Now it was his turn to attack. Keeping low, he crawled up the tumbled sand and peered through a clump of beach grass. To the north was nothing but a swirling gray-brown wall, fed by fires both afloat and ashore, with the northern breeze drifting the murk thicker and thicker toward where he lay. He could see nothing and hear little to suggest how the battle was going elsewhere. He cared even less, for his own private fight was not yet finished.
Cayla herself now stood ankle deep in the water, entirely nude. The two great serpents were coiled up on the beach in front of her, with perhaps the rear thirty feet of their bodies still submerged and their vast heads swaying gently back and forth some ten feet above the sand. Their mouths open and shut as she spoke to them in the half-bark, half-hiss Blade now knew so well. Behind her, drifting in toward shore, bobbed a great tangle of planks, spars, and canvas. Blade rose to his knees and hefted a spear. It was not his preference to kill an unarmed woman, but far too many attempts to kill him lay between them, and from this distance it would in any case be folly to try for a disabling shot. He might well miss entirely and have the serpents on him in seconds. He sprang to his feet and hurled the spear.
It was a good throw but not good enough. The spear grazed Cayla's hip and skittered into the water behind her. Before the ripples of its fall had vanished, she spun about, thrust out a hand toward Blade, and screamed out triumphantly. Blade snatched up the second spear and ran at the nearer serpent before it had time to uncoil most of itself. The head was still hovering uncertainly in the air as the flaring red eyes sought to focus on its prey when Blade ran in under that head, leaped as high as he could, and thrust the spear into the monster's throat.
Again a death-hiss tore at Blade's ears, again the fumes of the thing's blood tore at his lungs and stung his skin. He let go of the spearshaft barely in time to avoid being hurled into the air, as the monster reared up with the spear still embedded in its throat and lunged toward the sea. But he did not avoid its flailing coils entirely, as a yard-thick section of body whipped out and slammed into him hard enough to hurl him to the sand.
He saw the other monster rear up, clawed frantically backward to get at the remaining spear, then heard Cayla's cry of triumph change to a gasp and a bubbling scream. He lurched to his feet with the last spear in his hand and saw Cayla staggering, the point of a pike jutting from her body just below the left breast. A blood-smeared, smoke-blackened figure stood just behind her, and as Blade watched the figure jerked the pike free and thrust it into Cayla again. This time she went face down into the water, which instantly turned red about her thrashing limbs. As the figure stood over her and raised the pike for a third thrust, Blade recognized the face, darkened as it was by blood, smoke, and rage.
«Brora! Enough!»
«Captain Blahyd!» Brora turned, showed white teeth in a smile, and took a single step toward Blade. Then the last serpent, no longer under the control of its dying mistress, no longer responding to anything except hunger and rage, turned and noticed the two figures almost beneath its head. The head dipped, lunged downward, and Brora's final scream mingled with Cayla's as both vanished in a flurry of water. The creature's jaws snapped shut and blood began to spread in the water; then Blade sprinted across the sand and through the water to drive his last spear into the snake's eyesocket.
It reared up in a final agony, letting its prey drop as the blood-dripping jaws sagged open. Blade had one good look at what Cayla and Brora had become, then turned and ran as though the flames of hell were licking at his heels, back onto the dry beach, back up the slope and down the other side into the tent. There, and there only, he finally collapsed, too spent even to be sick, too deaf to the world to hear the final thrashings of the last of Cayla's monsters.
What broke into his semi-oblivion was an unexpected but not unfamiliar sound-the sound of somebody calling cadence, accompanied by the rhythmic thump of a large body of men coming down the beach in step. Such a style of marching did not suggest to Blade a mob of fleeing pirates or camp-followers. It was with as much jauntiness as his sagging limbs could muster up that he went out to greet the approaching men.
It was no surprise to see two companies of the Royal Guard of Royth coming down the beach at full march-step, weapons drawn and scouts thrown out in front. But what was a surprise was to see Tralthos tramping along at their head. And Tralthos was equally surprised when he recognized the preposterous figure that tottered into view, naked as the day of its birth, as the Constable Blahyd.
Blade had regained enough energy and had enough sense of the dignity of the occasion to keep from falling on his face a second time as he and Tralthos embraced each other and pounded each other on the back. But after that he had to sit down, and Tralthos followed him. They squatted on the sand while Tralthos told Blade of the great victory of Royth.
«We got out of the Keltz as easy as eating a gooseberry tart and hugged the coast all the way south, moving by night. Last night we sent some tough lads ashore from the fleet to take out the sentries on that little peninsula up north-«Blade nodded as Tralthos pointed «-and mounted some of our engines up there. This morning, we got the galleys around the point and in through a deep passage the local pilots knew about but the pirates didn't. Then we just rolled up their line from the north while the merchantmen went farther out and kept their big ships from getting away. I think we must have sunk or burned or captured more than three hundred ships. The admiral decided a couple of hours ago we might as well land some troops to clean up the camp, so he ran the transports inshore and unloaded the two battalions of the Guard he had along.»
Blade nodded. As with any brief account of a great battle, he knew that Tralthos was leaving two-thirds of it out. But Blade was not sure that his fogged mind and aching head could take in any more. But also:
«What about the army?»
Tralthos' grin broadened still further. «Horsemen with messages rode over the bluff not half an hour ago. Said we'd put four brigades between the pirates and the beach and the other five on their front and right. If they're smart, they'll surrender now. If not, it'll take a while to kill them all, but there won't be anything left but bandits in another two weeks.»
Blade nodded again. He had no more questions at this point and no energy to ask them even if he had. But Tralthos was going on.
«Pelthros is on his way back to High Royth posthaste. Can't wait to get back to his crafts, I wager, now that he doesn't need to be a big fighting man any more. He'd still rather leave that to people like you and me. But you'll be getting more rewards for this, believe me! He'll be lucky if the people let him get away with making you a count! And when you marry Alixa-«
But Blade suddenly could no longer hear the cheerful soldier. The ache in his head suddenly flared up to the point of driving in on his fatigue-dulled consciousness, flared to an agonizing wrenching as the computer reached out across the dimensions to snatch him home. He could no longer even sit; he was falling face down on the sand.
Then the sand that he was digging up with his clawing fingers and toes turned completely over, and he was clinging to the roof of a vast chamber, filled with a murky green vapor that curled about him. Half-hidden in the vapor, Tralthos and his soldiers hung head-down from the same ceiling, like bats from the ceiling of a cave. And then they were bats, squeaking and beating their wings and darting off to become lost in the darkness.