Lord of the Isles (49 page)

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Authors: David Drake

BOOK: Lord of the Isles
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Tenoctris stared at the peak of the merchantman's foremast with the intensity of a judge passing sentence. Her face was set. Did she disapprove of Nasdir's technique or was there something more to her concentration?
“Benlo bor-Benliman
erchonsoi razaabua
!” Nasdir said, stabbing his staff down into the center of the hexagram. The two sailors nearest him gasped and jumped back, hiding their thumbs in their fists in a gesture to turn away evil.
A wraith resembling light on dustmotes rotated twinkling up from the hexagram. Its color shifted between red and blue, like the shimmering of a cat's-eye gem.
The wraith was a pale image of Benlo. It slowly raised its right arm, pointing toward the deckhouse which held the two passenger cabins.
“We've got him!” the officer cried. He drew his sword. “By the Lady we've got him at last!”
The warship's crew could hear the shouts but they were too low in the water to see what was happening on the merchantman's deck. The drummer put his right foot on the stern rail and bobbed up for a better view. His narrow vessel rocked alarmingly; the captain turned and shouted angrily.
Liane was as still as a winter sunrise. Tenoctris kept her back to the wraith but her lips moved silently. Garric thought he saw the hint of a smile on them.
The two doors of the deckhouse faced the bow. The wraith was pointing at the one on the right where Garric slept. The common soldier moved to it carefully. He held his spear waist-high at the balance, cocked back to thrust if anyone rushed through the doorway.
He jerked the door open. Red and blue sparks swirled in the small cabin, a combination Garric knew meant that Nasdir couldn't discriminate among the forces he put into motion.
“Benlo bor-Benliman!” the wizard repeated. “
Erchonsoi razaabua!
”
There was a loud crack. The lid of the burial jar sharing Garric's cabin rose. Part of the rim split and lifted also, gripped by the pitch seal.
Benlo's nude corpse stood up slowly. The torn body cavity had been sewn with coarse twine. The perfume of aromatic spices mixed with but could not hide the stench of rotting flesh.
The soldier bellowed, turned, and ran straight into the mainmast. He bounced back with a clang. His spear clattered to one side of the mast; his helmet fell off and landed behind him. He got up again and staggered off at an angle, still blind with fear.
Nasdir shrieked like a hog being gelded and crossed his arms in front of his face, still holding the heavy black staff. The officer backed into him; both men fell in a tangle of limbs and screaming terror.
The soldier started to throw himself over the rail. Liane caught the man's left hand in both of hers and dragged him sideways so that his elbow crooked over the line tethering the vessels together. The warship's captain was shouting questions, and the oarsmen, relaxed a moment before, settled into place on their benches to grip the oarlooms.
Sparks of blue and red light gouted from the open doorway like the last flare of a dying fire, then vanished to normal sunlight. Benlo's corpse sank back into the burial jar; one arm still dangled over the broken rim.
Nasdir and the officer scrambled to the railing on all fours. Drenching in the sea awakened the soldier at least to some degree of function: he'd slid into the belly of the line and was now climbing hand over hand to reach the warship's side.
The officer grabbed the line, shoving the wizard aside, and realized that he was still holding his sword. He dropped the weapon into the sea to get it out of his way. The ivory hilt and the gold inlays on the blade's ricasso gleamed for some while as the weapon sank through the clear water.
Nasdir rose screaming and slashed the air with his staff. Liane ducked from a blow that would have broken bones.
Garric felt the same revulsion he'd known the night he found a rat lapping the blood of the pigeon whose throat it had gnawed out. He stepped forward.
“
Watch—
” Liane called.
Garric raised his open left hand. The staff whistled into it with a smack. The textured heartwood had a greasy feel in Garric's grip. His palm stung, but he'd come by his calluses through hard work; pain was nothing new to him. He tossed the staff over the port rail as his right hand closed on the wizard's throat.
Nasdir bleated for an instant. Garric lifted him, caught one of his thrashing legs—spindly things with less muscle than an honest man's arms—and hurled the wizard so far that he landed among the shafts of the warship's extended oars.
The old man managed to hang on to an oar long enough for a sailor to pull him aboard. Garric was glad of that, but he hadn't worried much when he threw Nasdir over the side. He bent over and supported his body on the railing, breathing deeply.
Most of the merchantman's crew had backed into the bow, but the helmsman stared at his fellows in voiceless wonder. From his position on the roof of the deckhouse he'd only seen Nasdir's wraith. The following general terror puzzled him.
