Let's suppose you're in charge of guarding a group of over two hundred prisoners and you spot something amiss - let's say, hypothetically, a door that should have been locked is swinging wide-open. You have at your disposal five reasonably-experienced men with crossbows and melee weapons… any more manpower would require making a much bigger deal out of the current situation and drawing the attention of your officers. What do you do?

The answer is: you absolutely make a big deal out of the situation. You get the officers, you bring in more people, and you make sure whatever you spotted really is a harmless nothing - because it's much worse to mistake danger as harmless than the other way around.

If you don't do that, then you've committed yourself to losing a man if the situation is even a bit dicey, but here's what you do: you send that one man in, well-armed, but not with a ranged weapon, and he immediately locks the door behind himself. You post two men with ranged weapons, well out of arm's reach by the main door and one each above the overhold grates. Anybody who so much as touches your man gets a bolt, and if things turn violent, you keep shooting until it's not violent anymore. Then, obviously, you've got to fetch the officers.

Fortunately, nobody informed our guards on proper security protocols. The pair who'd discovered the open door tromped down to the locked hold entrance, where they had a whispered (but heated) exchange with the pair of guards on duty there. After deciding upon a course of action, the pair helped themselves to fast-action crossbows and headed in, leaving it to the main guards to lock the door behind them. Their eyes were skittish, darting to and fro between the listless prisoners, all of whom, as far as they could see, were stowed where they should have been.

The shorter of the two men licked his lips. "Let's just lock the damn thing and-"

Lenschel swung his unbolted shackles at the man like a flail, striking the side of his head with a somewhat-unexpected double-crack - the second crack was the crossbow going off the bolt zipping off and lodging into the heavy wood of the bulkhead. The first crack was, I imagine, nothing very good for that sailor's health. The shackles weighed a good three or four kilograms with the cuffs attached.

The guard at the main door fumbled the keys in his panic. Bulia and Hiramino the Stowaway pushed the door open and leapt on to him, keeping the man occupied for long enough that at least a dozen of us got through. He socked Hiramino with a looping haymaker, dropping the slim, young man like a slim, young bag of rocks. He took in a great breath and shouted:

"Prison-" Presumably, he would have added a '-break' or '-ers escaping', but I fear we shall never know because he caught a face full of chain and dropped like a burly, middle-aged bag of rocks. Yes, it turns out that medium-gauge chains with iron shackles at the end make for a pretty decent weapon if you give them a good swing.

By then, I was out of the chattel hold and on my way up the steep, narrow stairwell leading to the prisoner galley, my breath ragged in mixed exhilaration and panic, my heart thrumming in my chest. I pivoted to ascend to the next level up - the crew quarters right below the main deck - but somebody pulled me aside, pushing me into a dark corner of the galley.

"Mailyn?" I hissed. "We've got to get up there…"

She looked at me with a resolve I'd rarely seen from her, little motes of fiery magic glittering in her eyes like constellations. "What can we do up there? We're kids, Vix…"

"Yeah, but-"

Mailyn shook her auburn locks and hefted her chain. "We ain't overpowering no grown-up sailors swinging these about." She pulled herself closer to the wall as a pair of teenagers clambered up the nearby stairs. "They can fight them sailors in the open. We should wait down here and-"

One of the teenagers tumbled back down the stairs, groaning. Her left arm jutted out at an unnatural angle and her dingy green dress was spotted with fresh, dark blood. A group of sailors swept down with professional aplomb, sliding down the stair rails as only inveterate sailors (and some monkeys) can. One of them grabbed the girl by the hair and shoved her against the wall. With his free hand, he pointed toward the chattel hold stairs.

"Get down there and stop any more from com- ah!"

"Leave her alone!" I shouted, my chain already coming around for another swing.

The sailor held out his arm, wincing as the shackles struck and the chains wrapped around his forearm, but absorbing the strike. With a yank, he pulled them right out of my hands and sent me sprawling to the deck. I could sense him shifting his weight to kick me, but before he could a chain whipped past my face and struck him in a very sensitive spot. The man bowled over, clutching at his groin, a victim of Mailyn's flail, but that earned me a bare second of reprieve.

The remaining two sailors were on us, one of them dealing with the injured teen while the other dealt with Mailyn and me, shoving me to the deck before lunging at Mailyn and grabbing her chain mid swing. She kicked him in the thigh, but he didn't so much as flinch, and then I lost track of her fight because I had my own problems to deal with.

I shrieked as I was lifted from the deck by my hair. A strong and calloused hand pinned my arms behind my back, and I kicked and flailed to no avail - the guy Mailyn had struck in the groin had recovered, and he wasn't happy. He released my hair and reached for a carpenter's mallet dangling from a nail in the nearby bulkhead. If I had to guess, he was about to bash my brains in…

"Urk… akh!" he suddenly released his grip as something warm and wet sprayed across my back.

