Death's Mistress

CHAPTER 23

Villagers bolted in panic from the outside festival area. Some ran to their homes to seize knives, clubs, bows, and anything else they could use as a weapon. Nathan and Bannon both drew their swords and stood together next to the plank feasting tables, although the young man’s expression was far different from what Nicci had seen on his face when he fought the selka. This time, he looked disgusted as well as terrified.

The massive dark ships slid forward swiftly even though the night was without breezes. Each vessel had one mast with a single broad sail dyed a deep blue, so as to be invisible at night.

Nicci heard splashing sounds and the gruff shouts of men. Peering intensely into the night, she enhanced her vision with an obscure distance spell, which let her see that the four invading ships were propelled by long lines of oars. The oars cut into the water like axe blades and swept back to push the vessel forward, then lifted into the air dripping moonlight, and stabbed the water again.

Bannon’s voice cracked. “Norukai slavers!”

“Norukai slavers,” Holden echoed, then added his own shout. “Prepare to defend yourselves! It’s another raid.”

“What is it, my boy?” Nathan asked. “Who are they?”

“Nightmares.”

The slaver ships came in fast, crushing a small fishing boat as they ground up against the Renda Bay piers. A chorus of guttural, challenging shouts came from the longboats. With a chill, Nicci saw that each of the four curved prows sported the monstrous carving of a sea serpent, and she recognized the design from the crumbling wreck they had found in the sheltered cove on their first night ashore.

The four raider ships careened like rampaging bulls into the harbor. Bright orange streaks soared into the sky from the longboat decks, arced downward, and scattered upon the village, striking streets, rooftops, and unfortunate townspeople. Several fire arrows stuck into the lapped roofs of the houses and set the buildings on fire.

Water crews raced with buckets to stop the conflagration from spreading, while the rest of the defenders converged toward the docks, carrying whatever weapons they had. But even at a glance, Nicci could see that the villagers could never drive off such an aggressive raid. By her guess, the four Norukai ships held nearly three hundred warriors. She turned to Nathan. “It is up to us to fight them.”

He raised his sword. “My thoughts exactly, Sorceress.”

Releasing magic, Nicci ignited a bright fireball in her hand and tossed it into the air, where it expanded, growing more diffuse until it exploded high overhead like a wash of chain lightning. The glow illuminated the big serpent ships and the raiders boiling off the decks. The nearest two vessels crashed against the piers and fastened with iron hooks and heavy planks, while the raiders from the outer two vessels dropped smaller boats into the water and rowed toward the shore.

Jann and her husband Phillip accompanied Nathan as they braced themselves for the attack. Jann cried, “Spirits save us!”

“I will save you,” Nicci said.

The wizard turned to the retired fisherman. “Are your people at war with the Norukai? Why do they attack Renda Bay?”

“We are prey to them,” said Phillip, his face haggard. “Normally, they dart in with a single boat, snatch five to ten victims, and flee into the night. But this … this is a full invasion.”

“Then we arrived just in time,” Nicci said.

Norukai warriors thundered across the docks, rushing to the village, while others jumped out of landing boats and sloshed up from the shallow water to shore, carrying clubs, ropes, and nets.

The sorcerous illumination dissipated overhead, but Nicci’s magic swelled. She stretched her mind in one direction, tapping into Additive Magic and the energy there, while she also drew upon Subtractive Magic. Combining both, she conjured jagged lashes of black lightning, which she whipped against the first three invaders who reached the end of the docks. Her lightning ripped their broad chests into smoking wreckage, and the burly men collapsed into a heap of bones.

Despite this unexpected attack, the slavers showed no hint of fear or even caution. They charged forward, sneering at her lightning, arrogant in their invincibility. A team of four left their landing boats and waded to the beach.

Nicci killed the next wave of them as well.

The Norukai were squat men with disproportionately broad shoulders, shaved heads, and bare arms, and they wore vests of scaled armor made of some reptile skin. Most horrific, their cheeks had been slit from the corners of their lips back to the hinge of the jaw, then sewn up again, as if to widen their mouths like a snake’s. Now, as they roared their fearsome battle call, their jaws opened wide, as if they were vipers about to strike. Only a few Norukai carried swords or spears, while the rest obviously expected to subdue and capture their victims, not to kill. They meant to harvest the people of Renda Bay.

A second rain of flaming arrows launched from the deck of a Norukai ship, pelting the village. By now several healthy fires were spreading among the wooden buildings, and when Nicci saw a blaze jump from one rooftop to the next, she flung out her hand and summoned her control of air and wind. Her directed blast swept the flames away, and as she pulled it back, she sucked away all the oxygen and extinguished the fire.

Nathan looked at her and groaned. “I can no longer help you in that way,” he said, gripping his sword. “But I will do my part, even without magic.” He ran beside Bannon, both of them holding their blades high as the muscular slavers charged ashore. As he prepared to fight, the young man had a strange look in his eyes—though not of fear. He seemed obsessed.

The villagers of Renda Bay had their own swords and spears, but did not seem skilled in their use. Holden shouted orders and ran bravely to meet the surge of attackers, although he had no tactical plan.

