The Ships of Merior (51 page)

‘But who
is
she?’ persisted the twin who was female, her grip on Arithon’s arm grown possessive out of blind instinct.

‘The lady’s called Elaira,’ Arithon said. His bard’s tongue made music of the name, and offered back skilled reassurance as he readdressed his visitor directly. ‘Were you bidden to see me, or Dakar?’

Cautious of his empathy, now schooled to sharp strength by his study under Halliron, the enchantress defended, ‘I came as a friend.’

‘But your kind go nowhere without purpose.’ Arithon’s sudden, flat expression set a sting to that truth as he gestured toward the crooked lintel of the shack. ‘You may as well come in.’ A corner of his mouth crawled up. ‘Or is it a Koriani preference, to address their affairs while standing ankle-deep in a mud puddle?’

Aware in that moment of the seeping, wet rings that darkened the hem of her skirts, Elaira stepped back. Her laugh of embarrassment was graciously passed over as Arithon dismissed his small admirers.

‘Over there,’ he said to the children, ‘see that plank? You can prop it on the trestles and practise with the plane. If your work is very neat, I’ll let you help finish with the gaff.’

This suggestion greeted with a whoop, the twins
moved off, chattering. ‘She has pretty hair. Red and brown all at once. Is he going to kiss her, do you think?’

The reply drifted back, rife with scorn. ‘Feylind! You ninny! Why should he want to do that?’

Finished wringing out her damp hemline, Elaira straightened up to find Arithon beside her. His grip as he took her elbow was more firm than she recalled, and each steely, flexible finger seemed to sear through her sleeve like a brand. His sailor’s dress and dishevelled grooming made him exotic and strange, too immediate a presence to bridge a prolonged gap of years and separation.

Then he drew her past the rude doorway into close gloom. By the feeble light threaded through chinks in the artless board walls, Elaira glimpsed coils of new hemp, a box jammed with cleats and oak blocks bought used from the local fisherfolk, and incongruous in the clutter, a level set of pegs that hung the Masterbard’s lyranthe, his sword, and a new woollen cloak and an oilskin. Then Arithon closed the leather-hinged door. The. shrill talk of the twins, and the hesitant, rasping first strokes of the plane came through muffled, while something amorphous slouched in the corner choked through a stertorous snore.

Elaira’s small start transmitted to Arithon’s hand.

Moved to amused exasperation, he called, ‘Dakar!’

The mass gave a moan, unfurled, and dug plaintive fingers into a thatch of screwed hair. An epithet emerged. Then the fat hands groped blindly and closed on a whisky crock as though the contents offered sustenance and life. To a belch and a fanfare of rank language, the Mad Prophet cracked open bleared eyes.

‘A woman!’ He shot erect too quickly, slopped an astringent spill of spirits, and yanked down his shirt to cover the pink dome of his belly. The pleased smile he began froze and died as the female in Arithon’s company crossed the unshuttered window.
‘Dharkaron’s Spear and Black Chariot!’ Dakar battered to his feet in alarm. ‘What are you doing here?’ To Arithon, he cried in agitation, ‘Send her out! Now. She’s Koriani, and worse than a plague-storm of fiends.’ Hazed by raw nerves, he hefted his crock. The draught he slugged down left his eyes squeezed tight shut. As if respite from sight lent him patience, he finished in forced enunciation, ‘If Asandir knew you’d let her kind in, he’d bring down the roof on your head.’

Arithon steered Elaira past a brimming bucket. ‘If you continue to shout, you’ll achieve as much by yourself.’

‘Damn you,’ Dakar swore. ‘This isn’t funny. Mark me, if you don’t send that witch packing, the one secret you can’t afford to share will be in Morriel’s ear by evening.’

Elaira’s breath caught. The nuance of Koriani observation inferred the entreaty was genuine; that despite a master’s training at magecraft and every informed and formidable defence, Dakar believed Arithon to be vulnerable.

Desperate that the order’s plans for her should not yield any unexpected windfalls, Elaira wished herself blind and deaf as Dakar resumed his invective. ‘Don’t claim I didn’t warn you.’ Despite a tipsy sway that undermined his will to stay upright, he lurched in determination for the doorway. ‘When Asandir makes his inquiry, tell him I had no part in this.’

