The Blinding Knife

Chapter 103

Commander Ironfist had Kip and Cruxer join him on the central skimmer. Instead of heading directly for Ruic Bay as Gavin had, Commander Ironfist had them work their way up the Blood Forest coast.

Though they had only been skimming for two hours, Kip was feeling antsy. He didn’t like being trapped on a boat. He tried to enjoy the salt spray and the speed and the small towns they passed. The sea today was much calmer, and the sky was blindingly blue. The sea itself changed color with every bay and shallow.

They came upon the scout ship so fast they barely had time to split the sea chariots off. They rounded a point, and there it was, approaching the point from the opposite side, flying its broken-chain flag. Commander Ironfist was shouting orders and two of the sea chariots darted off in front of the rest of them.

The cocca was a small ship. Twenty-five paces long, with a crew of perhaps twenty and lateen sails, and six medium guns per side, balanced on the gunwales the old way instead of outfitted with gunports. It didn’t get a single shot off. A single sailor was manning the swivel gun on the front, trying to load it, when the two sea chariots passed on either side. One set its hullwrecker near the prow, the other on the opposite side near the stern. Then they broke away.

Kip could hear men shouting, and for what seemed forever, he thought that the explosives had failed.

Then they went off at the same moment. Muffled thumps blew all the way through the cocca’s hull and out the opposite side as well. There was fire, but it was quenched quickly as the ship went down.

With four wide holes in the hull, it didn’t take long. At Commander Ironfist’s piercing whistle, the sea chariots regrouped and sealed their individual boats back into place. By the time they were finished, the cocca was underwater. A dozen men and women were paddling in the water or clinging to debris.

“Commander, should we take captives for interrogation?” Watch Captain Beryl asked.

Ironfist looked at the people in the water and judged how far they were from shore. It wasn’t far. Leaving them wouldn’t be a death sentence, but Kip knew that they didn’t have the space to take captives and still continue to sink ships. “Our mission’s elsewhere,” the commander said. “By the time they could bring word back to their generals, our battles will be finished, I think.”

They left and hadn’t gone half an hour farther up the coast before a putrid smell rolled over the skimmer. It was death.

“There’s a village a league or two from here,” one of the Blackguards said. “Weedling, it’s called. I grew up just a few bays down.”

The skimmer cruised slowly into Weedling Bay and Kip was relieved to see that the village wasn’t burned to the ground. But there were hundreds of gray shapes crowded onto the beach so thickly that there was hardly any sand visible. Perhaps a dozen locals were walking across the backs of the shapes, carrying machetes and buckets.

“Are those beached whales?” Cruxer asked.

“Orholam have mercy,” someone said.

The wind brought a blast of putrefying flesh and blood to the skimmer and Kip almost gagged. He felt funny. Not just sick or disgusted, but trapped. He wanted to jump into the waves and swim. He wasn’t even sure where. It was a crazed, caged animal feeling.

“Commander,” one of the Blackguards said, “I don’t feel so good.”

“It’s just dead fish,” Ironfist said. “Kalif and Presser, draft us some oars.”

They drafted oars and oar locks and the Blackguards rowed the ship in. When they got within forty paces, the villagers finally noticed them. Some fled outright, while the others merely watched them with hooded eyes.

A tall older man with some kind of long-bladed spear that he had been using to cut into the thick whaleskin stood on a half-butchered whale with one hand on his hip. “Well, the sea she brings us all sorts of insanity, don’t she?” he said.

“Are you the conn here?” Commander Ironfist asked.

“Such as we have,” the man said.

“I’m Commander Ironfist of the Chromeria Blackguard.”

“Ironfist? Aye, we’ve heard that name here. Curious boat you have. I’m Conn Mossbeard.”

He didn’t, so far as Kip could tell, actually have moss in his beard, but it was dyed a pale lichen green.

“What happened here?” Ironfist asked.

“Something’s been building for a couple weeks, though it’s not near so strong today,” the conn said. “Livestock acting like there were coyotes in the yard, but none were, you know what I mean? Plowhorses and oxen shying from their harnesses. Horses spooked. Pigs attacking like all the sudden they thought they were javelinas. We had people injured by the score, by beasts they’d known their whole lives. We’re farmers and fishermen here, we knew something wasn’t right. Still don’t know what, though. They say great powers clash, small folk suffer, I don’t know.” He spat.

Ironfist didn’t interrupt, gestured for the restive Blackguards not to speak either. If the stench of the decaying whales hadn’t been so overpowering, Kip would have jumped off the boat.

What’s gotten into me?

“Whales beached yesterday. Heard of it before. Never seen it, and never heard of so many doing it at once. Handy placement if they’re going to do it, I thought at first. We could get enough meat and oil to last us years, but…” He pulled his tunic up and Kip saw that he had a bandage around his side. It was bloody. “I started giving orders, like I done a thousand times. People here know you got to work together for big jobs like this. But they attacked me instead. Men and women I’ve known my whole life. Attacked me and run off. The animals are gone, too. It’s like a madness came. ’Cept it didn’t hit us all. The steadiest men and women, we’re all still here. Coro over there, he used to be an idiot, had fits when he didn’t get exactly one biscuit at dawn, exactly two pieces of bacon at lunch. Now he’s as right as you or me. But them’s were normal, most of them are long gone. Don’t know where. Don’t know what to do but butcher what we can and hope this all blows over like a squall.”

