Doom's Break by Christopher Rowley Page B

ship."

CHAPTER SIX
    "Land ho!" rang down from the top of the mainmast. Feet thudded on stairs and decks.
    Among the men of Shasht who ran to get a glimpse of the new land was one figure, decidedly different. Undeniably female, and undoubtedly not human, Nuza of Tamf ran up the rigging into the foremast crosstrees like any other sailor. She wore matelot pants like all the men, though she'd reworked them to fit her wider hips, and a shirt made from good Shasht cotton, but soft grey fur covered her from head to toe, except on the front of her face around the mouth, nose, and eyes. She was a mor of the Land, not a man of Shasht, and she beat all the topsail men to the crosstrees, even the best of them.
    They'd grown to expect that, having sailed with Nuza for ten months. For her weight, she was as strong as most men, and she had far better balance than any of them. On a dare she had often walked out to the ends of the topsail spars, spun around, and come back on her hands.
    For her, such stunts were actually easy. She'd been an acrobat and a tumbler all her life. The men of the Duster , even though they were veteran sailors, had had to adjust to the sight of her skinning up a line arm over arm and running out to the end of a yardarm like one of them.
    But after a month or so, they had accepted her. It was just the latest of the strange developments brought upon them by their loyalty to the Emperor Aeswiren. Fortunately, there were no fanatical worshippers of He Who Eats among them, with all the prejudices and hatreds of that dire cult. Still, there were those who looked askance at the peculiar relationship Nuza shared with the Emperor. Endless gossip it had provoked, and even a few fights, but now even that was largely accepted. Nuza was somewhere between a wild animal and a concubine, but she was clearly athletically superior to any of them, and they respected that.
    And, though it had never been tested, it was understood that she could fight. She practiced her kyo, mor's kyo, on the afterdeck every morning to loosen up her muscles. The men had all observed her swift moves, the whiplash speed of her feet when she struck a high kick. No one aboard had ever thought to challenge her.
    Now she sat in the crosstrees and stared at the eastern horizon. There it was, at long last, a distant smudge of brown along the terminator. She felt her heart thud in her chest as she caught sight of it.
    Home.
    Once she had thought she would never see it again. Back in those dark, dreadful days of early captivity, when she was one of a dozen mots and mors jammed in the hold of a Shasht ship. Back then she had thought no more than a day ahead. Only squalor and death seemed to lie in the future.
    But there was home, so close she could see it.
    She was racked by sobs as her mind filled with thoughts of her family. Mother, father, brothers, sister, everyone she had left behind. More than two years had passed since she'd last laid eyes on them, back in Lushtan, the town in the Farblow Hills to which they'd fled after the burning of Tamf.
    Tamf! Oh, by the wounds of the Spirit, poor Tamf! She cried again as she recalled how that beautiful old place had been burned to the ground by the men of Shasht. The towers, the houses, the ancient streets, all gone, destroyed by the hand of Man the Cruel.
    But the Land still endured. She knew that the mots had held their own for two years and that no major battles had been fought in that time. She knew that the great Toshak must have come to the rescue of Sulmo in those dark, terrible days of the summer of defeat.
    What she had learned since then had come directly from Aeswiren himself. She knew that the mots had avenged the defeat at Farnem and saved the city of Sulmo from the flames. The war went on, but on a smaller scale, with raids and the creation of Shasht forts on the coast.
    She stared at the distant land. All the questions, all the hopes she had, were tangled in her mind like noodles in soup, and she knew