The Ships of Merior (31 page)

While a lone rider on a black stud fares southeast, the Koriani First Senior reports of his journey to her Prime:
‘Arithon is making for Ship’s Port, surely bound for the open sea. He’s escaped us before on dry land. Over water, how shall we track him?’ And Morriel’s reply, ‘By means as old as time. Elaira shall be sent after him at my directive, to insinuate herself as his mistress…’

The shrine to honour Ath Creator lay well outside the walled harbour of Ship’s Port. No ceremonial building marked the site, nor ever had; the old beliefs took after Paravian ways, that an edifice of man’s design need not glorify the prime power that had made and Named all Creation. Only a worn, dusty path indented across the grey cliffs above the bay gave evidence of any activity beyond the swoop of gulls and nesting ospreys. Shadows striped the grasses as Dakar slid stiffly off the back of his lathered mount. He looped the reins over a weathered deadfall, too worn to care if the hack shied back and tore the bridle.

Exchanging horses in relays, he had been in the saddle two days. Sores galled his backside and knees like fresh vengeance; mere pittance beside the rancour that griped him due to Asandir’s geas. Riled as a smoke-hazed hornet, the lowering sunlight a flood of heat at his back, Dakar stalked down the narrow, stony defile toward the site of the shrine.

No voice disturbed the sour calls of fishing birds. The sussuration of surf funnelled up from the strand seemed the last sound in the world. The solitary trace of human
presence was a musk of sublimated wax unreeling on the draughts between the crags. Dakar used the stone to brace his balance. Light-headed as wind itself from days of thirst and hunger, even the thin fumes of candles turned his senses.

The cliff path plunged in descent. Ahead and to the left loomed a grotto, cut off from sound and sunlight. Cherished by no priest or attendant, water welled melodiously from the dark earth, to twine in splashing rungs toward the tide flats. Above the spring’s seeping brim, niches stepped into the natural rock cradled a sediment of congealed wax, dingy with trapped carbon and grained in lichens and moss.

Amid the remains of uncounted offerings left to celebrate Ath’s mystery, fresh beeswax dips shone ivory and gold, flames fluttered in the humid sea air. Limned in their crawling halos, Arithon, Master of Shadow, stood in the shrine exactly as the herb witch in Tharidor had foretold.

He would have died in that moment, had Dakar carried a knife. Bereft of any weapon; pained enough that his gorge rose for the fact his knowledge fell shy of bane-spells or riddles of unbinding, the Mad Prophet stopped in helpless hatred.

If the enemy he passionately wished to throttle heard the scraped steps of intrusion, he never turned, but sparked flame to a final candle, then spiked the light on the ledge alongside hundreds of others. Minutes passed. The sky beyond the grotto purpled and sank into indigo, while inside, the uncertain fires hissed and dwindled, to drown one by one in puddled wax.

Still, Arithon did not turn. Left no channel for his anger, Dakar fumed until reason intruded to argue why a man might bum candles alone in Ath’s shrine at dusk.

‘He isn’t gone!’ the Mad Prophet burst out. ‘Daelion Fatemaster grant me one prayer. Tell me Halliron didn’t die before Asandir got him home to Innish.’

Arithon bowed his head. ‘He passed the Wheel this morning. Just after sunrise.’ Whisper-quiet and level, he added, ‘Sethvir informed a soothsayer, who sought me out to bring word.’

Dakar swallowed awkwardly. ‘I’m sorry. Ath, I’m so sorry.’

Immersed in grief and self-pity, he fumbled to a spur of rock, and sat, and lost to his impulse to weep. In respect for the departed bard’s dignity, he found the restraint to keep silent until the final candle consumed itself in a spitting flare of wax; one drowned flame among thousands, an honour lit for a master singer talented beyond reach of millions.

Night by then had netted the last of the light. A movement in darkness, Dakar blotted streaked cheeks on his cuffs. He raised his head, shoved sticky hair from his temples, and discovered the shrine’s niche left vacant.

A moment’s search revealed Arithon standing outside, nervelessly still in a gloom that, for him, held no obstacle. Lined by the pale cream of surf, his black breeches and full sleeves fitted and neat, he faced Dakar with his head tilted an intent fraction to one side, much as he had in the past while he unriddled some melodic nuance of Halliron Masterbard’s teaching.

Antagonized by a mannerism drawn from his former, false identity as Medlir, Dakar stiffened. ‘You knew! You heard the resonance of the geas Asandir laid upon me and never bothered to warn.’

‘I did ask about the coin, if you recall,’ Arithon stated. ‘The harmonic pitch set about your person has strikingly similar overtones.’