The warship's captain and the dripping military officer shouted into one another's faces. Tenoctris hadn't moved since the boarding party arrived; now she extended her right hand toward the warship. Blue fire as dense and pure as the heart of a sapphire quivered above her index finger.
The military officer flung himself down in the narrow aisle. The captain shouted a hoarse command. The oarsmen began to stroke, raggedly until the drummer took up the beat and brought them into rhythm.
The little vessel drew away at nearly the speed of a man running. Tenoctris lowered her arm, looking worn but still smiling.
“Sister take you all!” Captain Aran said to her in a voice like that of a wounded bear.
He pointed to the cabin. “
That
thing goes over the side now!” he added. “And you can count yourself lucky if I
don't decide to do the same with the lot of you.”
“No!” Liane said. “He's my father!”
Aran stepped toward the deckhouse. Four of his men followed him.
“No,” said Garric. He knew what would happen if he snatched his sword from its oilskin wrapper. Instead he picked up the spear the soldier had lost when he collided with the mast. “No, you're going to land us and our belongings in Erdin as you contracted, so in a couple hours we none of us have to see the others ever again in our lives.”
Aran gestured his men to either side. He pulled a hardwood belaying pin from its socket on the port railing.
Garric lifted the spear and spun it on the fingers of his right hand. The spear was sturdy but still slimmer than a quarterstaff. Garric wasn't as skillful as Cashel, but he could make this lighter weapon dance.
“Set your sails, Captain!” Garric shouted. “Or shall I call my friend out of the cabin to help me?”
Tenoctris made a minuscule gesture. Garric didn't know for sure what happened behind him, but Aran dropped the belaying pin as though he'd burned his fingers on it. The sailors stumbled back.
“Set your sails,” Garric repeated, this time a plea rather than a challenge. He whirled the spear over his head; needs must he could give a good account of himself with it, though he didn't imagine he could stop the ship's whole crew if they rushed him.
Aran held his ground. He pointed past Garric. “You close that door,” he said. “Then we'll go about our business. And by the Shepherd! you'll never set foot on this deck again once you leave it.”
“Yes,” said Liane as she walked into the cabin with her father's corpse. “That's what we'll do.”
She slammed the door behind her. Sailors jumped to the mainspar's lifting tackle before Aran could even give the order. They'd accepted that the only way they'd be free of Benlo was to land him on shore.
Garric planted the spearbutt on the deck and leaned his weight onto it, utterly exhausted. An ewe bleated plaintively from belowdecks.
Garric felt just the same way.
L
ightning strobed, followed by a monstrous triple crash of thunder as Sharina loosed the mainfall. The boat's sodden leather sail dropped despite the wind's snatching grip. Sharina's right arm ached and she'd been feverish for the past three days of storm, ever since she'd put her hand on the stinging tentacles of a jellyfish that came over the side on the spume of a wave. Despite her dizziness, neither she nor the hermit could imagine trusting Asera or Meder with anything to do with the vessel.
The surf roared around them, displaying fangs of foam in the blue-white glare of lightning. The storm tried to swing the skin boat broadside, but Nonnus dug in his steering oar. Though the vessel shimmied, it drove high up on the northern shore of Sandrakkan safely on its double keel. Without the hermit's skill they'd have overset and very possibly drowned beneath grinding tons of whalebone and hide.
The wave receded. The boat toppled slowly onto its starboard side. Because the Floating Folk never came ashore they didn't build their vessels with wear strakes along the sides as bumpers, but the sandy beach was no direct threat to the boat's hull.
Sharina let the tipping motion spill her out onto the ground. She hunched on all fours, digging her fingers into the sand. She'd have prayed never to leave dry land again except that even after the ordeal of the past weeks she didn't want to spend the rest of her life on Sandrakkan—
And because being around Nonnus had made her unwilling to call on the gods lightly.
The hermit had jumped from the catcher boat while the incoming wave still foamed. He grabbed the bow rope—hemp cordage he'd brought from the trireme, not the stiff leather strap the Folk had used before the islanders appropriated the vessel—and trotted to one of the line of pilings at the head of the beach. A score of plank-built fishing dories were already drawn up on shore, overturned to keep the slashing rain from filling them.
Lightning pulsed for twenty seconds behind the cloudbanks, illuminating both sky and land. Sharina got to her feet. She wanted to help Nonnus, but just now standing upright was as much as she could handle.
“Why, this is Gonalia!” Meder said enthusiastically. “Gonalia Bay! I recognize the castle there on the headland.”
He paused as thunder rolled, shaking the dark land beneath. In a much different tone he said, “There's a light in the castle. Who would be there? It's not a place to visit at night.”
