The war cry hit the storm, and the storm gave it back doubled.
Lucy hadn’t finished the second word before her copied crew were already screaming it back at her, and by the time the third rolled off her tongue the flagship’s whole deck had it, because her voice went where she wanted and the wind was hers.
FOR THE QUEEN.
The Empire deck across the grapples was a floor of bodies and rope and small fires the rain wouldn’t put out, and Lucy’s boarders moved across it like a wave moves across a beach, and the Empire crew who’d been reloading their long guns discovered too late that the range they liked no longer existed.
I sat on my throne with rain running into my collar and watched three men die in the space of a sigh.
The right pane was still tracking NightSwallow.
She had gone through the deck like a fold in the air. Officer at the mainmast: down without a shout, folded against the post he’d been braced on.
Two crewmen who’d turned to see what had made the officer go quiet: down.
A mage in a wet grey coat who’d raised a hand to cast something: down before the hand finished the gesture, and his half-shaped fireball came apart in the rain and hissed away into the dark.
Then she went up.
The pane climbed with her. She used the shadow-side of the foremast the way a cat uses a shelf, up and up in the strobing dark, and by the fourth pass of lightning she’d folded herself into the corner where the platform met the mast, out of every eye that mattered.
She drew the first orb.
Set it. Wedged it into the angle. Ran her thumb across the rune.
The rune lit.
And then, into the storm, into my head, quiet and close and clear as if she were kneeling at my elbow:
“Queen, deck one. Their captain’s dead; they’re shouting a shanty for a formation that vanished two minutes ago. Their mages are three, and Lucy’s boarders have two of them. I have the last.”
She adjusted her head.
“Bird’s-eye on ship one. Ship two’s rail is fifteen yards to starboard, closing. Ship three is holding position. Ship four is turning into the wind, which is stupid; she’s giving up her broadside to hold formation. That’s a discipline call. Someone’s making them hold. Not their admiral. He’s on ship one.” She waited, then added with a grin. “He was.”
Down at the helm of the ship-that-had-been-ours, Lucy laughed loud enough to bend rain.
“Grapples, ye slow bastards, GRAPPLES!” Her voice rode the amplification onto the captured deck and stayed there. “Ship two, we take her by her own kit—use the port bank, she’s got a beauty of a chain-set an’ I don’t fancy repurchasin’ me own. Boarders, ye have twenty seconds to find yer feet before I sell the deck out from under ye.”
She was standing in the waist of the flagship with a fireball whistling past her ear. She didn’t duck. She turned her head to watch it go and grinned as if it had told her a joke.
“Missed.”
The joke wasn’t over.
The next fireball came in low from ship three’s forward battery and it were three fireballs, braided into a spiral by a mage who’d taken his time, and it opened out into a claw of fire that came apart across the flagship’s waist and took Lucy across her shoulder and side.
She went into the rail.
She flew into it hard, with the wet crack of a body in armor meeting wood that will not give, and she stayed there for two seconds, and one of the two seconds was her sliding.
I was out of my seat, moving to heal her.
Sit still.
Sit still, Charlie, sit still.
Two seconds of Lucy sliding down the rail, and my healing was on the entire wrong side of the deck, and if I let it out of me the scenario voided, and she died anyway.
It was hard not to heal, but thankfully, Lucy pushed off the rail.
She shoved off with her good arm, and the shoulder came up wet with something that wasn’t rain, and she wiped it with her forearm and looked at what came off and grinned.
“Aye,” she said, and the amplification carried it lazily across the water. “AYE, that was a proper hit. Well thrown. WELL THROWN, lads.” Her free hand came up, and light gathered in her palm the color of a hearth-fire seen through amber glass, and she pressed it into her shoulder without looking.
The bleeding stopped.
The gash closed itself along its own line, un-tearing.
She was already walking back toward the wheel, one shoulder still half-shrugged and the coat flapping open where the fire had opened it, and she was smiling with teeth.
