The Ships of Merior

by Janny Wurts

  The warped, unpainted planks cracked to a squeal of tin hinges. Fingers curled around the edge, the nails ragged and rimmed with dried blood. ‘Who calls?’ came a scabrous whisper.

  Gagged beyond speech from the stench, Dakar jingled his wallet.

  His name and his origins now a moot point, the herb witch opened her door.

  Daylight struck through into clutter and darkness, and roused a dusky rustle of wings. A sleepy rooster crowed, answered by a second, while a stinging billow of herbal smoke and incense swirled out into the street. The woman who straddled the sill peered outward with red-rimmed eyes. Her hair was a nest of pale, unwashed hair, stuck with thyme sprigs and a white fluff of breast feathers that looked to have drifted and caught there. She wore deerhide painted with sigils and food stains, and her skin was blue with ingrained soot.

  ‘What’re you wantin’? A love-knot? A health philtre?’ She stabbed a knotty forefinger at the bulge of her visitor’s gut. ‘Must be a philtre, yes? Woman left you for someone more strapping, is it? Acting shy won’t change the truth.’

  Dakar blinked and coughed out bad air in affront. ‘Actually, I need to have a geas lifted.’

  The crone cackled as coarsely as her hinges. ‘Some girl’s put the come-hither on you, then? Ach, that’s a pretty enough lie. You expect me to believe it?’

  ‘This has nothing to do with problems concerning a woman!’ Dakar snapped. ‘Besides, if you have to slit open chickens to work an unbinding, I’ve certainly picked the wrong party.’

  He spun to leave, but a pale hand shot out and clamped the wrist holding the money bag. ‘Such hasty thinking, foolish man.’ A breathy exhalation cracked into another wheezing laugh. ‘And as for slitting chickens, some clients expect it, which is all to the good if they pay. But one does tire of stewed fowl for supper.’

  Too late for trepidation, Dakar was jerked face-about and dragged inside by a grip like steel pincers.

  The herb witch pushed him down on a chicken crate, and kicked her rickety door shut with the back of a bare, bony heel. She then bent her elbows and drummed skinny fingers on her hips, while surveying her newest client through a twining maze of incense smoke.

  The reek of tanner’s vats and offal crept undaunted through the musk of perfume. Breathing in tortured, shallow gulps, Dakar realized that, except for the chicken coop he sat on, the cramped little cottage was clean, if oddly furnished. Crates and cages for pigeons and barnyard fowl supported a trestle table, and a cot bright with woven shepherds’ blankets. Bundles of herbs dangled from the rafters, their thrown shadows entangled with talismans sewn of felt and glass beads, and the dried, yellow claws of mummified birds’ feet.

  ‘My wares,’ the crone admitted in brittle amusement. She bent, scrounged up a cloisonné tin of incense, and lit a fresh stick with a snap of her nail and a cantrip ripped out in burred consonants. Then she blew on the tip to fan the ember and fluttered her fingers toward the artefacts. ‘Mostly charms to ward drowning for sailors. Waste not, want not, I should say, and the hens’ feet add a nice touch of mystery.’ She shrugged. Tharidor’s fashionable types aren’t big on spending for spellcraft.’

  Pecked on the buttocks by the birds cooped up behind the slats where he perched, Dakar fidgeted. He looked everywhere else but at the woman, who shuttled and wove around his person, muttering and tracing odd, red symbols with her incense. Smoke trailed from the ember like demon writing, distorted and erased on the draughts. The gloom clearly outlined to mage-sight the haloes of warped spells entangled in each gruesome little charm bundle. The witch worked her craft in blood-magnetism and the deep, earthy mystery that sang through the roots of eldritch plants. The draw of the moon infused the wards over her shack and less clean things, which made the knotted seals that Koriani enchantresses amplified through crystal seem clear and straightforward by comparison.

  Pressed by rising uneasiness, Dakar sought excuses to escape. ‘I’m not at all sure you can help me.’

  The crone snapped erect, rustily cursing. Her eyes flashed baleful as the rats’ as she stubbed out the stick in a brass tray cupped inside a bird skull. ‘Certain it is that I cannot!’ She jabbed splayed fingers through the last spent embroidery of smoke. ‘That’s Fellowship magecraft laid on you! How dare you set me at risk, asking to break a geas of Asandir’s making? Well, I don’t meddle with that sort of binding, set as it is over your own given word.’

