4 – The Clash
“Broadside!”
The quartermaster who had just bellowed had the right reflex, flattening himself behind the shelter of the gunwale the second after his shout, like practically all the men around the impulse-cannons. On deck, frozen in stupor, only the greenest of the crew remained standing. Nothing had ever prepared them for what was happening.
Following the blue flashes from the pirate ship, the shrill whistles of the cannonballs came like so many shrieks announcing death and destruction upon the Callianis. But it came to nothing. The gunners had missed their mark: the impacts pulverized only a few superficial structures of the forecastle, shaking the masts without real damage.
Damas raised his head from cover before drawing himself up. The galleon was charging full sail at them in an attempt to ram them; if this crew was good, it would take only half a minute for its bow cannons to fire the next broadside, perhaps more with this swell that was not going to help them. But the pirate ship clearly refused to let its prey escape in this bad and uncertain weather. It was counting on its ram to ensure it.
That was its mistake.
Jawaad, standing on the aft castle, had not deigned to take cover from the broadside. He gave a nod toward Damas to confirm his order. The latter then roared:
“Levitation!”
The low rumble of the abruptly strained machines immediately drowned out every other sound in an almost animal noise that could have evoked some bestial, primitive song. And the Callianis tore herself brutally from the rough waves, the levitation pressing down upon the fiery waters that gave way beneath the repulsive force, lifting her toward the sky, taking on a heel that hurled her bow skyward in a frightening tumult. Even the mechanics were surprised by the ship’s tilt. It had not truly been anticipated: the waves and the uncertain surface of the water countered the repulsive force. It was not for nothing that on the open sea, levitation was never used to lift a ship into the air.
Damas had to catch himself with all his strength not to slide across the wood soaked with rain and spray, along with the few men who had not securely lashed themselves down. The slope was practically forty degrees. But the gunners held fast to their posts. He bellowed for the machinists:
“Stern thrust, straighten up, damn it!”
The watch master was shouting as well, relaying the orders that flashed from one side of the deck to the other, carried from voice to voice:
“Hold your posts! And hang on, you pack of dogs!”
“Ready for the broadside!”
“Skirmishers, prepare to fire!”
In the chaos, at the instant of the crash between the two ships and the shrieks of the men that could not cover the mechanical whine of the engines and the creaking of structures harshly strained and shaken on all sides, the final order came from Jawaad’s voice, surprising in its power, at the very second the impact between the two vessels occurred:
“Rolling fire!”
Hell broke loose.
Eumüs Kapistos, captain of the pirate galleon Brise-Gueule, had seen and taken part in more battles and boarding actions than he could count. He was a veteran who had won his ship after a fierce struggle and had maintained her for over ten years. By the number of his victories and the amount of coastal pillaging in which he had taken part, he claimed, not without reason, to be a master of war.
And while half his men were barely better than undisciplined, fortune-greedy barbarians, whom he moreover considered subject to forced labor and expendable without scruple, he nevertheless knew he could count on a competent crew: the other half of his ship had followed him, in some cases for a decade, into the worst abysses, and it had been a very long time since anything held much terror for men like those.
Yet, at this precise second, his sailors, as much as himself, were seized with terror and incredulity.
Eumüs had quickly realized he was pursuing a very modern model of ship, one he had never encountered in person, but had only heard about by word of mouth: a swift sailboat designed for speed, but one he easily guessed was not at all meant for combat. The Callianis was a little longer than the Brise-Gueule, but easily five meters lower at deck level, her hull sleeker and narrower, without the two fortified castles with which the war galleon was equipped. Truth be told, this vessel appeared fragile and pitiable beside the colossus of the seas charging straight at her, its enormous ram ready to spear its prey pitilessly. Eumüs saw in her at best a merchant ship, perhaps fast, but in a bad position and poorly commanded. An enticing target that had made a maneuvering error, saving him half a day to intercept her.
The second his prey left the waves to rise more than eight meters above the furious sea, he realized he had been completely duped.
