A stronger puff of wind ruffled the leaves of the jungle trees, and he glimpsed a white wall. Squinting and still gasping for breath, he watched the place intently, and when a moment or two had passed he saw it again. "You're right," he told the lookout. 'There's a building on that island."
The white stone structure might easily be a castle, or at least a fort; and though reinforced by the gun-deck basilisks, Poltergeist, Windsong's giant culverin, would be no match for even a single small gun mounted on a steady platform and sheltered behind walls of stone.
''I'm glad you see it too, sir," the lookout sighed. "It sort of comes and goes."
"That's the wind in the leaves," Noen told her, and took Dinnile's telescope from his eye.
The instrument gone, his view was no longer restricted to the little patch of jungle he had watched before. He could see the whole island, including the dark, gray battlements that rose above the foliage and the elaborate, machicolated tower from which the Levar's colors flew.
He clapped the glass to his eye again. The tower remained, a narrow shaft of stone the color of a storm cloud, with a bartizan and a merloned summit. "That was a mast," Noen said.
He had only whispered the words to himself, but in the silence of the crow's nest the lookout had heard him. "Aye, sir," she said. "It comes and goes, sir."
"By the mark seven."
Noen heard the leadsman's cry as he descended slowly to the maindeck, and it decided his course of action. "We'll anchor here, Lieutenant. Break out the jolly boat."
"Aye aye, sir!" Dinnile shouted orders and bare feet pattered up and down Windsong's decks. The jolly boat was slung on davits below the stem gallery. and so could be put into the water a good deal more easily than the big longboat stowed upside-down aft of the mainmast. When the bow anchor had splashed into the sea, Noen bawled, "Steward!"
As though by magic, Oeuni was beside him, "You're not going yourself, sir'?"
"Get my sword," Noen told his steward. "My pistol, too. Load it." Belatedly, he remembered to return Dinnile's telescope. "And the small glass."
"Let me go, or Rekkue."
Privately Noen admitted that no matter what regulations might lay down concerning the captain's staying with his ship, he was quite incapable of sending Oeuni into danger while he remained in safety. Aloud he said, "You're not fully recovered, Dinnile's officer of the watch, and Rekkue's not experienced enough yet. That leaves me."
Dinnile put in, "You ought to take the longboat anyhow, sir. That'd give you twenty hands."
"Twenty hands dead," Noen told him, "if there's a gun on that island."
"Pistols for the crew?" Oeuni asked. She was too good an officer to argue.
Noen shook his head. The average sailor was to be trusted with a matchlock pistol only in the gravest emergency. (Not even then, according to some captains.) "Cutlasses and dirks. I'll have the falconets fore and aft, though. I'll man the aft falconet myself and mind the tiller. Eitha can see to the bow gun. "
As he loaded the falconet, taking exaggerated care to keep its smoldering slow match well away from the powder, Noen recalled that moment and regretted it. He was fundamentally a sailor, he told himself, and not a fighter; and even as a fighter he preferred cold steel to the tricky firearms that went off so often when their owners did not want them to, and so often failed to go off when they did.
But the little jolly could not carry more than seven in any kind of sea, and the two swivel-mounted bronze falconets, with their powder and shot, weighed as much as any seventh passenger. Eitha, the cockswain of the jolly, had her gun loaded and ready long before Noen (only too conscious of the eyes of the four men at the oars) had rammed a handful of musket balls down the barrel of his own and fixed the match in the serpentine.
That done, he assured himself that his steward had loaded his double-barreled pistol and that she had not wound its wheellock. There would be time enough for that when some actual danger threatened. Or there would not, and he would have to depend on the falconet and the clumsy broadsword he had hitched out of his way. Not that sword, gun, or pistol was apt to be of much use against magic.
The gray stone tower flashed into existence again, only to vanish like smoke. "Cockswain!" Noen called. "I want soundings."
Eitha tossed the lead ahead of the boat, letting the lead line run through her fingers. When the bow was over the lead, she drew it up, counting the knots. "By the half seven, sir," she reported.
