- Chapter 11 -

The Prince was an island of absolute calm as he and the pirate captain started to circle each other. "Trained by the Swordmasters of Kan'Tir, you say?", he asked. "Impressive credentials. Tell me, my dear Viper - have you heard of Jadriika?"

"The Dyal? The Dominatrix Princess of Ordjaa?", answered the pirate captain.

"The same", came the reply. "I trained with her for a few weeks - and no-one who comes to her to learn to master the whip leaves her palace without satisfying her most strict requirements..."

Raven, able to look over the heads of most of the pirates, did not hear what was said. Her entire attention was on the woman - a lithe, athletic specimen, with snow-white hair and pale blue skin, dressed in a loose white shirt, tight dark pants, with her skin showing through diamond-shaped holes down the legs, and a fine pair of glossy black thigh-length boots with silver heels. The boots had quite flamboyant cuffs, edged with gold and curving down along the lower edge, forming a point at the outside that reached past the knee. A pirate queen, if ever I saw one, she thought. But just what does the Prince think he's doing?

The woman - Ikurlahaen, Raven recalled from the memories she had harvested from the pirates she had fought - lunged, thrusting the point of her sword at the Prince's belly. The young man leapt aside, and swung his whip over his head at the same time, cracking it just short of the pirate's left shoulder. The whip is magical, Raven realised, seeing a faint shimmering aura surrounding the Prince's weapon. Well, that evens things out a bit...

The two combattants began a cautious dance, each testing the other's skill and agility. The Prince, with the longer weapon, had the initial advantage, but Ikurlahaen had the more deadly means of attack, one strike enough to end the young man's life, whilst the whip would have to work hard to endanger a life, unless its magic was very potent.

Taking advantage of an excellent opportunity to help the defenders of the Royal Yacht, Raven quietly set about dispatching the pirates nearest to her, her presence undetected by men focussed on the duel. Their roars and cheers blocked out the sound of necks snapping and swords falling from lifeless fingers as she worked her away round the edge of the crowd. Too easy, she thought, and almost no fun at all...

***Raven...?*** It was Ashyra, calling her from hiding.

***Yes?***, she replied, twisting yet another man's head right around, killing him instantly.

***Help is on its way***, informed the Shaelin girl. ***Some guards from the upper decks...and Yasil.***

Raven snorted inwardly, feeling not the slightest trace of fear at the mention of the half-Shr'Ganti's name. ***Just tell her not to stand in front of me, or I'll twist her head off, too.***

The crimson-skinned girl had killed seven men without a fight before someone on the other side of the crowd noticed. Four men with swords came charging round to face Raven, and two were almost immediately felled when she threw her most recent victim - a rather large man - at them. One pirate hit the deck hard, cracking his skull open, whilst the thrown corpse pinned the other man to the floor...

At the exact same moment, "first blood" went to the prince, the whip slashing through Ikurlahaen's shirt and into her left shoulder. Cursing, the pirate jumped back, her arm appearing strangely limp, or numb...

More pirates broke away from the crowd, on the far side, but they went to face a threat from their end of the passage - a group of charging soldiers, led by Yasil. The giantess wore a leather breastplate, inlaid with silver, and carried a wicked-looking pole-arm, as long as she was tall, half its length taken up by a serrated triangular blade.

On Raven's side, the pirates realised what was happening to their ship-mates, and turned on Raven. The red-skinned female swatted many of the first group away, swinging at them with the body of one of their fallen comrades, but there were too many of them.

Raven vanished under a wave of burly bodies. In the distance, over where Yasil and the soldiers were engaging the pirates, two halves of a raider's body, sliced apart by the giantess, flew into the air. Ikurlahaen hissed in pain, and stumbled backwards as the prince's whip caught her again, nicking her right hip and partly numbing her leg.

Skylla could take no more. "To the Void with this", she spat, and bounded from hiding to snatch up not one, but two dropped swords.

The First Dancer, moving with her customary fluidity and peerless grace, carved twin slashes across the back of one pirate, then opened his throat as he spun round in agony. A second pirate came within the arc of Skylla's blades, and found the point of a sword lancing into his eye socket, and out through the back of his head.

Skylla did not have time to extract her sword from the raider's head, for the heap of pirates pinning Raven to the ground suddenly exploded, hurling able-bodied men high into the air.

Raven had changed again. Standing amongst the scattered pirates, she was even taller - now maybe seven feet tall to the top of her head, taller still if one counted the broad night-dark wings that had sprouted from the back quarters of her head...

