Firehurler (Twinborn Trilogy) (51 page)

The men themselves had a motley feel to them. They
were of all nations and kingdoms, mostly lowborn, but a few had been well bred
but disgraced. He lumped both Denrik and Stalyart into the latter category,
though he knew not the history of either man. The captain was clearly a
well-educated man by his diction, and Stalyart seemed too keen to have gotten
all his learning from the docks and alleys.

“Now, what many of you have waited long for,” Stalyart
called out in the early evening hours, drawing men from all over the ship to
the area of the main mast. “This is our first haul. While we did not take the
Nyurissa
in battle, we nevertheless had much gold to bring aboard. This was gold once
won by Captain Zayne, and is now his reward to all of you for bringing him a
new ship.”

As men gathered about, they could see that he had his
foot on a strongbox and held a black-bound ledger in his one hand and a quill
in the other. One of the men Kyrus had not met opened the strongbox, and those
gathered nearest gasped and immediately began to press forward.

“Stay back, you dogs!” shouted Captain Zayne from the
quarterdeck, where he was overseeing the disbursal of funds. “You shall each
get your share, and no more. See these railings?” He pointed around the
perimeter of the ship. “This is the border of our little kingdom here, and
within this kingdom there is no stealing. Out there …” He gestured vaguely beyond
the ship to the world at large. “… all is for the taking, but here we are
brothers. If any of you smart fellows thinks that your brothers back on land
might steal from you, let me just assure you that I do not take kindly to bad
blood aboard my ship. When we fight, when we plunder, we need to know that
there is no knife at our back. When one prospers, we all do. When one fights,
we all do. Theft from one of us is theft from all. Gods willing, there will be
loot enough for us all to retire like kings.

“Now, all of you, hang back and wait for Mr. Stalyart
to call your name, then collect your share. There is a share for each of you, a
share and a half for Mr. Stalyart, Mr. Crispin, and Mr. Holyoake, and two full
shares for Mr. Hinterdale and for myself,” Captain Zayne said.

With that, the crowd gathered themselves into
something just shy of a mob, and waited their turn like hungry jackals, rather
than rabid ones. Kyrus hung well back and waited for the crush to die down
before bothering to approach Stalyart. He leaned against the forecastle and
watched as men slunk off to the crew quarters with handfuls of trade bars of
gold. Each roughly the size of a man’s finger and square cut, trade bars were
used for buying ships and land, or for negotiating ransoms. Few of the crew had
ever held one, and most did not know their exact worth, just that it was a lot
more than the same weight in eckle coins. Kyrus had a better guess than most,
but not by a lot. He figured that each was roughly three thousand eckles, and
that most of the crew had just gotten more than a year’s wages worth of
legitimate work.

When Kyrus’s name was finally called, at the end, he
received a share of sixteen bars from the nearly empty strongbox. He had been
mildly surprised that Captain Zayne had seen fit to give Kyrus a share equal to
his own, but he supposed it made sense. If Kyrus used his skill at magic to
good effect, he was worth any ten men of the crew. It was a bargain price for
what he gave in return. Kyrus was just grateful that it clearly showed the
captain’s support in front of the entire crew. Few enough men would be brave
enough to risk crossing Kyrus the Sorcerer, but hopefully none were foolish
enough to anger Captain Zayne, Scourge of the Katamic Sea.

That evening, Kyrus was invited to the captain’s
quarters, along with the ship’s newly appointed officers. Kyrus arrived
promptly when informed by one of the crew, a young man named Stevin, that there
was to be a dinner in celebration of their ship’s “liberation” from the
Acardians. He was struck immediately by how much larger and more luxurious the
captain’s cabin was. Despite their equal share of the loot, there was no
mistaking that the real power was centered here.