"Again," Noen snapped. Could magic deceive a lead weight at the end of a line? Yes, certainly—but not quickly or easily.
"By the half seven, sir."
Plenty of water for Windsong, and they had nearly reached the inlet. Noen studied both shores, but particularly that of the island. There should be a sentry there, someone fleet-footed, to tell whoever was in charge that the jolly had come. He saw no one, but perhaps the sentry had already gone. "Cast again," he told Eitha, "when we're at the narrowest point."
A bird circled the island and Noen, fearing it might be of the carrion kind, trained his glass on it. It was as black as any crow, yet lovely with its long wings and tail and its elaborately ruffled head: not a carrion bird, Noen thought, nor even a predatory one, though he was no student of such things. Twice more it circled, then flew seaward toward Windsong and appeared to light in the delicate filigree of her rigging, though when he turned his glass toward her he could not see it. "Smaller with its wings folded," he muttered to himself, then seeing one of the rowers looking oddly at him, cleared his throat.
"By the mark seven, sir." The island and the mainland loomed to the right and left of them.
"Again, when we're well into the bay," Noen said.
Now the castle appeared as solid as the Levar's palace. The rowers were whispering and jerking their heads toward it as they pulled their oars. "Silence!" Noen growled at them.
Rooks circled the tower, and the black muzzle of a gun thrust from every crenel on the walls. Had the castle been real, the entire navy could not have battered it into submission; but Noen felt sure those guns posed no more danger to the jolly than the phantom rooks.
A terrace led from the bay to the portcullis; on it stood two groups of gaily dressed people, some in armor and shouldering halberds or harquebuses. Both groups appeared to be watching intently the two richly dressed figures that stood arguing between them, though occasionally Noen saw someone glance sidelong toward the jolly, then look away at once.
"We'll land there." he told the rowers. "On that pavement." He put the tiller over.
"By the mark seven!" Eitha called triumphantly a moment later.
"Cut!" A small man in a shabby tunic stepped from the shadow of a ravclin. "Break, everyone! Rehearsal's over. I think—that is, I hope—we've been rescued."
The gaily dressed actors seemed to relax. They were not really as numerous, Noen saw, as they had appeared; less than a score, perhaps. The two who had been arguing ended their dispute instantly and turned to watch the jolly.
At the same instant, the castle shrank and changed, dwindling to a beached caravel whose canted mainmast flew the inverted flag of the Levar. The white-plumed disputant nudged the other, and together they swept off their hats and bowed low. With a few more oar strokes the jolly's keel grounded, scraped free, then grounded again. "In oars!" Noen ordered. "Get her to shore."
The rowers sprang out, seized the gunnels, and pulled the jolly far enough up the beach for him to step onto the sand without wetting his second-best shoes. "Eitha, see to the matches." Hiking his sword to a more conventional position and throwing out his chest while bitterly regretting his ragged trousers, he stalked up the beach with as much dignity as he could command.
The darkly plumed disputant made a second bow before replacing the hat that bore them. There were flashing black eyes below the broad brim, a great beak of a nose, and a prominent wart. "Welcome, sir!" This in a voice that boomed like a kettledrum. "Welcome, I say again, whomever you may be! I am Nordread ola Gormol, and I've the honor to be�
�"
"The menace of our troupe," cut in the little man. "That is," he added bitterly, "I hope you are."
The white-plumed disputant favored Noen with a dazzling smile. "And I'm its leading woman." The curtsy that followed this somewhat startling statement involved spreading the tails of a very masculine coat while kicking the wearer's sword out of the way. Noen thought of the awkward fashion in which he had adjusted to his own as he said, "I am Captain Tev Noen of Her Magnificence's galleass Windsong."·
"Ah," the "leading woman" sighed. (Noen decided the second disputant was a woman, though a woman as tall as he.) "I've heard of you. You're the captain who took that big Zhir ship a few months ago. Everyone thought you were going to be simply swimming in gold, but we're not officially at war with Ka Zhir, they say, so they gave it back. What a pity!"
Noen said, "I doubt that my history bears on the situation."
