“You’d have liked my other one.”
“I got a nice bit of steel too.” He tapped the sword at his hip, which rattled in its sheath. There was something about it Jonik recognised. The cross-guard, long and twisting like the arms of a kraken; the pommel, bulbous and bumpy and a deep black-grey, like the sea-monsters’s head. The likeness was good. Jonik knew that firsthand having fought a kraken once before.
He peered closer, eyes narrowing. “Where did you get that blade?”
The big man gave a chuckle. “Like it do you, boy? Aye, thought you might. Must’ve been some Rasal lord owned it once, what with these tentacles and whatnot. Maybe I’ll kill you with it instead? How’s about it? You want me to hack your head off or cave it in? Either works for me.”
The rain was falling in sheets now, heavy and cold, spitting with bits of hail. Jonik reached up, unfastening his brooch, letting his sodden cloak slip to the ground. His armour had been silver, filled with light, but now it sank to darkness at his command.
The big man watched the light leech out of it, frowning. “How in the frosted hell…”
Jonik had heard enough from him. He raised a boot and kicked at the door, blasting it open, knocking the big man back, who tripped, stumbling away into the men behind him. Jonik pressed forward, thrusting for the leader, but another of the deserters got in his way and he skewered him through the chest. He pulled back, swung at another man as he roared and ran, cutting him down. There was a whistle of air and Jonik turned, jerking his neck aside as a throwing dagger came flying for his head. Nims was there, pulling another knife from his criss-cross belt. He threw again. Jonik flicked the blade away with his gauntleted hand, and the knife went plunging into the eye of another man who lurched backward, arms flailing, to crash into a table.
By then the others had followed him in, Gerrin and Harden moving left and right, cutting and engaging. The ring of battle filled the inn. The big leader roared something wordless and charged, swinging down with that godsteel warhammer, but Jonik swung hard and knocked it aside, then swung again at the flank of his ringmail shirt. Several of the little links burst asunder in a shower of silver mist. He felt the edge of Mother’s Mercy cut through mail and leather and wool and flesh, then pulled back, saw the blood come sluicing from the wound. The big man roared.
The planks behind him rattled. Jonik turned. Two men were there. One bore a battleaxe, the other a broadsword. The axe chopped down at his head, the sword lunging for his neck. Jonik whirled away, quick as lightning, hacking down through both weapons at once with his blade, shattering the steel, shards of sword and axe splintering. The axe-man went crashing to the floor at the force of Jonik’s strike, chin cracking hard against the wooden deck, jaw crunching, teeth bursting from his mouth in a spray of blood and spittle. The other deserter stood there, open-mouthed, piss leaking down his leg, shivering all over. “I…I yie…”
Yield, Jonik thought, but he didn’t care to hear it. He cut through his neck before the word could be uttered, carving him open to the nape. The head snapped back, almost tearing free, blood spraying up in a wild red fountain. Jonik brushed the man aside, saw the Bladeborn with the shortsword running for Harden, ghosted forward and swung right through his body, parting top from bottom. Blood and bowels, guts and gore all poured onto the floor in a great stinking splash. A man nearby let out a shuddering scream of horror and ran, and another scrambled after him, fleeing into the night.
Jonik panted like a predator and turned about, searching for his next kill. Nims was dancing about, flicking his knives, leaping from table to table as Harden chased him down. The other Bladeborn, Truss or Hunter, was duelling Gerrin, but would not last long. You have no idea who you’re fighting, he thought. Nor you. He turned to the big man.
They came face to face at the heart of the room. The other men were dead or fled or dying. His foe held a hand at his side where Jonik had cut him, blood leaking out through his fingers. His other hand clung to his warhammer, a rare weapon, but Jonik didn’t care for it.
“That sword,” he said once more. “Where did you get it?”
The man said nothing.
“Tell me and I’ll make it quick.”
“Found it,” he said. “On a dying man.”
“Where?”
“Here.”
“Here?”
“Aye. Right here in this pissing inn. There’s a man upstairs, sick as a dog…didn’t think he’d need it. Well, that boy who was tending him thought otherwise, but I’ve always hated boys. Shouted at me to leave him be, but you think I was gonna listen to that? Men were coming to take him away, he said. Bollocks, I said back. Then I cut his pretty throat.”
Jonik’s fist tightened about his blade. “You admit to murder?”
“Good to admit your sins before you die. Might save me.”
“It won’t. Where are the innkeeper and his wife?”
