… a walking pile of bullsh-?" The taunt was ended by a crushing blow to the stomach.
The minotaur smiled through bloodied lips. "Who wouldn't respect a man almost worthy of the Legacy?" He got a foot in the teeth for that one.
The combatants reeled back a moment, gathered their strength, and lunged. Two fists carved the air. Two jaws cracked. Two sets of eyes spun. The fighters fell in opposite directions to the floor.
Brushing off his hands, Karn walked slowly between them and to the window. He peered out past the bars. "It's going to be a quiet night."
Chapter 13
Sisay staggered onto a blood-spattered deck. She hadn't time to see whom she fought-there were only pearly tridents and lashing scales-and then she was killing them.
The cutlass she had snatched below decks slashed down. It cut kelplike hair and clove a shoulder beneath. In fountaining gore, the beast crumpled. Sisay strode over it and caught a jabbing trident. She flung the iridescent prongs to the deck, where they stuck. Sisay's cutlass buried itself in a belly of scales and gutted the creature. It spilled messily at her feet, a net disgorging fish.
Another trident lanced in above the dead creature. Its twisted tines jabbed deeply into Sisay's side.
With a cry, she fell back, slipping on gore. She crashed down atop the two creatures she had slain. Her killer-that's what this scale-faced beast was-rammed the trident deeper. Sisay struggled, writhing back and forth on the impaling spikes. A hot gush came from her side, and she slumped.
The creature's fierce face changed not a whit. It hauled its trident back and spun to attack another crew member.
Sisay lay dying among the dead. She clutched the three ragged holes in her side but otherwise could not move.
The bloody battle all around became a dreamy thing… a masked dance. These fish creatures… they were beautiful in their clamshell armor and abalone masks… Green and gold, orange and red, they danced… What bright and flashing weapons they bore! The Rishadan crew-they were beautiful too. Tall, slim, bronze-skinned… Their cutlasses flashed in the dying evening. The players circled, fish and flesh. Steel joining them. Where it bridged the races, one would fall in red singing… How alike they were, scale and skin, when they bled and died. How alike were Sisay and the fish corpses that pillowed her…
She was death dreaming, she knew. This was the delirium of dying.
Amid the chorus of screams and the circling dance, there came a surreal figure. A beast as large as a whale vaulted onto the deck and clawed its way to the center of the fight. Warriors fell back in fear. The huge beast raised its fangy head and flung back green hair.
Stranger still-tangled amid that hair was a woman. She had ridden upon the beast's shoulders and now stood there streaming. She spoke to the stilled warriors. "Children of Ramos, fight no longer!"
It was Orim. Her voice was strained from the fist of the deep, and she was sodden to the bone, but it was she. In the tongue of the Cho-Arrim, she repeated the words. The vast beast beneath her roared something in kind.
The last tridents and cutlasses ceased their dance in air.
"We are not killers, but kin. The harpoon stroke that began this fight was given in error, and the second in terror. But those wounds are healed now. Already, too many of us lie dead from those absent strokes. Let no more die-"
Sisay smiled. This was not just a death dream. Orim and her Cho-Arrim magic had made allies of enemies. Even now, merfolk stripped feral masks from their very human faces. Their vast and scaly tails divided and reshaped into slender and very human legs. Where monsters had fought moments before stood only more humans.
This was not just a death dream, no-but it was a death… Sisay's death.
The last thing she saw in the twilight of her mind was Orim's face. The healer must have finished her speech, secured her alliance, for she had climbed from the beast's shoulder and traversed the deck of dead to kneel there beside her friend.
"Good-bye… Orim…"
"You cannot go," Orim replied firmly. "Not yet." Her hands settled on Sisay's side, and warm, silver, healing fire awoke.
Ever since she was a little girl, Hanna had had an intense dislike of water. Baths had been traumatic events, punctuated with shrieks and wails. As she grew older, she resisted all attempts to teach her to swim, and even, when possible, stayed away from the beaches and bluffs that bounded the shores of her native isle of Tolaria. Aboard Weatherlight, she had, to an extent, overcome this fear. Though, she felt herself fortunate the ship sailed through air rather than water.
Standing in the main street of Saprazzo, she was happy to be on dry land-or what seemed to be dry land. The city was built within a half-submerged volcanic caldera. A semicircle of basalt mountains ringed one half of the metropolis, and a thick, stone seawall ringed the other half. Together, mountain and wall kept the sea out. Like other arriving ships, Facade had entered a channel bored through the mountainside and progressed down a series of locks to the deep harbor at the center of Saprazzo. Crews and cargoes were off-loaded there, hundreds of feet below sea level. Though the streets of the upper city were dry, they were below sea level, and every airfilled building had its foundations in deep waters. One could walk the streets above or swim the streets below. Hanna stood on dry land, yes, but it was dry land poised atop-and beneathever-present water.
It was not a great comfort for a woman with hydrophobia.
She looked out at the shimmering city. Saprazzo was a vast inverted cone extending down into the caldera. Buildings and streets formed concentric rings in their descent toward the docks and the bay. Terraced houses in polished stones overlooked the central cone. A few of these dwellings were grand and dignified, with elaborate carvings and designs over the doors. Most were simple, with trailing plants hung over the pediments. These plants often bore bright blossoms or strangely shaped fruits. It would be difficult to imagine a greater contrast to the dry, dusty streets of Mercadia or the narrow, fishy lanes of Rishada.
Along the streets moved Saprazzans. They seemed completely at home on land or in water. From the docks the navigator had beheld groups of them sporting cheerfully among the waves. Most Saprazzans looked similar, having light blue skin and thick, flowing blue hair. The women wore their hair in cascades down their backs, save when they bound it up above the nape of the neck with exquisite silver filigrees. Saprazzan hands and feet were slightly webbed between fingers and toes, and about their necks was a suggestion of gills. They breathed water and air with equal ease and could transform their legs into fins. The Saprazzans who had attacked Facade in aquatic form had transformed into terrestrial bodies at the end of the battle, and stayed that way, tending the wounded and conducting rites for the dead. These same folk now walked with Hanna, Orim, Sisay, and the Mercadian contingent down a winding avenue in the heart of the city.
Hanna found herself stopping now and again to breathe the unusual air, damp and rich at the city's center. She felt as if she were inhaling an atmosphere that had somehow become liquid.
The broad pavement along which they made their way was intersected in places by little waterfalls that descended in a series of cascades from level to level. Hanna bent down to taste the water of one, and was surprised to find it fresh and pure. She straightened and caught one of the Saprazzans watching her. He smiled and said something.
Orim moved to her side. "He says these are the source of drinking water for the people here," the Samite healer said. She herself appeared to be more at ease than at any time since she had rejoined Weatherlight's crew. Her dark, curious eyes took in every sight as they passed along the street.