Traitor's Knot (epub)

  'His Divine Grace hates clansmen,' a hatchet-faced head-hunter commented. 'That's good enough cause to suit me.'

  The minstrel smiled. 'Very good.' His fingers stabbed a spray of notes from the strings he began tuning by absent habit. 'But why should his exaltedness keep paying your bounties, when the whole country-side's turning out elite troops to slaughter old blood lines for nothing?'

  Shot erect, now outraged, the lance captain puffed up to take issue.

  Before he spoke, the insolent singer dug an elbow into the button seller beside him. 'Friend, these grunts are too glum. You've still got those brandy crocks tucked in your pack? Pop the corks. Why not share? If something's not done to lift this sour mood, every last errant fiend will come back. You might not value your shrivelled equipment. But I'm tender and young. Not a bit ready to ruin my sport in the blankets! Or didn't you look? These poor wretches are scratching themselves raw through ripped clothing! Makes me wince, just to think of risking the breeks that keep gnat bites from welting my bollocks!'

  The brandy, exhumed, was exceptionally sweet. Perhaps even suspiciously potent. The jugs passed hand to hand, while the minstrel's satire kept its keen edge, catchy enough to invite uproarious laughter and knee-slapping rounds of shared choruses. The lyrics maligning the Light became insidiously infectious. Although singer and button seller moved on at dawn, they left every man from the disarrayed caravan singing into the morning.

  Beyond any doubt, the minstrel's bold repertoire would survive and spread through the port brothels of Southshire. In the mouths of the head-hunters and drivers, the scurrilous verses would travel on and take the stews of Sanshevas by storm. 'You're evil incarnate,' Dakar accused, well away and sweating his hangover through a waist-deep slog across a tidal marsh. They had left the road under the cover of mist to make rendezvous with a fishing smack. 'My brash singer, do you realize how near you came to earning a lancer's steel through your guts?'

  'As close as the salvation in your spelled flasks of brandy.' The bard's teeth flashed beneath the lyranthe he balanced on top of his sable head. 'I'm not dead. Nor was the binding of Davien's longevity put to the test on a goring. We're ahead of the game, actually. I'd hazard the guess: a few sunwheel dedicates will defect rather than cling to an idiot's honour and moulder in irons at Southshire. Aren't you eager to tackle the morass we'll find down the coast at Shaddorn?'

  'Not if you're stoned out of town by a mob,' Dakar puffed, flailing to haze off humming insects and the chaff sifting down from the bulrushes.

  'What a fine lack of faith you place in the ridiculous,' stated Arithon Teir's'Ffalenn. He strode forward, nonplussed; perversely still merry since he had been too busy with playing to sample Dakar's doctored drink. 'I thought the objective was to turn the mob with the stones on the tents of the sunwheel recruiters?'

  'No more swamps,' Dakar grumbled. 'Or I swear on my blood, I'll hoard the drink for myself and join ranks with the pious offenders.'

  The fishing smack hired to board two soggy passengers breasted a brisk chop and made rendezvous with a merchant brig, hanging off shore just past the horizon. The boat grappled her lines long enough to relinquish the contents of her hold, which consisted of contraband goods wrapped in tarpaulin and concealed beneath the glistening shine of the night's catch of mullet. For two extra silvers, her skipper was also persuaded to part with his small barrels of spoiled mackerel, stewed to reeking as bait for the crab trappers whose skiffs worked the shallows inside the reefs.

  The brown-haired, agile passenger who had given no name helped his stout companion aboard, then waved the fishing smack off with good cheer. The brig's sun-darkened crewmen cast off her lines, while the grizzled, blue-water captain looked on with a dubious squint.

  Lips pursed, he measured the sealed barrels and heaped fish, shovelled in an oozing, silvery heap that drew clouds of flies on his foredeck. 'Man, in this heat, we'll be wearing a weeping, ripe stink, since I notice you didn't pack any salt. I swear by Dharkaron's cast Spear, you'd better know what in Sithaer you're doing. Or I'll chuck the lot overboard, and your carcass, too. In these waters, believe me, the sharks never pause. You'll be torn to shreds in a heart-beat.'

