Well, he had thwarted Hamiruld’s scheme—but only because Hamiruld had been careless enough to tell Khardakhor that Thalame had gone to Bornigrayal, never dreaming that Khardakhor would share the news with the son of his worst enemy. What still disturbed him, though, was the agitation Thalame had displayed when she discovered that Hamiruld had blatantly altered the message she had given him about going to Bornigrayal, and the hesitation she had shown in revealing to him that Hamiruld was actually a key player in this Sea-Lord enterprise.
In his quiet way Hamiruld held plenty of power over her, he saw. On some level she must still be uneasy about his presence as a third partner in her marriage—that the marriage itself still had more of a hold on her than she would like him to think, that she seemed eager to gloss swiftly over anything that might demonstrate to him that Hamiruld still played a significant role in her life. It was clear now that Hamiruld intended to fight to keep his marriage intact; what was not so clear, Nortekku thought, was what Thalarne’s own position on the future of that marriage might be.
“You’re very quiet,” Thalame said, in something more like her normal tone of voice.
“You’ve given me a lot to think about.”
“The risks of the trip? The part about collecting artifacts? The fact that Hamiruld is involved?”
“All of it.”
“Oh, Nortekku—”
They stood facing each other across the room for a moment. He had no idea what to say. Neither, it seemed, did she. But only for a moment. The same bright glow came into her eyes that he had seen at their first meeting, back in Yissou, what felt like eons ago. She stretched her arms toward him.
“Come here,” she said.
The ship was much smaller than Nortekku had expected—a tubby, wide-bodied vessel, oddly square-looking, fashioned from thick planks of some kind of blackish wood, that sat low in the water along a weather-beaten pier at the harbor of Bornigrayal. It was hard to believe that a clumsy little craft like that, which seemed scarcely big enough to pass as a riverboat, would be able to carry them all the way across the immensities of the Eastern Ocean in anything less than a lifetime and a half.
Once he was aboard, though, he saw that he had greatly underestimated the vessel’s size. There was much more of it below the water line than was visible from dockside. Two parallel corridors ran its length, with a host of small low-ceilinged cabins branching off from them, and a series of spacious cargo holds at front and back. Nortekku and Thalarne were going to share a cabin near the ship’s bow. “This will be a little complicated,” she told him. “Kanibond Graysz knows that I’m the wife of one of the backers of the expedition. I’ve booked only one cabin, and they’ve let me know that they can’t or won’t make another one available. But I don’t dare try to pass you off as Hamiruld.”
“Shall we just say we’re very good friends?” Nortekku asked.
“Don’t joke. I’ve let it be known that we’re brother and sister. When we’re in public, make sure you behave that way.”
“I hate telling lies, Thalarne. You know that.”
“Tell this one. For me.”
“Can we at least be a particularly friendly brother and sister, then?”
“Please, Nortekku.”
“What if anyone passing our cabin at night happens to hear sounds coming out of it that might not be considered appropriate for a brother and sister to be making?”
“Please,” Thalarne said, as irritated as he had ever heard her sound. “You know how badly I wanted you to accompany me on this expedition. But stirring up a scandal won’t achieve anything for anybody. I don’t think anybody’s going to care, but we need to observe the forms, anyway. Is that clear, brother?”
He forced a grin. “Completely, sister.”
Their cabin was ridiculously tiny. The two narrow bunks, one above the other, took up more than half of it. They had one small cabinet for their possessions, and a washbasin. There was scarcely room to turn around in the middle of the floor. The atmosphere in the room was pervaded by the thick, piercing odor of some caulking compound, close to nauseating at first, though Nortekku found himself rapidly getting used to it. A single slitlike opening, not even a hand’s-breadth wide, was their window to the outside world. When he pushed the shutter aside a harsh stream of cold air, salty and acrid and unpleasant, drifted in through it, filling the room with a rank, heavy smell that cut through the other one. The smell of the sea, he thought. Of multitudes of fishes, of seaweed, of scuttling sea-creatures moving about just beyond the hull. He had never smelled anything like it before, insistent, commanding, hostile.
The Bornigrayans, Kanibond Graysz and Siglondan, had the cabin just across the corridor. They would have made a far more plausible brother-sister pair than Nortekku and Thalarne: indeed they might almost have been twins. They both were small and fine-boned, both were white-furred, though not from age, both had small alert close-set eyes, his a sharp yellow, hers blue-green. Their faces were cold and pinched, and when they looked at you out of those small bright eyes it was in what struck Nortekku as a shifty, calculating way, as though they were measuring you for some kind of swindle. He found himself taking an instant irrational dislike to them.
But they were affable enough. They greeted Thalarne warmly and showed no sign of surprise that she had suddenly produced a brother as a traveling companion. Wisely, she introduced him as the architect that he was, rather than as any sort of archaeologist, but explained that he had a deep and abiding interest in Great World history—a hobby of his since childhood, she said and had begged her to be taken along. If they had any misgivings about that, they said nothing about them. They talked mostly about the excitement of what lay ahead, the great discoveries that were certain to be made. Not that Nortekku had an easy time understanding them: the language spoken in Bornigrayal was essentially no more than a dialect of that of the West Coast, but the pronunciation and placing of accents differed in a number of significant ways, words were often slurred, other words were entirely unfamiliar, and at all times the two Bornigrayans spoke so quickly that Nortekku found himself lagging a sentence or two behind. Still, they produced a flask of superb Bornigrayan brandy, of a truly extraordinary smoothness and tang, and the four of them solemnly raised a toast to each other and to the success of the expedition. No one who would share brandy of that quality with people they barely knew could be altogether bad, Nortekku decided.
As the Bornigrayans poured a second round there came the shattering sound of the ship’s horn, three mighty blasts. Then the whole vessel began to quiver and from somewhere far below came the drumbeat pounding of the engines. The journey was beginning.
Within moments Nortekku heard a frightful creaking sound that he realized must be the first movements of the ship’s two great paddlewheels. They went up on deck to watch as the ship pulled out. There was room for perhaps eight people up there, along with a couple of lifeboats, a sputtering oil lamp, a bell hanging in the bow. The planks were stained and unevenly laid. A flimsy-looking rail was all that guarded the deck’s margin.
The day was cold, the sky bleak, a few wisps of snow swirling about. Ominous green lightning was crackling far out at sea. Quickly, but with a troublesome sidewise swaying motion, not quite sickening but distinctly unsettling, the ship moved away from Bornigrayal and on into the gray, unwelcoming ocean. This close to land the water was fairly calm, but dismaying-looking waves were curling along the surface out by the horizon. There would surely be worse to come. The sea is very wide, Nortekku thought, and our ship is so small.