Northward and Mercy

At eight o'clock Brightwater lay a mile off the eastern mouth of the deep channel, with Mercy's lamps dead ahead and the black mass of Orra beyond them. Four miles astern was the edge of the dark, where the sun lay on the sea.

Elske Marr stood at the quarterdeck rail with her watch open in her hand and the three red lanterns burning above her head. The ship was cleared for action. Her crossbow crews knelt at the carriages. In the waist, behind the mainmast, Corporal Maddox had the marines drawn up in two files, ten men in blue coats with pikes and short swords. Brightwater's boarders stood beside them, thirty sailors with cutlasses and hatchets. She could name every one of them.

The other half of the marines were with Dunning in the Kestrel, a mile off to port in the dark. She had sent them there herself. She did not think about it now.

"Mercy's escorts are turning out, ma'am," said Lieutenant Kell. "Both of them. Making for us."

"Signal Halberd," Marr said. "Engage the escorts. Brightwater goes for the engine."

The lamps went up, and away on the starboard hand the two Southwick ships answered and turned together toward Mercy's escorts. Petch had given her his best captains, and they handled their ships as if they had drilled for this for a year, which they had not. Marr watched them meet, with crossbows flickering between the ships. The escorts had been meant to stand between Mercy and anything that came out of the east. Now they had two ships of their size to deal with, and no attention left for her.

Mercy came on into the mouth of the channel under tow. Marr had seen the Darn drawings, and Nera's chalk outline on the floor of the mould loft, and neither had prepared her for the size of the thing in the dark. She was enormous. She was broad and high-sided, her masts struck down to stumps, her whole length hung with lamps. Two tugs were towing her under sweeps, and a third lay off her quarter.

As Marr watched, the tugs stopped pulling.

A cable ran out from Mercy's prow, and then another. The splashes came across the water a moment later. Her great shape swung slowly on the flood and settled, with her head pointing west into the stream.

"She's anchored," said Kell. "Blast her, ma'am. In the middle of the mouth."

"In the strongest of the flood," Marr said. "The current will turn her vanes for her now. She doesn't need the tugs at all. She doesn't need to move." She closed her watch. "Somebody aboard her knows his business. Very well. We go aboard her. Take us alongside, Mister Kell. Her port side, abreast the mainmast."

Brightwater came alongside Mercy within the quarter hour, and the fight for the engine's deck began on the port side, at the height of a ship's yard above the water.

Mercy's rail stood twelve feet over Brightwater's. Her sides had been hung with boarding nets. Crossbowmen stood along her rail above them, and as Brightwater's yards touched her side they shot down into the waist. A sailor beside Marr went down with a bolt through the shoulder. Another fell from the shrouds into the narrow black water between the hulls, and she heard him scream once.

"Get him out!" she shouted. "Hooks, there! Get him out of the water!"

They got him out, and he was alive. Nobody stays in the water. Mercy's fitting lay under her keel, perhaps thirty yards from the man's thrashing feet.

"Grapnels! Cut those nets!"

The grapnels went up, and sailors climbed Brightwater's shrouds with knives in their teeth and slashed at the nets from the yards. Brightwater's crossbows swept Mercy's rail, and her swivels cracked along it, and the enemy crossbowmen ducked back. Then Marr went up the side.

She climbed by the cut nets and the chain plates with her sword in its sheath and her hands on the cold wet timber. Maddox was beside her, and the marines behind. A head came over the rail above her with a raised axe, and Maddox put a pike-head into it from below, and the man fell back. Marr got a hand on the rail, then a knee, and came over onto Mercy's deck with her sword out.

The deck was a broad lit plain of planking, crowded with men. Most of them were sailors: deckhands, tug crews, the people who worked the anchors. Some carried weapons and some did not. They gave back from her, and some of them threw down what they held. Farther aft stood a line of marines in gray coats, twenty of them or more, with pikes leveled.

"Brightwater!" Marr called. "On me! Marines, form on me!"

They came over the rail behind her. Maddox got his ten into a line with Brightwater's sailors on either flank. Mercy's marines came at them.

