Avenger of Antares (Dray Prescot #10)

CHAPTER ONE
The leem lovers demand Jikai
"Blow the winds! Roar the gales!" I had shouted, exulting in my newly won freedom. "Bear me on to Valka and my high fortress of Esser Rarioch! Blow, winds, carry me home to my Delia, my Delia of the Blue Mountains, my Delia of Delphond!"
The lie to my boastful shouts was given by that ominous scrap of sail, striped black and amber, intermittently lifting over the horizon rim to the eastward. As our galleon bore on northward so that sail dogged us. I fancied I knew what beings manned her, what devils they were, and I went down to the armory and sharpened up a sword and saw most carefully to the harness of armor Captain Lars Ehren had laid out for me.
"By Vox, Prince!" said Captain Lars, his square spade beard thrusting from his blunt chin like the ram of a swifter. "We will send them scurrying back to their filthy dens with their tails between their legs!"
"Aye, Captain Lars." I looked at him, there in the armory of his galleon Ovvend Barynth, the iron harness cold in my hands. "Have you fought the leem lovers before?"
"No, Majister."
Concerned lest my tone lead him to suspect all the disquiet with which I faced the prospect of an action with these reiving ships from the Southern Ocean, I hastened to add: "I have. We exposed enough of their tripes to find out they are diffs like any other human being."
He laughed hugely. The galleon surged through the swell, her timbers creaking, the rush of water echoing along her stout lenken sides, the snap of blocks and the rattling of rigging distant but ever-present sounds. It is not easy to disconcert a galleon captain of Vallia, that proud island empire of Kregen.
"I have heard of them, Majister. Can you speak of your fight?"
I thought of Viridia the Render, and of how that pirate lady and I, as a member of her render crew, had fought off one of those reiving ships from the Southern Ocean. Here, south of the equator off the eastern coast of the continent of Havilfar, the sea was known as the Ocean of Clouds. Viridia and her crew had escaped from the leem lovers' ship only under the cover of a sudden gale. We had got away, but it had been a near thing.
"They fight dirty, Captain. I always look for the good in a man, and tolerate anyone until he proves himself evil or traitorous; I fancy I would have to look rather too long to find any decent humanity in these leem lovers."
"I have heard stories, Majister. Unpleasant stories." Captain Ehren buckled up his armor with the help of young Gil, one of the armorer's apprentices. He grunted with the effort of drawing in his stomach beneath the cuirass. "These shants carry their aura of evil about with 'em."
There are many names for these marauding ships and people from around the curve of the world; "shant" was merely one. We stood up, and stretched and wriggled until we were comfortable, then we clambered up the ladders and so came out onto the quarterdeck. The mingled streaming lights of the Suns of Scorpio blazed down, that glorious twinned fusion of opaz radiance, the emerald and the ruby, pouring in molten floods upon the sea and the ship. By Zair! It was good to be alive on such a day! I did not forget that I carried in my head half the secrets of the airboats that were going to prove of such great value to Vallia, my home on Kregen, in the inevitable war with the hostile empire of Hamal. That information must reach Vallia. I drew dark mental pictures of the holocausts of horror that would follow if Hamal attacked Vallia, suddenly, treacherously, fleets of skyships raining from the skies in steel and fire and destruction.
The first lieutenant, a Hikdar, saluted.
"She stays above the horizon longer, sir," he said to Captain Ehren.
To cheer them, I said: "It is certain she recognizes us as Vallian. That, my friends, gives pause to her cramph of a captain.