Goddess of the Ice Realm (39 page)

Thick hawsers at bow and stern lashed the barge to the merchantman. A coarse swatch of rope netting draped over the bigger ship's side provided a ladder, which several at a time could climb. A few worked on the barge by the light of several lanterns, stowing bales that the larger number who'd gone aboard threw over the merchantman's railing.

The men were Lusius's Sea Guards, though for the most part they were in tunics rather than linen cuirasses and only a few wore their swords. That was a factor Chalcus would have noticed from the moment the
Bird of the Tide
drew within bowshot; it explained why he was blithely taking the
Bird's
handful into the midst of the much greater number of Lusius's men.

The Sea Guards used many lamps, more than the work itself required, on the
Queen of Heaven
and the pair of barges. Lamplight illuminated only a small circle around each flame, and by doing so hid whatever was beyond those circles more thoroughly than the darkness itself. Lusius' men so feared what might be lurking aboard the merchantman that they ignored the possibility another ship might slip up on them.

The
Bird
thumped alongside the barge. Shausga and Ninon looped ropes around two of the oarlocks that lined the other ship's gunwales. Though the barge was by far the larger vessel, its deck was actually lower than the
Bird's.
Ilna and Chalcus hopped aboard together.

“Hey!” cried a Sea Guard as he and his fellows turned to see what had struck them. “Com—”

Ilna saved his life by spreading the pattern she'd knotted. She held it out so that lantern light fell squarely on its seemingly effortless artistry.

The man who'd spoken doubled up, spewing vomit that appeared to be mostly wine. Those nearby retched and covered their eyes. A man who'd been at a distance so that he'd gotten only a slanted view of the pattern called, “What? What?” in the voice of one waking from a nightmare.

Hutena cracked him hard over the head with the peen of his axe. “Tie these scuts up while we're gone!” the bosun ordered over his shoulder. He grabbed the boarding net a moment after Chalcus and Ilna had started up.

Ilna's eyes watered. She sneezed fiercely, smothering the sound in the shoulder of her tunic. The
Queen of Heaven
reeked of brimstone. Had it been a grain ship, it might have been fumigated before setting out on this voyage, but there was no call to worry about rats seriously damaging a cargo of tapestries. Besides, the smell hadn't clung to the timbers when they'd boarded the ship with Commander Lusius.

The netting was made from the same sword-leafed desert plant as the rope Ilna had handled earlier. It had a clean, dry feel, and the strands had been twisted by a careful workman
who knew her business. There was nothing so simple that there wasn't a right way to do it—or for most people in Ilna's experience, a wrong way.

“Hey, what's going on down there?” a man called from the
Queen's
railing. “Stop playing the fool or we'll tip this bloody tapestry on your bloody heads!”

Chalcus vaulted the railing, using his left arm as a pivot. He hadn't drawn his inward-curving sword, but Ilna knew how quickly the weapon could appear in his hand when he wished.

The Sea Guard screamed and stumbled back, crossing his hands before his face as if to keep from seeing his own oncoming doom. There'd been four of them lugging a rolled hanging, a full weight for them all together.
Silk with gold and silver wires on a wool backing; valuable no doubt but journeyman's work, exceptional only in the value of the raw materials . . .
The others jumped away also, and one started to draw his sword.

“Gently, lad, there's no need for that,” Chalcus said, taking the man's sword wrist with fingers that Ilna had seen bend iron nails. The Sea Guard gasped in pain; then Hutena mounted the railing behind him and quieted him with another rap from the axe.

“Who are you?” demanded the Sea Guard who'd first spoken. He wasn't armed, which may have been the reason his tone changed from hectoring to merely inquisitive in the course of a short sentence. “Sister take you, I didn't see you when I looked over the side, and I thought. . .”

He didn't bother to explain what he'd thought. Ilna could've guessed closely enough, even without a pair of Sea Guards coming out of the deckhouse hauling a corpse between them.

Part of a corpse: a man's head and shoulders, with the torso below that ending in a ragged slant at mid-chest. Ilna believed that the victim was the chief of the Blaise armsmen.

The men dragging the torso had sour expressions, and their minds didn't take in the things their eyes glanced over. They walked past the group around Chalcus and tossed the fragment into the sea between the two barges.

