The Ships of Merior (30 page)

‘It could be worse.’ Athera’s new Masterbard dampened his instrument, careless of the string that sawed out a sullen buzz against the white-gold setting of his signet ring. Amused by Dakar’s flinch, he added, ‘You might still be lying in a ditch, abandoned to the crows and the insects. Do you get migraines often? The wax merchant’s drover decided you had plague. He carried on about pestilence until you’re lucky the northbound couriers didn’t overhear. They’d have rousted the watch back out of Jaelot with faggots to burn your diseased carcass.’

‘Never migraines.’ Dakar sniffed in corrosive irritation. ‘I got indisposed from eating spoiled ham.’

He covered his ears, whimpering and uncommunicative. Though his sour stomach relented by morning, he maintained an offended silence throughout three days of hard travel. Since the man was a fool who risked the temper of any s’Ffalenn prince, Dakar sneaked away by night and begged passage into Tharidor on the slats of a salt merchant’s cart.

By noon, a whistle on his lips, he kicked open the door of the city’s most commodious tavern. Blinking through the fusty murk of pipe smoke, he breathed in the smells of acid oak casks, unperfumed humanity, and thicker odours of hot grease and chicken meat roasting on spits in the kitchen.

The inevitable pack of idlers clustered by the hearth. Dakar nodded greeting and chose a bench between a group of whispering merchants, fastidious in their summer silks and lace, and a foursome of sun-cured deckhands. ‘Beer,’ he demanded to the bar wench who scoured the stones by the hob. The best brew the house has to offer, and also, a plate of spiced chicken.’

The deckhands renewed their squabble over a dice throw made by a cheater, while Dakar’s order arrived.
He licked his lips as the head foamed over clean glassware, then raised the tankard to catch the thick stream in his mouth, eyes closed in beatific anticipation.

The taste hit his tongue, bitter enough to scour the linings of his sinuses. He huffed and slammed backward in recoil that rattled the floorboards. His eyes bulged. Tears streamed down the flushed apple curves of both cheeks and he choked through a spray of expelled droplets.

‘Fiends alive!’ snapped the sailor across the trestle. ‘If you’re minded to sprinkle, do it elsewhere, matey. Or else, understand, I’ll see your stinking lard carved up and stewed into lamp oil.’

Through a half-strangled fit of pure rage, Dakar spat into his tankard. Too husky to shout, he beckoned to the barmaid. ‘Look here, what’s this? The drink you serve is
vile.
Pure lye.’ His tirade gained volume as the pucker in his throat began to loosen. Do you habitually try to poison customers?’

Drawn from the kitchen by the commotion, the landlord appeared, a meat spit clamped in hand like a battle mace. ‘I won’t have this!’ He strode past the flabbergasted merchants and shook his iron implement at Dakar. ‘My establishment serves the finest fare in Tharidor.’

‘Oh?’ Dakar folded his arms in mulish challenge. Then standards hereabouts must need a boost to lick the belly of a snake.’

The spit banged into the trestle and stuck there quivering, a hair’s-breadth from Dakar’s planted elbow. The landlord loomed over him and bristled with both fists cocked on his hips. ‘You’ve no cause to sling lies and insults. If you can’t handle a man’s brew, go back to drinking fresh cider.’

Wide eyes averted from the metal that skewered the table, Dakar coughed into his cuff. ‘Well, look, you try this.’ He gave the tankard a shove with his forearm. ‘I’ll
be fair and admit to poor manners if what slops inside doesn’t scald your mouth to perdition.’

The sailhands’ dice clicked and stopped in suspended stillness. By the hearth, the greybeard idlers leaned forward in fascination as the landlord scooped up the glass. The merchants looked on, more discreet in curiosity, as he quaffed the contents in one draught. Then he sighed, his features hard with animosity as he licked the foam from bearded lips and thumped the drained vessel rim downward beside the upright meat fork. ‘You have a lively imagination, the sort that makes trouble I don’t like.’

A jerk of his chin called two enormous thugs from the one dim cranny Dakar had neglected to watch. These grasped his elbows in bruising, cruel fingers and forcibly pitched him out.

Hours later, parked on his rump in the gutter with three knuckles skinned and one side throbbing to the ache of bruised ribs, the Mad Prophet ran tender fingers over a swelling black eye and conceded to woebegone defeat. He had sampled beer vats and wine shops the breadth of Tharidor and found not a potable drop. The town tosspots making their evening rounds singled him out for ridicule, until the last tavern he visited paid heed to rumour and as firmly as though he was afflicted or insane, turned him away at the door.

