Godslayers

Some of them would live.

The Horizon was away with its crew of innocents, borne on an artificial tide generated by the Ragnar. They were headed for an island called Ethelios—a popular hub for Estheni ships to resupply and trade. From there, they would further the Luchenko Process by spreading the story we needed: that the Trade Fleet had come for the faithful of Horcutio, and their culture’s time was coming to an end. As that story spread, building the etheric associations we needed, it would create the necessary conduit for Varas to steal Horcutio’s food.

I was an idiot for not realizing the cost of that story would come due in blood and souls.

The villagers were still loading their ships with provisions, treasures, heirlooms, and whatever else. They moved limply. Another ship had followed the Horizon, in spite of the prophecy of doom I’d delivered, and tried their luck on the reef opening.

The commander had given the order, and Val had simply opened the bottom of the ship with the Ragnar’s translation engines. The wreck of the fleeing ship had plugged the exit for everyone else in a bitter foreshadowing of what we were planning to do with the captured pirate ship Thresher. I watched helplessly as distant bodies made the desperate swim back to dry land.

The sun had made a good portion of its climb past the clouds. The tide was coming in. It was time for the people of Baros to escape, but their gods—by the grace of the Eifni Organization—had decreed that there would be no escape today.

There were two ships remaining, and the distant beat of their rowing drums reached me on my vantage point on the cliffs. Not slave rowers, I guessed. The village seemed too small to support that many captives. All I could hope was that they weren’t chained to the bench when the hammer of the Trade Fleet descended.

The tide had finally come. The rout began.

The smaller ship went first, arcing through the little bay with surprising maneuverability. The beak on its prow marked it as a warship, intended to ram its victims and fix them in place. It flitted down the tail of the island, coursing for salvation. Too late.

From behind the mountains came the Thresher, hurtling along with no sense of self-preservation. The deck was practically empty; they would have kept the crew light, in anticipation of what was to come. The Barosian ship didn’t slow—how could they, with no other exit?—but I thought I might have caught a slight irregularity from the drummer. They charged ahead regardless, just as Eifni had written: the dead have no fear.

Thresher increased their speed as well, charging suicidally at the oncoming ship. I decided the rowers couldn’t possibly know what was about to happen; no one would crash like this on purpose.

Shouts across the water. The frantic beat of the drums. The second Barosian ship had slowed; the Perseverance was just nosing around the edge of sight, its decks bristling with javelineers. But the smaller ship and the Thresher were locked on each other, racing toward mutual destruction with every stroke of the oars.

For some reason I had the thought that the water was very blue, and it was a shame what we were about to do to it.

The warships collided with the crunch of a thousand planks splintering at once. They struck each other at an angle; the bireme, designed to plow into the enemy’s flank, found the curved prow of the Thresher an uncooperative target. An agony of splintering wood, a noise like a prolonged gunshot, echoed across the bay. Thresher bucked into the sky, a lethal rent down its side, while the impact shoved the bireme into the ocean. Camera-ready blue water bloomed gray with agitated sediment as the bireme’s plow wore itself into toothpicks along the shallows floor.

The bireme snapped in half, its front half tilting near vertically while the rear spun away from the Thresher. The Thresher was intact, but mortally wounded. It splashed down and immediately began to list to starboard as the bireme’s last blow made itself felt. The hole acted as a brake, sweeping the back of the ship out toward the reef as the nose headed for the bottom.

It was a reckless maneuver on both sides, but the Barosians were panicking and the Trade Fleet was ruthless. Our goal had been achieved: the wreckage of both ships would make it impossible for the final Barosian ship to escape.

Its captain seemed to understand. I heard a shout and its rowers reversed their strokes, one, two, three, bringing its approach to a crawl. But not to a stop. Even with their escape cut off, it seemed they intended to rescue the survivors.

From the other side of the wreckage, the Perseverance approached more cautiously. There was little room to turn, but they pulled up as much as they could to give the archers a clean line of fire. They drew and began picking off the survivors of the crash.

I turned away. Not to avoid the slaughter—not just to avoid the slaughter—but because the animal noises in the forest were thinning out. With my augmented hearing, I could hear distant sounds of movement.

Erid had arrived.

It was a short hike from the cliffs to the forest, and in that time the sky managed to darken to a depressive gray. I pushed through into the tree line, hacking off branches here and there with my knife—my actual, Eifni-issued knife, not the toys Rodi and I had been chucking at each other—heading for the Trade Fleet force. I took a deep breath, sinking into an ak ha var meditation. Erid didn’t need to know I’d been having a crisis of conscience.

Reach into the past. Visualize it until it’s real. I was competent, cocky, taking on a ship full of pirates just to prove I could. I was invincible, charging into the force of pirates. No weapon could touch me. I wove those memories into my shoulders and spine; I wove myself a mask from Lirian’s agonized face and the bodies of Merisite cultists. I was a killer and I walked like one. As a final touch, I laced myself a hakmir of the moment I showed up to the commander’s briefing in formal dress, unbowed in the face of her judgment.

It wasn’t an act. It was me. Just… a different me.

I cloaked myself before the first soldier came into view. They’d adapted to their mistake from yesterday, sending a screening force ahead of the main column. I waltzed cheekily through the middle of their line. The column proper was spaced tightly enough to make that more of a pain, so I just flanked them until I found Erid and Pellonine. They were walking together, and while I’d hoped to catch them gossiping about me, they looked like they’d run out of energy for conversations a couple hours ago. Dal Salim and Enochletes trailed behind them, the former with his hands tied.

Part of me wanted to reappear dramatically after cutting him loose, but Dal Salim wouldn’t know I was there and my knife was sharp enough to cut ideas. There was a lot of potential for accidents. So, boring way it is.

