CHAPTER THIRTEEN
ATTACK!
Fuck.
So, I guess Kai-La musta counted to five to make sure I didn’t go too soon, and then I counted to five, and… and I was dead. The flank of the balloon was right in front of me, but too far out. My trajectory was angling me down toward the deck, twenty feet below, just like I’d planned it, except it was already passing me by. I was gonna miss the stern rail by about two yards. It was funny in Roadrunner cartoons. In real life? Not so much.
I had one chance—the trick I’d learned in gladiator school when we’d been trying to figure out some fancy moves I could do in the arena. I whipped my big-ass sword out of the sheath on my back and swung it as hard as I could to the right, then let the weight of it jerk me around after it.
It worked. Well, almost.
I needed six feet. I got five. The mid-air swerve swung me toward the ship just like I’d hoped, but I didn’t quite make it to the deck. Instead, I bounced tits-first off the back rail and started to fall away again, head spinning and nose bleeding, but at the last second, I managed to throw out a desperate hand and caught the bottom of the railing.
Saved!
Sorta.
I really coulda used a minute to just hang there and catch my breath, but there were footsteps pounding across the deck above me. I had to move. With a grunt I braced my feet on the hull and vaulted onto the deck—and ended up face to face with a shitload of surprised priests and paladins, all staring like a shark had jumped in the boat.
“It’s her!”
“The other one!”
“The demon!”
“But she was sent away!”
You know, back in the stairwell, waiting to charge out and do this, I hadn’t been sure I’d be able to get it up to slaughter a whole bunch of people I didn’t know, but that did it. These were the guys who’d sent me back to Earth. These were the guys who’d chased Lhan halfway across Waar and put an arrow in his side. These were the guys who’d tortured Rian-Gi and killed his lover. These were the guys who’d sent thirteen ships crashing to the ground and killed hundreds of men. This wasn’t going to be a problem at all.
I jumped forward, hair flying, blood spraying, screaming like a banshee, and landed in the middle of ’em, chopping left and right. Four of ’em went down like pinatas, opened up and spilling their insides everywhere. The rest scattered, bellowing for help. I charged after ’em, howling, ready to lose myself to the red rage, but then I remembered I had a job to do, and changed direction.
The reason the pirates hadn’t been able to pull this stunt before now was because every time they’d tried to hook the ship and reel it in, they’d been pin-cushioned with crossbow bolts or zapped with blue fire and had to fall back. That’s what I was here for, to keep the firepower busy.
I leapt for the starboard rail, slashing wide and wild at the crossbowmen lined up along it. They scattered, screaming, but I caught ’em in a step, cutting the legs off one guy, and kicking two more over the side, then charged after the rest.
It was inevitable that some of ’em were going to start firing back, and I almost flinched myself overboard as a bolt glanced off my blade and nearly took my nose off. I hit the deck with more whiffing past me, and by the time I rolled back to my feet I was alone in the middle of the deck with the whole ship reloading and aiming at me.
I leapt straight up, screaming like a school girl, and a handful of bolts zipped under my feet, but a bunch more followed me, whizzing past my ears and sticking in the balloon over my head. I landed on the foredeck and charged another knot of shooters, my back tingling, expecting to be a pincushion with every step, but instead, all the crossbow guys started shrieking and falling and turning toward the rail.
Whew! Part two of the plan was a go. The pirates were finally firing from the mesa, shooting grappling-hook bolts over the rails and picking off the guys who were trying to pick me off. Now we had ’em in the crossfire. I attacked the crossbow guys from behind as they took cover behind the rail, and the pirates pegged ’em when I made ’em break cover. The poor fuckers were like chickens in a dog pen, they didn’t know which way to run.
But just as the pirates started hauling on their hooks and I figured we had it in the bag, the door to the under-decks slammed open and a bald-headed, buzzard-beaked priest with an extra fancy robe strode out with six paladin spear carriers for an escort and a motherfucking wand of blue fire in his hands.
He aimed it at me and the world stopped like someone had hit the pause button. I stopped. He stopped. Everybody stopped. The only thing I could hear was the blood pounding in my neck. Then he spoke. He sounded like a juvie school principal giving a lecture.
“I have orders to spare you, demoness.” He swung the barrel of his white plastic Casio-looking gun toward the mesa, where Kai-La and Burly and all the rest were still reeling in the ship. “But no such orders for your friends. Surrender or they die.”
I’d seen one of those pop guns in action before, so I knew he wasn’t bluffing. It might look like a vacuum cleaner tube with some Christmas lights on the side, but the fucking thing could carve a mountain in half if you wanted it to. It scared the living piss out of me. On the other hand, I could see it in his beady little eyes that I scared the living piss out of him too. Maybe I could bluff him.
I took a step towards him, sword low but ready. “And how many do you think you can kill before I cut you in half? You wanna try it? You wanna take your shot?”