“We're guests of the Commander, don't you recall?”
Chalcus said. “Now, where is it he would be, friend? For we've business for his ears only.”

“You're . . . ?” the Sea Guard said. He shook his head in puzzlement. “Well, I don't know, in one of the holds, I suppose, but—”

“Hoy, Commander!” Rincip bellowed, striding out of one of several open doors on the side of the deckhouse. He held a lantern high in his left hand. “There's a strongbox but there's money bags all over—hey!”

His eyes fell on Chalcus, then Ilna. “Where'd
you
come from!”

“In a crisis like this, all men must stand together,” said Chalcus, stepping toward Lusius's second in command. “Not so, Master Rincip?”

Rincip touched his sword pommel but didn't let his fingers close around its shagreen grip. After only a moment's thought he pointedly lifted his hand away.

“Civilians have no business here!” he snarled, but he didn't try to keep Chalcus and Ilna from entering the cabin he'd just left.

A lighted candle burned in a free-swinging holder hung from the ceiling. It threw a pale tallow illumination over the interior of the cabin, sufficient to see by even before Rincip followed them back in with the lantern.

A bed frame was folded out from the wall. The mattress was a common one of waxed linen filled with straw, but the bedclothes—now mostly tumbled on the floor—were silk. Instead of an ordinary sea chest roped to floor bitts so that it didn't skid around the cabin in bad weather, the wealthy occupant's large chest was cross-strapped with iron and padlocked to the bitts. The lid had a hasp and staple also, but the padlock that should have secured it was missing.

Three heavy leather money bags closed with lead seals lay on the floor. Beside them was a document case and several thick codices. Ilna recognized those last as ledgers, though she couldn't have read them even if they weren't in cipher—as they almost certainly were.

On the floor, half-covered by the bedding, was a man's hand and wrist. The hook-bladed sword it'd been holding lay beside it. One of the long bones of the forearm was still
attached, broken off at the elbow end. The muscles had been stripped away, but some tendons still dangled.

Smiling in friendly innocence, Chalcus gripped the hasp of the strongbox in his left hand and tugged. The lid didn't rise; it was fastened even though the external lock was missing.

“What's this about money?” said Lusius, stepping into the cabin with a Sea Guard holding a lantern. “There should be a specie chest—you!”

Four men and Ilna crowded the cabin. Hutena remained on deck, very possibly overlooked in darkness and the confusion. Chalcus had a way of drawing eyes to him, which—given the bosun's demonstrated ability to think and act quickly—could be the key to escaping a situation that was literally—Ilna smiled—getting tighter by the moment.

“Aye, Commander,” Chalcus said. “We saw the trouble in the sky and came to it, like good citizens of the Isles. And what should we find but you and your men?”

“It's my job to be here!” Lusius said. He didn't reach for his sword; the cabin was too cramped for sword work, and he'd seen what Chalcus's dagger could do in less time than a victim could blink. “You don't claim that I did this, do you?”

The commander thrust his boot under the bunk and hooked out the severed hand. “We saw the light, same as you did, and came to it as quick as possible. We were too late to save the crew, just as I warned the fools would happen if they didn't take my guards on board.”

He didn't mention that his troops were looting the merchantman's holds. In all fairness, Ilna didn't suppose she'd met ten men in her lifetime who'd have passed up a valuable cargo whose owners had been reduced to a scatter of body parts.

“And your wizard Gaur?” Chalcus asked. “Where would he be, Commander?”

Lusius shrugged. “Back in his bed, I suppose,” he said. “Gaur doesn't leave the castle often, and he never goes aboard a ship.”

Ilna stood silent with her hands cupped over the fabric of cords that she would display if she needed to. Getting out of the cabin would be possible if not easy; getting down the
side of the
Queen of Heaven
with a troop of hostile soldiers above them . . . that would be another matter, a problem to solve when they must.

The Commander's look hardened and he drew himself up. “Now, Captain,” he said, “there's the matter of how
you
came to be here. For the time being I'm willing to accept your story, though many folk would find it unlikely that any man went unbidden into wizardry unless his duty required him. What I say is this: get back to your ship, and get back to Terness—now. By my order as Commander of the Strait.”

