The crew had engaged the enemy. Evidently, Demos hadn’t chosen them first and foremost for their nautical skills. Though they fought in bands of two and three and four, they cooperated against the enemy with the tactical discipline of elite legionares. Several vordknights already lay dead on the Slive’s deck, most of them dismembered to boot. As Marcus watched, a grizzled sailor pitched a fishing net over a landing vordknight, entangling its wings in the net’s cords. Then he hauled the vord from its feet, while two other members of the crew went to work on the creature with axes.

Elsewhere, the burly bosun flailed desperately at three of the vordknights with his back to the mainmast, his short-handled bill keeping them back but doing them no harm. Marcus elbowed Demos, who stood at his back, and nodded toward the embattled bosun.

Demos growled under his breath and lifted his left hand again. The mainmast itself groaned and bent, and its two lowest spars swept down like a giant’s fist, hammering two of the three vordknights flat in a spray of disgusting fluids. The third vordknight leapt back in alarm, beginning to unfurl its wings, but the bosun didn’t give the creature time to flee. He closed in with the bill and all but split the vordknight in half with a single, downward-sweeping blow. The bosun kicked the stunned and dying vord over the side of the ship, glanced at Demos, and touched the brim of an imaginary hat.

“Too bad he ran out of whiskey on the way home,” Demos commented judiciously. “He fights better when he’s drunk.”

The ongoing gale had churned up a thickening curtain of ice crystals, and Marcus couldn’t see the front of the ship. More vord continued to land, singly and in pairs, and everyone he could see was rushing to hack them down as quickly as possible, anxious to keep the weight of numbers in the Alerans’ favor. Another vord landed on the port side, and Demos glided forward to dispatch it before it could be joined by others.

Marcus found himself faced with a foe on the starboard side, but reacted too slowly to force it off the ship and found himself fighting simply to remain alive. His sword matched the scythes of the vordknight, turning one blow after another, and his experience offset the creature’s power and fearless aggression, allowing him to stay just outside the critical distances that would allow it to close and cut him to bits.

But he knew that he couldn’t keep it up for long. His foe was both stronger and faster than he, and it would only be a matter of seconds before he found himself unable to deny the vord an opportunity for a lethal onslaught. Terror gave him strength enough for the moment, but if the fight didn’t change in the next few seconds, he was a dead man.