The Ships of Merior (35 page)

Dhirken twisted her weapon. A lacing sheared through with a thin rasp of sound and exposed a soft triangle of skin. ‘What makes you think you’ve got aught beside your bollocks left to bargain with?’

‘For one thing, I know where we are.’ Under his chin, another lacing parted. Arithon held steady, even as Dhirken’s blade dipped, snagged white linen, and nicked in a vicious downward tear. The sea plunged the brig through a bucketing roll and smacked her down in a trough. Spray pattered over decking and sail-hands, and Dhirken’s jarred blade stencilled a scratch in new blood.

The sting provoked Arithon to scalding impatience. ‘Go on and cut a bit lower,’ he challenged. ‘You’ll find a parchment from Sethvir tucked into my waistband that states to the copper what I’m worth.’

‘Sethvir?’ Dhirken reached out, grabbed, and dragged cloth across steel in a howling rip that left him stripped to the waist. ‘Sethvir of
Althain?
What is he but a legend told to snivelling little babes by their mothers?’

‘Look and see,’ said Arithon, the gleam to his eyes no less dangerous for the fact he was weaponless and trapped.

Aloft, the sail-hands’ teamed efforts gradually reduced the
Drake’s
canvas. While the deck crew minded belaying pins and tackle, loosened sheets and whipped blocks subsided to a tidier thrum as the wind skeined over taut cable. Speech could be heard with less effort now, but Arithon volunteered nothing else.

Beneath the fluttering shreds of his shirt, he did in fact carry a scroll, several sheaves thick, fastened with ribbon and bearing a cracked seal that looked very elegant and old.

Dhirken used her cutlass to hook the ties and fish it out.

‘You’re welcome,’ its owner said equably. ‘The seal, which is genuine, belongs to s’Gannley. The line ruled as princes in Camris. Go on. Read. I invited you.’

The captain snatched the parchment off her weapon tip. Cut ribbons fluttered overboard on the breeze as she flattened the sheet and scanned the lines.

‘Lady?’ Arithon offered in grave diffidence. ‘May I
suggest you fetch someone who can read?’ Subject to the captain’s venomous glower, he gave a hampered, apologetic shrug. ‘You’re holding the sheet upside down.’

‘Fiends alive!’ Dhirken grinned in icy enjoyment, despite herself pleased by his boldness. ‘You’re going to die very slowly. Maybe one finger at a time, until we’ve attracted enough sharks for the rest of you.’ The gold loops in her ears spat hard glints as she flipped the parchment into the startled grasp of her slit-eared first mate.

‘What does it say?’ she commanded.

The brig’s helm was hastily passed off to a sail-hand.

Embarrassed to be handed a scribe’s chore in public, the mate snarled at his smirking crewmates. ‘Anybody laughs, I’ll gut him later.’ He cracked the scroll straight, puckered up in a squint, and in hesitant, strangled diction, ploughed his way through the first page, with its lists of gold in coinweight, its itemized inventory of Falgaire crystal, fine silk, and Narms carpet. Wealth beyond the wickedest dream of avarice drew every deckhand within earshot to crowd his elbows in excitement.

‘Keep alert!’ Dhirken snapped. ‘If there’s riches, we haven’t seen one whit more than some straggly marks on a parchment!’ As the mate fumbled through the next page, she cut off his recitation and regarded her prisoner, who, despite the agility of a weasel, had not managed to ease the suspended posture her men maintained to force him passive.

‘These goods of yours.’ She laughed. ‘You’re telling me you came by them honestly?’

‘Now that
would
be prying.’ Arithon stretched to extreme limits and managed to claw a toe-hold on the deck. Perhaps annoyed that the sailors who pinioned his finely-made wrists seemed determined to strangle his circulation, he added, ‘I didn’t ask how you acquired the lading list in your hold.’

‘And you didn’t seek to hire a smuggler’s ship without particular reason, I see that.’ Left the predicament that
her brig was adrift beyond sight of bearings or shoreline, Dhirken fingered her cutlass.

Before she could render final judgement, Arithon cut in, sweetly reasonable. ‘You have nothing to lose by listening. For the trouble I’ve caused, why not hear what you stand to gain?’

Shadows like cabled cobweb crawled across sanded wood and the leached white grain of drying planks. The slit-eared mate worried the corners of the parchments, while the deckhands watched their captain, stone-still. The squeal of the steerage gear, and the creak of the yards to
Drake’s
wallowing assaulted the unsettled silence.

