Encrypted (9 page)

She scrambled out of the way. A snap echoed
through the brig, and an orange-clad man appeared. He collapsed on
the deck. Dead.

Color flashed behind Rias.

“
Look out!” Tikaya
cried.

He whirled as a woman with scimitar and
dagger leaped at him, blades leading. He ducked low and barreled
toward her legs. The woman jumped and spun in the air to land
facing him.

Knowing Rias was still shackled and had no
weapons, Tikaya lunged for the dropped sword. She jumped to her
feet, hilt clasped in both hands. Even with her inexperience, she
figured she could stab someone in the back, but Rias had closed
with the Nurian woman. They grappled briefly, then he released her
with a shove. She went down, her own dagger protruding from her
chest.

Wordlessly, Tikaya handed him her sword. He
would know how to use it whereas she would probably just trip over
it.

“
You all right?” Rias
looked her up and down, brow wrinkled. “Are these the same ones who
attacked you above?”

“
I’m fine
and...no.”

He knelt and pulled a pin from the dead
woman’s hair. “If they can turn invisible, there’s no telling how
many are on board.”

“
Comforting.” Tikaya
watched him probe the lock on his shackles. “How about we use this
chaos to escape or find a good hiding place until the ship gets to
port?”

His wrist accessories snapped open and
dropped to the ground. He pocketed the hairpin. “Let’s head above
decks and find out what’s going on.”

Tikaya raised her eyebrows. That was not
exactly her plan—her plan had a lot more focus on the word
escape.

CHAPTER 5

On the upper deck, Tikaya and Rias crouched
behind a funnel venting hot air from the boiler room. Streaks of
lightning branched from the cloudy night sky and lanced around the
warship, some sizzling harmlessly against the dark waves and others
tearing into mast and sail. Agile as monkeys, marines raced through
the rigging, beating out conflagrations. Others perched in the
fighting tops, rifles firing intermittently. Tikaya hoped they were
too busy to look down and notice her and Rias.

Two wooden Nurian ships, decks lit by
glowing orbs, trailed slightly behind on either side of the
ironclad. Every time they edged too close, an officer on the gun
deck barked orders to fire the cannons. The same weather phenomenon
setting off the lightning filled the enemy sails with unnatural
wind, and, despite the steam-powered propeller adding knots to the
warship’s speed, the Nurian vessels kept pace. In fact, they could
have overtaken the warship, and Tikaya had a feeling they were
waiting for something. The assassins to kill her? She grimaced.

“
We outman them and outgun
them,” Rias said. “But wizards always have tricks that make them
dangerous. Bocrest has already slagged this, letting them surround
us.”

At the moment, the invisible assassins were
more of a concern for Tikaya. “Let’s go to the training area.”

Rias tore his gaze from the Nurian ships.
“The blades are dulled; real weapons are kept in the armory.”

“
What I need is over
there.”

She expected him to question her further,
but he simply led her through the shadows. Two marines in the
forecastle manned the chaser gun, which was rotated toward one of
the Nurian ships and pounded rounds into the night. Open deck lay
between the men and the weapons racks, and the intermittent
lightning illuminated much.

Tikaya crouched low to approach the backside
of the racks, and she sensed rather than heard Rias behind her. The
booms of the great gun would have drowned out the approach of
howler monkeys.

Much of the exercise gear had been stowed
when the ship was cleared for action, and she worried she would not
find what she wanted. But, no, there they were. The heavy
sand-filled balls sat in the bottom row of a rack.

She slung one to the deck and found Rias’s
ear. “Sword, please.”

He handed her the cutlass, and she sliced
open the ball. She stuffed sand into the two hip pockets in her
dress until they bulged, then returned the blade.

A fiery projectile the size of her cabin
slammed into the side of the ironclad. Ineffective against the
metal hull, it bounced into the water, but the energy that had
hurled it coursed through the air. Tikaya’s skin hummed. She had
never been so close to so much power.

