5.Death of Chaos
CXXVIII
The Gulf of Candar
THE WATER FLARES over the bow of the Emperor's Pride, water so hot that it blisters the gray paint off the metal of the superstructure, and the bow plunges into the waves of boiling water that still rise above the bridge.
As the cruiser slides into that boiling mass, the fleet commander looks at the marshal. Stupelltry's face is red-blotched from where the droplets of boiling water have splashed it. “A handful of wizards? Demon-damn you and your handful of wizards!”
“I have done my duty as well as I can,” responds Dyrsse, clutching a bridge railing so hot that it blisters his fingers. Despite the burns on his face, his voice is firm and carries. “So have you.”
“Damn duty! We're all dead!” Stupelltry holds the helm now, as the steersman cradles burned and blistered hands unable to grasp the wheel. The lookouts have been torn off the bridge by the waves, lost kays behind the flagship. The fleet commander fights the helm, trying to hold the cruiser into the lines of the waves.
“Without duty, there is nothing!” Dyrsse pulls the signal cords to order the guns to continue their bombardment, but there is no response, either from the cords or the guns.
“Then there's nothing!”
The ship ahead, the only other one that Dyrsse can see, explodes in a wall of flame, and iron fragments spray into the towering waves. Any screams are lost in the howling of the wind, the explosions of the shells within the other ship's magazines, and the hammering of the waves on iron.
The Emperor's Pride noses into the boiling water, and the odor of boiled meat rolls across the bridge with the spray, and more bodies are swirled by the turret and below the bridge, bodies either from the cruiser or from one of the other ships that has been destroyed.
“Aeeeeeiiiii...” The helmsman, unable to hang on with his burned hands, slides and loses his grip, then is swept into the boiling maelstrom.
“Light to-”
CRUMMMPPPTTTT!
The magazines below the front turret explode in a wave of chaos, flame and shrapnel, and boiling water swirls over the sinking, blistered fragments of steel, over the bobbing boiled corpses that dot the Eastern Ocean.