Ilna sneezed again from the brimstone in the air. Bits of a pattern connected in her mind. While Lusius spoke in an increasingly louder voice and Chalcus faced him with his hands on his hips, Ilna bent forward and grasped the sword on the floor of the cabin.

“Watch her!” Rincip shouted, grasping Ilna's shoulder; she wriggled free. Chalcus caught Rincip's neck in one hand and jerked him away.

Ilna used the sturdy sword as a pry bar, her left hand reversed on the grip and her right on the pommel. She rammed the point into the seam of the strongbox's latch, then levered upward. After a moment's resistance the lid flew open.

The supercargo, Pointin, crouched like a hare in her form within. He leaped up screaming, blind with fear. The iron straps protecting the chest were held on with large rivets. Pointin had used a silk sleeve from his sleeping tunic to tie together mushroomed rivet-heads on the side and lid of the chest.

“By the Sister!” Lusius swore.

“Don't!” cried Chalcus, holding Rincip back with his right hand, his left poised.

The Sea Guard who'd come in with Lusius grasped his sword hilt. Ilna brought the Blaise sword around in a short arc. The back of the blade wasn't sharpened, but it broke the soldier's wrist bones with a crunch. He screamed and dropped the lantern in his other hand. Oil spilled but didn't catch fire for the moment.

“You're human!” Pointin cried. He'd been shoving away the air; now he lowered his hands. “Wha . . . where are the demons? Have they gone?”

Chalcus punched Rincip in the stomach, then kneed him in the jaw as he doubled up. Lusius's deputy thumped to the floor and lay still, groaning and bleeding from the mouth.

“Now, Commander Lusius . . .” Chalcus said. His eyes hadn't moved from the Commander's during the moments it'd taken him to put Rincip out of the way. “We'll leave the
Queen of Heaven
to you and your fellows to deal with, as you demand. But for safety's sake, you'll come as far as the deck of the
Bird of the Tide
with us. We'll climb down the netting with you on the side of my dagger hand.”

Chalcus spoke pleasantly enough, but Ilna noticed he hadn't worded the statement as a question even for the sake of conventional politeness. Lusius glared, gathering his thoughts for a response.

Before he could make one, Ilna said, “No, the Commander will climb down after you so that if anything's thrown over the side it'll land on
his
head.”

Chalcus opened his mouth for a protest. “And as he climbs,” Ilna said, loosing the silken rope that served her for a sash, “he'll have my noose around his neck—”

She tossed the running loop. Lusius bellowed in surprise and jerked his head back. The noose slipped over his head anyway and settled to his shoulders. Ilna tugged the soft rope tight—but not stranglingly tight—before Lusius got his hand up to throw it off. His lips twisted in a snarl, but he was smart enough to take his hand away before Ilna choked him to the floor, gasping and helpless.

“—to remind him that his duty is to escort us clear.”

“Right,” said Chalcus with the quick decisiveness that was the difference between life and death when time was short and the risks uncertain. “Pointin, going out of the cabin you'll follow Mistress Ilna and the Commander, and I'll bring up the rear.”

Ilna put a finger's weight of pressure on the noose. Lusius grimaced and started for the cabin door.

“But where are you taking me?” the supercargo demanded in a tone that started high and ended as a falsetto.

“Some place other than the belly of a seawolf with what's left of your friends,” Ilna snapped. “If that's not reason
enough, I've got enough cord here to put a loop in the other end too and drag you along with the Commander!”

Pointin's face registered shock; he didn't respond for a moment. Chalcus took him by the shoulder and headed him toward the door. Pointin raised his feet high enough to clear the side of the box in which he stood, but he moved in a slack-mouthed daze.

Ilna curled her lips under in irritation with herself. She had years of experience in telling people unpalatable truths, and never once had it seemed a good idea afterward. If she kept doing it nonetheless, she must be as great a fool as most of the rest of humanity.

The air outside was cool enough to be a surprise. She'd expected to see the Sea Guards waiting with their weapons drawn, but the interplay inside the cabin had gone unnoticed by most of those aboard. They had their own concerns, hauling heavy fabrics from the ship's several holds and disposing of the remnants of the vessel's crew.