Corsair botm-2

by Richard Baker

  “Pull, you dogs,” Narsk snapped. “I mean to be underway in half an hour, and I’ll flog the first ten men I see if we aren’t!”

  Geran joined the other oarsmen as they threw themselves into their work. His hands throbbed and his shoulders ached, but he smiled to himself when his eye fell on the leather letter-case sitting in Narsk’s coat pocket. He might not have missed his opportunity to eavesdrop after all, if he could only examine Narsk’s letter. All he had to do was find a chance to break into the gnoll’s cabin and steal it without getting caught.

  NINE

  30 Eleint, the Year of the Ageless One (1479 DR)

  Evening was descending over Hulburg as Mirya locked up Erstenwold’s Provisioners and prepared to go home for the evening. It had been a slow day, but right before closing time a farmer from the Winterspear Vale had shown up with a whole wagonload of cheese, bacon, smoked hams, and other foodstuffs to sell. By the time she’d finished with their business and had overseen the unloading of the wagon, it was an hour past the time that she normally locked up. Most of Hulburg’s shopkeepers lived above or behind their places of business, but the Erstenwolds were a family that had been in Hulburg for a long time, and Mirya’s house was a comfortable cottage surrounded by a small apple orchard on the river’s west bank, a little less than a mile distant. Anxious to start for home, she went to the store’s back door, the one that let out into the alleyway behind Plank Street, and looked up and down the narrow way for any sign of Selsha.

  “Selsha!” she called into the gloaming. Her daughter was nowhere in sight, but Mirya knew that she was rarely out of earshot. She could remember her own mother calling for her at the end of the day when she was a child and supposed that she probably sounded a lot like that to Selsha’s ears. A mother’s voice carried a long way, as she recalled. “Selsha! It’s time to go home!”

  She heard nothing at first and peered up and down the alleyway behind the storehouse. She rarely stayed at the shop this late into the evening, and the shadows were long and dark in Hulburg’s streets. The buildings surrounding Erstenwold’s did not seem so friendly or familiar as night descended over the town. During the day these streets were busy with scores of neighbors that Mirya knew well-the cooper across the alley, the tinsmith next to him, old Mother Gresha and her laundry tub two doors down, and Auntie Tilsie who sold scores of simple meals to the town’s porters and drivers every day from her kitchen around the corner from that. All of them doted on Selsha and were happy to let her pester them during the day, but they were all closing up or indoors now. After sunset Hulburg’s taphouses and taverns filled up, and instead of watchful neighbors the streets would be left to strangers searching for a place to drink themselves into a stupor. Mirya frowned at that thought and raised her voice. “Selsha! Where are you?”

  “I’m coming, Mama!” Selsha appeared at the end of the alleyway and ran to the door. She was a slip of a girl, just nine years old, with wide blue eyes that had a way of disarming Mirya’s most furious moments and with silky black hair just like her own.

  “Where were you? Did you not hear me calling?” Mirya scolded her. She bustled Selsha into the store and pulled the door closed behind her. “I was worried about you, Selsha!”

  “I’m sorry, Mama,” Selsha replied. Then she held out her hand. “But look, I found something.”

  Mirya looked down into her daughter’s hand. It was an amulet of some kind on a silver chain. She could see at once that it was valuable, and she reached down to gently lift it from Selsha’s grasp. “What is this?” she murmured, and she looked closer. The amulet was formed in the shape of a sunburst, but the rays were jet, and in the center gleamed a jawless skull of silver. She stared at it in growing horror, realizing that what she held in her hand was a holy symbol of Cyric, the Black Sun, the god of lies and murder. With a small cry she let it drop to the floor.

  “What? What is it?” Selsha asked.

  “Something that we are not to handle lightly,” Mirya answered. She rubbed her hand briskly against her skirt, unable to stop herself. “Selsha, where did you find this?”

  Selsha looked down, and her lip started to quiver. Mirya realized that her own sudden alarm had frightened the girl. “I’m sorry, Mama. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean-I didn’t know-”

  Mirya took a deep breath and kneeled down by Selsha, wrapping her arms around her daughter and stroking her hair. “No, no, Selsha, all is well,” she said softly. “I am not angry with you. I was only surprised. Now, tell me, how did you find the amulet?”