Dakar fired back a filthy epithet, but got no reaction for his trouble. Riled all the more since Arithon’s patience could outlast him, he blurted, ‘Well, what do you intend to do now?’

‘I’m overdue to visit a certain tavern on Harbour Street.’ The Master of Shadow pushed away from the rocks. ‘You look as if you need a beer.’

‘Ath, no,’ Dakar cut back. ‘Not again. That ploy won’t serve any more to keep me pliant and drunk.’ To thwart Asandir’s geas and compromise the Shadow Master, he would need subtle planning and clear thought. ‘Now that I know it’s your company I keep, you won’t catch me muddling my wits.’

A stir of white shirt in the gloom, Arithon shrugged. ‘As you wish. The truth is,’ could do with a beer.’

‘Daelion’s pity!’ Dakar bristled in disgust. ‘Where’s your respect? The bard who loved you enough to share a master’s training lies dead! Is this how you honour his memory? By running straight off to get sotted?’

No expression on his face, Arithon murmured a line in liquid Paravian lost to hearing through the thrash of the surf. Surprised not to suffer the expected scalding retort, the Mad Prophet was caught flat-footed as the subject of his rebuke shouldered past. Compelled to scramble after, the fat prophet tripped and stubbed toes all the way back up the cliff path.

From sundown till dawn, the harbourside quarter of Ship’s Port brewed up a teeming moil of racket and crowds. Here, where tricksters juggled flaming torches, and the pawn stalls stayed open all night for sailors to trade trinkets for coin, the raucous parade of whores and the reeling celebration of deckhands on leave packed into kaleidoscopic hubbub. If the alleys overlooked by the gable-roofed shops seemed thronged as a holiday fair, the taverns were jammed to bursting. Over-dressed or half-clothed, a stew of sweating humanity gathered in the frenzied determination of sailors to cram nine months of pleasure into their first night ashore. Most rampaged and caroused until their coin ran out, then
stumbled to the purser of an outbound trader to sign for another voyage.

The taproom of the Kittiwake Inn claimed distinction as the wildest dive on Harbour Street. Since it lay nearest to the wharves, deckhands still rolling on sea legs swayed in for their first drink and often passed no further. Smugglers’ crews gathered there, sober and wary, ready for swift orders from their captains, that illicitly-laden ships might slip hawsers ahead of the harbourmaster’s officers for flight to a hidden cove.

At the Kittiwake, if a newcomer wanted beer or a table, he was likely to need bribes for the privilege.

Helplessly tied by Asandir’s geas, Dakar forwent his urge to complain. His resolve to stay sober in the cause of bloody murder now enforced by a shortage of coin, he cursed and jabbed elbows to plough aside revellers in his need to keep pace with Arithon.

Small and unfairly quick on his feet, the s’Ffalenn prince could shoulder through crowds like an eel. He already had the ear of the landlord, a tower of a man with red-veined cheeks and an ingrained stoop left over from service as a ship’s cook. The pair engaged in a conversation that Dakar was of two minds about overhearing, torn as he was between nosy habit and new-found, poisonous animosity.

Never mind that drunken song and laughter and the squealing shrieks of pinched barmaids would naturally defeat his best effort. The height of summer in a seaport was an unhealthy season in which to sample taverns. The Kittiwake’s stone and plaster walls dammed in a suffocating, sweat-humid heat, and the knife-scarred beams that braced the ceilings thumped to more racket upstairs. Resigned to claustrophobia and sour boredom, Dakar unstrung every one of his shirt laces, jerked open his collar and cuffs, and stowed his bulk against a post. He endured in dripping impatience, deaf to the jeers thrown his way over the unravelled state of his clothing;
apparently the herb witch’s chickens had picked his seat to hanging threads. That misfortune should hardly matter, Dakar sulked, since salt air and mouldy ships would rot the breeks off a man anyway.

Something Arithon said caused the landlord to nod in enlightenment. His booming reply could not be missed. ‘Captain Dhirken? From the
Black Drake?
Ship’s crew’s here, sure enough. Her master likes the table in the corner where the air’s fresh.’

A coin changed hands and Arithon backed up, fast reflexes alone averting collision with a prostitute’s overflowing bodice. He grinned at her disappointment, dropped a half-silver down the maw of her cleavage, and cheerfully bypassed temptation. ‘You heard?’ he called to Dakar. ‘Well, come on, then.’