The meat from the sausage stall he visited as consolation caused his belly to chum and rebel. Wary by now of offended proprietors, Dakar stilled his complaint. As his sensitized innards clenched into fierce cramps, he squeezed back tears of aggravation, paid for his scarcely touched meal, and turned his back on the puzzled vendor to sit by the gutter to regroup.

In dark thought and vile temper, the Mad Prophet weighed the temptation to ease his troubles between
scented sheets in a bawdy house. But even the thought of a paid doxy’s comforts shot an unpleasant, warning tingle through his crotch.

Bearded chin propped morosely on the knuckles folded over his knees, his hair stuck like crimped yam to his brow by the stifling, seaside humidity, Dakar began serious cogitation. While elegant, lacquered carriages and dusty drays rolled to whip cracks and jingling harness past his perch, his stumbling thought met enlightenment.

‘Ath!’ His burst caused an alley cat to streak behind a stack of barrel hoops. A street-child clad in motley stopped scavenging hand outs to regard him with startled eyes. Dakar paid neither any mind. ‘Fiends plague that interfering sorcerer, what I really need is a herb witch!’

The street-child sidled nearer and gave him a winsome smile. ‘Master, I know such a person. For a half-silver, I’ll take you to her cottage.’

Dakar glowered at the waif, whose bare feet and rags masked a disingenuous, well-fed frame. ‘Miserable robber.’ But hunger and thirst overcame his will to haggle, and he grudgingly doled out the coin.

The herb witch brazen enough to practise her craft in Tharidor kept a squalid shack in the alley behind the tanner’s yard. Shown to her sagging entry by the street-waif, who bolted immediately afterward, Dakar pinched his nose with sweaty fingers and regretted his need to continue breathing. The reek that drifted from the tanner’s was overpowering, even without the witch’s rain barrel, heaped under in desiccated entrails and alive beneath a sun-caught swirl of flies. The eyes of scavenging rats gleamed from the shadow under the footings, then flashed in darting retreat at his irritable rap on the door.

The warped, unpainted planks cracked to a squeal of
tin hinges. Fingers curled around the edge, the nails ragged and rimmed with dried blood. ‘Who calls?’ came a scabrous whisper.

Gagged beyond speech from the stench, Dakar jingled his wallet.

His name and his origins now a moot point, the herb witch opened her door.

Daylight struck through into clutter and darkness, and roused a dusky rustle of wings. A sleepy rooster crowed, answered by a second, while a stinging billow of herbal smoke and incense swirled out into the street. The woman who straddled the sill peered outward with red-rimmed eyes. Her hair was a nest of pale, unwashed hair, stuck with thyme sprigs and a white fluff of breast feathers that looked to have drifted and caught there. She wore deerhide painted with sigils and food stains, and her skin was blue with ingrained soot.

‘What’re you wantin’? A love-knot? A health philtre?’ She stabbed a knotty forefinger at the bulge of her visitor’s gut. ‘Must be a philtre, yes? Woman left you for someone more strapping, is it? Acting shy won’t change the truth.’

Dakar blinked and coughed out bad air in affront. ‘Actually, I need to have a geas lifted.’

The crone cackled as coarsely as her hinges. ‘Some girl’s put the come-hither on you, then? Ach, that’s a pretty enough lie. You expect me to believe it?’

‘This has nothing to do with problems concerning a woman!’ Dakar snapped. ‘Besides, if you have to slit open chickens to work an unbinding, I’ve certainly picked the wrong party.’

He spun to leave, but a pale hand shot out and clamped the wrist holding the money bag. ‘Such hasty thinking, foolish man.’ A breathy exhalation cracked into another wheezing laugh. ‘And as for slitting chickens, some clients expect it, which is all to the good if they pay. But one does tire of stewed fowl for supper.’

Too late for trepidation, Dakar was jerked face-about and dragged inside by a grip like steel pincers.

The herb witch pushed him down on a chicken crate, and kicked her rickety door shut with the back of a bare, bony heel. She then bent her elbows and drummed skinny fingers on her hips, while surveying her newest client through a twining maze of incense smoke.

The reek of tanner’s vats and offal crept undaunted through the musk of perfume. Breathing in tortured, shallow gulps, Dakar realized that, except for the chicken coop he sat on, the cramped little cottage was clean, if oddly furnished. Crates and cages for pigeons and barnyard fowl supported a trestle table, and a cot bright with woven shepherds’ blankets. Bundles of herbs dangled from the rafters, their thrown shadows entangled with talismans sewn of felt and glass beads, and the dried, yellow claws of mummified birds’ feet.