  Chickens flapped and squawked as Dakar twisted to face her. “That’s impossible. I never -’ He stopped in remembrance and caught his full lower lip between his teeth.

  The crone peered at his crestfallen expression through her maniacal tangle of hair. ‘So,’ she concluded. ‘You are trapped. Well and truly bound, and with only your fool self to blame.’ Her knees creaked under her deerskins as she leaned aside, scooped a pouch from a coffer and spilled out a painted set of knuckle bones. She spat once to dampen them, rolled them in her palm, and cast them skittering across the floor.

  The last one whispered to rest against the toe of Dakar’s boot. Beaked heads tilted behind the crate slats as the chickens fluffed and dropped guano in suspicious scrutiny.

  ‘I can offer you only an augury, prophet,’ the herb witch resumed in a rasp like rust across velvet. ‘The man you must attend can be found two days hence, at sundown, in the shrine of Ath Creator by Ship’s Port.’

  Dakar crashed his fists on the bird coop and cried protest over the cackle of distressed fowl. ‘And if I refuse to rejoin him?’

  The herb witch lifted thin shoulders. ‘Then, as you have seen, the geas of your Fellowship master will react in force and sour every pleasure of the flesh, even to the food and drink your body requires to survive.’

  Dakar cursed in a mixture of languages and dialects. When he ran out of breath for his viciousness, a crafty look crossed his face. This geas. It ties me to the living presence of a man I consider an enemy. Is that where its limits lie?’

  The herb witch nodded.

  ‘Living presence?’ Dakar prodded.

  The flick of a dirty nail gave affirmation.

  ‘Then I’ll kill him,’ he promised, the rage embedded in his heart like gravel pressure-forced into glacial ice. ‘If that’s what it takes to win free of his company, Dharkaron as my witness, I’ll see the last Prince of Rathain well and thoroughly dead.’ The Mad Prophet shoved to his feet, fumbling after his silver.

  But the crone snapped her chin aside and refused payment. ‘Save yourself, sorry man. To reach Ship’s Port in time for a rendezvous, you’ll need all your coin to rent post horses.’

  Journeys

  Shadowed under gold-edged dunes in Sanpashir, while the ceaseless winds worry the carved ruts of cart tracks, a Fellowship sorcerer bows his head in mourning, then stirs and veils the face of the departed, who breathed through the glory of one last southern sunrise, but not long enough to know the coral walls and spindled towers of his native Innish …

  Eventide dims the sea mists to lavender, and softens the jagged walls and shattered drum towers of Tysan’s abandoned city of Avenor; above the ruin, on a hillock clothed in myrtle, the s’Ilessid prince just arrived laughs in the teeth of ancient fears, and assures the uneasy retainers at his back, ‘Here will I raise walls and a family, and the armies that will march to claim victory over the Master of Shadow …’

  While a lone rider on a black stud fares southeast, the Koriani First Senior reports of his journey to her Prime: ‘Arithon is making for Ship’s Port, surely bound for the open sea. He’s escaped us before on dry land. Over water, how shall we track him?’ And Morriel’s reply, ‘By means as old as time. Elaira shall be sent after him at my directive, to insinuate herself as his mistress…’

  VII SHIP’S PORT

  The shrine to honour Ath Creator lay well outside the walled harbour of Ship’s Port. No ceremonial building marked the site, nor ever had; the old beliefs took after Paravian ways, that an edifice of man’s design need not glorify the prime power that had made and Named al
l Creation. Only a worn, dusty path indented across the grey cliffs above the bay gave evidence of any activity beyond the swoop of gulls and nesting ospreys. Shadows striped the grasses as Dakar slid stiffly off the back of his lathered mount. He looped the reins over a weathered deadfall, too worn to care if the hack shied back and tore the bridle.

  Exchanging horses in relays, he had been in the saddle two days. Sores galled his backside and knees like fresh vengeance; mere pittance beside the rancour that griped him due to Asandir’s geas. Riled as a smoke-hazed hornet, the lowering sunlight a flood of heat at his back, Dakar stalked down the narrow, stony defile toward the site of the shrine.

  No voice disturbed the sour calls of fishing birds. The sussuration of surf funnelled up from the strand seemed the last sound in the world. The solitary trace of human presence was a musk of sublimated wax unreeling on the draughts between the crags. Dakar used the stone to brace his balance. Light-headed as wind itself from days of thirst and hunger, even the thin fumes of candles turned his senses.

