‘If you know when Rui captured her, we might be able to work out where she is now,’ Varrisher said.
Soren stood and looked at him intensely, desperate for any suggestion. ‘How?’
‘Even a pirate is going to have to keep logs of some sort. They probably won’t reveal much, but it might be enough to work out where he next made landfall. It’s not much, but it’s a start, and gives you somewhere to begin your search. Also, we still have Blasco and a whole crew to question about what they might remember, the ships and prisoners they took and where they went to sell their plunder.’
It seemed so obvious Soren couldn’t understand how he had not thought of it himself, but his emotions were in turmoil, and he wasn’t thinking clearly, not to mention he was fighting off the after effects of the Gift. Varrisher’s suggestion went some way to settling his mind and giving him hope. Having a way to move forward allowed him to focus on something that would be useful, rather than dwelling on the worst outlook.
‘Get Blasco,’ Soren said. ‘I’m going to start looking through Rui’s stateroom to see if I can find anything.’
Soren knew that Alessandra had fled Ostenheim roughly seventeen weeks earlier. The voyage south to Auracia would have taken eight days or so, if it had been anything like his own voyage south several weeks later. Rui’s cruising waters had been in the south, which meant she would have been close to Auracia, a week or so into the voyage when he came upon the vessel taking her there, if that was what had happened. He couldn’t expect that a pirate would keep a detailed log, but even they would need to keep financial records of some sort. Knowing roughly when Alessandra had been taken would give him something to go on. If Blasco could fill in any more detail, all the better. He had proved cooperative enough so far and had no reason to dissemble if he hoped to take possession of the Tear.
The Tear’s stateroom was no larger than that on board the Typhon; the ships were roughly the same size. Soren looked around, wondering where to start. On the starboard side there was a small cot on gimbals where Rui must have slept. On the port side there was an escritoire, which seemed like Soren’s best hope.
He attempted to open the cover, but it was locked. After a cursory search for a key he pulled out his dagger and jammed it into the lock. It punched through the wood of the desk and he gouged out the metal lock. Barely able to contain his impatience he pulled the cover down into an extended desk.
There were some papers contained within, scrawled with clumsy script of the type he had produced when first learning to write, not all that long before. He scanned through them quickly, dropping each irrelevant document on the floor until the escritoire was empty and Soren still had no useful information.
He sat on the bench at the back of the stateroom and sighed. He felt rushed even though there was nothing for him to do. Varrisher entered with Blasco, who seemed very pleased with himself. Despite their agreement to give him the Tear when they had what they needed, he still had to win the support of the crew — which he had obviously been confident of doing. Now that they had the help that they’d needed, Blasco was once again in a precarious position. Soren had no qualms with threatening to go back on their deal about the Tear if Blasco refused to help him. In the mood that held him, there were few things, if any, that he would have qualms about doing to get the information he was looking for.
‘I need you to tell me everything you know about the movements of the Tear over the past few months,’ Soren said.
‘Not sure I can help you,’ Blasco said.
He was looking smug. Delighted no doubt about their victory and the ship that he thought was about to become his. Soren resisted the urge to punch him in the face.
Blasco saw the dark look on Soren’s face. ‘Now, see here. There’s only so much I can do before I’ll have lost the chance to get the lads to trust me again.’
Soren ignored him. ‘About fifteen weeks ago, maybe sixteen, you took a ship bound for Auracia. There was a woman on board. She was wearing this, and Rui took it from her.’ He held up the amulet. ‘I’m looking for her, and if you don’t tell me where she is I will kill you, every man on this ship, and I will burn the Tear to the water line.’
Blasco was shocked by the abruptness of the threat — but not nearly so much as Varrisher from the look on his face.
