Volcanic Rituals

 

Jaya plunged down into the black waters, surrounded by the floating ruin of shattered wood and torn bodies.  She tried to swim, but her armor dragged at her, her boots filling with water and pulling her deeper no matter how she kicked for the light.  Looking up, she saw the surface crossed by the shadows of the ship’s hulls, the darting shapes of sharks as they tore at the wounded struggling in the deep.

She fought the straps on her shoulder-guards, shrugged them off, and then she cut the leather fastenings of her breastplate with her long dagger.  Her sword was gone, lost in the depths, and she had no time to mourn the loss.  She kicked for the surface, sliding her boots off, shedding all the belts and armor that had guarded her, but would kill her now if she did not set herself free of it.

Naked, she reached the surface and gasped for breath.  The waves were steep, and the wind was rising.  The Mordani warship was a flaming wreck sliding away from her, leaving a scatter of wreckage in its wake.  Smoke boiled up, filling the sky and cutting out the sun.  Everything was lost in a terrible haze that smelled of burning flesh, and though she looked for the Unjarah, she could see nothing.

A wave slapped her down and she had to fight back to the surface.  She clung to her dagger and gasped, caught a drifting piece of splintered wood, hung on to it as it rode up the face of a wave and the cresting top splashed her in the face.  She hung on, realizing she had to get away from here, from the spreading stain of blood and death that would bring the sharks and other sea-scavengers.  She had to get away from where her enemies would be looking for her.  She had escaped alive, but if they caught her, death would not be swift.

A tall fin knifed through the water near her, and she saw the pale shape of the beast as it slid past, held in the body of the rising wave as though it were on the other side of a glassine wall.  She saw the black, black eye, and she knew it regarded her.  She felt the cold glance, and she felt the indifference of the shark, like a cold wind.  She had lost the will of the gods, somewhere in her crusade, and she must have it back.

The Reaping Sea

 

Jaya drove her rowers hard through the morning.  The sun rose blazing behind them and she steered through waves that deepened and rolled more heavily as wind sprang up from the north.  At the prow she had a lookout watching the horizon, looking for her ships, and she could look to the north herself and see the sails of the oncoming enemies growing nearer, the wind driving them like whips.  She counted six sails, then ten, then sixteen, and she saw signals flashed from one to the other, a flickering of light.

The longboats rowed hard around the headland and she saw her own ships at anchor offshore, pitching as the sea grew rougher.  She had not brought her entire fleet here, only a flotilla large enough to deter attack.  She had six smaller ships, including her own Unjarah, and at the center one of the great warships she had captured and renamed the Reaper.

Seeing them at anchor like this sank her heart heavy in her chest, down into her belly.  They could never get underway fast enough to escape the enemy ships, and they were not enough to fight them.  The Mordani had brought a greater power to bear than she had foreseen, and now she knew this was the price of her strike against them.  They must have sent away for aid when she took Jinan, and now she was gathering the harvest of her success.

The rowers bent now, pulling fanatically until their skins were slick with sweat and their arms knotted and their backs groaned.  Jaya gave orders to her man at the prow and he shouted her commands ahead as far as his voice could bear them.  By the time they were close the ships were all dragging up their anchors and rushing to put on sail.  The heavy anchors of the Reaper would never come up in time, so men with chisels and hammers cut the chains away and set her loose.

Dhatun looked at her when they came near the immense warship.  The Reaper was his command, and it was his place to captain her.  Their gazes met for a long moment, and then he turned his boat for his ship as it began to move.  Jaya swallowed a heaviness in her throat.  She knew she would likely not see him alive again, if indeed any of them escaped this trap.

The City of Brass

 

Sinasekan lay quiet under the deepening summer, the days growing longer, the evening rains falling soft on the winding streets and the whitewashed houses.  By afternoon the humidity rose and steamed, and people escaped to their rooftops to lounge under silk canopies through the hottest part of the day.  They watched the air shimmer as the sun beat down, watched the towers of the palace of the viceroy seem to waver like the towers of a mirage, and they watched ships come and go from the great harbor.

So many ships, so many colors of hull and sail.  Traders from far Savindria and Sinagar, slavers from Achen, warships from Morda, and a dozen more purposes and nations all moving like swift fish through the blue waters.  The view reached far out over the sea, beyond the harbor where white towers stood watch, seeking the faded horizons and the stars that gleamed in the clear air even now, when the sun was high.  Sinasekan was a paradise on earth for its masters, who had seen the golden stone of the ancient palace gleaming in the sunset once and named it the City of Brass – the fabled home of a race older than man, and far more terrible.

The ship appeared in the swelling heat of midafternoon, and all marked it, for it was plainly one of the black ships that had set forth ten days ago, bound for the old kingdom with unimaginable riches swelling their holds.  The hull was black, and the sails had once been white but were now stained by smoke to a tattered gray.  The ship wallowed, her sails untrimmed, the driver alone forcing her onward at a walking pace, barely keeping steerage in the fallow sea.

Other ships turned to evade it, for it gave nothing to any other craft, only came on straight and slow and terrible.  Those who hove near from curiosity saw the bowsprit was draped with severed heads, flesh burned or torn away, eyes devoured by seabirds.  They veered away, terrorized, for when they came close they could smell the charnel reek of the ship, the miasma of death that followed it.  They saw the black hull was splashed with blood that crawled with a thousand flies, and in her wake were dragged bloodstained ropes with iron hooks at the ends of them, and from those hooks dragged pieces of shark-gnawed flesh that had once been men.