“It means he’ll hold off until the last moment to spring his trap.”
“Isn’t the last moment sort of . . . now?” Winsen asked.
Kip turned on him. “What do you want, Winsen? You want to let all our friends die? I didn’t get the scout’s report until I got it. You want to live forever? Get out. I’m sick and tired of wondering if I can count on you.”
“Bugger off,” Winsen said. “You’re the boss. Fine. Some accident of birth put you one notch above the rest of us. Fine. It’s one notch, not twenty. You’re the boss. I’ll follow you. That’s what we do. I’ll follow you to my death today, or some other day if we get lucky, but don’t expect me to enjoy it or kiss your ass on the way.”
“Your bitching hurts morale,” Kip said. “It weakens us.”
The craft slowed perceptibly as Winsen stopped drafting, irate. “I weaken us?! Me?”
“You can be a whiny little shit sometimes,” Ben-hadad said.
Winsen looked around to the others, and seemed baffled at their agreement.
Big Leo said, “This one time after I shit myself as we were escaping the Chromeria, I was cleaning my trousers and the stain . . . I was like, what! Winsen, what are you doing in my pants?”
Winsen’s rage evaporated as they all laughed. “Dammit, Big Leo.”
“Wait, you shit yourself in battle, too?” Ferkudi asked.
“Just the once,” Big Leo said defensively. “It was my first fight!” Then he side-eyed Ferk. “Too?”
Everyone looked at Ferkudi.
“It was just a little pellet!” Ferkudi protested.
They laughed, and the blowing wind took their strife for the moment.
Kip looked over at Winsen, who met his gaze.
“I’m in,” Winsen said. “I’ll try, all right? I just don’t want . . .” He wanted to say more, but he stopped himself.
It brought their present circumstances back into focus, though, even without him saying it. The Mighty looked at one another. That look was worse than scoffing. It was resignation.
“Good day for it,” Ben-hadad said, looking at the beautiful blue sky.
“Good day for what?” Ferkudi asked.
Kip sighed. “He means it’s a good day to die. Thank you very much, Ben.”
“I never understood why people say that,” Ferkudi said. “I don’t really want to die any day, and most other people don’t, either, I mean, except for suicides, right? So isn’t every day a bad day to die? Ben-hadad, why did you say that?”
“Ferk,” Cruxer said. “Ferk.”
“It’s one of the things for the Box, isn’t it?” Ferkudi asked.
“Yes. Yes it is.”
For Ferkudi, the Box of Things That Don’t Make Sense But Make Sense to Other People Don’t Worry About It It’s Not Important was filled with many things: why people go back to lovers who treat them badly, why people like cats (pretty much the same thing), metaphors involving cutting cheese, why one would eat intestine, why women don’t spend all their time looking at themselves naked, why the number system was based on ten but the time system wasn’t, why it’s normal for dogs to lick their balls in public but Blackguards aren’t even allowed to clear their underwear from cleaving the moon, and why he got that question so often about being dropped on his head. As long as he had Cruxer’s assurance that it wasn’t important for him to figure out, he was perfectly content to put things in that box and put it away in a dark mental corner.
“Anyone feel it yet?” Kip asked.
Head shakes all around.
“How stupid is Caul Azmith?” Winsen said. “It’s the same trap as last time. How can one man lose two fleets to the same trap?”
It was a good question. Not that the man wasn’t dumb enough to do exactly that, but surely someone would have said something.
But it was finally obvious to Kip, unbelievable as the answer seemed. He said, “We killed a bane at Ru. They think that means it’s gone forever. They don’t believe us that the White King has any other bane at all. They must have gotten word that a lightly defended fleet was coming, and they rushed out to sink it. Not a bad strategy.”
“If we were lying to them,” Einin muttered.
“Why would they think we were lying to them?!” Ben-hadad demanded.
“They knew we were in a bad spot. We were asking for men and money. In the same kind of situation, Dúnbheo lied to us to get our help, why wouldn’t we do the same?” Kip said.
They shared curses.
“What’s the battle plan?” Big Leo asked.
“That depends on . . . Are those sails?” Kip said.
“There it is,” Cruxer said.
It was exactly as Izemrasen had described, except now the two fleets had almost closed within cannon range. The White King’s ships were bundled in a knot so tight it was impossible to see how many of them there were from Kip’s vantage, but the Chromeria fleet was enveloping them with rank upon rank of ships.
The front ranks broke apart, every other ship slowly, slowly turning broadside. Then flashes of light blinked across the waves, followed by billows of black smoke floating up toward their sails—curiously silent from this far away. Those ships had turned forward again, as ahead of them those ships that had kept going now took their chance to turn broadside.
It was only then that the sound of the first cannons arrived, a distant thunder from that slow storm now covering most of the horizon.
No fire was returned from the White King’s ships, and Kip couldn’t see any result from the shelling, though scores must have died in the moments he’d been watching.
After the speed and chaos and dexterity required for ground combat, this naval positioning seemed graceless, ponderous. Give a man a sword and tell him to chase down another man, and the contest was decided within minutes; one ship chasing another could easily last all day.
And yet that apparent gracelessness was deceiving, Kip knew. There was a reason why famous admirals were famous. When you had to turn a ship weighing tens of thousands of sevens with only wind, and waves, and muscle, and had to judge exactly the rates at which your enemies could do the same, so that you could arrive at some future position where you could release a broadside at them before they could release one at you, it required a special brilliance to be successful. Add in needing to adjust any of your figures due to your slaves’ exhaustion, injuries to crew, the weight of your ship and of your opponent’s, timing to reload, then with possible damage to sails, rigging, oars, decks, or rudder, and you had to be brilliant to maneuver a single ship. Commanding a fleet must require another order of thinking altogether—especially when also having to deal with the egos of your subcommanders, like the idiot Caul Azmith, who’d broken ranks.
The single maneuver of interspersed fire, correctly executed, told Kip that whoever was admiral of the Chromeria’s fleet now, he or she was probably a genius.
A genius who was about to suffer a crushing defeat.
“Too late to get the Chromeria to pull back,” Kip said. “So we’re looking for the White King’s superviolet drafters, maybe in separate small boats. It seems the superviolets have to do something to trigger the bane to rise—so if we can kill them before they do that, we’ve got a chance.”