The glare he shot Arithon held a beacon flare of hatred. Elaira sensed its passion like the flung-off, sudden sting of static, nothing like the disgruntled irritation the Mad Prophet had shown while intoxicated in the past. Unsettled by the profound depth of change in him, she watched him trip on unsteady feet and bang headlong into the doorpanel. A hinge burst from the abuse. Then the cobbled-together raft of planks gave way. Ejected amid a spill of razed boards, Dakar measured his length upon his belly.
The filtered rasp of the plane faltered and stopped, replaced by shrill laughter from the twins.

Dakar snarled a curse, ripped his doublet off the claws of bent nails, and rescued his dropped crock just as the dregs escaped the neck. ‘Ah, Ath,’ he grumbled. ‘Should I be surprised there’s no luck in the presence of a witch?’ After a last scathing glower through the doorway, he heaved himself off to console his unhappiness elsewhere.

The renewed scrape of the plane over wood kept time to a peaceful stillness. In gloom scarcely mitigated by the additional influx of light, Elaira picked out a fungus colony of pans and rusted buckets scattered across the shell floor.

‘You have to credit our spellbinder for originality.’ Arithon pulled out the only available stool for her, then settled himself on an emptied beer keg. ‘Dakar set all the windows in the roof.’

Elaira sat. Her fine linen skirt rasped on the saw-grained wood of the bracing, and her foot bumped an ill-fitted peg. The room’s split personality haunted: ramshackle joinery at silent war with the lone, level trestle, spread with parchments lined with fine chalk. Sketched in a hand unmistakably Arithon’s lay the plans of his thirty-foot sloop.

‘Best keep your prophet’s hands off the shipbuilding,’ Elaira remarked with a dry smile.

Arithon laughed. ‘The twins won’t let him come near. “Keep your fat hands off, y’old drunk!”’ His incisive imitation of childish scorn cut off in sudden sobriety. ‘Enchantress. Koriani. How did you find me?’

Denied the easy, instinctive rapport of their first meeting, Elaira stayed still enough to mark the moisture that ticked off her soaked hem. She matched his gaze and gauged his reserve through her arts; and deduction implied the question pertained more to Lysaer s’Ilessid and his massed armies than to her, or any meddling of
her order. ‘I think,’ she said, husky, ‘you could guess.’

‘Jaelot,’ he surmised. Green eyes that threatened to dissect her heart like sharp knives turned down and fixed on the hands which had wrought a great and joyous miracle on the solstice: an artist’s unfettered celebration of beauty that a fate cursed by geas had recast to invite his downfall.

His guilt filled an unpleasant interval, that his passion for music had led him to careless betrayal of the very foundation of his principles. Then he said, ‘Are you here to help or to hinder?’

Elaira swallowed, set back by his directness. ‘You don’t know?’

That made him look up, pitched taut with an anger so virulent, she lost any footing to fathom its origin. ‘What should I know?’ His sarcasm raked her. ‘Hasn’t, your order’s prying interest in my affairs unearthed enough sorry facts?’

‘I couldn’t guess, not being privy to the secrets of the Senior Circle,’ Elaira said, too wise to give ground to his temper. Her trained eye had caught the minute change in tension as he braced for her condemnation.

When she gave no reaction, he drew breath to say something less forgivable.

But the wry, patient tilt to her eyebrows set him back, and the malice he used to defend his deepest feelings bled away. His attention combed over all of her then, from the heavy auburn hair spilled loose from the braid that constrained its unruly fall, to the three coins for luck a thief’s superstition made her sew to the turned-back lining of her cuff, to the silly wet drape of her hem. Her eyes in the gloom were soft opal and mystery, and firmly determined in kindness.

Disarmed, he laughed with the warmth she remembered. ‘You won’t be put off through ill manners, I see.’ The compassion that kept his fate hurtful rasped through. ‘I’m still in your debt for past service, but Dakar
is forced company enough. Can you respect my flawed intentions and leave Merior?’

That’s what you want?’ Elaira asked, amazed to find herself steady. Let him answer, and she would have excuse to evade the entrapment set by Sethvir’s prophecy and Morriel’s invidious plots.

‘What I want hasn’t merited much priority,’ Arithon pushed to his feet. A gust raked the shed; the mirrored liquid in the pans shattered into rings touched off by fallen droplets. Outside, the plane lay silent, the twins fled off home as a barrage of fresh rain pocked the gapped shakes of the roof. ‘Stay if you wish. I can’t stop you. Once the sloop’s fitted out, I will sail.’

Fretted by currents too dreadful to fathom, he paced, his quick energy a challenge: should her Koriani arts attempt to finger the changes Desh-thiere’s works and a masterbard’s gifts had stamped in him, the insight was not offered freely.

