The Lord-Captain
TAWIC STARED AT the bloody bandage on his leg. The chirurgeon’s calligraphy in the First Language of Man was invisible now, the ink consumed by spreading red. Its magic was meant to hold whether or not it was legible. The mending words, he was assured, would soothe Pain in his soul and hasten his body’s healing. The little insects of Decay and Plague would have no chance of claiming his limb.
Tawic was not persuaded. Lava flooded down his thigh and trickled up his hip. The magic in the words didn’t work. He had thought the chirurgeon’s script was messy. He could have written the runes better himself, if only he knew these spells. Now for that messiness Death’s ship loomed on his horizon.
He could face his end. The Silent Kingdom didn’t frighten him. But now, he realized, Pain did. Had one little arrow revealed his gods’ true nature? Could he not stand to suffer for his city?
A wave hit the ship. Tawic winced. He wanted to cry.
He was fifteen.
“You should have let me drown,” he whimpered.
Orer sat beside him on a pile of crates. They were in the infirmary, after dinner, and Heaven twisted into livid twilight beyond the portholes. By that late hour he should have retired to his berth. Instead he was with his closest friend, savoring his night’s mead.
“You’d be waiting for me for a long time in the Silent Kingdom if I had,” he said, unconcerned. He was one year younger than Tawic but had started to grow enormous, ursine, furry with body hair.
“I’ll still be waiting,” Tawic said. “I’m going to die. Only now in bed instead of battle.”
“That’s not the gods’ plan for you,” Orer said with a smirk. He regarded Tawic in the hammock, seeing the agony in his features, maybe even spotting the tears in his eyes, and he reclined atop his crates. “Heroes like us don’t die in bed. Not unless there are maidens there with us.”
Tawic didn’t reply. He hurt too badly to think of what to say.
Orer stayed beside Tawic until the last trace of Sun’s gleaming light disappeared atop the waves outside. He discussed the battle, how their arrows had flown like lightning bolts at the thunder-crack of their bowstrings, smiting foes on the galley they were boarding. He reminisced, as though it were not hours ago, how glorious it was that Tawic had been shot by an arrow in return, spilling his own blood in devotion to the God, and how jealous he was that none of his own was spilled that day. He talked about the wives they would win with their honor, and the favor they had courted with the gods, and how they would both be celebrated when they returned to port in Nis Daksi. He assured Tawic that the way he toppled overboard with the arrow in his thigh was normal for any young warrior injured for the first time, and that, had their positions been switched, he was sure Tawic would have dived into the water after him, too—just as Orer had.
Tawic did nothing but hold back his tears. He was grateful when his friend, at last, retired from the infirmary. Pain could conquer his soul without the tempering of Shame then. Alone he could weep like he really wanted, and he could scream like he really needed.
Sleep came to him for minutes at most. She did not let him rest. The gods tormented him when he slipped into the Unwaking World. He felt Sun’s heat against his pale cheeks. He looked down, and the arrow stuck from his thigh. The wound was fresh. The wooden shaft was pressing against the hammock’s mesh. The arrowhead was ripping through his skin, scraping his bone, spilling blood across the infirmary floor.
The arrow was still there. Had it ever been removed? He had to pull it out. He screamed for the chirurgeon, grasped at the bandages, wrapped his hand around the fletching—
His fingers found blanket. Shadow filled his vision, and Tide’s moon shone silver atop the sea. His leg was bound in damp linen.
He closed his eyes and tried to sleep again.
A thump echoed through the hull. Tawic was awake. He heard it as Pain hounded his heart and tightened his jaw. When the second thump came, he was certain he was delirious. The third was his imagination. And the fourth was just another wave against the ship. He ignored them all.
But when he heard the scream, he lifted his face from his blanket.
A man cried out on deck. The words were muffled and distant. Tawic righted himself, swaying in the hammock, gasping as his blanket fell away. There were more voices, and something fell, and blades were pulled from scabbards, and….
A shadow toppled past the porthole. It was black in the moonlight and then disappeared into Tide. Tawic only saw its silhouette.
Something banged toward the berths. The door shuddered. A man screamed, not muffled by the ceiling or walls. The scream stopped without ending.
Pain fled Tawic’s wounded leg and took his gods with her. He was left with only Fear as he stared at the sliding infirmary door.
