TWOLAS - 02 - The Ships of Merior

by Janny Wurts

  * * *

  Dakar aroused from the thick dark of sleep at the gouge of stiff fingers in his ribs.

  He groaned, stirred, and scrubbed bleary eyelids with his fists. The unheard-of surprise that he was not hungover shocked him enough to sit up. In a dimness red-lit by the flicker of a last, failing oil lamp, he squinted to assess his surroundings.

  Against a backdrop of wildly sprawled bodies, he made out the slight form of Arithon, standing impatient with the lyranthe furled up and slung from a strap at his shoulder.

  'Tide's turning,' said the Shadow Master in a low, urgent whisper. 'If you're sailing with me, I leave now.'

  Dakar blinked, still turgid from sleep. He cradled pained hands over his distended belly and none too softly, belched up the aftertaste of cod. 'You spelltouched the whole house into sleep with your masterbard's gift, you unprincipled bastard.'

  'You ate too much,' said Arithon in rejoinder.

  'What about them?' Dakar's groggy gesture encompassed the patrons heaped and snoring over trestles and bricks.

  'Brandy or beer, does it matter? The Drake will be ready to weigh anchor. Are you coming or staying?'

  'Coming.' Dakar heaved to his feet. 'For nothing else, just to see you hurt for this.'

  A soft thread of laughter mocked him back. 'Don't trouble. Dhirken's crew will likely be at my throat before your wits have had time to wake up.' Arithon flicked an airy, tight-cuffed wrist. 'Do you want to lend a hand?'

  Dakar peered, made out in wavering flame light the slumped form of Dhirken's shoulders. Her hands with their blunt, close-trimmed nails, her tanned cheek, and the wind-wisped, flamboyant plait trailed through puddled brandy and wet coins. 'Dharkaron! You do ask for trouble. How'd you convince her to take your contract?'

  'I didn't.' Efficient without seeming hurried, Arithon reached out, caught a wrist as lean-boned as a belaying pin, and tugged the lady captain upright on the bench. Her body lolled backward against his chest and the taut cloth of her tunic pressed the round swell of small breasts.

  'Well, there's one question answered without you risking your bollocks,' Arithon said.

  He flashed a fast grin, unstrapped the heavy cutlass, and thrust baldric, weapon, and the unslung weight of his lyranthe into Dakar's arms. Then he bent and hefted the woman in a seaman's carry across his shoulders. Her weight made him stagger a half-step. Wrist and feet dangling, her hips folded close against his nape, she was easily larger than he was, a limp body difficult to balance. He shrugged her bulk to ease a pressure point, and even that slight change in his stance raised a sweet-chinking clangour of metal.

  The floor around the table lay spangled with silver, coins struck by the foundries of a dozen different port towns: the tribute of the Kittiwake's revellers to a masterbard whose night's entertainment had pleased them. As though embarrassed by their generosity, Arithon gave another hitch to his load. 'Well, I've settled my debt to the tavern. The landlord should be satisfied, don't you think?'

  Dakar looked at him, eyes round as an adder's and his brows pinched in unaccustomed thought. 'Dhirken,' he said. 'If you wanted her service, why not spare the bother and just lie to her?'

  'Because I happen to need her trust.' Green eyes reflected the expectant, curbed patience a hale man might show a blind half-wit, until the silence stretched too long. 'Oh, Dakar,' the Master of Shadow said finally, his words drenched in irony that jabbed.

  'Trust you? Dharkaron's Black Spear and Chariot!' Dakar sucked in a breath, hot to launch into a tirade, then stopped. 'Her men,' he ventured through a pregnant pause. 'For this, you had to be rid of them.'

  Arithon waited, quietly subtle as slow poison.

  'Oh, you bastard,' gasped Dakar, slammed sick by the recognition that his rage had been teased and then used, himself a dumb pawn strategically advanced to further his enemy's design. The brawl in the Kittiwake had offered no setback at all, but played straight into Arithon's hand.

  The wrapped, fragile instrument in Dakar's arms became all that stayed him from violence. His hatred soared to fresh dimensions, directed as much at himself for falling prey to a ploy so smooth he had never thought to guard. Speechless, breathless, thwarted enough to kick his own shin from sheer fury, he barged ahead. Through the Kittiwake's common room, stumbling over slack and snoring bodies, blundering around benches, he slammed at last through the doorway to reach the night air in the street. On his heels in uncanny quiet for a man with a burden, Arithon bore Captain Dhirken.

