The timing baffled Lucius, that the harbor would come under attack seemingly unprovoked. If the raid had occurred while he was away, or at least most of his soldiers, that would make sense. It implied that something was about to happen which he wasn’t privy to. An attack by the demon? Reinforcements from Rackvidd? Perhaps the prince was marching on Giordana or there had been a change of power back in Aillesterra.

“Secure the prisoner, would you?” Lucius ordered, sending Adam off to protect Shiro as he marched to the harbor himself. The first guard he passed was wavering with a lantern in one hand and a spear in the other. The man shot to attention when he saw Lucius. Before he could babble out a justification for why he wasn’t moving, Lucius snatched the spear from him and proceeded to the ringing bell.

There was no fire, no capsizing ships and no obvious stigmata use, but the noise came from the ley cannon emplacement. It served a minor function as a secondary lighthouse, but a bronze dome reflected the light entirely to sea, leaving only dancing oil lamps b between the battlements.

When the alarm suddenly stopped, Lucius began sprinting. Half a dozen other soldiers had rallied around the base, but no one took charge to actually take the ladder up the tower. One of them saluted and grunted out a “M’lord,” when Lucius arrived.

“What’s happening?”

“M’lord,” the man grunted again, face grimacing in discomfort. The man’s accent was so thick he didn’t seem to actually speak Vassish.

Lucius snarled. “Ships? Pirates? Demons?”

“Men attacking,” the guard said, though he spoke it in the local tongue. Thankfully, Lucius had learned that much vocabulary. With that and the apparent sound of ax work, he jumped onto the ladder. With nearly two and a half stories to go up, there was no hiding his approach.

Someone stepped over the top and he knew at once they were enemies; Aillesterrans almost certainly. No local would ever tuck pants into their boots, not in the wet heat of the isles. They hefted a curved blade over their head as they squatted down, a derivative of the khopesh as good at cutting mooring lines as removing limbs.

The man never got to swing it. Lucius got the tip of his spear to the edge of the platform and used that as a guide to slam it upwards. Coming out of the darkness, the assailant failed to evade. The tip caught his dangling shirt and drove into him, gouging through his stomach and up through his diaphragm. He hit the floor spurting blood and unable to breathe.

Lucius had to pause and blink to take in the sheer audacity of the men before him. They were competent to an extent, as they had killed the three men stationed in the tower. Cutting them down in close quarters–as well as getting up the tower without detection in the first place–was no trivial feat to get out unscathed from. While they didn’t bear wounds from it, they were trying to bear off with one of the ley cannons. The sound of ax strikes had apparently been them chopping off the mounting post to make the main weapon more portable, but it was still a burdensome log of a weapon.

And the fools didn’t realize that the real engineering was in the geometry of the ley rods! Mistakes like this are why I have never thought very highly of the Aillesterran people. Their culture may be fine but intellectually they get by only through imitation.

The thieves regarded him for as long as it took him to put his hand to his sword, then the little parapet became a mincing board of steel and flesh. I was barely able to reverse engineer what precisely happened based on recovered corpses as my pupil’s recollections. The primary difficulty arose because one of their crew had the stigmata [Cloak of Shadows] or a close cousin of it. He immediately threw up a field of darkness like a frightened squid inking before its retreat.

The thieves did not run away with their prize however. Two of them jumped towards Lucius. We shall never know the first’s plan; Lucius opened his throat with a drawing slash as he stepped in. He tried to connect it to his right, to cut that man down as well, but slashed only into the tough steel of a targe. His weapon recoiled with a clang as loud as the alarm bell, steel shrapnel flying in every direction.

The shield glimmered with some vestige of stigmata magic. Lucius caught only a glimpse of it before the targe was pummeled into his chest and knocked him back. He hit the barrel of spent ley rods–practice munitions–and had to dive into the darkness to avoid losing his head to the eastern khopesh.

