Chapter 6: The Raid

“Find the wall,” Renzo hissed, drawing a look from Catyan that silenced him immediately. A low fog had rolled in suddenly, obscuring the raiders and their dingy from guards and sailors, but also hiding Lighthall’s galleon from them. They had become disoriented in the choppy water and now drifted somewhere near the Sea Wall, uncertain of their quarry and where dangers might lie. Talaho was at the rudder and Caia punched him hard in the shoulder, baring her teeth and pointing sharply in the direction that she thought they should go. She agreed with Renzo. They should find the wall, establish their position, then try again to find the ship.

Talaho glared at her and mouthed harsh words that she could not understand. Samyan pointed emphatically in the opposite direction and tried to communicate something with his hands. Silence was critical, the smuggler Reven told them as much as he was pushing them out into the water. It was true that sound carried across the water. There was a medley of disembodied voices from the ships anchored outside the Sea Wall. A cough here, a laugh or a mutter there, their distances impossible to gauge.

With a gesture from Catyan, everybody went still. Catyan closed his eyes. Wherever they were, they were near enough to the wall that the waves rebounding off of it buffeted them in unpredictable ways. Caia held tight to her oar as the dinghy crested a wave and slammed down into the surf. Salt stung her eyes. Beside her, Talaho mouthed an obscenity. Catyan did not react. Maybe the smuggler Reven could have gauged the distance to the wall by the shape of the waves made by incoming and rebounding water, but nobody in their crew had that ability. Five of the six of them were Islanders, so they had grown up around all manners of small ocean craft, but they were fighters, not sailors.

Catyan listened to the muffled echoing voices above them and frowned. He looked in the direction of the city, where the fog glowed bright from a hundred thousand lamp, then pointed decisively toward the black of the open sea. Immediately, four oars dipped back into the surf, and Talaho steered them toward the darkness.

Only a moment later, the hulking prow of a galleon emerged from the fog. It filled their vision, stretching as far as they could see upward and to either side. Caia knew they would collide with as soon as she saw it, but it all seemed to happen very slowly. They crested one wave and then another, and then the front of their ship crashed into the wall of wood. There was a horrible shrieking sound. Renzo went over the side and a deluge of water slammed into the bottom of the dingy. Renzo surfaced, sputtering, and was knocked further away by one wave and then another. Catyan stood, keeping his balance by sheer force of will as the dingy was pushed into the hull by each successive wave. He threw a climbing hook up into the mist and when it bit, he threw the rope to Caia.

She caught the rope and had hauled herself up far above the dinghy without a pause for thought. She was light and her arms were muscular and this was what she trained for. Then she found herself face to face with a mean-looking Islander. She started and then realized she was looking at her own reflection in the glass of a dark porthole. Her hair was cut short and oiled back and she had the scars of her father’s band on her cheeks and forehead, even though she had never met any of them. Her eyes were bright but hard, with a look that might charitably be called determination, but which bordered on cruelty. Her face was delicate, her arms sinewy. She was accustomed to being underestimated. That was why, when Catyan threw the rope to her, she was twenty feet into the unknown before she even understood her own reaction.

All of this went through Caia’s head in the space of a breath, but that was long enough for her to question what might await her in the shifting whiteness above. She put that out of her head, and with two more heaves she had herself above the fog with one hand on the ship’s rail. All together, she had taken less than ten heartbeats to scale the ship, and so the first sailor she encountered was still staring stupidly at the grappling hook when she vaulted onto the deck and opened two of his arteries. She fought with a knife in each hand and no protection over her loose pants and tunic, aside from hardened leather gauntlets with strips of inlayed metal to turn an opponent’s blade.

She immediately dropped to one knee and covered the sailor’s mouth. He resisted weakly, but he was bleeding out rapidly. She did not see anybody else on the deck, but she heard hurried bootfalls echoing from somewhere. Above the fog, a sliver of moon and patches of stars between drifting tendrils of cloud provided enough light. The bright beams of Sea Wall beacons drifted undirected and the lamplit thoroughfares of Merendir glimmered in the distance. The disembodied decks of two other galleons and the masts of a dozen smaller vessels drifted near and far in the fog outside the Sea Wall.

She thought she heard a harsh exchange from the dinghy, but it could have come from anywhere. The rope was still slack behind her and no other hook had been thrown. The sailor stopped struggling. She had a brief horrifying thought, that she had been cruel not to look at him as he died, leaving him entirely alone in that most significant moment. As well-trained as she was, she had never actually killed before. There was typically no call for killing when guarding a rich man’s estate.

She did not look down at the dead sailor. She did not want to see his face. The face she had seen as she leapt on to the ship had already faded from her memory, leaving only a vague sandy-haired round-faced impression. The footsteps were louder. There was nowhere nearby to hide and even if threw the body overboard and risked hitting her companions, there was nothing to do about the pool of blood. A door slammed open and two sailors stood emerged to squint into the night. Caia backed up close to the rail and crouched with a knife in each hand. Still no other grappling hook came from the dinghy.

It only took a moment for their eyes to adjust and then one of them, a huge Siltian with geometric tattoos and long braids, bellowed “Pirates!” A moment later, the Sea Wall beacons focused their beams and began to play across the top of the fog, searching for the source of the cry. More sailors followed them out of the door, all of them with the angular shaggy look of the northwest coast. Finding only a single opponent, and a slightly-built woman at that, they approached confidently, with weapons drawn. They did her the courtesy of fanning out to surround her, though they still smirked derisively. Caia did not need to beat them, she only needed to hold them off long enough for the others to climb to her. She still heard nothing from the dinghy.

