Chapter 20 #3
Chang En cut a ferocious path through the upper deck.
Rin saw him raise a broadsword over his head and cleave a soldier’s skull in half so neatly he might have been slicing a winter melon.
When another soldier took the opportunity to charge him from behind, Chang En twisted around and shoved his blade so hard into his chest that it came out clean on the other side.
The man was a monster. If Rin hadn’t been so terrified for her life, she might have stood there on the deck and simply watched.
“Speerly!” Admiral Molkoi pointed to the empty mounted crossbow in front of her, then waved at the Crake. “Cover them!”
He said something else, but just then a wave of cannons exploded against the Kingfisher’s sides. Rin’s ears rang as she made her way to the crossbow. She could hear nothing else. Hands shaking, she fitted a bolt into the slot.
Her fingers kept slipping. Fuck, fuck—she hadn’t fired a crossbow since the Academy, she’d never served in the artillery, and in her panic she’d almost forgotten completely what to do . . .
She took a deep breath. Wind it up. Aim. She squinted at the end of the Crake.
The Wolf Meat General had cornered a captain near the edge of the prow.
Rin recognized her as Captain Salkhi—she must have been reassigned to the Crake after the Swallow was lost in the burning channel.
Rin’s stomach twisted in dread. Salkhi still had her weapon, was still trading blows, but it wasn’t even close.
Rin could tell that Salkhi was struggling to hold on to her blade while Chang En hacked at her with lackadaisical ease.
Rin’s first shot didn’t even make it to the deck. She had the direction right but the height wrong; the bolt pinged uselessly off the Crake’s hull.
Salkhi brought her sword up to block a blow from above, but Chang En slammed his blade so strongly against hers that she dropped it. Salkhi was weaponless, trapped against the prow. Chang En advanced slowly, grinning.
Rin fitted a new bolt into the crossbow and, squinting, lined up the shot with Chang En’s head. She pulled the trigger. The bolt sailed over the burning seas and slammed into the wood just next to Salkhi’s arm. Salkhi jumped at the noise, twisted around by instinct . . .
She had barely turned when the Wolf Meat General slammed his blade into the side of her neck, nearly decapitating her.
She dropped to her knees. Chang En reached down and dragged her upright by her collar until she was dangling a good foot above the ground.
He pulled her close, kissed her on her mouth, and tossed her over the side of the ship.
Rin stood frozen, watching Salkhi’s body disappear under the waves.
Slowly the tide of red took over the Crake. Despite a steady stream of arrow fire from the Shrike and the Kingfisher, Chang En’s men dispatched its crew like a pack of wolves falling on sheep. Someone shot a fiery arrow at the masthead, and the Crake’s blue and silver flag went up in flames.
The tower ship now turned on its sister ships. Its catapults and incendiaries were no longer aimed at the Imperial Navy, but at the Kingfisher and the Griffon.
Meanwhile the Imperial skimmers, small as they were, ran circles around Jinzha’s fleet. In shallow waters the Republic’s massive warships simply didn’t have maneuverability. They drifted helplessly like sick whales while a frenzy of smaller fish tore them apart.
“Put us by the Shrike,” Jinzha ordered. “We have to keep at least one of our tower ships.”
“We can’t,” Molkoi said.
“Why not?”
“The water level’s too low on that side of the lake. The Shrike’s been grounded. Any farther and we’ll get stuck in the mud ourselves.”
“Then at least get us away from the Crake,” Jinzha snapped. “We’re about to be stuck as is.”
He was right. While Chang En wrestled for control of the Crake, the tower ship had drifted so far into shallow waters that it could not extricate itself.
But the Kingfisher and the Griffon still had more firepower than the Imperial junks. If they just kept shooting, they might cement their hold on the deeper end of the lake. They had to. They had no other way out.
The Imperial Navy, however, had ground to a halt around the Crake.
“What on earth are they doing?” Kitay asked.
They didn’t seem to be stuck. Rather, Chang En seemed to have ordered his fleet to sit completely still. Rin scoured the decks for any sign of activity—a lantern signal, a flag—and saw nothing.
What were they waiting for?
Something dark flitted across the upper field of her spyglass. She moved her focus up to the mast.
A man stood at the very top.
He wore neither a Militia nor a Republican uniform.
He was garbed entirely in black. Rin could hardly make out his face.
His hair was a straggly, matted mess that hung into his eyes and his skin was both pale and dark, mottled like ruined marble.
He looked as if he’d been dragged up from the bottom of the ocean.
