Dai-San - 03 Read Online Free PDF

looked about the ship.
    ‘Moichi!’ he called. ‘Where is Moeru?’
    The battle aboard the Kioku was all but finished. Still, Moichi fought the last of his foes, dispatching him with a ferocious thrust. He turned to Ronin, wiping at his sweating brow. Blood and gore streaked his arms and his shirt clung wetly to his caked chest.
    ‘The last I saw of her, Captain, she was leading a detachment of men onto an enemy vessel.’
    Ronin raced along the deck, leaping the mounds of the corpses and the wounded, calling to her in his mind, thrusting aside clumps of still fighting sailors and plumed warriors, heedless of friend or foe. Until, at length, he was certain that she was not on board, not even among the piles of the dead or the coughing, spitting maimed. The silence in his mind echoed like a tomb.
    He ran back to Moichi, who was calling to the men.
    ‘We must turn the Kioku around,’ he cried. ‘She is still on one of the enemy ships.’
    Moichi turned to him, his hazel eyes grave and watchful.
    ‘Whatever unnatural thing parted us from the obsidian ships saved our lives, Captain.’ He turned his gaze out across the starboard sheer-strake, across the high black water. ‘Look there, Captain. D’you see? We cannot return.’ The tetrahedral sails with their fiercely grinning avian insignia were fast dwindling aft. ‘Neither tide nor winds govern the Kioku now. A force from the deep hurls us onward and for the moment you must face the fact that, for as long as it may last, you are not captain and neither am I navigator.’
    ‘Moichi—’
    ‘My friend’—a large hand gripped his shoulder, the hazel eyes noted the pain in his face—‘use your eyes. Think with your head, not your heart. We are powerless.’
    Alive or dead, drowned beneath the tidal wave, captured by the plumed warriors, he had no way of knowing. Moichi’s raised voice came to him: ‘Overboard, lads! Cast them all into the sea! Clear the decks of this mess!’
    Ronin wiped down his bloody sword on a corpse and sheathed it. He went carefully across the humped deck, mounted the high poop. His hands gripped the stern sheer-strake, his arms as rigid as stone, watching the black sea foaming and geysering, laced with luminescence, the flora of the deep. He heard the heavy splashes behind him as the Kioku ’s load was lightened, as the dead meat swirled and sank beneath the dark creaming waves.
    They were far away now, those forbidding obsidian vessels, foundering above the unnatural seas, and all at once it seemed to him that the setting sun dimmed, though no cloud passed before its orange face and, straining his ears, he thought that he could hear a peculiar high keening, inconstant and thin, away and away and what is she to me anyway—?’
    ‘Captain.’
    Moichi called to him and he turned and went down the companionway to help tend to the remaining men.
    Some of you are avenged now. Freidal’s death will not bring you back, Stahlig; it will not shorten your journey, Borros. But—he turned from the silver and blue-green face of the sea to watch Moichi’s hawklike features, feeling again the pressure of the wide hand upon him, the warmth it conveyed—I must not deceive myself, whether or not the dead are past knowing, this revenge was for me. The big man moved away for a moment. Yet somewhere I suppose that I believe that they are not yet past caring. Farewell now, my friends.
    Still for him, he knew that revenge was far from over. The hate which continued to burn within him like a raging fire would never be slaked until he faced the Salamander once more. For the pale perfect face of his sister K’reen, dead by his own unknowing hand, still haunted him and only his former mentor’s blood would ease the torment he felt at the fiendish trap the shrewd hunter had set for him. Scarred but undefeated, having pried apart the serrated jaws of that trap, he now wished to stalk his hunter so that, one way or another, the last account should be