Meg looked up at the heavy-framed taverner. ‘Where is he now?’
‘Gone to get you your information.’
‘What information is that?’ Cutter asked.
Meg looked down at A Ahmud Ki whose eyes were open, watching her. ‘To see what ships are in port.’
‘Wheatbeer is arranging for us to meet with a shipmaster,’ Cutter told her.
‘When?’ Meg asked.
‘Later,’ Wheatbeer replied, ‘when things have quietened down.’ He eyed the sleek black rat preening itself on a crate, wondering why such an animal was the woman’s companion.
‘Can I borrow a knife?’ Meg asked. Cutter produced one and handed it to her, and she carefully rolled A Ahmud Ki onto his side, Talemaker squatting to help. She carefully cut away the material around A Ahmud Ki’s ribs. ‘I need more light.’
The taverner leaned forward, holding his lantern above where she worked, fascinated. ‘Are you a surgeon?’ he asked.
‘She’s a healer,’ Talemaker told him gleefully. ‘This is—’
‘No need for storytelling,’ Cutter interrupted gruffly.
Meg glared at Talemaker and looked up at Cutter in appreciation. Then she returned her attention to A Ahmud Ki’s wounds. ‘It went straight through. This won’t take much to fix.’ She placed her hands over the wounds.
The warehouse shook with an explosion and light flashed through cracks and windows. Everyone turned towards the door. ‘What was that?’ Talemaker whispered.
‘Thunderclap,’ Cutter answered. ‘A big one.’ He went to the door and listened. ‘Stay here,’ he told the others as he cautiously opened the door and peered out. And then he stepped outside.
The docks were ablaze from end to end and shadows of people were running in every direction—some from the flames, themselves torches, some towards them with buckets of water, futilely trying to quell the raging inferno. Slowly Cutter comprehended what must have happened. Two ships moored at the docks were burning fiercely, one already listing to starboard, its rigging collapsed and dragging it down. The ships were lost. Men were shouting instructions to teams who were directing their efforts to stopping the fires spreading along the wooden wharf. Through the mounting smoke, Kerwyn soldiers appeared. Cutter stepped back into the warehouse and closed the door. When he finished describing what he’d seen to the others, Wheatbeer said, ‘Kerwyn ships. That’s what they were. Bastards got what they deserve.’
‘What about the soldiers?’ Talemaker asked, looking at Wheatbeer. ‘They’ll search everything.’
The taverner lifted his lantern and pointed to a pile of crates deeper in the warehouse. ‘Under there is a little hideaway. I’ve had it there in case things got nasty with the Kerwyn. It had other uses before that. You can stay there until this fracas is over.’
‘What about the shipmaster?’ Cutter asked.
‘I’ll bring him when it’s safe to do so. The Kerwyn will be furious with this attack so it might be a few days before things calm down enough to get you on a ship. Stay here. Leave it to me,’ said Wheatbeer. ‘I’ll get you out of here.’
CHAPTER FORTY-ONE
Ineed a piss,’ said Talemaker irritably. He squirmed past A Ahmud Ki in the darkness, climbed the short wooden ladder to the trapdoor and listened. ‘Can’t hear anything,’ he told them before he cautiously lifted the trapdoor and disappeared through a brief gap of faded daylight into the warehouse.
‘How much longer is your friend expecting us to stay in this cesspit?’ A Ahmud Ki asked. ‘It’s been what? Two days already?’
Cutter, pressed against A Ahmud Ki’s shoulder in the cramped space, shrugged. ‘You’d rather take your chances out there?’
‘Yes,’ A Ahmud Ki replied sullenly. ‘Make some light.’ A tiny milky light sphere appeared in Meg’s palm. Shadows carved their faces into dramatic masks. ‘Is there anything to eat?’
‘No,’ Meg replied.
‘An Ithosen can make food magically appear,’ A Ahmud Ki said, remembering his Ranu training. ‘Can’t you do that?’
‘I’ve never tried,’ Meg replied.
‘Try now,’ A Ahmud Ki curtly ordered.
Meg glanced at Cutter whose unshaven face remained expressionless. She made the light sphere float by her shoulder. ‘How did you do it?’ she asked.
