Titans of Chaos

Giddy with freedom, we had been! Because all our lives had been spent on the orphanagegrounds, behind pitiless walls, under strictest watch, beneath the tutelage of Boreas. He couldpass for human, but Headmaster Boggin, as we called him, had been the North Wind himself. Myreal father, a sovereign of some ulterior dimension, never knew his daughter, did not raise me:Boreas, my enemy, did.

A flash of lightning lit the sea for a frozen moment, dazzling, burning.

I was expecting to see Echidna. Echidna, the mother of all monsters, who had dragged the giantluxury ship into these unearthly waters, had been looming over the rail just a moment ago, herbeautiful maiden's face cold with tearless grief and scaly snake-tail swollen with scorpion poison.

She had raised that sting to kill me, but had spared my life because I shed a tear for her dead son.

Then, she turned and dove beneath the waves when I whispered the name of the war-god who hadslain him.

Perhaps she was somewhere in the deep, brooding on revenge, her huge bulk drowned in fathomsbelow fathoms, her long snaky body, furlong after furlong, writhing. But my special powers wereblind, and I did not see her.

Instead I saw the fleet. There were at least a dozen barges, larger than oil tankers, built likestepped pyramids, with shields on every deck, and cannons, arbalests, catapults, and ballistaebehind every shield, and both upper and lower decks had raised gangplanks with iron teeth builtalong the bottom, like a siege-tower at sea. The barges were made of some black wood or metalthat shone darkly in the lightning flash, mountains of iron. Even from here I could hear thedrumbeats counting time for the oars. At the apex of each tall barge, strung between two tallpoles that jutted up and diverged, was a triangle of storm-beaten cloth. The cloth was black andon its field, in red, was a circle with an arrow coming from it at an angle.

It was the armada that Lord Mavors, whom the Greeks worshipped as Ares and the Romans asMars, sent for us. Perhaps he was here, and Echidna hunted him; perhaps it was merely his men,and the unearthly flesh-eating Laestrygonians.

Between these barges and the ocean liner, slender as spears in the water, was a flotilla of blackships. They were as light and swift as racing sculls, but each one held fifty men or more, withshields hung along the rail, Viking-style. Each one had a sloping nose ending with an iron-beakedram, and red eyes painted on the narrow hulls to each side of the ram.