Rias tapped her shoulder and they moved away
from the forecastle. With an uncanny knack for avoiding the marines
running up and down the deck, he led her past masts, funnels, and
vents. They rounded the smokestacks, and he headed toward the after
bridge. The captain and senior officers relayed orders to the gun
deck and barked commands to the men controlling the wheel.

Tikaya grabbed Rias’s arm. “Where are you
going? We’re hiding, remember? And escaping if possible,
right?”

Lightning flashed, revealing him gazing
toward the Nurian vessels. “If this ship sinks, we’re in trouble
too.”

“
And what would we do to
stop that?”

A long moment passed before he said, “All
right. We can hide between the launches and still see what’s—”

The aft chaser gun blasted, stealing the
rest of his words, but she nodded, and Rias led her through the
shadows.

Lightning flashed again. Rias ducked between
the boats mounted a couple feet above the deck in the center of the
ship. The space between them offered a shadowy place to hunker
down. The smokestack rose behind them, belching coal plumes and
further hemming them in. A determined search would reveal them, but
the darkness and chaos offered camouflage—from the marines, anyway.
The Nurians had other means of searching for her, but at least
lanterns were mounted across the deck from them and would
silhouette someone approaching. Assuming that someone wasn’t
invisible. She touched her bulging dress pocket.

Rias put his back against one of the
launches and stood where he could see the movement of the other
ships.

“
I can hide here alone if
you want to find the captain.” She hated the idea but could tell
Rias felt he could do something.

“
No, he wouldn’t
appreciate my input, and he’d chuck me back in the brig. Besides,
the Nurians are looking for you.”

“
Yes, and I should mention
they have ways to find me. They went straight to the wardroom
earlier, and I’m sure it wasn’t a coincidence they showed up in the
brig when I was there.” Tikaya looked up at Rias, though darkness
hid his face. “It’d probably be a bad idea to be standing next to
me if a psi wave is launched in my direction.”

“
I’ll risk it.” Rias
rested a hand on her shoulder. “Keep your back to me in case
they’re invisible again.”

She sandwiched between him and the other
launch, with the smokestack guarding their right side and his sword
ready on the left.

“
The sand,” Rias said, “is
for throwing at the invisible attackers? Will it disrupt the
spell?”

“
Possibly, if I catch them
by surprise, and their concentration lapses, but if nothing else
it’ll outline them for a few seconds until they
compensate.”

His rumbled, “Ah,” sounded pleased.

On the rear horizon, a third Nurian ship
floated into view.

“
Rust,” Rias spit. “He
needs to take down one of those ships before the reinforcements
arrive. Come on, Bocrest.
Think
. Don’t be so stodgy and
predictable.”

A fiery projectile the size of a cannon ball
arced toward them. Tikaya tensed. It clipped the yard closest to
their smokestack, and shards of wood rained upon them.

She gulped.

“
You all right?” Rias
dusted splinters off the top of her head.

“
Yes, but it’s
inconsiderate of these Nurians to muss my hair. I’d at least like
to look good when your people toss me on a funeral pyre.” Her
attempt at nonchalance might have worked if her voice had not
cracked on the last word. When she had been fleeing the Nurians,
she had been too busy to worry about her mortality. Standing here
gave her too much time to think, to wonder if she might very well
dodge the assassins only to fall to a random cannonball.

“
Don’t worry,” Rias said.
“No funeral pyres at sea. We just wrap your body in your hammock
and toss you overboard. Only the fish will judge your
hair.”

“
I’m vastly reassured,
thank you.”

Rias chuckled.

Oddly, his blasé
attitude
did
reassure her. If he was not worried, maybe she did not need
to be. She leaned back against him. If not for the guns roaring and
the lightning streaking the night, she might have noticed the heat
of his chest against her shoulders, the lean hard muscles beneath
his clothing, and the gentle breaths stirring her hair. Actually,
she noticed them anyway.

“
Rias?”

“
Yes?”

His murmur was soft, close to her ear, and a
thrum warmed her body. Focus, she told herself.