  'A woman,' Dakar groused, his beard hairs caught and tweaked by a tangle of baldric straps and studs. In case he might just be dreaming, or sick, he twisted to recheck his bearings. But the pair that emerged from the Kittiwake's torpid gloom were solidly, dishearteningly real. 'Your neck's going to stiffen if you lug her like that,' he stated in unhelpful satisfaction.

  Arithon bore him no rancour. 'I'll be lucky if that's the worst that befalls me.' As Dakar ploughed on toward the quayside, he tipped his chin a hampered fraction sideways. 'No, turn left. I've things to retrieve from my lodgings.'

  Pulled up short in the gloom by the gate to the harbourmaster's office, Dakar threw back a blank glare. 'Navigational instruments,' Arithon prodded gently. 'Charts. How could you forget? They're the point of this whole sordid exercise.'

  Which was unlikely to be the innocent truth, Dakar knew; not when the perpetrator was Arithon s'Ffalenn, whose motives ran to mazes of trickery the Fatemaster himself would be pained to unravel.

  Black Drake

  Captain Dhirken awakened thick-headed. Before she opened gummed eyelids, she knew by the slap and rush of the wake that her brig was well under way. The creak of burdened canvas laid the Black Drake over on port tack. Since the captain's elbow and hip were not jammed alee in her berth, she judged the weather was mild. The gusts that wafted through the overhead hatch grating smelled dry and unlikely to freshen. A kick of white spray off the rudder and a thrummed note of strain in the cordage meant staysails and topsails were set aloft. Attuned to her vessel as other women were to their lovers, she knew the square main should be braced around slightly more to starboard to balance the trim of the jibs.

  Moved by habit, Dhirken rolled to arise, when a male voice dispatched crisp orders. Her mate acknowledged. Feet thumped on deck as sail hands moved to obey, followed by the squeal of lines through the mainsheet blocks. Drake rocked and settled, docile as a stroked maiden, into harmony with wind and heading.

  Odd, mused Dhirken, still drowsy as her feet met cold planking. Her mate's skill at the helm had never been so deft. She braced against a bulkhead, unsettled to find she had slept in her clothes; never a habit of hers, unless a storm was brewing. The bracers she chose for her forays ashore had gouged her side into dimples, and the hair wisped loose from yesterday's braid held a clinging, smoky reek of used tobacco.

  The voice on the quarterdeck called another order, and awareness woke late that its timbre matched none of Drake's officers.

  Dhirken ripped into an explosive, whispered fit of swearing. Impelled by sheer rage, she dredged up the memory of a sticky table in the Kittiwake, and the blandishments offered by a green-eyed, silver-tongued bard. His jug of strong spirits had not turned her wits. She recalled every meandering thread of his conversation, and a proposal too brash for any right-minded captain to endorse; which apparently had not stopped the scheming dog from believing he could force her will by trickery.

  Balanced like a dancer as her brig rollicked over a swell, knuckles braced against a deck beam, Dhirken made a blind snatch toward the hook by the unlighted lantern. The brass-strapped scabbard of her cutlass slapped into her groping palm.

  Relieved to find her weapon hung in its proper place; reassured that her ship's boy at least still minded his duty, Dhirken steadied enough to rein in the raw worst of her fury. 'Lad?' she called through the gloom.

  Every boy to sign with the Drake answered to the same address; they earned names when they mastered the skills of deepwater sailors, and outgrew any instinct th
at tempted her to tousle their hair like lost little brothers.

  This particular brat was a sluggard. 'Lad!' Dhirken repeated in a stabbing whisper. 'Roust out! Now! I need you.' She poked with the sheathed tip of her cutlass and entangled the mesh of an empty hammock.

  A scrape at the companionway made her crouch and whirl around.

  'Cap'n?' A boy's lisp accompanied a rustled movement, and a narrow face lifted in the gloom. 'Is it washwater you're wanting?'

  'No.' Dhirken flicked her blade free and beckoned the child closer. 'Not yet.' Through the roll as Drake mounted a crest and sloughed through, she weighed the groaning creak of her working vessel. Nothing seemed amiss or unfamiliar: not the thickened smells of hemp cordage and tar, nor the musk of sea-swollen planking made pungent by coal smoke from the galley fire. Past the stem windows, foam ruffled off the wake, flurried over in a scatter of sparks as a crewman trimmed the wick in the deck lantern. Though the dark was not close or foggy, neither stars nor moon scribed their reflections on the swells. No distant sparkle of watch beacons lined the coast to guide the course of night sailing traders. Gripped by a primal urge to yank her steel screaming from its sheath, Dhirken tipped her crown against the bulkhead.