"Oh, but it does! If they hadn't, you'd be at home in Liavek, in your palace, and—"
"I," the little man put in, "am generally called Baldy. I'm our stage manager, and in the absence of our owner and leading man, Amail Destrop, I'm boss. That is, I'm boss when things get bad. That is, when they're not everybody else is, as you've already seen." .
"And you are in distress?" Noen asked.
All three tried to talk at once, one booming like a broadside, the other grasping Noen's sleeve and cooing in his ear, and Baldy jumping up and down and yelling until he had shouted them both to silence. "You can bet your luck we're in distress, Captain! That is, we're not actually starving yet, but we can't get off this rotten island, and there're three—"
"We can get off in the ship's boats, Captain. But the mainland's ever so much worse! There are—"
"I require transportation to Liavek," Nordread thundered, "and at once! I have myself had the honor of performing at the Palace, and His Scarlet Eminence was so kind—"
"—three wizards," Baldy finished. "And Amail's gone the gods know where. That is, unless something's eaten him."
At that, a silence seemed to descend upon the island.
Noen cleared his throat and clasped his hands behind his back. "Let me establish a few things if I may," he said, raising his voice. "You are shipwrecked. I am the commander of a vessel that has come to your rescue. As such, I can have any or all of you clapped in irons if I judge that to be in the best interest of my ship. Do you understand that?"
The erstwhile disputants glanced at each other, then they nodded. So did Baldy, and so did several of the onlookers.
''I'm going to ask some questions. They're to be answered fully but briefly by the person I indicate, and by no one else. Should anyone else answer—or attempt to answer—he or she will be bound hand and foot by the sailors under my command and thrown into that little boat. You will then be rowed to my ship and turned over to my first officer with instructions to put you in irons and confine you in the hold. My master-at-arms will see that you're fed once a day, provided he remembers. I understand prisoners can keep the rats at bay quite effectively by rattling their chains, at least for the first few days." Noen paused to let his threat sink in.
"Now then." He pointed to Baldy. "I take it you were passengers aboard that ship. Where is her crew?"
"I don't know," Baldy said. "That is, I don't know where they are now, or what happened to them. They disappeared—that is, most of them did, one by one while we were sailing from Cyriesae."
"They deserted?"
Baldy shrugged, his face blank. "I don't think so. That is, we were at sea, and they didn't take the boats."
"Could they have been stolen by the Kil?"
Baldy shrugged again.
"How did you come to this island?"
"With so many of the crew gone, we had to help pull up the sails and so on. That is, we helped as much as we could, but—"
"You weren't sailors, understandably."
"So when it looked like there might be a storm, the captain thought it would be better to get the ship in here. That is, we all thought that, and we did. Only the anchor dragged, and the storm washed our ship onto the beach."
Noen nodded. The bottom of the bay, like the beach, was probably sand. "Where's the captain?"
Baldy jerked his head toward the island, and Nordread coughed.
"You want to say something," Noen told him. "What is it?"
"I wish—I would point out…Captain, our captain took the remaining sailors—there were only two of them—and went inland. That was two days ago," Nordread's deep voice laid a heavy significance on the two, "and we haven't seen him since."
"He took all the sailors and none of you? Why would he do that?"
"I believe he had some thought of, ah, a hidden treasure, perhaps, or something of the kind. I don't believe he trusted us, Captain. At least, not as much as his own—ah—employees."
Noen nodded and turned to Eitha, waiting with her crew near the jolly. "Go back to the ship," he said. "Tell Lieutenant Oeuni that there's a good shelving sand beach here and no danger. No immediate danger, anyway. Handsomely, now!"
"I wish to point out," Nordread rumbled, "that our sailors vanished at a steady rate of one per night, and that—"
"Shut your mouth," Noen snapped.
•
That evening Noen told Lieutenants Oeuni, Dinnile, and Rekkue, "That's it. The players know nothing about the white building I saw, or they say they don't. My guess is the captain saw it and most or all of them didn't. As to what happened to their crew and whether it will keep on happening, I'd like your thoughts."
Dinnile said, "We mustn't let our lads and lasses find out about this, sir."
