Snake Heart (11 page)

The man who had been tying Yanko growled and strode over to help subdue her before finishing the task. Yanko shook his wrists to loosen the rope while concentrating on a pistol in a pirate’s holster. He lifted it free with his mind, hoping it would go unnoticed in the darkness.

Someone heavy dropped onto Lakeo, pinning her like a wrestler. The pistol floated over to Yanko, as he managed to free his hands. He wrapped his fingers around it and glanced around, hoping he might back away without being noticed. If he could escape, he could help Lakeo later.

The big Turgonian who had been carrying him came up behind him, a lantern in hand that illuminated Yanko’s intentions. He spotted the pistol right away and batted at Yanko’s wrist. Yanko yanked his hand back in time to avoid the blow, but he hesitated to fire, afraid his status might be changed from prisoner to corpse if he were to kill any of them. Trying something he had read about in Senshoth’s book, he formed an image of an inferno in his mind and attempted to share it, to make the pirate believe he was seeing an actual attack.

To his surprise, the big man stumbled back, waving his hands before his eyes. Several of the pirates did. The one on top of Lakeo screamed and rolled away from her.

“Run,” Yanko barked, continuing to hold the image in the men’s minds.

A pricking at the back of the neck warned him of someone else calling upon the mental sciences. He dropped to the ground and rolled down the beach.

Fire—
real
fire—blasted through the air just above him. He didn’t quite escape it, and it licked at his hair and the back of his shirt as he rolled. Heat bore through his clothing to his skin. He gasped in pain, but he kept rolling, trying to squelch the flames. He ended up in the lagoon, banging his foot against one of the rowboats. The flames went out, and the cold seawater eased the pain of being burned, but by the time he jumped to his feet, the pirates had recovered. They swarmed around him. Eight pistols pointing at Yanko’s chest left no question as to what his fate would be if he tried another magical attack. The orange-robed mage stood behind the men, a sneer riding his lips.

“Get in, you say?” Lakeo touched her knuckles to a split lip, her hand coming away bloody. Sand covered her clothes and hair, and she looked like she had taken as many blows as she had given.

“Whenever you feel like it,” one of the pirates said, “your yacht awaits.” He gestured at the boat Yanko had kicked.

Yacht, sure. He spotted at least ten places where holes in the bottom had been patched by tar.

Sighing, he clambered into the rowboat. At least he had avoided having his hands tied, for all the good it would do. Lakeo joined him, sitting beside him on the bench. Four pirates climbed in after them, two grabbing oars. Yanko was surprised they didn’t make their captives row, but maybe they wanted to keep him up front, where they could watch him. The other pirates and the fire mage filled other boats. Three craft headed out into the water, with the mage in the bow of the boat right behind Yanko’s boat. He could feel the man’s eyes boring into his back.

“Any chance your mama is going to put us in an officer’s suite and invite us to breakfast?” Lakeo asked.

“Do pirates have officers?” Yanko wished he could say they would get special treatment, but he truly had no idea. Maybe they were
already
getting special treatment. After all, they hadn’t been shot.

“I don’t know, but I want my chest back.”

Yanko glanced at the front of her vest.

“The chest full of
coins
I found.” She glowered at him.

“Oh.”

“I nearly drowned lugging that through the pool, and now those pirates have it.”

He lowered his voice to a murmur barely audible above the roar of the ocean beyond the lagoon. “Any chance you found the lodestone?”

“Not unless it was in that bag of interesting stuff I grabbed. Either way, that bag is on the bottom of the pool. I couldn’t swim with everything.”

“Ah.” Yanko stared down at his feet, unable to hide his disappointment. He supposed it wouldn’t have mattered if she had found it, since the pirates had taken all of their belongings.

“There wasn’t much time to rummage around with you and that rock monster tramping around the cave,” Lakeo said defensively. “What
was
that thing?”

“A soul construct.”

She let out a low whistle. “I thought those were just things of legend.”

“They’re supposed to be. Nobody makes them anymore.”

“Not nobody.”

