“We don’t need a wizard to light fires!” Istram said scornfully.
“I’m not asking for a wizard’s pay!” Tobas retorted quickly.
The captain smiled. “Good, because you wouldn’t get it. You haven’t even earned the boots we gave you, or the food you’ve eaten. I’m a kind man, though, so if you want to stay aboard you may; our next port is Ethshar of the Spices, if you care to leave us there, and after that it depends on what cargo we can get — probably we’ll head back west.”
Tobas nodded. “Thank you, sir.” He glanced down at the boots just mentioned, which had been donated by a lad in the crew who had outgrown them. The captain was right; he hadn’t really done enough work yet to earn them.
He sighed; he was a long way from the rich, easy life he wanted.
They were two days in port, unloading roughly half the cargo of furs, oils, and other goods, and replacing it with freshly-slaughtered beef — and a warlock, whose magic would keep the meat cool and prevent spoilage. There was enough lifting, hauling on ropes, and general hard labor involved that by the time the ship was loaded full again Tobas felt he had earned a cobbler’s entire shop. Once or twice he gave serious thought to deserting — or rather, since he had never formally signed on, leaving — but the sight and sound and smell of the crowded streets was still enough to deter him. Ethshar of the Sands was terrifying in its immensity and alienness; Ethshar of the Spices might not be.
He also remained on board in hopes of getting to know the warlock, and perhaps even learning a little of this strange new school of magic that required none of the rituals and paraphernalia of wizardry. After all, a career in any sort of magic might well be profitable, and simply because he had been initiated into the Wizards’ Guild he saw no reason not to pursue studies in the other varieties of arcane skill.
Of course, the ship had had another magician aboard all along; the white-robed woman who had stood beside the captain when Tobas first came aboard was a priestess, an expert theurgist, Tobas had learned, and was the magician charged with defending the vessel against pirates or other perils.
Theurgy, however, was not a form of magic that appealed to Tobas, since he understood it to call for a great deal of hard study and abstinence from many of life’s little pleasures, while still being less than perfectly reliable and predictable in its effects. Besides, the priestess refused to associate with anyone aboard other than the captain.
Tobas thought warlockry sounded far more appealing.
However, one sight of the warlock’s dark and forbidding face convinced him not to press the issue. This was obviously not a person eager to make friends.
No one else seemed to know the warlock any better than Tobas did; even Captain Istram, who treated the theurgist as just another crewmember, seemed slightly wary of him. As with the priestess, no one spoke of him by name; he was simply “the warlock.” Tobas was not entirely sure he had a name; for all he knew warlocks were not even human.
This warlock slept in a hammock slung down in the hold, close to the meat he was there to preserve; he had his meals brought to him there, and as the cook’s assistant Tobas was responsible for their delivery.
Once settled in his place, the warlock spoke to no one; he accepted his meals in silence and never emerged from the hold for any reason. Tobas guessed that maintaining the spell — for the hold was always very definitely chilly, despite the summer sun glaring on the sea on every side — took all his concentration and energy.
The journey passed uneventfully, for the most part, and Tobas was reasonably content with his lot. He was fed and housed. His clothing left something to be desired, as he still had only the one outfit, but he was able to wash it twice a sixnight in the communal tub.
Still, shipboard life, with its crowding, hard work, and poor food, was far from his idea of the ideal life, and Golden Gull would never be home.
On the last night of the voyage, after the ship had rounded the great peninsula and begun beating its way northwestward up the Gulf of the East, the entire crew was awakened by the warlock screaming as if he were being gruesomely murdered, perhaps skinned alive, or, one imaginative crewman suggested, eaten by rats. Tobas, as the one who had the most contact with him and the purported magician in their midst, was selected by acclamation to go and investigate.
The screams had stopped by the time he made his way down into the hold. He stood at the foot of the ladder for a moment, his lantern flickering, before he found the nerve to go on.
