Thieves' World: Enemies of Fortune (2 page)

Froggin’ gods, one of the surviving orphans had been Leorin and Leorin had been Cauvin’s wife for a few short hours last autumn, for the few hours it took to betray him to what remained of the Hand hiding out in the tunnels beneath Sanctuary.

Cauvin had escaped from the Hand a second time that night and Leorin had escaped the Irrune wrath he’d called down upon his captors. He’d hoped—because, though he couldn’t forgive his erstwhile wife, his heart still ached when he thought about her—that she’d have the sense to live her life far from Sanctuary. Far from him.

His wife had been beautiful—golden, curling hair, honey-hazel eyes, curves and grace—but she was about the same height as Cassata and had the same habit of twisting a bit of string between her fingers as she talked. The wisdom of his inherited memories said habits mattered more than appearances.

Appearances didn’t matter to the Hand—or, rather, appearance didn’t matter unless it was useful. A beautiful Leorin had been useful when no one knew who she worshipped. With that secret unmasked, beauty had become a liability—a beautiful Leorin could never have returned to Sanctuary.

The only questions worth asking were, Who had sent his wife back to Sanctuary? And why?

Cauvin had half a mind to walk right into the froggin’ shop and ask her. He hadn’t given in to that half … so far.

The trio concluded their business with Cassata and walked away from the shop, two headed off together and one headed toward Cauvin. He scooted silently over to the mule and had her walking when the Kintair thug came abreast of him. The two men gave each other the once-over and kept going.

Cauvin led Flower past Meerash’s shop. The mule was between him and the open door, and he was careful not to look into the shadows, but she’d see him—remember him—if she looked out, if she was Leorin … his wife. Cauvin told himself that he was, in his own way, warning Leorin—warning her that he knew who she was and that she needed to pack up and leave Sanctuary, this time for good.

The problem was, Leorin hadn’t gotten the message the last time Cauvin had led Flower past her shop, or the time before that; and Arizak wanted answers, results. Frog all, Cauvin didn’t want to stand in front of the Irrune chief and admit that he knew who had tied the knot around Meerash’s neck, where she was, and what she was to him. He didn’t want to say anything to anyone until he could say that Leorin was
gone.

The mule and Cauvin rounded a corner and headed back to the Wideway. With each step Cauvin cursed the luck that had brought Leorin back to Sanctuary while the one man he trusted completely was out hunting wizards. Frog all, he cursed the luck that had left him with a dead man’s memories, but not the wit to use them; and the sheep-shite luck that had brought him to birth in Sanctuary in the first place.

Widowmaker

C. J. Cherryh and Jane Fancher

“
S
ail ho!” the cry was, and Capt. Jarez Camargen of the
Widowmaker
climbed to the masthead himself with his best glass, sweeping the dawn sea.

A day and night of treacherous shifts and tricks, and now, with the wind off the starboard quarter, the
Widowmaker’s
best sailing point, there she was, their chase, the Yenized ship
Fortunate,
sail above the horizon.

“Ho, Cap’n!” came from his lieutenant, below. “No longer quite as
Fortunate,
eh?”

Camargen grinned, a wicked and wolfish sort of grin.
Widowmaker
was, to put it in the very best light, a pirate. Her prey had run her every trick in a thick old book, and here they were again, out of the isles and onto the southern coast.

They were a Yenized polacre xebec themselves, the
Widowmaker
—at least Yenized-built, before they’d taken her in the Isles. Capt. Camargen had liked the look of her: long, low-waisted, a pretty set to her lateen sails fore and aft, her bastard mizzen, which gave her power, and quick, oh, much better in his able hands than in the hands of the fool that had left her largely unmanned and anchored off Keina’s Head. Her former captain had been taking on water on that island when they’d seen black smoke billowing up from the harbor and their sweet xebec standing out to sea under all sail. The
Happy Isle,
she’d been, under a fool; but
Widowmaker
she’d become, and she had a nose for treasure—had a sure, keen nose, these days, wizard-guided, since they’d met up with old Hada Korgun and his grievance, and used him for a weathervane.

