He was in his groundling form. From the way his eyes blinked and his captors seemed to be holding him upright, Moon knew the damp patches on the front of his shirt must be Fell poison, recently forced down his throat. He couldn’t see the scale pattern on Merit’s skin, but the play of light and shadows might conceal it.
Merit trembled, watching Moon with wide eyes. Moon said, “Bramble, Delin, and Callumkal?”
“All alive and well,” Vendoin said, before Merit could answer. “Please speak only Altanic. If you speak to each other in your own language I will have Merit killed.”
So Bramble and the others were alive, but maybe not so well. In Altanic, Moon said, “Merit, are you and the others all right?”
“I don’t know.” His voice was hesitant and a little husky. “I don’t know where Bramble is. I haven’t seen Delin in—”
Vendoin interrupted, “That’s enough.”
Moon suppressed a snarl. He hoped that meant they had been held separately on the flying boat, and not that Bramble was dead.
Vendoin said, “Of course you don’t have these hypothetical maps and papers with you?”
“Hypothetical?” Moon wondered if this was an attempt to test him. He thought the fact that no one had tried to take him prisoner yet was a good sign. “If you didn’t want the scholar’s writing why did you stop there to kill her?” He heard Bemadin’s sharp breath, and other Hians glanced at Vendoin. He added, “Did you have to kill everyone in the house? The kids, too?”
Her voice tight and harsh, Vendoin said, “We did not kill them.”
Another Hian moved uneasily, something uncertain in her body language. This was obviously a topic of some dismay among them. Either there had been disagreement over whether to kill the scholar or not, or . . . Maybe her and her children’s deaths had been an accident, somehow. “They were pretty dead when we saw them,” Moon said.
“It was unintentional,” another Hian said. The Hian added, “I am Lavinat. You speak for the Raksura?”
“I speak for the Indigo Cloud Court, and the families of Delin-Evran-lindel of the Golden Isles and Callumkal of Kish-Jandera.” It might help to remind the other Hians that it wasn’t just them against the savage Raksura. “How do you unintentionally kill a whole house full of groundlings?”
Vendoin tried to answer and Lavinat spoke over her, “It was the weapon. I assume you know all about it.”
Something about Lavinat made Moon wonder if it was still Vendoin who was in charge here. “I know it kills Fell. If that’s what you want to do with it, it’s none of our concern.”
Her voice low, Bemadin said in Kedaic, “Don’t bargain with him. They will kill us.”
Vendoin ignored her. “Where are the papers you took from the scholar’s home?”
“Her friend’s home, the Bikuru,” Moon corrected. He knew the Hians must have searched the scholar’s house. “Stone has them.”
Vendoin didn’t seem surprised. “He will give them to us in exchange for you.”
“Or you could use the weapon and take them off his body,” Moon said.
Vendoin said, “We prefer not to waste the weapon.”
Then Lavinat stepped forward. “You haven’t asked us to release our captives yet. I find that very strange, that you stand here and bargain. As if you are waiting for something to happen.”
There was a murmur of confusion from the other Hians.
Moon tilted his head. Lavinat was clever. That could be a problem. Footsteps ran frantically down a corridor somewhere behind the cabin, so it was time to end the conversation anyway. Bemadin glanced at Lavinat, and said, “What does that mean?”
Lavinat said, “It means he’s trying to distract us.”
Moon flung himself backward and shifted in one motion. Someone shouted and he bounced up off the bow deck just as the wooden disks from fire weapons landed beneath him. The fault of the weapon was that once the disk was fired, the wielder couldn’t change the aim. Fire splashed on the deck, rippling across the soft surface as Moon landed on the platform next to the steering cabin. The Hians had already fled back inside, dragging Merit with them. Two armed with fire weapons still stood on the platform. Moon slammed one off, caught the other by the throat, ripped the weapon out of her hands, and tossed her over the side. Then he swung up on top of the cabin roof before any of the Hians inside had a chance to shoot at him.
The tricky part was not giving them time to threaten to kill Merit. Though shooting Merit without injuring any of the Hians near him would have been difficult anyway, as even the small fire weapons had never been meant for close quarters fighting.
Moon rolled across the cabin roof and braced himself on the edge. From here he had a view down into the open cubby against the boat’s starboard side, the one that housed the distance-light and the large fire weapon, big enough to repel major kethel. The two Hians at the station looked outward, expecting another attack from the air.
Peripherally aware that a Hian had climbed to the top of a cabin toward the stern and was aiming another bulky fire weapon at him, Moon fit his claw into the first trigger of his stolen weapon and pulled. Wooden disks shot out of the nozzle and landed in the mossy material of the cubby, and on the big fire weapon. The two Hians looked up in horror as Moon hit the second trigger and fire streamed out.
Moon rolled away as the large fire weapon thumped and the whole boat jerked sideways, like a giant fist had punched it. You can’t let them hit each other, a groundling had told him turns ago, on a trade road within the Kish border, when he had asked why the weapons guarding the camp were spaced so far apart, nothing else can catch one on fire. As the boat swung around, the Hian taking aim at him from the other cabin roof staggered and fell. She struck a lower platform railing before vanishing into the darkness on the port side.
Moon rolled back as smoke poured out of the hull. The cubby now hung sideways, connected only by a few broken stem-beams, and the steering cabin windows on that side were shattered. The two Hians in the cubby, their weapon, and the distance-light were nowhere to be seen. He shoved up to a crouch and by pure luck avoided a scatter of wooden disks that hit the spot where he had been lying. He grabbed the top frame of the broken window and swung around to flip himself through.
Moon landed on the steering cabin floor to see the Hians inside either ducking for cover or staring out the starboard window at what remained of the firing cubby. Merit huddled in the back corner, two Hians atop him, though Moon wasn’t sure if they were pinning him there or had fallen on him when the weapon exploded.
He grabbed one by the shoulder and the other by the neck and flung them into the group on the far side of the cabin. In his peripheral vision he caught sight of Lavinat crumpled at the base of the wall, but he didn’t see Vendoin. He snatched a fallen fire weapon from the floor as Merit flailed to stand. Then he grabbed Merit up and slammed through the door into the inner corridor.
Bramble had to cram herself into a storage cubby not much bigger than her body to hide from the searching Hians, but finally they moved on. She squirmed out, crept back down the stairwell and to the corridor where their cage was.
But when she reached it, it was unguarded and empty. They moved Merit, she thought, obviously, you idiot, and resisted the urge to rip at the walls. They would be using him as a hostage against her.
She went forward, back to where Delin’s cage was. Maybe in the confusion he had been left with only one or two Hians to watch him. But she heard voices in the corridor ahead and hurriedly dropped down a narrow set of stairs. She found herself in a cramped, low-ceilinged corridor, with ceramic containers on either side that stunk so strongly of moss it blotted our every other scent.