"And they don't give it away free."
Blays' brows muddled, then he laughed. "They sure don't. For your time and trouble, most honored bosun."
He passed the bearded man an iron two-penny. The sailor ran his thumb along its clipped rim.
"The Boon's at Pier 15. The Vanneya's Song's at Farry's Punt. Can't miss it," he said, pointing downstream to a dock that bent from the shore like a misshapen Y. "And the Bad Tidings is berthed at the Westlong Docks." He gestured further downriver, then squinted between Dante and Blays. "Might not want to hop ship just yet, though. Hear bad things are coming Narashtovik way."
"Like what?" Dante said.
The man shrugged, gazing off to sea with weighty significance. "Arawn's own dead. Sent to right the heresy of that old man in the tower." He shrugged again. "Anyway, that's what they say."
"Zombies?" Blays said, hushed. "My goodness. I'm going to need a bigger sword."
Pier 15 was just a short ways down the muddy banks. The Boon was a large longboat bearing a single square-sailed mast and a high bank of oar-holes, but one of its mates informed them it was all booked and refused access to either of the ship's quartermasters. Marine-green kelp swirled in the cold estuary. They thumped down the salt-whitened planks toward the bent protrusion of Farry's Punt. There, sailors dangled on ropes over the railings of the Vanneya's Song, gouging barnacles from its high hull with flat iron chisels.
"Taking passengers?" Blays hollered from below.
Without turning, a soldier jerked his thumb at a rope bridge bobbing softly in the low swells. Dante frowned, waiting for more explicit permission. Blays strode forward and threw himself onto the ladder.
From the ship's deck, Dante had a clear view of the longboats, galleys, barges, caravels, and sloops snarling the docks between them and open sea. Inland, a seaborn breeze dragged chimney-smoke across the steep roofs of the city. Blays rapidly learned two of the Song's quartermasters were ashore in taverns unknown, but the third remained in his cabin. Blays knocked on his well-cleaned door without hesitation. A middle-aged man opened it a moment later, his scowl deepening the heavy creases around his eyes, one of which was clamped tight around a thick glass lens.
"We'd like passage to Narashtovik," Blays said. "We have—"
The man's lens flashed. "Four rounds and four pennies per body."
"Well, you see. We don't have that. But we do have someone in Narashtovik who would happily—"
"Four rounds and four pennies per body. To be paid before your boots hit the deck."
Dante bared his teeth. It was easily three times what they had on hand. "Perhaps we could strike a bargain for other services."
The man's vowels were flat with an eastern accent Dante couldn't quite place. "Four rounds and four pennies per body."
Blays' spine stiffened. "You, sir, have just lost a customer! Four of them!"
He turned before the quartermaster could inject another word. They descended to the dock, which was suddenly chilly and thick with the scent of overripe fish.
"They don't leave until tomorrow," Dante said. "That gives us plenty of time to locate a few pockets heavier than our own and relieve their owners of their burden."
Blays nodded, distant. "I don't know. That could attract attention."
"Since when did you consider that a bad thing?"
"Since legions of soldiers might be on our heels. Not to mention the grumbling we'd face from Lira."
Dante waved his hand. "She's so high on her horse I doubt we'd hear a word of it."
"Anyway, just because crimes are fun and easy doesn't mean I always want to do them." Blays gestured downstream in the vague direction the sailor had indicated for the Westlong Docks. "Besides, we've got at least one legit chance left."
Dante considered him a moment, then headed down the docks, swerving around an inborn oxen team and the spittle flying from their driver's lips. A quarter-mile walk took them to a rather less-peopled stretch of warehouses and half-paved streets. Grains of wheat and corn speckled the muddy alleys. Planks lay between the stone streets and the doors of the blocky lofts and silos. Broad, flat barges wallowed in the waters beside the thick piers. Mussels and dark green slime coated the pilings.
