by Ree Soesbee
“All that, eh?” someone bellowed from the crowd. “What about the norn?” Bronn stepped forward with a teasing grin. “Sounds like you’re building a place of adventure. Is there some reason you’d keep our people out of this mercenary utopia you’re proposing?”
“Not at all,” Cobiah laughed. “The norn would be welcome. You,” he said, “would be welcome.”
“We promised King Baede that we’d stick close to his gold. You won it from Moran fair and square, but that doesn’t release us from our promise.” Grymm shook his armored fist at Cobiah. “You’d not be asking us to break an oath, now, would you?”
“No, no!” Cobiah pretended to fend him off as the gathered sailors laughed uproariously. “The port would be open to any and all, so long as they’ll fight against Orr and help to keep our waters clear.” Bronn and Grymm smiled, nodding to each other in satisfaction.
When the cheering died down a bit, a surly voice shouted, “Where will you build this mythical ‘free city,’ Cobiah? On the king’s land? Or are you planning to conquer part of the asuran coast?”
“No, Henst.” Cobiah guessed the speaker without seeing him. “We’ll build it in a place nobody else wanted. A site that’s been abandoned, left as wreckage; a place that’s just waiting for us to return and give it life again.” Enjoying the drama of the moment, Cobiah pointed to the northeast. “We’ll build our port on the ruins of Lion’s Arch.”
“Lion’s Arch?” Fassur blinked. “That city’s drowned. Covered in water!”
“As Isaye can tell you, the tide’s been going down over the last few years,” Cobiah explained. “If we built farther back and used the cliffs as protection for the town, the ruins in the harbor could even be part of our defense against the Dead Ships.”
Isaye considered Cobiah’s words seriously, running a hand through her dark hair as she spoke. “The tides in that harbor are still unpredictable. Ships would have to go very slowly sailing in and out, or they’d break their keels on the stone remains below the waterline.”
“That’s exactly what I mean,” he agreed. “That would slow down any Orrian vessel that tried to sail there, just like the corridors of the Ring of Fire Islands gave us an advantage here. That slow approach would be to our favor. We could put bulwark guns back on the cliffside, maybe even outfit the island at the harbor mouth with a defensive barricade of some sort. The port could employ tugboats to guide bigger vessels through the ruins. It’s the perfect place to make a stand against the ships of Orr—and most of all, it would give people hope. Not just the hope that we can survive the Dead Ships, but that we can come back from all this destruction and thrive.”
Cobiah called to them, “I know it sounds like a lot of work. I know it’d be easier to just take the money and enjoy ourselves. But that’s short-term thinking. We can defeat the Dead Ships, and we can show the horrors of Orr that we’re done hiding from them. But to do that, we need a safe harbor. We need Lion’s Arch. Tyria,” he said more quietly, “needs Lion’s Arch.”
Isaye beamed up at him with pride. “I’m with you,” she said firmly. He smiled and pulled her close, looking toward the gathered crew.
“Me too,” Sykox said brightly. “It sounds fun.” One by one, the other charr of the warband nodded, adding their voices to the throng.
“I guess we can’t be pirates forever,” Fassur sighed.
“Even if we want to be?” grumped Macha in return. But underneath her knitted brows, the corners of her lips twisted into a smile.
Cobiah breathed a sigh of relief. “So . . . are we agreed? All those in favor of rebuilding Lion’s Arch?”
The cheers erupting from the crew were all the answer he required.
ACT THREE
1237 AE
(AFTER THE EXODUS OF THE GODS)
The sails are rent, and the engine’s blown
The keel is split to stern, O
We lost the rudder to the tide
And the mizzenmast is burning
The rain’s like nails, and our harbor’s lost
And the compass spins and turns, O.
—“Weather the Storm”
“I don’t understand why the man can’t see reason!” Cobiah strode up the large cobblestone steps in the town’s main plaza. Walking beside him, Sykox laughed and shifted a heavy bundle of cogs and gears he carried over his shoulder. A dolyak cart clattered past in the roadway, carrying a wide load of lumber from the nearby forests. Merchants hawked their wares throughout the streets, and citizens ate, shopped, and moved about in the casual errands of everyday life.