Locked eye to eye with a prisoner no taller than she was, Dhirken sensed his taunting irony: as though death itself were a gambit tossed out to serve some feckless need. Since the habit of command made her cautious of allowing any miscreant to have his way, she hesitated; and the moment ceded a dangerous awareness that her crewmen sized her up like a wolf pack.

She had been challenged before them, by a man. Pitched to grasp at the first hint of weakness, they waited to see if she was afraid of him.

That fact alone saved his life.

‘You’ve caused no trouble,’ Dhirken pronounced at careful length. ‘Inconvenience, perhaps.
Drake’s
still in Eltair Bay, and not lost. If I steer to any heading but east, we’re bound to recover the shoreline.’

‘Ah, but where?’ Arithon matched her play like a card-sharp. ‘The constables at Whitehold have a price on your head. Jaelot would imprison you and confiscate your ship if you can’t meet their fines for unpaid tolls on strait passage. What if your landfall’s at Tharidor? I don’t know the
Drake’s
transgression, but the harbourmaster there said he’d retire for the pleasure of hanging you without a court of law.’

‘Enough!’ Determined not to seem flattered by the
scope of his ability to sort gossip, Dhirken reached out left-handed, peeled a raised splinter from the wheel mount, and proceeded to pick her front teeth. ‘My history and problems won’t matter one whit if you’re dead,’ she said around her clenched bit of wood. ‘Right now I see no reason not to silence your singing and throw off your bones for the fish.’

‘You could do that,’ Arithon agreed. ‘Or, better, we could wager. Choose any city, any place in the bay or on the continent where you prefer to make landfall. By the forgotten arts of navigation, I’ll steer the
Drake
to that harbour.’

‘Sorcery!’ Dhirken spat out a small shred of spruce. ‘I’ve no use for such.’

‘Knowledge,’ Arithon countered. ‘Imagine if you could sail straight out to sea, lose the merchants’ patrols over the horizon, then carve a straight course for whatever haven your fortune should favour?’

‘I don’t bet.’ Dhirken flung away her sliver, prepared to reacquaint him with her cutlass.

‘You don’t read, either,’ Arithon shot back. ‘Change just those two habits, and no contraband runner in these waters could match you.’

‘Captain,’ the seaman at the wheel volunteered in tremulous diffidence. ‘Listen to the man. We could kill him any time. But if he’s not lying, every one of us could be rich.’

‘I will say, he has a sure hand on a ship,’ the mate added.

‘Ath, you puling puppies!’ Dhirken sneered. ‘Would you plead for him, then, liar that he is, and shadow-bending sorcerer as well?’

When none of her crewmen dared to meet her eyes, the captain weighed her own counsel. In the yards overhead, sail-hands faltered in their furling to eavesdrop; aware they were idle by their motionless shadows on the deck, Dhirken snapped off a brusque warning. To her prisoner,
she said, ‘If what you say is true, if this navigation isn’t sorcery, then anybody here could learn it?’

‘Anybody,’ Arithon assured. ‘My hands could be tied. Given proper instruments and my instruction, you could make and plot the sightings by yourself.’

‘Then your hands will be tied and your feet also.’ Pleased to snatch triumph from opportunity, Dhirken dispatched a sail-hand to scrounge in a locker for spare cord. The landfall I choose is the harbour at Farsee. Get us there. Or I’ll see the crabs feed on your carcass.’

A busy interval later, bent over the contents of Arithon’s satchel,
Drake’s
captain completed her amazed inspection of gleaming, strange instruments and charts. Wakened to the fact she was hungry, she drew breath to call Lad, then recalled the seasick accomplice, left gagged and trussed like a turkey below decks. She stood in disgust. Unless the fat landlubber had tossed up his guts and suffocated in her quarters, she was going to have to cut him loose.

Blade drawn in hand, Dhirken descended the companionway.

The shadowed dark of her cabin seemed much too quiet. She swore as her eyes adjusted, and swore again as she saw Lad, fallen dead asleep on her berth. The cook’s best knife had fallen clear of slack fingers. An edge of reflected blue in the light through the opened stem window, the blade had impaled itself spare inches from the prisoner’s boots.

But Dakar was too far gone in misery to grasp the advantage of the moment. His complexion was green and his hair lay screwed in sweaty snarls. Dhirken noted in amazement he had managed to gnaw through the gag. Of the galley sponge, she found no sign, even when she bent to recover the dropped knife.

Above her, between moans likely due to colic from ingested shreds of sponge, the prisoner gasped, ‘Where’s Arithon?’

‘Tied to the mizzenmast pinrail, damned unpleasantly tight, if you please.’ A moment’s forethought, and Dhirken sheathed her cutlass, the cook’s steel being handier to hack through knotted twine. There your man stays till
Black Drake
makes port where he’s promised.’

