"We've got to help them!" Medd cried.
Sivi frantically untangled her weapon from the dead man's bow. "We'll need more than one toten-vec to stop that mob."
More than a toten-vec? Medd looked over his shoulder at the biggest weapon he'd ever seen. He took Sivi by the hand and dragged her along.
"Do you know how to operate that thing?" she asked, sizing up the weapon on the run.
"How hard can it be?"
The deck gun was loaded with a barbed harpoon, with a shaft as thick as Medd's thigh. The breech end of the gun was a hedge of levers, none of which were labeled.
Men and moggs were gathering on the dock.
Sivi saw the glint of sword blades among them. "Hurry!"
Medd pulled a lever. The deck gun swung left. Making a note of that, he tried the lever on the opposite side. The gun obligingly swung right. A lever between those two made the gun elevate or depress.
He hauled back on the left side control. The gun mount rotated rapidly until it was pointed dead astern. Medd let off the lever. He depressed the muzzle until the raked tip of the harpoon was pointing not at the mob of moggs menacing their friends, but at the deck below them. A bolt whizzed by his head.
"Hurry!"
Medd yanked a short lever below the three main controls and was rewarded with a spurt of vapor from the gun mount. Sivi twitched her toten-vec back and forth nervously.
"Try again!" she yelled.
On the elevation control knob was a black button. Medd pressed it.
There was a deafening blast, and the deck gun fired point blank into the rear of the ship. Sivi was thrown to the deck. The enormous harpoon barely cleared the barrel before imbedding itself below the bridge. Planking on the bridge peeled back as far as the harpoon penetrated. The impact hurled moggs through the air end over end.
Sivi sat up, holding her head. A loud clanging filled her ears, and it took her a few seconds to realize the noise was real and not coming from inside her battered brain. Medd dragged her to her feet.
He shouted something. She couldn't hear him. He put his lips close to her ear and shouted.
"They've raised an alarm! This place'll be swarming with soldiers soon!"
The breech of the gun opened automatically after firing. A brown, drum-shaped object popped out of a shute alongside the gun, and a pile of harpoons were stacked conveniently on deck. Medd staggered to the scattered pile of harpoons and manhandled one back to the gun. It wouldn't feed through the breech, so he loaded it down the muzzle. The brown drum was exactly the size of the cavity at the rear of the gun, so he inserted it and closed the breech.
Smoke from the first firing drifted across the deck to the airship dock. Dock workers had taken cover after the gun was fired, and in their place came heavily armed palace guards. Sivi used the smoke to reach the quarterdeck. Stunned, bleeding moggs lay everywhere. She had to dig under them to find her missing comrades. Khalil was dead, killed by the moggs before the gun fired. Langwin was senseless. She dragged him out and boosted him to his feet.
"You on Predator! Stand away from that gun!" shouted a voice from the dock. Medd pulled the right lever, and the harpoon thrower swung smoothly toward the voice.
"Stand away, or we'll storm the deck!"
Medd leveled the gun in the speaker's direction. He waited until Sivi appeared through the smoke with Langwin leaning on her shoulder.
"Loose!"
A wave of arrows swept the deck. Shielded by the massive gun, Medd was safe enough, but the volley caught Sivi and Langwin in the open. Langwin was hit twice. Sivi let the dead man fall and threw herself on the deck.
"What are you waiting for?" she yelled. "Let fly!"
Twenty-odd soldiers came running through the smoke, swords bared. They were in skirmishing order, so Medd depressed the gun at them and pressed the firing button.
There was a double explosion. The harpoon shaft snapped, and the barbed head plowed sideways through the attacking guards. The butt end of the harpoon shot crazily into the air, ricocheting off the dock and flying into the energy stream. It vaporized in a burst of white light and smoke.
Medd had failed to close the gun fully, firing it with the breech plug unlocked. The resulting explosion completely wrecked the gun.
Bleeding from minor shrapnel cuts to his face and hands, Medd staggered to his feet. Sivi was lying face down on the deck a few yards away. Heedless of the danger, he moved across the smoky deck to reach her. There were no obvious holes in her, but she wasn't moving. He knelt and prodded her with a bleeding finger.
"Sivi? Sivi, are you alive?"
She raised her head. "Of course I am." She stood up and dusted herself off. She coiled the toten-vec in her hand. "You're pretty dangerous with that thing."
"I ruined it."
"Good. That's why we're here."
The dock was still, though the alarm bell still pealed. The surviving rebels ran to the edge of the foredeck and rattled down the gangplank. No one on the dock was alive. The sideways spinning harpoon head had slain the entire squad.
Sivi paused long enough to salvage a pair of daggers. Medd found a sword that hadn't been bent too much by the blast and shoved it in his empty scabbard.
"Come," he said. "We must find Teynel and the others!" They reached the side stairs just as another detachment of palace guards arrived on the main lift. The rebels slipped away in the smoke, leaving a damaged but intact Predator floating easily on its moorings.
He never cried out. Greven admired him for that.
The questioning went on for hours without result. Greven and the mogg warders went through their standard repertory of branding irons, thumbscrews, and pincers. Eladamri never screamed, never begged for mercy. He cursed for a while, then fell silent. His resistance spooked the moggs, and they began to slip away from the session. By midnight no one was left in the cell but Greven and the stubborn rebel leader.
The Vec warrior poured himself a cup of tepid water. He sat down on a low stool and studied the enemy who had so long eluded him. Unlike the common soldiers of Rath, Greven never believed Eladamri had magical powers. He understood-or thought he understood-the mind of a dedicated fighter. But when Eladamri exhausted his interrogators and revealed nothing of his plans, his organization, or himself, Greven felt bereft of understanding. He was just a middle-aged elf, of no great size or physical strength. He didn't preach about freedom and liberty the way some rebel prisoners did. He said nothing. He endured.
"What's your secret?" Greven asked.
Hanging by his wrists, Eladamri twisted slowly with the torsion of the rope. He'd escaped into unconsciousness, but he was still visibly breathing.
The cell door swung open. Greven jumped up, snatching his bare sword from the table beside him. A shadowy figure stood in the entrance.
"Who's there?"
The intruder stepped forward, and Greven saw the hooded figure clearly.
"It's you," he said. "There's nothing to tell. He won't talk."
The hooded one glided into the room. Pale hands emerged from the wide sleeves and gently folded back the cowl. Greven saw the face of Furah.
"Why are you here?" he asked the Kor.
"I've been interested in this one a long time," said the visitor. "Your usual methods failed, didn't they?" Greven admitted they had. "You can't break a warrior like Eladamri by abusing his body. Someone like you, Greven, whose entire being is wrapped up in his physical form, you would have broken by now."
Greven bristled. "I am no stranger to pain."
"Pain isn't the author of submission-fear is. They're quite different. Ordinary men come to this room filled with terror because they know they will suffer great pain. Eladamri was not afraid. His spirit preserves him from mere physical suffering. To reach him, we will have to find out what he fears."