I stumbled to the deck, only to look up and find Aldo perched on the sailor's back with a blood-streaked knife. He stabbed twice more, two quick strikes to the neck, and the sailor collapsed, gasping pointlessly as he bled out. Aldo pointed past me with the tip of the knife, and I shifted to find Mailyn subdued, the sailor kneeling on the small of her back and wrapping thick cord to bind her wrists. His back was to us. I grabbed the wooden mallet from the dying sailor and rushed after Aldo.

I think I hit the man twice - once on the collarbone and once to the side of the head - but I'm pretty sure it was Aldo's knife that did him in. I pushed the dying man to the side as Aldo cut Mailyn free from her bindings. I remember at the time thinking it odd how Aldo didn't seem terrified or on the verge of tears like Mailyn or me - I suppose being a little kid on the streets will do that. Instead, he looked annoyed, quickly shifting to anger.

"What in the hells are you two doing down here? Are you crazy?"

Mailyn rubbed at her chafed wrists. "We… we reckoned it'd be safer down below than out in the open with all them sailors…"

He stalked toward his first victim, wiping the knife off on the man's shirt and then retrieving the sheath from his belt. "Never fight cornered, especially not if you're a kid against grown-ups. Everybody knows that."

"I didn't," I said in a small voice.

Aldo's advice was generally correct - you don't want to fight in close quarters in general, because it's difficult to create distance and the likelihood of being injured by an armed opponent, even one much less-skilled than you is very high. This is doubly true if they're a lot larger and stronger than you, because once they get into grappling distance, you're in trouble. There are exceptions - as Tactonius himself observed: when the advantage of an ambush outweighs a disadvantage wrought by terrain, it may still be prudent to spring surprise upon the enemy. But this wasn't one of those times.

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Aldo gestured toward the stairs. "You lookin' for an invitation?"

"Um… no…" I muttered. "I've just never killed anybody."

"You still ain't," he said with a shrug. "Not unless you cracked him a lot harder than I thought you did. We gonna take this boat or what?"

"It's a ship," Mailyn said. She wiped at her tears with her sleeve and helped herself to the other sailor's knife. "Even I know that."

"What about her?" I asked, pointing to the stunned older girl with the broken arm. She watched us listlessly, her lips moving but no sound issuing forth.

"I suppose you can carry her up if you want," Aldo said with a shrug, and with that he scampered up the steps. Mailyn went next, followed by me - I couldn't figure how to climb the ship's steep stairs with the big mallet in hand, so I tossed it up before clambering after it.

I stepped onto the main deck to find the Auspicio a scene of utter chaos. Around twenty of us had managed to escape and make it above decks, facing off against perhaps two dozen sailors, some of them still in nightclothes - the full complement of the ship was around thirty men, but some of them were either dead or dealing with trouble below decks.

The night was black, the moons obscured behind a veil of cloud, the world an inky void beyond the pools of lantern-light that populated the deck. Shouting and the sounds of feet thumping upon the deck surrounded us. There was very little of the sound of metal upon metal that you associate with armed combat, because the prisoners were armed with whatever they could find. Most of the sailors only had knives, usually around ten or twelve centimeters long - even on a military ship, most sailors don't carry weapons unless expecting combat, and we were on a merchant ship and had arrived unexpected in the middle of the night.

"No matter what happens stick together," Aldo said. I noticed his hand shaking as he gripped his knife - he was almost as scared as us, only more used to hiding it.

I nodded wordlessly, glad that at least one of us was familiar with violence. I suppose the plan was that we'd just gang up on whoever came near us. At the moment, nobody was. In fact, nobody had even spotted us yet.

"Hey, there's three kids over there!" somebody shouted. Oh well.

"Get out of the light!" I hissed. Aldo nodded, and we followed him forward, sprinting toward the nearest patch of darkness to the starboard fore of the ship. We soon found ourselves at the forecastle steps, which I scampered up without much thought.

I let out a sigh of relief - if they hadn't managed to keep track of us as we slipped through the dark, they might not follow us to the forecastle. Of course, we couldn't do much good to anybody up there, but it was safer than being below decks or on the main deck. I jogged over to the port and squinted off into the darkness, hoping beyond hope that I might spot a tiny island in the distance. We could take our chances against the mantis sharks. Mailyn and I could help Aldo stay afloat… I hoped Mailyn could swim, because I certainly wouldn't be able to lug both of them. I peered out, willing the glimmering slip of an island to appear near the horizon, but I saw only inky blackness. I could only even see the deck beneath my feet by virtue of the feeble light of a single guttering lantern upon the foremast.

I paced back toward the steps… was it just me, or had the fighting on the maindeck shifted to a new and more frantic tune, more pain and terror in the shouting than before? We had to help them, but how? If we could create a distraction, the sailors would have to climb the steep stairs to get to us, at which point we could ambush them. Or they could just shoot us if they brought some crossbows up. Hmm…

A large hand reached up and thumped upon the deck less than a meter from where I stood. I shrieked and swung my mallet at it. Something cracked, and the man - hopefully one of the sailors - cursed and crashed to the deck two meters below. To my left, Aldo screamed, and I turned just in time to see his knife skittering across the deck, two large sailors finishing their ascent to the foredeck. Aldo leapt over the forecastle railing and back to the main deck while Mailyn sprinted right toward me with two much larger sailors lumbering after her. As she zipped past, I turned tail, too. Maybe an opportunity would present itself, but it wasn't going to happen if I just let myself get nabbed.