She feinted toward the huge Siltian, a bit clumsily on purpose, and he paused but did not step back or look particularly concerned. His face seemed a bit friendly and stupid, even as it was drawn up in murderous concentration. She saw movement in the corner of her eye and dodged quickly to the side, skidding in the slick of blood as a dagger spun past her head and out into the ocean. Caia had never learned to throw a blade effectively, and so she did not carry extra knives. There were four men now closing in on her from different directions and two men that she had lost track of entirely. A second hook landed on the railing as the Siltian drew within two steps of her. He held a curved blade in two hands, larger than any she had seen before. She kept her eyes locked on his until he began his swing, and then dodged sideways at a different sailor. She caught him by surprise and easily deflected his wild swing with a gauntlet. One knife went up under his ribcage, the other across his throat, and she was past him.

When she turned back to the others, the concentrated beams of the Sea Wall beacons had found them and she was disoriented by the blinding light. There was a dark mass in front of her. She protected her head and neck and rolled to the side, hitting a coil of rough rope and staggering as she regained her feet. Her attacker had overcommitted to his swing and was off balance, less than an arms length away. She saw the massive Siltian was waiting with a bare blade at the railing for whoever might appear out of the fog below.

She grabbed whatever heavy thing was nestled in the ropes near her. She was not a sailor and could not say what it was. She lobbed it with both arms underhand in a towering arc toward the Siltain, yelled to get his attention, then followed with her body. As he caught the heavy cylinder and took half a step back, a glass bottle arched over the railing and shattered her feet. A streak of flame ran across the deck. She collided with the Siltian full force and shared an uncomfortably long look with him as he toppled backwards over the rail with a shout that ended with a cracking sound.

Even before the pain, her first thought when she was stabbed was anger that they had gotten her. It was a mistimed jab at her back that scraped across her ribs and caught her arm just above the elbow. She spun around, cursing, as a lanky northman retreated a step. Catyan was at her side. Her eyes misted with pain. Then Renzo was on her other side, soaking wet and strung with seaweed. There was more shattering glass and more fire. She held her ready position with her knives in front of her, but it was a bluff. She could not see and it was all she could manage to hold the knife aloft with her injured arm. Catyan stepped in front of her. Talaho jumped over the rail and fell immediately. Caia did not see what had hit him.

Catyan was gone and Renzo was fighting sword to sword with the last remaining sailor above deck. Caia fell to her knees and scrambled to Talaho. He had a crossbow shaft in his chest, but the blood came slowly and his eyes were clear. She thought maybe he would recover, but doubted that he could climb back down the rope to the dinghy. Her injured side was stiffening rapidly and that she wondered if she might not make it down the rope either. Flames had found the coils of rope and licked up the main mast. There was so much shouting. The heat was intense. She was trying to help Talaho up and then she was staring at the stars and Talaho was trying to help her up. Her wounds must be worse than she thought. A horn sounded in the distance. There were more shouts nearby. Caia closed her eyes. She wanted to get up and fight, but she needed to close her eyes.

Caia woke again in a rocking boat and might have thrown up if her body had not had other priorities, namely intense pain and shivering. The boat scraped against sand. The face of the smuggler Reven loomed large above hers. His eyes were wide and his lips trembled. Catyan pulled her from the boat and slung her arm over his shoulder and they staggered across sand.

“Walk below the surf line,” the smuggler whispered at them, and they staggered sideways into the low waves. The Sea Wall beacons lit up the sky. There were silhouettes around her. She thought she counted six of them. Were there six? Seven with Reven? She could not count. She could not even keep her head up.

----

The next time Caia woke, she was on a mattress with starched sheets. There was intense pressure on her chest, and a throbbing all-consuming pain. She forced herself up to where she could look around the room and saw Talaho asleep on a nearby cot. She could tell by the color in his face that he was recovering. Catyan was asleep in a chair nearby with a bandage on his neck, his face sternly impassive even in unconsciousness. Berekker was there too, staring at the floor and drumming his fingers against his thigh. When she stirred, he came to her side, carrying his chair with him.

“You’re awake,” he said, unnecessarily. He motioned over his shoulder and a man brought her water. She took the bowl and drank gratefully until she had to raise her arms and then she gasped and nearly spilled.

“Caytan says they would have failed if not for your bravery,” Berekker said. He was haggard from a lack of sleep. Caia had nothing to say. Berekker took the water and tilted it back carefully while she drank. They sat in silence for long minutes, while Caia skirted the edge of consciousness.

“I knew people with your scars,” Berekker said, tracing the lines on her face with his eyes. Caia wanted to speak but her breath would not come to her. “Their story was already written,” he said, “Everybody around them was working on how to justify their capitulation. They stayed true. They fought to the end. You’re too young to have been there. Are those the scars of your parents?”

Caia nodded. Berekker stared somewhere above her head for a long time. His expression hardened briefly into something ugly and then he shook it off. He motioned for his servant. “More water, and an analgesic,” he said, before looking her in the face again. “The Empire had already won. The Empire always wins. I think about your parents’ band sometimes when I need resolve.”

Berekker stood abruptly and left the room. Caia knew she wold not hesitate to kill for him again.

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