Siege and Storm (Shadow and Bone #2)(17)

A crack like thunder rent the air, and I knew the Darkling had gotten free. I looked back and saw a wave of darkness tumbling toward us. It’s over, I thought. We’re done for. But in the next instant, I glimpsed a bright flash and a shot rang out. The swell of darkness blew away to nothing, and I saw the Darkling clutching his arm, his face contorted in fury and pain. In disbelief, I realized he’d been shot.

Sturmhond was racing toward us, pistols in hand. “Run!” he shouted.

“Come on, Alina!” Mal cried, reaching for my arm.

“Genya,” I said desperately, “come with us.”

Her hand was shaking so badly I thought the pistol might fly from her grip. Tears spilled over her cheeks.

“I can’t,” she sobbed brokenly. She lowered her weapon. “Go, Alina,” she said. “Just go.”

In the next instant, Tolya had tossed me over his shoulder again. I beat futilely at his broad back. “No!” I yelled. “Wait!”

But no one paid me any mind. Tolya took a running leap and vaulted over the railing. I screamed as we plummeted toward the icy water, bracing for the impact. Instead, we were scooped up by what could only have been a Squaller wind and deposited on the attacking schooner’s deck with a bone-jarring thud. Tamar and Mal followed, with Sturmhond close behind.

“Give the signal,” Sturmhond shouted, springing to his feet.

A piercing whistle blew.

“Privyet,” he called to a crewman I didn’t recognize, “how many do we have?”

“Eight men down,” replied Privyet. “Four remaining on the whaler. Cargo on its way up.”

“Saints,” Sturmhond swore. He looked back to the whaler, struggling with himself. “Musketeers!” he shouted to the men on the schooner’s maintop. “Lend them cover!”

The musketeers began firing their rifles down onto the deck of the whaler. Tolya tossed Mal a rifle, then slung another over his back. He leapt into the rigging and began to climb. Tamar drew a pistol from her hip. I was still sprawled on the deck in an undignified tangle, my hands held useless in irons.

“Sea whip is secured, kapitan!” shouted Privyet.

Two more of Sturmhond’s men hurdled over the whaler’s railing and flew through the air, arms pinwheeling wildly, to crash in a heap on the schooner’s deck. One was bleeding badly from a wound to his arm.

Then it came again, the boom of thunder.

“He’s up!” called Tamar.

Blackness tumbled toward us, engulfing the schooner, blotting out everything in its path.

“Free me!” I pleaded. “Let me help!”

Sturmhond threw Tamar the keys and shouted, “Do it!”

Tamar reached for my wrists, fumbling with the key as darkness rolled over us.

We were blind. I heard someone scream. Then the lock clicked free. The irons fell from my wrists and hit the deck with a dull clang.

I raised my hands, and light blazed through the dark, pushing the blackness back over the whaler. A cheer went up from Sturmhond’s crew, but it withered on their lips as another sound filled the air—a grating shriek, piercing in its wrongness, the creak of a door swinging open, a door that should have remained forever shut. The wound in my shoulder gave a sharp throb. Nichevo’ya.

I turned to Sturmhond. “We have to get out of here,” I said. “Now.”

He hesitated, battling himself. Two of his men were still aboard the whaler. His expression hardened. “Topmen make sail!” he shouted. “Squallers due east!”

I saw a row of sailors standing by the masts raise their arms and heard a whump as the canvas above us swelled with a hard-driving wind. Just how many Grisha did the privateer have in his crew?

But the Darkling’s Squallers had arranged themselves on the whaler’s deck and were sending their own winds to buffet us. The schooner rocked unsteadily.

“Portside guns!” roared Sturmhond. “Rolling broadside. On my signal!”

I heard two shrill whistle blasts. A deafening boom shook the ship, then another and another, as the schooner’s guns opened up a gaping hole in the whaler’s hull. A panicked shout went up from the Darkling’s ship. Sturmhond’s Squallers seized the advantage, and the schooner surged free.

As the smoke from the cannons cleared, I saw a figure in black step up to the railing of the disabled whaler. Another wave of darkness rushed toward us, but this one was different. It writhed over the water as if it were clawing its way forward, and with it came the eerie clicking of a thousand angry insects.

The darkness frothed and foamed, like a wave breaking over a boulder, and began to separate itself into shapes. Beside me, Mal muttered a prayer and lifted his rifle to his shoulder. I focused my power and slashed out with the Cut, burning through the black cloud, trying to destroy the nichevo’ya before they could take their full form. But I couldn’t stop them all. They came on in a moaning horde of black teeth and claws.

Sturmhond’s crew opened fire.

The nichevo’ya reached the masts of the schooner, whirling around the sails, plucking sailors from the rigging like fruit. Then they were skittering down onto the deck. Mal fired again and again as the crewmen drew their sabers, but bullets and blades seemed only to slow the monsters. Their shadow bodies wavered and re-formed, and they just kept coming.

The schooner was still moving ahead, widening the distance between itself and the whaler. Not fast enough. I heard that shrieking moan, and another wave of shifting, slithering dark was headed toward us, already separating into winged bodies, reinforcements for the shadow soldiers.