Bone Lord 4, стр. 32

Elyse blasted her torrents of superheated light through the ranks of the soldiers with deadly focus, turning living men into smoking piles of ashes in seconds.

It didn’t take us long to take over the first ship.

I locked the rudder wheel to keep it moving in a straight line before we all reloaded our grappling hook crossbows. Amid a shower of arrows and crossbow bolts launched from other ships, we shot our grappling hooks across and tangled them high up in the other ships’ rigging to give us good angles and enough height to swing across the gaps between ships without hitting the water below.

Drok, Layna, and I attacked the ship to our left, while Elyse, Rollar, and Friya assaulted the one to our right. Both ships had taken heavy casualty tolls from the acid rain and Plague Storm, and mopping up the little resistance that remained was a simple task. This was the same for the final two ships, and after two more short and bloody skirmishes, all five were in my possession. Two had suffered some damage from Isu’s toxic rain, but Percy seemed to think they could be repaired without much effort.

“All right,” I finally said, looking proudly upon my new fleet of warships from the prow of the rearmost ship. “The Temple of Necrosis now has a navy.”

“A naval fleet needs sailors, Lord Vance,” Rollar said. “And the six of us are fierce fighters, of course, but we’re no experts when it comes to such matters as sailing and steering warships.”

“No, we’re not,” I said, “but these men were.” I pointed to the corpses of the dead Church of Light sailors and soldiers littering the deck of the warship.

“Aye, Lord Vance,” Rollar said, “but will they still know how to steer a warship when you resurrect them?”

“The undead retain some basic memories, especially of the things they were good at in their days of blood and breath,” I said. “They’re basically residual traces of automatic actions. You’re a fighter, so what would you do if I did... this?”

I lunged for Rollar’s face with Grave Oath. He reacted immediately, whipping his hammer up to deflect the attack.

“Did you have to think about blocking that attack?” I asked.

“No, Lord Vance,” Rollar answered. “It was instinct.”

“Right. And these guys are just as used to sailing. They won’t be able to think after they’re resurrected, but they’ll be able to act on instinct. So...”

It took a bit of power to resurrect so many of them at once, like the exertion one felt after a short sprint.

I surveyed my new undead crews with pride. “Now, my warships have crews. I’ll get my zombie captains to steer us toward a rendezvous with the pirate ships, so you all can relax on deck for a while. Unless you feel like hitching a ride inside the whale again?”

The immediate chorus of “no way!” and “hell no!” and “never again!” that came my way in response was very emphatic.

“I go inside whale,” Drok remarked with a shrug.

I chuckled. “How about some wine? These Church of Light fellas always have ‘holy’ wine with them, and I’m guessing you guys are as tired as me of that fiery pirate grog?”

Everyone was eager to wet their whistles after the battle, so we headed down into the hold. Sure enough, there were plenty of barrels of good-quality wine down there. A few were from Erst, and when Elyse saw them, a look of sadness crossed her face.

“You’ll return to your bishopric, Elyse,” I said to her. “Once we’ve defeated the Blood God and crushed Elandriel and whichever other assholes in the Church supported this Crusade against me.”

“The more time I spend with you,” she replied, “the more I question whether I should, or could, return to my previous position. I keep thinking about your youth, when your greatest desire was to become a Consecrated Knight. Elandriel’s scorn and rejection of your wishes completely turned your view of the Church around and set you off on an entirely different path. You once were fiercely devoted to serving the Church and the Lord of Light. But you changed. I think. . . I think I might be changing, too. Maybe it’s time for me to find my own path, as you did.”

“Whatever you want to do,” I said, “there will always be a place for you by my side in the Temple of Necrosis.”

“Thank you, Vance,” she said as she wrapped her arms around my shoulders.

I felt like now might be a good time to celebrate my battle victory, alone with Elyse, behind the locked door of this captain’s cabin. From the unmistakable gleam in her eyes, I could tell she felt the same way. But before I could lean in and plant my lips on hers, something tickled my attention.

I could sense the presence of death, human death, out on the ocean. But it wasn’t the corpses of Transcendent Sails sailors floating in the water around the warships. The human dead I could sense were much farther away than that, a few miles at least. We were far from any landmass too.

“As much as I’d like some alone time with you right now, Elyse,” I said to her, “there’s something I need to investigate quickly.”

“It’s no problem. You are now captain of a fleet, after all,” she said, the disappointment plain in her tone.

I closed my eyes and sent my mind into Talon. I flew out over the open sea, scanning the waves below me. After three or four miles, I saw where the death signal was coming from: a small dinghy, adrift on the ocean. I flew Talon down lower to get a closer look at the vessel. It was full of dead bodies—all Yengishmen, it seemed. They were far out of the way of the course my ships were on, so it wouldn’t have made much sense to raise them as skeletons or zombies. I could have ordered Talon to bring a corpse back to me so