Guild Wars: Sea of Sorrows (49 page)

“Two.” Isaye pointed out at the two massive, red-sailed Orrian xebec. “The
Nomad
has no elementalists. Those ships wield immense magics. If they catch us, we’ll have no defense at all.”

Cobiah could see only one path through. “The
Nomad
has to close and fight at close range with the
Indomitable
,” he replied. “Her guns are larger, but she doesn’t have the support of Orrian enchantments. If we’re brushing her hull, the xebecs won’t be able to use their magic against us without damaging their flagship.”

“Just like baiting a snow cat.” Grymm smiled broadly, cracking his knuckles as the
Nomad II
turned in her traces and spread her sails against the wind. “Once you’re up against its belly, you can gut it without fear of the claws.”

Bronn frowned. “If we have to stay that close, how will we get them to follow us to the city’s fortifications?”

“The hooks!” Isaye snapped her fingers. “On one of our last runs, we towed a stranded asuran paddle ship. We ran lines to it: ropes, tied off with iron grappling hooks stuck through into their hull. Tenzin.” She spun to him, her hair swinging, gray and mahogany, against her muscled back. “If we set those grapnels in the harpoon guns, can you hit the
Indomitable
’s low rigging with them? Tangle them around the masts or sink the hooks into their hatches?”

“I can use a harpoon just fine. It’s not so different from a rifle, once you have the weight and heft of it. I once used one to bull’s-eye a bosun’s pin from three ship-lengths away. Won fifty gold.” Tenzin tossed back his hair cockily and set the rifle on his shoulder. “I’ll have to set position somewhere high, maybe up on the yardarm. Keep the hook-loaded guns coming, and I’ll see that the grappling irons are placed solidly.”

“With the lines in place, we can tow the
Indomitable
.” Isaye turned back to Cobiah, her gold-green eyes alight. “We’ll never leave her side . . . and we’ll draw her straight into the city’s guns. When we’re close to Claw Island, we cut the lines, the
Nomad
pulls away into the harbor, and the fortress can open fire.”

“Won’t the undead sailors cut the lines?” Tenzin asked. “It’s what I’d do.”

Cobiah shook his head, considering Isaye’s idea. “They’re bloodthirsty. They
want
us close. One thing I’ve learned fighting Dead Ships for so many years is that most Orrians don’t do a lot of long-term thinking. If they see a target, they attack, and they don’t think about much else.”

Tenzin looked skeptical. “But what about leverage? Our ship’s smaller. All we’ll do is pull ourselves closer to the
Indomitable
.”

“It won’t matter who’s towing who so long as we can keep both boats within the current. The
Nomad
’s weight will pull them with us toward the island,” Isaye replied.

“There’s another problem,” Cobiah said. “We need to keep the undead aboard that flagship from slaughtering us all while the
Nomad
gives her a tow.”

“Leave that to my brother and me.” Grymm folded his arms, the muscles standing out as if they were carved from granite. While the others were talking, Bronn had demanded the sailors bring another massive sword from the
Nomad II’
s armory to replace the one the Seraph had stripped from him. He slid one hand up the glistening blade, testing the sharpness of the steel.

Cobiah turned to the norn. “You think you can keep the undead from swarming our deck?”

“Just tell the sailors to hold their own, Commodore.” Grymm Svaard smiled, tugging on his braided beard.

His brother’s teeth flashed beneath a thick mustache. “We’ll do the rest.”

A
   s the sun began to break through the gray fog of morning, Sorrow’s Bay was a tossing expanse of whitecapped waves, racing from the distant shore toward the depths of the sea. The tide was outbound, carrying with it traces of driftwood and washes of lingering foam. The chop of the sea was extreme, curdled by a thrashing wind and the wakes of multiple ships tacking left and right either to engage or to escape.

The
Nomad II
valiantly split the waves as she sailed toward her opponent. Her sails were fully extended, shifted against the wind to set her forward at full speed. All around her, white puffs of smoke rose from Krytan ships, their cannonballs hurtling toward the enemy. Orrian ships returned fire, but instead of leaden balls, they fired skulls set alight by dark magic. Isaye gave orders to the sailors working the rudder, but the captain’s eyes continually followed the
Balthazar’s Trident
within the Krytan armada, though the galleon was still far behind the line of fire.