The candle in the lantern had not been very well lit, or was perhaps clogged with wax; he considered using Thrindle’s Combustion to brighten it, but upon remembering the explosion in Roggit’s cottage decided against it. Using the spell on something already burning was dangerous, and he had no intention of blowing even this feeble flame out while he stood surrounded by unknown horrors.
When he finally gathered his courage and made his way back to the meat storage area he found the warlock sitting up in his hammock, leaning back against the bulkhead with his head in his hands. His long, thin legs thrust up pale bare knees that gleamed white as bone in the lantern light; his elbows rested upon his knees, and his face upon trembling fingers.
“Sir?” Tobas ventured, trying to keep his voice and hands steady despite his terror and the unnatural chill in the air.
The warlock looked up. “My apologies if I disturbed you, child. I had an unpleasant dream.” His voice was deep and mellow, and he spoke with an accent very slightly different from the Ethsharitic of the crew.
Tobas could not believe he had heard the warlock’s words correctly. “A dream? Just a dream?”
The warlock smiled bitterly. “Yes, just a dream. A drawback of my craft, child — warlocks are prone to nightmares of a very special variety. They arrive when we attempt to overextend our abilities, as I have on this journey, and they can lead to ... well, we do not know what they lead to, but warlocks for whom the nightmares have become a regular occurrence tend to disappear. I may well have doomed myself for the sake of fresh meat for the aristocrats of Ethshar of the Spices. Don’t let it concern you — it’s not your problem. Go back to sleep. I promise that I will not sleep, and that you need fear no further disturbance.”
This was by far the longest speech anyone on board had ever heard the warlock make, and Tobas was almost overwhelmed by it, but curiosity stirred; after a few seconds’ hesitation he asked, “Do they always come again, these nightmares, if you’ve had them once?”
“I wish I knew,” the warlock replied. “This is the first time I have had them in any strength since the Night of Madness, in 5202, when warlockry first came to the World — before you were born, I’m sure.” His smile twisted. “I never needed an apprenticeship, child; the gods, or demons, or whatever power it was that brought us our craft gave it to me whole, when I was a boy. Had you been born you might have received it yourself, even in the cradle — you might well have been carried away by the dreams yourself by now. You were born too late, fortunately. I was not. Go, now — dream your own harmless little dreams, and leave me to mine.”
Tobas obeyed, backing out to the ladder and departing the hold, glad to get away from the cool air, the smell of the hanging meat, and the warlock’s pale, haggard face.
There were no further disturbances, as the warlock had promised, but Tobas was quite convinced now, as he settled back in his hammock, that he would not be pursuing warlockry as a career, whatever happened. He would stick to wizardry; it seemed much safer, despite the occasional risk of spells backfiring or getting out of hand, as the combination of the protective rune and Thrindle’s Combustion had. He was, after all, already an initiate into the art, with his ritual dagger prepared and charged — a member, however minor, of the mighty Wizards’ Guild. All he had to do was learn more spells in order to be a real wizard; becoming a warlock apparently involved a good many mysteries and dangers of its own that he had never heard of before, and he did not care to investigate them further.
He was also now convinced that h
e was having a real, genuine adventure, of the sort stories are told about. Telven had had no excitement to compare to screaming warlocks, or cities like Ethshar of the Sands, and the busy, crowded life of the ship was far more interesting than life on the village farms. Not better, but more interesting.
Not, he reminded himself, that he wanted to spend his whole life at sea, or go about having adventures; that was not the way to become rich and reach a comfortable old age. Storytellers’ heroes notwithstanding, adventures were dangerous things that could easily get a person killed. At Ethshar of the Spices, he promised himself, he would go ashore and look for an easier, safer, and more promising career. He knew he would not be able to get another wizard to take him on as an apprentice, but perhaps he could somehow pay one to teach him a few more spells. That would be all he needed to begin a quiet career in wizardry. Once he had earned a little money, he would find himself a home somewhere.