  The scoundrel brought aboard at Fiark's behest smiled back with errant delight. 'You've brought the empty wine tuns I wanted from Innish? Very good. Let's bring them topside at once.' Comprehension sharpened the captain's astute face. 'Oh, man! You're not going to -'

  'Oh, yes. Just watch me,' the visitor promised, then proceeded to fill the twoscore emptied hogsheads bearing the sunwheel brand with his load of puddled, dead fish. He seasoned the mix with the brew in the bait casks, then had the ship's coopers seal in the bungs, while the southern sun beat down like a torch and rotted the contents to sloshing jelly.

  While the sailhands set the brig on her east-bound course, and the fat landlubber napped in the shade, the nameless man shared peppered sausage and bread in the aft cabin with the squint-eyed captain. Behind a closed door, the probing questions continued, each sally aimed to sate an unsettled curiosity.

  Deflected by his visitor's suave tongue, the captain at last tried a frontal assault, his massive hands clamped to a jack of black rum, brewed from Sanshevas molasses. 'You know you can't just sashay up to the docks, then switch out your barrels for a prized shipment of Orvandir red. Not under the noses of the Light's armed guard. Nor will you evade the devilsome eyes of the custom keeper's wolf pack of excisemen.'

  'I agree.' The strange young man seemed roguish enough, except for the fact he refused any drink, and his stare seemed to pierce a man's silences. 'That's why you'll lend me grade paper and ink.'

  'A forged requisition?' The brig's master chuckled, dismissive. 'That rum you're too proud to sample today will taste like pure joy, at your hanging.'

  The visitor grinned. 'You're right. Shall we wager?' He leaned down, delved into the canvas lately drawn from the heap of dead fish, and produced an intact seal in gold wax, affixed with a pristine white ribbon.

  The captain's eyes widened. 'Damn me! That's genuine!'

  'Nothing less.' Clever fingers accepted the pen from the chart desk, then paper, and in professional script, proceeded to fabricate a bundle of documents of lading addressed to the customs office at Southshire. One commanded the Light's resource to hire a team of longshoremen to debark a wine shipment for the sunwheel recruitment tents. The other, less complex, enjoined the port authorities to release a like number of hogsheads, stacked and lying empty, to be onloaded for transport to the wineries' guild agent at Durn.

  'You will then burn the new list you receive at Southshire and finish your run on the original papers Fiark dispatched from Innish. The delivery you leave will be the ones I've just borrowed, that now keep my haul of prime baitfish.'

  'But yon barrels at wharf-side are going to be full!' objected the brig captain with pigheaded logic. 'No longshoreman's going to miss that sore fact! Not as he rolls your suspect replacements under the eyes of the clerks at the docks.'

  That glaring concern left the swindler unruffled. 'This will be handled. Leave the details to me. You need do nothing but dally tonight. Stay hove-to with your lamps dark, at sea. Arrange to reach anchorage at Southshire by the dawn tide. Present your papers to the port authorities as usual. Then take my advice and slip your cable again before the full ebb at noon. Now, if I could be so bold as to charter your pinnace? For what fee? Not too dearly mind! You're free to collect her again in three days. I plan to leave her legally trim. You'll find her tied up and waiting in a paid berth on your next upcoast run through Shaddorn.'

  'You know how to sail?' the captain asked, doubtful. His mesmerized gaze watched the sum in bright gold, just now being stacked by his rum flask.

  'As well as I write,' the odd guest insisted. He lifted the sconce off the candle, then dripped off the wax to affix the seal of the Light's priesthood over his falsified documents. 'Are you asking for surety?'

  The brig captain selected a coin and tried the edge with his t
eeth. His blunt smile returned. 'Since you didn't foist off your payment in tin, naturally, your bonded signature will suffice.' More gold chinked and glinted. His expansive mood brightened. 'In fact, a simple handshake will do, and I frankly won't care if you wreck her.'

  The pinnace was unlashed and swung out, forthwith. Her mast was stepped, and her gear smartly rigged. She launched inside of an hour. By the handy way the departing visitor threaded the mainsheet blocks, he well knew his handling of boats. His torpid comrade was kicked awake, and stowed, complaining, amidships. The lines were cast clear. As the craft clawed away on the stiff, off-shore breeze, breasting the indigo swell, the captain regarded the stacked tuns left behind, contents cooking to noisome sludge under the scouring sunlight.

  The mate paused at his side, a sharp-witted man as mean as old rope who still tracked the tender's expert retreat towards the landward horizon. 'Who was that man, and why do I sense in my bones that he's up to no good?'