“What do you mean?” Asera demanded. She was fully the procurator again, commanding in voice and demeanor. She shook out her robe. She might better have wrung it. The fabric was so wet that it dripped during the present lull in the rain.
Nonnus was coming back. Meder watched the hermit and lowered his voice as he said, “A wizard built the castle a thousand years ago. He left no account of his activities but others did, and the stories weren't the sort to draw others here. The whole region was unpopulated for centuries after he died.”
“Wizards!” Asera said, the word a curse and a hissing reminder of the lightning of moments before.
The hermit joined them. He laid three fingertips against Sharina's forehead. His touch was cold; she'd known she was running a fever but hadn't realized it was this serious.
“You need to get inside,” he said. “Can you walk?”
“We'll all get inside,” the procurator said crisply. Even a renewed spatter of rain did nothing to quench her newly recovered
sense of authority. “If this is Gonalia—”
“Yes,” Nonnus said.
Asera frowned at the interruption. “Then there'll be a coach south to Erdin. We'll buy passage on a ship there.”
Her eyes swept the group, then settled on Nonnus. Distant lightning turned her pupils into balls of blue glass.
“And hold your tongues!” she ordered. “I'll travel as a shipwrecked Ornifal noble with you as my servants. I have enough money for immediate needs and I'll be able to arrange credit in Erdin. If word gets out that I'm an emissary for the king, though, it's our lives. Do you understand?”
Sharina wanted to slap her. The thought of the way everybody in Barca's Hamlet had felt honored by the procurator's presence now turned her stomach.
Nonnus smiled faintly. “Yes, mistress,” he said. “I understand life and death.”
He gestured with the butt of his javelin toward the wooden houses on the corniche above the beach; lights showed through the chinks of shutters but no one was out at night in this weather. “Go on to the inn. I'll follow you shortly.”
The procurator frowned, sniffed, and took the small bag of her belongings from the vessel. Sharina thought she'd been about to tell the hermit to carry her luggage, but she wasn't quite such a fool.
Meder already had his satchel. He carried the ivory athame thrust beneath his sash as if a weapon. Sharina looked at him, then said to Nonnus, “I'll stay with you.”
“No, child, you won't,” he said, touching her cheek with his fingers. “You're too sick. But I'll thank the Lady for you also in my prayers.”
Asera trudged toward the wooden staircase to the corniche. Meder looked at Sharina, then closed his mouth without speaking and went off with the procurator.
Sharina squeezed Nonnus' hand and followed them, carrying her own bundle. The rain started again. Its drops chilled her soul without seeming to cool her hot flesh.
Meder muttered to the procurator at the top of the stairs;
they paused for Sharina. Lightning shimmered on wet wood and the nobles' rain-streaked faces.
“The Pewleman served us well, I'll grant that,” Asera said to Sharina as she took the last step. “But he'd best recollect his position now that we've returned to civilization. If you're his friend, you'll see that he heeds my warning.”
“He did nothing for
you
, mistress,” Sharina said. The inn was on the other side of the street. She continued walking as she spoke because she wasn't sure she'd be able to move again if she stopped after climbing the stairs. “And since we're giving warnings—if anything happens to Nonnus, you'll learn how good a friend of his I am.”
She didn't suppose she'd have said that if it weren't for the fever. That was all right. It was the truth and they needed to know it.
The road was cobblestone, slick and cold and hard against Sharina's unfamiliar feet. Her calluses didn't cushion the shock. The nobles showed no signs of discomfort; Meder wore boots but the procurator's thin-soled slippers shouldn't have been much help.
Life in the palace would be that way in all things. Sharina might be Count Niard's daughter and of royal blood—she hadn't really let herself think about that—but she didn't know anything about the life she'd be expected to live in Valles. Every aspect of it would pound her, bruise her, just as these civilized cobblestones were doing to her feet … .
Asera struggled for a moment with the inn's front door; she raised the latch easily enough, but the weight of braced timber was a surprise. She probably had servants to open doors for her.
Meder bowed Sharina into the common room ahead of him. He'd have taken her bundle of personal effects if she'd let him. Both nobles had changed as a result of their return to civilization. While Asera had become brusquely commanding, the wizard had changed from a sullen youth into a polished gentleman attending a lady.
On balance Sharina thought she preferred the sullen youth.
In that frame of mind Meder had kept as far away from her as possible.
The air of the common room was dank. The innkeeper rose from one side of the chimney alcove; on the opposite seat the sole guest present merely turned his head and gave the newcomers a morose glance. The fire was tiny, dwarfed by the massive limestone hearth.
