Peters threw one of his clubs at the foremost, who had attacked the captain, knife in hand. It struck the man on the head, and he fell. Another was rushing toward Peters himself, saber upraised. In the meantime, Pfall had raised his blade into a guard position and was staring wide-eyed at his attacker, a burly fellow with a stiletto in one hand and a club in the other.
I shouted a hopefully distracting cry as I mounted the final stairs and headed in their direction, brandishing my blade. For the first time, as I did this, I became aware of a low, thundering sound, like a buried storm, coming from somewhere far forward of our vessel. It was more than a persistent note, for it also constituted a physically felt vibration which one detected down to the roots of one's teeth. To my horror, I understood its nature. I shouted again, and the rearmost man turned to face me. He was a tall, lean, wall-eyed individual who brandished a spiked club quite capable of snapping my blade if the nails with which he'd studded it connected properly.
I saw Peters avoid the swordsman's cut, stepping inside to parry with his club against his attacker's wrist.
Then he drove his massive right fist forward and upward. It was lost to sight of me then, blocked by his assailant's body. But suddenly the man was raised above the deck, bending double while lofted, blood spewing from his mouth. To my other hand, I saw Pfall fall back, blood upon his shoulder.
Then I had no attention for anyone's problems but my own, and I halted as my attacker's club was swung at me like a bat. I dropped my guard and retreated rather than risk my steel against such a juggernaut. He swung again, cross-body, and I retreated again, studying the way he moved, looking for an opening.
I heard Hans Pfall scream—a heavily accented outcry—and his blade rattled to the deck.
A flight of birds crossed over us from out of the northwest, crying E-teke-lili! as they passed.
My attacker raised his club over his right shoulder, and with both hands swung it in a diagonal cut past my chest. He laughed as I retreated again, and cried out. "You come to somethin', you gotta stop! No more runnin'! I get you then!" and I could only nod politely and smile, for I had noted that his recovery from a downward stroke was noticeably slower than from one which moved in a horizontal plane.
I heard Captain Guy's new attacker—to whom Peters had turned his attention on dispatching his own man—commence screaming, as Peters had caught his wrist, jerked him forward and torn his ear off with his teeth. While this was happening, the man Peters had knocked down with his thrown club began rising.
"E-teke— E-teke— Shit!" cried Grip, swooping by and defecating on Peters' attacker.
In the meantime, the Eidolon jumped, as if we had actually been lifted bodily from the waves—and I could not but be reminded of my strange experiences while aboard the ghostly Discovery—and when the Eidolon came down, our speed seemed to have increased. I half-expected green fire to dance along my blade.
Suddenly, it did. Had my thought summoned it? Did I possess some strange connection in this place even stronger than memory—with things I had touched in the past?
The tall crewman's eyes widened as the baleful gleam walked my weapon's edge. Yet he drew back his club over his left shoulder, and he swung it again. Again, I retreated. But not as before. Recalling an expensive lesson from a fancy-legged French fencing master who had once passed through town, I retreated but a single step with my left foot, drew back my right in an enormous hurry, brought my saber up, out, around and over, transforming it then into a point-weapon as I executed a stop-thrust which tore into the man's upper arm before he could recover from his missed swing. Immediately, I withdrew the point and executed a second thrust, to my assailant's throat. He took it properly.
I looked up then to see Peters throwing his unearred opponent against the one who had just risen. The man whose chest he had smashed lay sprawled, leaking blood through his ears and nose as well as his mouth. I glanced back, a precaution. The man whose chest I had cut open still lay beside the companionway. He was not breathing.
Three of the six, then, were down, two were attacking Peters, and the final one was just withdrawing his stiletto from a point somewhere below Hans Pfall's left ribcage. He turned his attention now to Peters, who had crouched and extended both his hands toward the two men he had dealt with before who now faced him again. Smiling, the burly man moved to assist them, swinging his club almost jauntily in his left hand, knife in his right, low and near to his hip. As he passed the still form of Captain Guy I heard a pistol's sharp report. The club slipped from his fingers and he dropped to one knee, left hand moving to clutch somewhere at his midsection.
Above the eternal growl of the Symmes' Hole I heard the man say, "I thought you was dead!" Then he dropped to his other knee and I could see past him to where Captain Guy still lay, back propped against a bollard, a derringer in his right hand, a small smile upon his lips.
"You were wrong," the captain said.
I advanced upon the two who faced Peters, one of whom had snatched up the saber dropped by the earliest attacker. As he heard my approach, this one turned to face me. He bent from the waist and extended the weapon out to his side, point angling back in toward me, his other hand fluttering forward—an obvious and cumbersome attempt to transfer knife-fighting technique to the larger weapon.
I strode forward almost contemptuously then. This was no problem for a trained fencer.
My heel struck a patch of bird feces and I slipped. Thus is arrogance occasionally brought down by the lowly. My attacker was on me in an instant, trying to lay the edge of his weapon across my windpipe and lean upon it. We both, of course, tried kneeing the other in the groin, and both successfully turned a thigh against it. In that my right arm had gone high and then out to the side during my fall and that my opponent now had a knee upon its biceps, I released the blade. I couldn't swing it from that position, and it was just an added burden of weight. I brought the hand over quickly, getting it beneath his blade, where it joined the other in holding the weapon back. Unfortunately, it was the edge that I was blocking.
Fortunately, it was not too sharp. Unfortunately, it was sharp enough... .
I felt it cut into my hands and he grinned as the blood began to run and drip upon my shirtfront; and he breathed on me, which nearly proved my undoing. His teeth were in very bad condition.
I still heard the sounds of struggling from Peters' quarter. The ship skipped again, and the forte of the blade ground heavily against my left palm. The Symmes' thunder came like some thousands of Niagaras now, and from the awkward angle at which I lay I saw that far off to my left and high up in the sky a great tower of mist and fog had grown up, drifting, looming, inclining toward us like an enormous shrouded human figure, white as bone, snow, or the skin of a cadaver... .
I spat full in my assailant's face—ungentlemanly, unsanitary, and not a thing I'd learned from the French master; but rather a trick told me by a young British officer called Flash with whom I'd gone drinking one night, described by him as so unnerving it had almost cost him his life in a duel. It had remained in my mind as a particularly egregious breach of etiquette ever since. Fortunately, I am neither an officer nor a gentleman, and it worked beautifully. He drew back sufficiently for me to grit my teeth and push, which gave me just enough of an opening to form my right hand painfully into a fist and drive it forward against the source of his bad breath. He did not rock back as far as I hoped, his weight still holding me pinned, but a leaning corpse-white figure other than the misty apparition in the sky caught hold of his neck then and twisted, raising him from me. The man's body swung toward Valdemar as he was drawn to his feet. His right elbow went back like a piston, and the point of his blade against Valdemar's abdomen; then he drove it forward, running my rescuer through. Valdemar twisted his neck and I heard it crack. Then he released him and looked downward.