Red Seas Under Red Skies

  “Didn’t give you a hand signal? I flashed you the ‘lying’ sign, plain as that bloody burning ship!”

  “You did not—”

  “I did! As if I could forget! I can’t believe this! How could you ever think…Where did you think I’d found the time to broker a deal with anyone else? We’ve been on the same damn ship for two months!”

  “Jean, without the signal—”

  “I did give it to you, you twit! I gave it when I did the whole cold, reluctant betrayer bit! ‘Actually, I know who sent them.’ Remember?”

  “Yeah—”

  “And then the hand signal! The ‘Oh, look, Jean Tannen is lying about betraying his best friend in the whole fucking world to a couple of Verrari cutthroats’ signal! Shall we practice that one more often? Do we really need to?”

  “I didn’t see a signal, Jean. Honest to all the gods.”

  “You missed it.”

  “Missed it? I—yeah, look, fine. I missed it. It was dark, crossbows everywhere, I should’ve known. I should’ve known we didn’t even need it. I’m sorry.”

  He sighed, and looked over at the two bodies, feathered shafts sticking grotesquely out of their motionless heads.

  “We really, really needed to interrogate one of those bastards, didn’t we?”

  “Yes,” said Jean.

  “It was…bloody good shooting, regardless.”

  “Yes.”

  “Jean?”

  “Mm?”

  “We should really be running like hell right now.”

  “Oh. Yes. Let’s.”

  3

  “AHOY THE ship,” cried Locke as the boat nudged up against the Poison Orchid ’s side. He released his grip on the oars with relief; Caldris would have been proud of the pace they’d set in scudding out of Tal Verrar, through a flotilla of priestly delegations and drunkards, past the flaming galleon and the blackened hulks of the previous sacrifices, through air still choked with gray haze.

  “Gods,” said Delmastro as she helped them up the entry port, “what happened? Are you hurt?”

  “Got my feelings dented,” said Jean, “but all this blood has been borrowed for the occasion.”

  Locke glanced down at his own finery, smeared with the life of at least two of their attackers. He and Jean looked like drunken amateur butchers.

  “Did you get what you needed?” asked Delmastro.

  “What we needed? Yes. What we might have wanted? No. And from the goddamn mystery attackers that won’t give us a moment’s peace in the city? Far too much.”

  “Who’s this, then?”

  “We have no idea,” said Locke. “How do the bastards know where we are, or who we are? It’s been nearly two months! Where were we indiscreet?”

  “The Sinspire,” said Jean, a bit sheepishly.

  “How were they waiting for us at the docks, then? Pretty bloody efficient!”

  “Were you followed back to the ship?” asked Delmastro.

  “Not that we could tell,” said Jean, “but I think we’d be fools to linger.”

  Delmastro nodded, produced her whistle, and blew the familiar three sharp notes. “At the waist! Ship capstan bars! Stand by to weigh anchor! Boatswain’s party, ready to hoist the boat!”

  “You two look upset,” she said to Locke and Jean as the ship became a whirlwind of activity around them.

  “Why shouldn’t we be?” Locke rubbed his stomach, still feeling a dull ache where the Sinspire bouncer had struck him. “We got away, sure, but someone pinned a hell of a lot of trouble on us in return.”

  “You know what I like to do when I’m in a foul mood?” said Ezri sweetly. “I like to sack ships.” She raised her finger and pointed slowly across the deck, past the hustling crewfolk, out to sea, where another vessel could just be seen, lit by its stern lanterns against the southern darkness. “Oh, look—there’s one right now!”

  They were knocking on Drakasha’s cabin door just moments later.

  “You wouldn’t be standing on two legs if that blood was yours,” she said as she invited them in. “Is it too much to hope that it belongs to Stragos?”

  “It is.”

  “Pity. Well, at least you came back. That’s reassuring.”

  Paolo and Cosetta were tangled together on their little bed, snoring peacefully. Drakasha seemed to see no need to whisper in their presence. Locke grinned, remembering that he’d learned to sleep through some pretty awful distractions at their age, too.

  “Did you make any real progress?” asked Drakasha.

  “We bought time,” said Locke. “And we got out of the city. The issue was in doubt.”