Nicci watched the fourth raider ship grind up against another dock, splintering wood as the invaders shouted. She did not intend to let them make it to shore. No longer crippled by poison, her command of magic was at its peak strength, and she could do more than summon wind or lightning.

She called forth a large roiling ball of wizard’s fire, a molten sphere that she hurled at the prow of the ship just as the Norukai lashed up against the damaged pier. The magical blaze incinerated the carved serpent figurehead and billowed back over the bow. Flames spilled across the deck and ignited fifteen of the armored slavers. They shrieked as the skin boiled off their bones, and their ugly, slitted mouths yawned open in a scream so wide their jaws cracked.

Wizard’s fire could not be easily extinguished, and it burned the ship’s deck boards, set the tall mast on fire, and ignited the midnight-blue sail, which roared up in flickering orange curtains. When she had used weaker balls of wizard’s fire during the selka attack on the Wavewalker, the storm and the washing waves had mitigated the fire, but here at the Renda Bay docks, the magical flames burrowed through the raider deck and ate through the hull.

Many Norukai leaped overboard, some with skin on fire. The ship went up like a blazing beacon. The death wails of the burning enemy satisfied Nicci. Although she had changed since then, those screams reminded her of when she had burned Commander Kardeef alive, roasting him on a spit in front of the people of a newly conquered village, just to prove how ruthless she could be.

By now, hundreds of Norukai had made their way into town. Raising their clubs and nets, they met the villagers who fought back with any weapon at hand. The hideous warriors showed no fear, and they were far more skilled with their cudgels and nets than the villagers were with their seldom-used weapons.

The slavers threw weighted nets on a group of three men who harried them with pikes and swords. Entangled, the men stumbled and thrashed, trying to throw off the strands, but the Norukai swarmed over them and clubbed them until they were stunned. It seemed to be a well-coordinated operation. Once the three men were beaten senseless, the Norukai bound and trussed them like wild animals. They picked up the fresh captives, one at each man’s feet, one at each man’s arms, and hauled them back aboard the nearest raiding ship.

Flaming arrows continued to soar through the air like shooting stars. Nicci tried to extinguish them one by one before they could fall upon new fuel, and she struggled to take care of other fires as well, but she could not keep up. There were hundreds of flashpoints. The Norukai seemed intent on destroying the whole town, strictly to cause chaos so they could snatch more victims. The slavers moved like professional hunters rather than a well-ordered army, ranging free and looking for targets. They swarmed into the town.

* * *

Nathan told himself that a blade could be as deadly as an attack of magic, so long as it was wielded by a skilled swordsman. His new shirt was loose, comfortable, and clean … for the moment. He charged into the front ranks of the burly Norukai, sweeping his sword sideways.

Beside him, Jann and Phillip recklessly joined the fray. Phillip carried a long hooked pike that he had used as a fisherman. He threw it like a harpoon and skewered one of the slavers through the sternum. Even though the hideously scarred man was dead with his heart punctured, he clawed at the shaft before he fell still.

Though she was small, Phillip’s wife was nimble. Jann darted among the attackers with a long butcher knife, hacking at the arms of one slaver, slicing open the side of another. Blood ran down his exposed ribs.

Nathan swung his sword with both hands, using all his strength, and his blade went right across the wide-open mouth of one of the grotesque Norukai, slicing off the top of his head. Next to him, Bannon became a whirlwind, not even watching where he hacked and cleaved. Even the slavers backed away from the young man’s mad, uncontrolled attack.

But the Norukai were not deterred for long. They let out a hissing growl as if it were a strange war cry, and a new group of invaders pushed forward, carrying long spears. Each weapon was tipped with the ivory tusk of some unknown animal, carved into serrated edges. As the front ranks of slavers swept in, holding thick clubs, the spear throwers took their stances and identified the centers of resistance.

Town leader Holden stood on top of one of the plank tables in the festival square and shouted to rally his people. “Stand up to them! Do not let them take our wives and children! Don’t let—”

One of the spear throwers cocked back his arm and flung the shaft with a mighty heave. The weapon whistled through the air and buried itself in Holden’s abdomen. The blood-smeared tusk sprouted from his back.

At the front lines, Nathan slashed with his sword, first to the left and then to the right, chopping off arms and stabbing through rib cages. He looked up just in time to see a spear hurtling toward him. He felt a ripple inside, a twinge that he thought might be a spark of magic. He reached into himself, trying to grasp it to deflect the spear. A simple, instinctive spell. Time seemed to move so slowly … but the flicker of magic vanished, snuffed out. The magic abandoned him again, and he was helpless.

Bannon grabbed his arm and yanked him sideways, and the spear whistled past. “Watch yourself, Nathan. I need you alive to help me kill more of these animals.”

The vitriol in his voice shocked Nathan. Something seemed to have been triggered inside him. The young man’s eyes were wild, his lips drawn back, and his normally cheerful smile had now become a death’s-head grimace. Blood flecks were more prominent than the freckles on his face.