‘There’s no need for threats,’ Blasco said, ‘but you have to understand my point of view. Getting help to kill Rui is one thing; the crew respect me for that. Shows initiative. Ambition. They’re about to agree to appoint me as captain. If I tell you where the ship has been and what the crew’ve done, I’ll be peaching on them, and they’ll string me up for that. If they think I’m telling tales that could put them on the chopping block, I won’t last ten minutes after they find out, and they will. To tell the truth, you killing me will be quicker and less painful.’
They were at an impasse, and it seemed to Soren that threats of violence were not going to get him anywhere. He struggled to control the rage that was coursing through his veins. He didn’t know what alternatives were left open to him. Blasco stood sheepishly in the centre of the stateroom, afraid. He wasn’t trying to act tough or call Soren’s bluff to assert his authority. It appeared that he fully expected to die in the next few minutes unless he was extremely lucky. Varrisher looked equally awkward.
Soren wondered if the rest of the crew would be of the same opinion as Blasco. If shipboard justice for ‘peaching’, as Blasco had put it, was so harsh, Soren would have to shed a great deal of blood in a particularly brutal fashion before he would get anything that might even be potentially useful. He had to ask himself if he would be able to live with that, although there was something inside him that didn’t care, and that frightened him.
He felt his rage flare up again, but he took a deep breath to try to quell it. ‘And all the crew will feel the same? Even if I start cutting them up and throw them to the sharks?’ He managed to keep his voice calm and even.
Blasco nodded.
‘Hold him,’ Soren said.
Varrisher did as he was instructed, not quite sure what was going to happen next.
Soren took one of Blasco’s arms and pulled it over to the table, placing Blasco’s hand flat on it. Blasco resisted, but Soren was able to force it. He pressed his dagger down on the first knuckle of Blasco’s index finger.
‘Sure you’ve nothing to say?’
Blasco was breathing heavily through his nose and his mouth remained shut. He shook his head.
Soren pressed down harder, until a thin line of blood appeared on either side of the blade. Blasco began exhaling in sharp, staccato breaths, but still said nothing. Soren looked at him and held his gaze. He was not going to say anything. He slammed the point of his dagger down into the table. Blasco gasped in anticipation and sighed when he realised that his finger was still attached to his hand.
‘Fuck!’ Soren said. ‘Fuck!’
He was still assuming that the Tear had taken the ship that Alessandra was on. There was no real way to know for sure, unless they had taken the names of those they had captured. Rui could even have bought the amulet at a market somewhere. Despite his overwhelming desire to find her and to extract any useful information from the crew of the Tear, torture and murder was not something he could bring himself to do. It was too much.
‘Get out,’ he said to Blasco. Varrisher released him and Blasco was out the door almost before Soren had finished speaking. Soren dropped his head into his hands.
‘You really had me going there. I thought you were going to hack him to bits,’ Varrisher said, as he made his way over to the escritoire and kicked his boot through the pile of papers that Soren had dumped on the floor.
‘I nearly did,’ Soren said.
Varrisher bent down and picked up one of the pieces of paper, and then shuffled through the mess on the floor to find several others written in the same hand.
‘When did you say you thought your friend was taken?’ Varrisher said, as he went through the pa
ges he had picked up.
‘I don’t know. Maybe fifteen or sixteen weeks ago, give or take. Maybe not at all.’ He walked over to the bench beneath the stern gallery window and slumped down on it.
‘Well,’ Varrisher said, ‘these are receipts for ship’s provisions. This is the most recent.’ He held up a piece of crinkled paper and pointed to something on it that Soren couldn’t make out from where he was sitting. ‘This mark means that it was issued from a ship’s provisioner in Caytown. This one is from about ten weeks ago. It’s from a provisioner in Galat, a city on the coast of Shandahar. This one is from another ten weeks before that, Caytown again. The Gandawai was taken eleven or twelve weeks ago if memory serves. It seems that after they took her they stopped at Galat and bought stocks of fresh food and water. Although it doesn’t say for sure, it stands to reason that they would have sold off any prisoners they had at the slave markets there. Prisoners take up space and cost money to feed. They also have a habit of dying when maltreated in cramped conditions and fed slop, so it makes sense to unload them and sell them off as soon as possible.’
