Corsair

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Yulan threw a quick glance back up the stairway to the postern gate. That did not, to put it mildly, look like a promising or quick path to safety. He sprang down into the water, almost falling as his feet sank into sand and Tessunt’s weight jolted on his back.

‘Into the cave,’ he shouted.

He did not look back as he ploughed through the water. He could hear others plunging into the sea, and struggling just as he did to move towards the dark oval of the cave. Little more promising than the vertiginous stair, he knew, but there must at least be doorways and passages in there that would be defensible, and less exposed.

The water shallowed a little as he passed into the gloom. Still the ebb and flow of gentle waves tugged at his legs and the yielding sand beneath his feet hampered him. He ventured a pause and twist of his neck to be sure the rest followed. It was no great surprise to find that while Hamdan and Corena and the children were there in his wake, the four men and women who had followed thus far were not. They were still dry-shod, standing and waving towards the seaborne newcomers. False friends, spotting a better wager on the horizon in the form of Lake and his warriors. It was no loss.

Deeper in, beneath the great mass of stone, there were oil lamps burning on the walls of the tunnel. Yulan followed that light. There looked to be a long, narrow quay built into the side of the cave back there, and beyond it a wide pair of doors that stood open. A bull’s head was sculpted above it. The unsteady light of the lamps threw its writhing shadow over the stonework.

Yulan slowed. He let Hamdan, still carrying Estell, and Navene surge past him. Navene was struggling, he could see. Tiring already from the dull opposition of the water. Corena was only a few strides behind, pushing through that same water almost as if it was not there. Silvery echoes of the splashes shivered around the cave.

Beyond, out in the daylight, Lake’s boat came. It ground and rasped its hull along that of one of the others moored there. It yawed and rocked out a flat-bellied sway across the cove. Men began to leap from its gunwale into the water. Some fell, but they rose, the sea cascading from their heads and shoulders. The Orphanidon jumped down. He saw Yulan and stood there, better than waist-deep, and held up sword and shield in … what? Challenge, perhaps, or salute.

Yulan stopped Corena as she brushed past him.

‘Take the boy,’ he said in a carefully measured tone. He did not want to frighten the child.

Corena glanced over her shoulder and nodded silently. But Tessunt tightened his grip about Yulan’s neck.

‘Don’t want to,’ the boy said.

From the splashing and scraping, Yulan could tell that Hamdan had reached the quay and was climbing out, or dragging Navene up. He patted Tessunt on the leg.

‘Go to Corena, child. Go now.’

The Orphanidon and his men were drawing near. They could not run, but they had the strength to barge a way through the sea. They were always going to be faster than the three children, in or out of the water.

Yulan shrugged Tessunt loose and swung him across to Corena.

‘Take them up, Hamdan,’ he shouted.

He saw the archer hesitate for a moment, looking from Yulan to the approaching gang of Kottren’s men.

‘I’ll be there soon,’ Yulan said.

Hamdan nodded and reached down to heave Corena and Tessunt up onto the ledge. No debate, no argument. Yulan was grateful for that. He did not need to explain that only by stretching out the time between hunters and hunted might this come to a happy end. He did not need to explain that someone had to go with Corena and the children, for fear of what might lie ahead, just as someone must stay behind to win that time.

Those thoughts done with, Yulan set them aside. Only the moment now, only what was before him. He edged cautiously backwards, closing the distance between him and the doorway through which he could already hear Hamdan and the others hurrying.

Lake was not coming in the first rank of the enemy. He followed just behind, alone among them all in looking calm, composed. Ahead of him, three men advanced across almost the whole width of the cave, their thighs piling up bow waves ahead of them. They were widely scattered, which would have been the right way to do it on land. Yulan thought it a mistake with hip-high water to hamper and slow any movement. There was some small hope yet that he was not about to die.

One of the warriors snapped his arm backwards and forwards, launching a spear at Yulan’s chest. He swayed and slapped the shaft away with the flat of his sword, sending it spinning point-over-tail to clatter against the cave wall.

‘Yield,’ Lake called out sharply. His voice reverberated from the stone.

Yulan only shook his head.

The three lead warriors tried to rush him, but of course they could not. The sand did not give their feet purchase; the water and waves tugged at their legs. The spray clouded their vision. Yulan took them as they came.

He turned the point of one spear down so hard and fast it buried itself in sand and bucked its length out of its wielder’s hands. Yulan killed him. He caught another man on the side of the head with an elbow, and managed to put a gash into his neck as he fell. The third was less rash, less clumsy, and Yulan had to meet sword with sword. The clash of blades was an assault upon the ears in those hard confines. It did not last long. A few hacks and parries and Yulan’s greater strength and precision told. His opponent let his sword dip into the water and Yulan had the space to lay a hard backhanded slash across the man’s face.

The water rocked. Curls and currents of blood were in it, almost black in the muted light. Lake was standing before Yulan now. The Orphanidon restrained those men behind him with outstretched sword and shield.

‘Kottren Malak is dead,’ Yulan said.

‘I know it,’ Lake replied. ‘I saw the deed done.’

He took a long step forward, brushing past the floating, limp arms of a corpse.

‘Then there’s no need for this,’ insisted Yulan, easing himself back. ‘Whatever service you owed him is done. All we’re trying to do is leave.’