  “Kynda and I were playing in the empty storehouse on Fish Street. I know we’re not supposed to, but no one was around. Anyway, I found it on the floor. See, the chain’s broken-I think someone dropped it and didn’t even know. Kynda and I were looking at it when we heard some men come in. They sounded angry, and we were afraid we would get into trouble, so we hid until they left.”

  “Did the men see you?”

  The girl shook her head.

  Mirya picked up the amulet from the floor, suppressing a shudder of distaste. “Do you think they were looking for this?”

  This time Selsha nodded slowly. “I heard one man say he thought it might have fallen through the floorboards, and the other man told him to go get a crowbar so they could pry up the floor and look for it.”

  “You shouldn’t have been in someone else’s storehouse, abandoned or not, and well you know it.” She gave Selsha a stern look and stood up, slipping the amulet into a pocket of her dress as she turned away, thinking about what to do with the thing. A token of Cyric was not prohibited by any law she knew of, nor was it an evil thing in and of itself. The Black Sun was not a god that she cared to honor, but then again few people truly revered such things as murder or strife. Most people either gave Cyric his due in order to avert his attention or looked past the darker aspects of his doctrines and instead saw him as a deity of ambition and determination-the sort of god who encouraged his followers in their desire to fight their way up out of their circumstances no matter what it took. The poor foreigners who huddled in miserable neighborhoods such as the Tailings sometimes turned to grim gods like Cyric out of simple desperation. Mirya couldn’t blame them for being attracted by promises of prosperity and success. Of course, she didn’t doubt that there were truly malicious followers of the Black Sun in those same neighborhoods. Slavers, thieves, and robbers of all sorts looked to Cyric for favor too, and there were plenty of those in the Tailings.

  But what Selsha had found wasn’t simply a charm or token. It was a holy symbol of the sort a high-ranking priest might carry. She could sense the enchantment of the thing; it was precious to somebody. “Now what should we do with it?” she muttered to herself. She certainly didn’t want to keep it. She could have Selsha put it back where she found it-but if Selsha was right, the men she’d overheard were already looking for it, and Mirya was not about to send her daughter into the hands of someone who might be a zealous follower of Cyric. Either she’d have to take it back herself, or she’d have to throw it away somewhere.

  Someone knocked sharply on the alley door. Mirya started and looked at the door. Only a neighbor would come by that door, and her neighbors were all at their supper tables by now. The knock came again.

  “Who is it, Mama?” Selsha asked in a small voice.

  “I’ve no idea.” Mirya frowned at the door and smoothed the front of her dress. This is ridiculous, she told herself. It’s probably Tilsie come to borrow some flour. Still, her intuition told her that wasn’t so. She set a hand on Selsha’s shoulder. “Stay here, dear. I’ll see who it is.”

  She went to the door, calmed herself for a moment, then lifted the bar and pulled the door open a foot or so. “Yes?” she said.

  Outside in the alley stood a pale, fair-haired man in a laborer’s garb. Streaks of gray marked his temples and the neatly trimmed square of beard under his chin. He stood with a strange, distracted smile on his face, but his eyes were dark and intense. “Ah, you must be Mistress Erstenwold
,” he said.

  “I’m afraid we’re closed for the evening. If you come back tomorrow-”

  “I’m not here on business,” the man said. He held up a hand to forestall her protest. She noticed a fine gold ring on his little finger and the smoothness of his palm and found herself doubting very much whether he was as poor as his clothing suggested. “I understand that you have a young daughter who might have been playing out in the neighborhood today. A dark-haired girl, perhaps ten years of age. Is that so?”

  A cold stab of fear sank into Mirya’s heart. “Aye, it is,” she said slowly.

  “Then perhaps she might have found something I lost, something rather valuable to me. By any chance have you seen a silver amulet? It would be marked with the emblem of a silver skull.” The man affected a shrug. “A keepsake, but one I would very much like to find.”

