Jemar met Shilriya’s eyes. Neither of them so much as twitched a finger, but when he looked away, he knew that they were in agreement.
Now for Youris.
“Captain Youris, I, too, must ask you to be brief. If what you want to say bears on my proposal, perhaps it could even wait until after I have spoken. Or is it something momentous, like an apparition of dragons?”
One drop of sweat had time to break out on Youris’s forehead. It had no time to start rolling down toward his nose, before Youris kicked his stool at Jemar and followed up with a furious leap, drawing his sword in midleap.
That midair draw nearly defeated Jemar, for all his speed, alertness, and longer reach. He had nothing but his dagger drawn when Youris closed with him. The stool had struck him in the jaw, tearing skin and jarring his skull.
He still had the speed to dart under Youris’s second slash, but not to thrust the dagger into a vital spot. Or at least an unprotected one-the first thrust met metal. Youris’s extra weight was armor under his tunic.
Not badly planned, thought Jemar, which means accomplices, even if he’s taken them by surprise as well as me. Who?
Jemar abandoned subtlety and gripped Youris’s sword arm. Then he thrust at the man’s throat and at the same time twisted the arm. The thrust caught in the embroidery of the tunic and skittered off the armor beneath. The twist was more successful. For a moment, Youris’s arm was unmoving. For another moment, struggling to free it, he was nearly so.
That was enough time for Shilriya to rise, fold her stool, and swing it hard at Youris’s head. She struck below the green hat that had always reminded Jemar of a badly made pudding. Youris staggered, the hat fell off, and the improvised club descended again.
The wood of the stools being plain did not make it light. It was cut from ironwood, so dense that it would barely float. It now proved harder than Youris’s head. The captain’s eyes rolled up in his head, and he sprawled at Jemar’s feet.
Jemar barely had time to step back when the cabin door burst open. The mate staggered through, blood streaming down one arm. His good hand held a cutlass. He slashed wildly at something Jemar could not see-then Captain Zyrub jumped up.
Zyrub was the largest of the five captains, and long-armed for his height. He didn’t bother folding his stool before he flung it. It hit something with a crunch, which was followed by a thud. Then he reached over the fallen mate and heaved an unconscious man into view.
It was Youris’s servant-Youris’s dead servant, if they could not heal him quickly. It would do the man no good in the long run; the yardarm awaited him regardless. But both he and his captain should not die with the secrets behind their treachery unuttered.
“Keep him alive!” Jemar snapped. “And that one, too,” he added, pointing at Youris. Shilriya looked at Jemar as if he’d asked her to decorate her cabin with piles of manure, then sighed.
“As you wish, O Great Captain.”
Jemar ignored the sarcasm. “Zyrub, you lead a boarding party from your ship and mine to Habbakuk’s Gift. If they resist, fight. If they try to get underway, signal and we’ll pursue.
“If there’s no resistance, don’t hurt anyone. But search Youris’s cabin thoroughly. Don’t let anyone else in there, and if anyone offers information, send them to me. “There will be rumors enough running about the squadron within the hour. I want to overhaul them with the truth.”
Zyrub’s expression said that they would be so lucky when minotaurs played the flute. But he always had a surly way of obeying-and never left Jemar in any doubt about his loyalty when matters grew serious.
Over a time Jemar could never measure, his men came in and removed the two senseless traitors, while bringing their one healer for the mate. Jemar knelt beside the man, as the healer rose and said he could do nothing.
On Jemar’s lips were witling’s words, such as, “I wasn’t that eager to save your pay and rations,” or “I know prophets are seldom honored, but this is ridiculous.”
Instead he held the mate’s hand until it went limp, and closed the dead eyes. He still felt those eyes following him as he went out on deck, and the sense faded slowly.
He did not feel really at ease until he saw the boarding party climbing the side of Habbakuk’s Gift, then the signal for “All well” climbing up to the ship’s masthead.
This half-witted treason had been strangled almost at birth. Half-witted, because if Youris wanted the chieftainship, there was the lawful Captains’ Challenge. Had he killed Jemar in that, all would have been oath-bound to follow him.
For what he had done, he would never have left the cabin alive even if he had killed Jemar. Youris had been desperate. Jemar greatly wished to know why.
* * * * *
As suddenly as it had hurled itself against Gerik Ginfrayson, the freezing mist receded the way it had come. He did not dare open his eyes to see what else it was doing, lest it leap at him again and this time blind him.
As a scream echoed around the dungeon his eyes flew open and every other sense grew as sharp as a sword’s edge. Someone was giving up his life in that scream, with fear or pain or both beyond normal human experience.
Not beyond the experience of the victims of mages, however.
As Gerik clung to his perch, he saw the blue light fade. The icy mist or smoke was contracting into a ball. Fustiar still stood, and as far as Gerik could tell, still lived. There was frost on his robes and hair, but he still chanted as if had not missed a syllable even while the ice-mist had surrounded him.
Then he touched his staff to the ball of ice-mist. It shook like jelly had began to change shape, flattening out and taking on a four-sided shape with one side curved-
An axehead. And from tales that might not have been intended to frighten him but certainly had, Gerik recognized what kind of axehead: an ice barbarian’s Frostreaver. It was the most terrible of all battleaxes, but equally burdensome to make, even for the most potent wizards of the ice barbarians. Therefore, mercifully rare even far to the south, on the glacier-rimmed islands where the ice barbarians squatted in their sealskin huts.
As for one being made here-never. Except that the evidence of Gerik’s eyes told him otherwise. A Frostreaver forged in a land of perpetual damp heat-and not melting on the spot. As far as he could see, not melting at all.
A voice told him that he should wait and see what became of that axehead of shimmering blue ice. If in an hour it was a pallid puddle on the filthy dungeon floor, he would have seen nothing that anyone need fear. Fustiar’s Frostreavers were bound by the same constraints as those of the ice barbarians.
But it was enough and too much that he had seen it made at all. Gerik dropped from his perch, careless of the noise he made, careless of bruises and cuts from stones and twigs. He half slid, half fell to the ground.
When he reached the ground, he ran.
* * * * *
Shilriya tossed back the last of her brandy and bent over Jemar’s table to refill her cup. Her tunic was as low as ever, but looser, and she wore perfume, a heavier scent than Jemar liked but so rare with Shilriya that it almost deserved to be entered in the log.
“So. Are there any doubts left?”
“No, except about whether Youris is fit to be tried and hanged. Only a complete idiot would record his debts to Synsaga without using the simplest cryptograph.”
“That, or one who didn’t want to leave a mystery behind, to confuse and divide us. Instead, he laid it all out neatly, so that when he was gone we could answer the riddle and fear nothing.”
The idea of Youris possessing that sort of nobility was alien to Jemar, but it took more than brandy to make Shilriya talk nonsense. Still, the man had to have been lacking somewhere to go so far in debt to Synsaga-a man who neither forgave nor forgot, without very good reason.