As he nipped on between two contentious stevedores, the Mad Prophet made determined effort to follow. But the gap proved too tight to admit his fat girth. Cut off, jostled by tar-stinking celebrants, he cursed, craned his neck, and located the window in question, placed between the weather-checked tits of a wooden mermaid and a party of caulker’s lads who linked arms in rollicking song. The panes in the worn sash casement were firmed with grease, and cracked open because the tired frame had stuck that way.

‘Fresh air,’ the Mad Prophet grumbled under his breath. ‘Didn’t know this port had any that didn’t reek of ship’s bilge and fish.’

Arithon by then had ploughed the last yard to the table. A luck nothing short of miraculous allowed him an empty stool. He settled across the boards from a doxie with a waist-length black plait and immediately started to talk.

By now parched enough to regret his resolve not to drink, Dakar glowered, but failed to recapture the Shadow Master’s attention. If the confounded prince chose to flirt on the eve of Halliron’s death, that weakness
might as well lend advantage; in particular since the vessel he hoped to charter was a matter of public record.

Dakar’s beard hid a smile rowed with teeth like a barracuda. He measured the Kittiwake’s bawling crush of patrons, chose his mark, and launched himself toward a pigtailed pack of gamers in vindictive intent to cause mayhem.

His sally bowled aside a rat-thin pickpocket and fetched him with a thump against a bench where a bald brute with notched ears and tar-blackened knuckles dealt out a quicksilver stream of cards.

Dakar hiccuped through a contrite smile.

‘ ‘Scuse,’ he slurred on an approximate note of apology. Graceless enough to seem intoxicated, he affected a reeling stagger, stumbled, and hooked an ankle between one rickety leg and its cross-brace. The bench upset. Dingy cards, dice, and silver cascaded in all directions. Only a seaman’s fast reflex let the bald lout regain his feet.

‘You there!’ he screamed in indignation, jostled and poked as enterprising bystanders dropped in a seething crush to snatch and scrabble after coins.

Before the offended gambler could ram through to defend his scattered cache, Dakar raised an ear-splitting shout. ‘Are you Captain Dhirken’s scumbag lackey?’

The surrounding celebrants dropped into electrified silence. Swarthy bodies pressed into a close ring.

Cut off from the happy din at the fringes, red-eyed in a hellish play of lamplight, the bald brute licked broken teeth. ‘What if I am?’ He flexed his fists. Sun-browned, hairy forearms bulged with sliding knots of muscle.

A broad-hipped serving girl burdened with a tray saw trouble brewing and wisely changed course.

‘What quarrel have you got with Dhirken?’ someone screamed from the sidelines.

Dakar backstepped and rolled his eyes. Cramped by hostile shoves from slit-eyed, tattooed sailors, he jabbed his thumbs in his belt. ‘Nothing, nothing.’ On the tail of a disarming smile, he shrugged. ‘Or nearly nothing, surely. I simply heard about a rumour…’

‘What rumour?’ The bald man kicked aside the upset bench to a forlorn flutter of disturbed cards. He sauntered closer. ‘Better speak. Or believe this, I’ll pound your front teeth clean down through your bladder.’

Dakar edged from foot to foot, his round face blanched suet-white. ‘Are you one of Dhirken’s men?’

‘Aye, so I am. The
Black Drake’s
first mate, in hard fact.’ A curl of a thickened lip, a glower hot enough to sear, and a last brisk step brought the mate within range to strike. ‘State yer piece, you snivelling piggin of fish bait.’

‘Ah,’ Dakar swallowed and contrived to look pathetic. ‘Well, in the square by the harbourmaster’s, somebody mentioned that Dhirken’s crew were slow as tar in a hard frost. A man I know wants to lure the
Drake.
Well, he shouldn’t, if this is the truth.’

‘You believe that?’ the bald giant shouted.

Quiet had spread like flung poison to the farthest corners of the room. Every ear awaited Dakar’s answer; every eye measured his unease. The hiss of oil lamps blended with the whisper of heavy breathing, against which Dhirken’s mate cracked his knuckles, the pop of each gristled joint distinct as the snap of flung gravel. He spat on both palms and dried them on the tar-stained thighs of his slops.

‘Oh,’ declaimed the Mad Prophet, his bulging eyes fastened on the fists cocked and ready to fight. ‘I only came here to ask. But really, if the
Drake’s
a slack ship, you’ve shown me no proof to the contrary.’

From behind, a raw-boned sailor chuckled deeply. ‘Matey, here’s facts, if you want to hear straight. Dhirken’s a mincing girlie a man could knock flat with
a whistle, and the crew o’ the
Drake?
They’re a pack o’ lisping sissies that my lame little brother could whip spitless!’