But the Guild Fleet still existed. Inda needed a big fleet to even consider going against the Venn. The Guild Fleet needed leadership.
Ramis turned his gaze westward, and Inda sensed that this extraordinary conversation would soon be ended. “Tell me how the Venn navigate in deep waters.”
“It is a system run by magic, connecting each ship to certain established sites in a webwork over the world. Their ship-mages—the sea dags—tend to the navigation, showing each captain where he is on the water in relation to land and to other ships.”
“They can spot us by magic, then?”
“No, they need sight just as you do. But because of that network their sea dags can reveal their position to the others, as well as the positions of ships they sight to others of their fleet.”
“So what we need to do to master that navigation is capture not their captain or mates, but these mages—dags?”
“Yes. But be aware of this: the dags transfer away if it looks like the ship they are assigned to might be taken. It’s an imperial order they always obey. And if a dag is incapacitated, it is the captain’s job to kill him or her. And the dags agree to a spell that kills them if they are given white kinthus—all measures to protect the secret of their navigation. A last fact: Venn captains, like your Marlovan warriors, are always men, but the dags can be either sex.”
Inda rubbed his jaw again as he tried to figure out which question to ask next—or if he dared ask a personal one.
“The tide is on the make,” Ramis said. “I must be on my way.”
Inda looked around. The sailors were busy preparing to set sail, as if they’d received some sort of invisible signal. “I suppose the Guild Fleet will not kill us as pirates out of hand if I contact them.”
“The Venn would probably wish them to do that, but those whose voices currently prevail will welcome with open arms, and open pockets, the one who defeated the Brotherhood.”
Open pockets. Inda recalled what Ramis had said about the writers of the Brotherhood of Blood book—he’d read it. That meant he, too, knew about that vast treasure supposedly buried on Ghost Island.
“The treasure is real, then?”
Ramis looked across the glittering water. “It is real. The few who knew the extent of it no longer live. The world expects the Brotherhood to have treasure, but the whereabouts and the amount have remained a matter of hot debate. There are kings who suspect the size of it and thus would willingly kill anyone to discover its whereabouts.”
Inda drew in a slow breath. He’d at first disbelieved in the existence of treasure; from his limited experience pirates spent loot as fast as they took it. But the Brotherhood was old, older than he’d thought, however violently it had changed its captaincy, and there had been those in its twisted, extremely violent past with an eye to empire building.
So if the kings find out I have it, then they can join the Venn in hunting me, he thought, grimacing.
He dismissed that for later consideration, and turned his mind to his immediate situation.
“And then what, if I do join with the Guild Fleet? Am I being set up for your ‘bad bargain’?”
“It’s a necessary question,” Ramis replied. “But no. You would have to do a lot more than you’ve done to come to the notice of those who tarry in the Garden.”
“Are we being watched now?”
Ramis’s mouth was grim. “Their gaze is elsewhere, or we would not talk with this much liberty.”
A man who could predict his own death with such calm certainty had to be listened to.
“As for my own motivations,” Ramis said, “consider how many of our kings and heroes appear to define honor by the worthiness of their enemies. Things will change only when honor is defined by our works.”
He plucked the metal from Inda’s fingers, touched his shoulder, and the black fire took Inda again, leaving him standing alone in the chart room of the Pirate House, feeling as if his bones had been stripped from his body and his muscles unstrung.
He leaned against a wall until he could stand without falling. The reaction passed fairly quickly, then he opened the shutters. His friends waited outside, patiently guarding what had been an empty room. He would go out and speak to them, and deal with protests, arguments, and exclamations, but not yet.
First he got his glass and watched the black-sailed Knife glide out of the bay—and out of his life.
And so, as the Knife vanished behind Ghost Island, Inda thought about treasure—that is, about vast amounts of someone else’s wealth—and what he’d seen happen to those who craved it. Kings would kill . . .
Inda rubbed his jaw. Kings.
He realized what Ramis had said, and what he had implied.
Kings. The first problem was going to be Fox.
