The Ships of Merior (34 page)

‘Cap’n?’ A boy’s lisp accompanied a rustled movement, and a narrow face lifted in the gloom. ‘Is it wash-water you’re wanting?’

‘No.’ Dhirken flicked her blade free and beckoned the child closer. ‘Not yet.’ Through the roll as
Drake
mounted a crest and sloughed through, she weighed the groaning creak of her working vessel. Nothing seemed amiss or unfamiliar: not the thickened smells of hemp cordage and tar, nor the musk of sea-swollen planking made pungent by coal smoke from the galley fire. Past the stem windows, foam ruffled off the wake, flurried over in a scatter of sparks as a crewman trimmed the wick in the deck lantern. Though the dark was not close or foggy, neither stars nor moon scribed their reflections on the swells. No distant sparkle of watch beacons lined the coast to guide the course of night sailing traders. Gripped by a primal urge to yank her steel screaming from its sheath, Dhirken tipped her crown against the bulkhead.

Gritty as scraped rust, she asked, ‘Lad, last night when I was brought back on board, who came with me?’

‘A fat man. And the other captain, who’s steering now. The one who said
Black Drake’s
going to be the fastest, richest brig ever to plough the deeps of the Cildein.’ In a child’s unvarnished curiosity, Lad finished, ‘They said you were pleased over that. How much rum did you drink?’

Dhirken clamped a forearm across her belly to lock back an oath like a mastiff’s snarl. ‘Not enough to save their miserable hides. The fat man, where is he now?’

Lad snickered. ‘Bent over the leeside rail. Ever since we weighed anchor, he’s been belly-down and heaving.’

‘Well, here are my orders.’ Dhirken spoke fast and low, then gave Lad a brisk push. The hinges oh her bulkhead door were superbly kept; the boy, well trained, moved as
silently. In the interval after he slipped out, the captain picked out her plait, used her tortoiseshell comb, and retied her dark hair for hard action.

No crewman lasted on a smuggler’s brig if he failed to attend orders without noise. Dhirken whipped the last knot in her thong when the door latch ticked up. Her barefoot, rangy topman and
Drake’s
slab-thewed cook padded in on a breath of salt air.

Between them, white and moist as a shelled oyster, they bundled Dakar the Mad Prophet. A dish-sponge crammed in his mouth stayed his outcry, and both plump wrists were creased by lashings his desperate struggles could not slip.

‘Well done!’ Dhirken grinned, a flash of bared teeth in the gloom. ‘Dump him on my close stool. We’ll see how he likes to talk.’

Plonked down with less ceremony than a biscuit sack, Dakar collapsed in a jelly-legged heap. The instant the cook yanked the sponge from his mouth, he moaned and bent double into dry heaves. The edge of Dhirken’s blade against his bared nape could scarcely make him sweat faster, wringing wet as he already was from sick misery and the salt spray that doused off the bow.

‘Who is that dark-haired upstart, and what does he want with the
Drake?’
Dhirken pressed him.

‘Ah, captain, ‘twas a dismal poor effort, I know.’ Wrenched breathless by another spasm, Dakar rolled his eyes. ‘But in my own fashion, I tried very hard to turn your crew from the Master of Shadow.’

Astonishment whetted Dhirken to fresh anger. ‘Master? Shadow! You refer to the mad prince who slaughtered Etarra’s army? Do I look the fool, to swallow such rubbish?’ Her steel niggled down another fraction. ‘That meddling little string-plucker who’s commandeered my brig is anything but royal and a sorcerer.’

‘I beg your pardon.’ Dakar cringed away until his forehead ground into his cramped knees. He said in muffled
injury to his trousers, ‘I lie well enough when I have to. Never, ever about that man.’ Despite the hands lashed behind his back, he managed a soulful shrug. ‘His string-plucking lulled you unconscious, a bard’s spell few could equal. That’s hardly the worst. Look outside. It’s black, though true night is past. Arithon has spun clever shadows to make you think you see a shoreline. But where are the signs of solid land?’

The first, creeping chill ruffled Dhirken’s composure, while the cook made a sign to avert evil. Unnerved enough to venture opinion,
Drake’s
most fearless top-man said, ‘Captain, something
is
queer, I said so earlier. Damn me, I couldn’t finger what. But now it’s mentioned, the wind carries all the wrong smell.’

Dhirken feathered her cutlass against the creased fat beneath her victim’s earlobe. ‘I should cut you dead here and be damned to the mess. You’ve caused me a packet of trouble.’

‘Kill Arithon instead,’ Dakar suggested, reamed already by cramps that made beheading seem merciful by comparison. ‘It’s a fair bet I hate him more than you do.’