Lion’s Arch had been reborn.
“You’ve been saying that for five years, Coby. If you dislike Captain Nodobe so much, why don’t you throw him off the council? Or kill him? That works in the citadel. A nice, clean killing always makes me feel better.” Sykox’s smile split his tawny muzzle, and the black leopard spots along his shoulders rippled with the effort of carrying a hundred pounds of iron.
Cobiah ran his hands through his hair, mussing up the ribbon that held it. He jerked the thing out, annoyed, and smoothed the hair back behind his ears. “You know I can’t do that. The Captain’s Council doesn’t work that way.”
“Well, maybe it should!” Sykox shrugged—an impressive feat, given the circumstances.
A hot sun beat down on the stones of the plaza, blazing on merchants and sailors alike. In the seven years since the area had been cleared and the first docks built, the newly reconstituted town of Lion’s Arch had prospered and thrived. Merchants had been desperate for a place to ship their trade rather than porting it by dolyak caravan through the dangers of the Maguuma Jungle. The response had been overwhelming, once the harbor was considered “safe.” It’d taken only four years, through three attacks by Orrian raiders, to prove Cobiah right. Now the port held a populace of over five thousand, of many different races from all areas of Tyria. The primary rule: leave your bigotry and bias at the gate of the city. Everyone was welcome here. Thus far, it’d worked well.
Now the docks were bustling with trade ships, and though they weren’t always the most reputable businessmen, they always paid their portage fees. Ships of every size and structure came through the Arch: shady dealers from Rata Sum, mercenaries from Ascalon, norn from the far north, and pirates of every stripe from cutthroats to vagabonds. The best of them, the wealthiest, had been offered a chance to invest in the port and join the Captain’s Council, of which Cobiah was the head.
It was a tenuous situation at best. Money changed hands frequently, keeping the wheels of commerce turning, and the city had a thriving underbelly of illegal trade. The only person who’d stepped up to take the position of guard captain was a roaring drunkard named Mort Duserm, and the keeper of the biggest store in the city was a strutting, self-centered asura named Yomm. Each captain was expected to keep their crew in line, and they did, for the most part, but the disposition of the city was only as stable as the ships in the harbor—and every captain had his own idea of how “strict” he wanted to be in observance of the laws.
When something needed to be decided in Lion’s Arch, the captains who had purchased a seat on the council were contacted. Those already in the port, or who could make it to the city within a week’s sail, would gather to discuss and address the problem. Other than that, and arranging for the small roster of guards to be paid, there was little in the way of bureaucracy governing the settlement. The system had worked when Lion’s Arch was little more than a handful of structures clustered around two long docks. But the town had grown.
In the last year or so, the friendly little port had become larger as more ships started using it. Before, it had been a loose confederation of rogues, pirates, and misfits. Now that it was clearly holding its own against the incursions of the Dead Ships, it was becoming practically respectable—and ironically, that meant there was a lot more crime. Furthermore, the friction was starting to show, and profiteers circled like vultures, waiting to see how they could gain wealth by taking a sid
e in the arguments. Yomm and Nodobe were only two of many.
“I can’t kill Nodobe,” Cobiah said at last. “It’d cause too much trouble.”
The charr engineer bellowed in laughter, clapping his friend’s shoulder. “Good old Coby. You had to take a while to think about it!”
Grinning, Cobiah chuckled. “I did. And if we were back on the Pride, maybe I’d have come to a different conclusion. If there was ever a man who could use a good keelhauling, that’d be Nodobe.” Striding through the streets of the little town, he continued. “But I have to consider the fact that Captain Nodobe’s paid his due, just like the rest of us. Man’s got the right to argue his point.”
“Pity. I was hoping you’d give him the old ‘Gah! Getum!’ ” Sykox extended his claws and made a silly-looking murder face. Cobiah laughed, and Sykox settled back into their walk. “I don’t like Nodobe, either. He wants the council to allocate an additional twenty percent of the town’s revenue to building new docks. We can barely defend the five we have now! Bah, the man can argue his point from here to the Orrian deeps for all I care. It’s not going to change facts.”
