Pinned down throughout the singeing exchange, Tarens tallied the separate voices to number the sea-wolves hell-bent to take Arithon.
The fourth on his list groused in clipped sibilants, ‘We’ve got no leeway to pussyfoot, Cayte! Not with hardened bountymen hot on our tail! More, we can’t hope to dodge those war galleys peeled off from the Sunwheel blockade.’
Gravel-tongue gave his opinion, again. ‘What if yon fishing blokes posted a lookout? If someone’s holed up on that anchored lugger, one whistle in warning will flush their slinking shore party like stoats. The brush here could hide them for hours.’
‘I’m not beating the reeds in this bog to flush anyone,’ a smug fifth fellow agreed. ‘That’s begging to get us pegged by clan archers. I say we make straightaway for the spoils. Square off with that rival crew, then bolt with their prisoner. Leave here, before this place gets choked with bully-boys frothed up to kill for religion.’
‘Should scuttle this cockle-shell first,’ drawled the thoughtful tactician among them. ‘At least stop the nabs on that lugger from chasing our wake through the gauntlet.’
‘A scavenging rat could do better!’ This voice female and piercing with scorn. ‘Given the weather’s too frigid to swim? Just shove off their dory and let the ebb-tide sweep her away down the channel.’
Another male circled with an objection. ‘But that leaves any louses left on their fishing smack—’
The woman’s abrasive contempt cut him off. ‘Not if we pounce on the prize opportunity! Let’s raid their wallowing fisher’s tub now! Snag off her mast pennants and escape under her official grant of safe passage, ourselves.’
‘No,’ said a more measured authority. ‘We’ll board that lugger and sail her intact. Shut the bound criminal inside the hold, gagged and bagged up in a crab sack. Then we cross Mainmere channel dragging her fish-nets. Meanwhile, the rest of our crew takes the sloop. Let them run ahead through the Sunwheel fleet, innocent as a decoy.’
‘She gets flagged down, inspected for nothing, and let go slick as spit!’ The observer whistled in admiration, through back-slaps and brays of laughter.
‘No bother, then, boys. Let’s hop and flense ourselves a few mackerel men.’
‘Daft nitwit!’ the woman pealed in rife scorn. ‘You thugs will have us branded for murder. No killing! We ambush the fishermen, snatch the temple’s fugitive, and go on our merry way. If yon dory’s cut adrift on the tide, the blokes will be stranded here, helpless. They might fashion a raft and snag their loose boat. But not before we’ve made our landfall at Barish and cashed out the temple’s bounty.’
‘You and you!’ the commander snapped, then gave his decisive orders. ‘Quit nodding off and launch this bath toy of a tender!’
The contraband runners grasped the dory’s rope thwarts and shouldered her from the strand. She lurched ahead, splashed into the shallows, and yawed in the swirl of the rip current that riffled past the mud-shoals. As the boat bobbed out-bound down the estuary, the hidden crofter hunkered within fretted in helpless frustration. The shade of Arithon’s past liegeman implied that the highest of stakes rode upon today’s outcome.
Yet until the loosed dory drifted to a safe distance, the sly marauders stayed free to pursue their bold plan unobstructed.
The sea-wolves did their dire work quickly and slipped out unscathed, reviled from the beach by the furious shouts of the plundered fishermen. While the narrow, swift sloop that had brought the marauders spread her pallid canvas and sailed to decoy the patrol fleet, their robbed victims cursed them: first, for the theft of the valuable prisoner, and again, with more murderous injury, for the ruthlessness that had jacked the lugger needed for their livelihood.
‘Unnatural, blood-sucking lampreys!’ the stranded captain frothed in contempt. A wiry man with bleached whiskers and a suffused, dumpling face, he ranted away as he stumped down the shore with his disgruntled mates.
His dock-side expletives suffered a hitch. ‘Look there! The blind nerve!’ In fact, one of the pirates was caught in the act, trying to lift their boat’s dory. The incensed captain hefted the cut sapling, carved to a point, that had failed to defend the snatched prisoner. He charged into the shallows waist deep, pitched to skewer the raffish blond lubber, caught trying to escape through the shallows. The captain’s baggy slops ballooned in the current. Worse, sucking mud mired his ankles. Which ungainly grace alone spared the thief. The loon was not gaffed because the stumpy fisherman overreached as he lunged to attack.