‘I don’t bet,’ Dhirken answered, clipped.

Amid the Kittiwake’s raucous turmoil, she had seemed staunchly determined; here, in cramped quarters kept so ascetically neat they scarcely felt inhabited, her presence loomed volatile as a touch match dropped head-down on dry lint. Dakar shivered in the throes of his nausea, helpless to guess which way female fury might turn her.

Then, with a move that slapped air, the
Drake’s
captain lifted her weapon. Habit drove her to finger an old scar that extended past the end of her bracer. ‘Depend on this,’ she finished with an edge that caused her seamen to shrink where they stood. ‘I will wrest back my command.’

At her gesture, the cook jammed Dakar back upright.
The topman stuffed the sponge back into the prisoner’s mouth and twisted it tight with his tar-stained shirt. A discreet tap sounded against the boards beneath Dhirken’s berth. A mercuric arc of reflection marked the changed angle of her cutlass as she peeled aside ticking and blankets and pried up a concealed hatch beneath.

Lad’s tow head and angular body emerged amid a gush of sour air from the bilges. ‘Your men on deck say they’re ready, captain.’

On a predatory flash of teeth, Dhirken slipped out of her cabin. The ship’s cook and the topman padded like mismatched shadows on her heels.

Lad stayed, the galley’s best flensing knife clenched in his hand, with instructions to fillet the prisoner if he sought to raise the alarm.

An idiotic and unfair precaution, Dakar sulked, his pouched eyes squeezed shut as he retched in balked spasms against his gag. A knife in the gizzard was no sort of thanks for information given in good faith; and even had illness lent respite for the purpose, he would cheerfully choose strangulation before he gave warning to spare the confounded Prince of Rathain.

Outside the swinging halo of her running lamp,
Drake
lay shrouded in darkness. Pricked in salt rime, shrouds and rigging angled upward from the spooled rail and lost form against a featureless sky. The bearing creak of filled canvas and the chafing squeal of trusses reduced hidden masts and tackle to a ghost presence overhead. If any shoreline bounded the horizon, neither light nor beacon tower showed. Dhirken tightened grip on her cutlass. She smelled neither shingle nor sheep cot; no fragrance of green growing fields. The air held only clean scoured salt, and the tarry bite of blacked cordage. Her brig settled easy over fair-weather swells, not a sail in her rig set amiss.

Master of Shadow or master singer, the man at the helm knew his seamanship.

Which competence brought no forgiveness; Dhirken tapped the wrists of her topman and cook to signal her intent. Then, wraith-still by the aft companionway, she gestured, and other crewmen rousted by Lad to lie in wait for her order moved ahead. Movement answered from the darkness. In grumbling pairs, laden with buckets and holystones, they filed from the forecastle and invaded the quarterdeck. There, amid cheerful oaths and grousing, they industriously knelt to swab planks.

The black-haired upstart stationed at the helm voiced a mild query.

A hulking mass at his shoulder,
Drake’s
first mate waved the seamen on about their business. ‘Our captain keeps a trim vessel,’ he assured. ‘Any land dirt left on her ship’s decks by dawn, and she’ll roust up our bosun to flog backs.’

‘Land dirt,’ mouthed Dhirken, convulsed by a soundless chuckle. ‘How perfectly apt.’ She flicked her sleeves clear of her bracers, jerked her chin for the cook and second mate to back her only as needed, then swung alone up the ladder to the quarterdeck.

Limned in orange by the stern lantern, the conniving little bard who had played the Kittiwake’s scum to a standstill stood in still grace before the binnacle. He still wore his oddly-tailored shirt. Silver-pointed cuff ties chimed at the wrist held negligently crooked around a wheel spoke. His pose of inattention was deceptive; the brig kept her heading like a gannet. Languid as poured honey, Dhirken stepped up to meet her adversary. He did not loom dangerous enough for a sorcerer, she thought; he lacked the grand majesty of a prince. Beyond hands too slim for their office, he could have been a ship’s boy with wind-ruffled black hair, bare feet braced against the heeled deck.

Only the gaze that flicked aside to greet her was too sardonic and deep for a child’s.

‘Uncommon fine weather for sailing,’ Dhirken opened in tea-room courtesy. She fielded a fractional nod from her mate, her sharkish smile for the foreign upstart who had dared to give orders on her ship. While her challenge fixed his attention, crewmen armed with knives and cudgels grappled over the rail at his back. Arrived from a circuitous route through the bilges, they scaled the sterncastle by way of her cabin window, masked by the industrious scrape of holystones.

