CHAPTER TWELVE
BREAKOUT!
“I don’t get it. I’ve seen y’all take on a navy ship before, and win. And that was twice as big as that boat out there. How did that one little ship wipe out thirteen of yours?”
Okay, yeah, I know I made it sound like I was gonna go handle shit all by myself, but I ain’t stupid. I knew going kamikaze wouldn’t get me anywhere but dead, and as I’d said to Lhan, fuck dying. So, instead of going to see the priests about a ship, I went to see the pirates about the priests, and now I was sitting around a dusty stone table with Kai-La and Burly and Lo-Zhar—yeah, him too—in what looked like an old kitchen.
Kai-La curled her lip. “A single wand of blue fire.”
I blinked. “Damn. Really?”
Lo-Zhar rolled his eyes.
Burly was a little more helpful. “The levitating air that fills our canopies is flammable, and the blue fire can burn through the envelope in the blink of an eye, and then… boom.”
Kai-La sighed. “We saw the ship on the horizon and took our time preparing to fly, thinking we had at least an hour before it would be close enough to engage. But a wand of blue fire…” She shook her head. “I know not the limits of its range, but it destroyed us from more than an iln away, every ship that was anchored here.”
Lo-Zhar bared his teeth. “I lost forty men.”
It still made no sense. “But then how the hell do y’all operate at all? If one wand of blue fire can burn a whole damn fleet out of the sky, what’s the percentage in being a pirate?”
Burly raised his head. “Because we never face them. Neither Ora’s army or navy possesses one, nor have I ever heard of a temple ship carrying one either.”
Lo-Zhar snorted. “Until now.”
“That is why we were taken by surprise.” Kai-La leaned back. “But for the two in the possession of the Aldhanan’s guard, only servants of the Temple are allowed to carry wands, and they are so rare, and so valuable, that they are almost never used, for fear of losing them or allowing one to fall into the hands of the enemy.”
“Huh. So why don’t they just make more?”
All three of ’em laughed at me this time.
“The wands are gifts of the Seven, lass, made by the gods themselves, and beyond the ken of mortal man to understand.” Burly chuckled. “The priests don’t even know how to fix them, let alone build another. If one breaks, it is gone for good, and there are so few now that they are named—Tyrant Slayer, The White Death, The Guardian of Modgalu, and the like.”
More Waarian Lord-of-the-Rings bullshit, giving a ray gun a fancy name. On the other hand, we did the same thing back on Earth all the time—The Peacemaker, Fat Man, Little Boy. Shit, I knew guys who named their dicks. Anyway, back to business.
“Okay. So there’s only one of these wands on the ship?”
Burly grunted. “One is enough.”
“I just wanna know what I’m gonna be up against once I get on board.”
Lo-Zhar snorted again. “Once you get on board? Shouldn’t your first worry be how you get on board? Do you mean to fly? That ship never comes closer than bows’ reach.”
Kai-La grinned. “You’ve not seen our girl in action, have you? She’ll get on board.”
I sat forward, trying not to look smug. “I hope I will, but what I want to know is, can you reel it in once I do? The last thing I want is to do something stupid and heroic and end up giving myself up to ’em.”
Lo-Zhar smiled, nasty. “It wouldn’t trouble me in the slightest.”
Kai-La and Burly gave him a dirty look, then Kai-La patted me on the wrist.
“Worry not, sister. A pirate always has a grappling hook or two lying about. We’ll hook your fish.”
“I just hope you do it before it swallows the bait.”
***
It took an hour for me and the thirty or so pirates who Kai-La and Lo-Zhar rounded up to get into position without being seen by the priests’ warship. I felt like we were a bunch of mice, trying to sneak across the kitchen floor while a fat orange cat walked around on the counters above. We could only move when the ship’s view was blocked by a wall or a tower, and we had to make sure wherever we stopped we couldn’t be seen from any angle, because the ship was constantly circling. The whole scheme woulda been impossible during the day, but with the big moon down and the little moon low on the horizon, the shadows were as black as caves, and there were plenty of them.
The whole plan hinged on that three-story building which I’d used as cover before. The battlement at the top of it was the only thing tall enough and close enough to the edge to get me to the level of the ship. It also had a pretty much intact stairway inside it that would give me enough run up for my jump. Unfortunately, it also had one big problem. When I was in position in the stairwell, I couldn’t see out, which meant I couldn’t tell when the ship was coming, which meant I didn’t know when to start my run. It’d be embarrassing as hell to do a perfect run up just to miss the boat and jump to my death.
In the end we worked out a system where Kai-La would stand watch outside the building and give me a whistle when the ship was coming in range. All I had to do was run when I heard her toot.
We finally got into position just as the ship passed the tower, and so we had to wait another endless fifteen minutes for it to circle all the way around again, but finally I started hearing the flap of its sails and the whispers from the pirates around the tower, and I went into a runner’s crouch at the bottom of the stairs.
Ten seconds later, “Weet!”
I tensed, but didn’t go. What if she’d whistled too soon? I better wait. One, two, three, four, five—okay go!
I launched like a sprinter coming off the blocks and pounded up the stairs as hard as I could, then kicked off the wall of the landing and ran up the second flight, skipping more and more steps with each stride. Another turn and there was night sky above me and I rocketed up onto the top of the tower, jumped onto the battlements, and kicked up into the air with the empty plains dropping away a thousand feet below me—and the priests’ ship slipping out from under from me to my right.