Traitor's Knot (29 page)

For of course, if the casks became wrecked, the brig's crew would be left stripped of options. They must turn for shore and succumb to the ambush, or else waste from thirst one by one.

‘Man, you can't!' Up the mainmast, with the jury-rigged stay half-secured, and the mizenmast ratlines unravelling, Dakar shouted, frantic, ‘We'll be at the mercy of that sigil, each minute. The Koriathain can't withstand your bane-song. Their tracking hold's loosened. Did you not feel the shift? The web they've
cast over us is fraying! Show them one second's respite, they'll rally and slam us all over again.'

‘I know. Believe me, there's no better choice.' Erect, though the
iyats
shimmered and weaved in bilked riffles of wind all about him, Arithon was not calm, or dispassionate as he breasted the storm to the ladder and raced for the main-deck.

‘Use shadow!' urged Dakar. ‘You've recovered the natural use of your talent. Damn all to these fiends. We'll stay unharmed if we give in and sail. Turn for shore. The Prime will slack off, once we're bearing the direction she wants to herd us. Surely before we reach landfall, we can raise some form of spell-craft to defang the threat of those galleys!'

‘No.' The rejection rang, unequivocal.

Fionn Areth glimpsed Arithon's face as he passed, taut with decision that
could come
to cost him his freedom, and worse. His anguish was backed by restless awareness: that if sorcery were invoked, the toll of such reckoning must outweigh even the lives and the friendship of his loyal allies on
Evenstar.
‘That fleet is aligned with Lysaer's Alliance! They are innocents, Dakar, bearing arms from blind fear. How many more dedicates will waste their lives if I show their conflict a tangible cause? I will grant no fresh proof that their terrors are real! Not by my hand, and not for self-preservation under my conscious consent!'

Which meant the assault would end here, in victory or hard-fought defeat.
Evenstar
would win free, or go down, with the choice of collateral damage ashore set aside by unflinching adherence to character.

Prodded by impulse, Fionn Areth charged forward and joined the crazed sprint toward the hatch. ‘I'm coming. You'll need help.'

Arithon turned his head. He never broke stride. His rushed glance pierced, for its honesty. ‘I don't have a solution,' he warned point-blank. ‘If every-one on this ship could sing fiend banes, the Koriathain would still outlast us. But follow along. Grasp at straws, if you wish. For my part, there's naught left but hare-brained tricks and invention born out of necessity'

Late Autumn 5670

Belowdecks, enclosed by low beams overhead, the bangs and thumps of the fiend swarm seemed magnified. Fionn Areth trailed Arithon at reckless speed, his heart raced by trapped apprehension. He was grass-lands born, accustomed to open sky, with the sun and wind in his face. In this noisome, damp pit, airless dark became nightmare, made worse by the ravaging
iyats.
Possessed objects clattered, hell-bent to cause injury. Loose feathers clogged eyesight and breathing. Harried and tripped, he might fall and break bones, even drown, never again to glimpse daylight.

Ahead, the pale glimmer of Arithon's shirt vanished into the gloom. Strewn flour foreclosed any use of a lamp. Never mind the fine dust became volatile tinder,
iyats
would find a live flame irresistible.
Evenstar's
timbers offered too ready a fuel for an explosive conflagration. Fire would doom her crew fastest of all, roasting them in a pitch-fed blaze, or casting them adrift beyond sight of land, crammed into an open boat.

Arithon spared no thought for such matters. As well, a mage with initiate talent would not require a light. He pressed ahead with sped grace in necessity, where Fionn Areth must grope. Stumbling blind through the ship's pitching dark, the herder kept on out of obstinacy.

At the bottom rung of the lower-deck companionway someone's hands fumbled a grip on his clothing, then steadied his step in descent. ‘His Grace went that way,' said the seaman on guard, breathlessly apprehensive. ‘The hatch to the hold. He'll go down. You sure he's asked for your company?'

‘Somebody ought to stand at his back,' the Araethurian said in stout irony.

His grass-lands inflection raised instant contempt. ‘Yourself?' carped the sailhand.
‘Watch his Grace's back?
I'd sooner trust him to a circling shark!'

‘Let him go,' cracked Arithon. ‘I've already said the goatherd could please himself without hindrance.'

The sailhand's clasp reluctantly loosened. ‘Off you go. That way. Harm comes to him, Feylind will scuttle you like a gaffed dogfish.'

Fionn Areth stayed silent. If Arithon fell to mishap, far more likely no man would be left alive on the brig to brandish the punitive knife. The goatherd blundered ahead through the buffet, beset by grisly smells and random barrages of fish guts: the opportunistic fiends had seized on a carcass, then torn it apart in possession. Gagging as he dodged the sting of flung cartilage, the Araethurian held still as his eyesight adjusted to the pin-holes of light fallen through the cracks in the main-deck.

Arithon knelt by the lower hatch, hazed by rope shreds and sundry whirled flotsam. ‘Shout topside,' he called back to the watchful sailhand. ‘I'll need a pry bar to draw the last nails.'

The man climbed for the main-deck, chased by whirled puffs of down and a sleeting glitter of fish-scales. He coughed to clear his airway, cracked the overhead hatch, dodged a hurtling shoe, and nipped through in dogged pursuit of his errand.

