The Sea Devil's Eye - Mel Odom [36]
Azla stood at the prow railing, her scimitar naked in her fist. The wind tangled her dark hair. She took her chain mail shirt from a crewman and quickly pulled it on. The ringing chains on leather barely sounded over the crack of the canvas and the smashing waves.
"Who is she?" Jherek asked.
"I don't know the ship," Azla answered, "but I know the flag."
Jherek concentrated on the flag atop the approaching ship's mainmast. A feathered snake curled across a field of quartered black and red, mouth open and fangs exposed.
"They're of the Blood Tide," Azla said, "a loose network of slavers who work for the Night Masks in Westgate."
The slaver vessel was within four hundred yards, its advance slowing as Black Champion seized the wind. Jherek rode out the rise and fall of the ship, his free hand resting on the railing while the other held the nocked bow.
"Unfurl the spinnaker!" Azla shouted.
Crewmen rushed to the ship's prow. An instant later, the white sail billowed out, blotting the sky from forward view.
"Cap'n!" a mate squalled from the crow's nest. "Something just leaped off from that ship's rigging, and it ain't falling. Some kind of bird."
Jherek peered into the cloudy blue sky. The sun setting behind them turned the cloud banks blood-mist red, but he could make out half a dozen black shapes boiling out from the ship's lanyards.
The creatures swiftly overtook Black Champion, cutting through the air. The bat-winged humanoids had wedge-shaped faces and fangs that ran nearly to their lower jaws. A single horn sprouted from their narrow foreheads, curling back slightly. Grayish-white skin looked like marble in the sunlight, glowing with a rosy hue from the setting sun. Besides the arms and crooked legs, the creatures had long, spiked tails.
"Gargoyles," Azla breathed.
The gargoyles screamed, a raucous noise that filled Black Champion's deck. They attacked the two men in the crow's nest first, swooping in to rip bloody furrows across the sailors' faces, chests, and backs with curved talons. Their blows also splintered the wooden cupola.
Tracking the nearest gargoyle, Jherek drew the arrow's feathers back to his cheek, led the creature a little, then released. The arrow jumped from the bow and struck the creature in the thigh.
The gargoyle screamed in pain, breaking the rapid beat of its wings for just an instant. It unfurled its wings and stopped its downward momentum less than ten feet above the main deck.
Horrid red eyes burned with rage as it spied Jherek. Screeching again, the gargoyle flapped its wings and gained height, streaking for the prow castle.
Standing his ground, Jherek fitted another arrow to the string. The other gargoyles in the rigging slashed the sails and smashed smaller lanyard supports.
"Kill those things!" Azla ordered at Jherek's side.
The young sailor released the bowstring when the gargoyle cleared the prow castle railing before him, less than twenty feet away now. Even with the uncertain pitch and roll of the caravel, his arrow splintered the gargoyle's head.
Jherek sidestepped the flying corpse and watched the gargoyle smash into the bow railing, shattering some of the thinner decorative spindles. He already had another arrow nocked, searching for a target.
Pirates scampered through the rigging with swords in their fists to take on the gargoyles rending the sails. One of the creatures clung to the side of the forward mast with both legs, tail, and one hand. It struck out with the other, cleaving a pirate's face from his skull. Shrieking, the pirate fell from the rigging and smashed into the deck below. The screams stopped abruptly.
Releasing the bowstring, Jherek watched his arrow go wide of the mark, catching the canvas beside the gargoyle and sinking to the fletching. The young sailor nocked another arrow and let fly again.
The arrow sank into the gargoyle's thin chest, driving it back and nailing it to the mast it clung to. The wings fluttered as it struggled to get away. Before it could, three more