The Dragon Round (2 page)

Theirs is a seafaring city that has largely traded its fishing fleet for trading galleys and its nets for coin purses, whereas Ayden has always trusted the endless bounty of its mountains: the stone and ore, the trees and game. Even the ancient shadows long to be shaped into stories featuring wondrous beasts and secret caves. Hanoshi stories are about the joy of riches and the pain of their loss. They would only shape the shadows on
Comber
if they could be boxed for sale.

Everlyn looks around her cabin. The small room is packed with barrels of golden shield, a curative herb they bought across the Tallan Sea. She's spent every spare moment of the last three days turning it into medicine. The Hanoshi council will give it away for free to employed citizens. The Trust, which owns
Comber
, is charging the city
just a nominal coin for the voyage, but this is not a selfless act. The Trust wants to become a ruling company, and ruling companies realize that if the city perishes of the plague, there will be no one left to rule or employ.

Everlyn lifts the lid of a pot simmering on the small iron stove at one end of her spattered worktable. She has spent so much of the past three days in here reducing the shield to medicine, she hardly smells it anymore. This disturbs her. Fresh, the shield smells like liver. As medicine, it smells like rotten liver. Oh, what she must smell like.

It's a small sacrifice, though, compared to the effects of the flox, which bubbles the skin as if boiled from within, then cools into a cracking black crust. The luckiest die, and most are that lucky.

Everlyn rattles through a wooden box under the table, pulls out a clear bottle of fine red powder and pockets it. From a different box she removes a larger green bottle with a skull painted on the label and takes a long pull. She swallows a belch, chases it with another, longer pull, then puts the bottle back and goes below, slamming the door behind her. Let the privateers hear that.

Tuse stalks the alley between the rowers' benches, so tall he shifts from hunching to squatting to both beneath the overhead. He coils and uncoils a white whip. “Fifty-seven strokes that took.”

“I'll say it again: They've had too much,” Everlyn says.

“I haven't,” one rower says, grinning wildly. A bear-claw brand glistens on his shoulder. A cut from Tuse's lash bloodies his cheek.

“Especially you,” she says.

“You're worried about my health?” Bearclaw says. He shakes his leg shackle. “I'm not one of them. I'll die down here. Might as well be fired up.”

“I won't have it,” the rower behind him says. “None of us will.” Having no shackles, he looks around. Unlike Bearclaw and the other five prisoners leased from the jail in Hanosh, the rest of the rowers wear a sodden armband with the crest of their guild, the Brothers of the Oar. “Brothers don't cheat. Look to Hume.”

Hume is a silent mountain. His eyes are closed. He may be asleep. Yet he pulls true. The brothers have looked at him in admiration before. They aren't as inspired now.

“I need some,” a brother says. “To get the job done.”

“And me,” another says.

“Oarmaster,” Bearclaw says, “I asked first.”

“You'll die,” Everlyn says. “And I won't give you the means. Or let anyone else.”

“It's not your choice,” Tuse says. “Should I tell the Trust an Aydeni tried to sabotage the trip? How many more would you be risking then?”

Everlyn chokes on her fury. The math is easy. She's done it with every dose of powder she's administered: How many will she save in Hanosh for each rower she might doom on the
Comber
?

She takes out the bottle of red powder and a spoon. Everlyn starts aft with a prisoner, who shakes his head. Some brothers cheer until one of their own takes a huge snort.

“I said it's to get the job done,” the brother says and stares at his oar.

Tuse grunts. Bearclaw laughs. Hume pumps the oar. The drum beats on.

Once she's done, Everlyn tucks a stray lock of hair behind her ear, holds her chin up, and says, “I have pots to tend.” Tuse ignores her. She marches past him, climbs the aft ladder, and sees the other mates staring abaft. They look concerned. Maybe there
are
privateers out here.

Livion eclipses the sun with his
hand and peers around it. “Do you see that? On top of the mist.”

“Too high for a sail,” Solet says. “Oh.” He squeezes the rudder tighter. “Could we outrun it?”

“It might not see us,” Livion says.