  The brig's master shrugged. 'He's left us a round fifty royals and no name. Yet Fiark's instructions on that score were plain. If a whisper of scandal sticks on us at Southshire, we're to claim our pinnace was stolen at sword's point by sea-roving clansmen. Then we're to leave an accurate description on record that fingers yon shady brigand as the thief.'

  By afternoon, the brig's pinnace nosed across turquoise shallows, parallel to the white thrash of spray on the coastal reefs. Sweating and red, Dakar nursed the tiller. Arithon stood in the wind on the foredeck, singing a passionate ballad that wrung the flux currents into high turmoil. To mage-sighted eyes, the rampant emotion unleashed a tempest of charge: prime target for the iyats that soaked up the energy churned up by the breaking surf.

  As the sprites arrowed in to make sport with the pinnace, Arithon wove shadow and locked them captive. He had gained in finesse. His reaped salvage of drake spawn was soon wound, bright as jewellery, onto his little finger. When his gleanings flashed silver, indigo, and deep purple up to his knuckle, he footed his way aft and reclaimed the rudder from Dakar's white-fisted grasp. 'We are owed a night's drinking in Southshire, I think. Your boots aren't dry yet?' Seated, his white shirt riffled in the afternoon breeze, and his hair like flicked ink in his eyes, the Prince of Rathain propped a bare foot on the thwart. 'Well, cheer up. Come the morning, there won't be another hike through a swamp.'

  'We'll be sailing,' groused Dakar, not one whit appeased as he shifted in vain effort to ease his back against the stay that anchored the mast. 'My tender stomach will scarcely pause to sort out the unpleasant difference.'

  'Then don't be hung-over,' Arithon said, altogether too vibrant when any natural creature should languish in the perishing afternoon heat. 'I'm not going to task very much of your resource.'

  'It's the worry,' the Mad Prophet admitted, eyes shut. Pink hands laced on his belly, he settled to doze in the shade of the thrumming mainsail. 'Don't wake me until we're at rest in the harbour. That way I might slip the burden of fate, and reach shore without getting sea-sick.'

  On schedule, the pinnace hove into Southshire. There, the prankish gusts lifted the wings of the gulls and sent them flocking over the roof-tops. The dock-side hung thick with the pitch tang of oakum, and the dust devils danced, whirling sawdust. The shipworks were winding down for the day. Banging mallets dwindled and died, and the doused coals smoked under the steam-boxes. Sundown painted a pastel sky when Arithon flagged a lighterman to row him ashore.

  Now red-haired and brown-eyed, he looked comfortably plump in the stuffed cloth of Dakar's spare tunic. He carried his lyranthe for care-free entertainment, to be back, he assured, before daybreak.

  As good as his word, he amused the off-duty watchmen, and the packs of dice-throwing sailhands crowding the water-front taverns. He ate dinner, listening to idle talk, then tuned up and composed a bright satire. Swept off with a rowdy smith and a chandler, he went to taste the free wine doled out by the sunwheel recruiters. For an hour, he sat on a bench with laced hands in the shadowy dusk of the tent. Since he never moved, no one blamed him for the fact that, thereafter, every cask the priest broached appeared to have soured to vinegar. He took polite leave of his casual acquaintances and returned to the dives along Harbor Street.

  There, the snake venom sellers were just hitting stride. A juggler with torches was swallowing fire. Skin flasks of rum could be bought for a copper, and a cocker was setting his boards in the street, contenders and bettors crowding his crates to size up the hackled combatants. The bard skirted the crowd, whistling, and chose a snug berth between wine-shops, where he played ditties for coin and sweet serenades for the young lovers. Dakar saw him, still there, when he reached shore at midnight, parched for a drink at the Fishnet. When the Mad Prophet emerged from the tavern, replete, the bard was down by the water-front sheds, cracking jokes with the sunwheel guardsmen. Two of the customs office watchmen were with them, bent over in howling stitches.

  Dakar parked against the sign-post of a trinket shop and wheedled for favours from three painted doxies. Their simpering drew whistles from a muscular galley-man, who flashed coin, and left the deserted spellbinder brooding. The sunwheel guards on the dock poked fun at his stiff state of misery as they moved off to pick up their beat. The carrot head bard was nowhere in evidence when the three of them paused by the customs' shack, and unaccountably, snoozed at their posts.