“Outside. We were going to bury them, but couldn’t be bothered, so just threw them into the field. There’s some beast out in them woods nearby, we heard. Thought we’d leave it a meal, keep it from our door.”
Jonik scowled. “And this boy?”
“Him too. Annoying little runt, he was, thinking himself all high and mighty. Said he’d served with heroes. Boasted the Barrel Knight was a friend. That ghost as well. Lying little cretin deserved what he got.”
Jonik’s breath stilled in his lungs. His eyes narrowed, fist tightening about his blade. Devin? he thought.
He took a hard step forward.
The big man stood his ground, hefting his warhammer, pulling out that kraken-blade. Blood oozed freely from his side, trickling down through the links in his ringmail, soaking into his leathers and wools. His face twisted in pain. “Let’s get this done.” He thrust with the blade, bringing the warhammer down behind it.
Jonik faded left, right, swung upward. The tip of Mother’s Mercy tore through the bottom of the man’s bearded chin, splitting it. A gurgly grunt erupted, teeth and blood spraying. The man stumbled backward. Jonik slipped sideways, quick as a whip, slicing through his lumpen nose, then rushed forward, gripped his neck before he could fall, lifted, squeezed, saw his eyes widen, bulge, burst out from the sockets of his skull, closed his gauntlet about his throat, ripped it out as he tossed the man aside. Blood poured from his flank, and his neck, and from the hole where his nose once was. His eyes dangled out on thin tendrils of ragged sinew. Jonik spat on him, then ran for the stairs, smashing the planks beneath his weight as he rushed upward.
He reached the landing, the floor groaning as though it might collapse, saw open doors leading into the rooms where the deserters had slept. One door at the end was closed. He stamped toward it, turned the handle, pulled. The stink of piss and pestilence rolled out, thick in his nostrils. The interior was pitch dark, the drapes drawn, the patter of rain heavy on the roof. There was a groaning sound, a man in a fever lying on a bed, unwashed and uncleaned and untended and unfed.
Jonik snatched a candle from an alcove outside and stepped in, waving the light across the room. The figure in the bed had a young face, a face barely older than his, a face he knew. The kraken-blade had been his, taken from the chests that Lord Humphrey Merrymarsh had given them, an age ago when they’d landed in Calmwater after their long voyage from the south.
Jonik rushed forward, set the candle on the bedside table. He pulled off a glove and a gauntlet and put a hand to the man’s forehead. “Sir Lenard,” he whispered. “Lenard, can you hear me?”
The young knight’s eyes flickered, but did not open. He groaned, moving in his sleep, shifting over the soiled linens. He had not been cleaned for long days, even weeks. Jonik drew back the filthy cover, saw his skinny body beneath, the wounds that raked across his chest covered in a bloody bandage, going brown. There was a plate of food beside him, but the food was mouldy, rotten, a cup of water dry as a bone. A fury boiled in Jonik’s guts. He wanted to go back down there and kill those men all over again, but that was done and they were dead.
Instead he turned and bellowed out, “Gerrin! Water! Now! Lenard Borrington is dying! Bring water! Now!”
16
The caravel was beached at the bottom of a cliff, inaccessible to them lest they risk a perilous climb down, caught on the rocks a hundred metres from the shore. The masts had all been snapped clean free, the sails shredded and torn apart, the gunwales and bulwarks battered, and the ship was listing badly. There were holes in the side of the vessel, Saska saw, and on the decks she could see what looked like bodies too, scattered here and there.
“So, what are we thinking?” asked Leshie, standing at the edge of the cliff with Saska, Del, and Rolly. The rest of the host were taking a moment to water the horses and camels, hiding from the sun in the shade of a grove of Aramatian cypress trees. There was a small roadside tavern on the other side of the Capital Road here, with a working well in the back. The innkeep and his wife and children were all hard at work bringing out trays of water for the host, and plates of fruit as well, mangos and pears, apples and dates, which the men - the sellswords in particular - were gobbling down greedily. “Do you think they foundered in that storm?” Leshie went on. “Looks like they were washed ashore.”
That storm, Saska thought. They had seen it from the coast, a brutal tempest that had turned all the southern skies dark for a full two days. ‘Weather of the new world’, Sunrider Alym Tantario had called it. He said that this was to be expected during the Ever-War, these apocalyptic weather events. And here was me thinking it was just gods and monsters we had to worry about. No. Apparently, they could expect tornados and superstorms and city-swallowing earthquakes too.