The cabin was appointed in dark-stained and polished
wood, much like the one Kyrus had claimed, but there was a large window at the
rear looking out the stern of the ship, and two smaller, round windows in each
of the port and starboard sides. The captain had a bed easily twice the size of
Kyrus’s own, set to the starboard side of the room, and to the port side,
situated between the windows, a locked liquor cabinet. The center of the room
was dominated by a large table and chairs with a wrought-iron chandelier
suspended above it by sturdy iron chains. The periphery of the room had
bookshelves, a smaller table with a map and charts, and there was a globe,
something that Kyrus had never seen except in the anteroom of the Society of
Learned Men. Whereas his own cabin had been plain yet sturdy, this cabin was
decorated with scrollwork and carvings befitting a nobleman’s parlor.

Captain Zayne was already seated and waiting, and
Kyrus was the first to arrive.

“Welcome,” he bid Kyrus, “come in and make yourself
comfortable. I am in excellent spirits today. The finest wine I was able to dig
up aboard this ship is yours to enjoy tonight, along with the rest of the
officers, once they arrive. Of course,” he added, “the rest will be along a bit
later. I asked Stevin to fetch you first, as I wished to speak to you
privately, without everyone else around.”

“About what, sir?” Kyrus asked.

He remembered to add the “sir” at the end, which was
going to take some getting used to. Kyrus had some idea of what the captain
wanted to discuss, but he was willing to play dumb long enough to find out what
Captain Zayne already knew.

“I think you know, so I will be blunt. Who are you,
Mr. Hinterdale?” Denrik asked.

Leaning forward in his chair and resting his chin on
his clasped hands, he looked Kyrus square in the eye, and Kyrus could not help
but avert his gaze under the scrutiny.

“Until recently, just a scrivener like any other.
Perhaps I was unusually talented, if I do say so, but—”

“No, that is not what I meant, and I believe you know
that. Mr. Hinterdale, I am neither a fool nor a man to be trifled with. I find
it impossible to believe that you learned the rudiments in a book somewhere.
From what I have heard of your trial, there was no such volume found despite a
rather extensive search of your shop. So allow me to rephrase this question:
who
else
are you?” Denrik added, and Kyrus knew what he meant.

Kyrus was not prepared to trust Captain Zayne with the
truth. He feared that anything he let on may find its way to the wrong ears in
Brannis’s world, so he thought fast and tried to come up with an alternate
identity.

“In Veydrus,” Kyrus said, “I am a highwayman. I work
by way of the north road out of Pevett, in the Kadrin Empire, and have a
hideaway not a half-day’s ride from the road. I work with a crew of five
others, and the most recent to join us was a sorcerer who had fallen out of
favor with Lord Whitestag and left his employ—I did not ask the cause of his
disfavor or the terms of his departure. I have been studying his spells and
watching him use them. My learning has thus been rather haphazard.”

“Kadrin, are you? Filthy bastards, the lot of them.”
Denrik sneered. “I had rather hoped you were not one of them, but you have the
look, now that I consider it.”

“I could not agree more, Captain. I make my living
robbing trade caravans, and I see that lot at their worst. I spare most of
them—bad business leaving a lot of bodies—but I do not regret when they choose
valor over poverty and end up on the end of my blade,” Kyrus said.

“A swordsman, eh? Show me,” Denrik said.

Still seated, he drew the cutlass sheathed at his hip
and handed it across the table to Kyrus.

“Forgive me not being in practice in this world. These
muscles will probably not do my skills justice,” Kyrus said and then took a few
practice swipes around the cabin.

He briefly considered how easy it would be to run the
captain through and wondered why he let himself sit at such a disadvantage. The
blade felt heavy and awkward in his hands, far more so that Brannis’s sword
usually felt, but he was fairly certain he could defeat an unarmed pirate of
middling years.

The answer struck him of course:
I could try to run
him through, of course, but that would hardly be the easiest way to kill him. I
could light Denrik Zayne ablaze with hardly an effort from this range, and he
knows it.
The pirate captain was brave enough just to be in the room alone
with Kyrus, weapon or no weapon.

“You seem a bit scrawny in the arm to be waving that
thing around, but I can see that you know how to use it, even if you could not
outduel a single man on this ship,” Denrik said. “Hand it back here before you
break something.”

Kyrus dutifully returned the weapon to its owner, and
the captain sheathed it once again.

“So you are a highwayman, you say …” Denrik left the
question unfinished, and Kyrus was unsure what answer he was looking for.