‘The man might be dead, the service is not,’ said Lake. ‘No one ever told you it was Kottren Malak I guarded or served, sellsword.’

Yulan suppressed the frown that twitched beneath the surface of his face.

‘I was brought here – and paid – to keep his daughter safe,’ the Orphanidon said. ‘It is her I promised to guard and serve, not her father. He is gone but the promise remains. You stand between me and my ward, and I judge you a threat to her.’

‘She’s a Clever, most likely unhinged by grief. I’m no threat to her unless she is one to me.’

‘So you say. But I would take counsel with my ward, and mean to do it now.’

With that, Lake surged forward, shield before his chest like a battering ram. It was different from the very first instant of their engagement. Yulan was the faster, the stronger, but Lake was unlike any opponent he had ever faced. All direct in one moment, cutting at Yulan’s flanks with savage aggression; all feints and deceits in the next, flashing the shield across Yulan’s face and shifting his footing in ways that belied his intent.

It was only speed that kept Yulan alive in those first desperate flurries of blow and block. There was no time for stratagem, only reaction and survival. He fell back as best he could, hoping to get close enough to the quay to swing himself up out of the water. As soon as his weight was on his back foot, Lake would press in and test his balance. As soon as he lashed out with his sword, the Orphanidon was ducking or twisting himself tantalisingly out of reach. Always the water was there, like leaden hands about Yulan’s legs, limiting him and robbing him of freedom.

Yulan felt his flank touch the side of the quay. He pushed himself backwards along it. Seawater was dripping from his arms. He could feel it wet over his face. He spat it from his lips and tasted the gritty salt of it. He could smell the oil burning in the guttering lamps. Everything was sharp to his senses. He was present as he had seldom been before.

‘You fight well,’ Lake said.

A sliver of hope there, in the pulses of hurried breath. The rapid rising and falling of the Orphanidon’s chest. The man was not young, after all. Drips fell from Yulan’s brow. He did not brush them away.

‘And you like to talk,’ he said to Lake.

‘There are few things I like, in truth. The Empire taught me that.’

Lake was edging closer. He left no simple openings for Yulan to punish. Yulan was willing to wait. Time was what he sought to purchase here, after all.

‘I thought I served something worthy of the service,’ Lake continued, ‘but it was not so. I thought I had ten thousand brothers and sisters, but it was not so. Pledge yourself to lies and liars and in time they will betray you.’

‘I believe it,’ Yulan said.

A thin, reedy whistle pierced the air. Yulan dared a snatched glance to the side. He was all but level with the wide, open doors at the back of the quay. Beyond them he glimpsed a broad ramp sloping up. That was where the distant whistle came from: Hamdan making an invitation.

‘We neither of us fight for our own cause here,’ Yulan said. He wanted respite as much as Lake now. A few breaths to gather himself, to think. ‘Seems folly for either of us to die today.’

The Orphanidon smiled coldly.

‘I doubt you believe that. I fight for a promise freely made, and that is the only thing I would die for today or any other day. It is the last vestige of honour I have left to me.

‘And you … you are of the Free. None but fools think the Free fight only for treasure. I have heard it said that you always find a way to make another’s cause your own. Wise or not, it is what you do.’

Yulan flailed his sword and arm through the water, sending up a sheet of spray into Lake’s face. He let the movement carry his body round and sprang, throwing a leg onto the quay and rolling. In the corner of his eye he saw Lake hunching behind his shield, the water breaking over its wooden surface. He saw the Orphanidon’s sword flashing yellow reflections of the lamps as it darted up and down.

The blade struck sparks from the edge of the quay a finger’s width from Yulan’s foot. He flowed into a crouch and swung his own sword round into the space where Lake would be if he tried to follow up out of the water. The Orphanidon was not so foolish. The shield was there instead, and it turned Yulan’s blow aside.

Yulan rose to his feet and stepped towards the open door. That saved him, for a spear spiralled in and passed across the back of his head, so close he felt it in his hair. It hit the wall and rebounded, quivering. Yulan thanked his luck and ran.

The Sorentines had cut a long and wide sloping passageway with a vaulted roof up from that subterranean harbour. Yulan sprinted up it into darkness, for there were no torches or oil lamps here. He almost turned his ankle over in a groove running down the length of the ramp. Cursing he ran on, ignoring the twinge of protest in that joint. Long, long ago, there must have been carts hauled up and down, their wheels riding in the grooves. Not now. Now there was only damp and the dark and silence.

A silence broken by a strange, trilling whistle from up ahead. It sounded vaguely familiar to Yulan, but he could not place it. Hamdan, he supposed, but what it meant he had no idea. An alarm? His stride faltered, skipped a beat.

And out of the gloom came a splinter of movement that sighed past his eyes. An arrow. He lurched to the side and pressed himself to the arching wall in time to avoid the second, and then the third that went straight and true as stooping falcons down the long slope towards the figures at the foot of the passageway. He heard at least once the distinctive thud of arrow meeting flesh, and a startled cry. After that, there was no more movement. No pursuit.

Yulan trotted on and up. His ankle ached, but not too much. The knife wound in his upper arm was throbbing, but distantly. He was alive when he could as easily – more easily – not have been. On another day, Lake would have had him. There was a unique kind of exhilaration to be had in knowing that this was not that other day. But then, it was still early.