Those pirates that could still stand picked themselves up and fled. Raven uttered one soul-rending, inhuman shriek, then the wings shrank to nothing, and she dropped to the deck, unconscious.

Skylla hurried to the girl's side. By the time she got there, Raven's skin had all but reverted to its usual, lightly-tanned hue, and there were no signs of the eerie second pair of eyes. "So, what's your story, girl?", murmured the First Dancer. "Just what are you?"

Getting no answers, Skylla looked up to find out how the duel was going. The pirate woman - a fabulous-looking creature, even by Skylla's standards - was faring badly, an arm rendered almost lifeless, a leg partly hampered by paralysis. The Prince was no longer unscathed, his right sleeve slashed open by a sword-tip, but he was unwounded, and quite able to stay well out of the way of his opponent's attacks.

What came next was an act of desperation that bordered almost on genius. One hand useless, the other clutching her sword, Ikurlahaen had to find some way to disarm her opponent without letting it touch her, and when the whip next came her way, she twisted round sharply, her hair swirling around her. The magical lash caught in the hair, and Ikurlahaen continued to spin, allowing the hair to wind around her, and pull the whip from the Prince's hand.

The pirates had all either fled or been slain, and the guards moved to apprehend Ikurlahaen, but the Prince ordered them back. "This is not over", he told them firmly. "The Viper may yet win her freedom - and you will let her leave if she does."

The pirate woman cut the whip free, chopping through her tangled hair - the Prince winced visibly when she did so - then she saluted her opponent in time-honoured fashion, pointing her sword upwards, then swishing it down to her side.

Ikurlahaen appeared to be recovering, now that the Prince no longer had a hold on the whip, and proved it by lunging at him. He sprang to one side, the sword-tip barely missing his stomach, then whirled around as the woman went past and brought the back of his heel in hard against the back of her right knee. Not fully recovered from the whip's numbing effect, the whole leg gave way under the pirate captain.

The Prince cartwheeled across the floor - an astonishing display, given the high heels he wore - and snatched up his weapon. Ikurlahaen was up, albeit unsteadily, at the very same moment, but the Prince struck first.

The pirate raised her sword to block the attack, but the paralysing magic, carried by the metallic strands that ran through the whip, was conducted at full strength through her weapon as metal touched metal. There was a blinding flash, a shriek from Ikurlahaen, and the woman was thrown halfway across the passage, blue lightning crackling over her whole body.

"You - you took your sweet time", muttered the Prince, trying to shake some life back into a hand shocked numb by magical feedback. "I expected that to be the first thing you'd do..."

In a display of sheer flamboyance, the Prince hooked a toe under Ikurlahaen's fallen sword, flipped it into the air, and caught it with his left hand. He brought the sword's tip close to the hollow where the pirate's neck joined her body, but did not touch her, in case the convulsions she was currently suffering led to unnecessary injury.

"Congratulations, Your Highness!", exclaimed the most senior guardsman left standing. "The Viper will pay dearly for daring to face you. All those who howl for her blood..."

"...will just have to keep on howling", finished the Prince. "As far as the rest of the realm is concerned, Ikurlahaen The Viper died here. I defeated her, and she is now mine."

The Prince untangled the length of severed hair from his whip, and wiped it across one of the pirate captain's wounds. "Here is the evidence of her death", he declared, tossing the blood-stained hair to the soldier. "Present a claim for the rewards, and distribute the proceeds amongst the families of your fallen comrades. If further evidence is required, I will make it available."

Skylla watched, amazed, as Yasil was called over, and began tearing the clothes off Ikurlahaen's trembling body. "She can keep the boots", said the Prince. "I like those."

Yasil pulled a boot off all the same. "I'll let her have one for now. She'll have to earn the other."

"You truly believe you can make a dancer of her?", enquired the Prince.

The giantess smiled wickedly. "Absolutely."

Skylla slipped into a day-dream, wondering just how stunning a dancer Ikurlahaen would be, but the fantasy was quickly dispelled when someone tapped the First Dancer on the shoulder.

Skylla spun round on her knees. Ashyra was standing there, a dagger in her hand.

"I believe you owe me your life", she said, and gestured with the dagger to a body on the floor. It was a pirate, a man Skylla had never even known was there, a sword in his hand and a dagger buried almost to the hilt in the back of his head.

"You're not the only one who knows how to use a blade", chirped the Shaelin girl, flipping and twirling her dagger.

"And I am thankful for it", the First Dancer replied. "When time allows, we should arrange suitable training for all the girls.

"But presently", she said softly, stroking Raven's hair, "there is one very brave and most exceptional girl in need of our attention."

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