  Mirya kept her face neutral. She was sorely tempted to deny it outright, but a small voice warned her that the stranger wouldn’t be at her door unless he had a very strong suspicion about the amulet’s location already. Priests sometimes knew finding spells of different sorts, and he might have already divined where his holy symbol was. She wished a couple of her clerks were still on the premises; she did not like being alone with this man at her door.

  The stranger took her hesitation for confusion. “Perhaps you could call your daughter to the door? I’d like to ask her about it-just in case, you understand.”

  As little as she liked the half-smile on his face or the strange intensity of his eyes, she liked the idea of this man speaking to Selsha much less. She reached into her pocket before she even realized what she was doing and held the amulet out to him. “There’ll be no need for that,” she said. “She found this in the alley a little ways from here. Is it yours?”

  The pale man gently took it out of her hand and glanced at it. He smiled broadly and inclined his head, but his eyes remained cold, almost serpentine. “Why, it is indeed!” he said. “Now I wonder how it came to be lying out in the alleyway? Doesn’t that seem strange?”

  “It looks like the chain has a broken link.”

  “It does.” The man carefully gathered up the silver skull and slipped it into his pocket. She noticed a gray smudge across the back of his hand as he did so, and her eyes narrowed. It seemed to her very much like the sort of smudge that someone who marked his fist with soot might have on the back of his hand. Either her visitor was one of the Cinderfists, which seemed unlikely since he did not strike her as a man who’d seen the inside of a foundry or had shoveled coal into a furnace, or he at least wanted people to believe that he was. Then the man leaned to one side, looking past Mirya into the hallway behind her. “And look! That must be your daughter.”

  Mirya glanced behind her and realized that Selsha was standing just a few feet behind her, staring at the pale man. Her daughter must have come out from the store’s front room while Mirya was speaking with the stranger. She looked back quickly to the man, but he just smiled again-a smile that still did not reach his eyes-and said, “What a lovely child. You are quite fortunate, Mistress Erstenwold. Quite fortunate indeed.”

  “Thank you,” said Mirya, her voice thick. She did not know what else to say. The idea of this man making small talk with her about her daughter chilled her to the marrow.

  “You should speak to her about picking up things she finds in alleys, though. Good evening, Mistress Erstenwold.” The man nodded to her and strode off into the gathering shadows.

  Mirya shut the door firmly and shot the bolt. Then she hurried Selsha home, starting at every shadow along the way.

  The next day passed without event, but at noon of the day after that Mirya thought she saw the hooded man watching Selsha when she came back to Erstenwold’s after playing with her friends in the morning. She stepped out into the alleyway and looked again, but the man was nowhere in sight. The encounter was unsettling enough that she dwelled on it all day long. She moved through the rest of her day in a distracted, pensive mood, her mind turning over the implications. She’d seen the man’s face, and she knew him for a servant of Cyric; if he wanted to be sure of keeping his identity a secret, he would have to make sure she did not speak of it again. Perhaps he was simply allowing her to see him to intimidate her … or it was possible he contemplated more stringent measures to keep his secret. By the middle of the afternoon, she called Selsha back inside and told her that she had to remain inside in the Erstenwold store and storehouse until she told her otherwise.

  The next morning she slipped away from Erstenwold’s for an hour, hurrying up to Griffonwatch to speak to the Shieldsworn. Geran and Kara were both away at sea, but her brother Jarad had served as the captain of the harmach’s soldiers for years before his death, and they’d thought the world of him. She met with Sergeant Kolton and told her story, but the veteran had little he could offer her. “We’ve not found out much at all about who runs the Cinderfists,” he told her. “They’re a closemouthed lot, they are. Mostly men from Impiltur, and they know their own-there’s not a single native-born Hulburgan who works in the foundries. I might’ve guessed that an outlander priest of Cyric is mixed up in it.”

  “So you’ve no idea who he is or what he might be up to?” she asked.

