Shoals of Sziklafok

Would nine tons of drowned iron lift the sloop’s petrified oak three inches above the razor-limestone shelf, or would the coral tooth rip her bottom out before the battery fired another shot? Illyés Gyarmati drove the iron master key into the brass padlock of starboard port number four, kicked the locking bolt clear, and shouted into the gun deck’s reek. He needed six thirty-two-pounders tipped into thirty fathoms of brine before the tide fell away, and every second lost to rusted tackle bound forty living men closer to the bottom.

"Pry-bars to the trucks!" Shipwright Pálóczy yelled behind him. Her canvas smock was gray with dried lime and sweat. She drove an ash lever under the rear carriage of the fourth carronade, her shoulders bunching as four topmen hauled on the side-tackles. "Lashings are cut! Up on the cascabel, you dogs! Up!"

Illyés lunged to the fifth port, thrusting his iron key into the grimed ward. The lock turned with a dry snap. Midshipman Zsolnay threw his frame against the out-haul line, veins corded along the boy's throat. Roundshot shrieked overhead, clipping hammock nettings and showering splinters across the deck. Farther out in the red haze, two provincial cutter-skiffs skimmed the shallows, raking the waist with twelve-pounder grape.

"Heave!" Illyés barked, putting his shoulder to the oak carriage. The wood bit through his wool sleeve, hard as cold iron.

The heavy barrel groaned on bronze trunnions. Pálóczy jammed her iron bar into the seam, using the sill as a fulcrum. With a screech, the carriage tipped forward, sending the thirty-two-pounder through the coaming into the churning foam.

The sloop rose two inches on her starboard side.

"Number six!" Pálóczy shouted, hands skinned raw. "Trip the wedge!"

They threw their weight against the final gun. The tube plunged outward into the green troughs of the reef. Relieved of nine tons of metal, the sloop eased toward thirteen feet of draft.

Above them on the quarterdeck, Commander Vázsonyi’s single eye burned behind his telescope. "Helm hard a-starboard! Ride the white water!"

A tooth-rattling vibration raced through the keel as the sloop struck the outer ridge of the Sziklafok shelf. Fifty feet of petrified floor timbers dragged across living coral stone with a prolonged, tearing scrape. Dust puffed from seams between deck planks. Men stumbled across the waist, clutching at cleats as the ship tilted three degrees to larboard and broke free into the deeper trench beyond the bar.

"We’re over!" Zsolnay cried, his hands smeared with rust and grease.

"Larboard battery!" Master Gunner Ormánságh’s voice cut through the boy's shout like an iron hammer. The old gunner stood braced against the waist bulkhead, his apron blackened by powder smoke. He pointed his brass-tipped priming wire toward the port ports. "Run out! The cutter is crossing our stern! Double-shot both chasers!"

A heavy provincial cutter had slipped through the shallow passage behind them, its low black hull throwing sheets of emerald spray. Its bow swivel crashed, sending eight-pounder grape whistling across the waist.

A stray iron ball caught the training tackle of the third larboard gun. The two-inch hemp parted with the report of a musket, whipping through the air like a striking viper. The loose carriage kicked backward on its recoil skids, slamming its iron cascabel directly into Ormánságh's right chest and shoulder.

The master gunner crashed against the deckhouse with a dull thump. His priming wire rattled across the bloody sand on the deck, and his mouth fell open in a soundless gasp.

Illyés was on his knees beside him before the carriage ceased rolling.

Ormánságh’s right shoulder had collapsed forward into his chest, the head of the humerus bulging against the pectoral tendon two inches south of its socket. The gunner's face was the color of mutton tallow. His right arm dangled limp, fingers twitching toward the fallen wire.

"Arm is cold, Surgeon," Ormánságh choked out. "Can't haul the match."

Illyés tore open the coat. His fingers dug below the collarbone, finding a thin, fluttering axillary pulse trapped beneath the displaced bone.

"Subcoracoid dislocation," Illyés said. "The head has slipped under the margin. If it stays pinched, the artery clots within five minutes and gangrene takes the arm before nightfall."

"Don't saw it," Ormánságh gasped, blood flecking his lips. "Shoot the gun, Illyés. The cutter will rake our stern."

The provincial vessel was fifty yards off their larboard quarter, its bow cannon swiveling toward the Great Cabin windows.

"Hold his good shoulder, Zsolnay!" Illyés commanded. "Plant your heels against his ribs! Do not let him roll!"