“Did any of the people act… um, oddly before they went?” a Blackguard named Pots asked. He turned to Commander Ironfist. “Your pardon, Commander.”

“We’re good people here,” the conn said. “Decent. Devout.”

“People do strange things when they’re not in their right mind. Things that aren’t truly their fault,” Pots said.

The conn grimaced. Spat again. “Seemed like folk lost all sense of dec… of decoration, if you take my meaning. I saw… I saw.” He spat again. Avoided eye contact. “Folks were rutting like animals. Folks walking about nekked. Folks grunting and howling and barking. Barking. You heard people called barking mad? I thought it was jus’ something people say. I saw men I’ve known forty years barking at each other. Scared me half to death. Like they was made animals in all but body.”

“Whatever it is, it’s driving the animals mad, too,” Commander Ironfist said.

“You feel it?” Pots asked.

Most of the Blackguards mumbled agreement.

“I think we better leave,” Commander Ironfist said.

“Kip, you feel it?” Pots asked.

“Absolutely,” Kip said.

“Nerra, you?” Pots asked.

“No.”

“Commander?” Pots asked.

“Maybe a little.”

“Wil, you?” Pots asked.

Wil swallowed. “I feel half mad, to tell you the truth.”

“It’s the greens,” Pots said to Commander Ironfist. “It’s something wrong in green. Lust, loss of self-control, rebellion against authority. The Color Prince has poisoned green.”

“Atirat,” someone mumbled ominously.

“Whatever it is, it’s not only affecting drafters; it’s hitting munds and even animals,” Pots said.

“Mossbeard!” Commander Ironfist called out. “We’re doing what we can to stop it. Your folk may come back yet. All may be restored to you yet.”

Conn Mossbeard looked at them with steel eyes. “Restored? I caught my wife with another man, and when she saw me, she just laughed and kept on. I looked into her eyes and couldn’t tell if it was madness plain and simple or if the madness was letting her do what she’d always wanted.”

Ironfist said nothing.

“Go play at your wars. Go visit your plagues on someone else. It’s always the little man as pays the piper. I killed my wife, sir, the woman who stayed with me through drought and blight and fire and the death of four daughters for twenty-four years. There’s no restoration here.”

They rowed away and Mossbeard went right back to slaughtering the whale he stood on without giving them another look.

“Greens,” Commander Ironfist said without looking at any of them, “you tell me if it gets too bad. If you feel like you’re going to turn on us, tell us. I’m not going to lose anyone today, through madness or death. Understood?”

“Yes, sir,” Kip said with the rest of them.

They went all the way up the Atashian coast that day, almost as far as Ruic Head, and they sank half a dozen ships. On many of them, the sailors were in disarray, unwilling or unable to follow orders and act as coherent units. It made them easy targets, and they sank them without any trouble.

It was, frankly, frightening how easy it was. With the combination of their speed and the explosive power of the hullwreckers and the fact that the ships they were preying on were distracted and had never seen anything like the sea chariots-much less prepared for them-they sank ship after ship. But their feeling of invincibility was broken when Pots took a ball in the shoulder. They bound him up, and made it all the way to Ruic Head, where a fort towered on top of the red cliffs there, bristling with artillery that could reach far out into the narrow neck of the Ruic Bay. They approached only close enough to look at the fort’s flags-it was still flying the Atashian colors.

Commander Ironfist turned them back toward the fleet, and they made it back an hour before dusk, which was a good thing, because it took them another hour of consulting the sextant and compass and skimming and guessing and consulting the sextant and compass again to find the fleet, which was making good progress toward Ruic Head. Three days out now. Kip and the other greens were relieved to get away from the Atashian coast, though, and he could feel the madness receding as they got farther away.

They talked, and they couldn’t be certain, because measuring feelings of growing dread wasn’t exactly as simple as sliding beads, but they thought that whatever was causing the madness had to be coming from the Color Prince’s camp itself. Or from one of his ships nearby. No one seemed to want to talk about the prospect of fighting a battle when men were as likely to jump off their ships as they were to obey an order. It seemed an invitation to chaos and slaughter.

Gavin didn’t come back that night. Kip wondered if he’d died somewhere, far away and alone.

The next morning, Commander Ironfist headed out again, but this time he wouldn’t let anyone who could draft green come with him. Kip was left alone. He waved to Cruxer and grimaced at his own ill fortune. When he turned to go inside, he found himself staring at Grinwoody.

“Young master,” the slave said. “Luxlord Guile finds himself with a spare hour. He wishes to play Nine Kings with you. Attend me, please.”

It wasn’t, of course, a request.

“And if I won’t come?” Kip asked.

Grinwoody smiled his unpleasant smile. “Long swim home.”