Chapter Four
THE next morning the five aboard the Vixen studied Ghost Island’s approaching shoreline. Only one of them searched for a glimpse of the walking dead.
The sun was not yet up but already the early morning fog had broken into gentle wreaths of mist, faintly throwing back the blue and warm yellow-pink glow from the eastern horizon. The water rilled outward behind the Vixen in a long, slanting wake, the ripples reflecting subtle shades of blue.
Five pairs of eyes spared the beautiful curve of the mainsail a glance or two as it shivered in the strengthening breeze, then returned to contemplation of Ghost Island.
Jeje couldn’t accept the notion of ghosts. She gripped the tiller, testing tide and wind against the wood’s resistance, then again lifted her glass to give the island, which rose in a dark mass against the skyline, one last sweep. Ghosts. Huh. Made no sense. If something had no body, of course you couldn’t see it! But the locals on the main island had been quite matter-of-fact about them. Oh, yes. The ghosts walk on yon island. No one goes to that island. Too often, they said, the living who did go never returned.
To Jeje that strongly suggested dirty doings from those who walked, talked, and breathed. Now that made all too much sense.
Well, now it seemed the Vixen was going to test the truth either way. Something during his interview alone with that sinister Captain Ramis had caused Inda to appear at each of their dosses last night, ordering them to be on the Vixen before dawn.
Moreover, something was wrong. She sensed it, and because she didn’t believe it could be these convenient ghosts, she studied the other four covertly, trying to identify what had caused the uneasiness in her gut.
They were all watching that shoreline as early morning banished the shadows and picked out details of thick greenery, rocky inclines, waterfalls, white sandy beaches. Nothing human walked there, though brightly colored birds sailed in the sky and skimmed the water. No living human beings in sight—or dead ones, either.
Jeje decided she might as well speak first. Test matters. If the others just laughed, well, there were worse things. “I don’t see any ghosts.”
Dasta, tall, wiry, and sun-browned, shrugged. “I don’t think there are any ghosts.”
Inda was sitting on a barrel, watching the coastline through a glass. “There are.”
“What?” Dasta and Jeje spoke at once.
“But we won’t see them, because we don’t want to see them.”
Fox’s eyes narrowed to slits of green. He drawled, “I take it you have seen ghosts?”
“Just once,” Inda replied, still scanning the beach. “Yesterday. When Captain Ramis took me to the other side of the island, on board the Knife.”
Silence again, then Tau said in a cautious tone, “Inda, you realize we never saw you leave the Pirate House. When exactly were you on board the Knife?”
Inda looked up at a row of faces that expressed a range of emotions from concern to disbelief. He snorted. “No, I’m not mad. He took me by magic transport. And sent me back by same,” Inda said.
“And while you were there he talked about ghosts,” Fox said, lounging against the rail on the weather side of the bowsprit, arms crossed, fine drifts of red hair esca
ping from his long four-strand sailor’s queue and ruffling in the wind.
“Yes,” Inda said, and raised the glass again.
Fox’s gaze was safely on Inda, so Jeje scrutinized his long, lean body. He always wore black and always went armed; there was the faint bluish gleam of polished black-wood hilts at the tops of his boots and in his loose sleeves when he lifted his hands.
Jeje wasn’t sure what to think about Fox even after a year of traveling with him. Fighting the same battles. Sometimes taking his orders, despite the fact that she and Dasta and Tau had been with Inda six years. Despite Fox having been with the pirates who initially captured them.
Tau had said it was because Fox was a Marlovan, like Inda. He’d also said there was a connection between the name they used for him—Fox—and the strange, raptorish golden fox face on their fleet banner that had caused Inda to be known across the seas as Elgar the Fox. Fox and Inda had never talked about that anymore than they had about their past.
The sail-hum changed in pitch as the teasing breeze shifted. Jeje leaned into the tiller to compensate. Those forward adjusted with the heel of the ship, all with the ease of long habit. They glided over the still water, the island appreciably nearer.