Yanko sighed, feeling tired and defeated as the rowboats traveled across the dark lagoon, toward one of the large black ships now anchored beyond the reef. He should have known from the beginning that this was the Midnight Fleet. No wonder Captain Minark had fled. A small part of him wanted to hope that Pey Lu would treat him well because he was her son, but it was hard to foster that hope. She had abandoned the family and destroyed its honor. Why would she care one way or another about him now?

“At least it wasn’t Sun Dragon who caught up with us,” Lakeo said. “We’d be dead for sure. There are only so many times you can outrun molten lava.”

Yanko tried to find this heartening and to agree, but it was hard to feel anything but defeat as the black ships loomed larger as they drew near, lanterns lit along the deck to welcome their prisoners.

Something bumped the bottom of the boat. A rock? Yanko looked back at the beach. They were quite far out to be hitting rocks, but the lagoon could be shallow all the way out to the reef.

The pirates kept rowing and did not comment.

Less than three seconds later, an explosion ripped through the night. It did not come from their boat but from one of the boats behind them, the one with the fire mage in it. Yanko nearly fell off his seat as he turned to look. The night lit up, as it had when his mother had hurled that fireball, but he hadn’t sensed magic being used. This was a mundane attack. An effective one. The boat was blown into thousands of pieces. Screaming men flew through the air, flailing their arms until they splashed down several meters away.

The pirates in Yanko’s boat cursed and shouted, and the oarsmen rowed harder. A wave surged toward them from the explosion site. It slammed into the back of the boat, and Yanko was dumped out of his seat. He caught himself on the side to keep from going overboard, but then realized that was the opposite of what he should be doing. Nobody was looking at him. He hit Lakeo on the shoulder, jerked his head, then dove into the water.

He started swimming before he was fully submerged, paddling and kicking to put as much distance between him and the boats as he could before coming up. By the time he ran out of air, he had gone fifty meters. He turned and spotted the burning remains of the mage’s boat. The other two craft were still afloat. One rowed toward people in the water, some waving, some floating, their bodies still. Yanko could not tell if the mage was alive or not.

The other boat... He gulped. It was coming toward him. Two men stood with pistols raised, aiming toward the water between Yanko and them, the water where Lakeo had come up.

She gulped in air and looked like she would dive below the surface again, but the pirates started shooting. Yanko rounded up water the same way he did air, and he channeled it into a wave. He hurled that at the boat. It rose over the sides, splashing into the pirates with enough force to startle them. One went over the side.

“Lakeo,” Yanko shouted. “Get down and—”

Something grabbed his foot.

Before he could do more than suck in a quick breath, he was pulled underwater. His first thought was of the kraken he had convinced to attack Sun Dragon’s ship, but his senses told him that a human had sneaked up on him. Sneaked up from
below
.

Though he was confused and his instincts wanted him to struggle, he recognized Dak’s aura. Yanko might not trust Dak to do what was best for Nuria, but he trusted him to help with pirates.

Still, it concerned him that Dak wanted to pull him
down
. He could understand if Dak were yanking him toward the shore, but he was dragging Yanko toward the bottom of the lagoon. He couldn’t imagine what good that would do, since he could only hold his breath for a limited time. Surely, the pirates would not leave in the next minute and a half. And how was Dak able to hold his breath all this time?

He tried to touch Dak’s mind, the way he did with animals, to share his bewilderment and hope that Dak might communicate a response, the way Kei sometimes did. Unfortunately, trying to communicate telepathically with Dak was like trying to communicate with a brick wall. He got nothing from the man, nor could he tell if Dak sensed his feelings.

He had no choice but to trust him at this point, so he twisted around and swam in the direction Dak had been pulling him. Yanko’s ears ached as they descended, but they finally reached the bottom and leveled out. He had lost his sense of direction and did not know if they were heading toward the beach or the reef.

As they continued to swim along the sandy floor of the lagoon, a faint light penetrated his blurry underwater vision. It didn’t come from the surface but from the bottom. The urge to breathe grew in Yanko’s chest, but he was somewhat reassured by the fact that they didn’t seem to be that deep. Fifteen feet? He could make it back to the surface if he needed to, but he followed Dak.

As the light grew, he picked out a blurry black cylinder and realized what waited for them. The underwater boat. How had Dak gotten it over here? And could a person enter it when it wasn’t on the surface? Wouldn’t it flood?