  Kolton shook his head. “You know as much as we do, Mistress Erstenwold. I can make sure the Shieldsworn check on Erstenwold’s regularly, at least for a few days. If you see the fellow you spoke with lurking nearby, I’d appreciate it if you pointed him out to the harmach’s men. You’re the only native-born Hulburgan who knows his face, as far as I can tell.”

  Mirya frowned at that thought. It might be very important to the stranger to remain unknown, and she could think of only one way that a man in his position might make sure of his anonymity. She found herself wishing that Geran was in town. It wasn’t in her nature to play the damsel in distress, but in the months since Geran had returned to Hulburg they’d slowly fumbled their way to something like friendship again, and perhaps a troubling flicker of something more than that-when it came to Geran Hulmaster she was not necessarily the master of her own heart. She knew herself well enough to keep any such nonsense at a very safe distance indeed, but she also knew that Geran would turn the Tailings upside down to ferret out the hooded man if he found out that someone had threatened her or Selsha. In any event, Geran was away on Seadrake chasing after pirates, and that left matters squarely in her own lap.

  Kolton took her silence for a reproach. The blunt-faced sergeant sighed. “We’re stretched thin, Mistress Erstenwold-you know that. There’s nothing the Shieldsworn wouldn’t do for you or your daughter, for Captain Jarad’s sake if nothing else. But if you’re worried, you might also speak to the Moonshields. They don’t like the Cinderfists much at all. I’m sure that Brun Osting can make sure a couple of his lads are close at hand whenever the Shieldsworn aren’t.”

  “Thank you, Sergeant Kolton. I might, at that.” Mirya took her leave and drove back down to Erstenwold’s, wrapped in her thoughts as her wagon rattled through the rough cobblestone streets. She’d hoped that the Shieldsworn would know who the hooded man was, but clearly that wasn’t the case. That didn’t mean there weren’t people in Hulburg who might know more. There was one other place she could turn to … but that was a bridge she’d burned a long time ago. Mirya reined in the two-horse team just a few dozen yards short of the Lower Bridge at the end of East Street and sat there thinking things through. Then she tapped her switch to the horses and turned left, climbing up Hill Street instead of crossing the Winterspear and heading back toward Erstenwold’s.

  Hulburg’s East Hill was a strange mix of old and new. Much of its seaward face had been ruined during the Spellplague of a century ago, replaced by the jumble of soaring green stone known as the Arches. On its western side a poor, working-class neighborhood clustered hard by East Street and the Winterspear; around the point to the east, the homes became little more than shanties housing the hundreds of men who toiled in the smelters and foundries a mil
e downwind of Hulburg proper. But the higher elevations of the East Hill above the crowded neighborhood overlooking the Winterspear were the places where Hulburg’s wealthy lived in grand old houses and gated manors. Mirya drove her team to a fine old house hidden behind a screen of low, wind-twisted cedars. She set the brake, slid down from the wagon’s seat, then climbed a short flight of stone steps to the house’s front door and knocked firmly before she could change her mind.

  Nothing happened for a long moment, and Mirya began to wonder if anyone was home. But then the door opened, and a young woman with long black hair and a plain dress of gray wool looked out. “Yes?” she said.

  “I’m here to call on Mistress Sennifyr,” Mirya said. “My name is Mirya Erstenwold. I’m not expected.”

  The servant studied her for a moment before answering. “Wait here. I will see if the mistress is available.” She disappeared back into the shadows of the house-the front room was dark, with heavy drapes drawn over the windows-while Mirya waited on the porch. Then the servant returned and offered a slight bow. “She will see you. Follow me, if you please.”

  The servant showed Mirya to a sitting room as dark as the foyer, and Mirya took a seat on a plush couch. She did not have long to wait. Just a moment later, a woman in an elegant purple gown glided into the room, her hands folded at her waist. She was perhaps forty-five years of age, but her hair was still a soft brown untouched by gray, and her face was smooth. Only the shadow of frown lines at the corners of her mouth and a cool, commanding sternness to her dark gaze hinted at her age. She looked at Mirya with a small smile then said, “Well, well. Mirya Erstenwold! You haven’t stopped by my home in years and years. I confess I am surprised to see you here.”