  Gritty as scraped rust, she asked, 'Lad, last night when I was brought back on board, who came with me?'

  'A fat man. And the other captain, who's steering now. The one who said Black Drake's going to be the fastest, richest brig ever to plough the deeps of the Cildein.' In a child's unvarnished curiosity, Lad finished, 'They said you were pleased over that. How much rum did you drink?'

  Dhirken clamped a forearm across her belly to lock back an oath like a mastiff's snarl. 'Not enough to save their miserable hides. The fat man, where is he now?'

  Lad snickered. 'Bent over the leeside rail. Ever since we weighed anchor, he's been belly-down and heaving.'

  'Well, here are my orders.' Dhirken spoke fast and low, then gave Lad a brisk push. The hinges on her bulkhead door were superbly kept; the boy, well trained, moved as silently. In the interval after he slipped out, the captain picked out her plait, used her tortoiseshell comb, and retied her dark hair for hard action.

  No crewman lasted on a smuggler's brig if he failed to attend orders without noise. Dhirken whipped the last knot in her thong when the door latch ticked up. Her barefoot, rangy topman and Drake's slab-thewed cook padded in on a breath of salt air.

  Between them, white and moist as a shelled oyster, they bundled Dakar the Mad Prophet. A dish-sponge crammed in his mouth stayed his outcry, and both plump wrists were creased by lashings his desperate struggles could not slip.

  'Well done!' Dhirken grinned, a flash of bared teeth in the gloom. 'Dump him on my close stool. We'll see how he likes to talk.'

  Plonked down with less ceremony than a biscuit sack, Dakar collapsed in a jelly-legged heap. The instant the cook yanked the sponge from his mouth, he moaned and bent double into dry heaves. The edge of Dhirken's blade against his bared nape could scarcely make him sweat faster, wringing wet as he already was from sick misery and the salt spray that doused off the bow.

  'Who is that dark-haired upstart, and what does he want with the Drake?'Dhirken pressed him.

  'Ah, captain, 'twas a dismal poor effort, I know.' Wrenched breathless by another spasm, Dakar rolled his eyes. 'But in my own fashion, I tried very hard to turn your crew from the Master of Shadow.'

  Astonishment whetted Dhirken to fresh anger. 'Master? Shadow! You refer to the mad prince who slaughtered Etarra's army? Do I look the fool, to swallow such rubbish?' Her steel niggled down another fraction. 'That meddling little string-plucker who's commandeered my brig is anything but royal and a sorcerer.'

  'I beg your pardon.' Dakar cringed away until his fore head ground into his cramped knees. He said in muffled injury to his trousers, 'I lie well enough when I have to. Never, ever about that man.' Despite the hands lashed behind his back, he managed a soulful shrug. 'His stringplucking lulled you unconscious, a bard's spell few could equal. That's hardly the worst. Look outside. It's black, though true night is past. Arithon has spun clever shadows to make you think you see a shoreline. But where are the signs of solid land?'

  The first, creeping chill ruffled Dhirken's composure, while the cook made a sign to avert evil. Unnerved enough to venture opinion, Drake's most fearless topman said, 'Captain, something is queer, I said so earlier. Damn me, I couldn't finger what. But now it's mentioned, the wind carries all the wrong smell.'

  Dhirken feathered her cutlass against the creased fat beneath her victim's earlobe. 'I should cut you dead here and be damned to the mess. You've caused me a packet of trouble.'

  'Kill Arithon instead,' Dakar suggested, reamed already by cramps that made beheading seem merciful by comparison. 'It's a fair bet I hate him more than you do.'

  'I don't bet,' Dhirken answered, clipped.

  Amid the Kittiwake's raucous turmoil, she had seemed staunchly determined; here, in cramped quarters kept so ascetically neat they scarcely felt inhabited, her presence loomed volatile as a touch match dropped headdown on dry lint. Dakar shivered in the throes of his nausea, helpless to guess which way female fury might turn her.

  Then, with a move that slapped air, the Drake's captain lifted her weapon. Habit drove her to finger an old scar that extended past the end of her bracer. 'Depend on this,' she finished with an edge that caused her seamen to shrink where they stood. 'I will wrest back my command.'