The young midshipman threw himself across the deck, locking his arms over Ormánságh's uninjured left side, his face pale with dread.

Illyés did not reach for his leather kit. There was no time for pulleys or foot-slings. He seized an ash handspike from the deck, looped a thick leather gun-tackle strop around the gunner's upper arm, and threaded the timber lever through the strap.

"Brace your back against the carriage bracket, László," Illyés ordered, his voice steady against the wind. "Bite your collar."

Illyés planted his right boot squarely into Ormánságh's armpit, wedging his heel against the ribs to act as a fulcrum. With both hands on the handspike, he threw his entire weight backward, exerting sixty pounds of continuous traction down the line of the humerus.

Ormánságh let out a ragged roar that tore through his chest. Veins bulged along his neck like thick cords.

The locked muscles resisted like cured ham. Illyés leaned back, scarred knuckles aching under the strain, maintaining outward pull to disengage the bone from the socket rim. He rotated the handspike five degrees inward, guiding the rounded humeral head past the coracoid process.

Snap.

A dull thud resonated through the deck beneath them as the joint slipped back into its glenoid fossa.

Ormánságh sagged backward against Zsolnay’s chest, panting in ragged bursts. Color rushed back into the old gunner’s cheeks as the pinched axillary artery opened, flooding warmth down to his calloused fingers.

Illyés pulled his boot from the gunner's armpit and helped the man sit upright against the bulwark. "Can you lay the gun?"

Ormánságh rotated his right wrist, testing the fingers. He drew in a long breath of sulfurous air and spat dark saliva onto the sand. "Hurts worse than provincial canister, you old butcher."

"Next time I'll let the rebel gunner reset it with a solid eight-pound ball," Illyés retorted, kicking the handspike toward the gun crew. "Get your linstock."

Ormánságh dragged himself up by the carriage trunnion. His face was grim, but his right hand closed around the hickory match-holder with iron firmness. "Train her three points abaft the beam! Depress two degrees! Level on her waterline!"

The gun crew swung the thirty-two-pounder with a roar of renewed fury. Outside, the pursuing cutter was rising on the crest of a brine swell, her guns bearing down on the sloop's stern.

"Fire!" Ormánságh bellowed.

The carronade leaped back against its breeching ropes with an ear-shattering crack. A wall of orange flame and sulfur smoke erupted from the port. At thirty yards, the twin thirty-two-pound solid balls smashed through the cutter’s fragile oak bow at waterline height, shattering her stem and ripping her forward deck into flying kindling. The rebel vessel plowed into the swell, her mast snapping under the sudden drag, water boiling up over her shattered foredeck as she rolled into the reef's backwash.

A cheer went up from the surviving imperial gunners.

Before the cry could clear the waist, a sharp hiss descended from the grey sky above.

High overhead, a corsair bomb ketch had lobbed a phosphorus mortar carcass into the clouds. The round shell fractured fifty feet up, showering the sloop with burning white embers. A jagged fragment of glowing astral phosphorus tore through the weather deck fifteen feet forward of the mainmast, plunging straight down into the quarantine hold.

The gunfire ceased, leaving the waist in a hollow, ringing silence broken only by the hiss of brine against the hull. Astern, the shattered cutter rolled into the reef troughs, her deck awash and abandoned.

Across the deck, men slumped against carronade carriages to catch their breath. Illyés did not join them. He walked slowly toward the smoking puncture in the weather deck.

Through the charred pine planks, a pale green thread of vapor rose into the salt air, reeking of burned tallow and weeping divine marrow. When Illyés laid his calloused palm against the deck seam, the wood was already hot and unnaturally slick, the oak fibers hardening to porcelain beneath his fingers. Beneath the planks, the ship’s frames vibrated with a deep, muted resonance, like an iron bell struck underwater.

Zsolnay stepped up beside him, cradling the leather tool roll against his ribs. The young runner did not ask what had happened below; he merely opened the flap and held out the heavy steel trepanning brace, its serrated circular bit cold in the wind.

Illyés took the iron grip into his hand. The weight was familiar, worn smooth by thirty years of butchery in the empire’s forgotten wars. Vázsonyi had brought the ship over the coral shelf, and Ormánságh had broken the pursuer with double shot, but those triumphs belonged to the salt and the open air. Down in the darkness of the hold, the demigod’s skull was swelling against the bone, waiting for an auger to let the fever out.