Read Avenger of Antares for Free Online Page A

land. The suns were nearly gone; floods of orange and crimson and emerald stained the water to the westward, and against that flood of radiance the stark black outlines of the land showed as jagged hungry teeth.
    Somehow I found Deldar Rogahan in the confusion.
    I gripped his arm. He was spattered with blood, a shining green figure in the darkling light.
    “Put a varter shot into ’em, Rogahan!”
    He was gone on the instant. A few shanks still wished to dispute the loss of their vessel, and with a handful of Chuliks and sailors I drove forward to finish the thing.
    I heard a varter clang. I knew Rogahan loosed.
    And then the cry we all dreaded burst up.
    “Fire! Fire!”
    That Opaz-forsaken yetch of a Hamalese airboat had flung down upon us an iron pot filled with blazing combustibles.
    With fearful speed the flames roared upon the ships.
    Smoke and flame rose into the dying light. The flames twined and lifted, roaring, gigantic tongues of fire shooting into the sky. The airboat turned, insolently it seemed, and I saw its Hamalese colors flying; then it showed us its stern and flew away.
    Helpless, on fire, we drifted down onto that bleak and barren shore.

CHAPTER FOUR
    Shipwrecked
    Darkness lay over land and sea.
    The breakers roared and leaped. The entangled ships rode down, wrapped in flames, sheets of fire spreading upon the tumultuous surface of the waters. The waves rolled in to break in crimson bands of flame upon the rocks. Gradually She of the Veils rose into the star-speckled sky to cast down her golden-pinkish light. Everyone left alive clustered to windward of the flames. The flames blew and gyrated in ghastly streamers and fingers of fire down toward the breakers.
    The wind would soon pile us up, if the flames did not eat their way back to our precarious perches along the taffrail and the poop varter platforms. I did not think any shanks had survived. Certainly we saw none. But the thought occurred to me that, being descended directly from fish, they might well be singularly at home in the sea. Even so, had any jumped overboard, they were a very long way from home. You may judge of my frame of mind if I say that I did not then give a great deal of praise to these fish-men’s courage in thus venturing so far across the seas; I was concerned only with the foul results of their voyages.
    The wild holocaust of breaking waves and iron-fanged rocks lay waiting for us.
    “Not long now!” bellowed Captain Ehren above the wind. We had all stripped off our armor. But we still carried our weapons. I was glad to see the Lamnian merchant had survived. The Vad of Kavinstok was also there, drenched with spray, a slash across one cheek; his eyes, bright with bitter anger, rested on me accusingly. I ignored him. Wersting Rogahan clung to his varter platform near me. Wind lashed the spray cut from the waves across us. Before our eyes the flames roared and crackled, and the mizzen suddenly exploded into a pillar of fire.
    The conflagration was now so intense that a number of men slipped into the sea, to take their chances against the breakers. Few were seen again. The heat beat against our bodies. The spray steamed as it spattered the decks where the pitch ran like mercury.
    “When we hit, we will slue!” bellowed Ehren. “Then will be the time to jump — when the stern is near the shore.”
    He was right, but it was small comfort.
    The scene presented a mad, confused nightmare: the black rocks, the spouting waves glinting a fierce orange and ruby in the awful conflagration as the ships burned, the driving wind and stinging sheets of spray, the continuous wild screeching that penetrated our eardrums and battered our bodies. The ships struck. Before they could swing, the waves pounded them and instantly they shivered to kindling. In a tumultuous torrent of helpless humanity we were swept from our perches. Smashed at by timbers and spars, by barrels and wreckage of all description, we went splashing headlong into the sea.