They reached the top of the wide stone staircase that led up the cliffside. Below them, the town spread out like a blanket, with some fourteen buildings catering to five long docks. There was an inn, a general market, and a plaza full of carts tended by wandering traders selling odds and ends. Most of the buildings were built on the wreckage of the original stone houses left behind when the floodwaters receded. One or two captains, their ships irrevocably ruined by Orrian assaults, simply dragged the hulls up onto the beach and built them onto permanent foundations. The ship-buildings were as good as anything else, and Cobiah had to admit it gave the village a certain nautical charm.
“Look, Sykox.” Cobiah pointed up toward the cliffs. “They’ve nearly finished the ramparts on the east face. We’ll have those last two bombards installed as soon as the architects say the foundation is stable.”
The engineer chuckled. “If they’re using the architectural columns from the old temple of Balthazar, they’ll be stable.”
“Well, of course they a—How can you know that?” Cobiah stared at him. “That temple was washed away by the tsunami. You said you hadn’t been to Lion’s Arch before the wave hit. How did you know where the temple of Balthazar used to be?”
Sykox looked uncomfortable. “Er . . . thought I’d mentioned this before. We studied the architectural plans of Lion’s Arch in the fahrar, when I was a child. The imperator of the Iron Legion was planning for our generation to assault and seize the city. You know . . . when the charr were done conquering Ascalon.” A sheepish smile. “Nothing personal.”
“Really? Huh. I grew up begging on the steps of that temple,” Cobiah responded with good humor. “It’s probably a good thing the charr never got very far along with that plan. We had this one priest named Brother Bilshan. I swear, the man must have been seven feet tall. He fought with a giant war hammer—in each hand. I don’t think the fight would have gone well for the charr.”
“Maybe so, Coby.” Sykox smiled. “Maybe so. I’ll give you this—we weren’t exactly eager for the duty, that’s for sure.” The big charr narrowed his eyes to stare past the stone pillars. “Ah . . . and there’s the Nomad. As usual, the last to arrive.”
Cobiah’s smile grew twice as broad. He looked out to sea, where a big galleon was being towed into the harbor by Lion’s Arch tugboats. The ship’s sails were half-furled upon the yardarms of her two large masts. The flag waving upon her highest point was colored with the gold and green of Kryta, yet this was not a military vessel. It was the Nomad, a merchant ship and occasional privateer with a letter of marque from King Baede himself, signed in Divinity’s Reach.
Few Krytan ships came to Lion’s Arch these days. King Baede considered the city a pirate haven: lawless, filled with anarchy and criminals hiding from Krytan justice. To some extent that was true—most of the human ships that came to the city were there to avoid Krytan ports—but by no means was Lion’s Arch completely without laws. Rambunctious, perhaps, and chaotic, but it was ruled by the Captain’s Council. Those who threatened the safety of the town met harsh punishment.
But this ship was well known to the citizens of the Arch, and Cobiah felt his heart leap to see her colors. The Nomad’s captain was a supporter of their rugged little town, one of the members of the Captain’s Council, and known to be the best pilot in the Sea of Sorrows. Isaye’s back, Cobiah thought, wishing he could catch sight of a dark-haired form on the Nomad’s deck.
The ship moved slowly past Claw Island, a stony curve near the harbor’s mouth. A small defensive fortification was being built there, designed to keep enemies from sailing close enough to bombard the docks. Cranes lifted stone deliveries to a rudimentary dock, placing them carefully on foundations that would one day become walls. It was the crowning jewel of the protection Sykox planned for Lion’s Arch, and the charr was understandably proud of it. The fortress would take years to complete, but when it was done, it would guard the mouth of the harbor, providing gunnery posts and defenses as well as early warning if the Dead Ships came in force, as they’d done at Port Stalwart years ago. Still, for now the fortress was little more than a pile of rough-hewn stones and foundation ditches along a rocky stretch of shore.
“Glad to see Isaye could make the council meeting.” Sykox hefted his load higher on his shoulder and started down the thoroughfare that ran along the cliff.
