Robert Redick - The Rats and the Ruling sea

Revenge, of course, for his daughter and the Babqri Father. But Rose had clearly believed that something else was at stake for the man. Hope of glory? Love of country? Proof of Arqual's deception?

The mast shuddered. A ball from the White Reaper had punched a hole in the spanker mainsail.

What proof would the Sizzies have, though, if they sank the Chathrand out here in the Nelluroq? And if killing them was glorious, wasn't it ten times more so to expose a plot that could destroy the Mzithrin Empire?

They must have wanted to take us alive. Some of us, at least. But thanks to Diadrelu's warning we made it out of the Black Shoulders without a scratch. And now their settling for slaughter.

A quarter-mile. The Jistrolloq was pitching wildly now, and her mainsails fell limp for three or four seconds at the bottom of each trough, the wind cut off by the waves towering above her. She was slowing, she had to be: but not enough for the Chathrand to pull ahead.

There was a scream of fire. A blazing thing like a comet streaked from the Jistrolloq and exploded against the Great Ship's foremast. Dragon's egg! men were howling. Everyone had heard of the weapons, but Pazel had never met a soul who had lived to describe them first-hand. Now he saw why. Deck and mast were suddenly engulfed in a dripping blue flame; and hideous to behold, so were the men, leaping from the ropes, tearing at their oilskins in a frenzy. In blind agony the fire-drenched figures scattered on the deck, as luckier men hauled desperately at the pumps and hoses.

For once the rain was their ally: the fire did not spread, not even on the tar-coated rigging. But the men at the blast's epicentre had lost control of their sails. The huge forecourse swung disastrously to leeward, tearing at the standing rigging, and the Chathrand heeled in the same direction, her bow diving and her stern lifting like a bucking mule. Pazel locked his elbow around a brace as his feet were torn from the clew line, and for a moment his body lifted away from the spar like a scrap of canvas. When the ship righted he crashed down painfully against the timber. He glanced over his shoulder, and a prayer of joy welled up inside him: Neeps was still there.

The Chathrand was yawing, rolling, and it would be minutes yet before the fore-topmen came to grips with the chaos of the sail. Pazel looked down and saw six men at the wheel, Rose among them, fighting to keep the ship from turning sidelong to the waves. And now the Jistrolloq was racing towards them, chaser-cannon firing one after another, and teams on her forecastle running out the hull-smashing carronades.

Another terrible crash, and the roof of the wheelhouse was blown to pieces. At nearly the same instant the mizzenmast tilted leeward with a groan: a wooden ballista-spear, dragging a kite's tail of iron barbs, had ripped through her starboard shrouds.

Pazel looked at Neeps and made a jerking motion: The hell with this. It's over. Neeps understood, and nodded. His lips formed one word: Thasha.

Pazel caught his meaning instantly. Go to her, Neeps was telling him, while there's time to say goodbye.

They were creeping back towards the mast when something inside the Chathrand roared. Pazel looked down and saw black smoke boiling up and over the quarterdeck, and around both sides of the hull. They had run out the stern cannon at last.

The Jistrolloq's bow plating was tempered steel, but four square openings pierced it: one for each of the chaser-guns harrying her enemy. It was those four cannon, Pazel saw now, that Rose had targeted, and with devastating results. Two of the guns were utterly destroyed, splintered like bottle-stems before his eyes. The other two were blown backwards through their ports and out of sight. The Jistrolloq herself was all but unblemished, but she would not get another shot at the Chathrand until she drew up alongside.

Except for those two grim carronades on the forecastle. Such weapons were absurdly inaccurate, being roughly shaped like whiskey barrels, but they threw shot so enormous that one hit at short range could stave in a hull, dropping a ship to the sea floor in minutes. Even now the Mzithrinis were taking aim: Rose's strategy had left them wide open. Pazel thought of the gun-teams on the Chathrand, reloading as fast as humanly possible. It would not be fast enough.

Then, somehow, fire leaped again from the Great Ship. It was a different sort of smoke plume, ragged spokes instead of a single billowing cloud. And Pazel remembered: the grapeshot guns in Rose's cabin. They too were best at point-blank range, for they riddled a wide space with iron pellets: useless for damaging a ship, but deadly against flesh. Pazel could see the proof of that: Mzithrinis dead or squirming in their blood or crouching in fear behind the carronades. One of the guns, already loosed for firing, disgorged its knee-high iron shot onto the forecastle. The ball raced aft, catching a man by the heel and crushing him instantly; then it changed directions with the pitch of the ship and smashed through the starboard rail. Pazel could only watch, sickened and stunned. All that with one cannon's grapeshot.

Another of the four guns boomed, killing an officer as he stood to rally the surviving carronade gunners. A third erupted when relief gunners tried to swarm up the ladder onto the forecastle. Pazel realised with a sense of awe that the team in Rose's cabin would be able to reload the first of the four guns before the last had fired, and that such a relay could go on indefinitely. The Jistrolloq had given up her forecastle, and Chathrand 's twelve stern cannon would soon be ready to fire again.

He's going to sink them. He's going to kill them all, right before my eyes.

Whether that indeed was Rose's intention Pazel never learned, for at the height of the next swell the Chathrand 's foremast tore her stays, ripped free her starboard shrouds; and then the whole towering mass of spars and sail and rigging crashed down over the portside rail.

Dead! thought Pazel, as the Chathrand heeled terribly sidelong, and cables snapped around him. The dangling, half-submerged mast would drag their bow under as surely as a hold full of seawater; it was unthinkable that they would have enough time to cut it free. The Chathrand wallowed backwards down the wave; he saw the nine open gunports being wrenched shut in a panic, and a row of mailed Turachs falling like dominoes, and two sailors vanishing overboard into a cauldron of white froth. He saw Neeps struck in the chest by a flying wheelblock; they would not last another five minutes on this spar. But would the ship herself fare any better?

Even as he framed the thought, they rolled: the following sea had caught the Chathrand straight across her beam. The mast where they clung with locked limbs dived towards the sea, while beneath them the crown of the breaking wave swept right over the waist of the ship, making her quarterdeck and forecastle look for a moment like two rafts separated by eight hundred feet of white-water. In that torrent men clung to ropes, rails, cleats, anything that did not move, and still many were carried away.

Pazel had a blurred impression of the White Reaper at a hundred yards, as perfectly in control as they were perfectly flailing, her bowsprit pointed like a sword at Chathrand 's tilting flank. Dauntless, her gunners were making a third charge onto the forecastle. No grapeshot would drive them off this time, and if they managed to fire those killer carronades they could hardly miss with their eyes shut.

But then the Chathrand righted. Pazel could not believe what his senses were telling him. Had the foremast gone by the board? How, how had they done it? But there was no doubt, they were righting, and as he flew skywards with even more sickening speed than before, Pazel caught a sound he had only heard once before in his life — the day Rose had destroyed the whaler in a rippling broadside.