Lifted by her levitation engines, the Callianis took the impact of the Brise-Gueule‘s bow head-on. But she was already too high above the waves; the ram that should have speared her and put her at its mercy slid under the clipper’s hull without any damage. The impact, even cushioned by the inertia of the sailboat floating in the air, was nevertheless harsh: it crushed wood and framing in a titanic creak, shaking both crews amidst shrieks of surprise and fear that only added to the brutal clamor of the shock.
The Callianis, lightened by the gravity effect of her engines, pivoted in the air, using the galleon’s bow as an axis, which was violently pushing her. She rushed toward her opponent, hull against hull, for a second violent shock. But she towered over the Brise-Gueule by two meters when Jawaad roared the order to fire.
The cannonade crashed down in a rolling fire upon the galleon, level with her masts and at point-blank range.
Stunned by the crash and blinded by the bluish flashes of the impulse-cannons, the pirate crew endured the broadside before even being able to take cover.
It was a slaughter.
Damas had nearly gone overboard and ended up crushed between the two hulls when they collided violently. Others had not had his luck, and several men from each deck ended up crushed between the two ships before being swallowed in the darkness. In the same second, the rolling fire of the Callianis devastated the deck of the Brise-Gueule in explosive sprays of wood, metal, and shredded bodies. Jawaad’s sailboat had only ten cannons on each side, but the maneuver had put them in perfect range to ravage the opposing galleon. Its mainmast was literally severed in a single blow and collapsed in upon itself, further increasing the chaos and destruction of the cannonade as it carried down in its inexorable fall its sails, its rigging, and the men perched upon it.
Had Damas been occupied with anything other than trying to save his own skin, continuing despite everything to shout orders at his men, he might have thought the game was already won. But he knew that for the immediate moment, it was not so, not yet. Lightened by her levitation engines, the Callianis pitched dangerously under the fire of her own impulse-cannons, with ominous creaks, tearing herself in a brutal jerk from contact with the Brise-Gueule‘s hull. She would not be able to hold out long like this before breaking apart.
Jawaad, on the aft deck, was perfectly aware of it. He shouted his instructions into the tumult, while the gunners prepared as best they could for a second broadside:
“Stop engines! Fire at will on her flank!”
He did not have time to continue his orders. Like all the men on deck, he watched, dumbfounded, as the opposing ship’s mainmast fell, carrying with it part of the Callianis‘s masts. Entangled by yards and rigging, the two ships found themselves de facto tightly bound to one another. Damas beat his boss to the punch this time, shouting as he himself ran ahead of the debris and the huge pieces of wood that dragged down the Callianis‘s sails while ravaging the rigging:
“To the axes! Get us out of this knot! We absolutely must clear ourselves from here!”
The Jemmaï was already attacking the first cables, surrounded by the shrill whistles of wood splinters, sometimes as long as sabers, projected by sporadic shots coming from the Brise-Gueule. He then heard, amidst the detonations, crashes, and shrieks, a cry let out simultaneously by many throats:
“Boarders!”
In Jawaad’s cabin, beneath the aft deck, Azur experienced the sensation she might have known locked inside a box that a facetious giant had shaken vigorously to rattle its contents. The three consecutive impacts had transformed the office into a menacing shambles where every piece of furniture and object was turned into so many formidable projectiles.
The psyké had possessed the reflex to pull Lisa under the desk, lashed to the floorboards as were the bed and stove. But she had succeeded only in sheltering herself. At the second shock, then in the enormous rolls that had followed the rolling fire of the Callianis, the young Earthwoman, screaming with fear, had escaped her grip, to be carried away violently all the way to the cabin door.
Azur gritted her teeth at the dull, heavy thud of her sister-slave’s body hitting the wood violently. She wanted to come out of her shelter to run to help her and bring her back to safety. But it was impossible to stand while the ship still seemed intent on capsizing and keeling over, dragging every object rolling in the room into another tumbling motion. Lisa, for her part, was trying to cling to the floorboards, her nails scraping on the wood to catch hold of anything that could serve as a grip, while the entire vessel listed terribly.