Inda still sat on a barrel, glass to eye. Unlike Fox he wore a battered old shirt, not even a vest as the weather would be hot as usual, and worn deck trousers. His feet were bare, his sleeves rolled—
Sleeves. Jeje looked at those powerful forearms, much more pale than the rest of his visible flesh, and recognized what was out of place.
It was the first time she’d seen Inda’s arms bare, at least since they were newly-hired deck rats of twelve and fourteen years old, years ago.
Inda’s profile was mild as he watched that island. Some of the islanders had not believed he was the fleet commander and mastermind of the Brotherhood’s defeat, insisting that Fox, with his sardonic gaze, his sinister aspect, was really in command. Inda’s face was broad at the forehead, his brown eyes wide-set, his face boyish despite the scars. His unruly brown hair escaped his sailor’s queue in curling tufts. He looked like a ship rat perched there on the barrel.
Were the others armed? Dasta, wearing deck mocs, old trousers with a weather-worn sash, and a vest without any shirt under it, had two knives thrust through the sash, and one strapped to his leg above his right moc. Jeje had her own trusty knife in her sash. She felt naked without it. And because Inda had been so mysterious the night before, she’d added another under her tunic, strapped to her thigh over her loose trousers, out of sight.
Jeje wondered if Tau was also armed—and just as she thought of him, his golden head appeared at the hatch, and he came up bearing four of her wooden, broad-bottomed mugs, two in each hand, their contents smelling of brewed herb with one of the island spices. He carried one to each person: Inda lowered the glass and murmured his thanks, Dasta grinned. Fox ignored Tau, who set his mug in the center of a coiled rope. Typical behavior from both. Despite their mutual antipathy Jeje thought they not only moved a lot alike, sometimes they seemed to think alike.
Tau brought Jeje her cup, his golden gaze narrowed with laughter. Jeje lifted a shoulder, carefully careless.
“There.” Inda pointed with the glass. “Beyond the three trees twisted about one another. There should be a lagoon.”
The sun had risen abruptly, as it did here on the belt of the world, and was fast burning away the remaining fingers of fog. Jeje drained her cup, her other hand gripping the tiller as she eyed the short promontory thrusting out into the water. It was scarcely higher than her mast, mostly a tumble of barnacle and dung-bespattered rock. Grass grew along the ridge of the promontory, culminating in a curious sight—three trees of a species none of them had seen before, twisted around one another, the gnarled branches ending in broad, feathery deep green fronds. Small wavelets lapped up against the rocky cliffs; ripples in the surface beyond the cliff’s edge indicated an abrupt rise in the seafloor.
“Leads,” Inda said.
Unnecessarily. Dasta had the stowed leads in hand. He gave a set to Fox. They stood at either side of the bowsprit, casting the leads and measuring, not calling out—they wouldn’t unless the shallows threatened the keel.
The water was so clear Jeje could see the bottom, and schools of fish, silvery blue and silvery green, darting about. She wondered if merfolk avoided this island as assiduously as did surface humans.
Inda and Tau hauled the mainsail sheet aft. They glided around the promontory and, as demure as a duck, the Vixen drifted into the broad lagoon on the height of flood tide.
They spilled wind. Fox and Dasta joined Jeje to brail up and furl the sails, Tau and Inda at the windlass, letting the anchor fall the right moment so the Vixen, losing way, headed around broadside to the shoreline. No other craft was in sight.
“Come on, let’s get the skiff down,” Inda said.
Each of them saw wariness and question in the other faces as they boomed down the skiff. All except Inda, whose expression was remote.
Leaving the Vixen behind, they rowed for shore.
Jeje sat at bow oar, determined not to speak again. Inda was never moody or sour, but sometimes he just wasn’t there.
The ripples of surf carried them the last distance. They shipped their oars and jumped out, the water briefly cool on their legs as they pulled the skiff up onto the beach. It was scarcely past sunup, but the air was so hot they were breathless.
“Where to?” Dasta asked. “What are we looking for?”
The distinctive ice-shivering zing! of steel caused them to whirl around.