“You're the host?” Asera said. “Well, start acting like one, then! I'll want food and a hot bath besides. Do you have a wine heater?”
The innkeeper looked astounded. The front door blew open: Meder hadn't latched it properly behind him. Sharina checked to be sure that Nonnus hadn't followed them after all, then slammed it shut herself.
“Well I …” the innkeeper said. Three guests coming out of the storm were as surprising as a lightning bolt. “I can mull some, I suppose.”
He looked up the staircase. “Enzi! Come down here! Pao! Pao! Where are you, boy?”
The innkeeper thrust a poker into the fire, looked at Asera's face, and hurriedly set three more billets of split wood on.
Sharina dropped onto one of the bench seats built out from the walls of the common room. Her surroundings shimmered in a pastel haze. Her right arm no longer ached but she thought she heard it buzzing. She opened and closed the fingers; they moved normally.
A woman who coiled her hair in twin braids on top of her head looked over the upstairs railing, took in the guests' aristocratic features, and bustled down without snarling the prepared response to her husband's summons. A gangling boy ran into the room from a back corridor.
Asera seated herself on the hearth bench the innkeeper had vacated. She leaned forward and warmed her hands over the growing fire.
Meder glanced at the man on the other seat as if considering ordering him to get up. Sharina suspected the only question was whether the fellow simply refused to move or
whether he knocked the wizard down with the sturdy stick he held between his knees. Meder apparently came to the same conclusion; he sat beside Sharina instead.
The innkeeper walked the boy to the door, talking earnestly to him in a voice too low to be overheard. The boy's eyes widened. The innkeeper sent him out the door and slammed it shut again behind him.
“Get wine, woman,” he said to his wife. “Our guests want mulled wine to warm them!”
She scurried to the bar and set a copper pail under a small cask on the wall rack. With an oily expression the innkeeper tented his fingers and turned to Asera. “Mistress?” he said. “May I ask how long you'll be staying?”
“No longer than the first coach leaves for Erdin,” Asera said. “When will that be?”
“Ah,” the innkeeper said. Instead of answering he took the pail of wine from his wife and carried it over to the hearth. “How did mistress come to arrive here, if I may ask?”
“You may get the skin flayed off your back if you don't keep to your own affairs!” Asera said. “Are you worried about your pay? Don't be!”
She took a coin from her purse and rapped it on the mantel; the gold rang musically. “Besides seats in the coach for me and my household, I'll need to replace some of the wardrobe lost when I was shipwrecked. Now, when is the next coach?”
“The boy should be back with that information shortly,” the innkeeper said. “Let me fix your wine.”
He took the poker from the fire, knocked ash from the glowing metal, and thrust it into the pail. The smell of hot wine and spices filled the common room, reminding Sharina of winter evenings at home.
She thought about the past. For the first time she really understood that she'd never be able to go home, at least not back to the home she'd known in the past. She was a pawn in the hands of strangers who'd never leave her alone, who'd hound her if she tried to return.
Sharina closed her eyes. She felt tears on her cheeks but
she didn't care. Voices swirled about her; the innkeeper talked about the weather and making up beds. Someone offered Sharina wine; she took the pottery mug and held it between her palms. She didn't want to drink, but the warm clay felt good in her hands.
Horses clattered up to the front door. Their shod hooves had a nasty, unfamiliar ring on the cobblestones. Horse
men
, not a coach; there was no sound of iron tires accompanying the hooves.
The door banged back. Sharina opened her eyes. Six armored soldiers crashed into the room with swords drawn. Over their mail shirts they wore white linen tabards with a black horsehead on the right breast. Their shouting presence filled the room.
Meder jumped to his feet. A soldier pushed him back onto the bench; another soldier put his sword to the wizard's throat and snarled,
“Don't
move or we'll see if that's sawdust you're stuffed with!”
Asera cried out in wordless anger. Sharina couldn't see her through the press of armored men.
Sharina raised the mug to her lips and sipped her wine. A soldier looked at her; he frowned but said nothing.
The innkeeper's wife had put too much nutmeg and not enough cinnamon in the wine, but it was a good vintage. Sharina didn't drink wine often, but her father had seen to it that she and Garric had an understanding of the subject.
Sights and sounds were as clear to her as the air of a frozen morning. The fever had burned all the dross out of her mind, leaving her wits sharper than ever before.
An officer entered; he wore a muscled cuirass and a bronze helmet with a trailing horsehair plume instead of the mail shirt and iron pot of the common soldiers. He didn't have a tabard but he wore a separate linen sleeve tied to hooks on his breastplate; there was a black horsehead at the shoulder.

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