“I specifically held it off until she could make it. Her last letter—”
“Her last love letter, you mean, Coby?” Sykox grinned wickedly. “Aw, c’mon, I’m surprised she’s not living here with you. When are you going to pop the question and make an honest woman of that pilot, eh?”
Cobiah rolled his eyes. “I’m busy here in town. Isaye wanted to help keep the sea safe for Krytan traders. Our relationship works better when we don’t see each other all the time.” He ran a hand through his hair, mussing it unconsciously. “I just hope Grimjaw doesn’t give her a hard time when she docks.”
“Oh, he would if he could, I assure you. Grimjaw can’t stand Isaye. Still, I doubt the black-hearted gunrunner will give her any trouble on the docks . . . since he’s right over there.” Sykox grunted and jutted his muzzle toward the building ahead of them.
In the wide doorway of the town’s main store, four charr clustered around a burly, square-shouldered asura. The asura’s arms were crossed, and a glower was smeared on his features, belligerence positively dripping from his long sloping ears. Opposite him, the charr sailors were clenching their fists and growling in low tones. Their legionnaire—the captain of their vessel—snarled down at the asura in warlike defiance.
“What’s the problem, shopkeep?” Cobiah pushed his way through the charr nonchalantly. Though he managed to sound at ease, he was glad Sykox was by his side. “Is there some kind of disagreement?”
Xeres Grimjaw was the charr captain, a surly fellow with dark tiger-striped fur, a thick muzzle, and two long snaggled canines. “It’s a scam. Nodobe said that his crew gets twenty percent off at the store. I want my crew to have the same. He gives preferential treatment to humans.” Grimjaw said the word scathingly. “This wretched, miserly asura’s the problem, and I’m the solution.”
“I’ll admit one thing, you surly stinkball. I do give Nodobe’s crew preferential treatment,” Yomm sneered haughtily. “But I do it because I prefer customers who pay their tabs. You and your crew skipped town with seven gold on your ledger. Seven gold!” The asura wrinkled his nose as if he smelled something rancid. Jade-green eyes as hard as stone chips glared at Grimjaw. “You’re a dirty cheat!”
“You copper-counting cutthroat! We’d pay if the prices were fair!” Grimjaw roared, the furor of his breath blowing back the little asura’s ears. “You’ll get that gold from us over our blood and bone!”
“Blood, bone. Whatever,” Yomm taunted, revealing long rows of teeth. “You’re still not getting the rum.�
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Two of the charr reached for their weapons, jerking them half clear of their sheaths. Cobiah stepped between them quickly, shouting, “Enough! All of you!” Sykox flinched, ready to fight. Among the crowd, Cobiah saw Aysom, the youngest of the charr in the Pride’s warband. The golden-maned warrior moved up behind the others, looking to Cobiah for a signal to attack. Since the death of old Grist a few years back, Aysom had taken the post of bosun aboard the Havoc and had grown into a massive specimen of his race, each muscular arm as thick as a human thigh. Aysom shook his mane with a growl and looked intimidating.
Sykox shifted the bag of machine parts onto his shoulder like a club. Although Cobiah couldn’t see Fassur, he was certain that the black-furred charr was somewhere nearby, just waiting for an opportunity to strike. Heartened, Cobiah squared his shoulders and met Grimjaw’s eyes. “The Captain’s Council meets today. If you think Yomm’s prices are unfair, you can make a complaint at the meeting, Grimjaw. Now, take this out of the street.”
Frustrated, the charr knocked it aside. “You’re damn right I will. And that’s not the only complaint I’ll be making,” he snarled. “I stored four bags of goods in his shop, and he says he’s lost them!”
“I didn’t lose them.” Yomm shook his head, ears flopping smugly. “I sold them, and all the belongings inside them, to pay part of your debts.”
“What!” Grimjaw roared even louder. “You skelk-stinking, ooze-chasing gold monger! Those were my dress uniforms!”
“Really?” Yomm lifted his eyebrows in mock surprise. “With all those spikes? I’d hate to see what the charr consider ‘dressing down.’ ” Pompous to the end, the green-eyed asura tossed his head. “I’ll tell you the same thing I tell everyone who uses my storage services: pay your tab or lose your deposit.”