‘I prayed through spells to Berak N’eth,’ A Ahmud Ki replied. ‘It’s simple.’ He recited a spell in a foreign tongue. ‘It’s Ranu,’ he explained. ‘Can you repeat it?’
‘Teach me,’ she said.
When the trapdoor reopened and Talemaker descended he found his three companions sharing a serving of food—seeds, nuts and fruit. ‘Where did this come from?’ he asked in amazement.
Cutter wiped his mouth and said, ‘Lady Amber.’
‘You made this?’ Talemaker asked in astonishment.
‘A Ahmud Ki showed me how,’ she replied, holding a handful of berries towards him. ‘Hungry?’
‘See anything outside?’ Cutter asked.
‘There’s a fog. The dock is quiet. It must be very early morning,’ Talemaker replied.
‘Easy to lose track of time down here,’ Cutter remarked. ‘No sign of our friends?’ Talemaker shook his head. ‘We may have to deal with this ourselves,’ Cutter suggested. ‘We can’t stay in this hole much longer.’
Scraping overhead stopped their conversation. Meg dispelled the light and they waited in silence. Someone knocked on the trapdoor. It opened and Chaser’s face appeared. ‘Come out,’ he instructed and opened the trapdoor wider.
Stretching in the fresher air of the warehouse, the group listened to Chaser’s news. ‘The Kerwyn have been rounding up anyone they suspect might have links to the Movement after the ships were sunk. There have been public executions—lots of them.’
‘And a shipmaster?’ asked Talemaker. ‘Wheatbeer said he’d organise someone.’
Chaser shook his head. ‘Wheatbeer was arrested.’
‘When?’ Cutter asked.
‘Last night. The Kerwyn came into the Three Emus and took everyone who was there.’
‘Now what do we do?’ Talemaker asked.
‘I’ve found a shipmaster who will take you,’ Chaser said and he looked at Meg. ‘But he wants gold.’
‘Gold?’ Cutter asked. ‘Why gold? Why not money?’
‘We haven’t even got money,’ Talemaker lamented.
‘How much gold?’ Meg asked.
‘A bar weight,’ Chaser answered.
‘A what?’ asked Cutter.
‘It’s a measure the foreigners use. It’s meant to be equivalent to the weight of a small bag of grain. Apparently it’s a trading currency in the foreign countries,’ Chaser explained.
‘That’s a lot of gold,’ said Talemaker.
‘Each,’ Chaser added.
‘Each?’ Cutter exclaimed. ‘That’s ridiculous! Who is this idiot?’
‘He’s the shipmaster of one of the dragon ships. He can take you where you want to go,’ said Chaser, again looking at Meg.
‘We don’t need a dragon ship. We just want to get somewhere safer—a refugee boat,’ said Cutter. ‘What about a local ship?’
‘No one will take you,’ said Chaser. ‘They know who you are. They won’t risk it, not with the Kerwyn so keen to catch you.’
Cutter stepped up to Chaser, his bulky presence suddenly threatening. ‘What do you mean they know who we are?’
Chaser stepped back slightly. ‘Word on the streets is the Kerwyn are searching for a red-haired witch with a rat and a foreigner with silver hair. They will pay handsomely for whoever finds them and will kill anyone who helps them.’
Cutter glanced at Meg and A Ahmud Ki before returning his attention to Chaser. ‘We know that. Something has changed, hasn’t it? What else do you know?’
‘A Seer arrived in Westport yesterday. He wants all of you taken directly to him.’
Meg blanched and touched her chest. The Seers knew she was alive. More than ever she needed to leave. If th
e Seers caught her she would never see her children again. ‘Tell the shipmaster he has a deal,’ she said.
‘What?’ Cutter gasped, wheeling to face her. ‘Where in Jarudha’s name are we going to get that much gold?’
Meg looked at A Ahmud Ki. ‘The same place we got our food,’ she said. A Ahmud Ki raised an eyebrow and smiled.
She sat apart from the others, knees wrapped in her arms, deep in thought. Whisper was out foraging along the wharf, A Ahmud Ki was sleeping, and Talemaker and Cutter were talking close to the warehouse entrance. It was good not to be cramped in the hideaway, but chancy sitting in the open warehouse. Chaser would return that evening with a shipmaster, so they voted to take their chances.
