TWOLAS - 02 - The Ships of Merior

by Janny Wurts

  'I haven't said whether I wanted you taken alive,' Dhirken remarked in joyous spite.

  'Should that concern me?' As her men lunged, and the brig slewed and shuddered broadside against the swells, Arithon smiled.

  The darkness blasted away.

  Sunlight ripped down, its glare at full noon like the blistering stab of sheared iron.

  'Sorcery!' someone screamed, while the attackers fell back in sharp terror. 'It's truth! He's the Master of Shadow!'

  Arithon stood still and denied nothing.

  Above other shouts of fear and dismay, and the dashing rush of shot spray, Dhirken's pealed order stopped panic.

  Her sun-blind mate found the wheel by touch, flung the helm down, and slewed the brig head to wind. Reviled by their captain's razor-edged tongue, the assault party firmed sweaty grip on their cudgels and regrouped.

  Unruffled, unarmed, the man now revealed as the prince whose powers had leashed the Mistwraith let them close to surround him. 'Do as you please,' he invited through the hammering thunder as gear thrashed aloft. 'I have no wish to start a fight.'

  'I'd say it's a bit late for such niceties,' Dhirken snapped. To her men, she added, 'Take him, fools. Hold onto him tight! Sorcerer or not, he's all mine.'

  For a heartbeat, no movement crossed the deck beyond the whipping snake of slack sheet lines. Then, needled on by their quarry's bold amusement, the sailors obeyed orders in a sudden, vindictive surge. Grasped and yanked spread-eagled by men who outmatched his strength and weight, Arithon tossed his head to clear fallen hair from his eyes.

  Through wrenching discomfort, he gasped, 'Dakar. I presume he's saved trouble and already told you my name?'

  No one answered. The men glanced about and shuffled uneasy feet. Dhirken stood stripped of her bluster. Tintless as fine porcelain, her freckles stippled dark across the bridge of her nose, she spun on her heel and stared for searching minutes under her visored fingers. Quandary met her, unpleasant and real; for as the fat man had threatened, the sea lay empty on all quarters.

  Water scribed a landless, flat line to the farthest rim of the horizon.

  For a heartbeat only, Dhirken stayed at a loss. Then the flog of loose canvas displaced her shaken nerves and the scope of the Drake's problem overshadowed all else. She whirled to face her mate, who now gripped the wheel with the desperate, whipped dog absorption of a man who wished himself elsewhere.

  'Where's the log?' She had to shriek like a harpy to be heard over the wind-pummelled fury of thrashed tackle. 'What's our heading? Speed? What course? How long have we been underway, and where do you place our position?'

  The huge man blew rolling sweat from his moustache. 'Your bargain,' he stammered. Too large a man to cringe neatly, he darted a glance to his shipmates. When no one stepped forward to back him, he swallowed and spoke out alone. 'The foreign cap'n was to navigate.'

  'Fiends alive!' Dhirken made a whistling jab and stopped her cutlass just shy of taking flesh. 'We could be anywhere in Eltair Bay by now!'

  The mate feared to look at the weapon that trembled at his heart. He thumbed his slit earlobe, plumbed dry of words, while the sun glinted off his bald crown.

  At length, his captain lunged away, her gaudy scarlet shirt moulded to small breasts by the riffling pressure of the breeze. In a reviling cascade of filthy epithets, she dispatched the gawkers on the sidelines to stow their buckets and holystones, then scramble aloft and furl sail. 'Move lively, you louses! For every thread thrashed off my staysails, I'll have me a patch of flayed arse!'

  Freed at last to vent her spleen upon the primary offender, Dhirken braced against the brig's wallowing roll. Light scalded off her studded bracers as she raised her cutlass and caught the tip through the ties at her prisoner's shirt front. 'Don't think to bluff your way through this. I was never drunk in the Kittiwake last night. You heard me plainly when I said the terms of your contract were fool's play.'

  'Ah,' grunted Arithon, a hitch to his breath as a seaman bent his arm a notch higher. 'Since you didn't give me an answer, it's fair that I'm offering again.'

  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 fast 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 ju
dgement, 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, stonestill. 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 cardsharp. '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 shadowbending 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.'

  Attrition

  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. Iceclad, 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.

  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. nnn

  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 decks by dawn, and she'll roust up our bosun to flog backs.'