Azur screamed in terror when the cabin door gave way. Lisa was immediately swallowed up. Without time to grab onto anything, she rolled painfully across the deck in the pouring rain amidst debris falling from everywhere. Azur had the reflex to draw herself up to launch herself after her and catch her. She did not have the time. A pitcher of thick crystal, turned into a wild projectile, struck her on the side of the head. There remained for the psyké nothing but a black shroud, as she collapsed unconscious, rolling across the cabin until she hit the wall.
The captain of the Brise-Gueule watched in dismay as his mainmast, practically severed at his opponent’s first fire, collapsed like a defeated giant, carrying down in its fall part of his own rigging and that of the Callianis. On his deck lay scattered in their blood and viscera nearly a third of his men mowed down by the cannonade; most, mortally wounded, were agonizing, screaming and imploring; almost none would survive their wounds.
The decision was swift. The damage he had just suffered was terrible, and there was no question of retreating with his tail between his legs.
He roared the order:
“Board ’em!”
This was taken up by dozens of voices, and in the clamor of the assault, grappling hooks and ropes flashed onto the Callianis, which was falling heavily back onto the water at that moment. Though Eumüs had lost a third of his men, he knew he still had more than enough to overwhelm the crew of this cursed ship that had just humiliated and thrashed him. And his men knew it, too: throwing planks as best they could from one side to the other, pistols and sabers in hand, over fifty pirates descended upon the clipper’s deck in a deluge of fire, bloodthirsty and hungry for revenge.
Lisa tumbled onto the deck, rolling like a poorly thrown ball, until she struck one of the capstans, finding herself in the midst of smoke, explosions, and debris whistling through the air like so many deadly projectiles. Stunned, she tried to raise her head, seeing an axe head pass a cubit above her. It severed a rope clean in a stinging noise that could almost have evoked for her the snapping of a guitar string.
A step away, the sailor holding the axe was working frantically, covered by one of his colleagues pointing a pistol and a broad cutlass toward the first pirates climbing onto the deck. In the crowd, Lisa was jostled; but the sailor had other fish to fry than to worry about what his captain’s slave was doing there, and was already returning toward the fray. Stunned, dumbfounded by the shots of the impulse-pistols and the din of battle, she crawled across the wood slick with rain to find shelter beneath the capstan. Shaken by hiccups of terror, her eyes wide with horror at the chaos unfolding before her, incapable of gathering the courage that would have allowed her to run toward the cabin to hide there, she saw Jawaad coming down from the quarterdeck, holding in one hand his pair of sangtis and in the other a sturdy hatchet. He was coming to lend a hand to his men trying to free the Callianis from the grip of her masts entangled with those of the Brise-Gueule.
From her hiding spot, Lisa saw only legs running in every direction amidst splinters of wood, torn canvas, and thick swirls of smoke and soot. Soaked by the spray rinsing away the splashes of blood reddening the deck, she was plunged into the heart of the battle, with all the horror that word could hold for someone who had never seen its unreal madness. The essence of battle in all the terrifying, extraordinary elements it brought together. She heard the shrieks of rage and pain; she could see bodies falling like puppets with severed strings, immediately towered over by other pairs of legs moving to the rhythm of torsos, invisible to her, fighting to survive. For a brief instant, her mind wavered toward the darkness she had learned so well to know, where it would have been so easy to comfortably drown herself. But adrenaline and the survival instinct denied her that possibility. If her consciousness was indeed capsizing, the most animal part of her being fought with all its strength to keep her conscious and stay alive in this deadly tumult.
