The Astrologies

Chapter 6: The Raid

"Find the wall," Renzo hissed, drawing a look from Catyan that silenced him immediately. A low fog had rolled in suddenly, obscuring the raiders and their dingy from guards and sailors, but also hiding Lighthall's galleon from them. They had become disoriented in the choppy water and now drifted somewhere near the Sea Wall, uncertain of their quarry and where dangers might lie. Talaho was at the rudder and Caia punched him hard in the shoulder, baring her teeth and pointing sharply in the direction that she thought they should go. She agreed with Renzo. They should find the wall, establish their position, then try again to find the ship.

Talaho glared at her and mouthed harsh words that she could not understand. Samyan pointed emphatically in the opposite direction and tried to communicate something with his hands. Silence was critical, the smuggler Reven told them as much as he was pushing them out into the water. It was true that sound carried across the water. There was a medley of disembodied voices from the ships anchored outside the Sea Wall. A cough here, a laugh or a mutter there, their distances impossible to gauge.

With a gesture from Catyan, everybody went still. Catyan closed his eyes. Wherever they were, they were near enough to the wall that the waves rebounding off of it buffeted them in unpredictable ways. Caia held tight to her oar as the dinghy crested a wave and slammed down into the surf. Salt stung her eyes. Beside her, Talaho mouthed an obscenity. Catyan did not react. Maybe the smuggler Reven could have gauged the distance to the wall by the shape of the waves made by incoming and rebounding water, but nobody in their crew had that ability. Five of the six of them were Islanders, so they had grown up around all manners of small ocean craft, but they were fighters, not sailors.

Catyan listened to the muffled echoing voices above them and frowned. He looked in the direction of the city, where the fog glowed bright from a hundred thousand lamp, then pointed decisively toward the black of the open sea. Immediately, four oars dipped back into the surf, and Talaho steered them toward the darkness.

Only a moment later, the hulking prow of a galleon emerged from the fog. It filled their vision, stretching as far as they could see upward and to either side. Caia knew they would collide with as soon as she saw it, but it all seemed to happen very slowly. They crested one wave and then another, and then the front of their ship crashed into the wall of wood. There was a horrible shrieking sound. Renzo went over the side and a deluge of water slammed into the bottom of the dingy. Renzo surfaced, sputtering, and was knocked further away by one wave and then another. Catyan stood, keeping his balance by sheer force of will as the dingy was pushed into the hull by each successive wave. He threw a climbing hook up into the mist and when it bit, he threw the rope to Caia.

She caught the rope and had hauled herself up far above the dinghy without a pause for thought. She was light and her arms were muscular and this was what she trained for. Then she found herself face to face with a mean-looking Islander. She started and then realized she was looking at her own reflection in the glass of a dark porthole. Her hair was cut short and oiled back and she had the scars of her father's band on her cheeks and forehead, even though she had never met any of them. Her eyes were bright but hard, with a look that might charitably be called determination, but which bordered on cruelty. Her face was delicate, her arms sinewy. 

She was accustomed to being underestimated. That was why, when Catyan threw the rope to her, she was twenty feet into the unknown before she even understood her own reaction.
All of this went through Caia's head in the space of a breath, but that was long enough for her to question what might await her in the shifting whiteness above. She put that out of her head, and with two more heaves she had herself above the fog with one hand on the ship's rail. All together, she had taken less than ten heartbeats to scale the ship, and so the first sailor she encountered was still staring stupidly at the grappling hook when she vaulted onto the deck and opened two of his arteries. She fought with a knife in each hand and no protection over her loose pants and tunic, aside from hardened leather gauntlets with strips of inlayed metal to turn an opponent's blade.

She immediately dropped to one knee and covered the sailor's mouth. He resisted weakly, but he was bleeding out rapidly. She did not see anybody else on the deck, but she heard hurried bootfalls echoing from somewhere. Above the fog, a sliver of moon and patches of stars between drifting tendrils of cloud provided enough light. The bright beams of Sea Wall beacons drifted undirected and the lamplit thoroughfares of Merendir glimmered in the distance. The disembodied decks of two other galleons and the masts of a dozen smaller vessels drifted near and far in the fog outside the Sea Wall.

She thought she heard a harsh exchange from the dinghy, but it could have come from anywhere. The rope was still slack behind her and no other hook had been thrown. The sailor stopped struggling. She had a brief horrifying thought, that she had been cruel not to look at him as he died, leaving him entirely alone in that most significant moment. As well-trained as she was, she had never actually killed before. There was typically no call for killing when guarding a rich man's estate.