As his bonds gave way, the Mad Prophet chafed scored wrists. ‘How many seamen did he kill before you trussed him?’

Knelt down to free Dakar’s ankles, Dhirken looked up sharply. ‘None,’ she said in irritation. ‘Why ask? He gave himself freely.’

‘Ah, lady.’ Dakar heaved a soulful sigh. ‘You don’t know him at all. That’s trouble. Whatever you think, whatever Arithon led you to believe, be certain of this. If he didn’t kill, then you dance to his design.’

Dhirken stood, her eyes like sheared rivets in the gloom, and her dagger hand thoughtfully steady. ‘You don’t like him one bit. I don’t find that reassuring.’

Dakar shook his head, then snapped his palms to his mouth to dam back another seizure. As he groaned an apology and stumbled through the companionway to be sick, Dhirken looked after him, her arms folded in tight trepidation across her breast.

‘Well, by Ath, I don’t trust either one of you,’ she confided to her cabin’s creaking bulkhead. ‘Whatever the outcome, until I see a motive, I’m going to use my own judgement.’

Along the coast of Eltair Bay, late summer hazed the jumbled, steep-sided valleys in their mantle of hardwood and evergreen. The oaks hung gemmed with acorns. Larks ceased singing to mark off territory, their fledged young gone from their nests. But in the mountains to the west of Jaelot where Luhaine fared on the errand deferred to him by Asandir, cruel cold ruled the upper altitudes with small regard for changing seasons. On cloudless mornings, the loftiest peak in the Skyshiels pricked the sky like a knife upthrust for a sacrifice. Ice-clad, glistening white, or else scoured of cover like a hammered scrap of unforgiving black iron, it shadowed even the deepest gorge glazed by snow melt through the clefts of Rockfell Vale. Under mist or in storm, its edged northern scarp split the winds. On days when the gusts raged the hardest, the wail of sheared air keened like a haunt through the glens and broken foothills beneath.

Foresters from Daenfal who worked traps in these wilds never tarried over their snares. They claimed the mountain’s brooding could be felt in the sough of the breeze; a solitary man could go mad here, listening too long or too carefully.

In the hour the Fellowship envoy arrived to resurvey the Mistwraith’s prison, the rain that drenched the green lowlands rampaged in blizzards across the heights. Gusts whirled over cliff wall and ice face, shrill as war steel dragged sharp across a whetstone. Driven snow scoured the incongruous stone stair cut into the scarp at the whim of Davien the Betrayer. The baroque scrolls of newel posts and chiselled, glowering gargoyles poked through blank drifts, sheeted like age-rotted dust covers over frivolously abandoned furniture.

To Luhaine’s mage-tuned perception, the eyes of the carvings were not dead. Spells of guard wakened by his passage flared to coronas of energy just past the range of natural sight. Wild rocks would have shown indifference to his trespassing; the obsidian-flecked bones of Rockfell Peak were not dumb, but aware and watchful of encroachment.

Yet where an intruder who lacked Fellowship guidance might press upward unheeding, misguided to believe that this sky-framed, wind-burnished pinnacle would permit an unsanctioned presence, Luhaine paused. An unseen vortex more chill than frost, around which the gusts sucked and skirted like a current rechannelled by obstruction, he unreeled a tendril of awareness downward, touched the mountain, and tacitly requested a permission.

A vibration answered from the deep, a bell-stroke chord reminiscent of earthquakes, mournfully slow and drawn out. Too subtle to stir mortal senses, the language of stone held a grandeur so vast that time seemed dwindled and meaningless. To Luhaine, whose fussy penchant for austerity counted music a scatter-brained dalliance, the enduring character imbedded in primal rock made the quickened lives of plants and animals seem chaotic and shrill by comparison.

Rockfell’s bleak depths lay cloaked by a dignity that humbled; its consent had extended through longsuffering
centuries, to house and imprison those myriad entities bent in malice against the Law of the Major Balance. The latest of these was the Mistwraith, and there, even Luhaine’s obstinate patience must bow in salute to the mountain’s steadfast endurance.

Granted leave to resurvey the ward-spells that bound Desh-thiere’s warped spirits captive, Luhaine diffused his presence. No longer a contained vortex of fine energies, he settled and sank downward into the heartrock of the mountain. Snow, ice and surface cliffs gave way to striated black mineral never harried by air or sunlight. The hidden depths whispered of earthsong and ores, and buried trickles of subterranean springs stitched a darkness interlaced with magecraft. Luhaine’s perception could discern each gossamer strand, laid down in resonance and spun to shining harmony by his disparate Fellowship associates.