It was a bad, hard, crowded fight in the lamplight. The pikes met with a crack of shafts. Men shoved and struck and fell. Marr went in at the end of the line with Maddox's pikemen beside her and fought their sergeant, who had a cutlass. He was strong and slow, and she turned his first cut, let the second go past her face, and ran him through the thigh, and he went down. A pike came at her from the second rank. She knocked it aside with her forearm, felt the shaft bruise the bone, and cut the pikeman across the wrist, and he dropped it.

Somewhere behind her, Kell was shouting for the deckhands to lie down, lie down and they would not be hurt. Many of them lay flat on the planking with their hands over their heads, and the fight went over them.

Mercy's marines broke at last and went back. They did not run to the rail. They ran aft, in good order, to a raised coaming abaft the mainmast, and went down through the hatch in it one after another. The last of them pulled the hatch cover shut behind him with a crash. Marr heard bars go across underneath.

She stood in the middle of Mercy's deck with her sword dripping and the breath sawing in her chest, and looked about her. The deck was theirs, and Brightwater's people were taking the surrender of the deckhands. Some of the prisoners were islanders, from the look of them, thin and hollow-faced, pressed into the work. One of them was saying over and over that he had a family at Lisk.

"Corporal," Marr said. "The prisoners into the forward boats, under guard. Nobody hurts a deckhand who has thrown down. Nobody goes over the side."

"Ma'am," Maddox said.

Maddox went, and Marr walked aft to the hatch. It was an armored cover of oak plated with iron, set in a coaming as high as her knee. On the Darn drawings it was the only way into the frame compartment from the deck. Below it a ladder dropped twelve feet to an iron grating, and beyond the grating lay the compartment itself, under the waterline, with the frame inside it.

She had seen already what was waiting for her down there. A big pulling boat from the supply ship's escort had come across the channel crammed with marines and gone in under Mercy's starboard quarter, out of reach of Brightwater's crossbows. Its men had climbed in through the engine's stern ports. Vaust had looked at the battle from wherever he stood and sent his marines where they would count most. They would be below her now, with the others, behind the frame.

Kell came up beside her with a cut on his forehead, and blood ran down into one eyebrow.

"Ma'am. Halberd signals. Northward is engaged. Resolute's boats are at her cages."

"Good," said Marr. "Then let us not be last."

Brightwater's carpenter broke the armored hatch, and Marr took the first charge down into Mercy's frame compartment.

The hatch went with a scream of torn iron after a dozen blows of the carpenter's maul. Two marines heaved it back, and below it was a square of lamplight, and the iron ladder going down into it.

Marr looked into it, and saw how it would go, and went anyway. She could see no other way.

"Pikes first," she said. "Then me. Then the swords. Quick down and spread out at the bottom. Go."

The first marine went down the ladder. He was halfway when the crossbows below loosed together. Marr heard the thud of the bolts going in, and saw him fall the last six feet onto the grating. The second marine went down after him with a shout. He reached the grating and got his pike up and stood over the first man. Marr went down the ladder behind him.

The compartment opened round her as she dropped: a tall iron chamber, lit by lanterns hung on chains, and filled by the frame. She had seen the Lamb's frame broken at Orra, a thing the size of a cart. This was a cage of bronze and black wood that rose from the floor to the deckhead and ran fore and aft into the shadows. Lattice stood on lattice, threaded with lines of pale ward-light that moved slowly through it like sap, and all of it hummed so that she felt it in her teeth.

Between her and the frame, behind a barricade of chests and iron plates, Mercy's marines were waiting.

There were a dozen of them, and they had had time to prepare. They loosed a second volley as she reached the grating. The marine in front of her took a bolt in the throat and fell against her. Behind her someone had come down the ladder too quickly and landed badly and was crying out. A fire pot came over the barricade, a clay jar with a lit rag in its neck, and burst on the grating, and flame ran across the iron and up the legs of the ladder.

"Back!" Marr shouted. "Back up! Get them up!"

She got the marine with the throat bolt over her shoulder. He was already dead, and she carried him anyway. Hands reached down from the hatch. She pushed him up into them and went up after him with the heat of the fire on her legs, and the last man came up behind her with his coat smoldering. A bolt came up through the hatch past her head and stuck quivering in the beam above.

They slammed the broken hatch cover back across the opening and stood on it.