Gurgling. Pounding. A cry for help.
The corridor went silent.
The door’s membrane was translucent. A shadow grew larger through the screen. It was a man whose arms bulged with muscles and blades. It was drawing nearer, making no sounds at all.
It reached the door. A giant hand grasped the handle, and it pulled.
In the darkness of the threshold, Tawic saw it was no man. Its muscles were scales, and the blades were fins.
It entered the moon’s light. Beneath the waist its body was a powerful serpent. It slithered closer. Its scales were blue and matte, and sharkskin bandoliers hung from its torso, lined with daggers carved of bone. Human and seal and dolphin skulls dangled on a brace upon its shoulder.
Tawic tried to move away. But there was nowhere to go in the little infirmary. He slipped from the hammock and fell to the ground.
The serpent lowered its torso. Its shadow fell upon him, blotting out the moon.
Its claw closed around his bicep and hoisted him into the air.
A miasma of fishrot poisoned him. He choked and gasped but looked ahead and saw the creature’s face.
Its eyes were piscine and lidless, hazy and cold and unreflective. Dozens of shark teeth lined its maw. Two slits marked its nose, and beneath them, gills flared like raw wounds on its man-like neck. Tawic saw through them and into its red throat.
Its dead eyes considered him. They looked down at his bloody leg.
The head of the chirurgeon was tied to the creature’s bandolier. It dangled at the serpent’s waist by the hair.
Tawic held his breath but did not close his eyes. His gods wouldn’t let him. He wanted to face his killer, to remember what it looked like when he reached Death’s kingdom.
The serpent raised its other claw. It could tear Tawic’s head free in a single grasp. He was certain it would. It would take him as a trophy.
It brought the claw to its mouth, and made three gestures. Hand signs. Symbols, a language of the deeps.
The claw let go. Tawic crashed into the ground. He sobbed and spat but pushed himself up just in time to see the serpent turn.
It slithered out of sight. Then he was alone with Pain again.
New sounds of slaughter echoed down the staircases. Tawic heard the Lord-Captain’s voice. His friends and brothers screamed, and bronze blades clashed against hard scales.
“Aldeat,” Tawic whispered, and a torch lit on the wall.
A trail of blood in the shape of the serpent’s tail led out through the door, glossy in the orange glow. And the fire seemed so gentle as it pushed the spirits of Shadow away. The waters were calm, and the ship cut through the waves, sailing forward through the night. This was another nightmare. The serpent had not been real. Even now he was lost in Sleep’s realm of imagination; Tawic would awaken in his hammock in a moment, grasping at his thigh, gasping for breath once more.
He tried to stand. Pain struck him to the ground. He toppled into the serpent’s trail, and as he looked at the spirits of Sun that waltzed across the cabin ceiling, he knew this was no nightmare.
Stories of nights like these were told by sailors, the most ancient ones who haunted the Freedman’s Tier, whose skin was cracked and whose ribs showed through their tunics. Sometimes boys like Tawic would stop to listen. Sometimes they would hear the horror that man could find upon the Blood Seas of Dinre.
These serpents were Mircasa. They had come to claim trophies from honorable prey. And what honor was there in a trophy from Tawic? The Mircasar had seen his leg and spied his weakness. He had been weighed and judged and found unworthy, and so he was spared.
The Mircasar had been right. The tears in his eyes proved it. Tawic had none of Courage in his Soul Pantheon. He was a coward, a supplicant to Fear, a disciple of the Cult of Stinging Tendrils who let the kiss of Pain incarnate rule him. He lay in blood and clutched his bandaged leg, useless, and Shame became his shroud.
“Alor Kas, Aspect of the Killer, drink this blood…”
The chorus came from the deck. Distant, choked by the din of battle, but Tawic heard the voices speak the invocation to Violence.
“Those I slay, I slay for my brothers!”
Orer. It was Orer’s voice, rising above the others, screaming across the deck. Then there was clattering, shouting, the chaos of Violence and his daughters, and Tawic made out nothing more amidst the crying, crashing, roiling cacophony of war.
Orer was not weak. He was worthy—everything Tawic knew he could not be. Orer would have grabbed that Mircasar’s claw, avenged the murdered chirurgeon, honored the God and his place as a Corsair-Lord of the Armada even to his death. Especially to his death.