"That's why I made the players stay in the vicinity of their ship and posted the sentries," Noen told him. "But they will find out. We can't afford to fool ourselves. They'll probably find out tonight, even if no one vanishes. If they don't, we can be certain they'll know by tomorrow night. If we finish plugging the leak tomorrow and get Windsong back to sea, they'll know even faster because we'll have to take the players with us."
Rekkue said, "The storm that washed their ship on the beach must have been the same one that stove in Windsong. Sir, do you remember the wind that wizard on Zhironni whistled up? Could it have been magic?"
Noen lifted his shoulders and dropped them again. "I don't know, Lieutenant. And I don't know how we can find out, unless we can find the wizard and stick his feet in a fire."
Oeuni used her hook to scratch her head. "You said there were three, Noen. Three wizards."
Noen put a finger to his lips. One of the sentries was coming, his approach made visible by the crimson spark of the slow match in his pistol. As he neared their fire, Noen saw a second figure behind him.
The sentry touched his forehead. "Cap'n, I got a sailor here from the Lady of Liavek."
Inwardly Noen berated himself. All afternoon he had planned to examine the log of the beached ship, but he had been so involved in the tricky process of careening Windsong without doing further damage that he never had.
Dinnile said, "Is that the derelict, Chipper? I didn't think there was a hand left on her."
The sentry, in more normal times one of the carpenter's mates, shook his head. "He says when the others went off in that pirate they captured, he didn't want to go, sir. So he hid, but then he was afraid the passengers would take it out on him, so he stayed hid." He winked. "I reckon he had a pretty easy time of it, sir. Only now he says he wants to tell about the wizards. They're the ones that make that castle come and go, I guess, sir."
Noen said, "We'll talk to him. Get back to your post."
The sailor who came forward was young and blond, tall but rather slightly built for a seaman. He saluted awkwardly, looked at Windsong's four officers one after another, and at last seemed to fasten on Dinnile as the largest. "Cap'n Noen?"
Dinnile shook his head. "Second mate. That's the captain over there."
The sailor saluted again. "Cap'n Noen, there's somethin'..." He seemed at a loss for words.
<
br /> "Something odd?" Noen prompted. "Something uncanny?"
"Yes, sir. I heard about what them passengers told you today sir, and—"
"I know you did."
"—and I want to tell you some more, sir. 'Cause what that little bald 'un said wasn't the truth of it, sir, not at all, and—"
Oeuni broke in, "Noen, this man's no sailor!"
"Certainly not," Noen told her. "But how did you know, Lieutenant?"
"By his hands." Oeuni paused, suddenly embarrassed. "I suppose I look at hands now more than I used to. But they haven't been in the sun much, and I never saw a hand in my life—I mean a hand's hand—with nails that long."
"I had supposed it was because he said yes." Noen was speaking to the imposter, not Oeuni. "Sailors don't say yes, because the word's too soft to make itself heard in a high wind. Sailors say aye or aye aye. Please try to keep that in mind."
The imposter saluted a third time. "Aye aye, sir. I'll try, sir, 'at I will."
"For that matter," Noen told Oeuni, "This man's no man, although the last time I saw her she was dressed like one and playing a man's part. Very skillfully too, I thought. Meet the leading woman of the players."
Oeuni's mouth opened, then shut again.
The player smiled and said in a somewhat higher though still throaty voice, "Since you've penetrated my little masquerade, Captain, may I sit down?"
"Of course. Move over a bit there, Rekkue. By the way, I appreciate your giving my sentry that tale about the pirate ship."
He was rewarded with a dazzling smile. "I thought you would, after the way you stepped on poor old Nordread this morning; sailors are a superstitious lot, I understand. And I want to apologize for playing dress-up; but you or one of your officers must have told those men not to talk to members of our troupe, and I wanted to see you."
"I also told you not to talk to them," Noen said severely.
"For a good reason, which I understood and respected. But what Baldy told you just isn't true." The player paused, pulling off a scarlet bandanna and shaking bright blond hair. "I'm Marin Monns, by the way."
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