The Bad Tidings was one of the few sailboats at the Westlong, with one high mainmast and two smaller and well-mended sails snapping in the steady offshore wind. Blays hollered more than once before a sailor in a knit cap popped up on its deck. The crewman let them aboard to see yet another quartermaster, a man in his early 40s with a beard thick enough to raise robins in. His name was Mart and he was blunt but reasonable; over the course of a few minutes, Dante and Blays bargained him from a fare that outstripped the official on the Song and down to a mere three rounds and change apiece—still more than double what they had on hand.
"I'm sorry, but that's as low as reason allows." Mart reached for a much-scribbled scrap of paper. "If you change your minds, we'll be here until tomorrow afternoon."
Dante sighed through his nose. "I hope by then to be able to take advantage of your generosity."
Blays glanced out the porthole. Sunset's last red spark trickled through the bubbly glass. He leaned from his chair and slapped the wooden floor. "What are you hauling here?"
Mart glanced up, eyes sharp. "Barley. A whole lot of barley."
"Got rats?"
"Does the king's mistress have crabs?"
"That would explain the pettiness of some of his recent policies. Maybe we can offer you something besides money." Blays tipped his head toward Dante. "My friend here is the finest rat-catcher in the land. Possibly in all the lands."
Mart smiled indulgently. "Is that so?"
"So they say," Dante played along.
"Here's my proposal." Blays leaned forward conspiratorially, patting Dante on the shoulder. "My friend Blegworth goes down into your hold and goes to work on your rats. If he clears them all out, we get free passage. Us and our two companions. But if he leaves a single rat alive, we go on our merry way, and you still have a whole lot less rats in your hold."
"I'll need complete solitude," Dante said. "The presence of others might scare the rats into their dens."
Mart jutted his lower jaw. "So you can steal the rum? Or set fire to the entire hold? What then?"
Blays held out his hands. "Then you and your crew stab us until you feel justice is served."
The quartermaster laughed for the first time. "I can't tell if you're arrogant or insane. But it sounds like I win either way. If you can get rid of all the rats, the trip is on me."
They squared off the details; the crew was still in the midst of relocating goods, refreshing supplies, and patching sails, but Mart claimed he'd have them cleared out belowdecks by 11th bell of the evening. Dante climbed down to the deck and headed offship.
On their way to meet Mourn and Lira, Blays stepped over a grassy pile of manure. "So can you actually do that?"
"I have no idea."
"Fantastic. Do you think you can do it?"
Dante slowly shook his head. "I have an idea. I can't say whether it's a good one."
"If it were I would be highly skeptical it was yours."
"Thanks for volunteering me, by the way. If I can't pull it off, I expect you to sell your body for the cause."
Blays snorted. "If I did that, we could buy our own boat."
"Then get to work." Dante detoured around a ring of hooting bystanders. In their middle, two men swayed and postured, throwing more insults than punches. "What did you call me back there? Blegworth?"
"You look like a Blegworth."
Lanterns sputtered from plaza poles and the cabins of boats. Blays waited at the plaza's edge while Dante rendezvoused with the others. Water sprayed from the mouth of the stone salmon on the fountain. They accepted his explanation with little comment. Mourn looked tired, Lira stiff. For whatever help it would be with their lodgings, Dante passed over his comically light purse.
"Meet back here at dawn," he said. "I'll be the one who
smells like rats."
Lira tilted her head. "What exactly are you doing out there?"
"What I do best: exterminating."
They parted ways. With several hours to kill, Dante and Blays meandered the nearby streets, eventually settling in at a thriving tavern. Rather than tables, deep shelves stood at rib-height along all four walls. A vaulted ceiling with naked beams allowed space for a sort of shack in the center of the room, where men lined up to step through a curtain, spilling a fan of bright green light across the tavern floor. They emerged a minute later with mugs in hand. At intervals, smoke jetted from the pipes protruding near the top of the shack, smelling of kelp and orange rind and bitter larret root.
Blays pressed iron into Dante's hand. "Go buy us some drinks, will you?"
Dante frowned at the hissing shack. "Why me?"
"Because I'm paying. And because I'm bigger and I'll shove you around if you don't."