There was a Seer in Westport hunting for her. She’d known that news of her exploits would eventually reach the Seers, but somehow she’d expected to get aboard a ship and be long gone from Western Shess before the Seers realised who she was. Her secret had been kept silent for more than a decade and to all except her closest family in Summerbrook Lady Amber was dead. Events had forced her hand. The Seers knew Lady Amber was alive and the Conduit still existed. Now they would hunt her again, like she’d been hunted before by Truth and Light. Who would come after her this time?
Leaving Western Shess meant more to her than staying. Summerbrook was a graveyard. Buried there were her mother, her brothers, her husband and one of her children. She buried some of them by hand without even knowing who it was she was interring. That filled her heart with unfathomable sorrow and pulled her towards Summerbrook again to say goodbye. Emma was buried there and Samuel Kushel, the old soothsayer and her great-uncle who had told her she would meet a host of people, all of whom would affect her life. She knew the Seers killed him in their desperate hope of getting hold of the Conduit, but he thwarted them by passing it through Emma’s hands to her, giving her a burden she barely understood and wished she had never been given. He had changed her life irrevocably. The Seers could not have the Conduit. With it, they intended to release the Demon Horsemen to destroy everything in the name of their religious aspirations for Paradise and she could not let that happen. She would not let that happen.
The dragon ship was the answer to the twin spectres in her life. First, two of her children were still alive—sold into slavery and taken overseas to a foreign world she only knew as the Lands of the Dragon People. A Ahmud Ki wanted to call it Andrakis, but his memory was a thousand years old and it might not be the same place. It didn’t matter. What mattered was that she could search for her children with a real hope of finding them. That was what mattered. Hope. And secondly, a journey away from Western Shess would take her out of the reach of the Seers and their megalomaniacal plans for a new order. In a new world she could find peace.
The shipmaster who arrived with Chaser was shorter than Meg had imagined and older, a robust greybeard with one arm bent awkwardly at the elbow from an old injury. He studied the four refugees one by one, stopping and staring open-mouthed when he reached A Ahmud Ki. After an uncomfortable moment, he spoke in a tongue that sounded to Meg similar to a language A Ahmud Ki sometimes used. ‘What are you? Fairy folk?’
A Ahmud Ki’s eyebrow rose. ‘What do you mean?’
‘How long have you been here?’
‘A few cycles.’
‘And you got here on whose ship?’
A Ahmud Ki glanced at Meg before he said, ‘I thought you meant here in this port. I didn’t come here by ship.’
The shipmaster’s eyes widened. ‘How did you get here then?’
‘I came from the east. I was born there.’
‘East? What country is that then?’
‘He comes from Ashua,’ Meg broke in.
The shipmaster turned to her, a hint of surprise in his expression. ‘You can speak Andrakian too?’
‘Yes.’
‘How? Who taught both of you this?’ He looked at A Ahmud Ki with increasing suspicion.
‘I’ve an uncle who used to be a shipmaster,’ Meg improvised, but her memory sparked words from Emma. ‘My family name is Kushel.’
‘Kushel?’ the shipmaster said. ‘No. Never heard of it.’ He walked around A Ahmud Ki, inspecting him like a buyer would inspect a horse. ‘You must be some kind of throwback. You look more like a painting than a real person. What’s your name?’
‘A Ahmud Ki.’
The shipmaster stepped back in shock. ‘You’re joking.’
‘No.’
‘Why would you say that?’ Meg asked.
The shipmaster kept an eye on A Ahmud Ki as he answered Meg. ‘In my country there’s an ancient tale about a madman who tried to take the Andrakian throne a thousand or more years ago. He was called Amuchki.’
Meg looked at A Ahmud Ki whose face remained expressionless. ‘What happened to him?’ she asked.
‘King Dilun killed him with a magical sword, along with the Dragonlords and all the dragons.’ The shipmaster chuckled when he saw the concern on Meg’s face, and added, ‘The tales are all bullshit, lady. Made up.’
‘Then why are you looking at our friend like this?’ she asked, aware that Cutter, Talemaker and Chaser were staring in confusion at the three conversing in a foreign tongue that they couldn’t understand.
‘Because he looks like the pictures I saw as a kid of the fairy folk that they say used to live in the forests. It’s uncanny. Are you sure he’s not from the west?’
‘From Ashua,’ Meg repeated. ‘We met in The Valley of Kings. It’s to the east.’