Rin found him oddly familiar, but she couldn’t place where she’d seen him before.
“What are you looking at?” Kitay asked.
She blinked into the spyglass, and the man was gone.
“There’s a man.” She pointed. “I saw him, he was right there—”
Kitay frowned, squinting at the mast. “What man?”
Rin couldn’t speak. Dread pooled at the bottom of her stomach.
She’d remembered. She knew exactly who that was.
A sudden chill had fallen over the lake. New ice crackled over the water’s surface. The Kingfisher’s sails suddenly dropped without warning. Its crew looked around the deck, bewildered. No one had given that order. No one had lowered the sails.
“There’s no wind,” Kitay murmured. “Why isn’t there a wind?”
Rin heard a whooshing noise. A blur shot past her eyes, followed by a scream that grew fainter and fainter until it abruptly cut off.
She heard a crack in the air far above her head.
Admiral Molkoi appeared suddenly on the cliff wall, his body bent at grotesque angles like a broken doll on display. He hung there for a moment before skidding down the rock face and into the lake, leaving behind a crimson streak on gray.
“Oh, fuck,” Rin muttered.
What seemed like a lifetime ago, she and Altan had freed someone very powerful and very mad from the Chuluu Korikh.
The Wind God Feylen had returned.
The Kingfisher’s deck erupted into shouts. Some soldiers ran to the mounted crossbows, aiming their bolts at nothing. Others dropped to the deck and wrapped their arms around their necks as if hiding from wild animals.
Rin finally regained her senses. She cupped her hands around her mouth. “Everybody get belowdecks!”
She grabbed Kitay’s arm and pulled him toward the closest hatch, just as a piercing gust of wind slammed into them from the side. They crumpled together against the bulkhead. His bent elbow went straight into her rib cage.
“Ow!” she cried.
Kitay picked himself off the deck. “Sorry.”
Somehow they managed to drag themselves toward the hatch and tumbled more than walked down the stairs to the hold, where the rest of the crew huddled in the pitch darkness. There passed a long silence, pregnant with terror. No one spoke a word.
Light filled the chamber. Gust after gust of wind ripped the wooden panels cleanly away from the ship as if peeling off layers of skin, exposing the cowering and vulnerable crew underneath.
The strange man perched before them on the jagged wood like a bird alighting on a branch. Rin could see his eyes clearly now—bright, gleaming, malicious dots of blue.
“What’s this?” asked Feylen. “Little rats, hiding with nowhere to go?”
Someone shot an arrow at his head. He waved a hand, annoyed. The arrow jerked to the side and came whistling back into the soldiers’ ranks. Rin heard a dull thud. Someone collapsed to the floor.
“Don’t be so rude.” Feylen’s voice was quiet, reedy and thin, but in the eerily still air they could hear every word he said. He hovered above them, effortlessly drifting above the ground, until his bright eyes landed on Rin. “There you are.”
She didn’t think. If she stopped to think, then fear would catch up. Instead she launched herself at him, screaming, trident in hand.
He sent her spinning to the planks with a flick of his fingers. She got up to rush him again but didn’t even get close. He hurled her away every time she approached him, but she kept trying, again and again. If she was going to die, then she’d do it on her feet.
But Feylen was just toying with her.
Finally he yanked her out of the ship and started tossing her around in the air like a rag doll.
He could have flung her into the opposite cliff if he’d wanted to; he could have lifted her high into the air and sent her plummeting into the lake, and the only reason he hadn’t was that he wanted to play.
“Behold the great Phoenix, trapped inside a little girl,” sneered Feylen. “Where is your fire now?”
“You’re Cike,” Rin gasped. Altan had appealed to Feylen’s humanity once. It had almost worked. She had to try the same. “You’re one of us.”
“A traitor like you?” Feylen chuckled as the winds hurtled her up and down. “Hardly.”
“Why would you fight for her?” Rin demanded. “She had you imprisoned!”
“Imprisoned?” Feylen sent Rin tumbling so close to the cliff wall that her fingers brushed the surface before he jerked her back in front of him.
“No, that was Trengsin. That was Trengsin and Tyr, the pair of them. They crept up on us in the middle of the night, and still it took them until midday to pin us down.”
He let her drop. She hurtled down to the lake, crashed into the water, and was certain she was about to drown just before Feylen yanked her back up by her ankle. He emitted a high-pitched cackle. “Look at you. You’re like a little cat. Drenched to the bone.”
A pair of rockets shot toward Feylen’s head. He swept them carelessly out of the air. They fell to the water and fizzled out.