Two of Trae’s men were standing on one of the still-fixed portions of the upper deck by now, holding the “special satchel” between them. At Trae’s shout, a third man lit the fuse and the two tossed the thing onto the center of the pirate galley’s deck. That area was cleared, except for corpses. The pirates still alive—a good half of the crew, Helga estimated—were cowering at the bow and stern. Even after the marines retreated, they hadn’t been in the least inclined to “pursue.”
“Get us away from here, Sharlz!” bellowed Trae. “That’s a short fuse!”
The command was pointless, really. Thicelt already had the ship under way, the hortator pounding his mallets. Their progress was slow, at first, with only the lower bank of oars working. But by the time the satchel charge blew, less than a minute after it was tossed, Helga’s ship was fifty yards away and retreating rapidly. Some corner of her brain was impressed by the speed with which Thicelt had gotten the upper bank back into action.
But only a corner of her brain, and a small corner at that. Most of her mind was being washed over by a wave of sheer hatred, intermingled with horrible flashes of memories she had long suppressed. One male body after another—just pieces of bodies, really; a bare chest, a leg, a scrawny belly wet with her violation, another gap-toothed grin—slamming onto her, one after the other. She never knew how many; didn’t want to know. It had lasted for three days.
At first, she was disappointed by the burst of the satchel charge. She’d been expecting to see the pirate ship simply disintegrate. Break in half, at least. But then, not more than a second later, seeing the bloom of fire wash across the ship, she understood what Trae had meant by a “special.” He must have designed this satchel charge especially for use against an enemy ship.
Trae confirmed her thought immediately. “Beautiful, isn’t it? There wasn’t actually much powder in the thing. Just enough to set off the naphtha—some other stuff too—I had in those flasks. She’ll burn down to the waterline, you watch.”
Helga didn’t doubt it. Neither, judging from their looks of horror and their screams, did any of the pirates still alive on the ship. Seamen fear nothing quite so much as an uncontrolled fire on a wooden vessel. Even though the waters around the burning galley were now being crisscrossed by white-tipped fins, Helga could see at least a dozen more pirates jumping overboard.
Her hatred now consumed her entirely. From the stern of the ship, she had a perfect view of the massacre. She pressed her groin against the rail, clutching the wood with hands like claws, and screamed across the waters.
“Try raping the redsharks, you fuckers! I hope—”
What she hoped, in shrieking and graphic anatomical detail, had Trae and Jessep and Lortz pale-faced within seconds. Minutes later, when she finally turned away, they were still pale.
Seeing the expressions on their faces, she snarled at them. “Tough men!” she jeered. “Try surviving three days of a gang rape, you pussies, before you think of telling me what ‘tough’ means.”
And with that, she stalked over to the hatch and lowered herself into the hold. Muttering under her breath all the while about her need for the company of women.
* * *
Once below, she found herself spending the next ten minutes trying to quiet her wailing infant. He and Ilset’s baby daughter were producing a truly incredible volume of noise.
” ‘Twas the screaming did it,” explained Polla apologetically. “Ours, I mean.”
She gave Helga another crooked little smile. “The sound of the guns made things worse for little Yuli, but it actually seemed to steady your boy for a bit there. Like father, like son, the old saying goes.”
Helga returned the smile with one that was probably just as crooked. She’d been careful, since Adrian had returned her to Demansk, to keep the identity of her baby’s father a closely-held secret in the family. An unknown pirate’s bastard was simply a tool for Demansk’s enemies to shame him. Had it become widely known that the father of Helga’s child had been Gellert himself, the repercussions might have been much worse.