He edged back, eyes twitching from me to the pirates and back, as his guards stepped in front of him, spears leveled. “You would not risk it. Your lover is among them. You—”
With a sound like a fastball hitting a catcher’s mitt, a crossbow bolt appeared in his shoulder and he shrieked and fell and dropped the wand.
“Ha! Nice shot!”
Score one for my pirate pals, and more bolts started to thud into the deck all around him as the crew on the mesa reeled the ship into close range. A bolt took out one of Beaky’s paladins. The others were ducking and backing away.
I sprang at ’em, hoping to finish ’em off and get a hold of that fucking zap gun, but they were a lot tougher than the guys I’d cut down earlier, even under fire, and kept me back with some fancy spear work, stabbing and backing and stabbing and backing as Beak-Nose staggered to his feet with the wand clutched to his chest and ran for the foredeck.
“Hold her! The wand must be saved!”
I had no idea what he was talking about, but I tried to go after him anyway, leaping high, dodging wide. No dice, those spears were everywhere. If I wanted to get past ’em, I’d have to go through the hard way. I turned all my attention to breaking the paladins’ line, chopping through their spears, bashing ’em back, kicking their knees and shins, and all the while afraid Beak-Nose was gonna find a nice little perch and start sniping from on high.
But he didn’t. As I fought through his dudes, I saw him up on the foredeck pulling a tarp off some big piece of equipment I hadn’t noticed before. I thought it might be some kind of big-ass machine gun or sling shot, ’cause it was high in the middle and square on the sides, but when the tarp came off I saw it was a futuristic boat-bike looking thing.
Even knowing there were wands of blue fire lying around, this freaked me out. There was no way these sword-swinging, loincloth-wearing shit-kickers had built anything like that. It looked like a cross between a ski-doo and one of those crazy-ass souped-up racing boats that they always show crashing on ESPN. It was flat and square and wide at the bottom, like a big white plastic mattress, but with what looked like a snowmobile seat and handlebars sticking up out of the middle.
The weirdest part, though, was when Beak-Nose climbed on and fired it up. He was tiny on it. He looked like a kid sitting on his dad’s Harley. In fact, it looked like there was some kind of booster seat on top of the bench just so he could reach the handlebars. I almost laughed until the thing whined like a rice rocket going eighty and rose up off the deck like a hovercraft. Then I stared—and almost got speared through the neck for it.
I snapped back to my fight with blood streaming down over my collar bone, and hacked off the tip of the spear that had almost shish-kabobed me, then bulled through the rest and leapt for the foredeck, trying to stop him.
The ski-doo had two rows of glowing white spheres—each about the size of a beer keg—sunk into its undercarriage, and they were vibrating so fast that the air around them was blurring, and this seemed to be the way it was flying. Yeah. No rotors, no jet engines, just an annoying high-pitched screech from the vibration. The goddamn things were levitating.
“Anti-motherfucking-gravity. Wow!”
I bounded toward the thing as Beak-Nose angled it around toward the back rail, but just as I was gonna land on it and cut his head off, it slipped out from under me like a watermelon seed and made a screaming bee-line for the horizon, its white globes glowing like tracer bullets in the dark.
I crashed down on the deck and stared after it with my jaw hanging open. “Look at that thing go. Goddamn.”
There were footsteps on the stairs behind me, and a shitload of shouting, and I turned, ready to fight again, but it wasn’t Beaky’s paladins. It was Kai-La, a bloody cutlass in her hand, and a smile on her face.
“Well fought, sister! You have won the day!”
I looked around, amazed. The battle was already over, and I’d missed it. While I’d been fighting the paladins and chasing Beak-Nose, the pirates had pulled the ship tight against the mesa and swarmed it, and the priests and paladins were surrendering all over the place. Not that the pirates were paying any attention. I got a little queasy as I saw them grabbing priests who had thrown down their weapons and started tossing them over the side. I mean it was one thing to kill somebody when they were trying to kill you, but this was straight up murder.
I turned to Kai-La. “You’re gonna kill ’em? All of ’em?”
Lo-Zhar turned from cutting a priest’s throat and answered for her, snarling. “It will still be but one for every ten they killed of mine.”
Kai-La nodded. “Aye. And priests of the Seven hold a special place in my heart. I would spare a vurlak’s life before that of a priest.”
I still didn’t like it, but she clapped me on the back before I could say anything else, and waved back toward the mesa. “Now, come, your beloved lies in a cell, alone. Bring him aboard and you shall have a cabin to yourselves for the great work you have done today. You have saved us all!”
That snapped me out of my funk. I gave her a salute, then bounced down to the main deck and across to the mesa. A cabin to ourselves? Well, yippy-kai-yay! I’d hot-footed it across the entire universe to get Lhan alone again. It was about fucking time.
Heh.
Or about time for fucking?