The scenario that he painted was not one Soren was comfortable hearing but, as Varrisher said, it stood to reason. Slavery and gods only knew what else would have awaited her. He felt like he was going to throw up.
‘When I first agreed to sail with you,’ Soren said, ‘you said that you’d drop me off anywhere I wanted. I’d like to go to Galat.’
‘I did,’ Varrisher said, ‘and I intend to honour that agreement. Kirek is on the way to Galat, so it won’t delay us stopping there to collect the bounty on Rui’s head. I’d bring you directly, but you know how desperately I need to collect the money. Anyhow, I’m sure your share of the bounty will be of help when you go after your friend.’
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Chapter 45
The Desert Kingdoms
Kirek was not what Soren had expected. To his mind, Shandahar was a desert filled with oases and nomadic tribes but that couldn’t have been farther from the truth. The city was a mass of white buildings surrounded by a lush, verdant river plain. It was a large port, one of five along the Shandahari coast, each of which sat on the delta of the river that bore the same name as the city. Each river cut through the desert, a blue and green swathe in a sea of yellow sand.
The Typhon arrived in the circular harbour of Kirek six days after leaving Point Vermeil and the fight against the Bayda’s Tear, just as Varrisher had predicted. The harbour was massive and allowed vessels larger than the Typhon to make fast to the octagonal quayside that projected into the centre of the harbour.
The ship dropped its sails before entering the harbour and coasted through the mouth under its own momentum. A pilot boat was waiting with a thick tow cable that was hauled on board. The cable disappeared into a building on the quay.
As they were being towed in, Soren watched small boats make their way in and out of the harbour, powered by triangular sails and helmed by bronze skinned Shandahari.
Flocks of birds swirled about in the hot air, screeching and occasionally diving down to the water to retrieve one of the scraps thrown overboard by the passing boats. As they were drawn ever further into the harbour, the noise level grew. The sounds of sailors and dockworkers filled the air, shouting, laughing, cursing and hauling goods about the place.
Soren had encountered Shandahari before in Ostenheim. Like all the peoples of the Middle Sea, they were a race of maritime traders, famed for their fine, vividly coloured fabrics. Their ships regularly called at Ostenheim and Soren, who had spent much time watching the hustle and bustle of life around the docks in his youth, had always enjoyed experiencing the different cultures and exotic merchandise that passed through.
The hot weather was tempered by a cooling sea breeze creating a pleasant climate that was not nearly so humid and sticky as the Spice Isles. Gone also were the fragrant and exotic smells. Kirek smelt much like any other city that Soren had visited, albeit hotter. Between the colours, the weather and the prospect of being on the right path to finding Alessandra, Soren was in the best mood he had experienced for many weeks.
Once the Typhon was secured against the quayside, Varrisher was eager to call on the Khagan as soon as possible. Sancho Rui’s head had been floating in a small cask of vinegar and Varrisher wanted to be rid of it nearly as much as he wanted the money. Soren and Varrisher left the ship and walked toward the city, along the causeway that connected the quay to the mainland, dodging the fast moving carts laden with goods destined for markets in both Kirek and in the other direction, to those that were a sea voyage away.
The city was characterised by white, flat-roofed buildings. Occasionally the monotone aspect was broken by ultramarine blue constructions that glistened in the sun as though their surfaces were wet. The streets were narrow and busy, filled with sounds and colours that fascinated Soren. Varrisher had been in Kirek before and led the way toward the Khagan’s palace, seemingly oblivious to the visual feast on display.
Soren followed him as best he could, as his attention was constantly grabbed by the exotic and intriguing new city. They crossed a nondescript bridge over a river that was wide enough to allow two of the long, narrow boats that plied it to pass one another.
There were many small rivers running through the city, and they were crossed by dozens of the plain little bridges. The water flowed quickly, keeping the rivers free from rubbish and filth and keeping the hot city feeling fresh.
