Avenger of Antares Read Online Free

away from her foremast. Chips flew from her bulwarks where a catapult-flung rock bounced, and rebounded on to smash bloodily onto the deck. The men set up a cheer.
    Then the answering broadside came in. Noise clamored about our ears. A man at the nearest varter spun back, streaming blood from a shattered jaw, stumbling to pitch over. Halyards parted and the ship-deldar — that is, the bos’n — roared his crew into knotting, for there was no time now for splicing.
    With that and a thunking great hole through the waist palisades, where a rock bounced and miraculously touched no one, we escaped further damage from that broadside.
    We were past.
    We took the breeze and we went foaming into the northeast with the wind over our starboard beam. If everything held we were on a board that would take us well clear of the Risshamal Keys before we needed to go about again and so run into the northwest for the passage past the island of Astar and so on toward Vallia. The passage would be a long one.
    Someone yelled then and I looked back, and there was that Opaz-forsaken cramph of a shank speeding after us.
    “He does not mean to let us get away so lightly,” observed Captain Ehren.
    “Lightly?” said the Lamnian merchant, Lorgad Endo, staring with a sickly cast to his face at the screaming sailor on the deck below. The man’s comrades were tending to him, and one wrapped a kerchief about his shattered jaw, so that his awful shrieks were muffled. “Lightly?”
    “What the captain means, Endo,” said the Vad of Kavinstok in his cutting way, “would be outside the understanding of a merchant.”
    This was blatant rudeness. The Vad had deliberately omitted the courtesy title of Koter, and as a Koter is a gentleman, and Lorgad Endo was a gentleman, for all he was a merchant and a Lamnia, then he should be addressed as Koter Endo. The others of the deputation to Hyrklana had gathered, all armored, all with weapons, and no doubt they looked a fine warlike party. I had no faith in them to stand to it when the tinker-hammering began.
    The Lamnia merely turned away, and crossing the quarterdeck he engaged in conversation with Hikdar Insur.
    One of the deputation, an apim, Strom Diluvon, broke into an animated running commentary on the damage sustained by the enemy vessel, and the others paid him rapt attention, so the awkward moment passed.
    “He’ll be up with us again, and soon, Prince,” said Captain Ehren. He thumped the telescope into the palm of his left hand.
    “You have a good man on the poop varters?”
    “Aye. A rascal called Rogahan. The men call him Wersting Rogahan. But he’s so good a shot I had to make him up to dwa-Deldar, and overlook his rank indiscipline.”
    “Aye, Captain. So many good men have this streak of resentment of authority.”
    And then I, Dray Prescot, realized what I had said.
    By Zim-Zair! Had I become so stuffy and orthodox in my old age? Had all these ranks and titles, these princes and Kovs and Stroms that loaded me down, had they corrupted me, made of me a mere establishment figure of clay, turned me from the man who kicked instantly against all authority?
    Captain Ehren looked at me oddly, and away, and so I knew my ugly old figurehead of a face must have been glaring with all the malice that, to my sorrow, I know it is capable of.
    I took myself off up the ladder and onto the poop.
    Right aft where the taffrail had been extended out with platforms into two wings, one over each quarter, were sited the varters. A little forward of them and on the centerline, well abaft the mizzen, stood the aft catapult.
    The men clustered around the machines stiffened when I appeared. Well, Zair knew, I was used to that. Wherever I went, it seemed I found myself either at the bottom of the stack — slave, prisoner, condemned — or at the top — Lord of Strombor, Strom of Valka, King of Djanduin, Prince Majister of Vallia, Zorcander of my clansmen of the Great Plains. During that recent period of my