Tawic could do nothing. He lay on the floor and wept.
But the thought of leaving his friend to face these monsters alone made Pride recoil. Violence shuddered. Love retched, and Shame climbed from her tower.
Pain had no hold of his soul then. Perhaps he was not worthy prey. But he would not let his brothers of the Armada die without him. Tawic couldn’t stand, but he could crawl.
He pulled himself through the infirmary door.
The sleeping Corsair-Lords were butchered in their berths. Rivers of red shifted with the swaying ship. Tawic crawled past torches on his arms and one knee, through dark and light and dark again.
Lord Kersin was in his path. The Mircasa had found him in his sleep. Blood fountained from his throat. He had been pulled from his hammock, tossed onto the floor, and his right hand had been torn from his arm.
These serpents sought out worthy prey. But they did not fight with honor.
Tawic climbed over Lord Kersin’s still-warm body. From there he saw the rest. Every man had been killed. Some looked to have fought back. Those were the most disfigured, their bodies partway devoured or dismembered or mutilated for trophies.
He took hold of a hammock and heaved himself upright, finally, and beheld the berths.
Tawic knew every man onboard, but he could not recognize most of the bodies.
Vengeance wrapped her batwings around him. He saw no god but her.
He found his berth between two severed arms. There was his chest. Within was his family’s silver sword, his quiver, and the arrows he hadn’t used in the battle. He saw the enchanted words still etched into their shafts.
His bow had been lost overboard, but he could still use those arrows. He slipped the sword over his shoulder in its sling and put the quiver on. Then he looked toward the stairs.
The serpent feasted in the stairwell.
It had found a sailor, and Carnivory owned its soul. Its squalus mouth tore into the man’s belly, ripping fat and intestines free as it held him in place.
Tawic watched it from the light. He drew his sword. The tip of the gleaming blade trembled in his grip. He hopped closer, leaning on the wall, knowing that if he put any weight on his wounded leg he would fall.
The Mircasar did not notice him.
It was colossal. Its muscles bulged from its arms like the ringed plate of full bronze panoply. What was Tawic to a creature like this? He could not match it. Vengeance fizzled away, blown out, unable to conjure Violence in her stead. His teeth chattered.
He should have struck it. He should have lunged for it while it gorged. That was what Duty wanted. That was what a Corsair-Lord was meant to do.
Instead he braced against the wall, and he kept himself as far from the Mircasar as he could. His sword jittered between them as he hopped toward the deck.
It never deigned to notice him.
An arrow sailed above his head. Tawic fell to the deck, and his sword toppled from his grip. Half-snakes scaled over the gunwales. The shapes of sailors and Corsair-Lords fought in every direction. The Mircasa wielded spears of bone as they swarmed the deck. Battlelines were broken. There were no ranks. Serpents came from every corner, slithering up from the sea. Tawic saw an arrow strike one in the neck, and it made no noise as it dropped its spear, grabbed the shaft, and darted back overboard. He watched another skewer a Corsair-Lord and toss him into Tide. The Lord-Captain, dressed in white, jumped onto the rigging to escape a slashing claw.
And in the center of the chaos, Orer battled two serpents at once with his sword and shield.
He wore no armor. He was clad only in black. A bone spear had impaled his leg, and blood poured from his cheek. He blocked the crush of one serpent’s fist with his shield, and parried the spear tip of the other; he jumped backward from their snapping mouths, ducked from their lashing tails, and darted up the steps to the quarterdeck.
They chased him up the stairs, pulling their huge bodies after him. But another was already behind him. It tossed a man overboard and turned.
All three serpents surrounded Orer.
Tawic could not stand. He could not fight. He could not reach them in time. He was helpless as he watched. Storm’s clouds passed before the moon, and darkness fell across the deck.
He reached into his quiver, and he drew the shortest of his arrows. He could think of nothing else. He had a single moment. This was all his gods would let him do.
He hurled the arrow overhand, sending it spinning toward the quarterdeck, and screamed:
The words disappeared into the melee. He could not hear himself. But Language heard, for the magic in the ancient First Language of Man carried through the Domains.
The arrow burst.