Dante joined the roped-off line. It moved quickly. Each time a man came and went through the curtain to the shack, green light washed the floor. Soon, it was his turn. Inside the shack, green light gleamed from bottles of all colors of the sea—blue, gray, green, and black. A very average-looking man tapped his fingers behind a short bar. Dante stared at the source of the light, an unwinking stone suspended a few inches from the ceiling.
"Is that a torchstone?"
The man didn't glance up. "That doesn't sound like any drink I've ever heard."
Since they were within spitting distance of the Houkkalli Islands, Dante bought two anise-flavored kaven and found Blays parked at one of the drinking-shelves. Past the gritty glass windows, the bustle of daily labor shifted to the whoop of nocturnal play.
"What do you think?" Blays asked once they'd drained their second mugs. They'd been talking around the war for the last few minutes. "I mean, what do you really think?"
"What do you think?"
"I think everyone's full of shit. Hot, windy shit. Wait, that's pretty gross." Blays tipped back his mug, dislodging another couple drops of rosy liquor. "I think Setteven gins up an ultimatum, the clans huff and puff for a couple weeks before backing down and accepting their demands, and Cally plays it as dumb as he can to continue the illusion we're keeping our noses clean. Nobody wants a war."
Dante gazed out the greasy window. Low clouds had encroached with the night and a misty drizzle dewed the cobbles. "I think Setteven's growing increasingly displeased with the unruliness of the eastern branches of their kingdom. I don't think they'll discard the opportunity to put us in our place."
Hours plodded by in that bovine way time takes while waiting on an unwanted task. Dante sipped his way through his third cup. 10th bell rang from the spires of Taim. A half hour later, he cut Blays off and started back for the Bad Tidings. The ship was so quiet you could hear every wave rippling against its hull. Thousands of pounds of sealed wood creaked and popped. Up top, Mart waited for them, flanked by four sailors armed with straight swords.
"The hold is all yours." He gestured to his men. "If you try anything funny, you're all theirs."
"Just them?" Blays said.
"And I'll require your swords."
"Ah." Blays reached for his buckles. "Well, that might even it out."
Dante passed over his sword and his two larger knives. Mart nodded to a crewman as tall and thin as the mainmast, who moved to pat Dante down. Dante clung to his last blade, a pick as short and slender as his little finger.
"I'll need this one."
Mart chuckled, expression unchanging. "That's how you'll be rid of them? We leave tomorrow. Of this year."
"See you at dawn." Dante smiled with half his mouth. He nodded at Blays. "Cover the top of the stairs. No humans are to come down nor rats to come up."
Blays crossed his thumbs in the salute of the Bressel armsman's guild he'd never actually been fit enough to join. "Of course, my liege."
Dante stepped over the rim of the hatch and clumped down the stairs. The main chamber of the lower deck was a square roughly thirty feet to a side, lit by a single smokeless catchlamp at both ends. Barrels lined most walls, blocked and chinked in place. It smelled of fresh beer and stale water and the acrid stink of small mammals. Barley gritted underfoot. Something small rustled from the gloom. Large serving-tables took up the remainder of the room. Small cabins filled the aft with a galley and chain locker at the fore, the iron links of the anchor lying heavy on the floor.
A second set of stairs descended to the main hold. This was split between three main spaces front, middle, and rear. It was pitch black; Dante drew out his torchstone and breathed on it until white light expanded over the casks, barrels, sacks, crates, and chests. Some sections were packed higher than his head, held fast through arcane packing techniques that required few if any ropes or restraints. White grain dappled the deck. So too did tiny black droppings.
He would work his way down. The creatures of the dark always descended in times of crisis.
He ascended to the lower deck and knelt beside the stairs. He drew the slender knife and traced a line of blood across his left forearm. He'd never summoned the nether on open water before, but if it differed from the sources on land, it was too subtle for his eyes—the same mothlike shadows fluttered from the cracks and corners, coating his hands, turning gently as they waited to be shaped. He rubbed his thumb against the torchstone until it faded, leaving him in the weak light of the catchlamps.
It didn't take long. Submerged in the nether, his sense of time was somewhat blurred—destabilized, perhaps, by the eternal cycles of the shadows—but no more than five minutes could have passed before the first rat crept from the maze of cargo. It moved in stops and starts, stopping to haunch back, nose and whiskers twitching, before it lurched forward to snatch up a stray kernel of barley and crunch it down to nothing.
