Kage Baker - The Anvil of the World

“Master,” said a deep voice plaintively, “that ship threw something at us.”

Smith swore and sped up the companionway.

The bodyguards were standing in a circle, staring down at a ball of chipped stone that rolled to and fro on the deck. Willowspear, who had retreated as far forward as he could get, pointed mutely at the warship that was by then just over an effective shot’s length astern, close enough to see the blue light in the depths of the cabochon eyes of its dragon figurehead.

“Was that a broadside?” inquired Lord Ermenwyr, worming past Smith to glare at the ship.

“No. That was a warning,” said Smith.

Cutt, Crish, Stabb, and Strangel all bent at once to pick up the stone ball, and butted heads with a noise like an accident in a quarry. After a moment of confused growling, Cutt got hold of the ball. He turned and threw it at the warship, in a titanic stiff-armed pitch that struck its foretop and broke the yard, sending it crashing to the deck in a tangle of rigging.

Lord Ermenwyr applauded wildly.

“That’ll slow ’em down! Good Cutt!”

“What if all they wanted to do was speak with us?” cried Willowspear. “Do you realize we may have just lost any chance of resolving this peacefully?”

“Oh, you’re no fun at all.”

“The best we could have hoped for was being boarded anyway,” said Smith. “They’d have confiscated the boat and stuck us in a holding prison for civilians while they sorted us out. If we were lucky, we’d have seen the light of day after the war’s over.”

“But—”

“They’re cranking back their catapult for another shot,” warned Lord Ermenwyr.

Smith saw that this was indeed the case, and that the warship’s crew, which had been going about their business on deck in an unhurried way until the strike and only occasionally glancing out at their quarry, was now assembled all along the rail, staring at the Kingfisher’s Nest as a hawk stares at a pigeon.

The fighters among them held up their oval shields, bright-polished, and began to tap them against their scaled armor in a slow deliberate rhythm, clink and clink and clink, and the common sailors took up the rhythm too, beating it out on the rail. On bottles. On pans. The ratcheting of the great arm echoed it too as it came back, and back—

“Hell! Here it comes,” said Smith, and prepared to drop flat, but the shot went high and fell short, sending up a white gout of water.

“We don’t have anything we can shoot back with,” fretted Lord Ermenwyr.

“If you’d told me about this trip ahead of time, we might have,” Smith retorted, watching the activity on the enemy’s deck. Now there were sailors swarming in the rigging, hauling up a replacement yard and cutting lines free, and there was a team busy adjusting the placement of the catapult. The moment it was set again, however, all hands paused in their work, all faces turned back to the Kingfisher’s Nest, and once again they began to beat out the rhythm, clink and clink, even the clinging topmen striking out their beat on the dull blocks and deadeyes.

But as the catapult’s arm moved back, inexorable, there came a sound to counterpoint it: clank, and splash, and clank and splash, and clanksplash clanksplash —

“Hooray!” Lord Ermenwyr made a rude gesture at the warship. “We have oarsmen!”

And oars did seem to have deployed out of the panniers astern, jutting and dipping with a peculiar hinged motion, like a team of horses swimming on either side. The Kingfisher’s Nest did not exactly surge ahead, but there was no denying it began to make way, in a sort of determined crawl over the choppy swell. Over on the warship they launched their shot, and it arched up again and hung for a moment in the white face of the early moon before plummeting down in another fountain, approximately where Smith had been standing two minutes earlier.

“Now they’ll see,” gloated Lord Ermenwyr. “We’ll leave them all befuddled in our, er—”

“Wake,” said Smith.

“Yes, and after dark they won’t have a chance, because we’ll slip silently away through the night and evade them!”

“I don’t think we’re going anywhere silently,” said Smith, shouting over the clatter of the mechanism. “And there’ll be moonlight, you know.”

“Details, details,” Lord Ermenwyr shouted back, waving his hand.

They fled south, keeping the coastline just in sight, and the warship followed close. Its smashed yard was replaced in a disconcertingly short period of time, so the Kingfisher’s Nest lost some of its lead again. The whole chase had a bizarre clockwork quality Smith had never seen in a sea battle before. The Kingfisher’s Nest paddled on, puffing steam like a teakettle, while the warship’s crew kept up its clattering commentary. Were they trying to intimidate? Were they being sarcastic?

They never gave it up in any case, all the way down the coast, past a dozen fishing villages, past Alakthon-on-Sea, past Gabekria. The sun sank red, throwing their long shadows out over the water, and the white foam turned red and the breasts of the seabirds that paced them turned red as blood. When the sun had gone they fled on through the purple twilight, still pursued, and the warship lit all its lanterns as though to celebrate a triumph.

“Aren’t they ever giving up?” complained Lord Ermenwyr. “What did we ever do to them, for hell’s sake?”

“They’re chasing us because we’re running,” said Smith wearily. “I guess they think we’re spies, now. It’s a matter of money, too. We got off a shot at them and did damage, so we’re a legitimate prize if we’re taken.”

Lord Ermenwyr lit his smoking tube with a fireball. “Well, this has ceased to be amusing. It’s time we did something decisive and unpleasant.”

“It has never occurred to you to pray to Her for assistance, has it?” said Willowspear in a doomed voice. His lord pretended not to hear him.

“It would help if we had a dead calm,” said Smith. “That would give us the advantage. Could you do something sorcerous, maybe, like making the wind drop?”

“Hmf! I’m not a weather mage. Daddy, now, he can summon up thunder and lightning and the whole bag of meteorological tricks; but I don’t do weather.”

“In fact, I don’t think I ever saw you praying at all, not once!”

“Could you summon us up a catapult that’s bigger than theirs, then?” Smith inquired.

“Don’t be silly,” said Lord Ermenwyr severely. “Sorcery doesn’t work like that. It works on living energies. Things that can be persuaded. I could probably convince tiny particles of air to change themselves into wood and steel, but I’d have to cut a deal with every one of them on a case-by-case basis, and do you have any idea how long it would take? Assuming I even knew how to build a catapult—”

Smith hadn’t heard the shot, but he caught the brief glint of moonlight on the stone ball as it came in fast and low, straight for the glowing point of the lordling’s smoking tube. Without thinking, he dropped and yanked Lord Ermenwyr’s feet out from under him. Lord Ermenwyr fell, the ball shot past. It smashed into the nearest of the boiler domes, where it stuck. The dome crumpled along one riveted seam and began to scream shrilly, as steam jetted forth.

“Those bastards!” Lord Ermenwyr gasped. “That could have been me!”

“It was meant to be,” said Smith. “But please don’t call them names when they board us, all right? We might get out of this alive.”

“They’re not boarding us,” said Lord Ermenwyr, scrambling to his hands and knees. “I defy them!”