Emerald fireworks scattered through the night. Ricocheting volleys of green shot down against the deck, peppering the Mircasa, cracking against the sails, and the boom of thunder followed. The sky turned bright as Sun’s day with brilliant forks of green lightning. The flying lights sent shadows racing everywhere across the ship.
The Mircasa hesitated. They lifted their claws to their eyes, looked to the ground, recoiling. The abyss-born serpents hated Sun and loathed the magic of brightness, and they were stunned.
The Corsair-Lords weren’t. The Lords of Nis Daksi struck as Shadow crashed back atop the deck. Orer charged. He skewered a Mircasar with his sword and punched another in the gills, driving his fist into its neck. He heaved it sideways and pushed it toward the gunwale and shoved it into the water. With a scream he turned, and as the third serpent behind him looked back up, uncovering its eyes, it made a sign with its left claw. It slithered into Tide in fright.
The Lord-Captain shot an arrow through a serpent’s head from the rigging. Two sailors pulled another to the ground. All the others fled. And as Tawic tried to stand, as he went to join the slaughter of the rout, his leg gave way, and he fell, and he hit his head on a barrel.
THE BANDAGE ON his leg had been changed. There was only a hint of blood beneath the sorcerous words. Tawic could read them, if he dared to look closely. They still did not keep Pain away.
Orer sat beside him in the light of Sun, sipping at his day’s ration of mead. His leg was bandaged, too. And his head, and arm, and most of his torso.
Neither boy was wounded badly enough to warrant space in the infirmary now. They had been moved to the deck. A dozen other casualties lay around them.
“That,” Orer whispered, “was a glorious battle.”
Tawic’s hands had not stopped shaking in hours. He hadn’t slept in two days, and he had spilled the mead they gave him. He shook his head.
“For you,” he said. The best he could do was stop the chattering of his teeth.
“For Nis Daksi.”
“They thought I wasn’t worth fighting. They knew I was a coward,” Tawic said.
“You were worthy,” Orer said, certain and uninterested.
“I never even used my sword.”
“So?” Orer wiped blood from his leaking nostrils.
“I should have fought,” Tawic said. “I should have served the God.”
“Your spell got more of them killed than my blade,” Orer said. “What else could a cripple do?” He wrapped an enormous arm around his friend’s shoulder, and the two leaned against each other. “They slithered away because of you.”
“But I didn’t fight,” Tawic said.
Orer laughed. “It’s not the Lord-Captain’s job to fight. He gets the Corsairs into battle. That’s how we honor the God.”
“The Lord-Captain did fight,” Tawic said, without thinking.
“You said you didn’t,” Orer said, voice sly.
Tawic frowned. He glanced at the tall man in white, their shipmaster, who tended to the wounds of a dying sailor.
“We have a Lord-Captain already,” Tawic said. “He isn’t me.”
“But he didn’t use letera on the serpents.”
Tawic remembered the moment he chose that arrow. It had seemed so obvious, when there was nothing else to do. But it hadn’t been his idea. It had come from somewhere else.
“Neither did I. My gods did.”
“Your gods. No one else’s,” Orer said. “And we’d all be shades sailing for the Silent Kingdom if you hadn’t. It’s too early for that. We’re not done earning glory yet.”
Tawic sighed. “I want to fight. I want to be as good as you.”
“You never will be. You’re too little.” Orer grinned. “But my brain will never be big like yours.”
“And when I die? Will it be watching you fight my battles? What will Death think of that?”
“No,” Orer said. “When you die, I’ll die with you. We’ll fall back-to-back in a galley hold. Or surrounded by serpents. Or—fighting a dragon. We’ll be old men, covered in silver, with our own ship. You’ll be Lord-Admiral by then. And we’ll reach the Silent Kingdom together. And if it looks like that’s not what’s in the gods’ plans…”
“What?”
“Then… I’ll kill you myself. That’d be honorable enough.” He stuck out his hand. “That’s what I promise, Lord-Captain. I give you my oath before the God.”
Tawic smiled at last. It was the first smile that had pushed through Pain in days. He took his friend’s hand.
“That would be honorable enough,” Tawic agreed. “And if it looks like that’s not what’s in the gods’ plans for us, Orer… I swear my oath before Violence: I’ll kill you myself.”
Orer laughed and took a swig of mead.