Bannon leaped forward, paying no attention to the clubs and nets and blades of the slavers. His ginger hair flew wild, and he howled wordlessly as he hacked through the neck of one squat man, then cleaved the shoulder of another. “Animals!” he shrieked.

A vicious slash from Sturdy opened the guts of another attacker, who sneered down at his snakelike entrails and reached out to grab Bannon’s sword hand. But the young man tore himself away and spun to chop off the slaver’s arm, and in an unthinking malicious retaliation, he cut off the other arm, so that both stumps spouted blood onto the man’s exposed entrails.

“You’ll get yourself killed, my boy,” Nathan cautioned. He ran after Bannon, trying to keep up as the Norukai closed in on this unexpectedly wild attacker.

One of the enemy spear throwers hurled his weapon at the young man, but Nathan swept his sword just in time to strike the wooden shaft with a loud clack, knocking it aside. The ivory-tipped spear flew at an angle, ricocheted, and buried itself between the shoulder blades of another advancing Norukai.

Closing around the seamstress Jann, the slavers threw a net over her. She tugged at the strands, driven to the ground. She used her bloody knife to cut herself free, peeling the net away, but two muscular Norukai stooped over her and raised their clubs to beat her senseless.

Nathan came up behind them and stabbed one slaver in the back. When his partner turned to glare at Nathan, Jann freed her arm and plunged the butcher knife deep into the slaver’s calf. Roaring, he reached down to grab at the knife, and Nathan sliced off his head with one clean blow. The old wizard quickly pulled away the remaining strands of the net, freeing Jann. The small woman crawled out, exhausted and shaking.

Her husband strode up, covered with blood and filled with gratitude. “You saved her. Thank you, Wizard,” Phillip said. He reached out for his wife—just as one of the falling fire arrows struck him in the back of the neck. The steel arrow point, still covered with gobs of flaming pitch, sprouted from the hollow of his throat. Phillip reached up and grasped the arrow as if annoyed that it had distracted him from his reunion. Jann screamed, and Phillip turned to her, his eyes wet and longing, then collapsed, dead.

Bannon howled at the sky, slashing with his sword at the falling rain of fire arrows. He threw himself upon two more Norukai with such fury that they staggered back, and Nathan was forced to help him, leaving Jann to sob over her fallen husband.

* * *

Blazes had begun to spread through the town. Nicci extinguished as many fires as she could, but that was a losing battle for now. She realized that if she could not drive away these attackers, it wouldn’t matter if Renda Bay burned.

The villagers made a good accounting of themselves, though by now at least thirty had been beaten into unconsciousness, trussed, and dragged to the first raider ship. Dozens of Norukai swarmed back aboard, stomping on the decks. Loud drumbeats rumbled through the hold, and the oars lifted and lowered as the galley slaves were forced to back the ship away from the dock.

Nicci summoned more black lightning and brought it down, killing six Norukai who thought themselves safe aboard the retreating ship. She didn’t think she could stop the vessel from escaping, so instead she devoted her efforts to the remaining raiders on the shore.

Well over a hundred slavers still attacked. They had seen Nicci and her powers, and a few seemed to have decided that the beautiful, powerful sorceress would be a worthy slave. They were fools.

One monster-jawed slaver swung a mace tipped with a ball and chain, while two others held up their nets, closing in on Nicci from either side. They must have thought she would be an easy target.

She didn’t have time for this. She stretched out her hand, pointing from one slaver to the next, and the third, in quick succession, stopping their hearts cold. They fell dead in a tangle of their own nets.

She panted, catching her breath, flexing her fingers. She had enough strength to summon another blast of wizard’s fire. She could ignite the retreating slaver ship, but that would kill everyone aboard, including the new captives. Would they prefer that fate? That was not for her to decide. No, she would fight the Norukai here.

Nicci called up wizard’s fire and, instead of concentrating it in a ball, flung a fan of deadly magical flames at the line of advancing slavers, spattering at least thirty of them. The relentless inferno did not sputter out. Even a glob of wizard’s fire no larger than her thumbnail would burn and keep burning until it burrowed its way through its victim.

Writhing and screaming, the Norukai fell like trees in a forest blaze. Even though she felt depleted from expending so much magic, Nicci called normal fire and sent it through the air until it struck the sails and masts of two more ships, setting the dyed fabric on fire. Soon, the raider vessels were engulfed in flame.

Nathan and Bannon had each killed fifteen or twenty slavers themselves. They continued to attack with their swords, as did hundreds of shouting, angry villagers. The Norukai spear throwers hurled the last of their shafts into the crowd, indiscriminately choosing targets.

With the last of her strength, Nicci sent out a wall of wind, a solid battering ram of air that knocked the burly Norukai backward. With the angry armed villagers storming toward them, the slavers at last retreated.

As the Norukai frantically tried to extinguish the burning sails on their ruined ships, the attackers piled onto the last vessel with shouts and curses. Accompanied by threatening drumbeats, the slaves at the oars began to push the serpent craft back, tearing the ships free of the piers, leaving wreckage behind.

Nicci took out her knife and saw she had more work to do. She didn’t need magic to kill the stragglers left behind when their raiding ships retreated. She and the villagers still had a long night ahead of them.