Tome of the Undergates [Sam Sykes] (fb2) читать постранично, страница - 3
- Tome of the Undergates (а.с. the aeon's gate -1) 1.2 Мб, 577с. скачать: (fb2) читать: (полностью) - (постранично) - Sam Sykes
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shoot Cragsmen.’ Upon seeing her unregistering blink, he sighed and kicked the corpse again. ‘These things! The pirates! Don’t shoot our humans!’
‘I haven’t,’ she replied with a smirk. ‘Yet.’
‘Are you planning to start?’ he asked.
‘If I run out of the other kind, maybe.’
Lenk looked out over the railing and sighed.
No chance of that happening anytime soon.
The crew of the Linkmaster stood at the railings of their vessel, poised over the clanking chain bridges with barely restrained eagerness. And yet, Lenk noted with a narrowing of his eyes, restrained all the same. Their leering, eager faces outnumbered the Riptide’s panicked expressions, their cutlasses shone brighter than any staff or club their victims had managed to cobble together.
And yet, all the same, they remained on their ship, content to throw at the Riptide nothing more than hungry stares and the occasional declaration of what they planned to do with Kataria, no matter what upper assets she might lack. The phrase ‘segregate those weeping dandelions ’twixt a furious hammer’ was shouted more than once.
Any other day, he would have taken the time to ponder the meaning behind that. At that moment, another question consumed his thoughts.
‘What are they waiting for?’
‘Right now?’ Kataria growled, flattened ears suggesting she heard quite clearly their intentions and divined their meaning. ‘Possibly for me to put an arrow in their gullets.’
‘They could easily overrun us,’ he muttered. ‘Why wouldn’t they attack now, while they still have the advantage? ’
‘Scared?’
‘Concerned.’
‘About what?’
Largely, he told himself, that we’re going to die and you’re going to be the cause. His thoughts throbbed painfully in the back of his head. They’re waiting for something, I know it, and when they finally decide to attack, all I’ve got is a lunatic shict to fight them. Where are the others? Where’s Dreadaeleon? Where’s Denaos? Why do I even keep them around? I could do this. I could survive this if they were gone.
If she were. .
He felt her stare upon him as surely as if she’d shot him. From the corner of his own eye, he could see hers staring at him. No, he thought, studying. Studying with an unnerving steadiness that exceeded even the unpleasantness of her long-vanished smile.
His skin twitched under her gaze, he shifted, turned a shoulder to her.
Stop staring at me.
She canted her head to one side. ‘What?’
Any response he might have had degenerated into a sudden cry of surprise, one lost amidst countless others, as the deck shifted violently beneath him, sending him hurtling to one knee. He was rendered deaf by the roar of waves as the Riptide rent the sea beneath it with the force of its turn, but even the ocean could not drown out the furious howl from the Riptide’s helm.
‘More men!’ the voice screeched. ‘Get more men to the railing! What are you doing, you thrice-fondled sons of six-legged whores from hell? Get those chains off!’
Not an eye could help turning to the ship’s wheel, and the slim, dark figure behind it. A bald beacon, Captain Argaol’s hairless head shone with sweat as his muscles strained to guide his bride of wood and sails away from her pursuer. Eyes white and wide in furious snarl, he turned a scowl onto Lenk.
‘What in Zamanthras’s name are you blasphemers being paid for?’ He thrust a finger towards the railings. ‘Get. Them. OFF!’
Several bodies pushed past Lenk, hatchets in hand as they rushed the chains biting into the Riptide’s hull. At this, a lilting voice cut across the gap of the sea, sharp as a blade to Lenk’s ears as he pulled himself to his feet.
‘I say, kind Captain, that hardly seems the proper way to address the gentlemen in your employ, does it?’ The helmsman of the Linkmaster taunted with little effort as he guided the black vessel to keep pace with its prey. ‘Truly, sirrah, perhaps you could benefit from a tongue more silver than brass?’