The brief flare of daylight unveiled the Prince of Rathain, intent gaze locked upon his made double. His stripping search lingered, unswerved by the ear-splitting clamour, or the yells of the cook, separately damning his pots. Against such hell-bent noise, a masterbard's diction bit through with razor-sharp clarity. ‘Why are you down here? I want the truth.'

Fionn Areth could scarcely declare that he searched for a reason to hate. The excuse he presented hung, utterly lame. ‘I don't understand you.'

Arithon slapped down the ace of spades that nicked in to gouge at his face. ‘You can't explain why I have friends, with my history?'

Sweating beneath that unflinching perception, Fionn Areth let fly. ‘You would let us sink, here. Dishonour the vow you once made to a mother. See every-one you care about lost at sea, all for those others who'd trap you, ashore. Enemies who would just as soon see you burn. Folk with families you never saw. You
dare
the effrontery to act like they matter?
I will not be deceived by such pretence!'

Their locked stare lasted. Even when the crewman returned and slammed the hatch to, dropping dark like a wall to separate them.

Out of that fiend-festered maelstrom, and through the tread of the sailhand, approaching, Arithon gave his answer. ‘We're not done. Nowhere near close to losing those casks. This hull hasn't yet sprung a critical leak.' Dauntless, he accepted the offered pry bar, then began to draw nails, his exigent haste guided by mage-sight. ‘Koriathain know but one way to raise power,
and I am not out of options.'

A squeak of tight wood saw the hatch cover loosened, and time had run out for discussion. ‘I'm going down,' Prince Arithon said. ‘If you follow, beware.
You'll step into danger. At this point, I have to use fiend banes. The effects cause the
iyats
to disgorge their energies. They'll fight, even turn in attack as they're drained. My banishment cannot act on them cleanly. Not with three diligent circles of Seniors and the Great Waystone actively feeding them.'

His rapid statement in fact mapped a war against entities enspelled by coercion. The sailhand took back the pry bar, unasked. ‘You'll sing interference throughout our ship, the same as you did before?'

‘No,' Arithon said, then explained. ‘This pass, I'll have to run the tonal vibrations through air. The Prime's sigil is set into the sheathing and laid against
Evenstar's
timbers. Opposed in headlong contact through wood, her forces and mine could spark off a conflagration.' To the herder he added, ‘If you come, I can't assure you protection. The swarm is going to center around me. Mishaps in that hold are going to increase. Since a quartz-driven binding won't let the sprites leave, they've no choice but turn viciously violent.' To the sailhand, he finished. ‘Seal the hatch. Keep it closed at all costs. If
Evenstar
burns, or starts taking on water, tell Feylind to abandon the ship. Launch the two boats with all hands and row for your very lives!'

The sailhand's nerve wavered. ‘Leave you below?'

‘And any-one with me,' Arithon cracked. ‘No questions. No argument. Batten the hatch. Post a diligent guard.' As a wet crash from below signalled another cask hurled and demolished, he exhorted, ‘If I need aught else, I'll shout. My voice, do you hear? You'll not answer another.'

The seaman nodded, unhappy.

‘Good man. Hold the line.' Beyond option, out of time, the Master of Shadow yanked open the grate. Air-borne water sprayed out, mixed into a gyre of splintered staves. He ducked the macerating onslaught, evaded the scything spin of a barrel hoop, and slipped through.

His agile descent down the ladder was hard followed by Fionn Areth.

The hold was a jet well, alive with the whining, vexed breezes of
iyats
seeking invention. Off to one side, a cask creaked and sloshed. The air smelled of bilge, hot steel, and soaked tarps, stitched by the manic splashing of waterspouts looped up in defiance of gravity. While Fionn Areth stood blind, groping clumsily to re-orient, a hardened hand caught his collar and yanked.

He staggered aside, while something bulky whipped past his head and just missed clubbing him unconscious.

‘Ballast rock!' Arithon snapped in his ear. ‘Without mage-sight, you're a helpless target.'

Again without asking, the grip steered him on. Fionn Areth was shoved the next stumbling step, then roughly repositioned, close enough to his enemy's back that he felt the man's light, rapid breathing.

‘Stay close! The
iyats
must demand all my attention, and no way else can you hope to survive this.' Athera's Masterbard gathered himself then, and launched into the threnodies for fiend bane.

The notes were arrhythmic, and difficult. Their tonal balance ached the teeth. Pressed against the singer's vibrating form, Fionn Areth shared a sense of the coiling tension required to create the exacting pitch. Tuned sound pierced his mind like razor-taut wire. Each fluid, transformational run sieved deranging harmonics through the echoing hold of the ship. The flow pierced pandemonium. Its unsubtle, nerve-cringing tempo disrupted the
iyats
and sapped the flux of their energies.