Two were dead and three hurt, and nothing was gained. Marr stood on the hatch. At Ember Roads she had watched the Halcyon's people go to a forward hatch, one after another, because a captain had told them to. She was not going to do that here. Whatever else she did today, she was not going to send her people down a ladder into that again.

Down the channel to the west, a lamp began to talk.

Kell had the slate out before she turned. The lamp was low on the water somewhere toward the Throat, quick and clean, and it was the Compact book, every group made up as the book said. Kell called the groups as they came, and his voice tightened as he went.

"Brightwater, from Kestrel. Kestrel aground on the Brack, dismasted. Crown through the Throat. Break off Mercy. Engage Crown." The lamp went dark. "That's all of it, ma'am."

Marr looked west. Two miles down the channel the lamps of Crown and the Kestrel and thirty boats ran together into one smear of light, and she could not have said which was which, or on which side of the hulks they lay. It was the fallback, word for word. If Crown got over the Throat before the Kestrel boarded her, Brightwater left Mercy and went after her. Marr had written it herself. Under her feet was a hatch she could not get down, and Rusk was somewhere in that light, aground or not.

Her hand had closed on the rail. She took it away.

"Countersign?"

"None, ma'am," Kell said. "It ends at Crown."

"Then it isn't from us," Marr said. "Acknowledge nothing. Brightwater keeps to Mercy."

Halberd's lamp began to wink off the starboard quarter. Kell made it out. "Halberd asks, do we break off?"

"No ship leaves her target," Marr said. "Tell him so. And tell him Vaust has a Compact book and a lamp on the Brack."

The answer had hardly gone when the terrace spoke, high on Orra's crown, and Kell's pencil moved again.

"Signal from the terrace, ma'am. Northward's vanes stopped at four past nine. Saltgrass."

Her watch said six minutes past nine. If Venn's people held Northward's vane room for twelve minutes, Northward's dark would end at sixteen minutes past. If they did not, it would not end at all.

She had twelve minutes to think in, and she took them.

"Mister Kell. Fetch me the Darn drawings from my cabin. The roll marked Mercy. And send to Halberd: I want Mister Ebb."

By the time Tomas Ebb came up Mercy's side, Marr had the drawing pinned flat on the deck under four belaying pins.

Ebb looked worse than she felt. He had spent the battle so far in Halberd's cable tier, under guard, because Marr had wanted him alive and near. He knelt beside the drawing and put his finger on the hull side at once.

"The maintenance port," he said. "Here. Starboard side, abreast the frame. It's how they bring frames in, in the yard, in sections. A timber hatch, five feet by four, above the waterline. Bolted from inside. Eight iron bolts, their heads sunk under wooden plugs on the outside. You've drilled it."

"Through the hull," Marr said.

"Yes, Commander. Straight into the frame compartment, at the level of the upper lattice. Behind anybody guarding the ladder." He looked up at her. "They'll know it's there. Their officer will know."

"Granted," said Marr. "Will he have men on it?"

"I don't know," Ebb said.

"Terrace again, ma'am," Kell said from the rail. "Resolute alongside Northward. Boarders on her deck. Fighting aft."

"Countersign?" Marr asked.

"Saltgrass," Kell said.

Marr looked at her watch. Venn had five minutes left to hold, if she was holding.

She studied the drawing, and then she looked west, down the length of the channel, past Crown's lamps in the Throat, to the black beyond the western mouth where Northward was.

As she looked, the farthest dark in the west turned pale. A thin cold band of light lay along the sea six or seven miles off, past the southern point of Orra, and the black of the canopy stood over it like an eave.

"Northward," said Kell. "That's Northward gone. Her field's failed."

"Some of it," Marr said.

The band of light came no nearer. Crown's field reached four miles west of the Throat, and Northward's deck lay under it yet. The men fighting on that deck could see the daylight a mile off and not have it. But the dark that had joined the strait to the four engines in the west was gone, and Leary would see it, and so would Vaust.

"One," said Marr. "Mister Ebb, you're coming in the boat with me. Corporal Maddox."

"Ma'am," Maddox said.

