Headroom was scant, he found out by barking his scalp. This space seemed devoted to cargo and crew quarters, judging by the hammocks tucked here and there. Down again. This was the oar deck, oval beams of sunlight from the ports dotting the deck and benches in a row, the glimmer of wave reflections dancing over the low ceiling, a surprising lack of stench. And one more descent, into unrelieved shadow; his dark-sight came up without thought, laying his surroundings bare. This was the hold for Falun’s lucrative human cargo. Pen could tell by the long rows of leg irons bolted to the hull braces.
Empty. Falun hadn’t loaded on yet.
Bastard blast it, I could have sunk this accursed ship the other night!
Pen fell to his knees in something not quite a prayer. Lord god Bastard, I dedicate this day to you. I hope you are suitably amused. In fact, you can have this whole detestable week…
Apart from two sisters waiting in hope for him out on the water. Pen was keeping that godly gift. That being so, falling over in a lump of rage and despair and drumming his heels on the deck like some uncannily dangerous two-year-old was not an option.
Preferably not, murmured Des. You know we old mothers have tricks for dealing with such tantrums.
I’d rather not find out.
He sighed and clambered back to his feet, and up the ladder-stairs. No prisoner-crew to conscript. A ship too big for him to sail. What next?
If you start pining after those dolphins again, said Des, I’m going to slap you.
Pen’s lips twitched up despite everything. What, I think it’s a grand idea…
Pen stepped up into the light to discover that what was next was Captain Falun exiting the door from the aft cabin and stopping short, staring at him in astonishment. “You!”
Pen scratched his scalp, damp and sticky and itchy with seawater. “You know,” he said conversationally in high Roknari—the mode of scholar to servant was nicely insulting—“I’ve been having an extraordinarily aggravating day. You probably shouldn’t add to it.”
Falun didn’t listen, of course. People seldom did. Instead he started back and drew a sharp cutlass from a rack on the cabin wall, turned, and lunged at Pen.
Pen sheared the complex conglomeration of nerves in his armpit clean in half. Falun’s arm fell limply and hung at his side, the cutlass falling from suddenly lifeless fingers to clatter on the deck. “What…?” He stumbled, unbalanced, the arm swinging from his shoulder like a heavy sack, confusingly painless.
He’d never be lifting a sword again. Or a spoon.
“I could do the same thing to the nerves from your eyes, you know,” Pen informed him. “It wouldn’t even be theologically forbidden.”
For all his dapper air, Falun didn’t keep captive slaves in line, or control the rowdies who kept them in line for him, by being kindly or slow. He bellowed and bent and grabbed for the cutlass with his working hand. Pen danced back from the rising slash and scraped Falun’s sciatic nerves good and hard, and then he went down and didn’t get up.
The noise, of course, drew his crew away from the distractions at the railing, plus a servant-or-slave from the cabin, and then Pen was put to putting all of them down. Fortunately, there were only half-a-dozen men aboard at present, and their mystification at what was happening gave Pen a marginal advantage which he used to the full.
He surveyed the resultant heap of humanity, flopping around at his feet like a catch of fish. He could shove them all overboard into the harbor to drown like a betrayed sorcerer. He could. At least physically. Theologically borderline, such murders, hurrying souls unripe to their gods.
Instead he stepped over the groaning bodies to the base of the mainmast and looked up. A line of pegs for gripping, a crow’s nest at the top. Des whimpered.
Yes, yes. The ship is barely rocking. Endure, love. He stretched and climbed, realizing about halfway up just how exhausted he was when his arms started shaking. Des whimpered some more, but he made it up to the bare perch of the lookout without falling, wrapped his legs around the last of the mast, and clung.
He first checked for the Corva sisters in their rowboat. There they were, still bobbing about in the shade of the galley. He waved. They waved back, upturned faces puzzled but reassured.
Next, he swiveled around to observe the shore.
Goodness, said Des. One might take the remark for surprise, but to Pen it sounded more like glee.
Three columns of black smoke boiled skyward, blending in the upper air, one from the warehouse, one from the customs shed, and one from the pier. The two docked ships and their pier were all afire now. Well, one ship was having a conflict between rising water and descending flames. Pen wasn’t sure if fire or water would win, but it was plain the ship was going to lose. In all three locations, people had given up running around yelling and hauling buckets, and just stood back in little groups watching in morbid consternation.
The rich pirate ship nearby was not faring fortunately either, or else was coming along quite well depending on one’s point of view. Pen thought it was lovely, and so, by her approving hum, did Des. The fire had spread from the collapsed rigging to the deck and below, and the sailors were in process of abandoning it, crowded into a teetering rowboat or swimming with the aid of planks or spars tossed overboard.
Pen studied his trail of chaos. We aren’t going to be welcome back in Lanti, are we.
Shouldn’t think it, no, agreed Des.
That’s fine. I didn’t like the town anyway.
Pen blew out his breath and started looking around the harbor for something, anything, that floated, had a sail, and was smaller than a whale. They now possessed a rowboat to get to it, so they were that much to the good after all this effort. With all his running, had he only succeeded in running them into a blind alley?
A wink of light and flash of color at the broad harbor mouth drew his attention away from the spectacle of the shore, and he swung around and squinted.
It was a galley. The color had been a sail being furled, the light a reflection off the long double bank of wet oars as they rose and dipped, turning the ship in toward the town. Another Roknari slaver? No, too narrow, too swift…
That’s a war galley, said Des. She couldn’t sit bolt upright in alarm, but Pen could rise for both of them, standing on the support and peering out under the edge of his hand.
No… not a war galley… One, two, three… six, with others occluded behind, seven, nine, ten… A couple of fat freight cogs sailed after, the nautical equivalent of a baggage train. The Carpagamons finally coming to reclaim their island? Some Rathnattan prince doing the same? The ships were actually more in the Cedonian style of current naval architecture.
A breath of breeze in the mild afternoon blew the lead ship’s pennants out straight.
…What was half the duke of Orbas’s fleet doing here?
And, oh yes, Pen recognized the commander’s banner. Nikys had painstakingly and lovingly sewn it for her dear brother, after all.
General Adelis Arisaydia, scourge of the Rusylli and pride and terror of his troops. Pride because terror, Pen gathered, because soldiers thought like that.