Ships were taking damage on all sides. Although the Krytans were excellent hand to hand, the Orrian ships weren’t closing. Only a few of the human ships had fighting aboard their decks, and those were the ones being
swarmed by the undead crawling up their hulls from beneath the dark waves. Off the port bow, a Krytan frigate was shoved forward on the waves, masts collapsing, sails set alight by wicked purplish fire. She careened slowly into an Orrian clipper, smashing her prow into the rotted ship’s side. The fire quickly spread from the frigate’s masts onto the Orrian ship. Clearly, the Dead Ships were not immune to their own flame.

Isaye was giving orders to adjust the ship’s rigging, shift the rudder, and watch for undead rising from below. Her sailors leapt to the task, their faces white but their hands steady on the till. “Watch to starboard. There’s a shadow beneath the waves!”

“Acknowledged, Cap’n!” Bosun Rahli yelled, calling to the ship’s sailors. They rushed to the side of the ship and met the assault with flashing swords.

The things that crawled and slithered onto the
Nomad II
’s deck weren’t human. It wasn’t clear from their forms whether they had ever been human. Tentacles swayed from sockets, and reverse-jointed knees bent as their huge, hooked claws sank into the ship’s pine hull. One of the monstrosities had the rotting head of a shark, while another was made of seaweed-bound bone and sharp shards of coral.

Grymm strode into the beasts, gripping the shark-headed one by its wretched arm and driving his fist into the monster’s nose. His brother was close behind him, greatsword slashing out in a wide arc. It caught one of the tentacles as it passed by, severing the festering limb. Sliced away, the tentacle twisted and snarled on the oak boards of the ship’s deck.

Gunfire rang out from the yardarm, and the creature of bone and coral jerked and spun from a blow to the shoulder. A second shot cracked almost immediately
thereafter, and fragments of skull exploded from the monster’s head. It howled in rage, but Bronn’s sword caught it, lifting it as the blade cut through and tossing both halves of the horror back into the sea.

“There she is.” Isaye pointed just ahead of the
Nomad II
’s bow. “The
Indomitable
.”

The mighty ship of the line crested the waves before them. Her hull had blackened over the years, rot spreading in dark patches on the ruined wood. Fleshy mold clung to the keel and hull boards, and long threads of kelp fluttered like banners from the horizontal spars of her three masts. Her black sails shivered in the wind, pulling the galleon forward with the might of a foul-smelling gale. Rotted sailors hung from the
Indomitable
’s rigging, some firing pistols and others addressing the set of her yardarms. They sang, and howled, and caterwauled, the cries drifting across the rolling waves in an eerie cacophony. At the ship’s wallowing prow rode the brass lady, the demon with six arms spread wide in malicious glee, green tarnish blighting her features like a disease.

The dark galleon’s guns roared a challenge, blasting through a smaller ship in the Krytan armada as the
Indomitable
rolled toward the
Nomad II
. Her hull struck the side of the schooner with enough force to crack its keel, twisting the boards until the Krytan ship’s frame gave way. The brigantine broke apart, scattering boards to the tide and pouring her crew into the grasp of gruesome undead horrors beneath the waves.

They were running perpendicular to the
Indomitable
, and the larger ship was slower than the
Nomad II
. Still, the sea between them was wide and filled with writhing monstrosities. “Can we catch them?” Cobiah shouted to Isaye. She didn’t respond, glancing back at him with worry in
her hazel eyes as the valiant clipper bore forward into battle.

“May Grenth shatter their bones!” Cobiah cursed, running his hands through his graying hair. “I wish we had the
Pride
’s engines,” he said, striding to Isaye’s side. “Or even that old clunker we had on the
Havoc
. I wish we had Verahd to give us the gale! We need more
speed
.” He glanced to the port side, where one of the Orrian xebecs was disemboweling a Krytan galleon.

“We’ll catch them,” Isaye said through gritted teeth. “Come on, come on . . .”