Jawaad brought his hatchet down with a sharp stroke against the fastenings of a shredded rigging, which gave way immediately in sounds of almost organic tearing. But the sound, drowned in the insane tumult, did not change much of the surrounding chaos. Near those of his crew trying to outpace the boarding action to clear the Callianis, he could see the entire deck, soaked with a mixture of salt water, rain, and blood, where many dead and wounded already lay on the ground, over whom sailors and pirates fought in a murderous, infernal melee.
In the middle of them, Damas, stripped of his saber from the first second of the assault, whirled in a dance of death almost impossible to follow with the eyes, armed with two daggers. It would have been difficult to count how many attackers he had just killed. Every pirate who approached him had no more than three seconds to live, as he ran along the gunwale, regularly throwing a dagger, hitting his mark practically every time, replacing it so quickly with another that the human eye could not have followed the movement. He was a killer, one of the most formidable assassins, Jawaad knew oh-so-well, that one could have encountered in all of Armanth and beyond. Even a veteran among the legendary Sicarius of the Athémaïs would have hesitated at the spectacle of this perfect choreographer sowing death around him.
Though Jawaad had known for a long time how formidable the Jemmaï was, he was nonetheless enthralled for the moment by the incredible carnage, which terrified even those of the two crews in deadly struggle who had the questionable fortune of seeing him in full action. The sailors of the Callianis defended themselves like wild beasts before the wave of pirates enraged by the turn of the boarding action. It was not simply that they were well paid or that they feared their taciturn captain. Every man on board had sooner or later been tested by Jawaad, every one of them had been made to prove his loyalty and trust, and every one of them had been able to see, in return, that which the Master Merchant accorded them. They fought neither for pay nor for fear of punishment, but for the life of each and every one of them, all comrades united by their captain. The men of the Brise-Gueule, for the most part ruthless pirates and killers, half of them mercenaries with no more experience than honor, fought nevertheless with the same rage, drunk with anger, to take this ship which might well be their only escape from a shipwreck on the open sea. But facing them were practically only united and solidary veterans, and not simple merchant navy men wanting to save their lives.
Jawaad let go of his hatchet to push against a shattered yard and clear it from its fastenings. A sharp whistle at his ears, and he had time to see half the face of Clessar, his old navigator who was lifting the wooden spar with him, explode in a slurry of blood before being sprayed with it. Pushing with all his strength to finish bringing down the wooden piece, he let go of everything and threw himself to the ground, rolling in the same movement, glimpsing through a reddish curtain three pirates gaining a footing on the Callianis from the aft rigging. One of them had just scored a lethal hit.
The first of the attackers to set foot on the deck was charged by the huge mass of Sianos, one of the solidest men on the Callianis, who was on his second crossing with the Master Merchant. The pirate literally flew under the impact to crash against the quarterdeck stairs. But Sianos did not have time to finish him off: he was set upon by the two other pirates, and in the fray, unskilled at combat and lacking confidence, he was in a bad spot. Jawaad grabbed his sangtis and charged to lend him a hand. Practically all the pistols had fired since the beginning of the assault, and given the time required to reload one, the battle was now going to be settled primarily in hand-to-hand combat.
Lisa clung with all her strength to the foot of the capstan that had become her sole and uncertain refuge, her senses overwhelmed by panic, while on the ship’s deck a deadly melee was now being waged. Less than ten meters away, through the curtain of rain, she could glimpse Jawaad, who had just trapped a pirate’s saber and was entering merciless hand-to-hand combat, assisting Sianos, whose leg had just been slashed. The Master Merchant wielded the sangtis with expert skill, the paired weapons ensuring an unstoppable defense for whoever knew how to use them; and he had mastered it, holding back, parrying, and turning back the assaults of the two pirates facing him, covering the colossus at the same time.
Terrified and mesmerized by the scene, Lisa saw the pirate stunned by the colossus’s charge draw himself up. He held a second impulse-pistol in his hand, and staggering, he aimed at Jawaad. Less than three meters from him, he could not miss his shot. Lisa screamed with all her strength, springing from her hiding place to rush toward her master. She did not realize what she was doing. Only one thing mattered: trying to save Jawaad. Had she been asked at that second, she would not have known why she was taking such a risk. No more than she realized that, in fact, she was not screaming:
She was Singing.
