EPIC: Fourteen Books of Fantasy (229 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 V

O
N
THE
UPPER
DECK
, T
IKAYA
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.

“How come none of your people know about this shindig going on in the middle of the ocean?” Tikaya asked.

“I don’t know.”

A great swirling gust of wind tugged at her dress and whipped loose strands of hair into her mouth. She looked up at the stack. The smoke was not affected, meaning the disturbance was localized.

“Nurian magic!” Rias wrapped his arm around her.

A flash of yellow burned Tikaya’s eyes, and vertigo washed over her. A final burst of wind railed at her, her stomach dropped, then silence engulfed her.

She blinked and tried to wipe away the yellow dots swimming before her eyes. Bile churned in her throat, and she forced a swallow. The world came back into focus.

She was belowdecks, not in the ironclad but in a wooden vessel. She stood in a storage space full of Nurians pointing short bows at her, arrows nocked and drawn back. Crates, barrels, and a number of confusing machines, or perhaps practitioners’ contraptions, fenced the large hold. Rias still had his arm around her, and he held the sword out before them, but it did not matter with so many weapons pointed their way. A smug woman in black robes smiled in triumph.