Dak pushed him toward a hatch on the side. Thanks to the light, Yanko could now see that he wore a strange helmet that swallowed his whole head. Before he could further assess it, Dak shoved him through the hatchway. He entered a tiny, water-filled... closet. He was sure that there was no Nurian term for whatever the Turgonians and Kyattese called it. There was another hatch on the inner side, but it was closed.

Dak pressed a gloved hand to Yanko’s chest and held up his hand in a stay-there motion. Then he disappeared, pushing off the bottom and leaving bubbles behind.

Yanko stared after him for a moment. He must be going to get Lakeo. Yanko understood that, but his lungs were already demanding air. How long was he supposed to wait? He turned toward the inner hatch, which presumably led into the underwater boat, and tried to turn the circular handle. It did not budge.

For the first time, fear trickled into him, making his heart beat faster, harder. Was he using more of what little air he had left? He tried the hatch again. Still, it didn’t move. He tried knocking on it, as if there were someone inside who might answer. To his surprise, someone knocked back. He reached out with his mind. Arayevo? Yes, it
was
her. She was right on the other side of the hatch. He knocked back. Why wouldn’t she open it and let him in? He tried to brush her mind, to suggest that opening the hatch would be a very good thing. By now, his lungs were screaming for air, and panic had him thinking about pushing out of the tiny chamber and swimming to the surface as quickly as he could. He didn’t even care if the pirates were waiting to shoot him.

A hesitant, uncertain feeling came to him from Arayevo. He knocked again, silently pleading with her. Just as he was certain he could hold his breath no longer, a shadow fell across the doorway. Lakeo was pushed into the space with Yanko, mashing him against the wall. Dak with his big helmet came in behind him, cramming into a spot that surely was meant for one person, not three. He shut the outer hatch behind them, plunging them into darkness. Sheer terror filled Yanko, and he wanted to thrash, to find a way out, but his arms were pinned.

A clank sounded, then a whooshing sound. A trickling followed it, like water draining into the pipes under a shower. Yanko closed his eyes, trying to find some meditative state that would let him control his lungs. He could feel them on the verge of gasping, even though his brain knew that nothing but water surrounded him.

The coolness of air touched the top of his head. He did not understand what was happening, but he jumped up, trying to find that air. His lips broke the surface at the same time as his head cracked the top of the strange closet. He couldn’t see anything, but he knew air when he felt it against his damp skin. He tilted his head back so that his lips broke the surface and sucked in a deep breath. There could not have been more than four inches of air, but it was enough. He inhaled long and deep.

A sputter and a cough came from beside him.

“Lakeo?” he rasped.

“Who else do you think is jammed into this coffin with you?” she demanded between coughs and gasps.

“Isn’t Dak the one smashing you into me?”

“Yeah, but he’s got a fishbowl on his head. I don’t think he needs air.”

Was that what the helmet did? Yanko had never heard of such a thing.

“Just when you thought Turgonians couldn’t get any uglier,” Lakeo went on. “I thought some kind of bulbous squid monster had grabbed me.”

“Ugly? Didn’t you once say he was handsome from the lips down?”

Lakeo snorted. “Maybe. Do you think he can hear with his fishbowl on?”

The water level was falling quickly, and Yanko could now stand on the deck with his head out of the water. He assumed Dak’s head was above the surface. As tall as he was, he probably had to hunch to fit into the tiny chamber.

“Probably,” Yanko said, “but I’m sure he already knows about his attributes.”

“Wonderful.”

Whether Dak could hear them or not, he did not speak as the water continued to drain out. Finally, only Yanko’s feet remained under the water. It was a good thing his sandals had a strap that fastened around his ankle, or he would have lost another pair of footwear during this crazy night. Given the cramped confines of the cubicle, he felt relieved that nobody was standing on his feet. Dak’s shoulder was mashed into his ear, and Lakeo’s hair kept tickling his nose.

A second clank sounded. The inner hatch creaked as the wheel finally turned. A crack of light appeared, and Yanko, still pressed against the hatch, stumbled into a corridor. Half blinded after being in the darkness, he would have fallen if someone had not gripped his shoulder.