‘But his name is Ranu. I know that language like my own. I used to sail there all the time when I was learning the trade. A Ahmud Ki—the seeker of power.’
‘I don’t know why my parents named me this name either,’ said A Ahmud Ki. He glanced at Meg. ‘My father was a traveller. He went to many places. Perhaps he knew the Ranu tongue.’
The shipmaster laughed. ‘Why is that funny?’ Meg asked.
‘I’ve heard stories of people who’ve named their children after they’ve been to another country and found out later that the cute name was really something offensive. A friend told me that he knew a man named Ka’enfa because his father travelled to the Islands of Fire and wanted to call his son an exotic name. Turns out Ka’enfa means “little dick” in the local tongue, but no one ever told him that. His father just didn’t understand what the word meant,’ said the shipmaster, stifling his grin. ‘But Amuchki? He was evil. Who would name their son after him?’ He turned away, shaking his head, and in Shessian asked Chaser, ‘Where’s the gold?’
Chaser looked at Meg. She pointed to a small wooden box. ‘It’s in there.’
The shipmaster went to the box and peered in. Satisfied with what he saw, he said, ‘My men will collect this. You have to be aboard the Waverunner tomorrow morning before dawn. I’ll send someone. Be quick and be silent. If the Kerwyn interfere, I never saw you in my life. Agreed?’ He didn’t wait for an answer. He shut the box and headed for the door.
‘What was that all about?’ Cutter asked Meg after the shipmaster left.
‘He thought he knew A Ahmud Ki,’ Meg explained. ‘Just a strange coincidence.’
Cutter frowned. ‘How come your friend knows the language?’
Meg shrugged. ‘I don’t know. I’ll ask.’ She walked away, annoyed with herself for dismissing Cutter so abruptly, but her thoughts were focussed on what the shipmaster revealed about A Ahmud Ki’s history. She wanted answers too. Who was he really, if the old myths painted him as a villain? Was he meant to be pinned to the dragon statue for more than he had told her?
A Ahmud Ki watched her approach and as she reached him he said, ‘I suppose you have a lot of questions.’
Caught by his frankness, she paused before saying, ‘The shipmaster acted as if he’d seen a ghost—a bad ghost.’
‘I was surprised too.’
‘You didn’t show it,’ she said. ‘You didn’t seem to deny what he said.’
‘How could I? What did you want me to say to him? That
I am A Ahmud Ki? That I’ve been locked away for a thousand years, but here I am?’
‘Is what he said true?’
‘Which part?’
‘About—about the evil,’ Meg said. ‘About trying to take the throne.’
‘I had no interest in any throne,’ A Ahmud Ki replied. ‘I could’ve had the throne at any time, but I didn’t want it. As for evil, what is evil? What you might consider a good thing from your perspective might be someone else’s evil. Who is evil at the moment in this city? The Kerwyn who are trying to restore order now the war is over or the members of the, what is it, the Movement, who are killing Kerwyn?’
‘But it sounds like your name will not be welcome in the Lands of the Dragon People.’
‘Then I’ll use another name. You heard the shipmaster. It’s all mythology. The stories have changed over a thousand years. He didn’t even know the right name for the Aelendyell. Fairy folk? What kind of name is that?’
‘Are you sure you want to go the Lands of the Dragon People? It might be nothing like you remember.’
‘My hope lies there,’ A Ahmud Ki replied, and met her gaze. ‘So does yours.’
Meg’s eyes widened. ‘What do you mean by that?’
‘Call it intuition. You want to go there. I feel it. You’re seeking something and someone has told you it’s where you are going.’
Meg left the statement uncontested. She turned from A Ahmud Ki and walked across the warehouse, weaving between stacks of crates to find a place to be alone. A Ahmud Ki was an enigma. His answers weren’t convincing—they were evasive—and they made her less certain of him than ever. If the shipmaster’s reactions were a taste of what his presence would generate in the new land, their journey there would be disastrous. To find her children and free them, she wanted anonymity so that she could search without arousing suspicion. She had no idea how the people who bought them as slaves would respond to her desire to get them back, but she wanted no risks, no factors that would jeopardise her mission. A Ahmud Ki was looming as a liability.
CHAPTER FORTY-TWO
A Solitary Journey Page 36