His jab missed. The stick dropped as he windmilled his arms to avoid sitting down in the channel. Nobody laughed. If he toppled, his canvas breeches would fill, and the tide’s pull would quite likely drown him.
The bungler chose not to snatch the rude advantage. Instead, he leaned sidewards and grasped the wet rope tied in farmer’s knots to the mooring cleat. He tugged. The dory glided ahead through brown water, not aground after all, but staked to the bottom by dint of a bashed-in crab-trap. Which folly was not only stupid but blind, with the boat’s proper tackle left in plain view in the bow.
Never mind that the dory had not washed into the Westland Sea, and that a destructive brute’s use of his trap-line heaved the jacked tender back into reach. The beached captain grabbed hold. He straddled the thwart, hot to strangle the stowaway before he lit after the pilfering rats on the sloop.
Until what the stranger was telling him pierced the blind haze of his rampage.
‘I amn’t your enemy?’ The luggerman’s bristle of whiskers deflated as he sucked in his puffed cheeks.
‘No,’ the liar replied in town accents, his smile raggedly nervous.
Eyes black and suspicious as a nest-robbed wren’s resurveyed the blond hulk, who in fact was no sailor. Rumpled in a snagged cloth jacket thrown overtop the buckskin preferred by the free-wilds barbarians, the fellow was dirt-scuffed and raffish. The captain said, cautious, ‘You claim to know where yon skulkers are bound?’
Even teeth flashed again through the glint of gold stubble. ‘I do. But not if you threaten me.’
The fisherman harrumphed. His muscular yank and a glottal protest from the mud saw him into the rocking dory. ‘Say on, lad. Make your case. Mayhap my boys might decide not to dice up your liver for crab bait.’
‘I secured your loose tender,’ the wretch pointed out. ‘Politely, you might call me Tarens.’
‘Ah, laddie, I’m thinking you did that to save your own skin.’ The inimical survey measured his length, then abruptly dismissed the hopeful thought of drafting him for the oars. ‘Yer peaked at the gills. Get seasick, do ye?’ Without pause for answer, the captain laughed, deep-chested as an emptied beer keg. ‘Shift your arse, then. Ach, no! To the stern seat. Damn you for a brainless, overgrown puppy who thinks we keep a mud-hook to play strong man’s hurley!’
Tarens flushed, embarrassed. In fact, he had wrestled with the anchor until the dead weight of the iron defeated him. Although his brief nap had begun to restore him, he preferred seeming ignorant to the admission of puling weakness.
‘Well, speak up!’ barked the captain, his beefy hands busy slotting the oars in the rowlocks. He chopped the left blade, torqued the dory about, then put his back into a shoreward stroke to pick up his marooned crewmen. ‘Slack tide’s in an hour. Need to row like Dharkaron’s almighty Chariot to overhaul that vile sloop. Not to mention clobber the rogues who’ve cast loose my blowsy bitch of a lugger. Best hope she’s run hard aground on a mud-bank, and not torn apart on a reef!’
‘The sloop’s away, clean,’ Tarens rebutted. ‘Chase her down, you’ll get no satisfaction. She’ll shelter under the law since you don’t bear hard proof that her sailhands have done you an injury.’ Which impertinent statement earned him the end of an oar, jammed into his larynx. Bowed backwards, Tarens gasped through his crimped throat. ‘S’truth.’
But the burly fisherman stayed unimpressed. ‘In cahoots are ye, laddie?’
‘Not!’ Alarmed as the tilt of the dory scooped up a slosh of cold w
ater, Tarens twisted his chin and tried pleading, ‘Listen, at least, before you crush my neck! That sloop’s running empty to mislead the chase. Your lugger’s not drifting at large, she’s been stolen! Sailed by intent with your prisoner aboard, she’s lending those brigands the cover to slip the blockade.’
The stout captain exploded. ‘They’re faking innocent, using my nets?’
Knuckles clenched to avoid being rammed overboard, Tarens wheezed, ‘I overheard them say they’ll dock at Barish, smug as fed ticks, acting ordinary.’
‘Well, that won’t work! We’re a Torwent tub, above-board by the customhouse registry.’ The oar’s pressure relented. The listed dory righted herself, while the disgruntled captain reset his looms. He carved a mighty stroke, still complaining, ‘We’re licensed to fish here only if we sell our catch to the bursars who supply the temple’s war host.’