They were heading toward a large blue archway straddling the road, one of the blue buildings Soren had noticed when they first arrived. As they approached he could see that it was covered in glazed tiles of ultramarine blue and was decorated with gold and silver reliefs of fantastic looking animals that Soren had never seen before. It was the first time that he had been in a city that had never been part of the Empire. It was the most unique place Soren had seen.
Distracted, he bumped into a man who swore at him in a language that was entirely alien to Soren’s ears. Soren mumbled an apology but the meaning didn’t carry across the language barrier and the man continued with his angry utterances as he made his way on down the road.
They had to stop at the archway, which was guarded by several men in pale blue robes with enamelled armour and helmets. When they saw Varrisher and Soren approaching, they blocked the way and presented their spears.
Their challenge was completely unintelligible to Soren, but he could get the general idea from the context of the situation: ‘Who are you, what do you want, piss off’. Varrisher seemed to get by in Shandahari and remonstrated with them for a few moments, gesturing frequently to the small barrel he held by an attached loop of hempen rope. He moved to open the barrel, which was enough to persuade the guards to let them through.
As they passed under the archway, Soren could see why there were no visible gates attached to it. They would have ruined the aesthetic appeal of the arch and were more than adequately replaced by the enormous metal portcullis that was hidden above them in the centre of the vaulted roof.
The arch led into a large walled compound that was filled with an ornamental garden. Despite Soren’s previous conception of Shandahar being an arid land of deserts, the palace didn’t give any hint that they might be short of water. The courtyard was dominated by two large fountains on either side that created several cascades and waterfalls that disappeared into metal covered drains in the ground. The courtyard was filled with trees and bushes and the sound of the flow of water and the shade of the lush vegetation created a peaceful enclave.
They walked through the garden toward the front of the palace where another guard was waiting. He demanded what Soren assumed was yet another explanation. Varrisher rattled off a few sentences of Shandahari interspersed with gestures to the barrel, which seemed to satisfy the guard. He led them up a flight of white stone steps and into the palace itself.
Professional curiosity drew Soren’s eye to the guard’s weapons and arm
our as they followed him. Like the men at the gate, he wore robes of pale blue material that had a smooth sheen when the light caught it a certain way. The guard also wore armour made of black enamelled plates that only covered the vital parts of the body, and the forearms and shoulders. Unlike the armour that the men at the arch had worn however, this man’s armour was finely decorated in a neat pattern of muted golden swirls and floral curves. Such decoration would not come cheap, so Soren presumed this man was an officer or a member of a more elite group of warriors. The sword at his waist was slender and had a slight curve, not unlike the Ruripathian sabre.
The Khagan’s throne room was more like a balcony than a room. It was long with a roof but no walls along its sides, merely a stone rail interrupted at regular intervals by stone pillars that supported the roof. Soren peered out at the fine view it gave of the city. The design allowed a breeze to pass through which kept it cool. There were a number of people there, most of whom were clustered at the far end around a dais that contained only one chair, on which a man sat.
The guard gestured for them to wait and went forward to speak with someone in the group at the far end of the room. After a moment he brought the man he had been speaking to back with him.
‘You are Imperials?’ the other man asked, in accentless Imperial that Soren had no difficulty in understanding.
‘Well, yes I suppose so,’ Soren said.
‘I appreciate that the Empire has not existed for a very long time,’ the man said, ‘but in Shandahar we tend to refer to all those from the north as Imperials. No offence is intended and the reference is purely based on your common language.’
‘None taken,’ Soren said, trying to remember the basics of the etiquette classes he had taken whilst a student at the Academy in Ostenheim. It was easy to forget that he was no longer dealing with pirates and shipboard humour. ‘I’m Banneret Soren of Ostia and this is Master Mariner of the Grey Varrisher of Ruripathia.’
The Huntsman's Amulet (Society of the Sword Volume 2) Page 23