With that thought, he fell asleep.
In the morning, when he came up on deck after cleaning the breakfast dishes, he almost changed his mind.
Ethshar of the Spices was, if anything, even bigger than Ethshar of the Sands. The coastline here was fairly clear-cut and rocky, and the land comfortably hilly and broken, rather than an eerie dead-flat expanse of sand jutting out into a maze of sandbars as the land around Ethshar of the Sands had been, but once again the city covered at least a league of the shore. And although no Great Lighthouse towered above everything else, no palace dome soared to incredible heights, and no towers guarded the harbor, the city was, in general, built taller than Ethshar of the Sands. There, save for the great civic structures, nothing had been higher than three stories, at most; here, four and even five stories were commonplace. Instead of a single immense lighthouse there were two smaller ones; instead of harbor towers, Tobas glimpsed immense guard towers in the city wall; instead of a palace dome he saw warehouses, tenements, and shops jammed together in truly unbelievable numbers. The waterfront in Ethshar of the Sands had been awesome, but almost two-dimensional; the mere length of it had been daunting. Here the length was just as great, and the slope of the land allowed him to see depth as well; the city reached well inland, covering hills and ridges as well as the waterfront.
And the smell that reached his nose was even less familiar than what he had encountered at Ethshar of the Sands; smoke and crowded streets mingled here with spices and a strange mustiness, as if the entire city were perfumed to hide underlying mildew.
Still, he told himself, he had to get off the ship eventually. And the captain had said the next journey would probably be back around the peninsula and westward again; this was, therefore, probably as far east as he could get on this vessel. If he stayed aboard he would merely be retracing his steps, and he had no desire to do that.
The Small Kingdoms, the sailors had told him, were just the other side of the Gulf, and beyond them the eastern and southern edges of the world; surely, he would find no better spot to make his fortune out there than he would here in this city of wonders, on its reassuringly familiar, hilly terrain. A city of this size would certainly be fraught with wizards, and he needed only to find one who would part with a few spells. Once he knew a reasonable amount of magic, he was sure he could establish himself in business and make himself a new home — perhaps not in Ethshar of the Spices, but somewhere.
With that in mind, once the ship was securely tied up at Long Wharf — which the sailors told him was in the Shiphaven district of the city, for whatever that might signify — he wrote a quick note to the captain explaining that he had stolen his boat, and describing as best he could its proper owners, so that the captain might, if the whim took him, return it. That done, he gathered up his belongings, took a deep breath, and walked down the gangplank, leaving Istram’s Golden Gull behind forever.
Chapter Six
Long Wharf, Tobas discovered, was indeed very long; it wound its way in from the deep waters of the Gulf, across the shallows and rocks around the western lighthouse, and split into two diverging causeways just short of the highwater mark. He chose the more travelled route and turned left, toward the southeast.
The smell of the sea and the constant splashing of wavelets against the stone piers were quickly buried beneath the thick odor and steady clatter of the city. Ethshar’s smell was compounded of fish cooking over charcoal in a thousand kitchens, the wood of a thousand homes slowly decaying in the harbor’s damp air, and a myriad other human activities, leavened with spices and perfumes that gave it a strange and exotic tang, and blessedly free of the outhouse aroma that clung to most human settlements; the city boasted an efficient sewer system.
The causeway Tobas followed curved to the east and quickly became a street along the water’s edge, lined with shops and taverns and brothels on the right and open to the sea on the left, with an occasional dock or wharf jutting out into the water; he wandered along aimlessly at first, taking in the sights, sounds, and smells.
The brothels caught his eye immediately; where the shops and taverns relied on signboards and window-displays to attract customers, the handful of brothels, although they also had signboards above the doors, were distinguished by balconies above the doors, where comely young women — and sometimes young men as well — leaned over railings, occasionally calling suggestions to potential customers. They wore attire not quite like anything Tobas had seen before — tunics cut low across the breast, skirts that clung to the hip enticingly, hems cut at a slant to display one ankle, all of expensive-looking fabrics, soft and shiny, or filmy, or glittering with golden threads.
