Chapter 37 Surrender
“Stormveil!” cried the captain. “All stations, run dark!”
The first mate swung to the captain.
“We can’t,” he said. “There’s too much damage.”
“And we’ve already been seen,” said Smoke. “You can’t miss a frigate just dropping out of the sky like that. Look.”
And he pointed. True enough. While the Marelethan boasted a skeleton crew, the Endorathil was fully manned, and she was already making sail to turn.
“Damnations,” Thanavar cursed. “She must have just arrived. Report, Mr. Fahr.”
“Bowsprit disabled, and damage to the foremast and yards. Gundeck and hold breached. Taking on water, sir.”
“The rudders?”
“Sound, sir!”
“Bring us about, Mr. Oakum!”
“Release the drag sails, Buck!” called Smoke as he spun the moonswheel, and the great canvas domes fluttered to the deck. “Let’s see if we can move this old girl!”
The Endorathil’s long guns boomed, but she was out of position, and the balls splashed harmlessly into the sea.
“Mr. Broom,” snapped the captain. “Report from the gundeck. We need the guns in place and firing immediately.”
“Sir!”
“Aro’el, rouse the Court of Sand. We need the Aluciatus and Mendacium.”
“The what?”
“Go!”
I turned and bolted up the steps to the pup, where the ironmages lay on the bloody deck. I knelt over the nearest ironmage, Magister Liskeel, rolled him over to see red running like rivers from his eyes, ears, and nostrils. He gazed up at me.
“It is finished?”
“Aye, it is,” I said.
“Praise the Sisters…”
He smiled, and I saw he had lost several teeth. I swept my gaze over the other two. They were alive, but barely. The Dreadwall had almost been the undoing of the Court of Sand. Tek pushed himself up from the deck, and I rushed to my mother, who was hidden beneath her sweep of black hair.
“Honor,” she said. She, too, was bleeding from ears and nose, and her eyes were shot with red. “You live.”
I helped her to her knees, wishing Echo were here. Loudly wishing.
“Lindurithain?” she asked.
“We’re here,” I said. “But so’s the Endorathil.”
“Aluciatus,” she said. “Mendacium. Magisters, rise.”
There was another boom of the cannon, and this time, the shot splashed off the stern.
I could hear shouting from the gundeck as Buck and his men rolled the cannons into position, strapping them in with cable and cord.
The sails filled, but the Touchstone lurched in the water, and I knew she was floundering. Broom burst on deck.
“Might we have a waterspinner, sir?” he asked. “We’ve got twenty inches in the hold, and we’re sinking fast. We lost three men and four cannons through a breach.”
“Mr. Fahr!”
Dev disappeared with the gunner into the ship.
Another boom. This one whipped through the main topgallant, leaving a tear the size of a corkanut. The Marelethan hadn’t moved, but it didn’t matter. The Endorathil was closing hard, and we would be easily lost if there were holes in our hull.
“Aro’el?” Thanavar called. “The Court of Sand?”
“Barely there,” I panted as I sprang down from the pup. “But alive.”
Echo appeared in the hatch.
“We lost five through the breaches,” said the doctor. “Eight more wounded on the gundeck, and one from the splintered sprit. I have no room in the pit.”
“We can load the ironmages onto a longboat, sir,” I suggested. “Spin them to the island.”
“Ilvalour will blow them out of the water without a thought,” said Thanavar. “No, Doctor, you were correct, and we need to go ahead with the Aluciatus.”
“Not everyone knows—”
“Irrelevant now. Take everyone to the hold, including the ironmages. It is about to get bloody up here.”
“Aye, sir,” said Echo.
“Remember, Aluciatus, followed by the ship-wide Mendacium once we are boarded. I will need you back on deck for that. It is all on the ironmages now, so whatever you do, keep them alive and keep everyone in the hold.”
“This will be difficult, Captain,” said Echo. “If we had been able to—”
“Also irrelevant.” He looked at me. “Ensign Renn, help the doctor. Not a request.”
Echo and I scrambled back up to the pup to find my mother on her feet, along with Tekamorian.
Between us, we were able to lift Liskeel, who was so thin that it seemed his very bones had turned to sand.
We’d barely made it to the quarterdeck when the Endorathil’s cannons thundered once again.
Roundshot tore through the transom and the mullioned windows of the captain’s cabin, and the pup exploded behind us, sending us all to the deck in a hailstorm of splinters and shattered staves.
Beneath us, the gundeck boomed with returning fire, and the Endorathil shuddered as our shot peppered her prow. With my mother tucked under one arm, I cast a quick, last glance around the main. There were a scant few to help Buck on the cannons, and I wondered at the captain’s strategy.