Hurled ahead by the jerk that vented balked rage, Tarens massaged his bruised neck, his silence mistaken for disapproval.
‘Don’t like being forced to feed the realm’s enemies!’ Baleful, the captain spat into the sea. ‘But boats get sunk, or our fish-shacks and houses burn down each time we’ve bid to shake off the Light’s requisitioners.’
Inclined towards sympathy, Tarens inquired, ‘That’s why you sought the head price for the fugitive? You needed the coin to rebuild?’
The captain huffed, his tousled head cocked askance to guide his craft towards the shingle. ‘Oh, for gain, right enough. We’re taxed something brutal for the official pennants that grant our free passage through the blockade.’
Which subject’s bleak frown implied desperation, should that rightful waiver be lost to the hands of the contraband runners. The next vengeful pull shot the dory ahead, while the gulls screamed and dipped, and the bow sliced through the low breakers and doused spray that left Tarens stung blind and frigidly streaming.
The captain braced his oars, without comment. The moment his furious crewmen arrived and splashed into the shallows, he bared his stained teeth, and announced, ‘Bag this one, boys! He won’t bring the same price in gold as the first. But the temple’s decree named a tidy fee for the capture of the blond accomplice.’
Tarens shouted in protest, while two men caught the boat, and the others pinned him in rough custody. ‘You don’t have any idea what you’re risking!’
‘Do we not?’ The captain belted out another coarse laugh. ‘Tie yon wretch with the painter. We don’t need the line for cleating the tender till after we chase down our lugger.’
While the disgruntled crewmen piled in like wet dogs and doubled up on the benches, the captain bellowed, ‘Stroke, you laggards! Those jackers handling a gaff rig aren’t apt to make prize-winning headway. Hands used to a sloop will pinch her sails. She’ll lose way like a hog when they tack. Even if they mend their mistakes, the tide will shift in our favor within the hour. Keep our stroke nippy, and we should be able to overhaul their position!’
‘Take back the black-haired singer, as well,’ snarled the skinny man, bent to lash the fair captive’s wrists.
‘You have no idea,’ Tarens warned in a frantic attempt to be heard. ‘The fellow might seem to be mild and small. You probably found him well-spoken. But the contraband runners won’t have their way. Believe me, that mettlesome prisoner’s more dangerous than you imagine.’
‘Are you joking, or daft?’ The dory’s burly coxswain glared back, irritated.
‘I’m telling you straight,’ Tarens insisted. ‘Your enemies have taken on deadly trouble.’
‘Hell’s glory!’ cracked the coxswain, impatient. ‘We already know that! The little criminal fought like a hooked shark from the very moment we grappled him! Sliced two of us bloody with Hammon’s filched knife. And see, Bish’s arm that’s strapped up in a sling? His wrist’s swollen purple and probably broken!’
While Tarens gaped speechless, the lugger’s captain grumbled in sour corroboration. ‘We’d gotten the bloke roped. Wouldn’t have lost him, forbye, if the contraband crew hadn’t snuck up behind, with us caught licking our wounds from your henchman’s dastardly round of rough punishment!’
Early Spring 5923
Causes
Having lost her bid for Elaira, the Prime Matriarch exhorts her stymied Seniors in Tysan: ‘If that lugger can’t be seized in the estuary, or in case our live prize isn’t landed for bounty at Barish, we’ll spur the surprise invasion of Havish and harrow the coast-line southward to Torwent. Arithon won’t slip through that net. Not since yesterday’s massive stir in the flux galvanized the Light’s faithful against him . . .’
‘Don’t make the fatal mistake!’ Dakar shouts, raked by the prescient sight of red war and frantic to stop Lysaer, who mounts his fresh horse with an insistent resolve beyond reason, ‘I must ride at speed ahead of my troops! Who else alive can spare the Light’s followers from wholesale slaughter on the Prime’s game-board? Chase my heels, as you wish. But nothing you say can shift my moral charge to try for an intervention . . . !’
Rushed into a premature departure by his oath of Fellowship constraint, Asandir warns the young High King of Havish: ‘You’ll face dire events. Expect vicious purges of clanblood, and wide-scale burnings of newly fledged talent. Koriathain are putting the spurs to your enemies, and worse, they have baited Lysaer s’Ilessid to pledge a disastrous return to the field . . .’