"Choose me eight men," Marr said. "Swordsmen. Pikes are no good in a cage. And find me the carpenter and his heaviest maul. Mister Kell, you'll have the hatch. At five minutes past ten, by your watch and mine, you will make all the noise you can at it. Break it open again. Throw something burning down it. Make them sure we're coming down that ladder. You'll go down only if I signal you up through the hatch."

"How will you signal, ma'am?" Maddox asked.

"You'll know," Marr said.

It would take most of an hour to sway the cutter out on Mercy's blind side, choose and arm the men, and work down the engine's flank without a lamp. Marr hated every minute of it, and spent them.

Before the cutter left, a red glow had come up beyond Orra's southern point, low under the black, and grown. It was fire, a ship's worth of it, lighting the underside of the dark. The terrace was blinking again. Kell made it out with his jaw set: RESOLUTE AFIRE ALONGSIDE NORTHWARD. SALTGRASS.

Marr watched the glow for the space of three breaths. No ship leaves her target. She had said it at Holm Sound, to Venn's face among the rest. She turned her back on the fire and went down into the boat.

Brightwater's cutter pulled away round Mercy's stern and in under the engine's starboard side, where no lamps were lit. The flood ran hard along the planking there.

There were twelve of them in the boat: Marr, Ebb, Maddox, the carpenter, and eight marines and sailors. They pulled with muffled oars, and the flood carried them down along Mercy's side faster than Marr liked, and the oarsmen had to back water to hold her. Mercy's hull rose over them like a sea wall, black and wet and smelling of weed. Somewhere below it the vane cages hung in the stream, and she could hear them: a deep, steady churning in the water under the keel, the sound of an engine feeding itself.

"That's it," said Ebb, very low. He was pointing. "There. The seams."

She saw it in the light of the shuttered lantern: a rectangle in the planking, a little higher than her head above the boat, outlined by seams that ran a different way from the strakes. Eight round wooden plugs, paler than the planking, marked where the bolt heads lay sunk.

Something touched the boat's side.

When Marr looked down, a hand had come up out of the black water and taken hold of the boat's planking below the rail. It was white and swollen, and very strong, and another came up beside it. A face rose after them, a drowned man's face with its eyes open and the water running off it. Beyond him the water moved in other places.

"Mercy's," said Ebb. His voice shook. "They're Mercy's. Her fitting is right under us."

Maddox brought the butt of his short sword down on the drowned man's wrist, and the hand let go. The face came on until a marine drove an oar blade into it and pushed it under. Two more hands caught the rail on the other side, and the boat heeled.

"Hold her!" Marr said. "Carpenter, the bolts. Now. Never mind the noise. Everyone else, keep them off."

The carpenter stood up in the rocking boat with an auger and a drift, bored out the first plug, set the drift on the bolt head, and struck. The iron rang out under the hull like a bell. He struck again, and the bolt went through the timber and rang on iron somewhere inside, and he moved to the next. They had done it on the Darn wharf in three minutes. The wharf had not rolled.

They fought the drowned off the boat with oars and sword-butts and boathooks, breaking hands and arms. Marr struck a drowned woman's arm aside with the flat of her blade and pushed her back into the sea, and felt sick, and struck again at the next. One got its arm round a sailor's neck and began to drag him over. Maddox and Marr hauled him back between them, and the marine beside them stilled the thing with the butt of his pike across the neck, and it slid off into the sea.

Five bolts were through, then seven, and the carpenter was gasping.

Above them, on Mercy's deck, a great crash came, and shouting. Kell had broken the hatch again. Flame flared up yellow out of the deck far above, and men were yelling down the hatchway, and someone was beating on iron.

"Now," said Marr. "All of it. Hit it."

The carpenter dropped his drift and swung the maul with both hands at the port. Maddox hit it with his shoulder. Two marines drove an oar into the seam and heaved. The timber groaned, and split, and gave, and the hatch fell inward with a crash into the light.

Marr went through it.

She came into the frame compartment at the height of the upper lattice, on a narrow iron walkway, with the light of a dozen lanterns below her and the frame filling the chamber all round.

Mercy's marines were below her, at the barricade, facing the other way. Every one of them was looking up the ladder toward the hatch, where Kell's fire was falling through in burning scraps. Their officer, a tall man with a lieutenant's knot on his shoulder, had his sword up and was shouting at them to hold.