“All hands, to the hold!” he barked as Echo and I dragged our charges through the hatch.
The decks were in chaos as the ship was pressed into battle.
We’d had no chance to recover from the Dreadwall, and Mr. Broom’s gunners struggled with moving the cannons from the stern to the bulwarks.
Even as we helped the ironmages deeper and down, a thundering volley took out the aft guns and sent a crewman flying with the impact.
“Fire!” shouted Broom, and I saw him leaning out a port window as our cannons answered with lead and chimeric.
“Fire!” repeated Bergy, and he lit the touch on the Molly Boom.
“Echo!” I shouted over the roar. “Chimeric! I can use it!”
He looked over his shoulder.
“To the hold, Ensign. Captain’s orders.”
The port exploded inward, and Broom was flung across the gundeck, pierced by staves of the Touchstone’s hull.
“To the hold!” Echo barked.
I threw one last look but wished I hadn’t. Bergy gathered the gunner’s body to his chest, tears streaming down his cheeks.
We stepped down midcalf into water. Dev was spinning the water backward as Ben and his swabs nailed shattered planks to the hull.
Water streamed in through cracks and bubbled up from leaks below the bilgeline.
A sow and a goatling bleated in distress, captive as they were in their pens, and the remaining scratchfowl shrieked in their wooden cages.
Normally used for the livestock, bales of hay and bundles of straw now sopped up water near the prow, and barrels of potatoes bobbed awkwardly in the bilge.
Boots thudded down the stepladder as a dozen or more crewmembers rushed to the hold. Fahr turned.
“Echo? What’s going on?”
“We’re going ahead with the Aluciatus, then Mendacium,” said the faun as he helped the two mages onto the straw.
“Forge, that’s risky.”
From the bales, my mother raised a hand, summoning me.
“Daughter,” she said. “Stay.”
I ignored her.
“Dev, I have to go up,” I said.
“We have a plan—”
“I can get chimeric from the cannonballs.”
“Honor,” called my mother. “Please!”
“Dev, whatever this plan is,” I said, “you know I can help with chimeric.”
A series of shots, this time close and in rapid succession, and the Touchstone shuddered under the battery. Our own cannons responded, but we weren’t making a dent. We’d been out of position from the start.
“Dev, no,” said Echo.
Dev turned to the carpenter.
“You’ve got this, Ben?”
“Aye, Dev. I do.”
He nodded at me.
“We have to make it quick.”
I’m sure there was some deeper motive as I turned my back on Echo and my mother, ignoring my captain’s orders as I rushed back up to the light.
Perhaps I really did have mutiny in my bones.
I wasn’t thinking of much save survival, though, and as soon as my boots hit the gundeck, Fahr and I raced for the monks, lidded to keep the balls from scattering across the floor.
Through the ports, I could see the Endorathil as she swept broadside, fierce as a tusk cat through the trees.
Bergy leaned out between the guns.
“Fire, boys!” he shouted, and the cannons discharged their fury in succession, filling the gundeck with smoke.
Dev grabbed a shot and tossed it my way, and the scars immediately sprang to life once the laced lead touched my skin.
I breathed it in, feeling the chimeric shoot up my arms to my chest, tightening my throat and cracking my teeth, pushing my eyes out of their sockets and threatening to split my skull.
It shot down my torso to my belly and my spine.
It was deep, visceral magik that crackled from my fingers and my toes.
I didn’t care if it burned its way into my guts.
It felt good to feel this strong, this powerful, this bonded with rune.
Hels yes, I was a runechaser and proud of it.
“Back to the hold!” he barked.
We grabbed two balls each, turning toward the stepladder when the final array hit.
It was like being underwater. All sound dulled; all movement slowed.
I was blown off my feet and slowly sailed across the gundeck, into Bergy, Flip, and their nine-pounder.
I saw Flip’s head snap back as he struck the bulwark.
I watched Bergy’s blood spray across the cannon’s black bore as his chest blew apart before the cannon herself greeted me with an iron kiss.
I saw stars and shadow, suns and moons, all in the span of a heartbeat or two.
Sleep, I told myself. I could cast chimeric later. Just a bit of sleep.
Wayward girl.
It felt good to surrender, just this once.
Wayward woman, slip away.
I don’t know how long I sank in the darkness, but at some point, a voice rippled through the blackness.
“Blue,” it said. “Blue, come on.”
“What?”
“Blue, we’ve struck the colors.”
I pushed myself to my elbows.
“We surrendered?”
“On deck, now, or they’ll kill us where we lie.”
Surrender? Thanavar?