‘Ah, lady,’ the foreigner said in his lyrical, singer’s chagrin. ‘Would you meet me with a threat?’ Timed to a masterful fine point, he loosed the helm, whirled face about, and confronted the stalkers poised to jump him.

A following crest slammed the rudder. The unattended wheel spun like a ratchet and veered the brig off her heading. Aloft, heavy canvas sucked flat, then back-winded with a bang and a rattling thrash of slack blocks.
Drake’s
crewmen were hurled back a halfstep as the deck lurched in violent response. Seasoned sailors, they recovered by reflex.

‘I haven’t said whether I wanted you taken alive,’ Dhirken remarked in joyous spite.

‘Should that concern me?’ As her men lunged, and the brig slewed and shuddered broadside against the swells, Arithon smiled.

The darkness blasted away.

Sunlight ripped down, its glare at full noon like the blistering stab of sheared iron.

‘Sorcery!’ someone screamed, while the attackers fell back in sharp terror. ‘It’s truth! He’s the Master of Shadow!’

Arithon stood still and denied nothing.

Above other shouts of fear and dismay, and the dashing rush of shot spray, Dhirken’s pealed order stopped panic. Her sun-blind mate found the wheel by touch, flung the
helm down, and slewed the brig head to wind. Reviled by their captain’s razor-edged tongue, the assault party firmed sweaty grip on their cudgels and regrouped.

Unruffled, unarmed, the man now revealed as the prince whose powers had leashed the Mistwraith let them close to surround him. Do as you please,’ he invited through the hammering thunder as gear thrashed aloft. ‘I have no wish to start a fight.’

‘I’d say it’s a bit late for such niceties,’ Dhirken snapped. To her men, she added, ‘Take him, fools. Hold onto him tight! Sorcerer or not, he’s all mine.’

For a heartbeat, no movement crossed the deck beyond the whipping snake of slack sheet lines. Then, needled on by their quarry’s bold amusement, the sailors obeyed orders in a sudden, vindictive surge. Grasped and yanked spread-eagled by men who outmatched his strength and weight, Arithon tossed his head to clear fallen hair from his eyes.

Through wrenching discomfort, he gasped, ‘Dakar. I presume he’s saved trouble and already told you my name?’

No one answered. The men glanced about and shuffled uneasy feet. Dhirken stood stripped of her bluster. Tintless as fine porcelain, her freckles stippled dark across the bridge of her nose, she spun on her heel and stared for searching minutes under her visored fingers. Quandary met her, unpleasant and real; for as the fat man had threatened, the sea lay empty on all quarters.

Water scribed a landless, fiat line to the farthest rim of the horizon.

For a heartbeat only, Dhirken stayed at a loss. Then the flog of loose canvas displaced her shaken nerves and the scope of the
Drake’s
problem overshadowed all else. She whirled to face her mate, who now gripped the wheel with the desperate, whipped dog absorption of a man who wished himself elsewhere.

‘Where’s the log?’ She had to shriek like a harpy to be
heard over the wind-pummelled fury of thrashed tackle. ‘What’s our heading? Speed? What course? How long have we been underway, and where do you place our position?’

The huge man blew rolling sweat from his moustache. ‘Your bargain,’ he stammered. Too large a man to cringe neatly, he darted a glance to his shipmates. When no one stepped forward to back him, he swallowed and spoke out alone. ‘The foreign cap’n was to navigate.’

‘Fiends alive!’ Dhirken made a whistling jab and stopped her cutlass just shy of taking flesh. ‘We could be anywhere in Eltair Bay by now!’

The mate feared to look at the weapon that trembled at his heart. He thumbed his slit earlobe, plumbed dry of words, while the sun glinted off his bald crown.

At length, his captain lunged away, her gaudy scarlet shirt moulded to small breasts by the riffling pressure of the breeze. In a reviling cascade of filthy epithets, she dispatched the gawkers on the sidelines to stow their buckets and holystones, then scramble aloft and furl sail. ‘Move lively, you louses! For every thread thrashed off my staysails, I’ll have me a patch of flayed arse!’

Freed at last to vent her spleen upon the primary offender, Dhirken braced against the brig’s wallowing roll. Light scalded off her studded bracers as she raised her cutlass and caught the tip through the ties at her prisoner’s shirt front. ‘Don’t think to bluff your way through this. I was never drunk in the Kittiwake last night. You heard me plainly when I said the terms of your contract were fool’s play.’

‘Ah,’ grunted Arithon, a hitch to his breath as a seaman bent his arm a notch higher. ‘Since you didn’t give me an answer, it’s fair that I’m offering again.’