R. Salvatore - The Dame

In the common tongue of Honce, the Behr warrior added, “This one is worthy to wield that sword!”

Sweeter words Bransen Garibond had never heard.

He’s a madman!” Laird Panlamaris roared, storming about and crushing the parchment in his powerful hand.

The courier from Delaval City shrank back from the wild man, eyeing the door of the tavern’s common room as if searching for an escape route. He wasn’t the only one; of the thirty men and women in the room, all seemed more than a bit unsettled by the powerful man’s outburst. All save one dressed in monk’s robes and sitting calmly at the same table Panlamaris had occupied when he had been handed the note-before he had leaped up, fuming.

“A madman!” Panlamaris said again and he kicked a chair across the room.

“He is the King of Honce,” Father De Guilbe remarked. When the Laird of Palmaristown fixed him with a severe glare, he merely shrugged.

“Read it!” Panlamaris said, throwing the parchment De Guilbe’s way.

De Guilbe didn’t catch it, but rather, deflected it to the floor. “He demands that you attack Chapel Abelle,” he said.

“Yes,” Panlamaris replied. “He wants me to throw all that I have against those walls, with the monks hurling fire and lightning at us from on high.”

“And with your finest warriors off rampaging in the far east,” said De Guilbe.

“It is madness!” Panlamaris declared.

“Foolishness, at least,” De Guilbe agreed. “King Yeslnik is a man who does not yet understand battle.”

“Am I to write his lesson in the blood of Palmaristown’s garrison?”

“Are you?”

“No!” Laird Panlamaris yelled. He took a deep breath and seemed to relax a bit. He even managed to grab a chair from a nearby table and take his seat across from De Guilbe. “We cannot go against such a fortress as Chapel Abelle. Not with their magical powers and with my ships getting sunk by powries behind them. Powries! Of all the ill times to have powries in the gulf!”

“A remarkable coincidence, you believe?” asked De Guilbe, and in a tone that suggested that he thought it no such thing.

“Is it not?”

“Among those who did battle against Ancient Badden were a pair of powries,” De Guilbe explained.

Laird Panlamaris and many others looked at the monk incredulously.

“It is true,” De Guilbe insisted. “When the Highwayman dropped Ancient Badden’s head at Dame Gwydre’s feet, he was accompanied by the man Cormack, who betrayed me, by a barbarian woman, and by a pair of bloody-cap dwarves. He introduced those powries to Dame Gwydre as friends, and the powries wintered in Castle Pellinor.”

“This cannot be,” said Panlamaris, giving voice to what almost everyone in the room was thinking.

“But it is, I tell you,” said De Guilbe. “They wintered in Castle Pellinor and were given free passage from the city as soon as the snows had calmed.”

“Powries?”

“Ugliest little creatures I have ever seen.”

Laird Panlamaris stroked his beard and stared through the tavern door and up the hill to the distant outline of Chapel Abelle. “You believe Dame Gwydre enlisted the little beasts?”

“I know that Dame Gwydre did not kill the two who came to Pellinor,” De Guilbe replied. “I know that she released them, and that the one called the Highwayman named them as friends. Friends help friends, do they not?”

Laird Panlamaris stared off into nothingness for a long while, his eyes narrow, his nostrils flared. His defeat at the wall of Chapel Abelle had stung him profoundly, but the loss of three warships had positively infuriated him. Panlamaris had been a sailor throughout his youth, when his father had ruled the port city, and he had traced the Honce coast from Delaval City to Ethelbert dos Entel and from the Vanguard coast all the way to southern Alpinador. He had battled powries before, as well, out on the open Mirianic and in fact had been instrumental in devising ways to cripple the dreaded barrel boats, using ballista-launched weighted nets to drag the low-riding craft under the waves.

As with almost every sailor in Honce, Laird Panlamaris hated powries most of all.

And now-was it possible? The notion that these wretched little beasts had joined in with his enemies boiled his blood.

He slammed his fist down on the table so hard that the nearest leg creaked in protest, cracked, and nearly buckled.

“We attack, my laird?” one commander standing nearby asked with great enthusiasm.

“Shut up,” Panlamaris said, then to De Guilbe added, “I will confront Dame Gwydre in parlay. If she is in league with these beasts, then one day soon Vanguard will bow to the rule of Laird Panlamaris.”

He stood up powerfully, his chair flying behind him, and called for a scribe. “Soon,” he repeated grimly to De Guilbe.

Pedal faster, ye mutts, or we’re to miss all the dippin’!” Shiknickel cried out to his crew. Up in the squat tower, the powrie watched as a pair of barrel boats closed fast on a warship, another flying the colors of Palmaristown.

Below and behind him, the tough dwarves picked up their pace, the barrel boat leaping away across the dark waters. Shiknickel grinned but didn’t openly applaud their efforts, preferring instead the inspiring, “Yah, but ye call that fast? Ye mutts, me dead mum could swim past ye!”

He was smiling wider as he finished, but his grin disappeared a moment later when the Palmaristown warship attacked. Deck-mounted ballistae, giant spear throwers, let fly at the nearest barrel boat, launching thick, weighted netting. Their shots weren’t true but didn’t have to be, for just putting the spears near to the boat, which was no more than twenty yards from the warship’s broadside, sent the net over its tower, hooking fast and draping over the back half of the boat. The drag slowed the craft immediately, and, worse, the netting hooked the barrel boat’s single propeller. Instead of charging in now at high speed to ram the warship, the barrel boat was suddenly adrift and tilting as the heavy weights pulled at her.

Spotters ran along the warship’s deck, pointing out the second approaching barrel boat while the ballista crews reloaded. A host of archers appeared at the rail and began raking the trapped barrel boat even as some of her crew tried to climb to cut the netting free.

“They was ready for us,” Shiknickel whispered. “Bah! Stop yer pedaling!” he shouted down to the dwarves. “Stop, I’m tellin’ ye!”

Mcwigik came to the base of the ladder. “Gwydre’s boat?” he asked.

Shiknickel motioned for him to climb up. “Palmaristown, still,” he explained. “But they’re coming out ready.”

Mcwigik grimaced as he considered the scene. The trapped barrel boat was listing now, water splashing in through her tower. Dwarves tried to come up, and arrows cut them down.

The second boat had turned, but the warship, too, was tacking to give chase.

“They ain’t seen us yet,” Mcwigik remarked, and Shiknickel nodded grimly.

“We got to be quick and hard.”

Mcwigik smiled at him and punched a fist into his open palm.

Shiknickel lifted his signaling mirror and turned it behind the boat, where he knew three other barrel boats to be on the prowl.

“Lay quiet,” he ordered Mcwigik. “They’ll go by us chasing our friends. Almost.” He ended with an exaggerated wink.

“They’re turnin’ inside us, are they?” Mcwigik asked.

Shiknickel smiled.

“Swing out wider?”

“Slowly,” ordered Shiknickel. “They’re lookin’ th’other way, so keep our spray down and keep them looking th’other way.”

Mcwigik went back into the hold and motioned for silence. Facing the crew, he held up his right hand while slowly turning circles with his left, and the right hand crew began a slow pedal, executing a left turn.