He turned at the crash of the port, and saw her.

Marr dropped off the walkway onto the top of the barricade and came down among them with Maddox and the marines pouring through the port behind her. They tried to turn. Their crossbows were spanned and pointed the wrong way. A man swung round with one and she cut his hands, and the bolt went off into the deckhead. Maddox landed on another and bore him down. The lieutenant came at her across the grating with his sword.

He was very good, young and quick, and had been taught by somebody who knew. He came in low and she parried, and he turned his wrist and came again high, and she felt the point go through her sleeve and score along her ribs. She gave ground, and he came after her. She let him come, a second step, a third, and on the third she stopped giving ground and met his blade forte to foible and turned it outward and down. His point went into the grating. Her point went into his shoulder, and he cried out and dropped his sword.

"Yield," she said. "Yield, or the next goes through you."

He stood there gripping his shoulder and looked round at his men. Two were down. Four had thrown down their weapons already. The rest were backed against the frame with Maddox's swords at their throats.

"I yield," he said.

"Hold them," said Marr. "Mister Ebb. Now."

Ebb came down off the walkway with the canvas roll in his arms. His hands were shaking so hard he could barely untie it. Marr took the knife from her belt, cut the cords, and the ward-breakers fell out onto the grating: four iron wedges with their faces cut in counter-wards.

"Where?"

"Here. And here." Ebb was at the frame, touching the bronze lattice with his fingertips where the pale lines of light ran into each other. "The nodes. Where the four main members join. Drive them in, Commander. Hard. The wards on the wedges will do the rest."

The carpenter set the first wedge into the joint Ebb showed him and swung the maul.

The frame screamed, a high, thin, metal sound, and it went through her head and set her teeth on edge. The pale light in the lattice flickered and ran away from the wedge in every direction like water from a dropped stone. The carpenter set the second wedge, and Maddox held it for him while he struck.

Somewhere in the deep of the frame a member cracked with a report like a carriage crossbow, and the light stuttered. Ebb was shouting the third place, and the carpenter drove the third wedge home. The whole lattice gave a long rending groan and split from top to bottom down its middle, bronze and blackwood shearing apart. The pale light went out of it all at once.

The humming stopped, and the chamber was full of lantern-light and smoke and the sound of men breathing.

Far above, through the broken hatch, Kell was shouting something about the east.

Marr went up the ladder and came out into the dark of Mercy's deck, and saw what he had seen. Crown's field still lay over the ship, deep and black. But away to the east the edge had drawn back two miles, all at once, and a broad sweep of sunlit water lay three miles off where there had been none. Brightwater's people and the prisoners alike had all turned to look at it.

"Two," said Marr.

The fitting lay under the frame in its sea-chest, and Mercy's people had not given up yet.

"Commander!" Maddox came up the ladder behind her. "There's men aft in the hold, below the frame room. They're opening the cocks."

"Hells," said Marr, and went back down.

Ebb had found the trunk already. It was a square iron shaft beside the shattered frame, with a hatch in the grating over it and a lifting tackle hanging above. At its foot, he said, eight feet down, the fitting sat in its chest, open to the sea. From aft, through a bulkhead door, came the sound of rushing water and men shouting.

If Mercy sank here, with her fitting whole, it would lie on the bottom of the channel mouth for as long as anyone cared to think about. Every drowned thing in the strait could shelter round it. Vaust would keep a foothold in the strait whatever happened to Crown.

"Corporal, take four men and stop them. Shut those cocks if you can. I want them alive if they'll yield."

Maddox went aft, and Marr heard fighting break out beyond the bulkhead, and splashing, and a man yelling. She and Ebb and the carpenter and a marine got the trunk hatch open. The tackle's hook went down into the black water in the shaft. Ebb, on his knees, guided it with a boathook and swore under his breath in the island tongue until it caught.

"Haul," he said. "Haul, haul."

They hauled, and the tackle creaked, and something heavy came up the shaft, streaming. It was an iron cage the size of a bucket, and inside it lay the fitting: a fist of dark warded metal knotted round a lump of black stone, wet and dully shining. When the lantern-light fell on it, Marr felt her skin crawl. There was nothing to see but metal and stone. It felt like being looked at.

