After one last anguished look — which Kyle answered reassuringly — the youth slid down amid the rowers’ berths and disappeared. Kyle stood. The crew confronted him, spread out, the ex-Stormguard at the fore.
‘The lad warned you, did he?’ Storval growled.
Kyle ignored the glowering mate. He spoke to Tulan: ‘You should be proud that your nephew finds murder distasteful.’
The master of the Lady’s Luck at least had the grace to appear embarrassed. He pulled on his thick black beard, his gaze downcast. ‘My apologies, outlander. But we must know …’
‘Show us the blade,’ Storval demanded.
Kyle glanced to the east where the coast lay as a dark line that brought the horizon close. With his foot, he drew the pack he used to rest his head on towards him. ‘You want to see the sword, do you?’ And he reached behind his back.
Storval yanked his shortsword from his belt. The ex-Stormguard levelled their spears. The front line of the crew reached for their knives. The rest raised cocked crossbows.
Kyle slowly drew the weapon and shook off the leather wrap. A glow immediately suffused the bows, cast by the curved, translucent, cream-hued blade.
‘Whiteblade,’ one of the crew breathed, awed.
Storval’s gaze remained fixed on the sword. He took a steadying breath. ‘Hand it over.’
‘Before I was in Korel lands,’ Kyle said conversationally, hefting the blade, ‘I was with a mercenary company. The Crimson Guard. And with them I acquired a rare and mysterious skill. I will demonstrate it now.’
Storval frowned at him, puzzled. ‘What?’
Kyle kicked the pack up to his free hand and turned to the side. Then he planted one foot on the gunwale and leapt over. Roars of outrage followed him until his head plunged beneath the frigid water.
He emerged into darkness. The sword in his grip was a murky glow in the water as he struggled to open the pack. The ship was a diminishing dark blotch in the night. A great cheering whoop reached him from it — Reuth’s shout of triumph — followed by Tulan’s barked: ‘Shut up, lad! Come about!’
They might bring the Lady’s Luck about, but Kyle was confident they’d never spot him here in the dark of night amid the waves. Holding the sword beneath the pack, he drew out the water-bladders he’d half inflated, and began blowing into one. It would be a long swim to shore and he’d have to keep topping up the bladders, but he should make it — provided he didn’t freeze to death first.
*
Dawn saw a man drag himself by his elbows up through the surf, his hands mere pale blue clubs. He lay on the beach of coarse gravel, half in the waves, exhausted and immobile, warming himself in the gathering light.
Later in the morning, Kyle pushed himself up and blew on his hands. He pulled at his wet clothes then faced inland. Eroded cliffs topped by scrub and brush hid what lay beyond, but he knew what awaited him: a broad flat steppe-land of grasses and copses of trees, arid, a near desert in regions, that swept all the way east to the foothills of the near-mythical Salt range.
He drew the sword from his shirt, wrapped it in the empty sack, and tucked it through his belt. Then he pushed back his sodden hair, tied it with a leather strip, and set off.
CHAPTER IV
A storm caught them while still west of the southern Bael coast. Master Ghelath saw them through, bellowing commands, solid on the deck though chilled blue from the spray. The towering cliff-high waves would have overpowered Havvin at the tiller arm had not Bars and Amatt taken hold to follow the canny old pilot’s orders.
Storms were one of the main reasons Shimmer hated these deep ocean crossings. It seemed to her that no frail construct such as a ship should dare challenge the might of such vast depths and lengths of open water. The pitching and yawing below decks made her sick; that and the clattering of loose equipment and the ominous groaning of the mere finger-widths of timber that separated her from the cold dark depths. The noise and stink of vomit drove her to seek the fresh air above decks — even when ‘fresh’ meant gale-force winds and driving sleet.
She found Lean and Sept taking their turn at the tiller arm, following Havvin’s commands yelled above the crashing of waves. K’azz was also above decks, an arm round the mainmast, staring forward into the roiling cloud cover. She climbed the stern to the pilot’s side, noting the length of line that secured him to the tiller arm. The old man, his long white hair a plastered layer upon his knobbly skull, sent her another of his intimate winks.
She planted her legs wide, lowered her head against the blowing spray, and offered him an uncertain frown.
The old man laughed his amusement. ‘Know you why Master Ghelath named her Mael’s Greetings?’ he called.
‘No,’ she shouted back.
‘Because Mael, having sent his greetings, need not send them again!’ and he cackled anew.
Sailors, she thought. The oddest sense of humour.
The pilot sliced an arm forward, yelling, ‘That one! Straight on!’ Lean heaved her considerable bulk against the arm while Sept pulled. ‘Further!’ Havvin urged. ‘Hard o’ port!’
‘I don’t remember volunteering for this,’ Lean gasped as she strained.
‘Beats marching,’ Sept grinned.
Lean, her jaws set, shook her head. ‘Never the right weather, is it? Always too hot or too cold. Too wet or too dry.’
Shimmer saluted them and headed back below. If they could still joke, then things were in hand. She descended the steep ladder to find Bars and Blues awaiting her at the bottom. Water poured down over her shoulders in one last chilling wash. ‘I’m beginning to hate these journeys,’ she told Bars.
‘I’m with you, Shimmer. Only way to get anywhere, though.’
They braced themselves on nearby timbers in the darkness of the low deck. Water sloshed about their boots. ‘And you, Bars,’ she asked. ‘Where were you in Assail lands?’
The man grimaced at the memory. ‘Exile Keep. On the shores of the Dread Sea. Turned out to be two inbred families of mages battling each other for control of the coast.’ He paused and ran a thumb along a scar on his chin. Blues’ eyes glittered in the dark as he waited and watched, just as Shimmer did. ‘Somehow they got it into their crazy paranoid heads that we were plotting to take the keep, or some damned fool thing like that. Both the families turned on us. Every last one of them. Anyway …’ Bars cleared his throat. ‘Cal an’ the rest withdrew. Pulled ’em all off so me and my Blade could escape in a local’s fishing skiff. That was the last I saw of them. Headed north along the Anguish Coast.’ He lowered his head to study the knuckles of one hand.
‘That was Cal’s plan, wasn’t it?’ Blues said gently. Bars nodded. ‘So stop beating yourself up about it. The plan worked. Now we’re back because of it.’
Bars curled the hand into a tight fist, lowered it. ‘Right.’
Ah, Bars, Shimmer thought. Always feeling everything so keenly. Like a raw exposed nerve. The man’s emotions were like a storm; it would be attractive if it were not so exhausting.
‘Where’s K’azz?’ Blues asked.
‘Up top. Watching the storm.’ Shimmer shook her head, mystified. ‘It’s like he’s not afraid one whit. Just curious. As if he wants to experience it.’
Blues snorted. ‘Well I’m damned afraid, if he’s not. Don’t like being out of sight of shore. Too far to swim.’
Of course, Shimmer reflected, being a mage of D’riss Blues wouldn’t like being out of sight of land. ‘We’re none of us happy sailors,’ she said.
The two chuckled their appreciation. ‘That’s for damned certain,’ Blues agreed, and he peered up nervously through the open hatch to the black churning mass of clouds above.
The next day the storm passed to the north and Mael’s Greetings, sails tattered and seams leaking, limped under oar to the south-east. Havvin was aiming for an island he had sketched into his personal rudder from descriptions and stories he’d heard over the years in sailors’ taverns in Delanss, Strike, and the Isle of Malaz.