Tying the end of the rope to his wrist, just below the manacle, he stood on the yardarm and waited. The wind snapped at his shirt and trousers, ruffed his fur, even pulled at his tail. From that high up, he could see the Wikuni on the deck of the ship, fur and feathers and scales of them visible to him as the animal-people efficiently maximized the wind with their many, many sails and caught up to the galleon at a very brisk pace. His sharp eyes caught sight of Sheba and her priest, standing by the helm just as Kern had done, and she was pointing around and shouting orders.
"Tarrin!" someone barked from the deck. He looked down, and saw that it was Miranda. Sisska was standing beside her protectively, her huge axe in her hand and ready, but the other had Miranda by the shoulder, and she was pulling her away. "What are you doing?" When he didn't answer, he could even see the surprise in her eyes from that distance. "Are you crazy?" she demanded.
Maybe he was. He wasn't really scared at what he had planned. It was more of a calm emptiness, a knowledge that he had to do it to protect his friends. He knew what he had to do, and he understood the danger involved. He wasn't about to let Sheba overrun them and either sink them or flood their decks with her pirates. He could take the fight to the clipper, and he was certain that with him on deck, they wouldn't be thinking about boarding the galleon. They'd be much too busy.
The ship was a stone's throw away. At least for him. The men aboard had abandoned some posts and taken up weapons, and several men stood on the port side with grappling hooks in hand. Sheba meant to board. That was so much the better. The group of ten men at the bow with bows were the immediate concern, for the clipper wasn't too far from coming around the shield that Dolanna had raised, and that would expose the crew to arrow fire.
It was time. He was within reach of it now.
Exploding from the squat near the mast, he raced along the yardarm, grappling hook in his paw. When he reached the edge of it, he pushed off at an angle, sending him soaring away from the ship and towards the stern, some hundred and more spans in the air. That altitude increased as he rose in an arc above the yardarm, giving him distance away from the ship, and for a fleeting moment he felt as if he were flying over the waves. But the arc reached its zenith, and he began to fall.
About halfway down towards the water, the grappling hook in his hand began to spin, and then was launched at the clipper. He was directly in front of it, almost perfectly in line with the bowsprit, and the fifty spans of rope that had been coiled in his hand zipped out and away as the grapple lanced towards the black ship. The grapple struck the foremast just above where the ropes holding the spinnaker sails were anchored. The instant it hit, he yanked on the rope, locking it into the rigging, and he tightened the slack with another tug, then grabbed the rope with both paws and heaved. The move caused him to careen towards the clipper in a sharp turn of direction, as his inhuman strength served to yank him towards the clipper.
It was going to be close. Tarrin cut the rope tied to his wrist with a claw and pulled his staff from his back even as he twisted in the air, using his cat-given agility and innate sense of where he was in the air and how he was aligned with the ground-or the sea, in this case. The clipper had been further away than he thought. He'd been aiming for the bow, but he was short. He adjusted himself for the bowsprit, the long pole extending from the bow to which the spinnaker sails and the stay lines for the masts were attached.
The landing was hard, but it was successful. Tarrin landed right at the very tip of the bowsprit, but his force caused his foot to slide out from under him. He grabbed the sprit with his free paw as he tumbled past it, and his arm yanked slightly out of its socket as his claws drove into the wood and arrested his fall. The shock shuddered through the half-healed claw wounds in his stomach, gifts from the Were-cat female, but the pain only served to focus him even more on his task. He was back on the sprit quickly, staff in hand, and he could see the archers through the ropes tied to the wooden spar. Some of them had seen him land, and they looked astonished.
There was no time to recover. Exploding from the crouch he stood in after climbing back onto the sprit, he charged directly through the ropes, cutting them with the claws on his free paw and sending sails flapping into the wind as he rushed up the length of the bowsprit. The archers began to call an alarm and turn their bows in his direction, but it was too late. He came off the bowsprit and was on the deck in a heartbeat, and two more steps brought him right into the midst of the archers. Only one had had the time to draw his bow, but the dog-faced Wikuni wouldn't have a chance to aim.
Staff in paws, Tarrin cut the Wikuni bowmen down with savage efficiency, swinging the ironwood staff with his impressive might. Every swing broke bows and bones, crushed organs, even took the heads right off a couple of his enemies. His opponents didn't have weapons to counter his staff, and he killed them all before they had a chance to run, even to draw their cutlasses. The blazing speed of his attack combined with their surprise at his appearance to doom them, and the ten Wikuni lay dead within heartbeats of Tarrin's arrival on deck. "Repel the boarder! Repel the boarder!" someone shouted ahead of him, and Wikuni that had once been gathered along the port now charged to the bow to deal with Tarrin. They were disorganized, attacking as a group of men rather than an armed body, and Tarrin grinned viciously when he saw that. The faster ones were going to reach him before the slower ones, allowing him to kill them one at a time rather than have to fight them all at once.
With an incoherent roar, Tarrin charged the armed sailors, and that made the lead Wikuni, a big lion Wikuni, stop dead in his tracks. Tarrin bored into him, knocking his sword aside and striking him with the forearm of his other paw, then picking him up and carrying him along. Tarrin heard the cracking of his ribs and the whooshing of air from his lungs as Tarrin picked him up, then used him as a living battering ram, slamming the Wikuni's back into the next closest Wikuni and driving them both to the deck. He was right in their midst then, and Tarrin's conscious mind was joined to his animal instincts, turning him into an effective, efficient killing machine.
Staff whirling, he took on the entire group of Wikuni and their cutlasses. His inhuman speed allowed him to strike and defend in the same breath, and the fury of his attack had put the Wikuni back on their heels. One Wikuni cried out as he was caught right in the belly by a broad sweep of Tarrin's staff, and was picked up and hurled overboard as the Wikuni's body offered absolutely no resistance to the force of the broad swing. Tarrin kicked a man that tried to stab him as he recovered from his swing, then his tail snapped out and struck another Wikuni in the ankle when he tried to attack him from behind, spilling the beaked hawk Wikuni to the deck. The Wikuni were overmatched, surprised, and at a loss to deal with the invader, and Tarrin took full advantage of it. Soon enough the surprise of him would fade, and they would begin to cooperate to deal with him, so he had to do as much damage as possible before they put him on the defensive. He stabbed a Wikuni in the chest with the end of his staff, and the force of his blow plunged the weapon through his breastbone like a spear. Tarrin turned and swept the staff with the body still impaled on the end into a group of four attackers, and they were driven to the deck when the body came free and bowled them over.