‘Stuff your metaphors in your eyes and burn them, Cragscum!’ Argaol split his roar in twain, hurling the rest of his fury at his crew below. ‘Faster! Work faster, you hairless monkeys! Get the chains off!’
‘Do we help?’ Kataria asked, looking from the chains to Lenk. ‘I mean, aren’t you a monkey?’
‘Monkeys lack a sense of business etiquette,’ Lenk replied. ‘Argaol isn’t the one who pays us.’ His eyes drifted down, along with his frown, to the dull iron fingers peeking over the edge of the Riptide’s hull. ‘Besides, no amount of screaming is going to smash that thing loose.’
Her eyes followed his, and so did her lips, at the sight of the massive metal claw. A ‘mother claw’, some sailors had shrieked upon seeing it: a massive bridge of links, each the size of a housecat, ending in six massive talons that clung to its victim ship like an overconfident drunkard.
‘Were slander but one key upon a ring of victory, good Captain, I dare suggest you’d not be in such delicate circumstance, ’ the Linkmaster’s helmsman called from across the gap. ‘Alas, a lack of manners more frequently begets sharp devices embedded in kidneys. If I might be so brash as to suggest surrender as a means of keeping your internal organs free of metallic intrusion?’
The mother claw had since lived up to its title, resisting any attempt to dislodge it. What swords could be cobbled together had been broken upon it. The sailors that might have been able to dislodge it when the Cragsmen attacked were also the first to be cut down or grievously wounded. All attempts to tear away from its embrace had proved useless.
Not that it seems to stop Argaol from trying, Lenk noted.
‘You might,’ the captain roared to his rival, ‘but only if I might suggest shoving said suggestion square up your-’
The vulgarity was lost in the wooden groan of the Riptide as Argaol pulled the wheel sharply, sending his ship cutting through salt like a scythe. The mother chain wailed in metal panic, going taut and pulling the Linkmaster back alongside its prey. A collective roar of surprise went up from the crew as they were sent sprawling. Lenk’s own was a muffled grunt, as Kataria’s modest weight was hurled against him.
His breath was struck from him and his senses with it. When they returned to him, he was conscious of many things at once: the sticky deck beneath him, the calls of angry gulls above him and the groan of sailors clambering to their feet.
And her.
His breath seeped into his nostrils slowly, carrying with it a new scent that overwhelmed the stench of decay. He tasted her sweat on his tongue, smelled blood that wept from the few scratches on her torso, and felt the warmth of her slick flesh pressed against him, seeping through his stained tunic and into his skin like a contagion.
He opened his eyes and found hers boring into his. He saw his own slack jaw reflected in their green depths, unable to look away.
‘Hardly worthy of praise, Captain,’ the Linkmaster’s helmsman called out, drawing their attentions. ‘Might one suggest even the faintest caress of Lady Reason would e’er do your plight well?’
‘So. .’ Kataria said, screwing up her face in befuddlement, ‘do they all talk like that?’
‘Cragsmen are lunatics,’ he muttered in reply. ‘Their mothers drink ink when they’re still in the womb, so every one of them comes out tattooed and out of his skull.’
‘What? Really?’
‘Khetashe, I don’t know,’ he grunted, shoving her off and clambering to his feet. ‘The point is that, in a few moments when they finally decide to board again, they’re going to run us over, cut us open and shove our intestines up our noses!’ He glanced her over. ‘Well, I mean, they’ll kill me, at least. You, they said they’d like to-’
‘Yeah,’ she snarled, ‘I heard them. But that’s only if they board.’
‘And what makes you think they’re not going to?’ He flailed in the general direction of the mother chain. ‘So long as that thing is there, they can just come over and visit whenever the fancy takes them!’
‘So we get rid of it!’
‘How? Nothing can move it!’
‘Gariath could move it.’
‘Gariath could do a lot of things,’ Lenk snarled, scowling across the deck to the companionway that led to the ship’s hold. ‘He could come out here and help us instead of waiting for us all to die, but since he
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