75
~ AKELLA ~
A sword whizzed through the air where Megs’s head had been just a moment earlier, and Akella’s heart caught in her throat.
“Stop!” she wheezed, wrapping a hand around Dezmond’s wrist before he could swing again. Akella’s grip was weak, but Dezmond stopped anyway. “Friends. They’re friends, Dez. They’re the ones I came here with.”
The big man glanced between his rizalt and the two newcomers, who eyed Akella and her crew warily, their blades still drawn.
Dez lowered the long rapier he’d taken off the dead witches a few minutes earlier. “Aye, Rizalt,” he grumbled reluctantly.
The rest of the crew lowered their weapons, too – a makeshift assortment of broken bedposts, shards of glass wrapped with cloth on one end, and iron fire pokers. For a tense moment, no one moved – her sailors stared at Megs and Linna suspiciously.
“Is they possessed, Rizalt?” Fayzo whispered in Adessian.
“Are you possessed, Megs? Linna?” Akella asked loudly in common tongue.
“No,” Linna said, managing to put into a single syllable exactly what she’d thought of the question. She eyed the fourteen men surrounding Akella. Unlike them, Linna hadn’t lowered her blades. “Are you? Are they?”
“They were. Now they aren’t.” Akella coughed, then turned to the side and spat out another wad of blood. Beside her, Dez winced. She still had hold of his wrist, but it wasn’t to stop him anymore; it was to hold herself up.
Her crew – or the dozen some-odd left of them, anyway – stood in a tight semi-circle around her. They didn’t look much like she remembered them. She had to keep reminding herself that six years had passed, not two. Most of them used to have long hair, wearing it in braids or dreadlocks down to their shoulder blades in the fashion popular amongst Adessian sailors, but their captors had shaved their heads down to their scalps. Their hair wasn’t the only thing that was missing. Over the course of six years, they’d grown gaunt. Some of them, like Dez, still carried a hint of the robust, healthy bodies they’d once had. But even Dezmond, giant though he was, looked like a hunched and bony shadow of his former self. They no longer possessed the hardened bodies and calloused hands of men who spent each day working a ship, but the pale skin and hollow cheeks of caged slaves.
Behind them, a child’s wail broke the silence, and all nine men turned their heads towards the dormitories as one body. The shadows inside them were gone, but the instinct and habit of tending to their progeny was not, apparently.
“So I take it the witch told the truth,” Linna said as the wail faded and one of the men left to comfort the crying child. “Your men really were used as the Order’s stud horses.”
The muscles of Dezmond’s forearm twitched beneath Akella’s wrist, and she squeezed gently to calm him.
“Yes. But they remember none of it,” said Akella.
“Almostnone of it,” one of Akella’s men growled behind her.
Megs took a step in Akella’s direction, face full of concern. “You’re hurt.” Her eyes traveled up and down Akella’s body. “You’re badly hurt.”
Akella gave Megs a wry grin, but she kept her lips pressed together so Megs wouldn’t see that she’d lost one of her front teeth somewhere in the dormitory behind them.
“Dez here nearly managed to beat me to death before I managed to get the sorcerer’s blade into him,” she wheezed.
“Rizalt, I’m so sorr–” Dez started plaintively, but Akella waved his apology away.
“Obviously, he didn’t kill me,” Akella continued, “but the rest of these fine sailors had to be … well, let’s say convinced, one by one, not to murder their captain.” She shrugged. “So yes. I’m hurt. But it’s the debt I owed to Preyla for leaving them here in the first place.”
“Don’t say that, Rizalt,” said another one of her crew, speaking in Adessian instead of common. “You escaped, and we’re glad for that. They wouldn’t’ve had use for you like they had use for us, so who knows what they woulda done t’you. You came back for us as soon as you could. It’s more than most captains would do for their men.”
“What did he say?” Linna asked.
“Nothing that matters now,” Akella answered. Pain flashed through her ribcage and she gasped involuntarily, tightening her grip on Dezmond so that she wouldn’t collapse.
“Mother Moon, Akella, you’re half-dead,” Megs said, sheathing both her blades and hurrying over. She slipped an arm under Akella’s shoulder and nodded to Dez. “Let’s set her down against the wall. How long has she had this gash on her leg?”
The sailors exchanged guilty glances while Megs examined Akella’s various wounds. When Akella had imagined Megs all over her body, being nearly incapacitated hadn’t exactly been part of the fantasy. She sucked in another breath when Megs prodded at the cut across her thigh. It throbbed but it wasn’t particularly deep. If it had been, Akella would have bled to death by now.
“Gods. She’s lost so much blood.”
Well, maybe it was a miracle she hadn’t bled to death after all, even if the cut across her thigh wasn’t too deep.
Megs glanced up at the sailors again. “None of you stopped to bandage her?”
“It’s like … coming out of a deep sleep,” Fayzo said by way of explanation. “My cousin, Preyla rest him, he got kicked in the head by a bull once and was out fer a whole week. When he finally came to, he was still half-asleep for another two weeks. That’s how I feel – like I got kicked in the head by a bull and I’m still half-asleep.”
“Yes, well, you’re awake enough now to help,” Megs snapped irritably. “Get me something clean to bind this with – a bedsheet, maybe.”
Fayzo nodded and disappeared into one of the little cells that lined the hallways.
Megs took command so easily. She reminded Akella of herself that way. Akella reached out and gripped her arm with what strength she still had. The mere act of reaching out made her head spin, though, and she had to close her eyes for a moment to make the world stop tilting.
