The Sea Peoples(51)

“Then they all ran into the lizard with the grin. Your Captain Moishe turned on the Koreans while they were fighting it, and finished off the saltie with a solid bolt. And the last Korean too, burned her to the waterline with napalm shell or firebolt. Your frigate Stormrider came across the wreckage a day or two later, the dead saltie floating belly-up and one survivor on the keel of a capsized Korean ship. Gibbering mad, apparently.”

“They could talk with him?” órlaith said, surprised.

Wooton shook her head. “He was a Biter . . . what you lot call Eaters . . . from Los Angeles.”

Well, now I know that Johnnie was alive then, órlaith thought. The problem is I don’t know what sort of trouble he’s in now, and that’s more worrying than it was before. As if hope activates fear.

The envoy from Darwin gestured to the two catapult bolts lying beside the skull; one was unmistakably the product of Donaldson Foundry & Machine, a well-known Corvallis firm and the supplier Feldman & Sons Merchant Venturers used. The other was cruder, a steel head heat-shrunk on a broken-off wooden shaft.

“Definitely jinnikukaburi work, Heika,” Egawa Noboru grunted, leaning over to examine it.

And using an extremely insulting nickname the Nihonjin used for their enemies from across the Sea of Japan; it meant roughly cockroach crawling in human flesh.

“So,” Reiko said. “The last of the chon ships which pursued us to Montival are destroyed. My revenge for my father’s death continues.”

“That was very well done,” Egawa conceded. “But our Captain Ishikawa was with them on the merchant’s ship, of course.”

“Of course, Egawa-san,” órlaith said, hiding her smile.

There’s arrogance so sublime it’s an odd sort of innocence, órlaith thought. And Egawa is a very good fighting man and utterly loyal to his Tennoˉ. And if he’s ruthless . . . well, he’s fought all his life against an enemy who would eat the flesh from his children’s bones, and that’s the cold and literal truth.

“What’s really got King Birmo’s knickers in a twist is this,” Wooton said, pulling aside a cloth that covered a small object beside the catapult-bolts and the man-sized skull. “The saltie was wearing this, on its forearm, forelimb, whatever the fuck you want to call it.”

It was an armband composed of ruddy metal, probably aluminum-bronze. On it was a broad circle of some glossy black material, and inlaid on that was a three-armed triskele of gold, with curved writhing arms coming from a central knot.

She heard Alan hiss from the group standing behind her. órlaith nodded in sympathy; there was a sense of revulsion to that thing, one that made her feel as if her bones had suddenly been filled with ice water pouring off a glacier in the spring.

But not in that good-clean-painful way.

One of Karl’s Mackenzies, the young fioasache—seeress—Gwri Beauregard Mackenzie gave a pained grunt too. Reiko’s hand dropped to the hilt of the Grasscutter. One of the kahunas beside King Kalaˉkaua raised his tabu-staff and began a chant of pule mahiki, a prayer to cast out evil spirits.

“Gives me the willies,” Wooton said, then stopped and looked from face to face. “Not the only one, eh?”

órlaith nodded grimly. “That beast didn’t attack by accident, I think.”

“Fuck me, weaponized salties?” Wooton blurted. “Look, mates, there’s something bloody dodgy going on up there in the Ceram. For a long time it was just ships disappearing now and then and we reckoned, what the hell, fuckin’ pirates, right? But it’s more than that.”

“It is,” Reiko said in her slow, clear but accented English. “But this is not the same evil akuma who works through the kangshinmu of our enemies. It sent the beast against the chon ships, not to help them.”

órlaith nodded. “Or the Power that was behind the Prophet and the CUT in Montival,” she said. “That feels like your enemies, Heika. This does not. Well, the Powers that are our guardians are many; we shouldn’t be surprised that those who wish us ill are as well. Or that they fall out among themselves.”

She put her hand to the long double-lobed hilt of the Sword of the Lady.

“You powerful God, you Goddess gentle and strong, be with me now,” she whispered, and drew it slowly. “Threefold Morrigú, Crow of Battle, patron and guardian of my House, spread Your wings about me.”

Shock.

The world seemed to halt for an instant. Seeing with the eyes that drank the light of common day, you saw only a yard of marvelously shaped steel . . . but it was never only that. The steel and crystal caught the sunlight and refracted it, and there was a glow, something you couldn’t be sure you were seeing or only somehow sensing.

órlaith raised it high, then gently lowered the point to the sigil.

Shock.

This time the feeling was sharper, more like the way the Sword felt when she drew it in hot blood for war. There was an intense internal feeling of stress and release like the snap of breaking wire as the point touched the yellow sign. A sigh went through the watchers as she sheathed the Lady’s gift.

Like a pain you didn’t know was there until it’s gone, she thought.

Wooton blinked and rubbed her eyes, as if suddenly realizing she hadn’t been completely awake.

“I’ll be stuffed,” she said reverently. “I was right not to touch the bloody thing.”