Not the last, though. Aloud, Pirvan said, “Are the towns all going bounty-hunting?”
“I doubt it is the bounty that lures them,” Waydol said. “They are most likely doing it to purge doubts of their loyalty. High Captain Beliosaran commands ashore now, and he has a reputation for being harsh with enemies, and for seeing them everywhere.”
Just the sort of man needed to change an honorable campaign into butchery, if given time, thought Pirvan. “Let us pray that the winds bring Jemar faster than Beliosaran or the town levies.”
“In my way, I shall do so,” Waydol said. He turned and now his voice was softer, as close to a whisper as nature allowed in a minotaur.
“There is something else I have wished to ask of you. No oath binds you, but if you had a son of an age to be looking upon women …”
Pirvan would have given much to be able to relieve the Minotaur’s evident embarrassment. Unfortunately he had not the remotest notion of what was on Waydol’s mind.
“Darin will remain behind when I sail,” Waydol continued. “His life is not bound to me forever. But in time, our band will also cease. Then he will be a man alone among men, needing to make his way in the world by what is in him.”
“I can give oath to guard him as if he were my own blood kin,” Pirvan said.
“You will do that without any oath, I know,” Waydol said. One immense hand rested on Pirvan’s shoulder-lightly, but after a sleepless night and a brisk fight, it made the knight’s knees sag.
“What I ask is that you-that you keep him from Lady Rubina. He-she does not seem the kind of woman that a young man should find first.”
This is asking me to light a fire in a barn full of hay and keep the barn from burning down. But Waydol had the right to ask anything of him, even the impossible.
“Lady Rubina hardly listens to me, though somewhat more to Birak Epron.”
“He is not oath-bound to me.”
“He is to me, and therefore to you. Also, he is a man of sense.” Pirvan grinned. “One of vigor, too, or so I have heard. He may well entertain the lady so that she has no time to cast eyes elsewhere.”
And gully dwarves are really dragons in disguise.
“Do not give me false hopes, Sir Pirvan.”
“Very well. Then I will give you a real one. My good lady calls your heir so splendid a young man that he will not be long in finding a woman worthy of him. What Lady Rubina may do will neither make nor mar him.”
“May it be so,” Waydol said. “Sir Pirvan, I must bid you good night. Can you find your way back alone?”
“He will not be alone,” came Haimya’s voice from the darkness.
“No,” Waydol said. “With you, Lady Haimya, he cannot be alone. May Darin be so fortunate.”
And as we end the night’s work with a prayer for a miracle …
The door thumped shut, and Haimya put an arm around her husband.
* * * * *
Tarothin managed at first to keep from his mind any thought of the vast depth of the water under him, and what it might hold.
Then he could not forget that the bottom was as far below him as the foot of a hill from the top. All of the distance was dark water, with the-gods-knew-what swimming about in it in search of food.
Natural creatures only, of course. He would have sensed it if the priests of Zeboim had been calling up anything else to their aid or the aid of their patroness.
Tarothin swallowed water, nearly choked, and for a moment floundered desperately. He calmed both breath and limbs, then resumed a steady stroke. It upheld both his body and his courage that he’d found the water warmer than he’d expected, and his swimming surer.
Yet even the warmest water will leech away a man’s strength if he is in it long enough. Slowly Tarothin felt his limbs grow heavier, his breath come harder, his thoughts come slower until they hardly came at all.
He was swimming almost by instinct when he struck something hard and slimy. He looked up, and redness glared down at him. Stared at him, for it was a single enormous red eye, and the hard, slimy surface he’d touched was the shell of a gigantic turtle-
Tarothin screamed-which was the best thing he could have done. The sound did not carry far in the fog, but it roused everyone aboard Gullwing.
The wizard had just time to realize that he’d touched the weed-grown rudder of a ship, and that the “eye” was its stern lantern, when a line splashed into the water beside him. He gripped it, determined to hold on with not only hands but also teeth and toes if need be.
He went on gripping it as the sailors hauled him in like a dead fish, over the railing, to land with a thump and a splash on a well-scrubbed deck. He made it to his knees before all the water he’d swallowed came back up, and stayed on his knees until his stomach was empty.
By then he had a circle of sailors around him. None of them were minotaurs, and none of them were the young giant who had to be the Minotaur’s Heir. Neither were their faces particularly friendly.
I suppose a half-naked, half-drowned wizard is not something that a respectable ship hauls aboard every night, he thought.
That thought reminded him of his staff, and stark terror at the thought of having lost it heaved him to his feet. He rose so suddenly that he found his staff by its cracking him across the back of the head. He unslung it, held it in both hands, using it partly as a crutch, and would have kissed it if he hadn’t been surrounded by those staring sailors.
Then the ring parted, and from what seemed to be near the masthead a strong man’s voice spoke.
“What has Habbakuk brought us now?”
* * * * *
Darin had invoked Habbakuk more to please his sailors than out of his own beliefs. But after he’d heard Tarothin out, and been satisfied that the Red Robe told the truth, he thought that the Fisher God had indeed done him and all his friends a favor.
“We must leave the fleet,” he told the Mate of the Deck. “There is danger, and we must warn Waydol and Sir Pirvan.”
“Eh, what about our oaths?” the mate asked.
“We cannot be bound by them now,” Darin said. “Not to Aurhinius. Our oaths to Waydol and Sir Pirvan come before those, though I doubt that Aurhinius personally has a hand in this.”
The mate looked bewildered. Darin groped for words that would sound true without revealing truths too horrifying to be spread abroad.
“The fleet sailed from Istar divided within its ranks. A faction opposed to Aurhinius plots mutiny, with the aid of certain mages. If they prevail, or even if they attempt to seize power, Aurhinius’s pledge to protect us will be worthless. If they prevail, the fleet may make war without mercy, against both us and Jemar.”
The mate whistled. “Well, then we’d best be about taking our leave. I’ll have one of the boats put over the side, with a mast and sail, and hang a lantern at the masthead. That’s close enough to the same height as our stern light, so anybody looking at it will think it’s us, until it’s too late.”
Darin wished he could do more than thank the mate for a cool seaman’s head in this crisis. He wished even more that he could be certain of being alive in a few days, to give that reward.
“Oh, and we’ll pad the oars a trifle, and douse the sails to make our shape smaller,” the mate went on. “And if any of the lads makes a noise, I’ll have his guts for a hatband!”
No one made a noise, the sails came down and the oars slid out in silence, and the lantern-bearing boat drifted off until it was lost in the fog. Then, at a soft whisper from the mate, the oarsmen began backing water, and Gullwing slipped astern out of the fleet and off into the night.
Chapter 19
Aurhinius slept through the dawn uproar of turning out the morning watch, cleaning the decks, and setting to rights anything that had gone awry during the night. What eventually awoke him was his secretary, shaking him. He stared up into the young man’s face.