Damas was slitting his last opponent’s throat with a sharp gesture when he saw Jawaad in a bad spot. Nearly twenty meters from him, he spotted the pirate taking aim at his boss and friend. It was an extreme distance to throw a dagger. Added to the difficulty were the driving rain, the swell, and the wind; he knew his chances were very slim, but did not think twice. He cocked his arm, when something happened that the Jemmaï felt long before he could say he saw it.
Around Jawaad, back to back with Sianos, who was wounded in the thigh, reality suddenly shimmered: it was as though someone had thrown a stone creating waves on water. The air shimmered and vibrated, distorting the image.
Damas threw his dagger with all his strength. His half-second of hesitation cost him another wound when a pirate threw himself upon him, and he found himself caught once more in the deadly melee, furiously defending his life. The pirate aiming at Jawaad felt his weapon vibrate abruptly in his hand, but fired, and the blue flash of his pistol spat the bullet that would strike its target head-on.
At that second, the shimmering metamorphosed into a storm.
Everything surrounding Sianos and Jawaad was abruptly pushed back with the devastation of a tornado. In a blink of an eye, an invisible force ravaged the deck’s panelling as if it had been sand, tore away a section of the gunwale as if it had been balsa, carrying off in the gust of a reality turned pure destruction the three pirates, who were crushed by the shockwave, then propelled overboard like disjointed puppets. The bullet fired at the Master Merchant never reached its target, no more than the dagger thrown by Damas, both transformed into ridiculous wisps of straw hurled like everything else into the devastating arc of the circle that had just been born.
And before the surreal scene, Lisa was Singing.
She stood in a trance, arms outstretched, silhouetted in shadow before the brief scene of ravage that had just died out as quickly as it had appeared. Everything metallic around her still glowed with a faint bluish, electric sheen that highlighted her frail silhouette, her hair waving in total defiance of the wind.
Damas promptly rid himself of his opponent to remain frozen before the scene. He knew what he was seeing. He had seen it before: the Song of Loss, that rare and terrifying gift, considered cursed, which his boss possessed and mastered. But not at this power, not at an ounce of this power. Jawaad could never have caused so much destruction in such a brief instant, a single note, in fact; he would have had to concentrate perhaps a whole minute, perhaps more, putting all his guts into it to achieve it. Concerned with knowing his boss’s limits and means, Damas had tested him several times; he knew well enough. Jawaad’s slave, the frail, fearful little redhead of Earth origin, the one he had taken so many years to search for with a maniacal patience, the one for whom cohorts of slave traders had torn their hair out trying in vain to satisfy the Master Merchant and find his rare pearl, this girl he wanted with such insistence without ever explaining anything of his precise criteria, not even to Damas, was a Loss Singer.
Jawaad did not have time to realize immediately what was happening. He knew only that he had heard the report of a pistol behind his back and that, at the same instant, a wave of force such as he had never experienced had broken loose around him. He understood what it was about when he set his gaze on Lisa, standing wild-eyed a few steps from him, still surrounded by the blue glow of Loss vibrating in unison with her, while a few rare pieces of debris fell limply here and there, as if gravity had wished to take its time.
Around his neck, the astrolabe he wore as a pendant vibrated stronger than ever. Jawaad sketched a smile, incongruous in the chaos and battle still raging. He had not been mistaken; quite the contrary. There was just one detail, rare, of which he could not have suspected from the outset, and which was now glaringly obvious to him. But he had no time to ponder further. Enormous creaks shook the ship as she righted herself, the deck slipping back toward the horizontal.
“We’re clear, hold on!”