  The cliff path plunged in descent. Ahead and to the left loomed a grotto, cut off from sound and sunlight. Cherished by no priest or attendant, water welled melodiously from the dark earth, to twine in splashing rungs toward the tide flats. Above the spring’s seeping brim, niches stepped into the natural rock cradled a sediment of congealed wax, dingy with trapped carbon and grained in lichens and moss.

  Amid the remains of uncounted offerings left to celebrate Ath’s mystery, fresh beeswax dips shone ivory and gold, flames fluttered in the humid sea air. Limned in their crawling halos, Arithon, Master of Shadow, stood in the shrine exactly as the herb witch in Tharidor had foretold.

  He would have died in that moment, had Dakar carried a knife. Bereft of any weapon; pained enough that his gorge rose for the fact his knowledge fell shy of bane-spells or riddles of unbinding, the Mad Prophet stopped in helpless hatred.

  If the enemy he passionately wished to throttle heard the scraped steps of intrusion, he never turned, but sparked flame to a final candle, then spiked the light on the ledge alongside hundreds of others. Minutes passed. The sky beyond the grotto purpled and sank into indigo, while inside, the uncertain fires hissed and dwindled, to drown one by one in puddled wax.

  Still, Arithon did not turn. Left no channel for his anger, Dakar fumed until reason intruded to argue why a man might bum candles alone in Ath’s shrine at dusk.

  ‘He isn’t gone!’ the Mad Prophet burst out. ‘Daelion Fatemaster grant me one prayer. Tell me Halliron didn’t die before Asandir got him home to Innish.’

  Arithon bowed his head. ‘He passed the Wheel this morning. Just after sunrise.’ Whisper-quiet and level, he added, ‘Sethvir informed a soothsayer, who sought me out to bring word.’

  Dakar swallowed awkwardly. ‘I’m sorry. Ath, I’m so sorry.’

  Immersed in grief and self-pity, he fumbled to a spur of rock, and sat, and lost to his impulse to weep. In respect for the departed bard’s dignity, he found the restraint to keep silent until the final candle consumed itself in a spitting flare of wax; one drowned flame among thousands, an honour lit for a master singer talented beyond reach of millions.

  Night by then had netted the last of the light. A movement in darkness, Dakar blotted streaked cheeks on his cuffs. He raised his head, shoved sticky hair from his temples, and discovered the shrine’s niche left vacant.

  A moment’s search revealed Arithon standing outside, nervelessly still in a gloom that, for him, held no obstacle. Lined by the pale cream of surf, his black breeches and full sleeves fitted and neat, he faced Dakar with his head tilted an intent fraction to one side, much as he had in the past while he unriddled some melodic nuance of Halliron Masterbard’s teaching.

  Antagonized by a mannerism drawn from his former, false identity as Medlir, Dakar stiffened. ‘You knew! You heard the resonance of the geas Asandir laid upon me and never bothered to warn.’

  ‘I did ask about the coin, if you recall,’ Arithon stated. ‘The harmonic pitch set about your person has strikingly similar overtones.’

  Dakar fired back a filthy epithet, but got no reaction for his trouble. Riled all the more since Arithon’s patience could outlast him, he blurted, ‘Well, what do you intend to do now?’

  ‘I’m overdue to visit a certain tavern on Harbour Street.’ The Master of Shadow pushed away from the rocks. ‘You look as if you need a beer.’

  ‘Ath, no,’ Dakar cut back. ‘Not again. That ploy won’t serve any more to keep me pliant and drunk.’ To thwart Asandir’s geas and compromise the Shadow Master, he would need subtle planning and clear thought. ‘Now that I know it’s your company I keep, you won’t catch me muddling my wits.’

  A stir of white shirt in the gloom, Arithon shrugged. ‘As you wish. The truth is,’ could do with a beer.’

  ‘Daelion’s pity!’ Dakar bristled in disgust. ‘Where’s your respect? The bard who loved you enough to share a master’s training lies dead! Is this how you honour his memory? By running straight off to get sotted?’

  No expression on his face, Arithon murmured a line in liquid Paravian lost to hearing through the thrash of the surf. Surprised not to suffer the expected scalding retort, the Mad Prophet was caught flat-footed as the subject of his rebuke shouldered past. Compelled to scramble after, the fat prophet tripped and stubbed toes all the way back up the cliff path.