“I’m taking you home when we get out of here,” she said. “Perrintot. My brother will love you. My mother … well, she’ll warm up to you. She’s never gotten used to the idea that I won’t give her grandchildren. It’s warm in Perrintot all year, not like that bloody awful place where – ahh!”
“Be still,” Megs said.
Linna, who’d been watching without comment, a slight frown on her face, addressed Akella. “I’m glad you’re alive and found your crew, but it’s going to be dawn in an hour or two. We’re still in the headquarters of the Order of Targhan, surrounded by the most deadly fighters any of us have ever faced. We’ve been lucky, and I’m glad for it, but rescuing sailors isn’t what I came to Persopos for. We need to get to the palace and find the Commander and the Empress, before they discover us.”
“I say we kill the witch-bitches in their sleep while we got the chance,” Dez said in Adessian. “Then make our way to the palace. Getting to the palace will be safer once they’re all dead.”
A few of the other sailors sounded their agreement. Akella couldn’t blame them for wanting revenge; they’d been prisoners of the sorceresses and controlled by shadows for six years. But Linna, who Akella was beginning to realize had grown grumpier and bossier since last they met, scowled at Dez’s suggestion.
“What?” Linna asked. “What did he say?”
“He wants us to kill the assassins in their sleep while we have a chance. And he has a point,” Akella added quickly before the girl could argue. “I know you want to get to the palace quickly, but even if we make it inside undetected and unchallenged, we still have to come back this way on our way out.”
“We take ’em now,” Dezmond said to Linna, this time in the common tongue. “Hit ’em hard and fast before they know what’s coming.”
Again the other sailors nodded their agreement, adjusting their makeshift weapons in their hands as if they already saw the enemy in front of them.
“They’ll know what’s coming. If they don’t know already, they will soon,” a deep voice to Akella’s right said. She recognized it as belonging to Raffin, their ship’s cook, who doubled as a priest of Preyla. “They’re all connected, Rizalt. Here.” Raffin touched a finger to his temple. He spoke slowly, but in Raffin’s case, his slow, almost sleepy manner of speaking wasn’t related to the six years he’d spent as a shadow-possessed slave – he’d been methodical in his thoughts and speech as long as Akella had known him. “What one of ’em feels, all of ’em feel. What one of ’em thinks, all of ’em think. If they ain’t here yet … it’s more likely because they’re choosing their moment than that they don’t know what’s what.”
Instead of looking down at what Megs was doing to bandage her injuries, which hurt the way Preyla’s punishment should, Akella forced herself to look up at Raffin, keeping her eyes on his face despite the swimming feeling in her head.
Now that she thought on it, it had been remarkably easy to sneak inside the spiraling white city, relatively easy to persuade the sorceress who attacked Megs to give up information, and easy, in a certain way, to make it inside the Order of Targhan compound.
Was Raffin right – did the Order already know they were here? Had they walked right into a trap and sprung it?
But Akella shook her head stubbornly, which she shouldn’t have – her brain rattled against her skull like dice inside a cup. She closed her eyes tight, waiting for some clarity to return before speaking again.
“Then the witches’ mind-connection must not be working very well tonight,” she said to Raffin and the rest. “We’ve killed three already – one in here, one on the wall, one in the city below. Nobody’s come to stop us.”
“You’re thinking wrong,” Raffin said. “You speak of individuals – one witch here, one witch there. But that’s how you see them, not how they see themselves. They’re as shadow as human, and the shadow half of them cannot be killed. From your point of view, you killed three. From the shadow’s point of view, you did nothing but trim some fingernails. Now there’s just three shadows hopin’ to join a new mortal body, soon as the king is strong enough again.”
At the mention of “the king,” the sailors rippled behind Akella uneasily.
“How do you know this, Raff?” Akella asked.
The cook looked at his rizalt with mournful eyes. “It’s been a long time, captain,” he said in Adessian. “You don’t want to know all that I know.”
“We’ve killed four, actually, not three,” Megs corrected, pausing momentarily to look up from bandaging Akella’s leg. “Linna and I took out another one just before we came in here to find – oi, to find what a mess you’ve made of your captain. Maybe they’re connected somehow, maybe they’re not, but the one we killed had heard the ruckus happening inside here, and she was just about to –”
A loud, metallic clanging erupted just beyond the closed door, cutting Megs off. Within moments, it settled into a steady rhythm: Bong-bong, bong-bong, bong-bong…
Everyone grew still.
“Do that,” Megs finished.
Akella cursed loudly in Adessian.
Dez cracked open the door and peered out into the courtyard beyond. “Shite on a sea biscuit, Rizalt.” He counted under his breath in Adessian, trailing off when he got to eleven. “A dozen of ’em on their way. More coming now. They’re swarming like sharks to a dying whale.”
Raffin made the ward against evil with his pinky finger. “Preyla, come to your loyal sailors now, in our moment of need.”
A dozen assassin-witches, each of them unnaturally bolstered by shadows.
Akella suddenly remembered the prophecy the tinker woman had made when Akella dreamed of her in Port Lorsin’s dungeon: Going to Persopos would free her men, but she herself would never see home again.
So be it.
Over Megs’s protests, Akella pulled and pushed her way back to her feet, wiping her own blood and her sailors’ blood off the rune-marked dagger. Let them come. They would never touch her men again, not while she still drew breath.