He ordered the Fury onto the proper heading, and, barking a word of command, jerked the wind back into her sails when some other spellcaster sought to redirect it for his own purposes. A Turmishan ship changed course to intercept the galleon, but fortunately, he had sahuagin swimming around her like outriders, and when he spoke to them in their own snarling, burbling tongue, magic carried the sound to their ears.
The shark men converged on the enemy vessel and, dropping the tridents that would otherwise have hindered their climbing, swarmed up the sides to attack with fang and claw. It was a suicidal assault, but it kept the Turmishans busy while the Fury passed by, and shortly afterward, the ship of the Treefather’s Chosen emerged from the grayness and the rain.
Unlike Evendur’s vessel, she wasn’t a galleon or a grand galley, either, just a caravel. Still, she was plainly a formidable warship, not that it would help her now.
For now was the time for all the brutal, sudden, overwhelming strength that Evendur could muster. He roared a word of power and shook his boarding axe at the caravel. A wave reared up behind her, taller than her mainmast, then crashed down on top of her. The water felt like his own prodigious hand, first trying to swat the ship to splinters, then to grab whatever was left, roll it over, and drag it to the bottom.
But to his irritation, the magic of the enemy Chosen opposed him. He hadn’t caught his foe by surprise. Druidic power attenuated the force of his blow and weakened his grip. When the attack ended, the caravel was still floating upright.
He knew why. For an instant, he’d sensed two additional Chosen of Silvanus. They were ashore somewhere but still lending power to their ally.
Yet even so, that first attack had nearly succeeded, and he saw no reason to allow his foe time to recover the strength to withstand another. Seeking the Treefather’s Chosen, he studied the enemy ship.
The small man in armor that looked like a coat of leaves was almost certainly an accomplished druid. But it was the woman beside him, white-haired but still straight-backed and sturdy-looking, who was plainly Chosen; Evendur could feel the spark of divine power smoldering inside her. Glaring at her, hissing a curse in one of the secret tongues of Umberlee’s worshipers, he willed her lungs to fill with water. Nearly invisible in the rain, a streak of shimmer stabbed at her.
But the magic missed by a finger length. It was like the druidess wasn’t truly standing where she appeared to be. If so, a spell of clear sight might wipe away the deception.
But before Evendur could start casting one, she raised a bronze sickle over her head, and ghostly red flowers bloomed around her like a picture frame. She slashed the curved blade down and bellowed, “Oakfather!” Somehow, the shout was also an ear-splitting thunderclap, and at the same instant that she roared it, the world blazed white, and the undead pirate shuddered in burning agony.
Silvanus’s Chosen had struck him with lightning! He recognized the pain and spastic paralysis from when the two Red Wizards had used the same force against him, but their efforts had been puny compared to what the white-haired druidess had called down from the sky.
When the pain released him, he found himself sprawled on broken planking, in some danger of dropping through into the hold beneath. His ears rang, and patches of his putrid flesh were burned black and smoking. His high-collared sea-green cape was on fire.
Clambering to his feet, he stripped the burning garment off his shoulders and waved it like a flag for the druidess to see. Because he suspected her mastery of lightning was her deity’s special gift to her and her greatest weapon. And he wanted her to know right away that it wasn’t enough to stop him.
Meanwhile, catapults arced projectiles back and forth, some ablaze, some balls of cold stone and iron. Ballistae and springalds shot their darts, archers their shafts, and crossbowmen their bolts.
Some missiles found their marks. Wood crunched, and men fell thrashing and screaming. But many missed. The rain had soaked hemp and flax strings and sinew cords to the detriment of both range and accuracy.
Evendur realized he didn’t mind. As magic hadn’t decided the fight and artillery and bows weren’t getting the job done, either, he’d just have to do it by leading a boarding party onto the enemy ship and hacking down its defenders with axe and cutlass. And why not? That was the pirate way.
He bellowed his orders, and other voices relayed them the length of the galleon, to the mix of reavers, soldiers of the church, and Impilturian sailors who now made up the crew. The helmsman adjusted the ship’s course.
Boulders fell like the rain, ripping sails, cracking into spars, breaking cordage, and crashing onto the deck, a few smashing men to pulp and spatters in the course of their descents. The conjured barrage was another worthy effort on the part of the druids, but once again, not devastating enough to arrest the Fury’s forward progress, especially when Evendur didn’t really even need the rigging. If necessary, the sea alone would sweep the ships together.
Still, he hated having bits of his splendid new vessel battered into kindling, and he retaliated by bellowing Umberlee’s name and spinning his boarding axe in a circle. The water under the caravel copied the motion, churning into a whirlpool that spun the Turmishan vessel and shook a crewman and a catapult over the side.
As Evendur would have wagered, the druids managed to quell the maelstrom before it capsized the caravel or dragged it under. But the quelling took time, and when they finished, their ship no longer had any hope of keeping away from its foe. The crew scrambled madly to prepare to repel boarders; the whirlpool had shaken and tumbled any previous arrangements into disarray.
The Fury’s archers and crossbowmen obliged them to do it under a hail of shafts and quarrels. And as the two vessels came side-by-side, other pirates threw grappling hooks then hauled on the lines that now bound the ships together.
Because the galleon stood higher that the caravel, some boarders would slide down those ropes. Evendur, however, simply leaped before the corsairs pulling on the ropes had even finished their task.
His strength carried him across the gap, and he thumped down on the caravel’s quarterdeck. For this moment, he was alone, every one of his followers left behind on the galleon, and his enemies would never have a better chance to attack him. But, goggle-eyed, the closest Turmishans froze.
No doubt someone had warned them what to expect, but even so, Evendur’s appearance-hulking, slimy-rotten, the lightning burns surely only adding to the horror of it-had balked them. Laughing, reveling anew in the gifts the Queen of the Depths had given him, he struck left and right, cleaving the skulls of two dark-skinned mariners with square-cut black beards.
That jolted the remaining Turmishans on the quarterdeck into motion. But at the same instant, timbers groaned as the two hulls bumped and ground together, and the first of Evendur’s crew jumped and swarmed after him.
He let the newcomers handle the Turmishans left in the stern. He had a white-haired old woman to kill, and he gazed out over the main deck to determine her current location.
Once Anton managed to maneuver the Octopus squarely astern of the galleon, the same strong, steady wind that Evendur had likely called up to speed his own vessel aided the one behind her as well. The reaver called the Thayan helmsman back to his post and trotted to rejoin Umara in the bow. She scowled at the ship ahead.
“Ready?” he asked.
She snorted. “Are you? Back in Sapra, the fact that neither of us has ever managed to hurt Evendur Highcastle very badly failed to persuade me that we should stay well away from him henceforth. Now, however … well, let’s just say I’m still game, but I see both sides of the argument.”