  Only Dakar noticed the iyats steal in. He watched through slit eyes as they pried all the bungs from the wine tuns stacked under their cover of tarps on the wharf. The excisemen's seals gleamed under the rise of the moon, undisturbed by a pilfering hand as twenty-eight barrels of Orvandir's best spirits gurgled until they were emptied. Their contents trickled through the cracked boards and into the black slosh of the tide with no official at Southshire the wiser.

  Crimson dawn saw the pinnace away. The change of the tide brought the inbound brig, complete with her forged bills of lading. Just past the morning change of the guard, the drained barrels on the wharf were replaced by a paid crew of sweating longshoremen. They onloaded the dry barrels, then unladed the brig with their equal number of filled replacements.

  The wagoner who served the recruiting tents arrived later. He collected his load and delivered his haulage for pay, all unaware he had replenished last night's soured stores with twenty-eight tuns of rank fish bait.

  By then, bard and prophet were well gone, sails spread to catch the spanking breeze that chivvied them on towards Shaddorn. They made port in two days, left the pinnace sedately tied, and sought a performer's lodging in one of the tile-roofed, dock-side taverns.

  The landlord wiped wet hands on his apron and surveyed the odd pair on his door-step, lukewarm. 'A free singer, eh? You'll pay for your bed. If the company appreciates your balladry, they'll leave a coin or two in your cap. If they don't, you'll not hear your own notes for the noise. If you want yesterday's bread and the fish-stew on the hob, you'll have dinner at the sailhands' cost of two pence.'

  'That's fair,' said the minstrel, his blithe nature unruffled. Now sporting a tangle of pallid blond hair, he entered the salt-musty common-room, while the stout companion who tagged at his heels grumbled that the inns on the Tip were unfit for the manners of stable flies. 'It's pinching indecent not to give a free singer bed and board, never mind an allotment of beer.'

  The minstrel took a room. Notwithstanding, he paid, and slept undisturbed until dusk. Returned to the tap-room, clad in garish motley, he straddled a bench and tuned up his lyranthe. The tables were bustling when the fast courier rode in, bearing word of the riots at Southshire. 'Fair tore those sunwheel tents into shreds, will you know! The fracas started when the priests ran out of wine and tried to serve up the Light's supplicants with rotten mullet.' Paused for a drink, the parched messenger slapped settled dust from his leathers and broke into braying laughter. 'When the daisies in their sunwheels accosted the stevedores for restitution, let me tell you, the fisticuffs started in earnest. They say you'll know the Light's minions by their black eyes, a
nd the longshoremen's guild, by the over-ripe stink o' thrown fish!'

  To no one's surprise, the resident bard composed a satire in commemoration. The packed crowd stamped and clapped, begging for the same ballad again, and crying themselves prostrate with mirth.

  The delighted landlord refunded the minstrel's lodging and generously forgave the stout companion for his mean-spirited comments. 'Stay the week,' the inn's red-cheeked matron entreated. 'A month, even.'

  The fair-haired bard smiled, and firmly declined. I'm bound north, for Etarra.' Since his performance had captured the bystanders' interest, his explanation cut through conversation. 'Folk say that the troops who are billeted there have so many gold buttons they're wont to stake their spare clothing at cards.'

  A startled guffaw cracked the ambient quiet.

  The minstrel winked, snapped a rollicking arpeggio, and gushed on, 'And I've heard! The white avatar who pays them to die cannot sleep without candles alight at his bedside. If that's the truth, then he's no god at all. Any wretch who hates darkness needs no divine Light! Give me a sweet lay and a halfpenny wick for my prayer to bring in a safe morning!'

  The Southshire courier roared with delight. Half of the inn's replete patrons joined in. Badgered by threats of shadow and war, and pinched by taxes to fund sunwheel troops, they met the free singer's bold, shafting comments with stamping appreciation. Before their mood shifted, he flipped back pale hair and launched into a medley of reels. Each break between tunes, he added a new verse to the infamous saga that described the demise of the righteous to barrels of fish bait at Southshire.

  Midnight drew nigh. The tap-room was crammed beyond bursting. The pot-washer ran to a neighboring tavern to roll in a fresh hogshead of beer. The landlord scarcely had cause to complain that the price asked for the brew was extortionate. Both of his cash chests were jammed at the hinges. The customers who were too tipsy to stand overflowed and fell down in the street. The door banged, admitting a stream of new-comers, drawn in to hear the uproarious comedy. Their shouted choruses threatened to raise the wooden pegs from the floor-boards.