Unable to cross-link their matrix of being into material possession, their hold upon captured objects faltered, then failed. A clatter of noise ripped the dark, as sprung wood staves, whirling barrel hoops and ballast stones, and scooped water sliced out of suspension and crashed. The din was horrific. The brig's timbers rebounded to the bludgeoning impact of who knew what load of dropped wreckage. Without light, the damage could not be assessed. Pelted by spray and oddments of wood, while glued, sweat-soaked, to Arithon's back, Fionn Areth fought blanketing panic as he faced the gravity of his predicament. He knew
nothing
of ships. The fierce slap of liquid over his feet might have been bilge, or a sprung seam that let in the sea. The blanketing dark left him no choice but to suffer the peril of joined battle, tied up by his helpless ignorance.

Beyond such uncertainty, Arithon sang, now pressing for increased volume. Though such harsh triplets
must
strain the voice, and unhinge the most rapt concentration, he struck each piercing pitch without cracking. Throughout the dimmed hold, the
iyats
responded. The freakish swarm shifted, impelled to escape the harmonies that gouged them to entropic destruction.

And there, true to Arithon's horrific forecast, the Prime Matriarch's sigil recontained them.

The hold's contents and casks were no longer an arena for sport, but the field of contention for the energy sprites' basic hold on survival.

Evenstar's
stakes were not one whit less. As the trapped fiends recoiled in back-lash, their locked contest with Arithon redoubled. Gathered like wraiths, the unseen creatures closed in, lashing up vicious, hot breezes. Small objects and slivers of wood whistled in, stinging flesh and stabbing through clothing. Arithon changed key, raised his frequency, then sounded a drilling overtone through his teeth. The whistle ran chills over Fionn Areth's skin and ripped like sharp pain through his viscera.

Rocked to vertigo, he snatched and caught Arithon's shirt to keep balance.

The soaked flesh beneath was quivering with strain. Shocked by the force of the bard's raw exertion, Fionn Areth almost tripped as a barrel hoop reeled into his feet. As Arithon's fist snatched him short of a fall, then forcibly tugged him a tangential step sidewards, the herder realized: the urgent cue pressed him to move with his protector across the beleaguered hold. The Araethurian was forced to keep pace by touch. Smothered in darkness, he could not guess what bent drove the sorcerer's intentions.

But the Master of Shadow engaged no dark powers. Through the bruising
collisions, the barked shins, and the stumbling recovery of each misplaced step, Fionn Areth at last discerned the purpose: Arithon laboured to shift the imperilled casks farther aft. There, he padded them under a wadding of tarps and ripped netting, scavenged off the baled silk and sundry crates of stacked cargo.

Though clumsy, a talentless partner could help. Fionn Areth hefted barrels and lugged armloads of burlap in shuffled steps through the darkness. If the slippery bilge grating was littered with splinters, broken staves, and flung rocks; if he blundered into the sodden wads of dumped grain-bags and snarls of unspun silk, he regrouped, steadied upright by Arithon's shoulder.

Throughout, the bard whistled his tooth-grating threnodies. Marked as their deadly adversary, the fiends whickered and dived, harrying at his person. They hampered his footsteps and snatched at his flesh, and snapped gusts to hinder his vision.

He sang them down. Unremitting, his voice drove their railing jabs back, pealing cascades of triplets that stayed achingly pure. As the casks were restacked and swaddled over in cloth, Arithon spared the astonishing grace to bestow the odd back-slap of encouragement.

Fionn Areth blinked stinging sweat from his lashes; spat the bitter taint of splashed brine. He worked himself ragged to distance the thought, that all adamant striving was wasted. How could a man hold those sharp notes without tiring, or keep rhythm with such aching, tight clarity? How long, before Arithon spent his last strength or grew hoarse from extended exertion?

The ordeal reeled on without sign of requital. Against quartz-driven malice, no flesh-and-blood artistry might wrest back the hope to snatch triumph. Then the moment arrived. Arithon faltered. His exhaustion finally wracked his critical timing off true.

At the first wavered note, he stopped his fierce keening. Silence clapped down like a shock on the nerves. The restless, enraged pack of fiends came unhinged. Restored to autonomy, they rippled through air, snagging up dropped bits of jetsam. Ballast rocks, loose bits of wood and snarled cloth, the collection stormed down in a battering wave. The volley of viciously animate debris was aimed to pulverize human resistance.

Fionn Areth tucked his head under crossed forearms. The reckoning had come. Coerced to abandon his upright principles, he would die here, entrapped in the feuds of a sorcerer.

‘Faint-hearted,' gasped Arithon on a spent breath. ‘You don't pray to be saved by the Light?' His manic, phrased mockery masked the movement as he reached, lightning-fast, for his sword.

Blade sheared from scabbard with a metallic chime, ink against jet in the darkness. Amid mobbing fiends, a pallid light gleamed. The Paravian runes woke, blinding, and pealed out a silvery chord as enchanted steel roused to the starspell inlaid at its forging. The clarion cry sang like the ring of struck bronze, expanded through subsonic registers.

Light scattered the dark, and the embattled hold sprang into untrammelled view. Raised bilge wheeled, glistening, through the grinding tumble, as possessed rocks skittered and smashed to fragments. Billows of frayed silk slithered and knotted through the rags of ripped tarps and garrotting swatches of burlap. At their backs, their painstakingly piled casks offered no cranny in which to evade the incoming assault.