The world ended.
* * *
“What’s that?” Donnuld Grayn gasped.
“That is my brother,” Esmond said, throwing up a hand and shouting.
He needed to do both. The Strikers had been creeping up toward the Confed encampment in the dark, their ships lightly beached behind them to the north. For a moment the night turned bright as day, a huge globe of fire rising to silhouette the rear of the camp’s wall where the magazines of the captured Islander quinquerimes had exploded. Streaks and ribbons of fire shot up from it, and huge burning timbers pinwheeled through the sky. When they fell, whatever they landed on burned as well; the other ships in the harbor, the long sheds above the shoreline crammed full of pitch and tar, turpentine and rope and boards and sails, the warehouses of olive oil and grain, the rough pine barracks the Confeds had raised . . .
One of the wooden towers along the landward wall was blazing, too; a twenty-foot baulk of pine flaming like a torch had dropped out of the sky on it. Men swarmed along the parapet, frantically tearing at the burning wood and dashing futile buckets on it.
“Fire!” Esmond called, startled out of his wonderment. “Fire, and save your lord!”
The arquebuses of Adrian’s men began to bark with a methodical eagerness. And on the wall of the Confed fortress, men began to die.
Oh, shit, Adrian thought, as he pulled himself up.
His ears hurt, and his head when he shook it to clear his vision of the spots strobing across it. When it did clear, a grin spread over his mouth despite the pain. Half the harbor was burning, and half the camp beyond—and most of the men there were far too occupied to be concerned with the small boat they’d spotted a moment before. Make that three-quarters, he thought, as another Confed vessel began to blaze out of control, and its deck crew scrambled ashore or over the side.
Sisssht. More arrows plowed into the water around the boat; this time two stuck in the thwarts, humming like bees.
“I’d be afraid if I had the time,” Adrian said quietly. Louder: “Row for the north bank of the harbor—that ship there!”
He pointed to one of the sunken merchantmen, just within sling range of the north tower. Then he stood, trying to compensate for the pitch and roll of the little skiff with his knees, sling dangling from his hand. The enemy launch was quite close now, close enough to see the firelight glitter ruddily on the spears of the men between the rowers.
Swing. Swing. Throw.
His hand moved in blank obedience to Center’s direction, fingers releasing the thong when the red dot blinked. The firebomb—molotov—arched out with a steady, inevitable trajectory. He could hear it shatter against the breastplate of the officer in the launch, and hear the man’s scream as the flames took him even more clearly. Luck—Adrian’s, not the man’s in the launch—pitched him forward into the arms of his men, to spatter fire among them, lighting hair and tunics and the wood of the craft with impartial ferocity.
“Row, gods condemn you!” Adrian roared to Simun and his nephew.
The towers had seen what was happening, and worse, where he was going. He felt at the burlap sack; three more molotovs. Arrows fell around them, and more stuck quivering in the wood of the skiff. One passed by his ear, close enough for the feathers to sting; two inches left, and the last sound he ever would have heard would have been that one crunching into his brain.
Shock of impact; the prow of the boat was level with the railing of the sunken rock-filled merchant ship. The wood was splintery under his hands as he vaulted aboard, the deck wet and unstable underneath his feet. Two ships down, a party from the tower was clambering towards him, shields up and assegais out. Their faces were red with the light of the burning camp; he must be a black outline to them, a figure out of darkness and night.
“Behind you!” he screamed at them. “Your tower’s burning too, you velipad fuckers!”