Siege of Stone

CHAPTER 27

The six Norukai vessels arrowed toward the harbor, their rows of oars like the legs of a centipede on the water.

Running along the docks, Captain Norcross shouted orders. He had spent many nights alone at a candlelit desk drawing up scenarios, imagining defenses against the hideous raiders. He had consulted with his fellow D’Haran soldiers, and together they had come up with many ideas, some of them ingenious, some impractical. Norcross had decided to implement everything he could. He didn’t have magic, but he did have tactics.

Now he raced to the end of the southern pier, watching his three large cargo ships move into position, ready to close like pincers around the oncoming Norukai. On the largest ship, helmed by Captain Mills, Norcross could see armed sailors crowding the rail on the starboard side. Bright pinpoints of light sparkled as a dozen archers lit pitch-covered arrows and loosed a volley that rained down on the first oncoming raider.

The Norukai scurried to extinguish the fire on the deck, but several arrows struck the dark sail, which went up in flames. Three of the raiders were killed by the burning arrows, and their crewmates quickly dumped them over the side.

The other five serpent ships pressed forward like hungry predators. Loud, bass drumbeats echoed from the raiding vessels, and Norukai warriors crowded the sides, eager to fight with swords, spears, and battle-axes. They chanted an inhuman-sounding howl.

Out on the water, bright wooden buoys marked positions. The Norukai paid them no heed, but the D’Haran engineers had practiced, setting their aim and their range, and the buoys marked the specific strike points. When the serpent ships approached the line, Norcross fought back a smile. “Catapults!” he shouted, and other soldiers picked up the order. “Catapults!” They knew exactly how and when to fire the giant boulders resting in the cradles.

Soldiers turned the heavy cranks on the siege machines, winding the cables and ratcheting the gears. Ropes groaned and long wooden beams creaked as they cocked back the catapult’s arm. Muscular fishermen loaded a boulder into the cradle, doused it with pitch, then ignited the missile. When a Norukai serpent ship passed the first marker buoy, Captain Norcross gave a signal, and the catapult loosed its stone. With a liberating snap and crash, the arm heaved upward and launched its burden. The giant flaming stone tumbled like a comet through the air.

Aboard the serpent ship, the Norukai shouted in sudden terror as the burning boulder smashed the hull. The people of Renda Bay cheered, seeing the tremendous damage. The crippled enemy ship veered to the south as the raiders struggled to regain control and put out the fires.

Meanwhile, the first vessel that had been peppered by flaming arrows also burned. The sail was nearly consumed, and now the fire spread to the decks and climbed the masts.

As raiders approached the watchtowers at the mouth of the harbor, the Norukai responded with their own fire arrows like a rain of shooting stars. Some defenders raised shields to cover their heads, but others had no such armor. Dozens of people fell, skewered as they fled for shelter.

Norcross felt isolated at the end of the pier with arrows pattering around him, thunking into the wooden boards.

The four intact serpent ships pressed in, relentless. The first raiding vessel ground up against the base of one of the lookout towers at the mouth of the harbor. Its carved figurehead smashed the head of the piers. Norukai boiled off the decks, some leaping into the water, others dropping onto the piers and surging forward.

Seeing them for the first time, Norcross was appalled. The raiders were as hideous as he had been led to believe, their mouths slashed and tattooed to look like serpent jaws, their bodies studded with spikes and horns implanted in their skin. They were monsters as terrifying as Emperor Sulachan’s undead armies, which Norcross had seen only once.

Another serpent ship crashed against the opposite pier and disgorged its army of invaders.

At the top of the twin watchtowers, the defenders shot arrows and hurled rocks down upon the raiders. From their high vantage, they should be able to massacre these invaders. Even so, Norcross felt sick as he drew his sword and ran to fight hand-to-hand. The scarred slavers didn’t seem to care how many they would lose.

Usually during raids, Kor’s warriors were like wolves chasing fat and stupid sheep, but now he saw that Renda Bay would be more of a challenge. The people were putting up a real fight and they had built unexpected defenses.

Kor let out a rumbling hiss deep in his throat. The villagers would still lose, but it would be a test for his raiders, and the Norukai liked to be tested. Harsh challenges made them stronger, just as their bleak windswept islands made them hungrier for conquest. Renda Bay’s resistance would only bring about greater retribution, and that was fine with Kor.

