“A man who would make a very bad galley slave.”
Which was certainly a believable assertion. The fisherman fell back to confer in his own tongue with the rest of his stolen ship’s crew.
Some of the sailors reappeared, dragging in the half-paralyzed and disarmed guards from the front room. One of them took the chance to get in a few retaliatory kicks. Pen’s hand landed on his shoulder. “That’s not necessary. You can tie them up. Or just lock them in here when we leave.”
The man swore and turned on him, brows lowered, beginning to snap something; but then fell silent, stepping uneasily away.
A sailor pulled one his comrades, clanking, up to the first mate. “None of these keys work!”
Pen sighed and bent to the leg irons. “Let me try. Ah, there.” The bolts fell into his hand. The comrade shook the shackles free. All three men goggled at him as he rose.
“How did you do that?” asked the sailor.
“There’s a trick to it,” Pen said vaguely. “It’s a puzzle. Like that one with the bent nails.” Which had repeatedly defeated him as a child, as he recalled. Not anymore. He smirked to himself.
The three said nothing, instead hurrying away to join their fellows who were filing out to marshal their foray in the corridor and the front room. But the first mate frowned back at Pen, and from somewhere in the chamber echoed an unwanted whisper of Sorcery! He’s a sorcerer!
The mob of them were too noisy to fit Pen’s notion of a night raid, but with luck things would go swiftly. The most able-bodied shouldered up to the front ranks, with the injured, mostly helping each other, trailing after. The nervous but determined first mate took the natural lead, or was thrust into it. He had surrendered rather than die before, Pen recalled, but perhaps his unpleasant experiences since had stiffened his backbone.
The Astwyk fisherman meanwhile gathered up his own crew at the far end of the corridor, preparing to escape out the back way, presumably to search for his own beloved boat. Pen didn’t think that the surest bet, but provided they didn’t impede his own escape he wasn’t going to argue with the man. Chaos worked in any direction.
The sailors from the Autumn’s Heart poured out of the prison and moved off in the dark like a big mumbling caterpillar, more shuffling than charging. But the distance to the pier was short and downslope, and they picked up momentum despite themselves.
Pen hung back till he was sure they’d reached their ship. The wharf guards seemed fire-watch rather than soldiers, and were swiftly overborne by numbers. Pen heard muffled cries and a couple of splashes as bodies hit the water, then the reassuring thump of feet upon a deck, followed by more confidently nautical barked orders.
Pen turned and ran for the side street.
The girls were still where he’d concealed them, thankfully. They hadn’t wandered off or even fallen asleep again, but instead waited in a worried huddle. Their breaths hitched as he dashed up, but they didn’t recoil or yelp, so presumably they could at least recognize his height and pale hair in the gloom. They rose at his panted, “Come on. Time to go! Run.”
They did their best, but Pen’s legs were undeniably longer. He tugged them down the street in little leaps, like young deer. “Where are we going, Master Penric?” gasped Seuka.
“I’ve secured us a ship. It will take us to my home in Vilnoc.” If it got away from the dock swiftly enough to outrun pirate reinforcements from shore that would surely be coming along soon, when the noises from the prison and pier were finally noticed.
The sailors already had one jib-sail up, stretching out to catch the gentle land breeze and bestow the first steering-way. A couple of figures scurried along the edge of the pier, casting off lines. “Hurry!” called someone from the thwart, peering landward toward the prison and Pen. “I can see him coming back!” Leaving the lines to trail in the water, the figures pelted from the dock and galloped up the gangplank, which swung and scraped as the ship started moving.
“Hey!” yowled Pen. “Hold! We’re here!”
A pair of sailors looked right at him and yanked the gangplank inboard. The ship eased away from the pier, the black water below widening. Already it was farther than Pen could jump, and certainly farther than he could toss the sisters, even one at time. Crow-girls don’t fly… And neither could sorcerers.
“What are you idiots doing?” Pen screamed after them.
The first mate hung over the rail, looking unconvincingly apologetic. “I’m sorry! But we cannot be having with a sorcerer aboard. You’d bring us bad luck for sure!”
I’ll show you bad luck. I could still sink you from here, you know! Pen, gasping in breathlessness and outrage, barely kept the threat from escaping his tongue. Or, more effectively, from his seething mind.
A couple of seamen stood at the rail beside their leader and made averting holy signs at him.
Pen’s return signs were a lot less holy. “You ignorant, ungrateful, selfish sons-of-bitches!” As he stamped along the pier in parallel to their retreat, a torrent of long-unused Wealdean broke from his lips. It was a wonderful language for obscenities, guttural, blunt, and inventively coarse. Wealdean invective had weight. It blew his audience back from their rail in brief alarm, but, alas, had no other effect. Even that was lost as the mate cuffed his comrades and sent them to help raise more canvas. At the bow, a spinnaker was haled upward and bellied out, sliding the ship silently away into the night waters.
Pen, halted by the pier’s end, bellowed after it, “Bastard’s teeth I hate sailors!”
He was overheated and dripping with sweat, partly from the run but mostly from using too much magic, too fast. Too carelessly. Too obviously. Obviously.
The Corva girls, Pen discovered as he wheeled, were hunched together staring at him in deep dismay.
He hardly needed his dark-sight, raking the shoreline, to spot more trouble on its way. The wavering torches were clue enough. He switched to Roknari. “We have to get off this pier and hide. If they don’t see us, chances are they’ll think we escaped on that ship, which will buy us time. There’s no going back to the ransom house now.”
Because if the sisters took refuge there, they would presumably be separated according to the original sales agreement, one sent north, one south, despite the missing Penric. How angry, and at whom, was Falun going to be to discover he’d been sold a false scribe? It occurred to Pen, belatedly, that the revelation of his true calling might protect him from being carried off on Falun’s ship. What would happen instead was extremely unclear.
“Are you really an evil sorcerer?” whispered Seuka. And when had she learned to understand that word in Adriac?
Pen rubbed his face in exasperation. “I am really a Temple sorcerer. Very tame. Learned Penric. Divine of the white god, graduate almost with honors of the great seminary at Rosehall which… you’ve never heard of, right, never mind. If I were an evil sorcerer, I would have sunk those thankless Adriac scum-suckers.” Or set the ship on fire. That would have been gratifying. And spectacular. A lesson all around worth half-a-dozen sermons. He’d missed a teaching opportunity.
Now, now, I was quite impressed with your restraint, murmured Des. Perhaps the white god knew what he was doing after all when he gifted me to you.
I’m glad someone did, Pen fumed.
“Weren’t you casting a spell?” said Lencia.
“It sounded like magic words…” said Seuka warily.