“We’re Rovers, Hawk,” she said, bending to the lock in the door.
We make our own luck.
Kneeling with one leg braced against the door, she inserted the pick into the lock and began to work it around. The lock was new and its workings easily tapped. It gave in less than a minute, the latch snapping open as she pulled down on the handle, the door giving way. She cracked it and looked out into the passageway. Shadows cast by oil lamps and ropes hung from pegs in the walls flickered and danced with the rolling of the ship. At the passageway’s forward end, a bulky form braced against the shipwalls and stared up the ladder at the hatchway.
Rue Meridian ducked back inside the storeroom and eased the door closed again. “One guard, a big guy. I can’t tell who or what he is. We have to get past him, though. Do you want to handle him or shall I?”
Furl Hawken tightened his grip on the knife. “I’ll deal with him, Little Red. You get to the others.”
They stared at each other in the dim light, breathing quickly, faces flushed and anxious. “Be careful, Hawk,” she told him.
They went out the door on cat’s paws, sliding silently into the shadowed hallway. Furl Hawken glanced back at her, then started toward the guard. The Jerle Shannara continued to shake and sway in the grip of the storm, the wind howling so fiercely that the guard seemed unable to think of anything else. A crash jarred the decking, something falling from a height, a loosened spar probably. The guard stared upward, frozen in place. Rue Meridian glanced at the doors of the storerooms closest, two only. The smaller held their water and ale in large casks. There was no extra room for prisoners in there. The other contained foodstuffs. That was a possibility, but the larger holds lay farther aft.
Another few steps, Rue Meridian was thinking, watching Hawk’s cautious progress, when the hatchway opened, and a raindrenched figure started down the stairs.
He caught sight of the Rovers immediately, screamed a warning to the guard with his back turned, and bolted up the ladder. The guard wheeled at once toward Furl Hawken, a wickedlooking short sword in one clawed hand. Hawk closed with him at once, and Rue Meridian could hear the impact of their collision. She caught a glimpse of the guard’s reptilian face, scaled and glistening with rain that had washed down the hatch. A Mwellret! The other man, by the look of his uniform, was a Federation soldier. She felt a cold sinking in the pit of her stomach. She and Hawk were no match for Mwellrets. She had to stop the fleeing soldier from giving warning to whatever others there were.
Impulsively, she went after him, leaping past Hawk and the Mwellret. Bounding up the ladder through the hatchway, she charged onto the open deck into the teeth of the storm, the wind whipping so wildly that it threatened to tear her clothes from her body, the rain drenching her in seconds. The ship wheeled and twisted in the storm’s grip, its light sheaths down, its draws gathered in, stripped bare as she should be in this weather, but for some reason drifting in powerless confusion. Rue Meridian took in everything in a heartbeat as she raced after the soldier. She caught up with him amidships, just below the pilot box, where a second soldier struggled with the airship’s steering, and she threw herself on his back. Locked together, they rolled across the deck and into the foremast. The soldier was so desperate to escape, he didn’t even think to draw his weapons. She did so for him, yanking loose the long knife he wore at his belt and plunging it into his chest as he thrashed beneath her.
Leaving him sprawled out and dying on the deck, she sprang back to her feet. The Federation soldier in the pilot box was screaming for help, but there was nothing she could do about that. If she killed him, the ship would be completely out of control. The wind was obscuring his cries, so perhaps no one would hear. She started aft. Without a safety line to tether her, she was forced to creep ahead, bent low to the deck, taking handholds wherever she could find them, slipping and sliding on the rainsoaked wood. Through clouds of mist and sheets of rain, she glimpsed the rugged gray walls of the channel’s cliffs, rising through the mist. Somewhere not too distant, she could hear the pillars of the Squirm clash hungrily.