“Oh, THAT,” she called across the water, “that’s what ye had? That’s the one? That was yer big one? Not even ten percent HP!”
Ship three’s forward battery, either because they hadn’t heard her or because they had, loosed the second volley.
“COME ON THEN!” Lucy roared, and this time the amplification filled the space between our fleet and theirs like a bell tolling underwater, and I felt the flagship’s timbers hum in sympathy. “MORE! MORE OF IT! WHERE’S THAT MAGE? WHERE’S THE ONE WHO PLAITED IT? YE GOT ANOTHER FOR ME? SEND IT! SEND IT!”
Six fireballs.
Eight.
Ten.
The Empire mages on ship three obliged her the way people oblige shouting at me… uh, at a drunk in a bar, because he keeps shouting, and Lucy stood in the waist of her own ship with her arms wide and the storm behind her and let them come.
Only two hit.
The rest went into wave and wind and the pale grey nothing.
One took her across the thigh and one took her across the hip, and she healed both walking.
She was laughing now.
Actually laughing, the whole shoulders-back full-chest laugh, and behind her, moving up the deck at her back without a word said, four of her copy-crew slipped over the far rail of the captured Empire ship-of-the-line and used its port grapples the way she’d promised: the beauty of a chain-set, half again as long as our own, thrown three at a time in a triple arc that landed on ship three’s rail like fingers of a hand closing.
And ship three came alongside.
And Lucy’s boarders, reinforced by the eight she’d taken off ship one, and by four new ones she’d apparently summoned from the pockets of her exploiter paladin’s-class because the numbers didn’t add up, poured across the new chain in numbers ship three’s deck could not deal with.
The mage who had plaited the spiral was the third body Lucy’s forward boarder set foot on.
“That’s the one,” Lucy said to no one, the amplification pulled back to her own voice. “Aye, that’s the one. Poor lamb. Ye had one good shot in ye and ye spent it on the wrong hat.”
I had my hands flat on the armrests and my breath in my throat, and the whole wet howling world was holding still around Lucy grinning at a corpse.
“Queen, deck two.”
NightSwallow, in my head.
“Second orb placed. High on the aft-mast. It sees the whole waist and half the quarterdeck. The ship’s captain died at the wheel; he wouldn’t come off it. That’s why she was turning into the wind. He held her there dead.”
She paused. In the pane on my right, she was already moving again, low along the ship-two deck, twin daggers out and a fresh smear across her sleeve.
“Empire flag lost. Ships one, two, three are ours or gone. The other seven have stopped trying to fight the cascade and started trying to survive it. Their formation is closing. Around one hull.”
She stopped, her head swinging, her eyes unfocused, and I could hear her breathing.
“Sorry, Queen, I can’t see the hull yet. I’ll see it in a minute. I’m going to ship four.”
She went to ship four.
Ship four was where it went bad, because it had a diviner.
I didn’t know it was a diviner because I knew anything about Empire ship classes; I knew it because the pane snapped from tracking-shot to something else in a way I’d never seen a pane do. It jittered. It went bright at the edges. And in my head, NightSwallow said—
“Queen, seen.”
Just the two words.
I grappled the armrest and wished her luck under my breath, and then the diviner on ship four’s quarterdeck raised a staff, and a bright white line drew itself in the rain from staff to a piece of the deck below him, and the piece of the deck was NightSwallow.
She stopped being nowhere.
The un-hiding ran back along every shadow she’d been using like ink through water, and eight Empire crew turned as one to look at the place the bright line ended, and NightSwallow was standing there in the rain with both daggers already out.
The diviner opened his mouth.
He didn’t finish opening it.
She used a skill and crossed the six yards between her and him in the time it took him to draw the breath he was going to shout with, and the twin daggers went in at his throat and up under his jaw, and he was falling as the shout tried to leave him and did not.
The bright line broke.
The other seven Empire crew realized where she was a half-second late. Which was the half-second she needed.
She dropped the diviner and moved.