“It won't have to. The stench of the shield will lead it right to us.” Solet curses. “Why couldn't
Comber
be a trireme? We'd have marines. More weapons. Better defenses. The same speed.”

“At ten times the expense,” Livion says. “I'll wake the captain.”

Jeryon rubs his face awake. The
mates weary him, and he needs a shave too. As a man's chin goes, so goes the man, and his will be impeccable. He puts a small towel and clay pot of soap on a shelf beneath a porthole and takes his razor, a circular copper blade, from its ivory case. It would be a ridiculous indulgence if not so useful.

Maybe Livion is worth saving,
he thinks,
if he could shave away the bad influences. It would also be indulgent, but he should give his mate that chance. Why should someone suffer for another man's wrongs?

Jeryon hears Solet say, “Oh.” Through the porthole, he sees it: a tiny shadow creeping on the verge of dawn. He holds his hand at arm's length. The shadow's a quarter-thumb wide, no bigger than a fire ant. His stomach churns. The math is easy. If the shadow reaches the
Comber
, it'll cover the entire ship.

As Livion runs overhead to the stern deck ladder, Jeryon fits the razor into its case and pockets it.

2

Everlyn dodges Livion as he slides down the ladder from the stern deck and bangs on the captain's door. He sticks his head in briefly, then walks past her onto the causeway over the rowers' deck. He says to Tuse below, “Silent drumming, double-time.”

Tuse glances up. “Aye.”

“And shutter the ports,” Livion says.

Tuse nods to the drummer stationed by the mast, who plays a
little roll to signal the change, then taps his heavy sticks to keep the beat.

The relative silence is astounding. Everlyn is almost dizzied by the absence of pounding, as if someone had pulled her feet out from under her. She grabs Livion's arm and says, “What is it?”

Before he can answer her, Jeryon emerges from his cabin. His black jacket emphasizes his bony frame, his red three-quarter pants reveal it, and his yellow cotton blouse, regardless of the rank its color designates, does nothing good for his pallor. His clothes have been fiercely brushed and pressed, though. His only informality is a pair of old sandals cut square in the back, Hanoshi-style. Boots are encouraged for officers on Hanoshi ships, but in his mind only Aydeni wear boots.

Jeryon tells Livion, “Break out the crossbows. Eight men to fire, two to load, and I want all sixteen loaded to start. And get the harpooners on their guns.”

Livion says, “We're not going to run?”

“We're running already,” Jeryon says. “It won't make any difference if we're seen.”

Livion knows better than to say they can't possibly win. Jeryon admires his restraint. “I have a plan,” he says. “I hope we don't have to use it.”

Everlyn says, “Will you tell me—”

“You'll be told what you need to be told, when you need to be told,” Jeryon says.

She screws up her mouth and nods. He sounds like one of the Hanoshi ladies on the Crest, with their “I'll tell you what's wrong with me” and “I know what medicine's best.”

“Livion, task two sailors with bringing an extra sailcloth to the poth's cabin and a few casks of water. Now,” he turns to the poth, “cover the barrels and crates with the sailcloth and keep it drenched. If the
Comber
's just a smoking hull when it reaches port, our cargo will still survive.”

“Might not be fire,” Livion says.

“Always prepare for the worst,” Jeryon says. “Makes all other outcomes seem less terrible.”

Jeryon climbs the stern deck ladder. When Everlyn turns to Livion, he's already beyond the mast. Every word he says springs a sailor into action like a ball scattering skittles.

Everlyn scans the horizon. No privateers. Sailors pass her with the sailcloth. As they go into her cabin, she bends over the larboard rail to look past her cabin to stern. Except for a single far-off gull haunting their wake, they're all alone.

On the stern deck Jeryon asks
Solet, “Gliding or flapping?”

“Gliding. It dove a few times, then floated up again.”

“Good,” Jeryon says. “Flapping means it's interested.”

He rubs his chin and considers the sail, a triangle the same yellow as his blouse, and the three banners dangling from the yard of the galley's fore-and-aft rig: company, city, captain. Jeryon's, striped blue and white, is the smallest. It's also set at the bottom, the most easily replaced.