A flaming boulder from the second catapult hurtled through the air after the crack-smash of its released arm. The giant stone whistled overhead, and the Norukai crew on the target ship—Yorik’s vessel—used their oars in a furious but futile attempt to shift course. The projectile clipped the top of the mast, shattered the yardarm, and made the sail collapse.

Kor’s ship cruised into the small harbor, passing one of the new stone watchtowers. His vessel ground up against the nearest pier, and his fighters threw ropes to lash the vessel into place. Norukai warriors leaped from the decks and ran wildly down the docks with weapons raised.

Within minutes, they encountered a force of trained soldiers that stood against them—real soldiers, not simpering villagers, with armor and good swords. Kor resolved to claim those swords, even if he had to pry them from the bloody hands of fallen warriors.

Howling raiders slammed into the soldiers in a spray of blood and a crash of steel. These outside soldiers, strangers to Renda Bay, were well trained and not easily frightened. With some surprise, Kor watched several of his own warriors fall, cut down by the combat skills of their unexpected opponents. Dead Norukai bodies were roughly kicked into the water to get them out of the way.

For his own weapon, Kor preferred a long-handled axe with a rounded stone club on the opposite end. He swung it one-handed as he bounded onto the pier, striking viciously, left and right. He hit the first soldier who faced him, smashing his axe brutally against the steel sword. The soldier’s wrist snapped, and the man reeled away as he gaped at the strange angle of his arm, the protruding bone. Kor swung the weapon again, bashing him in the face with the rounded end. For good measure, he turned the weapon around and sank the axe blade with a wet, meaty impact into the defender’s chest. With his boot, Kor stomped on the fallen man’s ribs to yank his weapon free.

Screams of pain, howls of anger, and the clash of weapons made a deafening clamor all around him. To Kor it sounded like music.

From the watchtowers above, defenders hurled rocks and sharp javelins while archers fired a rain of arrows. Kor saw seven of his fellows drop in an instant, arrows protruding like spikes from their bodies, and he spun just in time so that an arrow merely struck his shoulder instead of his heart. When he reached back and ripped it free, the barbed arrowhead tore a wide gash in his flesh, but Kor didn’t feel pain. He was in a battle mind-set now.

The first wave of Norukai stormed down the length of the pier and into the town. Many of the homes, freshly rebuilt after the last fiery raid, were burning again, ignited by fire arrows. The defenders formed a cordon to stop the raiders from entering the town. They held swords, spears, even rakes and shovels, and their expressions were grim, determined. This was no scattered, panicked flock of cowards. The people of Renda Bay had been trained, and this surprised him. But they would all still die.

The Norukai smashed into the defenders, wielding their axes and spears. The townspeople tried to stand their ground, but they fell like harvested grain. And yet the rest of them kept fighting.

One of the officers on the opposite side of the water, a captain of some sort, shouted orders as the fifth and sixth serpent ships pushed into the mouth of the harbor, their impatient crews eager to attack. But on either side of the bay, the villagers worked huge cranks and chains, raising some unexpected weapon submerged beneath the water. Kor swung his sword instinctively to deflect the blow of a bearded fisherman who attacked him with a boat hook, but he was preoccupied with what was happening in the water. He punched the fisherman in the face, kicked him off the dock, and turned his attention back to watch.

A deadly rake of sharp metal shafts, spears lined up on a rotating hinge that had been sunk beneath the shallow harbor, began to turn, rising to the surface. Kor had never seen such a thing before. The long, deadly spikes lifted out of the water, angled directly toward the oncoming serpent ship.

Kor saw what was going to happen, but could do nothing about it. “No!” he roared. “Change course!”

The serpent ship pushed forward at full speed, driven by the coordinated sweep of the oars. On deck, several Norukai screamed a warning, and the men at the oars flailed, disorganized, but they couldn’t react quickly enough. Momentum drove the vessel ahead, and the hull rammed itself upon the parallel spikes.

