Chapter 82 : Undying Flesh
Nobody believed Evan's stated reason. The man facing him assumed the Yin-Chill Strike finger-point was a sword-art technique — he'd seen the staff-work already, and an index-finger strike could pass for one of the rarer fingertip blade-styles. He brought the greatsword up in a wide guard, pale aura flooding the blade, the silvery sheen of defensive cultivation spreading across his skin.
It wasn't a sword technique. The dark smoke compressed into a column, and when it hit the greatsword, the man's body seized for a moment. His eyes went wide.
Soul strike.
While he stood frozen, Evan drove the sword-cane into his chest. The man swayed and went down, the light in his eyes fading before he hit the deck.
Shuang reappeared. "That's what you get for attacking me."
Prince Elloran stood at the center of the deck watching all of this, unhurried, his expression cool. He nodded once to Evan as his eight bodyguards kept the remaining attackers engaged. Two of the Blood Shark men had broken off and were driving passengers toward Elloran's position — using the crowd as a wedge to scatter the defensive formation. Elloran had the priest on one side and his attendant on the other. The priest watched the Wyvern overhead with his hands still lit, a divine technique ready but not released. The Wyvern was watching him right back.
Evan caught the shift in the crowd — the light-point from last night, moving through the passengers. He raised his voice: "Watch yourself."
Elloran coughed, a flush crossing his face, and stepped aside half a pace, which brought the attendant out from behind him. The attendant's hand came up with a dagger, and when a figure appeared from the crowd, her blade met his in a clean deflection. The figure pulled back, vanished, and the attendant returned to position without having changed expression once.
He came back a moment later with a different approach — the air split, and two identical figures moved toward Elloran from slightly different angles, blue light running along twin narrow blades. The color alone said what the blades were carrying.
The attendant's response was the same: no visible change of state. A warm red light bloomed from her skin for a single instant — there and gone — and in that instant both figures stuttered. Her dagger crossed two throats faster than anyone tracking it could follow. One figure dissolved. The other stumbled back clutching his neck, made it several steps, and fell.
The attendant had already turned her attention elsewhere when the third strike came.
Evan hadn't seen this one either. She'd boarded with the morning crowd, dressed like a minor noble's companion, exactly the kind of person whose face you forget before you look away. Her weapon was a narrow three-sided blade less than a finger wide, gleaming faint blue — designed for one thing. She'd held back through the whole engagement and chosen her moment perfectly: the instant the second figure fell, the instant attention shifted.
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She crossed the intervening distance in a movement that wasn't quite a blink but was as close to one as a person on foot could manage.
Elloran's face went through several things at once. The flush came back, darker this time, and his eyes shifted from blue to a strange red, and the black fog that had been controlled all morning surged. His right hand came up and caught the blade.
He caught it. Bare palm, bare fingers, closing around the point. Blood appeared immediately and turned dark green.
He made a sound that wasn't a human sound. His left hand came across — the fingers changed, something about the configuration wrong, carrying the black fog — and hit the assassin's chest. His hand came back with her heart in it.
He held it for a moment, then seemed to come back to himself. He looked at his right hand, which was darkening from the wrist down, and made a decision. The left hand formed a blade-edge and struck. His own right hand dropped to the deck.
The hand moved, even severed, for a few seconds. Then it corroded rapidly, flesh dissolving in under a minute, until only bones remained.
From the stump at Elloran's wrist, the black fog churned. New tissue appeared at the cut edge and kept appearing. The hand grew back.
Evan watched the entire sequence with a feeling he recognized as recalibration. Undying Flesh. The ability belonged to a class of infernal beings called Oomani — the ability to regenerate severed limbs, to bleed green rather than red, to restore damage that should be permanent. He had no immediate explanation for how a Norma prince came to carry it. A willing contract with an Oomani would be a theological catastrophe in the heart of Creationist territory. But the priest standing beside the prince was clearly aware of the situation and hadn't raised an alarm. Which meant the possession was involuntary. Elloran had been harmed somehow, and the Oomani had found an opening, and whatever was sustaining it was being managed rather than exorcised.
The implications about why he might be traveling quietly to Nabos with a priest for company began to make more sense.
One of the eight surviving boarders had watched the hand come off and the new one grow back and apparently decided that "devil" covered the situation adequately as an exit reason. He broke from his fight and ran — straight into the reality that there was nowhere to run on a ship. The momentary loss of concentration was enough. A bodyguard's sword-aura caught him before he'd covered two steps.
The dynamic shifted. The remaining six regrouped and, under the particular pressure of having no options, fought harder — two bodyguards went down, one more took a wound, but the six gave back three casualties in exchange. Evan watched this without moving, still holding the sword-cane. He had no particular stake in how quickly the ship's bodyguards finished this, and they were capable.
Elloran's color had gone further toward paper. The attendant maintained her position behind him like a second shadow. The priest hadn't taken his eyes off the Wyvern.
The Wyvern was still circling. Since the engagement started it had been watching the deck, but the rider was now working with signal flags, reading the relative positions of the two pirate ships and the passenger vessel, calculating firing solutions. The rider wasn't just transportation — he was the spotter.
The gun crews on both pirate ships were waiting on his correction. The first ranging shot came in — short, the water column rising twenty-odd cubits to port, testing the bracket. An injured bodyguard's foot slipped on a wet board and he went down close to where Evan was standing. One of the boarders drove toward him immediately.