Hush (Dragon Apocalypse) by James Maxey Read Free Book Online Page B

Rigger, perhaps fifteen, and was staring into the glass with the same sweating intensity Rigger showed in manipulating the ropes. Perhaps the fact that she had the cover over the lens explained her effort. But even with the cap she was seeing something, since she shouted out, “Another grappling hook starboard! Three men on the rope!”
    Rigger nodded. “Anyone else? Should I drop them?”
    “Wait... there’s a fourth climber getting on... now!” She looked pleased as the screams of men falling into the water reached the wheel. It was a reliable guess that this young woman was Sage, the clairvoyant of the Romer clan.
    “The attacks are slowing down,” shouted the third person at the wheel, an older woman with streaks of gray in her dark hair, her skin tanned and deeply lined by a life at sea. This was Gale Romer, matriarch captain of the Freewind , and the reason that the Skellings kept getting gusted off their gangplanks. Gale had the power to control winds even before her encounter with the mer-king, which helped explained the Freewind’s reputation for speed. She looked at Sage and cried, “Give me a count of the dead!”
    “Thirty-seven,” said Sage. “Mako and Jetsam are making short work of them.”
    “How’s Infidel doing against those ice-serpents?”
    “Hard to say,” Sage answered. “The Gloryhammer is so bright I can’t see through the glare.”
    “What’s that about Infidel?” I asked, forgetting I couldn’t be heard.
    Fortunately, I wasn’t kept in suspense long. The hatch to the cargo hold was wide open and suddenly a bright beam of light shot up from the guts of the ship as if the sun had just risen inside.
    With a whoosh , Infidel flew from the hatch. She was completely enwrapped by what I can only describe as a python covered in thick silver fur. Three or four pythons, in fact, although it was difficult to tell where one snake ended and another began. Infidel had only one arm free of the tangle, but she had a death grip on the Gloryhammer as she rocketed into the sky, then dove, heading for the shore. I gave chase, unable to tell if she was in control of her flight or not. She flew directly for a large bonfire. In a flurry of sparks and flames, she dropped feet first into a pygmy funeral pyre, shielding her face by pressing it into the crook of her elbow. She stood there for only a second, protected by her armor as the serpents screamed. Their squealing voices were disturbingly similar to those of human babies as their oily fur ignited. Infidel leapt from the thick of the flames. The writhing serpents slipped from her torso to bunch around her legs. She rubbed her eyes and coughed for a few seconds, then spat out a gob of spit that looked blood-red, though that might have been due to the firelight. Without waiting to catch her breath, she shot off like a comet. The burning serpents couldn’t hold their grip against the acceleration and fell, crying as they tumbled.
    In the blink of an eye, Infidel was back at the Freewind , barreling through a line of a dozen burly warriors who were struggling against the wind up a gangplank, tossing them like tenpins. The water below was thick with bodies. A boy maybe sixteen years old was running atop the waves, jumping and skipping over the reaching arms of drowning Skellings. He wore no armor and was armed with only a slender rapier, but his skill with it was, literally, eye-popping. This had to be Jetsam. He had the power to run on water as if it was solid earth, and from his relatively solid footing he was moving among the struggling barbarians and driving the tip of his blade into their brains. I’d seen my share of eye-gouging in Commonground, so I wasn’t too horrified by Jetsam’s battle tactics, but I was slightly put off by the fact that as he danced around the waves he was singing , a rollicking sea shanty I’d heard a time or two sung drunkenly in bars:
     
    And all my enemies,
    Will sleep beneath the seas
    Around me waves turn red
    As