  “Captain,” said Delmastro, “we were sort of wondering if we could get started on the next part of this whole scheme a bit early. Like right now.”

  “You want to do some boarding and socializing?”

  “There’s a likely suitor waiting to dance about two miles south by west. Away from the city, outside the reefs—”

  “And the city’s a bit absorbed in the festa at the moment,” added Locke.

  “It’d just be a quick visit, like we’ve been discussing,” said Ezri. “Rouse them up, make ’em piss their breeches, loot the purse and the portable goods, throw things overboard, cut some chains and cripple the rigging—”

  “I suppose we have to start somewhere,” said Drakasha. “Del, send Utgar down to borrow some of my silks and cushions. I want a makeshift bed rigged for the children in the rope locker. If I’m going to wake them up to hide them, it’s only fair.”

  “Right,” said Delmastro.

  “What’s the wind?”

  “Out of the northeast.”

  “Put us around due south, bring it onto the larboard quarter. Reefed topsails, slow and steady. Tell Oscarl to hoist out the boats, behind our hull so our friend can’t see them in the water.”

  “Aye, Captain.” Delmastro shrugged out of her overcoat, left it on Drakasha’s table, and ran from the cabin. A few seconds later Locke could hear commotion on deck, Oscarl shouting about how they’d only just been told to raise the boat, and Delmastro yelling something about soft-handed, slack-witted idlers.

  “You two look ghastly,” said Zamira. “I’ll have to get a new sea chest to separate the blood-drenched finery from the clean. Confine yourselves to wearing reds and browns next time.”

  “You know, Captain,” said Locke, staring down at the blood-soaked sleeves of his jacket, “that sort of gives me an idea. A really, really amusing idea…”

  4

  JUST PAST the second hour of the morning, with Tal Verrar finally shuddering into a drunken slumber and the festa fires extinguished, the Poison Orchid in her costume as the Chimera crept past the Happy Pilchard. She passed the battered, sleepy little ketch at a distance of about two hundred yards, flying a minimal number of navigational lanterns and offering no hail. That wasn’t entirely unusual, in waters where not one act of piracy had been reported for more than seven years.

  In darkness, it was impossible to see that the Orchid ’s deck carried no boats.

  Those boats slowly emerged from the ship’s larboard shadow, and at a silent signal their rowers exploded into action. With the haste of their passage they turned the dark sea white. Three faint, frothy lines reached out from Orchid to Pilchard, and by the time the lone watchman on at the ketch’s stern noticed anything, it was far too late.

  “Ravelle,” cried Jean, who was the first up the ketch’s side. “Ravelle!” Still dressed in his blood-spattered finery, he’d wrapped a scrap of red linen around his head and borrowed an iron-shod quarterstaff from one of the Orchid ’s arms lockers. Orchids scrambled up behind him—Jabril and Malakasti, Streva and Rask. They carried clubs and saps, leaving their blades sheathed at their belts.

  Three boats’ worth of pirates boarded from three separate directions; the ketch’s meager crew was swept into the waist by shouting, club-waving lunatics, all hollering a name that was meaningless to them, until at last they were subdued and the chief of the
ir tormentors came aboard to exalt in his victory.

  “The name’s Ravelle!”

  Locke paced the deck before the thirteen cringing crewfolk and their strange blue-robed passenger. Locke, like Jean, had kept his bloody clothing and topped it off with a red sash at his waist, a red bandanna over his hair, and a scattering of Zamira’s jewelry for effect. “Orrin Ravelle! And I’ve come back to pay my respects to Tal Verrar!”

  “Don’t kill us, sir,” pleaded the captain of the little vessel, a skinny man of about thirty with the tan of a lifelong mariner. “We ain’t even from Tal Verrar, just calling so our charter can—”

  “You are interrupting critical hydrographic experiments,” shouted the blue-robed man, attempting to rise to his feet. He was shoved back down by a squad of leering Orchids. “This information is vital to the interest of all mariners! You cut your own throat if you—”

  “What the hell’s a critical hydrographic experiment, old man?”

  “By examining seafloor composition—”

  “Seafloor composition? Can I eat that? Can I spend it? Can I take it back to my cabin and fuck it sideways?”

  “No and no and most certainly no!”