Telven had no brothels, and although Tobas had heard that Shan on the Sea had half a dozen he had never come across them in his few brief visits there. He had never given such establishments much thought before, but here they were hard for a newcomer like himself to ignore. Some of the women were very tempting — but of course, he had no money.
He noticed, also, that some of the women were older than they had appeared at first glance, and that no customers were to be seen going in or out; business was obviously not good.
By the time Tobas paused to consider his destination he had lost sight of everyone he knew from aboard ship, and, overawed as he was by the city’s unfamiliarity, he could not bring himself to ask passing strangers for advice. Even strangers were in fairly short supply; this was obviously not a thriving neighborhood. Most of the spaces at the docks were unoccupied, and maintenance of the port facilities was clearly not what it should be. He wondered whether the actions of privateers back in the Free Lands had anything to do with the empty slips and shuttered shops — had trade suffered that much from their depredations?
He shivered. If the pirates were to blame, and anyone here recognized him as a Freelander, his life would probably be short and unpleasant.
He considered going back to the last brothel and asking the women on the balcony for directions, but could not quite get up the nerve. Instead, when he came to a particularly large wharf that did not seem as badly decayed as the others, he turned right, onto the street leading directly inland from the docks. He did not care to stay on the waterfront, under the circumstances; sailors would be far more likely to recognize his accent if they heard it, and to do something about it, than people who remained safely ashore.
He walked silently along two long blocks lined with warehouses and shipfitters’ shops, marvelling at the size and splendor — and age! — of the buildings, and at how very straight the street was, and then found himself emerging into a market square.
Unlike the waterfront shops, the market was far from deserted; shipping might be poor, but the difficulties did not appear to have reached two blocks inland as yet. Knots of men — and a sprinkling of women and children — were scattered thickly across the hard-packed ground, and the air around him was awash in their conversation, as loud and constant as a heavy sea breaking on rocks. A good many wore the blue kilts of sailors, and most of the others tunics and breeches no different from the everyday garb in S
han on the Sea, but a few were clad in strange and fantastical garb — gowns, robes, jewels, furs, odd caps, or leather harness. Tobas was not sure what to make of these.
A strong smell of spices hung over everything, more heavily than in the streets he had previously travelled, though he could find no source for it; he guessed it came from the surrounding warehouses.
He saw relatively few booths or carts displaying goods, and those that he did see held not grains and produce, as he was accustomed to finding in markets, but rope samples, or ironmongery, or candles, or other hard goods, generally of varieties that would be useful aboard ship.
Most of the market, however, was taken up with people clustered about individuals with no visible goods at all. Some of these stood on boxes or stools, others made do with the ground.
Curious, Tobas stepped up to the back of one group, composed mostly of sailors, and listened.
“...further, you need have no fear of passing the Pirate Towns,” the man was saying, “because we will have aboard not one, but two magicians of the first order — the incomparable Kolgar of Yolder, wizard, and Artalda the Fair, warlock! Either one of these mighty enchanters can easily defend the ship against the best the pirates can throw against us, and they will be sleeping in alternate shifts, so that at no time can our vessel be caught by surprise! A minimum of risk, for a maximum of gain — all the wealth of Tintallion there for the taking! Who among you will sign aboard the Crimson Star for this voyage?”
“Where’s her old crew?” one aging sailor demanded.
“Ah, my friend,” the recruiter replied, “you haven’t been listening! The Crimson Star is a new vessel, fresh from the shipyards!” He waved a hand toward the west, which Tobas assumed to be the direction wherein lay the shipyards. “Who will sign?”
The old sailor turned away, and saw Tobas at the outside of the crowd. “Don’t listen to him, lad,” he said. “Tintallion’s a cold and miserable place, and no richer than we are here.” He stalked off.
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