At once, he learned the darkness had no effect on the ability user. By the grace of instinct, he pulled his head back as another blade hacked at him and took off part of his nose as well as split his cheek. His retaliation was far more effective; a hack through the man’s thigh which snapped his kneecap off. The Aillesterran collapsed, the pain knocking the sense out of him and ending the stigmata.

In the light once more, he saw that the fight was not five against one. Half their number were climbing off the side of the tower with the weapon. When he rose and stabbed the [Cloak of Shadows] user through the throat, there was only a single warrior opposing him. Lucius tried to goad them, but found himself coughing up blood.

From behind the shielder, one of the thieves stood upon the parapet and looked back at him with a sneer. “Solhart I take it?” he asked in Vassish.

“You can speak a civilized tongue?”

The thief laughed and gave a half-bow. “Someone had to, how foolish would it be for us to come all the way to see you and not even greet you? The gambling lion! What a pleasure to see you in the flesh. Too bad that–”

Lucius slammed his heel into the shielder’s targe. The stigmata caused a vicious recoil through his leg, shattering the bone completely and making the skin split from a thousand lacerations. On the other hand, the Aillesterran went flying back, tumbling over the tower’s edge. He screamed before he split his skull open on the sea rocks.

My pupil was never one to talk in the middle of a fight.

The one able to speak VAssish got the memo and threw himself into the dance of swords. Both of them hacked and swung, throwing their bodies in and out to lunge at one another while hardly able to move their feet. Lucius couldn’t feel his right foot and the Aillesterran thief had his heels to the wall. He refused to budge, protecting the rope ladder his comrades were clambering down until Lucisu finally got the better of him.

His blade caught the foreigner in the hand and removed all four of his fingers.

The man howled and retreated at last. With a spectacular roll, he fell off the tower, only to grab onto the rope just before hitting the ground.

“Capture them!” Lucius howled. He watched with a snarl, unable to even imagine climbing down the ladder yet. To his great pleasure, he didn’t need to.

While climbing up into a melee took a certain grit that most men lacked, standing around the bottom of a tower with bows and arrows and spears, ready to turn an off-balanced enemy to minced meat, was something any man could do. Eight of them had assembled and laid into the men escaping with the ley cannon.

As best as we have been able to figure, the Aillesterrans were operating off of poor information and viewed this raid as a sort of probing gesture. They wanted they ley cannon, but more importantly was the information they could glean from the attack. They weren’t unskilled, but they weren’t such experts that they could win against Lucius. Any of the local guard would have been trounced if they had the spirit to head up the ladder. In that sense, it was good they didn’t. The poor luck of the thieves was that Lucius happened to be nearby.

Still, it wasn’t a complete loss for them.

The thief had a stigmata of his own, and by the time anyone realized it, it was too late. Some form of swimming ability let him vanish beneath the dark surface and only reappear nearly a hundred yards from the shore. The guards hadn’t been fools, they were all waiting in the area for the foreigner to expose himself, but only a very good archer could hit a man at sea a hundred yards away.

Lucius scowled from atop the tower and wondered if any of the thieves could be brought to a doctor in time. His cuts had been rather too decisive; there was hardly a spot on the whole tower he could step without treading on blood and none of the men below seemed to be moving. Their corpses looked somewhat like trophy fish hauled out for inspection, or miniature whaling of a sort.

Then he learned what the man was swimming towards, not the mere open ocean. If that had been the case, they could have dispatched a few vessels and caught up with him. The water ahead of him erupted like a volcano. White mist plumed up as if from a gargantuan whale’s blowhole, and from the shower of water emerged a black-sailed ship. The new vessel turned, circling around the thief and throwing ropes to him. An instant later, he could be seen aboard the ship.

Lucius saw someone else at the prow, nothing more than a smudge in the dark that barely registered as human in his eyes. The captain–as he presumed–waved at him before the ship turned and sailed north.

Lucius swore, finally understanding why it had been so impossible to track the pirates down. He had been dutifully searching the ocean like any sailor would; by looking at the top. His nemesis had been gleefully sailing beneath the surface like a sea monster and he had no way to pin them down whatsoever.

He could, however, re-light the beacon for the harbor.