The shout came from the bow. Freed from the bindings connecting her to the Brise-Gueule, the Callianis followed the wind and tore herself from the pirate ship. The attackers still trying to board the clipper were dragged into the chasm opening between the two hulls. The grappling hooks lost their grip, ropes gave way, and planks slipped out, plunging the surprised pirates into the sea.
In the movement, a rain of debris beat down on the deck in a deadly deluge as the melee continued. Jawaad did not see the three-hundred-kilogram piece of timber above his head hurtling down the rigging, tearing away everything in its path.
Lisa regained consciousness knowing nothing immediately of what she had just committed. But she realized the deadly danger her master faced and began to charge toward him at full tilt as if her own life depended on it.
Jawaad suddenly felt pulled from the ground by Sianos, who dragged him along as best he could, balancing on one leg. Trying to save his boss, he slipped to sprawl heavily across the mixture of water and blood dripping on the deck.
The impact of the yard arm devastated the deck more effectively than an explosive, digging a gaping hole in sprays of wood and metal, with a dreadful crash that created something like a silence, brief but so intense it seemed to swallow the entire world. Sianos was dazed by the impact. Jawaad, dazed as well, felt blood flowing, warm and viscous, across his chest. Strangely, he felt neither pain nor wound, but only a weight upon his chest; he wondered incongruously where he could have been injured.
Opening his eyes to check, he saw a mass of scattered fiery red hair, then Lisa’s inert body slumped over him. A wood splinter the size of a dagger was embedded through her left shoulder, transfixing it from side to side beneath the collarbone. Jawaad suddenly felt a black rage rise:
“Stupid slave!”
He abruptly pushed away the unconscious Lisa, who rolled across the soaked deck, while he drew himself up to look at the state of his ship. Sianos was dazed too, and the Master Merchant had only an instant to stare at the desolation surrounding him. Another broadside fired by the crew of the Callianis released its deadly devastation in blinding blue flashes. The Brise-Gueule held firm; it would have taken an entirely different firepower to bring down the powerful warship. But without her mainmast, she was no longer a threat, provided the Callianis managed to gain distance.
A few steps from the Master Merchant, in the melee, Damas had resumed the fight after being frozen by the surreal scene he had just witnessed. Others had seen it too, similarly enthralled. For some, their bewilderment had cost them their lives. There were still nearly a dozen attackers grappling with the crew, and they had not yet realized that, with the Callianis detached from the Brise-Gueule, they were now left to themselves.
Jawaad cast a dark look, seething with anger, toward his wounded slave; for the moment he could do nothing for her, and he had to start by saving his ship and his crew. He swept aside with a gesture the locks of his black mane soaked with rain and spray, the water washing from his face in red streams the blood and flesh of what had been Clessar’s skull. He stepped over Lisa, prostrated on the floorboards, to join the melee, shouting:
“No survivors!”
***
Sonia set foot on the deck. As soon as the Loss-metal engines were started on the open sea, she had understood what was brewing, and thus that her hiding place would quickly cease to be safe. The heel taken by the Callianis while levitating had confirmed she was right. Part of the cargo moorings had not survived the impact, and the hold had become an infernal chaos where anyone would have ended up crushed by crates and barrels tumbling from side to side. That was indeed what had happened: while Sonia had had time to reach the ladder to the lower deck, an old crew member who had no doubt hoped to secure the moorings had not been so lucky; he ended up crushed at the foot of the stairs by a barrel that must have weighed three times his weight. Sonia thought briefly that it was one less worry to handle. He had had time to catch sight of her and be surprised by it. For the last time in his life.
Crossing the lower deck had been no easier. In the time of the three jolts and the dreadful crashes indicating that the assault had begun, Sonia had been forced to cling with all her strength to the ship’s beams, dodging as best she could everything unlashed that became a dangerous missile whistling all around her. By the time she laboriously reached the deck, the boarding action had begun in detonations, whistles, and shouts.
