No guards up here; the distances to the nearest other rooftops, too far even for a sailor to jump, made an effective moat of air. The drop straight down to the cobbled streets and flagged courtyard invited leg-breaking. More enticing was an odd tower Pen recognized after a puzzled moment as part of a mast and its crow’s nest salvaged from some ship, set up to be a lookout. Yielding to the urge to climb, he lodged himself in its basket fifteen feet above the roof. Not a bad perch—when it was standing still. He imagined it swinging back and forth in high seas; Des, who loathed heights, whimpered at the vision.
He surveyed the town, which the cook had said held some eight thousand souls. Closely crowded stone, stucco, and whitewash in the central sections tailed off to scattered mudbrick, stucco, and thatch on the uninviting hills up behind it. Across the town, diagonally upslope, a dome topped a six-sided stone building not much higher than its neighbors—an old Quintarian temple built in the Cedonian style. A Quadrene temple must also be tucked somewhere, but its architecture was less obvious to Pen’s eye.
The snowless mountains would not store water against summer drought. Fishing, not farming, was likely the mainstay of the island people. Piracy was a logical extension of the land’s dearth.
He turned back to the sea, glittering in the morning light, deceptively serene. Vilnoc and home lay some two-hundred-fifty miles to the southwest from this spot. It was about four hundred miles south to Lodi and then Trigonie whence, hah, he had started. Three hundred miles north and east, entirely the wrong way, would find Rathnatta-to-be-avoided. Less than two hundred miles straight across, due west, would strike the coast of Cedonia. Currents and cross-winds aside, it was a country. Even the rankest amateur navigator could not miss it. Turn left and keep the coast in sight, and eventually one must come to the border of Orbas.
Steal a small boat? That would have been a tempting thought, before Pen’s experience of the tempest. Pen had sailed such nimble craft on canton lakes, and even those limpid waters could drown the unwary in storms. Pen and two children in anything he could handle by himself? He might bet his own life on the weather holding fair, but theirs? Were they naive enough to follow him into that danger?
Bribing a local fisherman to ferry them across would require the man to take them on credit, on Pen’s bare word that he would be paid on arrival in Orbas. Finding someone that kindly and credulous on this island seemed improbable. Pen also suspected that while for the pirates stealing from others was all in a day’s work, that insouciance did not apply to anyone caught stealing from them. The fisherman’s risks could be much sharper than merely that of losing his labor, up to losing his head. Hm.
The Darthacan broker Marle would own, or have passage on, some seaworthy ship heading in the right direction, and have Seuka already with him. Could Pen sneak himself and Lencia aboard, stow away until it was too late to turn around? The news that Pen was sometime-court-sorcerer to the duke of Orbas would catch the man’s greed; his sailors might be more inclined to throw Pen overboard. Embarking in any ship that Pen did not himself control bore the same risk.
He’d better find out more about Marle. And Falun. So much depended on which of their flesh-brokers first filled his quota and sailed, and how soon.
Contemplating the sunlit scene, he realized that every possible course of action he might evolve converged to the same point, the absolute need for a boat. So what I require is the shortest route to one.
And here came a new one, furling sails and sliding into the harbor. Its draft was shallow enough that it could warp in to the unblocked pier on the farther end of the harbor, where half-a-dozen men came out to catch and loop lines and pull it to a halt. A sturdy gangplank was thrown across to the dock and its deck grew busy, with crew, stevedores, and wharf rats combining to carry off cargo like a line of ants. The line terminated in another customs shed, where Pen was fairly sure harried port clerks took inventory for the town’s cut, and perhaps the further divisions among captain’s guild, officers, and crew. Some of the nearby buildings must be warehouses for the pirates’ ill-gotten cargos. The goods seemed too miscellaneous, the unloading too random and raucous, to be the work of some prudent merchant. Was the ship a pirate’s prize? Lencia’s and Seuka’s first ship, perchance?
Pen’s guess was confirmed when a group of men in manacles was marshaled on the deck and marched across the gangplank in chained pairs. Some much more alert-seeming guards than Pen had yet encountered prodded them along at sword’s point. Squinting into the salt-hazed distance, Pen counted about thirty heads. They were paraded not to that pier’s customs shed, but to a more squat and solid building farther up the shore; they disappeared within. The sturdier slave prison, no doubt, and now Pen knew just where it was.
So, there was a ship. And over there was a crew. All Pen needed to do was bring them back together. Des could go through locks, chains, and manacles like so much paper. And his rescuees would be grateful to Penric, a coin he might actually bargain with.
Ooh, said Des. I fancy that plan.
Pen wasn’t sure if that meant she thought it was the best plan, or just the one that would leave the most chaos in its wake.
No reason it can’t be both, she protested.
“There you are,” called a peeved young voice from below him.
Pen looked down. The Corva sisters stood looking up in vexation.
“You’ll get sunburned,” reproved Lencia, and “I want to climb, too!” cried Seuka.
Seuka matched actions to words, and Pen’s breath hitched when she nearly slipped while stretching for the pegs spaced for a sailor. By the time he’d mustered squeaks of caution, she’d joined him, eeling into the basket. Lencia jittered a moment before swarming up after her. Well, Pen wasn’t a heavy man. Their crammed platform probably wouldn’t break, though it creaked ominously.
“You can see everything from here!” said Seuka, who likely seldom had an advantage of height.
There was no reason for them to be left as disoriented as he’d been. Pen repeated his little tutorial on regional geography, arm out in a long explanatory sweep. They seemed especially interested in the route to Lodi. Lencia’s gloomy glance east, back toward distant Jokona, was blocked by the hills behind.
Lencia repeated her fears for Pen’s pale skin in this sun, and Pen let her bid him somewhat imperiously back indoors. He then bethought of a way to divert them from all their anxieties with those otherwise-useless old accounts. Gathering the papers, he led them back to the kitchen where, under the amused eye of the cook, he showed them how to make a serviceable ink with stove soot, water, egg yolk, and a bit of honey, and shape the ends of twigs from the firewood to make writing sticks. At this point, the cook ran them and their mess out, so Pen set up again at a trestle table.
Pen started with a list of useful words in Adriac and Cedonian, and soon had the sisters, heads down and biting their lips charmingly, printing them in two alphabets. They sopped up the new vocabulary with the enviable speed of the young. Seuka drifted from the lesson by drawing a quite recognizable menagerie of a horse, rabbit, dog, and cat, so Pen showed her the words for them as well. He finished by teaching them to recite a short girls’ bedtime prayer to the Mother and Daughter, common in both its Adriac and Cedonian versions. This made a useful preamble to easing them back upstairs for the nap in the heat of the late afternoon that was customary in these summer countries for children and adults alike.