“Not yet,” Drake said with a manic grin. “Hold the damned line.”
Tanner looked like he was about to argue.
“Hand me a torch.”
Tanner growled, but turned and pulled a torch from the hands of one of his crew.
Drake placed the sack of coconuts behind him and pulled out one of the little weapons, grinning at the confused look on Tanner’s face. With a wink, Drake held up the fuse to the torch and the little bit of rope started fizzing.
“What the fuck is that?” Tanner said, recoiling back from the coconut.
“History,” Drake said. He waited another second and then rolled the coconut quickly along the ground towards the approaching knights. It bounced once, but held together and disappeared amidst the men’s steel-plated legs. Drake grinned even wider. Two more seconds passed.
Boom!
The explosion was loud and violent and threw knights and soldiers alike to the ground, stunning everyone in the area. A mist of blood shot up into the air before raining down along with the odd limb. Then the screaming started.
Tanner was the quickest to recover, and he shouted at his men to push the advantage. His crew surged forwards, and as the stunned knights and soldiers struggled to recover from the blast, the pirates fell upon them, stabbing and slashing and revelling in the bloody massacre.
Drake reached into the sack for another coconut.
The soldiers fanned out, attempting to surround Beck. She let them. The two dead men at her feet and the three arrayed around her had proven how deadly an opponent she was, and no doubt the soldiers would now attempt to rush her all at once from all directions. Beck took the opportunity to reload one of her pistols and slotted it back into her jerkin. At most she had ten shots left, including those already loaded, and given that more soldiers were arriving to skew the numbers even further in their favour, it wouldn’t be enough to win the fight for her.
There was fighting all along the beach as soldiers attempted to quickly best the pirates they’d found in the sand and join the fight in the town, no doubt hoping to crush the townsfolk from behind as they dealt with the force coming from the jungle. The pirates on the beach weren’t inclined to let the Five Kingdoms soldiers act on their plan, however, and there were dozens of small skirmishes taking place even as Beck now held up the largest force.
Twenty men faced her, closing in slowly.
She was tired. Days of hard labour and heavy use of strength-augmenting blessings had taken their toll, but she was an Arbiter, trained by the Inquisition and made into a weapon against the heresy of the world. The men facing her might not be heretics, but nor were they righteous, and that made her worth a hundred of them. She would prove it on the beach of New Sev’relain.
Volmar’s power coursed through Beck’s body, and she began to chant the words of a sorcery. She knelt down and whispered the magic into the sand. It rippled around her like a pebble dropped into a still pool. The ripples spread quickly outwards until they reached the circle of soldiers, and the sand erupted upwards, engulfing some of the men while others stumbled backwards.
Beck was already moving even as the first grains shot into the air. She set off at a sprint, straight ahead towards her first target, her speed enhanced by the blessing she chanted. The first soldier, a small man with a crooked nose and hairy palms, had been one of the smarter ones, stepping backwards away from the wall of sand. Beck leapt as she neared the wall and crashed through it as the grains of sand reached their zenith and began to fall. The man recoiled, but it was too late for him. Beck whispered a blessing of strength and his helmet and skull both crumpled under the force of her pistol as she brought the butt down on his forehead. Men were already shouting, and Beck caught at least one of them screaming something about a witch. It only served to enrage her further that the fools might consider she was the heretic.
Wrenching her pistol free from the swaying corpse, Beck flipped it over, aimed at another soldier, and pulled the trigger. The noise rang loud in her ears, and before she could witness the result she was already racing towards another fight.
Drawing a second pistol, Beck batted away a soldier’s attempt to skewer her with his sword. She thrust her first pistol into his throat and watched his eyes bulge as his windpipe collapsed. As the last of the sand fell to the ground around her, Beck launched a kick into the dying soldier’s gut and he flew away from her, rolling in the sand and thrashing like a beached fish.
Two of the soldiers were fleeing from the fight while four more were down, choking on sand. The others looked panicked. One man shouted out to the others, getting them into order. Beck wasn’t about to let them get organised. She slid one of her pistols back into its holster on her jerkin and pulled the much larger pistol gun from her belt holster, aimed at the soldier shouting orders, and pulled the trigger. His chest erupted in pink mist and his body crashed into the sand.
In a mixed display of cowardice and valour, some of the soldiers broke and ran while most of them charged her. Beck holstered both her pistols and whispered Volmar’s power into a sorcery, and fire burst into life in her right hand. She threw the little flame up into the air above the soldiers, already knowing it would drop down on top of her target and quickly engulf the man as he attempted to flee. Into her other hand she whispered another sorcery, and thrust it into the sand.
Mimics of Beck’s hand shot out of the sand in front of her, clutching and grabbing hold of anything they could find. Some soldiers tripped and others crashed to the ground. Four soldiers still came at her unimpeded, and Beck just managed to draw two of her pistols before the first man was on her.
Ducking his sword swing, Beck thrust a pistol butt into the man’s gut then whipped it up, cracking his jaw and sending him stumbling backwards with a howl of pain. She trained another pistol on the second of the oncoming soldiers and pulled the trigger. The bullet ripped through the man’s shield and he fell away, screaming.
Holstering the empty pistol, Beck stepped into the third soldier’s attack so that it went wide, whispering a sorcery to her empty left hand while blocking the fourth soldier’s attack with the pistol in her right hand. She pressed her left hand against the chest of the third soldier and he crumpled, screaming in pain as his stomach started convulsing.
The first soldier had recovered and was charging at her. Out of the corner of her eye, Beck saw yet more soldiers hacking at the sandy hands that held them. She disengaged from the fourth soldier and met the first in a blind run, and they both crashed to the ground in a tangle of limbs.
Beck was up first, already whispering to her hand again. As the first soldier gained his feet, she tapped her hand against his head. His expression went blank as his consciousness fled. She drew her last loaded pistol from her jerkin, pressed it against the soldier’s neck, and fired. The bullet ripped through his flesh and buried itself in the fourth soldier as he came towards them. Both men dropped to the sand, dead.
Beck looked about for the pistol she’d dropped when she collided with the soldier, but wherever it had fallen, she couldn’t see it. Some of the men delayed by her sandy hands were now free and were busy extricating the others. Beck took the opportunity to reload her large pistol as well as four of the smaller ones. It was all she had left.
Her head swam with exhaustion and the effort of channelling Volmar’s power, and her legs were wobbling. But there were still seven soldiers left, three of them already free from the sand. Two of them held shields, crouching behind them as the third worked to free his comrades. Beck wished she had some runes or charms, but most of those, and everything else that would be useful, were in her Arbiter coat stashed safely in her cabin aboard the Fortune.