She moved beautifully, and I sat on my throne with rain in my mouth and watched the lady of the night fight in the open. She wasn’t built for it. The class wasn’t built for it. Everything she had was built for you not knowing she was there, and once you knew, all she had left was her hands and the daggers and the twenty-percent of her class that still worked when the shadows wouldn’t open.
It was enough for the first man. She took him through the ribs and out.
It was enough for the second one. She let him swing and slipped inside the swing and cut the tendon behind his knee and put a dagger through the back of his neck as he dropped.
It was enough for the third, barely. He came in with an axe two-handed and she caught the haft on both her crossed daggers and rode the force of it sideways instead of trying to stop it, and when the axe went into the deck, she was already off the deck herself and behind him and opening him from kidney to shoulder blade.
The fourth was where she started losing.
The fourth had a shield. The fifth was already behind her. The sixth had a crossbow already drawn.
Charlie, don’t watch. Charlie, don’t watch this.
I put hands over my eyes, but despite that I took a small peek as she took a crossbow bolt through her thigh.
I felt it in my thigh. I felt the muscles in mine tense and clench because hers had, and the pane gave me her face in the rain and it was still and she pivoted on the pierced leg because she had to and put both daggers through the throat of the man with the shield and left them there.
She had nothing in her hands.
The fifth was a foot behind her. The sixth was reloading.
I watched her decide. It took her a quarter of a second. I watched her decide to spend everything at once, and her hands came up empty, and the storm-dark that had refused to hide her did the only thing it could still do for her:
It stretched.
Shadow-afterimages. Six of her, then eight, then ten, fanning out across the deck in a half-circle of dark, every one of them lifting her hands the way she’d lifted hers, every one of them moving different.
Night Dance.
Perfect use of a sixty-second cooldown.
The fifth man swung through two of her that weren’t there and cut a stanchion in half. The sixth man’s crossbow bolt went through four of her that weren’t there and buried itself in the mainmast. She was on the diviner’s body, retrieving her daggers, and then she was on the rail, and then she was in the shadow of the shrouds, and then she was gone.
The Empire crew stood in the rain, looking at a deck full of their own dead and a shadow-cloud thinning into nothing, and no NightSwallow anywhere in it.
The pane in my right went dark for two full seconds.
Then it came back.
She was on the far side of the ship-four foremast, wedged into the crook where the yard met the mast, one hand pressed to her thigh and the other bracing her upright.
“Queen, third orb placed,” she said in my head, and her voice was thin around the edges. “Mid-ship four. I have three views.”
“Nightswallow—”
I said it out loud, into the storm, on my throne, and I don’t know if the tactical channel went both ways or if it was only her sending, and I never got to find out because she went on.
“I’m reading it.”
She took a health potion and was quiet for a long moment. On the pane, her thigh was dark with blood the rain wasn’t washing off, but the wound was gone. I knew it was fine because they took just a few of her hit-points.
But I was worried anyway.
She had her head tilted. “Ship six,” she said. “Center-rear of what’s left of the line. Not the biggest. Not the flag. Third-rate hull, but her wards are strange. I can see them from here without the orbs once you know to look. Purple shimmered up the mast, three layers deep.”
She breathed. Kept her voice flat.
“Queen, ship six’s captain hasn’t been on his own deck since the engagement started. Twice now his bo’sun has gone below at the exact instant of a salvo. Curious.”
Another breath.
“Ship six is holding formation tighter than the others. They’ve bent their whole remaining line into a bowl around her. Ship five and ship seven are dying to stay in that shape. They know it.”
She lifted her head. On the pane her eyes were closed, and when she opened them she was looking at nothing anyone could see.
“That’s her.”
The right pane held on NightSwallow, now healed, still braced against the mast, and I sat in the rain with the third fact of the night landing on me. I couldn’t help her.
I couldn’t tell her to go either.
She went anyway.
