Then, as he closed in on the sharks, he aimed skyward.
He shot into the air, and felt a jarring bump from beneath propelling him even higher.
It turned him off axis, but Ben-hadad—Orholam bless him for being such a damned genius—had built the skimmers well. The foils weren’t edged but round, so when Kip hit the waves again, there was little danger of catching an edge and flipping over. Instead, Kip skipped over the waves a couple of times, then the foils dug into the waves and he was off again.
Directly toward dozens more sharks.
But before any of them could attack, on some unseen cue, the majority of them turned away and dove.
Kip had no time to figure out why they’d turned away, or what that dark immensity was far beneath the waves.
He also had lost track of what was happening with any of the rest of the Mighty. He could only keep himself alive now, and that took everything in him.
He was within forty paces of the first ships now, and though the teams were still reloading cannons and swivel guns, men on the galleons’ decks were firing muskets toward him.
Splashes pocked the water as he juked one way and then the next.
At the last moment before he crashed into a galleon’s hull, Kip veered his skimmer hard sideways and accelerated as quickly as he could.
The Mighty’s lack of training as a squad on the skimmers nearly got him killed. He veered directly into Winsen’s path, surprising the young man as much as the musketeers on the galley’s deck.
Winsen popped his skimmer up into the air, and Kip ducked, taking a faceful of water even as he blasted luxin skyward. Winsen’s skimmer was flung high into the air, and by the time Kip was able to clear his eyes, he heard a splash on the other side of the galleon.
Then he saw the stern of the next ship, looming directly before him, and he cut hard to port and inside the first circle of ships.
Kip glanced back just in time to see Big Leo follow his path, but this time a red wight was ready for him. The young woman with burn-scarred skin oozing pyrejelly set herself aflame and leapt through the air into Big Leo’s path.
His immense chain swung in a quick arc and batted her aside as if she were an overexcited puppy jumping toward her master with muddy paws. She plunged into the waves, hissing and sizzling, and he swung that flaming chain once more above his head to regain his balance, slapped it into the waves to extinguish the last red luxin-fed flames, and came after Kip as they darted inside the outer circle of ships.
The second circle was entirely slave-rowed galleys without sails, their decks lower to the waves and packed with warriors, most of them only lightly armored.
Kip saw Cruxer speeding past an entire ship broadside, his skimmer shearing through slaves’ oars while he himself needled the massed warriors on deck, shooting a storm of short blue luxin arrows from his hands, unguided and small but fiercely sharp. Whether hit themselves or just cowering before this terror, the warriors went down like sheaves of grain as a scythe passed across the deck. They folded in blood and screams.
Taking advantage of the chaos Cruxer was creating, Einin angled in to the ship and slapped a hullwrecker down near the waterline, then zipped away.
Winsen fought like a madman on a spring. He bounced his skimmer up to the height of a deck, loosed two arrows while he was in the air, put his hands back on the reeds, and bounced again as if the sea were made of boiled rubber. He killed the captain, the first mate at the wheel, he killed a bo’s’n, he killed every officer and fighting man who looked important—and then he turned back around and kept killing until someone panicked and shouted the order to fire a broadside.
The young archer heard the order, though, and instead of popping back up from the waves, angled his skimmer downward and stayed underwater.
The broadside of twenty cannons boomed with a fury—raking death across the decks of its allied galleon in the outer circle.
Winsen popped up out of the waves, water sluicing off the skimmer as he barely held on, blinded and cursing, and no longer holding his favorite bow—but alive. Three sailors, muskets now reloaded, ran to the rail and aimed down at the temporarily immobilized young man.
Kip threw blue spikes as hard as he could from his awkward angle far beyond the ship himself. The first wasn’t even close. The second shattered against the railing under the sailors’ hands, barely a miss. The third flew low but passed underneath the railing and blasted the nearest sailor’s legs out from under him.
Between the blue shrapnel exploding in their faces and their crew-mate going down, the two unharmed sailors panicked. One froze. The other stepped backward, tripped, and accidentally discharged his musket into the air.
Seeing Winsen regain his balance and his velocity, Kip cut under the beakhead of the next ship and in.
The directed explosion of the hullwrecker snapped out behind them, and Kip saw a billow of smoke and showers of wood from the ship behind them.
At the Battle of Ru, the Blood Robes had used a single rowboat filled with superviolet drafters to raise the bane.
Kip had expected the same here, but perhaps with nine rowboats.
There were no rowboats.
This was a fucking dragon-ship.
A dozen galleys had been lashed together, the disparate parts melded into a whole with wood and burnt red luxin. Cut in the brutal style of early pagan art, this floating castle had the look of something crafted by a master artist equipped only with an ax. Brushed white pine skin yielded to spikes carved from ivory tusks. The open maw, equipped with great spouts for shooting out burning red luxin, showed lips of burnt red luxin, like blackened, cracked skin. It had claws and eyes of atasifusta wood, ever-burning.
In a carven saddle, high on the dragon’s back and raised high above the waves, was a black throne. Empty.
But that didn’t mean the rest of the dragon-ship was empty. Like fire ants rushing up your trouser leg when you stepped full into their anthill, the Blood Robes on it were in a violent panic, frothing forth onto every surface Kip could see.
And all of them—red-robed though they were—were drafters or wights. There were hundreds.
But that wasn’t what frightened Kip.
Behind the immense throne was a tower of chains and gears. Six great crank wheels were being turned by a dozen slaves each, and six taut chains with links as large as a man raised pulleys at their apex at the foot of the throne itself.
A great deal of chain had already accumulated around each of those crank wheels, and as Kip took a moment, he could feel a burgeoning tension in every color—like he’d felt in green before the Battle of Ru.
The bane were rising in a circle around the dragon-ship. All of them.
The Mighty were too late.
Kip’s heart jumped, but then he felt something immense nearby. He blinked furiously and felt as if between blinks something happened to his eyes—had he been hit?
He glanced down, but in chi’s spectrum, and his gaze saw something beyond his ken, a single slice of ocean down to the depths, being crossed by a monstrous shape.
A flutter of the eyes, as if clearing blood away. Blink. Nothing. Blink. Another slice, half a degree departed. A curve of pectoral fin. Blink. Gone. A fluke. Gone.
A whale?
She was turning, deep under the waves, even as dozens of sharks bit at her flanks and flukes.
It broke Kip out of his paralysis.
He hurled the retreat signal flares skyward for the Mighty and banked sharply away himself.