  From sundown till dawn, the harbourside quarter of Ship’s Port brewed up a teeming moil of racket and crowds. Here, where tricksters juggled flaming torches, and the pawn stalls stayed open all night for sailors to trade trinkets for coin, the raucous parade of whores and the reeling celebration of deckhands on leave packed into kaleidoscopic hubbub. If the alleys overlooked by the gable-roofed shops seemed thronged as a holiday fair, the taverns were jammed to bursting. Over-dressed or half-clothed, a stew of sweating humanity gathered in the frenzied determination of sailors to cram nine months of pleasure into their first night ashore. Most rampaged and caroused until their coin ran out, then stumbled to the purser of an outbound trader to sign for another voyage.

  The taproom of the Kittiwake Inn claimed distinction as the wildest dive on Harbour Street. Since it lay nearest to the wharves, deckhands still rolling on sea legs swayed in for their first drink and often passed no further. Smugglers’ crews gathered there, sober and wary, ready for swift orders from their captains, that illicitly-laden ships might slip hawsers ahead of the harbourmaster’s officers for flight to a hidden cove.

  At the Kittiwake, if a newcomer wanted beer or a table, he was likely to need bribes for the privilege.

  Helplessly tied by Asandir’s geas, Dakar forwent his urge to complain. His resolve to stay sober in the cause of bloody murder now enforced by a shortage of coin, he cursed and jabbed elbows to plough aside revellers in his need to keep pace with Arithon.

  Small and unfairly quick on his feet, the s’Ffalenn prince could shoulder through crowds like an eel. He already had the ear of the landlord, a tower of a man with red-veined cheeks and an ingrained stoop left over from service as a ship’s cook. The pair engaged in a conversation that Dakar was of two minds about overhearing, torn as he was between nosy habit and new-found, poisonous animosity.

  Never mind that drunken song and laughter and the squealing shrieks of pinched barmaids would naturally defeat his best effort. The height of summer in a seaport was an unhealthy season in which to sample taverns. The Kittiwake’s stone and plaster walls dammed in a suffocating, sweat-humid heat, and the knife-scarred beams that braced the ceilings thumped to more racket upstairs. Resigned to claustrophobia and sour boredom, Dakar unstrung every one of his shirt laces, jerked open his collar and cuffs, and stowed his bulk against a post. He endured in dripping impatience, deaf to the jeers thrown his way over the unravelled state of his clothing; apparently the herb witch’s chickens had picked his seat to hanging threads. That misfortune should hardly matter, Dakar sulked, since salt air and mouldy ships would rot the breeks off a man anyway.
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  Something Arithon said caused the landlord to nod in enlightenment. His booming reply could not be missed. ‘Captain Dhirken? From the Black Drake? Ship’s crew’s here, sure enough. Her master likes the table in the corner where the air’s fresh.’

  A coin changed hands and Arithon backed up, fast reflexes alone averting collision with a prostitute’s overflowing bodice. He grinned at her disappointment, dropped a half-silver down the maw of her cleavage, and cheerfully bypassed temptation. ‘You heard?’ he called to Dakar. ‘Well, come on, then.’

  As he nipped on between two contentious stevedores, the Mad Prophet made determined effort to follow. But the gap proved too tight to admit his fat girth. Cut off, jostled by tar-stinking celebrants, he cursed, craned his neck, and located the window in question, placed between the weather-checked tits of a wooden mermaid and a party of caulker’s lads who linked arms in rollicking song. The panes in the worn sash casement were firmed with grease, and cracked open because the tired frame had stuck that way.

  ‘Fresh air,’ the Mad Prophet grumbled under his breath. ‘Didn’t know this port had any that didn’t reek of ship’s bilge and fish.’

  Arithon by then had ploughed the last yard to the table. A luck nothing short of miraculous allowed him an empty stool. He settled across the boards from a doxie with a waist-length black plait and immediately started to talk.

  By now parched enough to regret his resolve not to drink, Dakar glowered, but failed to recapture the Shadow Master’s attention. If the confounded prince chose to flirt on the eve of Halliron’s death, that weakness might as well lend advantage; in particular since the vessel he hoped to charter was a matter of public record.

  Dakar’s beard hid a smile rowed with teeth like a barracuda. He measured the Kittiwake’s bawling crush of patrons, chose his mark, and launched himself toward a pigtailed pack of gamers in vindictive intent to cause mayhem.