The corners of Fox’s mouth were wry as he laid the blue-steel Marlovan blades on a flat stone, and sat down to pull his boots off. Jeje remembered what Dun, their marine carpenter, had told them not long before he was killed by pirates: Marlovan steel is made with many flat sheets of metal, folded and refolded in a method kept secret by the Iascans. The Marlovans conquered Iasca Leror just to get that steel.
And Tau had added, in a whisper, Meaning our gallant Iascan ancestors were superior armorers but not warriors.
Fox dumped water out of each boot, wrung out his socks, put them back on again, and resheathed his knives.
Inda had been surveying the thick greenery crowding down to the beach. “Ah. There. Has to be the path.”
He started off at a run, kicking up white sand behind him. They followed, Jeje—being shortest—last.
Tau dropped back to match his pace to hers. He said softly, “Did Inda tell you why we are here?”
She swiped a hand over her damp hairline. Jeje was not beautiful. Never had been, never would be. She cut her fly-away dark hair off with a knife as soon as it grew long enough to tickle her neck; her golden earring, with its single ruby gleaming, swung free against her narrow jaw. Jeje was short, boyish in shape, muscles flowing like a hunting cat beneath her smooth brown skin. She was grimly practical, looking at the world with trenchant humor from under those straight black brows.
Not in the least matching the world’s standard for beauty. So what was this new vagary in the comedy of human nature that made her so damned attractive?
Sex Tau could get anywhere, any time. And whether it was because he was a bawdy-house brat or it was just his own innate flaw, he could enjoy sex—very much—but never was any emotion attached. He had watched from a sympathetic distance as Jeje struggled to overcome her adolescent craze for him, settling into this tranquil friendship he had come to value more dearly than diamonds.
He restrained the instinct to touch her. He would do anything to avoid losing her friendship, which he would if she were to fall back into the brooding obsession that had made them so unhappy. And so he looked away before she could catch his glance.
“No,” she said, her voice deep and rough. It had always been the deepest voice among them, boy or girl, but since her teens she’d not only been muscled like a hunting cat on the prowl, her voice sounded like one—quite ravishing. “But I’m not blind.”
Tau laughed under his breath. They two then were the only ones who’d seen what Inda had stashed below Vixen’s deck: bolts of the cloth they used for light-air sail.
He saw Jeje marking the way and dropped obligingly back.
Jeje, like Fox and Dasta, was memorizing the landmarks as they pushed up a narrow trail through thick green ferny growth. Here a distinct pile of rocks, mossy though they were, there a lightning-struck shell of one of those broadfronded trees. Up along hard switchbacks into the rock hillside, affording the occasional glimpse below of the peaceful sand, undisturbed by any feet but their own. They smelled brine, wet sand, the heavy scents of flowers, and the fresh tang of savory herbs.
No sign of ghosts.
For a time they walked single file along a cliff, everyone looking down with some care. The skiff seemed a child’s toy in the lagoon below, and beyond the Vixen lay, looking small and fragile through the heat’s haze.
“Here,” Inda said at last, pointing to a waterfall.
Fox looked at it, then down at the rocks it thundered and foamed over, and wiped his brow. “Here?” It was the first time he had spoken.
“Behind the water,” Inda said. “At least, so the map said, before Ramis cast it into the fire.” He grinned.
They eased along the slippery path, which was scarcely wider than their feet, not caring that some of the waterfall spray dashed over them. It felt good.
Farther, farther, another step, a sudden sharp turn to the right and there was a cave, smelling of wet stone and mold.
They sloshed inside.
One of Dasta’s feet slipped on slime, and he scrambled to recover. “Should we go back for light?”
“Nearly there,” Inda said. “We’ll let our eyes adjust— Ah!”
They stopped. Their night vision gradually picked out the rocky cavern, with its old limestone drip-spikes hanging down from the root-pierced ceiling. Weak blue light from the water-curtained mouth of the cave revealed a black hole against what felt like the northern end opening out into the sea.