empties overboard, then,” said Lord Ermenwyr, reaching out gingerly with the funnel. “Certain mindless fish have been known to stalk fishermen with something remarkably like intelligence. And a sense of injury.”
Smith shrugged. When the oil reservoir had been filled, when the water pump had been opened, when the burner had been lit with a handy fireball and the troll’s eyes begun to glow an ominous yellow behind their glass lenses, Lord Ermenwyr stood back and regarded the whole affair with an expression of dissatisfaction.
“Is that all?” he said. “I was expecting a rush of breathtaking speed.”
“It has to boil first,” said Smith.
There came a thump and clatter on the deck above their heads.
“Master,” said a deep voice plaintively, “that ship threw something at us.”
Smith swore and sped up the companionway.
The bodyguards were standing in a circle, staring down at a ball of chipped stone that rolled to and fro on the deck. Willowspear, who had retreated as far forward as he could get, pointed mutely at the warship that was by then just over an effective shot’s length astern, close enough to see the blue light in the depths of the cabochon eyes of its dragon figurehead.
“Was that a broadside?” inquired Lord Ermenwyr, worming past Smith to glare at the ship.
“No. That was a warning,” said Smith.
Cutt, Crish, Stabb, and Strangel all bent at once to pick up the stone ball, and butted heads with a noise like an accident in a quarry. After a moment of confused growling, Cutt got hold of the ball. He turned and threw it at the warship, in a titanic stiff-armed pitch that struck its foretop and broke the yard, sending it crashing to the deck in a tangle of rigging.
Lord Ermenwyr applauded wildly.
“That’ll slow ‘em down! Good Cutt!”
“What if all they wanted to do was speak with us?” cried Willowspear. “Do you realize we may have just lost any chance of resolving this peacefully?”
“Oh, you’re no fun at all.”
“The best we could have hoped for was being boarded anyway,” said Smith. “They’d have confiscated the boat and stuck us in a holding prison for civilians while they sorted us out. If we were lucky, we’d have seen the light of day after the war’s over.”
“But—”
“They’re cranking back their catapult for another shot,” warned Lord Ermenwyr.
Smith saw that this was indeed the case, and that the warship’s crew, which had been going about their business on deck in an unhurried way until the strike and only occasionally glancing out at their quarry, was now assembled all along the rail, staring at the Kingfisher’s Nest as a hawk stares at a pigeon.
The fighters among them held up their oval shields, bright-polished, and began to tap them against their scaled armor in a slow deliberate rhythm, clink and clink and clink, and the common sailors took up the rhythm too, beating it out on the rail. On bottles. On pans. The ratcheting of the great arm echoed it too as it came back, and back—
“Hell! Here it comes,” said Smith, and prepared to drop flat, but the shot went high and fell short, sending up a white gout of water.
“We don’t have anything we can shoot back with,” fretted Lord Ermenwyr.
“If you’d told me about this trip ahead of time, we might have,” Smith retorted, watching the activity on the enemy’s deck. Now there were sailors swarming in the rigging, hauling up a replacement yard and cutting lines free, and there was a team busy adjusting the placement of the catapult. The moment it was set again, however, all hands paused in their work, all faces turned back to the Kingfisher’s Nest, and once again they began to beat out the rhythm, clink and clink, even the clinging topmen striking out their beat on the dull blocks and deadeyes.
But as the catapult’s arm moved back, inexorable, there came a sound to counterpoint it: clank, and splash, and clank and splash, and clanksplash clanksplash—
“Hooray!” Lord Ermenwyr made a rude gesture at the warship. “We have oarsmen!”
And oars did seem to have deployed out of the panniers astern, jutting and dipping with a peculiar hinged motion, like a team of horses swimming on either side. The Kingfisher’s Nest did not exactly surge ahead, but there was no denying it began to make way, in a sort of determined crawl over the choppy swell. Over on the warship they launched their shot, and it arched up again and hung for a moment in the white face of the early