“
Do you want to escape or
not?” she asked. “If you don’t... Well, that’s your prerogative,
but it’d help me to know. I’ve mentioned it a couple times tonight,
and, even though I chanced upon you breaking out of your cell, you
seem to be more interested in what’s going on with the battle than
getting out of here. I can’t help but think that it’s handy how
we’re standing next to a couple boats, and the marines are all
preoccupied.”

“
It’d be suicidal to
launch a boat into the middle of the Nurians,” he said. “Besides,
based on the knots-per-hour average of this ship, the days it’s
been since you were brought on board at the Kyatt Islands, and our
northeasterly direction, I estimate us more than a thousand miles
from the mainland. There aren’t many archipelagos in this part of
the ocean. It’s likely we’d die of thirst before making land.
Also...”

“
What?”

His long exhale tickled the back of her ear.
“The fact that the Nurians are trying to kill you makes me believe
we really need you.”

“
We?”

“
The empire. Bocrest’s
family has been personally loyal to the throne for a long time.
That Emperor Raumesys picked him over brighter men suggests this is
a very sensitive mission. My people may have unearthed something
that’s put them in danger. If the Nurians have found out, well,
they’d be the first to help us on our way to the black
eternity.”

Tikaya pressed her hand against the cool
wooden siding of the launch, dread curling through her gut for a
new reason. If the Turgonian emperor had walked onto her plantation
and asked for her help, she would have told him to shove sugar cane
into his anal orifice. But Rias asking her to stay and help...

She shook her head. She
hardly knew him. And he was one of
them
. Surely, she owed him
nothing.

“
How can the empire’s fate
even matter to you?” she asked. “After they condemned you and left
you to die?”

“
Strange, isn’t it? By the
emperor’s decree, I’m dead to my family, my friends, everyone I
ever knew, but it was the emperor who cast me out, not them. I
still care that they are well, and I’m not sure the orchards where
I grew up will ever stop being the place my mind conjures when
someone says home.”

Tikaya cleared her throat and tried to sound
offhand when she asked, “Family?”

“
Parents,
brothers.”

“
No children?” No
wife?

“
My wife didn’t want
them.”

So, there was a wife. The intensity of her
disappointment surprised her.

“
Ex-wife,” Rias said, as
if reading her thoughts. “I know you owe nothing to me, Tikaya—in
fact, I owe you a couple favors. But if you would stay and decipher
the language and help—I can’t believe I’m saying this—help Bocrest
solve whatever problem my people have gotten themselves into,
I’d...”

The request she had dreaded. She swallowed
and waited.

“
I have nothing I can
offer you.” He sighed. “Not even my protection since I’m even more
a prisoner than you. All I can promise is that I’ll do everything
possible to ensure you escape and can return to your island
afterwards. I imagine you have family you miss, people who are
worried about you.”

“
Yes.” If she died out
here, would anyone even tell her parents what happened?

“
Children?” he asked in
the same offhand tone she had used.

“
No.” Then, feeling the
need to lay everything out, she added, “My fiancé was killed on a
science vessel that went down near the end of the war.”

“
Oh.” A long beat passed,
probably because he did not want to know the answer to the next
question, but he asked anyway: “How did it—who sank it?”

“
Your people.”

She felt his shoulders slump behind her.

“
I’m sorry,” he
said.

A twinge of guilt wound through her; it was
not as if he had done it. If he had been on that penal island for
two years, he would have missed the last year of the war, the year
when things unraveled for the Turgonians and their people stopped
paying attention to Kantioch Treaty dictates. Yet she could not
bring herself to say it was all right. It wasn’t. It never would
be.

The attack had slowed, and Tikaya felt a
stirring of hope, but then another set of lights appeared on the
inky horizon. Another ship, bringing the total to four. The
captains had probably just paused to confer—deciding on a final
strategy—through communications practitioners. The attack would
resume with all four ships joining in, and even the sturdy ironclad
would sink under that assault.