Jeryon says, “Steady as she goes.” He slides down the stern ladder and orders the sail and banners brought down, as he would before a storm. They'll slow, but their profile will be smaller. Better to lose an hour from their schedule than to be seen and lose their schedule entirely.

Livion stands on the foredeck between
the galley's two harpoon cannons, bulbous iron vases mounted on steel tripods bolted to the deck. A dozen single-flue irons are stacked beside each, and a metal barrel with powder sits on the main deck, given some cover by the foredeck. Trust ships can whale if it won't affect their schedules, which means Jeryon rarely allows it. But on this trip the cannons are meant only for defense.

When they'd set out, Livion told the crew that the Trust believed
Aydeni privateers would attack them. The sailors had thought that far-fetched, regardless of the rumors spreading through the Harbor. None had imagined this alternative.

Beale, a harpooner with arms as thick as his weapon, says, “Will we fight?”

“If we do, we'll be ready,” Livion says. “I'll take the larboard cannon.” Beale nods.

Topp, a crossbow loader, says, “It would make a rich prize.”

“For one ship in a hundred,” Livion says. “And the one in a hundred men on it who survives. You know what happens to the other ninety-nine. Let's not push our luck.” He heads for the stern deck.

Beale says, “I can't think of a ship that's done it.”

“So someone's due, right?” Topp says. “One good shot, and you could get promoted to mate.”

“And I'd make you a harpooner so you can see how hard it is,” Beale says. “It would be an interesting shot though.” He swivels the starboard cannon, aiming over the horizon. “A whale's a cow compared to that.” When Topp doesn't respond, he realizes the captain is coming toward them. Topp is already pulling crossbows from compartments under the foredeck. Beale loads the cannon, but the captain takes no notice of either of them.

Solet and Livion watch Jeryon pace
fore and aft to the beat of the oars. It's maddening, his precision, but it's better than watching the shadow slowly approach.

Solet says, “You've been through this before, haven't you?”

“Yes, but not with one so big,” Livion says. “We still lost the ship.” He glances back. “Twenty-five minutes. Could be twenty.”

“If we could beat it, though,” Solet says, “would we render it? No one's getting a share this trip. Only the captain gets a bonus. But we'd all get a taste of the render.”

“We can't beat that,” Livion says.

“What if we did beat it?”

“We couldn't render it,” Livion says. “Not with our schedule.”

“What's a few extra hours?”

“The flox kills quickly. Maybe ten people the first hour, twenty the second, and so on.”

“Maybe so,” Solet says. “Maybe not. What's a few people you've never met against a fortune you'll never see again?” he says.

“I'd be happy just to keep my life,” Livion says. “Again.”

“And what's your life now against what it could be?” He looks at Livion. “Stop thinking like him,” Solet says. “Think like the owners. The Trust would also get a share of the render. An immense share. The dragon's share. Your woman's father wouldn't just bring you into the family business then. He'd give you a piece of it.”

“The only way to get it, though,” Livion says, “would be to betray the captain. And mutiny never pays out in the end.”

“Not mutiny,” Solet says. “Opportunity.”

Livion steps away. He should have Solet broken down to sailor. He would if what he said didn't ring true. His monthly would never satisfy Trist, and to her father anyone below captain is a ship's boy. And would the flox spread so quickly? People had been staying indoors. The city guard had been keeping the streets clear. Victims had been isolated. And all the tales he's heard about the plague's virulence, they could be just that, tales. Tristaban, though, she's real.

Did he just see a flap? A grue clutches his spine.

While pacing, Jeryon keeps his head
down and his eyes up so he can read Solet's big mouth and expressive lips. He'll deal with the second mate in a moment.

He enters the poth's cabin. Drenched sailcloth cloaks the barrels and crates, many of which are under the table, and it's anchored by the casks of water. He nods and notices the packets in a crate by the door. Another crate holds various tinctures and pills.

“Bandages,” Everlyn says. “I never travel without some. And medicine. I could prepare better if I knew what we were facing.”

Jeryon says, “Burns.”

She plucks some bottles from the table. “Salves.”