‘Khetashe,’ Lenk cursed under his breath, ‘they’ve been waiting for us.’
‘Were they?’ someone grunted from behind him, a voice that seemed to think it should be feminine but wasn’t quite convinced.
He turned about and immediately regretted doing so. A pair of slender hands in fingerless leather gloves reached down to grip an arrow’s shaft jutting from a man’s chest. He should have been used to the sound of arrowheads being wrenched out of flesh, he knew, but he couldn’t help cringing.
Somehow, one never got all the way used to Kataria.
‘Because if this is an ambush,’ the pale creature said as she inspected the bloody arrow, ‘it’s a rather pitiful excuse for one.’ She caught his uncomfortable stare and offered an equally unpleasant grin as she tapped her chin with the missile’s head. ‘But then, humans have never been very good at this sort of thing, have they?’
Her ears were always the first thing he noticed about Kataria: long, pointed spears of pale flesh peeking out from locks of dirty blonde hair, three deep notches running the length of each as they twitched and trembled like beings unto themselves. Those ears, as long as the feathers laced in her hair, were certainly the most prominent markers of her shictish heritage.
The immense, fur-wrapped bow she carried on her back, as well as the short-cut leathers she wore about what only barely constituted a bosom, leaving her muscular midsection exposed, were also indicative of her savage custom.
‘You looked as surprised as any to find them aboard,’ Lenk replied. With a sudden awareness, he cast a glance about the deck. ‘So did Denaos, come to think of it. Where did he go?’
‘Well . . .’ She tapped the missile’s fletching against her chin as she inspected the deck. ‘I suppose if you just find the trail of urine and follow it, you’ll eventually reach him.’
‘Whereas one need only follow your stench to find you?’ he asked, daring a little smirk.
‘Correction,’ she replied, unfazed, ‘one need only look for the clear winner.’ She pushed a stray lock of hair behind the leather band about her brow, glanced at the corpse at Lenk’s feet. ‘What’s that? Your first one today?’
‘Second.’
‘Well, well, well.’ Her smile was as unpleasant as the red-painted arrows she held before her, her canines as prominent and sharp as their glistening heads. ‘I win.’
‘This isn’t a game, you know.’
‘You only say that because you’re losing.’ She replaced the bloodied missiles in the quiver on her back. ‘What’s it matter to you, anyway? They’re dead. We’re not. Seems a pretty favourable situation to me.’
‘That last one snuck up on me.’ He kicked the body. ‘Nearly gutted me. I told you to watch my back.’
‘What? When?’
‘First, when we came up here.’ He counted off on his fingers. ‘Next, when everyone started screaming, “Pirates! Pirates!” And then, when I became distinctly aware of the possibility of someone shoving steel into my kidneys. Any of these sound familiar?’
‘Vaguely,’ she said, scratching her backside. ‘I mean, not the actual words, but I do recall the whining.’ She offered a broader smile to cut off his retort. ‘You tell me lots of things: “Watch my back, watch his back, put an arrow in his back.” Watch backs. Shoot humans. I got the idea.’
‘I said shoot Cragsmen.’ Upon seeing her unregistering blink, he sighed and kicked the corpse again. ‘These things! The pirates! Don’t shoot our humans!’
‘I haven’t,’ she replied with a smirk. ‘Yet.’
‘Are you planning to start?’ he asked.
‘If I run out of the other kind, maybe.’
Lenk looked out over the railing and sighed.
No chance of that happening anytime soon.
The crew of the Linkmaster stood at the railings of their vessel, poised over the clanking chain bridges with barely restrained eagerness. And yet, Lenk noted with a narrowing of his eyes, restrained all the same. Their leering, eager faces outnumbered the Riptide’s panicked expressions, their cutlasses shone brighter than any staff or club their victims had managed to cobble together.
And yet, all the same, they remained on their ship, content to throw at the Riptide nothing more than hungry stares and the occasional declaration of what they planned to do with Kataria, no matter what upper assets she might lack. The phrase ‘segregate those weeping dandelions ’twixt a furious hammer’ was shouted more than once.
Any other day, he would have taken the time to ponder the meaning behind that. At that moment, another question consumed his thoughts.