“We have to!”

“We
will
.” Throwing a glance down at her pilot’s compass, Isaye grinned fiercely. “There! We just crossed into the harbor current. Now it’s
our
turn.”

“Our turn to what?” Cobiah asked, but as he got the words out, he felt the
Nomad II
shudder. The ship began to pick up speed, slowly at first and then faster, her prow rising as it bit deeply into the harbor’s waves. “What’s happening?”

“We’ve caught the warm inbound current, the one that heads westward. It’ll push against the
Indomitable
, slowing her down. That’ll make it damn hard to steer the
Nomad
, but she’ll be faster in her passage, that’s for certain.” Though the increase in speed built slowly, it was notable. Bit by bit, the distance lessened between the two. “Make ready!” Isaye called to the sailors on the deck. The norn had cleared it of creatures, but several men and women aboard the ship were injured. Even Bronn was hurt, twisting a scrap of sail around his arm to bind a long slash. “Tenzin?” Isaye shielded her eyes and looked up.

From the upper yardarm, the dark-haired Krytan waved. The sailors had rigged a bucket of harpoon rifles near him, each loaded with a thick grappling hook and a
long reel of hemp line. Grymm and Rahli prepared the sailors: one group under the norn, ready to fight off the undead, and a second mustering at Bosun Rahli’s command to heave the lines once hooks pierced the enemy’s deck. “Once we get the ropes clamped down,” Isaye commanded, “we turn the
Nomad
west, toward Claw Island’s fortress. We’ll still be in the current, and that should help with our leverage. We need to get the
Indomitable
within range of the island’s guns.”

“Acknowledged, Cap’n.” Rahli relayed the orders to the crew.

Before she’d finished speaking, the
Indomitable
opened fire. The boom of cannons rang in their ears and the smell of scorched gunpowder filled their noses. Shrill whistles accompanied the heft of cannonballs as they hurtled through the air, hurling up white-foamed spray where they struck the water, ripping wide rifts in the
Nomad II
’s sails and landing with shuddering explosions against her hull.

“Return fire!” Isaye shouted, and her crew was quick to obey. The
Nomad II
’s guns were fewer than those of the
Indomitable
but had greater range, and Cobiah saw breaches tear open along the black ship’s hull where Isaye’s gunners struck their mark.

The wounds to the
Indomitable
’s hull wouldn’t slow her, nor would the Dead Ship take on water as the
Nomad II
would. But as they closed on the black-sailed ship of the line, Cobiah found himself counting. They had nineteen seconds until the Dead Ship’s cannons could fire again.

The
Nomad
reached her in sixteen.

With a steady heave, the smaller clipper ship pulled alongside her enemy’s deck and blasted her first grappling lines through the
Indomitable
’s hull. The proximity prevented either ship’s cannons from doing damage;
neither could fire their big guns on such a close target without doing equal damage to their own hull.

Her crew was another matter. Undead sailors swarmed the gunwale, leaping across the gap between the vessels before planking could be laid between them. The rotting, filthy corpses of once-living men had no fear of falling, nor of water, nor of the beasts that lashed about beneath the fetid waves. They wielded rusted swords or swung bare fingers with sharpened bones protruding through the tips of greenish flesh.

Pistols fired aboard the
Nomad II
as the living sailors defended themselves. Bronn followed the first rush of flying lead with a long swipe of steel. His massive great-sword sliced through flesh, bone, and all, chopping through undead as they leapt onto the ship. He managed to skewer one on the tip of his sword, but it did not stop him—after a few more chops, the zombie body fell in pieces from the blade.

Not to be outdone, Grymm plowed into the fray with a yell, sounding for all the world like an avalanche tumbling downhill. He lifted one zombie bodily, snapping it in half with his bare hands. The big bearded norn shoved another of the walking dead from the ship, but its clutching hand gripped his shirtsleeve. Defiant, Grymm placed his hand on the zombie’s shoulder and heaved, ripping dead cartilage from shattered bone. He grabbed the dead sailor’s arm and began to beat another zombie with it, caving in the rotting sailor’s skull.