The seneschal, himself unsettled by the pitching of the vessel, clung to the stay, gasping for breath as he caught the spray from a cresting wave full in the mouth. He shouted for Fergus, and the reeve made his way across the slippery deck.
“Secure me,” he ordered his reeve, who nodded and braced himself, then grabbed hold of the seneschal’s arm.
“Luff! To the lee, man!” called the pilot to the helmsman again.
The seneschal felt the black fire within his soul rage with anger at the helplessness he now felt. The ship was pitching violently, the sailors scrambling, when only a few moments before they had been following a fair wind, making good time. That his journey, and thereby his goal, was in jeopardy, infuriated both man and demon.
“Right the helm!” the captain shouted.
“Hold sound,” the seneschal said to Fergus, who nodded his understanding.
Fighting off the gale, he grasped the hilt at his hip and drew Tysterisk.
A shower of infinitesimal sparks of fire gusted forth from the scabbard, visible only in the blink of an eye.
The seneschal held the sword hilt aloft, slicing through the gale with a vicious sweep.
To any eye other than one as close as Fergus’s, it would have appeared that the seneschal was merely in possession of a handle of black steel. But Fergus, being close enough to touch the man, caught for a split second a glimpse of the blade, its edges faint black outlines that held within their boundaries a swirling of tiny currents, invisible except for the droplets of water from the spray that were caught and spun within them.
And in that split second, the reeve could see the tiny, formless faces of spirits, eyeless wraiths with dark mouths open in howling agony, that spun within the invisible blade; for that moment he could see the weapon’s heft, its power, crackling in the air around it.
That power radiated instantly through the seneschal, causing his body to stiffen, to surge with a strength that Fergus could feel in his grasp. The skin beneath the seneschal’s robes grew warm, then blistering, too hot to touch. With a guttural sound of pain, Fergus relinquished the lord’s arm.
There was little need to secure him now anyway.
Lightning crackled in the wind that swept the deck and sails.
Like the sword blade, the seneschal’s lean body seemed to take on a greater heft, a sinewy muscularity, as the power from the weapon surged through him. He threw back his head and laughed, then shouted into the wind.
“Bow to me!”
The twins, prone on the deck, stared up from the pools of vomit through their sodden hair, watching the transformation.
Watching their master instruct the wind itself.
“I am your lord!” the seneschal bellowed into the gusts that tugged at the mains’l. The sound of his voice was deep, cutting through the scream of the gale like the blade of the sword through snow. “Bow to me; I command it.”
In answer the thundering wind crackled with static, whipping in a cyclone-like spiral skyward.
Then, in a twinkling, the wind died down; the waves, absent its tormenting buffets, calmed. The sails, aback, their surfaces pressed aft against the mast by the force of the wind a moment before, slackened and fell, then filled again as a fairer breeze blew through, catching them.
The crew stood stock still, their eyes riveted on the seneschal.
The seneschal closed his eyes, a wide, triumphant smile on his lips. He raised his face to the sun, visible now that the clouds had been blown away. He stood for a moment, reveling in the glory of his mastery of the gale; then, as if coming to clarity, opened his eyes again quickly and leveled a displeased glance at the crew. The breeze around the hilt in his hand sparked angrily, tiny sparks of flame like windswept embers of a campfire taking to the air.
“Get on with it, then,” he said in a low, deadly voice.
The captain turned quickly to the pilot.
“Thus!” he called, the order to maintain the course. The crew, dumbstruck the moment before, scrambled to attention, returning quickly to their posts.
Fergus dried his stinging palms, blistered from the heat of touching the seneschal, on his breeches, then crossed the deck to where the crossbowmen still lay, sundered by nausea.
“Rise up,” he said in his gruff voice. “Get back belowdecks ’til you’re needed.”
The mate paused as he passed the captain on the way back to the quarterdeck, leaning close to his commanding officer so as not to be overheard, not realizing that the wind heard everything.
“What have we taken on, sir?” he asked nervously.
The captain did not flinch.
“I couldn’t say,” he answered, watching the seneschal return to his quarters below decks. “But surely our voyage is blessed. How can we ask for more than to have the wind itself with us?”
9
With the morning came the wind.
The man stood with the rising sun behind him, his face to the west, watching the rolling mist billow in waves half a heartbeat behind the surf as it broke over the black sand of the beach.
All around him the towering wrecks of ships dozed, their ancient timbers jutting from the sand like the cracked bones of giant mythical beasts, wrapped in dense blankets of fog.
The sea looks calm this morning, he thought, watching the gentle ebb and flow of the waves, foaming as they ran up the dark, sparkling sand of the beach, then retreating shyly. He knew it was all a pretense. The riptide a few feet from shore was deceptive and merciless, the rocky bottom jagged as broken glass from the volcanic shards of sand. Here on the lee of the Skeleton Coast, peace was only a pretty mask for a deeper, deadly threat.
The thought amused him.
On the windward side of the coast, the waves made no attempt at concealing their rage. They rolled in high white breakers, pounding the shore with an unforgiving fury, crashing against the rocks, blasting their spray violently into the air, churning madly until they were sucked back into the maw of the sea again, only to return insistently a moment later, over and over and over endlessly.
There was something much more appealing to him about that undisguised sea rage, that unapologetic hostility, unfettered by the need to hide, to appear passive. It was a rage he felt himself, an anger that lurked deep inside, needing to be disguised, tempered, cloaked in a gentle face, an amiable aspect, for the sake of cooperation. Like the leeward sea.
For now.
A beam of gold broke through the ever-present haze, illuminating the vapor in the cloudy air, making his dusky skin shine coppery, the color of the earth in sunlight. Sorbold skin, burnished by the desert wind, the unrelenting sun. There was a beauty to his people that did not exist in the other strains of the human race of the continent, a superior mettle that withstood the relentless sun, the pounding blasts of desert wind, the harsh clime, the brutal nature of the culture, and came out the other side stronger, honed, like a clay pot tempered in fire.
Soon to be put to the test.
A creaking whistle interrupted his musings, a groaning that could be heard from time to time along the Skeleton Coast. It was only the wind bending around the ruined masts of the ancient ships, whipping over the remains of the hulls, blasting the wood clean. The dead ships had been built from a strange wood, from a kind of tree not seen on this side of the world, wood that had not rotted even with the passage of fourteen hundred years. The wind seemed to caress the ruins lovingly, wrapping them in the steam of morning, moaning its plaintive song.
The man looked up, his thoughts refocused on the task at hand. He had been scouring the beach in the gray light of predawn, as he had been the day he first found treasure here, as he had done endless times since, to no avail. There were only a few moments left before full sun, when the misty beach would turn white and cloudy, the haze impenetrable, blocking any chance for a glimmer of magic to be seen. Quickly he cast his gaze around one more time, his eyes scanning the foaming waves, the black sand.