There he was, out under the bowsprit, incorruptible, as good a guide as a pirate’s instinct to the whereabouts of the
Fortunate.
They didn’t check him often, but he was there, arm outstretched, glassy eyes open, mouth still stretched wide with his dying curse, and where he pointed, there they sailed.

There was a Yenizedi wizard on board the
Fortunate,
likely in better shape. And they’d tried the soft approach—used
Widowmaker’s
Yenized-built outlines and her old Yenizedi flag to get close to the
Fortunate
the first time, but that trick would never work twice. Hada Korgun had laid his curse, burst his heart doing it, and now forget all the old bastard had said about duty to the king of Enlibar and the pardon they’d get if they only got his treasure back. A dead wizard didn’t keep promises any better than a live king, and Camargen never had liked that part of the bargain.

The
Fortunate
carried a number of items along with a scoundrel of a Yenized wizard, a man after Camargen’s own heart, who’d stolen this treasure from Hada Korgun by an act of hospitality betrayed … clever man, who had a very well-known ruby, the Heart of Fire, along with a book of spells and a gold-headed wand.

The Enlibrite, Hada Korgun, had lost his court job over that theft, the ruby being the property of the king of Enlibar. He desperately wanted his king’s property back, along with the head of the offender, that being the condition of his reinstatement. He’d approached them in the free port of Anbec, offered them considerable inducement to pursue the fugitive—for starters—and claimed the magical ability to track this prize.

All this was useful until they had the ship in sight and Korgun tried some rite or another attempting to link the two ships. He died in the magical backlash—died, or something like it. The crew had lashed him to the mast and kept him there four days, in the hopes he’d come around and blast the ship that now ran them a merry chase. His arm moved. Where that ship went, when it tacked or wore, it tracked, no matter the weather. But he’d begun to have an effect on the crew, just standing there in the way of hands on business, and it seemed less and less likely he’d come to and be himself again.

So they’d lashed him under the bowsprit, down where hands bound for the head could look out and wish him a good day, if they wanted. At night he had a wan kind of bluish glow about him, and for his part, Capt. Camargen would just as soon cut him free for fish bait, being averse to wizardry from the start and convinced by a long shot he didn’t need a wizard-compass to run down a bloody great Yenizeder merchantman in the middle of the ocean.

But the captain of that vessel was a right seaman, no question. They’d used all their tricks on each other, setting out decoys at night, muffling up their wizard-compass with sailcloth and dousing all lights to creep closer on a following breeze. They’d gotten the most of every wind that would serve, crept through a maze of islands and chartless reefs, turned tricks of light and weather, and all he’d done had kept the bastard from any civilized port, at least. Run as he would, every time he came close to land, he’d gotten between and chased him out to sea.

They’d be rich. The law of the Brotherhood was share and share alike, and they’d be rich when they ran that beggar down.

So the crew put up with misery, put up with a chase that dragged into days and weeks, into calms and blows and heat and frozen, deadly rigging. The deep calms had set them in sight of one another, the weed growing thick on both their bottoms, until they both sailed like slugs, and no time for either of them to heave down and scrape clean. The chase took on a nightmare slowness at times, every scrap of sail aloft and the log running slower, slower, while they blazed away at one another with Yenized Fire, and flung glass bombs, trying to set sails or pitch-soaked wood ablaze. Crew were scarred with burns, to a man.

Then they reached latitudes where storms grew deadly icicles in the maintop, that plunged to deck and dented the planks, where men took horrible falls, and thus far survived them. “’Cause he’s dead, we ain’t,” was the common wisdom, and the crew didn’t want to look at their wizard—all frozen up with icicles, one report said, but still moving—but they had acquired a superstitious belief that old Korgun was their luck as well as their compass.

A sensible captain might have called it enough.
Widowmaker’s
situation had gotten desperate, running them low on provisions and on water, the bitter latitudes wearing the already thin sails and rigging to a perilous state. At times they thought they’d have lost their quarry, and Captain Camargen began to think of ordering the
Widowmaker
to some wooded shore, some foreign port where they might forget the foolishness and get it out of their blood.