‘My wares,’ the crone admitted in brittle amusement. She bent, scrounged up a cloisonné tin of incense, and lit a fresh stick with a snap of her nail and a cantrip ripped out in burred consonants. Then she blew on the tip to fan the ember and fluttered her fingers toward the artefacts. ‘Mostly charms to ward drowning for sailors. Waste not, want not, I should say, and the hens’ feet add a nice touch of mystery.’ She shrugged. Tharidor’s fashionable types aren’t big on spending for spellcraft.’

Pecked on the buttocks by the birds cooped up behind the slats where he perched, Dakar fidgeted. He looked everywhere else but at the woman, who shuttled and wove around his person, muttering and tracing odd, red symbols with her incense. Smoke trailed from the ember like demon writing, distorted and erased on the draughts. The gloom clearly outlined to mage-sight the haloes of warped spells entangled in each gruesome little charm bundle. The witch worked her craft in blood-magnetism and the deep, earthy mystery that sang through the roots
of eldritch plants. The draw of the moon infused the wards over her shack and less clean things, which made the knotted seals that Koriani enchantresses amplified through crystal seem clear and straightforward by comparison.

Pressed by rising uneasiness, Dakar sought excuses to escape. ‘I’m not at all sure you can help me.’

The crone snapped erect, rustily cursing. Her eyes flashed baleful as the rats’ as she stubbed out the stick in a brass tray cupped inside a bird skull. ‘Certain it is that I cannot!’ She jabbed splayed fingers through the last spent embroidery of smoke. ‘That’s Fellowship magecraft laid on you! How dare you set me at risk, asking to break a geas of Asandir’s making? Well, I don’t meddle with that sort of binding, set as it is over your own given word.’

Chickens flapped and squawked as Dakar twisted to face her.
“That’s impossible.
I never -’ He stopped in remembrance and caught his full lower lip between his teeth.

The crone peered at his crestfallen expression through her maniacal tangle of hair. ‘So,’ she concluded. ‘You are trapped. Well and truly bound, and with only your fool self to blame.’ Her knees creaked under her deerskins as she leaned aside, scooped a pouch from a coffer and spilled out a painted set of knuckle bones. She spat once to dampen them, rolled them in her palm, and cast them skittering across the floor.

The last one whispered to rest against the toe of Dakar’s boot. Beaked heads tilted behind the crate slats as the chickens fluffed and dropped guano in suspicious scrutiny.

‘I can offer you only an augury, prophet,’ the herb witch resumed in a rasp like rust across velvet. ‘The man you must attend can be found two days hence, at sundown, in the shrine of Ath Creator by Ship’s Port.’

Dakar crashed his fists on the bird coop and cried
protest over the cackle of distressed fowl. ‘And if I refuse to rejoin him?’

The herb witch lifted thin shoulders. ‘Then, as you have seen, the geas of your Fellowship master will react in force and sour every pleasure of the flesh, even to the food and drink your body requires to survive.’

Dakar cursed in a mixture of languages and dialects. When he ran out of breath for his viciousness, a crafty look crossed his face. This geas. It ties me to the living presence of a man I consider an enemy. Is that where its limits lie?’

The herb witch nodded.

‘Living presence?’ Dakar prodded.

The flick of a dirty nail gave affirmation.

‘Then I’ll kill him,’ he promised, the rage embedded in his heart like gravel pressure-forced into glacial ice. ‘If that’s what it takes to win free of his company, Dharkaron as my witness, I’ll see the last Prince of Rathain well and thoroughly dead.’ The Mad Prophet shoved to his feet, fumbling after his silver.

But the crone snapped her chin aside and refused payment. ‘Save yourself, sorry man. To reach Ship’s Port in time for a rendezvous, you’ll need all your coin to rent post horses.’

Shadowed under gold-edged dunes in Sanpashir, while the ceaseless winds worry the carved ruts of cart tracks, a Fellowship sorcerer bows his head in mourning, then stirs and veils the face of the departed, who breathed through the glory of one last southern sunrise, but not long enough to know the coral walls and spindled towers of his native Innish …

Eventide dims the sea mists to lavender, and softens the jagged walls and shattered drum towers of Tysan’s abandoned city of Avenor; above the ruin, on a hillock clothed in myrtle, the s’Ilessid prince just arrived laughs in the teeth of ancient fears, and assures the uneasy retainers at his back, ‘Here will I raise walls and a family, and the armies that will march to claim victory over the Master of Shadow …’