Dante stilled his mind and struck the rat with a narrow spear of nether. It flopped to its side, legs kicking, smearing blood across the timbers.
All creatures great and small carried a pulse of nether within their skin or shells. By the Cycle of Arawn, all life itself was nether-born, brought to motion by the black grist ground from Arawn's cracked mill. With his fear and rage and pain, man carried the most nether of all, but if Dante made himself go quiet enough, he could feel the thin thread waning in the struck rat's veins. Even once each of its organs went still and dark, the nether didn't disappear. It simply quieted, too. Dormant. Only when the body decayed and dissolved would the shadows also pass away into the earth.
Dante seized this snoozing nether, melding it with a strand of his own. With a thought, he returned the rat to its feet, where it waited in perfect undead stillness.
Go, he told it. Find the others. Bring them to me.
It skittered into darkness. A moment later, a short, inhuman shriek pierced the silence. Fur whispered on wood. The undead rat backed into the cleared space around the steps, tugging a fresh corpse along in its teeth. Dante brought this one back to its feet, too. Before he ordered it away, he closed his eyes and shifted his sight into it. Vertigo bent his head—he looked back on himself, terribly tall even when kneeling, a pale-faced giant whose features were sharpened with the cruelty of one whose role is to kill. He sent the rat his command. His second-vision swung as it turned on its claws and raced into the towering alleys of crates. Its whiskers tickled along the splintery wood. It reached the wall of a cabin and squeezed into a crack that would be invisible to a standing human. Dante felt it rustling among loose shreds of chaff, splinters, and the browning rinds of lemons. In total darkness, its teeth clamped down on something hairless and pink. The baby vermin screamed. Dante opened his eyes and gazed at nothing.
It was dawn by the time he returned to the deck. Mart raised thick and skeptical brows, then lowered his gaze to Dante's left arm, laced with paper-fine cuts and crusted with rusty layers of blood. The man's face softened into something that might have been concern.
"Sleeping Arawn," Mart said. "Did you challenge them all to
a fistfight?"
Blays shouldered past the quartermaster, puffy-eyed with the grueling sort of hangover that comes from burning off one's liquor without the help of sleep. "Well?"
"Well what?" Dante said.
"Did you get all the rats?"
"Oh, that? I ferreted out the last one hours ago."
Blays gaped. "Then what have you been doing down there all that time? Napping? I want to nap!"
Dante let out a long breath. "I understand the loons."
7
Fortunately, Mart brushed that off as the delirious statement of a man who's spent hours in the dark with no company but his thoughts and a growing heap of dead rats. As hand-counted by a teen boy who was clearly on the outs with Mart, these totaled 240 all told, a bleeding and mutilated heap that had the growing crowd of sailors eyeing Dante with some emotion between respect and disgust. Mart took a tour belowdecks while Dante leaned against the railing and let the ocean wind wash the scent of blood, fur, and feces from his nose.
Mart thumped up the steps a few minutes later. He leaned against the rails beside Dante and gazed seaward. "The fact of the matter is there's no proof of your achievement."
Dante turned, incredulous, and gestured at the mountain of motionless rodents. "What do you call that? Coincidence? Did I smuggle them aboard in my pockets?"
Contempt hardened Mart's eyes, quickly fading. "Our agreement insisted you kill every single rat."
It took a moment for this to penetrate the fog of sleeplessness around Dante's mind. He stiffened. "And there's no way to prove they're all dead."
"Not without tearing the ship apart board by board."
"I see." He supposed he should be angry. He supposed he would be, after he'd had some sleep. After the Bad Tidings had sailed away.
"But if I left you ashore, my crew would tear me apart board by board." Mart nodded to the idling men. One scooped up a rat and waggled it in a bearded man's face, earning himself a meaty punch in the shoulder. The rat bounced from the deck. Men laughed. "You've earned your passage."
"You could have told me that from the start."
The Cycle of Arawn: The Complete Epic Fantasy Trilogy Page 64