She said, “Queen, going,” and the pane cut with her; off the mast, down the shadow-side, off ship four’s stern rail and onto ship five’s bow in a movement I couldn’t parse. Just: mast, air, deck. She was on ship five and moving across it low, and the storm covered her because now the storm wanted to, and no one on ship five had turned yet.
Ship five wasn’t hers to take, and she wasn’t there to take it. She crossed ship five’s waist in the shadow of a broken mainsail and her twin daggers took one man who saw her—quick, quiet, then gone—and then she was over the far rail and in the water for a second, and then she was on ship six’s chain.
Ship six’s chain, because ship six was tied to ship five with a defensive line to keep formation.
She climbed the chain.
She climbed it fast, hand over hand, the storm eating her outline halfway up, and she came onto ship six’s rail at the place where its own guards weren’t looking because their eyes were on the boarding action three ships away.
She dropped onto ship six’s deck between two coils of rope, and the pane went dark again.
She was inside her class again.
“Queen, below,” she whispered in my head. “There’s a hatch aft of the mainmast. Two guards. Ceremonial. They’re not looking for a boarder. I’m going to take the hatch.”
The pane gave me nothing. Two dark seconds. Then the whisper came again.
“Down.”
She had taken the hatch, and the guards, and I hadn’t seen it happen.
The pane came back in a different world.
It was quiet.
That was the first thing. The howl of the storm had gone from mouth-in-the-ear to muffled-through-wood, and the sound that was left was the ship creaking, and the drip of water finding its way through the deckhead, and the small hiss of magical torches burning steady in brackets, and voices.
Voices speaking calmly. In a tongue I didn’t have, probably some random temple fuckery.
The pane tracked her along the interior. Narrow, low-beamed. Every second timber was carved. The magical torches gave off a pale green light that didn’t smoke. The corridor was lined with runes cut into the wood at intervals.
She reached a door.
It was broad, dark wood, three layers of runes deep, with two guards standing at rest before it, this time with runic armor and fancy weapons. I couldn’t see their level through the pane, but they looked elite.
She didn’t touch them.
She flowed to the wall beside the door and set her shoulder to it and dissolved into the wood-shadow, and the guards didn’t turn, and the pane went through the wall with her.
It was a chamber.
Dry, in the middle of a storm and a ship, and I couldn’t tell you what magic held the wet out, but it held it. Torches were in ranks along both walls. A long carpet was laid down the middle, dark green with gold. Six figures in silver-and-white armor standing three to a side down the length of it, halberds grounded, still as statues. Two mages in violet robes at the far end, chalking a circle onto the deck-boards in something that smoked faintly where their sticks passed.
At the carpet’s head, there was a throne. Smaller than mine. Higher-backed. Lacquered black. Not bolted to the deck.
On the throne: a woman.
She was smaller than I’d expected. Slim. She wore what I would have called a coronation dress, pale ivory silk, silver embroidery running down the sleeves, a high collar with a lot of runes running alongside the fabric. A thin circlet of silver on her head with a single dark stone at the brow.
She was watching the chalking mages. Her face in profile was very calm.
She was young.
She was around my age. Not the imperial matron I’d been building in my head. A woman my age, in a dress, on a throne, in a chamber below-decks in a storm, with six elite-tier guards and two ritual mages, waiting for something.
The pane held on her.
NightSwallow’s whisper came tiny.
“Queen. She’s here. I have her. Six guards, two casters. Ritual in progress. I don’t know what it does.”
The Empire Queen turned her head.
She spoke.
“Sister,” the Empire Queen said warmly, in the voice of someone welcoming a guest. “You’ve come farther than I expected. Sit.”
The clock in the air ticked over.
The guards glanced around the room, but they couldn’t see anyone.
[Time remaining: 00:41:07]
Author's note: Welcome to July! This is the first "longer chapter" post. From now on, we'll move onto two chapters per week, as the vote was 100% :) First chapter will be Tuesday, but which day you want the second one?
There will be another vote for a week: Thursday/Saturday?
See you on Tuesday, wrapping up this fight!