“Yes, and what are you, or should I ask … who?” Kyrus
countered.

“In Veydrus, I am a sorcerer, and a powerful one.
Here, I can barely draw enough to light a candle, but in Megrenn, I am
respected and powerful. I know plenty of magic and was properly schooled, even
though I can hardly get much use out of it here, despite the bounty of aether
that abounds. I could teach you. My price is service aboard my ship, and that
you do not go around acting like a Kadrin,” Denrik said.

“Acting like a Kadrin? What do you mean by that?”
Kyrus asked, genuinely confused.

He had already started doing the figuring in his head:
Megrenn claimed its independence from Kadrin roughly twenty-one
winters—years—ago, and the war ended twenty ago. Denrik must be at least in his
middle forties now. He was probably educated at the Academy and very likely
fought for Megrenn in the war.

Kyrus wondered for the first time if he might be able
to return the favor Brannis had done him in teaching him magic. Maybe he could
find a way to act as a spy for Kadrin. Megrenn outriders had taken High Pass,
and it was likely that they were somehow involved in the current goblin
problem. Megrenn had always been one for making odd alliances.

“For starters,” Denrik said, “resist the urge to
conquer anyplace we dock. It may be hard, since it runs deep in the blood, but
I insist. I extend this to my ship as well; I will not have you fighting me for
command. Also, there must be no talking of Veydrus— or anything at all from the
other world for that matter—when any besides myself or Mr. Stalyart are
present. He and I are the only ones who know of the other world, and like as
not, we are the only two who are not afraid of you just for practicing magic.”

“Stalyart? The first mate knows, too?” Kyrus asked.

“Aye, met him during the Freedom War on the other
side. He is a trader and scoundrel in both worlds. You would swear you had met
the same man if you saw him there. He cannot work a lick of magic in either
world, near as I can tell, though he is enough of a Crackle player that I could
not say for certain. He used to supply Megrenn with stripe-cats and monohorns
for our cavalry, after the Kadrin occupation had left us with so little to
defend ourselves. You Kadrins were never much as sailors, and he ran your
patrol lines with ease. Tellurak is more developed nautically, and I suspect he
used tricks he picked up around here to help him smuggle,” Denrik said.

“Are there any others. I mean, not just on the ship? I
suspected when you called me a sorcerer that you knew something, but that was
the first I had heard of anyone with knowledge of the other world. And I assume
that you
know
it is another world, correct? Is it possible that it is
just another part of this one?” Kyrus asked.

“No, I think not. Tellurak is a vast place, but
between myself and Stalyart, we have seen the mammoth’s share of it, with
nothing hinting that it overlaps Veydrus at all. Stalyart and I have made quite
a career of sharing information between worlds. When you pay close attention,
you will find things that you can exploit, one world to the other,” Denrik
said.

“Such as?” Kyrus pressed, taking a mouthful of the
excellent wine Captain Zayne had provided.

“Well, cannons for one,” Denrik said, and Kyrus nearly
choked on his wine. “And even though I do not have the draw you do, I use magic
to my advantage on occasion myself.”

“Are you telling me that Megrenn has cannons?”

Kyrus was incredulous. Immediately he thought of the
new “siege engine” the goblins were reported to have used at Illard’s Glen.
Some sort of improved catapult, they said. Would not a cannon be seen as such,
especially if they had only seen it from the receiving end.

“You will see them in Kadrin, soon enough. Pevett, you
said? Give us a season and you will see them for yourself.” Denrik smiled.
“There will be a reckoning, and Kadrin will find out what it is like to be
occupied.”

“Why would you tell me this, after I admitted to being
Kadrin? Surely you must suspect I would try to do something to stop you.”

“Why would I?” Denrik countered. “I know from long
experience that you cannot just bring information from one world to the next
with no explanation. No one in Veydrus would believe you, and I doubt you could
get through their primitive heads what a cannon was before they saw one used
against them in battle. Kadrins know magic, I give them that much, but if you
can match their magic on the battlefield, or even close the gap, they lack the
military strength Megrenn has.