  “Right,” said Locke. “Toss this fucker over the side.”

  “You ignorant bastards! You hypocritical apes. Let go—let go of me!” Locke was pleased to see Jean stepping in to perform the duty of heaving the robed scholar off the deck; not only would the man be scared witless, but Jean would control the situation precisely to keep him from actually getting hurt.

  “Oh, please, sir, don’t do that,” said the Pilchard ’s captain. “Master Donatti’s harmless sir, please—”

  “Look,” said Locke, “is everyone on this tub an idiot besides me? Why would I sully the soles of my boots with a visit to this embarrassment unless you had something I wanted?”

  “The, um, hydrographic experiments?” asked the captain.

  “Money!” Locke seized him by the front of his tunic and heaved him to his feet. “I want every valuable, every drinkable, every consumable this overgrown dinghy has to offer, or you can watch the old bastard drown! How’s that for a hydrographic experiment?”

  5

  THEY DIDN’T clear such a bad haul for such a little ship; obviously, Donatti had paid well to be carried around for his experiments, and been unwilling to sail without many of the comforts of home. A boat laden with liquors, fine tobacco, silk pillows, books, artificers’ instruments, alchemical drugs, and bags of silver coins was soon sent back to the Orchid, while “Ravelle’s” pirates finished sabotaging the little ship.

  “Rudder lines disabled, sir,” said Jean about half an hour after they’d boarded.

  “Halyards cut, braces cut,” shouted Delmastro, plainly enjoying her role as an ordinary buccaneer for this attack. She strolled along the larboard rail with a hatchet, chopping things seemingly at whim. “Whatever the hell that was, cut!”

  “Sir, please,” pleaded the captain, “that’ll take ages to fix. You got all the valuables already….”

  “I don’t want you to die out here,” said Locke, yawning in feigned boredom at the captain’s pleas. “I just want to have a few quiet hours before this news gets back to Tal Verrar.”

  “Oh, sir, we’ll do what you ask. Whatever you want; we won’t tell no one—”

  “Please,” said Locke. “Cling to some dignity, Master Pilchard. I want you to talk about this. All over the place. Use it to leverage sympathy from whores. Maybe get a few free drinks in taverns. Most importantly, repeat my name. Orrin Ravelle.”

  “O-orrin Ravelle, sir.”

  “Captain Orrin Ravelle,” said Locke, drawing a dagger and placing it against the captain’s throat. “Of the good ship Tal Verrar Is Fucked! You stop in and let them know I’m in the neighborhood!”

  “I, uh, I will, sir.”

  “Good.” Locke dropped the man back to the deck and stowed his dagger. “Then let’s call it quits. I’ll let you have your amusing little toy ship back now.”

  Locke and Jean met briefly at the stern before boarding the last boat back to the Orchid.

  “Gods,” said Jean, “the archon is going to love this.”

  “Well, we didn’t lie to him, did we? We promised pirate attacks at every compass point. We just didn’t say they’d all feature Zamira as the major attraction.” Locke blew a kiss to the city, spread across the northern horizon. “Happy festa, Protector.”

  6

  “IF THERE’S one thing I never particularly need to do again in my life,” said Locke, “it’s dangle here all day painting this bloody ship’s ass.”

  At the third hour of the afternoon the next day, Locke and Jean were hanging from crude rope swings secured to the Poison Orchid ’s taffrail. Now that last night’s hasty coat of dark paint had forever blotted out the Chimera, they were laboriously christening the ship with a new moniker, Delight. Their hands and tunics were spattered with thick silver gobs.

  They had gotten as far as Delig, and Paolo and Cosetta were making faces at them through the stern windows of Zamira’s cabin.

  “I think piracy’s a bit like drinking,” said Jean. “You want to stay out all night doing it, you pay the price the next day.”

  The Orchid had turned north that morning a comfortable forty or fifty miles west of the city; Drakasha had cleared the area of their Pilchard raid with haste, and decided to spend the day at a remove, brushing up her old wooden girl’s new disguise. Or, more accurately, turning that duty over to Locke and Jean.