I decloaked, casually swiping Erid’s knife out of her belt an instant before she did. Enochletes yelped, trying to bring his spear down on me but getting it tangled in an overhead branch.

“Danou—” Erid started angrily.

“Dead,” I said, tapping her on the shoulder, “dead, and dead.” I pantomimed tossing her knife and mine at Pellonine and Enochletes.

“Fuck an octopus, Idiot! We don’t need your showboating!”

“Trust me, you don’t want to fuck the octopus,” I said seriously. “Anyway, if you think about it, this is on you. You should have been prepared for an unseen assassin. This is a security issue.”

“Give me my knife back.”

I ignored her, jerking my head back at Dal Salim. “Why’s he tied up?”

Erid grinned nastily. “Security issue.”

“Hilarious,” I said. “Hey, Dal Salim.”

“Good rainfall to you,” he said equanimously.

It wasn’t raining. Was that just a Dal Salim-ism?

“They’ve got you tied up,” I noted.

Dal Salim nodded calmly.

“Danou, I want that knife back,” Erid said with an edge in her voice. But not in her belt, ha-ha!

“Chill, Erid,” I said. “Lemme cut these ropes real fast. C’mon, Dal Salim. Over here.”

“You have your own knife!” Erid said.

“Yeah, but I want his hands to stay on,” I shot back. While she was processing the implications of that, I pulled Dal Salim aside and sawed through the ropes tying his hands together.

“Seriously, you okay?” I asked him. I think I let through a little more of my feelings through than I intended, because he looked at me in a way that said he understood. I’m not just saying that, my comm picked it up explicitly.

“I knew you’d come back,” he said, and that was that.

We fell into formation, my shadow haunting my right shoulder once again. I flipped Erid’s knife around, catching it by the blade, and reached across Pellonine to hand it back to Erid.

“Godsmile to you to,” I said to Pellonine.

“Danou.” Her voice was terse, but in a businesslike way, not an I-don’t-like-you way. Or at least not entirely. “Do you have a report for us?”

“What am I, your scout?” I said. “I just came out here to delay them from attacking you.”

“How many dead?” Erid said.

“Hell if I know,” I said. “Uh, I engaged them once on land, but it was psychological. No casualties. I did convince them to try escaping by sea. One of their ships went down on the reef, and the Thresher took out another one. Perseverance was engaging their last ship by the time I came to find you. It didn’t look good for the—pirates.”

Erid and Pellonine exchanged glances, and I fought down the anxiety that it was in response to my minor hesitation about what to call the enemy combatants.

“What’s the ground look like?” Pellonine asked.

“Steep,” I said. “This trail leads out onto a bunch of terrace farms. It’ll be narrow fighting on the path, maybe three to four people across. You could try flanking around, but I don’t know how long it’d take.”

Erid grimaced at me. “What kind of scout are you? You were out here all night!”

“Do I tell you how to swagger around a deck and yell at people?” I said. “No? Then don’t tell me how to rout a village full of people into an obvious trap.”

“How did you accomplish that, exactly?” Pellonine asked.

“Um,” I said, trying to figure out how to hide the Ragnar’s involvement. “Right, about that. You know that one goddess who really likes when people die? We can’t say her name anymore.”

Enochletes gasped. “Alcie—”

I punched him in the face.

“Shut up!” I screeched. “Yes! That bitch! Don’t say her fucking name, you got that?”

A look of horror covered Pellonine’s face. “What did you do?”

“What I fucking had to, okay?” I yelled at them. I took a deep breath. “It’s not happening again.”

I bore their judgmental stares, trying not to look guilty for this to disguise the fact that I actually did feel guilty about the moral aspects of the mission in general. What a headache. It would be great to be invisible about now.

“Well, then,” Erid said. She didn’t look horrified—more like she’d made a decision. “Thank you for your ser… vice, theological consultant.”

I blinked at the weird pause. My comm said she was making a threat, but I had no idea what it meant.

“Sure, whatever,” I said. “Let’s go kill people, I guess.”

Thunder sounded overhead.

“You shut the fuck up too,” I told the sky.

Pellonine and Erid immediately stepped away from me. I rolled my eyes.

“If Kives wanted to hit me with lightning, she had multiple chances,” I said.

“Kives doesn’t send the storm,” Dal Salim said. “This is the wrath of the Lord of Tempests.”

I looked back at him. “You knew this was coming, didn’t you?”

“It’s in the air,” Dal Salim replied. “Since last night. His wrath is slow to build, but it cannot be stopped.”

“Idiot,” Erid said. “Wasn’t it your job to stop that?”

“You heard the man,” I said. “’Cannot be stopped.’ They don’t pay me to do the impossible.”

Erid grunted. “You gonna fight this time?”

“Nah,” I said. “I misplaced my sword somewhere. Gotta go look for it.”

“Keep your pirate trash company, then,” Erid said. “Go stand away from us and shout at Horcutio some more. We’ll win the war without you.”

“It’s a date,” I said.

We broke through the tree line into cold, wet wind. Gray clouds had chased out the lovely blue sky from this morning, and the clear blue water was choppy with waves. The bay was full of bodies; the last remaining Barosian ship had caught fire somehow. Below us, the villagers had assembled in ranks behind makeshift fortifications.

Erid, surveying the village with satisfaction, turned to her troops.

“There’s one last group of savages on this island!” she bellowed. “Thieving, raping pirate scum, pissing merchant blood all over our drobol! But that ends today!”

A cheer went up from the assembled troops.

“Form ranks!” Pellonine shouted, striding up next to Erid. “First rank, down this slope! Second rank, support from the terraces! For sword and crown!”

“SWORD AND CROWN!” the Trade Fleet roared.

Thunder rumbled above us. Rain began to fall. The Trade Fleet marched.

I looked wearily down at the village.

Some of them would live.