overfilled and now leaked through the rest of his body. The ruptured tattoos bled beneath the young man’s skin and he collapsed to the deck, twitching violently. In moments, his entire body was black. He thrashed and choked, and in moments he was dead.
Everyone else on the ship was studiously ignoring the wytches. Kaldrosa found herself the only one watching the exchange. The leader of the wytches said a word, and the other wytches tossed the corpse overboard. Then he turned and watched her with too-blue eyes.