I ducked under a boom, dodged past a grasping hand, and nearly brained myself against the gunwale when I tripped over a metal post. I scrambled back to my feet just in time to avoid a knife flashing by my face… apparently, this sailor was okay with stabbing kids. I swung my hammer, but only hit the man's shoulder, and an instant later, he ripped it from my grip and almost grabbed my wrist. I took off, eyes peeled for Mailyn or Aldo but finding myself utterly alone. As I made for the starboard side of the ship, veering toward the big chair-shaped fixture in the middle of the foredeck - the mage-cannon that Second Mage Awis'le had so proudly shown us - a rough hand grasped me by the collar. Panic flashed through me, and I found myself back in the Shadelands once again…

But not for long.

The entire world around me was reduced to a tiny pool of grimy light in an infinite sea of black. I slipped past the hand that had grasped me, as if my whole body was covered in a thin sheen of oil, and as I arced through the air, I noticed a tiny mote of pure pinprick brightness in the middle of the grimy light. Then it flashed.

I found myself hurtling back, cool wind buffeting me as a deafening Thoom pressed against the sides of my head. An instant later, I found my flight cushioned by the body of a stunned sailor knocked against the gunwale. In the distance, arcing across the ocean, a faint blue light slid across the sky before impacting the water and erupting with a brilliant aquamarine crack followed by the spray of water before once again being enveloped in black. Shaking off my disorientation, I got to my feet, only to be grasped by the recovering sailor. He pointed a knife at me with his free hand.

"Best not," he said in a rough voice.

He hauled me down to the main deck, where I saw that Mailyn and Aldo had been apprehended, too. A few people tried jumping overboard, but I think they were all fished out.

The change in sound I'd heard below, when the pitch of the battle changed, was when the crew of the Auspicio had finally gotten their hands on the armory weapons, which quickly turned a slightly-lopsided battle into a quick domination. I think two of the prisoners managed to jump overboard, but at least one of them was fished back out again, and all of us were then corralled into a group at the middle of the main deck while a pair of sailors brought up shackles from down below.

Captain Chirar paced over to us. He wore his captain's jacket over his night clothes, his wig askew on his bald pate, his face red with fury. The tip of his unsheathed sabre bobbed as his hand quaked with rage. Furious eyes, one dark and one cloudy, looked over us, flitting on each of us and nobody in particular.

"Who planned this?" he hissed through clenched teeth. "Who planned mutiny on my ship?"

Nobody said anything. The sails above whipped in the gentle breeze, and the ship creaked beneath us. After a minute or so of silence, he paced over to a weeping, severely-injured man and put him out of his misery with an efficient thrust to the chest. The woman next to the man wailed in horror, but Chirar turned away with an almost-bored expression.

"I'll ask again. I can ask all night. Whose mutiny?" He stalked forward, stopping right in front of me, his eyes flitting downward and meeting mine before pulling his sabre back for another thrust.

Lenschel, the older boy from our little chain group, cleared his throat. "It was me, captain. It was my idea. I came up with the plan."

"I see," the captain said, his voice gone low and quiet. His blind, milky white eye seemed to glow in the lantern light like some sickly, pusilanimous gem. "Put him in chains. Now."

Lenschel didn't struggle much as a pair of sailors dragged him to his feet and another fitted him with a full complement of heavy chains - usually, they only put us in 'medium' chains. The captain approached him, standing only a bit taller than Lenschel, who was tall for his age. The captain's jaw pulsed with anger, and for a moment I thought the man was about to stab him. A big, scarred hand grasped around the chains binding the boy's hands together. "If you're so eager to escape my ship, who am I to refuse?" He shoved Lenschel and then brought his sabre to bear, stalking forward. When the point touched Lenschel's belly, the boy cried out and scrambled back to prevent injury, but the captain pressed forward until the boy was pressed against the gunwale and clutching his belly where the saber had produced a meager rivulet of blood. Then the captain kicked him overboard.

I shrieked as I saw Lenschel tumble over the side of the ship, and I wasn't the only one, but my scream did nothing. There was a splash, and that was it - no shouting and no sounds of struggle. I suspect Lenschel sank without much fuss, as thick as those chains were.

"Fit the rest of them with heavy chains if we've got enough," the captain said. "I am hereby adding ten years to each and every one of your sentences. Does any officer here object?" His good eye drifted toward Second Mage Awis'le.

"No, sir," the mage said quietly.

"Good. Get them below."

Strong hands fitted me with chains despite my thrashing struggles, and once again I found myself dragged toward the belly of the ship. Then the alarum bell rang and a sailor cried out:

"Pirates! Pirates off the port bow!"