The feline creature remained frozen at the spectacle of the battle raging. The massive shadow of the Brise-Gueule was silhouetted against the black screen of the night, blurred by floods of spray and driving rain. And before her, the sailors of the Callianis fought with rage against the pirates who had managed to board the deck. No quarter was given. Sections of torn sail, ravaged pieces of wood lay everywhere, and the ground was nothing but a mixture of soot, water, and blood, amidst the smell of ozone, smoke, and burnt flesh.
At the center of the melee, as she crouched in the shelter of a mast, she fixed her gaze on Jawaad and Damas, practically back to back amidst their men, facing the pirates now trapped. The Jemmaï had exhausted all his throwing knives and was wielding two curved daggers in a deadly dance. And behind him, Jawaad watched his rear, armed with his sangtis, trapping and snapping the sharp blades of attackers who no doubt knew themselves lost now.
The Callianis was moving away from the severely hit galleon, amidst the creaking of rigging and wood, under sporadic cannon fire. The game was won, and the ship’s crew was overcoming the pirates, who were disappearing one by one.
A fierce struggle was now being played out, in the sole hope of staying alive, amidst bodies and shrieks of agony, leaving no doubt about the outcome. Sonia shivered with a wave of excitement and tension that brought her nothing but pleasure. The tutor, fascinated and almost transfixed by the surrounding fury, could have stayed in her hiding place and delighted with her whole being in the spectacle, appalling as it was. But her gaze was drawn by a mass of red hair and the frail body of a young woman on the deck among the corpses.
Sonia knitted her brows; her trance was immediately ruined when she recognized who lay a few meters from her.
In a few agile, cautious steps to take shelter from potential shots and splinters, she towered over Lisa’s body, and her comment, whispered in a tone of disappointment where one could almost have felt the grief of genuine affection, seemed to echo the angry shout uttered earlier by Jawaad: “Stupid slave.”
Sonia was no physician and would have admitted with a certain haughtiness that it was not her job. But Lisa mattered deeply to her, and the tutor had often been, in her long life, the only person available to perform first aid on the wounded. Among the immense sum of her nearly endless knowledge, she could claim to be an expert in it. Leaning over the young Earthwoman, always with a cautious eye on the fierce struggle taking place nearby, she had time to assess the damage of the wound. The thick wood splinter transfixed the young woman’s shoulder through and through, breaking her collarbone. Opening Lisa’s mouth unceremoniously, she ensured the lung was not affected. But in view of the hemorrhage, she grimaced. There was a risk that the subclavian artery was damaged. If that was indeed the case, she did not give her charge long to live.
The coarse linen shirt of one of the pirates lying on the deck was quickly turned into an improvised compress, and Sonia applied herself to a tourniquet as tight as possible without trying to remove the piece of wood embedded in Lisa’s shoulder: if the splinter moved, the young woman might well bleed out in an instant. She could do nothing better without a minimum of equipment, but for the moment she could move and shelter the young woman without risk.
A third volley from the Callianis‘s cannons thundered from five pieces at once, blinding anyone who had the misfortune of keeping their eyes open before the electric flashes of the detonations. Sonia shivered with pleasure as she dragged Lisa to shelter. A few meters away, the last surviving pirates, surrounded, shouted their surrender.
And Jawaad’s cold, implacable order in response drew a sinister smile from the licentious tutor.
“I said: no survivors!”
Jawaad backed away cautiously to avoid having to trample further over the bodies of the dead and wounded, so intermingled that he could not have distinguished his men from the opposing crew. The last three survivors of the attackers were at that very instant pushed overboard without the slightest pity for their implorations; even the youngest, who could not have been seventeen, was thrown into the water, which amounted to condemning him to a horrible death. Jawaad turned away from the scene without his gaze expressing the slightest ounce of compassion, only a dull flame of restrained anger, letting the rage and tension of combat drain away. The driving rain finished cooling and quelling the martial fury that had seized him alongside all his men, but another anger was not going to calm down anytime soon.