The carpenter knocked the cage open with his maul. Ebb tipped the fitting out onto the iron grating, and stood back.

Marr took the maul from the carpenter's hands and struck it.

The stone cracked on the first blow. On the second the metal round it split. On the third the whole thing burst apart into fragments that skittered across the grating. A cold went out of the room, a cold she had not known was there until it left.

Beyond the bulkhead the fighting had stopped. Maddox came back through the door, wet to the chest.

"Two cocks shut, ma'am. The third's jammed open. She's taking water aft, but slow. The men there yielded. And the drowned in her bilges went down all at once, ma'am. Just went limp."

"They're Mercy's," said Ebb. "Were. They'll lie still now. But they're in the water, Commander, and Crown's fitting is two miles away. That's within her reach. Give them a while lying in seawater, and Crown can take them up again."

"Then break them," Marr said. "Every one in this ship. Necks and legs. Corporal, see to it. I'm sorry for it. Do it anyway."

Not long before eleven a longboat came out of the dark from the north, under a lugsail, round Orra's eastern shoulder, and the lookout on Mercy's rail hailed it.

The answer came back thin and hoarse across the water: "Resolute. Saltgrass. Captain Venn."

Marr went to the rail as the boat came down on the flood and in under Mercy's lamps. It was full of people, some sitting up and some lying in the bottom. Smoke stains blackened their clothes, and the boat stank of burning. In the stern sheets, with a man holding her upright, sat Ilyra Venn.

Her coat was gone, and her left arm was wrapped to the shoulder in a wet sail-cloth, and her face was blistered red down one side. Blood had soaked a bandage round her thigh and dried brown. She looked up at Marr on the high rail and lifted her good hand, the beginning of a salute.

"Commander."

"Captain," Marr said. "Get her up here. Gently. Send for Brightwater's surgeon."

They got her up in a bosun's chair and laid her on a sail on Mercy's deck. Marr knelt beside her. Venn's eyes were open and clear, though her breath came short.

"I saw Mercy's dark go," Venn said. "From the Kittle."

"Where is Resolute?" Marr asked.

"Burned." Venn closed her eyes and opened them again. "Listen, before your surgeon starts on me. We let the hawsers go up-tide of her and the flood took them down into her cages. The vanes stopped at four past nine. Then they came for the spares. They've a vane room over the cages with the spare vanes racked like oars, and if they'd shipped one she'd have turned again. So we took the room and held the door." She stopped and breathed. "They came at it with a spare vane for a ram. Sabin had his back to it and I had my sword through the gap. Twelve minutes. You don't know how long twelve minutes is, Commander, until you're holding a door for them."

"I think I do," Marr said.

Venn's mouth twisted. "Perhaps you do. Her pressed men were chained to the racks. We cut them loose when the light came up, and I broke her fitting and threw the spares over the side. Then her escort came back and threw fire pots into Resolute. Tarred rigging, dry canvas. She went up in five minutes. I got every soul still alive off her onto Northward's deck, and she drifted off burning and went down in the approach with her colors flying." Venn turned her head on the sail. "She was a good ship."

"Yes," said Marr. "She was."

"Sabin holds Northward. Her frame's whole, but she has no fitting and no vanes, and she'll not make dark again in two hours or ten. Her escort's lying off, but she won't come in against Sabin's crossbows." Venn's eyes went past Marr, west, along the channel. "I came round by the Kittle because I couldn't come through. Look at it."

Marr turned. Brightwater's surgeon was coming up the side with his bag. Behind her the band of sunlight lay in the east, three miles off, gold and shining. Away in the west the second band lay beyond Orra, pale and far. Between them, from one to the other, over the whole length of the channel, the dark of Crown's field stood as black as midnight.

In the middle of it, nearly two miles off in the Throat, Crown's lamps burned. Against her side, very small, Marr could see the lamps of the Kestrel.

"Two fields gone," Venn said. "Two out of three."

"Yes." Marr stood up. Her side hurt where the lieutenant's point had gone along her ribs, and she noticed it for the first time. "And Crown still covers the channel."

Somewhere in that dark, Rusk and Nera were aboard the last of them.