  They finally managed to put the “light” into Delight around the fourth hour of the afternoon. Thirsty and sun-baked, they were hauled up to the quarterdeck by Delmastro, Drakasha, and Nasreen. After they’d gulped down proffered mugs of lukewarm cask water, Drakasha beckoned for them to follow her down to her cabin.

  “Last night was well done,” she said. “Well done and nicely confusing. I don’t doubt the archon will be rather vexed.”

  “I’d pay something to be a fly on a tavern wall in Tal Verrar these next few days,” said Locke.

  “But it’s also given me a thought, on our general strategy.”

  “Which is?”

  “You told me that captain and crew of the ketch weren’t Verrari—that will curb some of the impact of their story. There’ll be questions about their reliability. Ignorant rumors and mutterings.”

  “Right…”

  “So what we’ve just done will fester,” said Zamira. “It will cause comment, speculation, and a great deal of aggravation to Stragos, but it won’t cause a panic, or have the Verrari rioting in the streets for his intercession. In a way, as our first bit of piracy on his behalf, it’s a bit of a botch job.”

  “You wound our professional pride,” said Jean.

  “And my own! But consider this…perhaps what we need is a string of similarly botched jobs.”

  “This sounds like it’s going to have a very entertaining explanation,” said Locke.

  “Del told me this afternoon that you two are pinning your hopes for a solution on Stragos’ personal alchemist; that you can somehow secure his assistance by making him a private offer.”

  “That’s true enough,” said Locke. “It’s one of the aspects of last night’s visit to the Mon Magisteria that didn’t go very well.”

  “So obviously what we need to do,” said Drakasha, “is give you another chance to make this alchemist’s acquaintance. Another plausible reason to visit the Mon Magisteria, soon. Good little servants, eager to hear their master’s opinion on how their work is progressing.”

  “Ahhh,” said Locke. “And if he’s looking to shout at us, we can be sure he’ll at least let us in for a chat.”

  “Exactly. So. What we need to do…is something colorful. Something striking, something that is undeniably a sincere example of our best efforts on Stragos’ behalf. But…it can’t threaten Tal Verrar directly. Not to the point that Stragos would feel it a useful step in his intended direction.”

  “H
mmm,” said Jean. “Striking. Colorful. Nonthreatening. I’m not entirely sure these concepts blend well with the piratical life.”

  “Kosta,” said Drakasha, “you’re staring at me very strangely. Do you have an idea, or did I leave you out in the sun for too long today?”

  “Striking, colorful, and not threatening Tal Verrar directly,” Locke whispered. “Gods! Captain Drakasha, you would so honor me if you would consent to one humble suggestion….”

  7

  MOUNT AZAR was quiet this morning, the twenty-fifth of Aurim, and the sky above Salon Corbeau was blue as a river’s depths, unmarked by the old volcano’s gray smoke. It was another mild winter on the northern Brass Coast, in a climate more reliable than Verrari clockwork.

  “New swells coming in,” said Zoran, chief dock attendant of the morning watch.

  “I don’t see any more waves than what we already got.” Giatti, his more junior counterpart, stared earnestly across the harbor.

  “Not swells, you idiot, swells. Gentlefolk. The landed and larded class.” Zoran adjusted his olive-green tabard and brushed it clean, wishing that he didn’t have to wear Lady Saljesca’s damned felt hat. It made him look taller, but it generated sweat without keeping it out of his eyes.

  Beyond the natural rock walls of Salon Corbeau’s harbor, a stately new brig, a two-master with a dark witchwood hull, had joined the two Lashani feluccas at anchor in the gentle sea. A longboat was coming in from the newcomer; four or five of the quality rowed by a dozen oarsmen.

  As the longboat pulled up alongside the dock, Giatti bent down and began uncoiling a rope from one of the dock pilings. When the bow of the boat was secure, Zoran stepped to its side, bowed, and extended his hand to the first young woman to rise from her seat.

  “Welcome to Salon Corbeau,” he said. “How are you styled, and how must you be announced?”

  The short young woman, unusually tanned for someone of her station, smiled prettily as she took Zoran’s hand. She wore a forest-green jacket over a matching set of frilled skirts; the color set her curly, chestnut-colored hair off rather well. She seemed to be wearing rather less makeup and jewelry than might be expected, however. A poorer relative of whoever owned the ship?