Jawaad hated fighting and having to use violence. Not that he was a pacifist—that concept would likely never have been understood by any Lossyan whatsoever—but simply that he hated stooping to having to strike his fellow man. And he generally felt a lasting bitterness afterward, aroused by the feeling that having to resort to combat was more or less the masterly confession of a failure of his intelligence.
Tonight, that confession was all the more intense, even though he knew he could not have avoided this battle. As he headed toward the quarterdeck, he could count the number of bodies grotesquely splayed across the deck; the dead and the dying who would have very little chance of making it through the night, whose pitiable calls he ignored. He estimated that he had undoubtedly lost twenty men. Not counting the wounded who would be unable to maneuver during their convalescence, he was practically certain that the assault had cost him a fifth of his crew, or nearly so.
But he risked having lost far more than sailors and brothers-in-arms. He quickened his pace further toward the last spot where he had pushed his wounded slave aside. And came face-to-face with Sonia who, between the aft capstans, held the unconscious young woman against her, in shelter.
Jawaad raised a puzzled eyebrow. But he did not seem particularly more surprised than that before Priscius’s tutor, who was nevertheless clandestinely aboard his ship. His gaze drifted to his own slave. Though wan, she was still breathing. He brought his dark gaze back to Sonia, the effect heightened by his mood, just as somber, and his appearance rendered even more sinister and terrifying by the rain soaking him and the blood drenching him:
“Will she live?”
Sonia was surprised by neither the greeting nor the question. She was beginning to understand the Master Merchant well:
“It’s very premature. Not without an excellent surgeon and a good hospice, master.”
Damas was joining his boss, holding one shoulder. He had not emerged unscathed from the melee, and now that the adrenaline was ebbing, he could count painfully the numerous wounds that the battle had left him as a souvenir. He had left his men to take care of the survivors, all thrown overboard—not without having lied absently at one point, promising safe conduct to whoever would give him the name of the ship and her captain. The deception posed no real qualms of conscience for him, and the unfortunate survivor who had answered him had finished like the others: thrown into the sea.
He stared at Sonia in surprise. He was not really any better off than Jawaad, also covered in blood, soaked, dirty, his long stringy hair tousled into bundles of inextricable knots:
“What the hell is she doing here?”
Jawaad turned to his second in a sharp movement, his gaze hardening to the point of appearing even darker than the stormy night surrounding them. His voice was a dry, sharp bark:
“Haul up the sea anchors and set all sail! Make the Callianis run as fast as she can! Course straight for Mélisaren!”
Damas stared at his friend, dumbfounded:
“Jawaad, we have heavy damage on the deck and rigging. And wounded by the bucketful! Explain to me!”
Rarely had Damas asked to understand. But here, the situation obviously justified his request. In an even rarer occurrence, Jawaad answered clearly and immediately so that everything would be plain to his second:
“My slave must not die. She must NOT die! Everything I have undertaken depends on it. Until she is saved, she alone matters. Her life is worth more than this ship and my crew.”
Damas paused, staring at his boss in bewilderment. If there was one thing nearly universal to all Lossyans, and which Jawaad had never questioned even once, it was considering that the life of a slave came, whatever happened, after that of free men. And even if, by far, that was not the case in private, so intimately attached could some become to their slave, far more than to any free person, no one would ever have publicly questioned this point. Putting a slave before a free man could easily be considered a confession of weakness and a redoubtable insult. That Jawaad held these words took on a truly dramatic significance for the Jemmaï: it was necessarily grave and vital for his boss. Jawaad had never shown the slightest direct weakness toward his slaves, not even for Azur, his favorite; but above all, behind his answer, Jawaad’s gaze enlightened him further on the secrets his friend had kept to himself all along.
“So be it,” he resumed, “at your command. But we’re going to have to steer around the storm, all the same. Um… by the way, what the hell is she doing here?” he finished, pointing at Sonia, who was amused by it with an almost perverse smile.
“She understood what I told her before returning her to her former owner.”
“And what did you tell her?”
“That she was invited.”