But there was that damned wizard-compass up under the bow, their figurehead. And just when they thought they’d lost her, there was the thrice-damned
Fortunate.
At times a glass showed her clearly, let them see that cursed Yenizedi wizard walking around, talking to the crew, sometimes just lingering back by the stern and watching them, just watching, silver hair streaming in the wind—a live wizard, to their dead one.

“We can find other prey,” Capt. Camargen had said. Even he had a conscience, and when water itself ran short, when they could take no time to send boats ashore: “We’re down to a ton of water,” he told the assembled crew, “and even the hardtack is running slim.”

“We ain’t et all the rats, yet,” the crew shouted back. “We’re goin’ on, Cap’n!”

The log itself had gone strange. What Capt. Camargen thought he’d written turned out written differently when he checked his course. His charts showed frayed and lost lettering just where it might have been most useful.

But now they were closer than they had been in weeks. The
Fortunate
was hull-up, and lagging, the wind deserting her sails as she bore close to a shore where the charts warned of reefs and shoals, another of her tricks, but not one she could play to great advantage: The
Widowmaker
could skin through channels where the
Fortunate
risked her bottom, and a xebec’s sails gave her much more maneuverability in the tricks of wind.

Around a headland, skimming close, close to shore, and now there seemed to be a spot on the lens. Capt. Camargen closed the glass, polished the lens with his cuff, and tried again.

Not a spot, after all. A spot of bluish haze, the sort of color that ought to belong on the horizon, but that had set down on the sea, right near that coast, and the sea beyond it all wrinkled with wind.

Camargen snapped the glass shut and glared, not needing a glass now to see that situation, the dog.

They had the wind off their starboard quarter, carrying them along at a good rate, no danger of a lee shore while this wind blew, but that riffling of the blue water out there was a white squall of the sort infamous in the southern sea, a brutal shift in the wind, in this case bearing right toward the coast, and the
Fortunate
sailing right along that coast. The
Fortunate
had that squall in their sights, too. Had it in their sights, bloody hell! That blackguard wizard might have stirred it up as a favor to the captain.

Hammer and anvil, the coast for the anvil and the squall for the hammer, and them a good long ways behind. The
Fortunate
was meaning to skin through, pass by that deadly rocky headland before the squall came sweeping down on that coast, and leave them in her wake. It intended the squall to cut them off, to force them to veer out to sea and sail wide of the weather.

They were both short of water and short of rations, damn them, and if the
Widowmaker
had to turn out to sea, she had as well turn around and go back to the Isles, her prey escaped, all this long chase for nothing.

That or a long, thankless search in every cove and inlet on this impoverished, treeless coast, for a ship taking on water.

Crew had seen it too—exhausted crew that had been hauling up glass bombs and fitting the cables to the catapult. Some tried to point to the situation.

“Carly!” Camargen yelled for the bosun. “All aloft. Mizzen royal, storm trysails! Gunners, shift everything forward!”

Carly stared at him half a heartbeat, the whole intention implicit in those orders. The pipe shrilled. There was a moment’s awful hesitation, old hands knowing full well what the game was: It was in their eyes. But then they howled with one voice, “Camargen or the devil!” and top hands swarmed aloft to spread all the canvas she had, while gunners worked like devils to shift their light catapults to the forecastle to back up the bowchasers.

Camargen dived down to the xebec’s little cabin for another look at his charts. The shore was notorious for its hidden reefs. In sight of the shoreline, he had his landmark in the headland itself, and he set everything in memory well as he could, because they might sail on their wind right across the teeth of that squall, much faster than the
Fortunate
on this point of sailing, and they were going to have to run up the
Fortunate’s
backside and come under fire from that towering deck in order to clear that space of coast before the squall swept them onto the reefs. The crew saw their prize; they cheered the choice they saw. They knew they could overhaul that bastard. If they could withstand the fire she could throw long enough and not sink her, they could board and take her.