Elaira arose. On parting she gave him the two truths she had unentangled in her oathbound obligations: ‘Merior has no one trained in herbals and healing. And the prophet you keep in your company would as soon put a knife in your ribs as offer you comfort or friendship.’

That evening, tied by Morriel’s immutable will, she unpacked her jars and her remedies and arranged room and rent for an extended stay.

Dakar passed out senseless on the boarding house porch, while the fishermen who crossed the shell fiats on return from their dories were arrested by a cascade of lyranthe notes. The melodies burned like sparks through the dusk, by turns exalted to a tingling joy, or else plangent with a sorrow to uproot the heartstrings and make the very stars seem to shimmer through the clouds like strewn tears.

Captain Mayor Pesquil, commander of the northern league of headhunters, straightened up from his examination, knee-deep in grass rimed with frost. His expression stayed as closed as a steel trap as he surveyed the site of the latest massacre. The dead did not reek any less in the cold, nor for having been chewed on by predators. Neither was Pesquil inclined to waste effort in fits of useless swearing. ‘This was barbarian work, for a surety,’ he announced. Bland as a bust in a tea room, he regarded the hands left befouled from close-up study of corrupt flesh.

The green-faced officer at his side swallowed noisily. ‘But the wagons weren’t robbed! Why should clan reivers slaughter bound men, then leave fine southland silks behind to moulder?’

Pesquil’s thin lips curled, dimpling the scars left gouged in his cheeks from a childhood infection of the pox. ‘I recognize the knife work. You would as well, were you seasoned enough to have seen the barbarian brats under Arithon’s command slitting the throats of our wounded beside the Tal Quorin.’

Folded over by involuntary reaction, the city garrison
officer crouched beneath the turned leaves of a hazel bush to retch.

The headhunter captain’s dry scorn pursued him. ‘Better puke fast and be done. You’re riding at once for Etarra.’ A leathery, thin figure in a dust-drab surcoat, Pesquil moved off to mete out a round of brisk orders.

His personal troop would remain and mount a stiff guard on the road, while the division of city garrison split off from patrol and returned at speed to the Mayor of the Northern Reaches.

Propped back erect, blanched and shaking, the officer wiped his chin and waved toward the corpses rowed in bound bundles beyond the angular, rib-splayed skeletons of oxen still yoked in the mould-furred leather of rotting harness. ‘My Lord, before we ride out, surely we should spare an hour and see the fallen are decently burned.’

Paused beside his stocky, brush-scarred gelding, Pesquil reached for his saddlepack and freed a waterskin from its hide lacing. He yanked out the stopper with his teeth. While the officer attended him, diffident, he used the last, warm dregs to sluice the corruption from his fingers. At length, around the plug of moist cork, his thin lips pulled back in conclusion. ‘Let the bodies stay as they lie.’

Not too shaken to show outrage, the officer gathered himself. ‘But-’

Pesquil spun about, killed refutation with a glare like sheared iron, then ejected the cork into a horny palm. ‘I said let them lie.’ Unhurried, but efficient, he recapped the flask, gouged a shred of gristle from a thumbnail, then reached beneath his mail to blot his damp knuckles on his gambeson. ‘Tactics before sentiment, always. I don’t wish Red-beard’s Companions warned off by any smoke. Let his barbarians stay encamped in this region, unaware. And when they raid again, we’ll be prepared for them. My men will gain the bounties they merit. Better than last rites that yon murdered bones have no
use for, your victims will be granted due vengeance.’

Through narrowed, joyless eyes, Pesquil watched the shaken officer hasten to rejoin his troop. Then he set his boot in the stirrup, mounted, and dug in spurs and bit to rein his mount around and ride out. The time had come to act on his gnawing suspicion, that these late bloody raids were not done for spite, nor for revenge. In the unerring instinct that had won him his commission, the headhunter commander sensed this slaughtered caravan lay connected with the Shadow Master.

A fortnight later, the stench of corrupt flesh a memory that rankled no less, Captain Mayor Pesquil cast his jaundiced regard on the gold-bordered curtains, the ebony and ivory inlaid footstools, and a sumptuous tasselled carpet which silenced his predatory tread, and clashed in evil virulence against green and purple tiles of fired enamel. The tastes of the city seneschal were typically Etarran. The embers in the hearth discharged enough heat to wilt a hothouse flower.

Snake-still in his formal black and white surcoat and silver gauntlets, Pesquil parked his lean length before a massive, carved desk. He worked his jaw muscles in irritation as the bootlicking little secretary scurried to fetch the mayor’s seneschal from his nap.