Even from where he stood, Kor heard grinding and splintering as the metal points gutted the serpent ship like a fish. Nearly a hundred Norukai warriors leaped overboard, and several of them were impaled on the spikes as well. The ship was destroyed, its keel shattered, and within minutes its hold flooded, although the sharp spikes held the wreck up like a slaughtered goat hung on a meat hook.

Other raiders charged down the docks into the town, while longboats scraped up on the stony shore. Even before they landed, the Norukai men and women tossed torches onto docked fishing boats. Abandoning their vessels and splashing ashore, the burly raiders raced up the shingle to keep attacking.

Kor led his own party, killing townspeople and armored soldiers as he swept his battle-axe from side to side. He pushed deeper into the streets.

Hundreds more villagers emerged from their hiding places, bursting out of buildings where they had lain in wait. In moments, the defenders doubled in number, making the invaders’ charge falter.

Astonished, Kor howled in wordless rage. This was supposed to be a slave raid, a punitive attack to avenge the previous failure of weaker Norukai. His mission was to leave no one alive, no structure standing, but now three of his ships were already destroyed, two of them still in flames. The people of Renda Bay were not fleeing in terror. Instead, they surrounded the raiders and blocked off their escape.

He saw one of his best fighters, his own first mate, jabbing and stabbing with his spear. He killed three Renda Bay villagers, but six more closed in on him. They caught the first mate’s spear with a boat hook, drove it to the ground, and broke the shaft. The first mate fought back with both fists, his scarred jaw flapping open and closed as he snarled, as if he meant to snatch them with his teeth.

The Renda Bay townspeople knocked him to his knees, then stabbed and clubbed him to death. In that moment, as he watched the man fall, Kor began to feel fear. For the first time in his life, he sensed that he was going to lose.

Outside the harbor, Yorik’s ship was listing to the side, trying to limp away as its hull filled with water after being damaged by the catapult missile. Five landing boats full of scarred raiders ready to die fighting had already launched from the sinking ship.

The three large sailing ships outside the harbor, vessels of a type he had not seen before, closed in with inexorable momentum. Fully under sail, the three-masted ships came after the Norukai landing boats, and from their high decks, the sailors shot countless arrows and killed all the warriors who had been trying to escape. The nearest cargo ship scraped against the damaged serpent vessel, their hulls colliding. The sailors aboard leaped over the rail, swarming the deck of the damaged Norukai ship.

Kor spun about to look at the larger disaster, not just the bodies of those he had killed lying around him. Twenty more Renda Bay defenders charged down the street toward him. They didn’t look terrified at all. Rather, their eyes showed a bloodlust that Kor had previously seen only on the Norukai.

Backing away, looking for a defensible position, he glanced to the other side of the harbor, saw the professional soldiers forming a blockade, marching forward with their swords and spears to trap twenty Norukai who had no place to run. The raiders fought viciously, but failed, and their bodies dropped into the water.

Sweeping his eyes across the battlefield, Kor made a quick count. He had lost three of his six serpent ships, and two-thirds of his warriors were likely dead. It was simply not possible! If other towns learned to stand up like this, the Norukai could face defeat after defeat.

This was something entirely unexpected. Kor could not accept the idea that the Norukai were being defeated by a fishing village!

He saw Lars and Yorik, still alive, struggling to pull their crews together on the three remaining ships, and Kor knew he had to withdraw with what remaining fighters he had, with the ships that could still sail. King Grieve needed to know what had happened here. In a hoarse voice, he bellowed the signal that all Norukai dreaded to hear, a signal that had rarely been used in many centuries.

A retreat.

Kor shouted for any Norukai fighters who could break away to rush back to their ships. He would lead them from Renda Bay and back out into open water so they could limp back to the main Norukai islands.

His raiders were burned and bruised, and the fire in their hearts had been snuffed out. It might be better if he just stayed and died here, because once he reported his failure to the king, Kor would surely be sacrificed to the serpent god. But he couldn’t think of that. He had to save his warriors so they could return and fight again with greater frenzy. For vengeance.

King Grieve had to know of this terrible and disturbing new threat, even if it cost Kor his life.

He decapitated a burly villager who swung a sharpened spade at him. Kor didn’t even watch his victim fall as he sprinted back, hoping he could survive long enough to reach his own ship.