Early Spring 5923
X. Reversals
T
he contraband runners who held the creature suspected for acts of rogue practice were canny enough not to trust the restraint of a dangerous prisoner to kindness. They crammed the minion of Shadow forthwith into a draw-string crab sack. Stiffened by salt, the hemp mesh chafed like wire against skin pummeled raw from mishandling. Bagged and slung up from an overhead beam, Arithon’s contorted weight cut off circulation to his cramped limbs. Eyes shut in distress, he tried and failed to ease his position. Despite miserable discomfort, his straits were not dire. The drubbing dealt by his captors left him battered and grazed, with kicked ribs that ached until every breath hurt. But his bones were not broken. As his bruises subsided to a dull throb, he determined that his joints were not damaged. Surely, left enough time to himself, he should manage a clever tactic to free himself.
Except that the trauma left ingrained by his prior imprisonment would not let him stop trembling. The visceral kick of stark terror refused to bend under the trained discipline of his faculties. He dared not give in, or dismiss the grave set-back. If his emotion could not be quelled or harnessed to constructive purpose, he must restore control before the crisis undid him.
Yet the inchoate desperation that rode him only tightened its grip. He was not in fit state. This had to be recognized. The unwise, hard use wrung from overstrained faculties throughout his attempt to spare Tarens left him pressed to the brink of delirium. Or so he presumed, beaten limp at the rough end of a wildcat fight. But after an hour alone in the dark, he still shuddered under the after-shock. Unease raised the unpleasant possibility that he suffered far more than the straightforward abuse of injury and over-extension.
In cold fact, the struggle in him had gone berserk long before the first bite of the ropes. Beyond the sickness brought on by prolonged immersion in the flux stream, Arithon traced his persistent, crazed fear to the taint of an arcane compulsion, still fastened onto his captors. He acknowledged his part in that ground-swell of chaos: his own back-handed move to upset the darker intent of the puppeteer powers against him should have raised every ship on Mainmere’s seaboard against him.
Now, as he languished, Arithon grappled the recoil unleashed by his inflammatory stroke. Indeed, he would reap the whirlwind to come. Just how deadly the match, he dreaded to think, as the dissonant wrongness cranked his nerves beyond sense at close quarters. Which persistence did not add up, after the incendiary measures driven by his music faded to quiescence. Apparently his captive state had not satisfied the Koriathain’s perverse purpose. Rather than retire their black net of sigil
s and pluck their snared prize from his keepers, the sisterhood maintained their compulsive influence in force. Why they should burn power at such reckless strength that hapless folk stayed afflicted bespoke wider stakes, for who knew what unfathomable end game. Arithon reeled through fitful waves of rogue far-sight, forewarned that their provocation inflamed the True Sect doctrine towards broad-scale war. He could not react, entrapped as he was, dangled as the hot lure for a crafting that flicked his tuned instincts to light-headedness.
The roll of the hull swung the crab sack in ponderous arcs over the silvery gleam of the cod catch. Inside the shut, reeking gloom of the hold, the stink and the working creak of ship’s timbers should have unstrung his frayed nerves. Instead, the noise and rough motion put Arithon at ease. The splash carved up by the bow and the slap of the wavelets against weedy strakes seemed familiar. The distinctive, sharp lurch confirmed that impression, when the inbound current through the narrows tugged the crosswise course of the vessel’s keel. His instinct chafed at the blatant mishandling, as pinched canvas riffled a plaintive warning, then slatted into a jarring clatter of spars.
Rushed footsteps banged, above decks, while a scathing shout cut across the crew’s dismayed outcries. ‘Steer small, damn you!’
‘How can I?’ the disgruntled helmsman snarled back through the thunder of slackened sails. ‘Persnickety bitch has no way left to her. Whipstaff under my fist’s gone as limp as a lubber’s prick in a whore-house!’
‘Mind your course and shut yer gob, butty!’ bellowed the man in authority. ‘Want a stiff sword rammed up yer tucked arse? Lose our lead, and the Sunwheel armada will have us carved up for their admiral’s trophy.’
The pintles squealed sternwards. Someone’s almighty shove threw down the strapped rudder to a lugubrious slosh of pressed water. The lugger yawed, wallowed amid the cross chop and nearly in irons. Her dumpling bow battered the wave crests to splashed spray through her ponderous swing, until the rampaging flog of her head-sails backed wind with a whump that shuddered her length.