  At her gesture, the cook jammed Dakar back upright.

  The topman stuffed the sponge back into the prisoner's mouth and twisted it tight with his tar-stained shirt. A discreet tap sounded against the boards beneath Dhirken's berth. A mercuric arc of reflection marked the changed angle of her cutlass as she peeled aside ticking and blankets and pried up a concealed hatch beneath.

  Lad's tow head and angular body emerged amid a gush of sour air from the bilges. 'Your men on deck say they're ready, captain.'

  On a predatory flash of teeth, Dhirken slipped out of her cabin. The ship's cook and the topman padded like mismatched shadows on her heels.

  Lad stayed, the galley's best flensing knife clenched in his hand, with instructions to fillet the prisoner if he sought to raise the alarm.

  An idiotic and unfair precaution, Dakar sulked, his pouched eyes squeezed shut as he retched in balked spasms against his gag. A knife in the gizzard was no sort of thanks for information given in good faith; and even had illness lent respite for the purpose, he would cheerfully choose strangulation before he gave warning to spare the confounded Prince of Rathain.

  * * *

  Outside the swinging halo of her running lamp, Drake lay shrouded in darkness. Pricked in salt rime, shrouds and rigging angled upward from the spooled rail and lost form against a featureless sky. The bearing creak of filled canvas and the chafing squeal of trusses reduced hidden masts and tackle to a ghost presence overhead. If any shoreline bounded the horizon, neither light nor beacon tower showed. Dhirken tightened grip on her cutlass. She smelled neither shingle nor sheep cot; no fragrance of green growing fields. The air held only clean scoured salt, and the tarry bite of blacked cordage. Her brig settled easy over fair-weather swells, not a sail in her rig set amiss.

  Master of Shadow or master singer, the man at the helm knew his seamanship.

  Which competence brought no forgiveness; Dhirken tapped the wrists of her topman and cook to signal her intent. Then, wraith-still by the aft companionway, she gestured, and other crewmen rousted by Lad to lie in wait for her order moved ahead. Movement answered from the darkness. In grumbling pairs, laden with buckets and holystones, they filed from the forecastle and invaded the quarterdeck. There, amid cheerful oaths and grousing, they industriously knelt to swab planks.

  The black-haired upstart stationed at the helm voiced a mild query.

  A hulking mass at his shoulder, Drake's first mate waved the seamen on about their business. 'Our captain keeps a trim vessel,' he assured. 'Any land dirt left on her ship's dec
ks by dawn, and she'll roust up our bosun to flog backs.'

  'Land dirt,' mouthed Dhirken, convulsed by a soundless chuckle. 'How perfectly apt.' She flicked her sleeves clear of her bracers, jerked her chin for the cook and second mate to back her only as needed, then swung alone up the ladder to the quarterdeck.

  Limned in orange by the stern lantern, the conniving little bard who had played the Kittiwake's scum to a standstill stood in still grace before the binnacle. He still wore his oddly-tailored shirt. Silver-pointed cuff ties chimed at the wrist held negligently crooked around a wheel spoke. His pose of inattention was deceptive; the brig kept her heading like a gannet. Languid as poured honey, Dhirken stepped up to meet her adversary. He did not loom dangerous enough for a sorcerer, she thought; he lacked the grand majesty of a prince. Beyond hands too slim for their office, he could have been a ship's boy with wind-ruffled black hair, bare feet braced against the heeled deck.

  Only the gaze that flicked aside to greet her was too sardonic and deep for a child's.

  'Uncommon fine weather for sailing,' Dhirken opened in tea-room courtesy. She fielded a fractional nod from her mate, her sharkish smile for the foreign upstart who had dared to give orders on her ship. While her challenge fixed his attention, crewmen armed with knives and cudgels grappled over the rail at his back. Arrived from a circuitous route through the bilges, they scaled the stemcastle by way of her cabin window, masked by the industrious scrape of holystones.

  'Ah, lady,' the foreigner said in his lyrical, singer's chagrin. 'Would you meet me with a threat?' Timed to a masterful fine point, he loosed the helm, whirled face about, and confronted the stalkers poised to jump him.

  A following crest slammed the rudder. The unattended wheel spun like a ratchet and veered the brig off her heading. Aloft, heavy canvas sucked flat, then backwinded with a bang and a rattling thrash of slack blocks. Drake's crewmen were hurled back a halfstep as the deck lurched in violent response. Seasoned sailors, they recovered by reflex.