Down they slid, black beads on a string. When Taliktrum arrived seventh, his aunt could barely contain her fury.
"You might have struck me with that hook," she said. "And as Talag's son you should be last down the rope."
Taliktrum glared at her. "I am last," he said.
"What?" Dri counted quickly. "Where is Nytikyn?"
Taliktrum said nothing, but dropped his eyes.
"Oh no! No!"
"A boy did it," said Ensyl. "Some fisherman's brat."
"Nytikyn," said Diadrelu. Her eyes never stopped moving, hunting threats among the crates and timbers stacked around them-but her voice was hollow, lost.
"He saved us," said Taliktrum. "The boy was a fiend, trying to cut the rope and drown us. Who knows, Aunt? Maybe he's the same lad we heard blubbering for his ship. The one you found so charming."
Diadrelu blinked at him, then shook herself. "We run," she said.
They had no trouble on the barge, nor with the leap from her rails to the shrimper moored alongside. But once aboard the shrimper disaster nearly struck again: her crew was scrubbing the forecastle, and when the boat rocked, a wash of bilgewater struck them like a river in flood. But they locked arms, as ixchel will, and those at the end held fast to a deck cleat, and the torrent passed. Moments later they ran to the dark side of the pilothouse and scaled it to the roof.
One challenge more. A bowline from the Chathrand passed just above them, one of dozens of ropes tying the ship like a colossal bull to nearly every fixed object on the wharf. This line ran from the fishing pier-the very point they had been making for-looped low over the shrimper, and then rose sharply for a hundred feet or more to the Chathrand's topdeck.
Leaping up to the bowline proved simple enough, but the climb was terrible. If you have ever scrambled up a wet and slippery tree, you might have some idea of their first minutes. Now imagine that the tree is not six or seven times your height but two hundred times, and branchless, and filthy with tar and algae and sharp bits of shell. Then consider that this tree lacks bark, lacks footholds of any kind, and heaves and twists with the slow rocking of the ship.
Up and up, hand over hand. When they were sixty feet from the deck the sun appeared on the horizon, peeking under rainclouds, and Dri knew they were exposed to the sight of any giant who glanced their way. Inch after scrabbling inch, hands bleeding from the scratchy rope. All the while she waited for the shout: Crawlies! Crawlies on the line!
The last nightmare was the rat funneclass="underline" a broad iron cone threaded onto this and every other mooring line to keep the pests from doing exactly what they were attempting. The mouth of the funnel opened downward and spread, bell-like, farther than any of them could reach. Dri and Taliktrum had practiced for this moment on a real bell, in a temple in Etherhorde, but this was infinitely worse. The cone weighed more than all of them together.
Two of the East Arqualis climbed inside, set their shoulders to the funnel wall and pushed against the heavy rope with their feet. Gasping and sweating, they tilted the funnel to one side. Dri and Taliktrum gripped the rope with their legs as if riding a horse, and leaned the upper halves of their bodies over the lip of the funnel. "Go!" she snapped, and her people climbed over them, using their backs and shoulders like steps. Then: "Out, you!" to the pair inside the funnel, and beside her Taliktrum hissed. Dri felt it, too: the huge weight of the funnel, tearing at her ribs. The East Arqualis were crawling out past their legs, making an about-face on the rope (Hurry, by Rin, hurry!) and climbing, like the others, up her body and Taliktrum's. Her nephew's teeth were locked and his lips pulled back in a snarl of pain. But together they bore the weight.
"Climb, Aunty," he whispered.
Dri shook her head. "You first."
"I'm stronger-"
"Go! S'an order!" She could not manage another word. Still he disobeyed! He glanced down at her straining ribs, seemed to consider. Then, with the same acrobat's grace as his father at twenty, he loosed his grip and kicked himself past the rim of the funnel.
Something ripped inside her. She cried out. The ixchel above seized Taliktrum as he leaped, turned him in the air by his ankles, and just as Dri's grip broke his hand descended and caught her own, and dragged her past the funnel's lip.
The last thirty feet were a red agony for Diadrelu. But when they gained the ship they were safe-the rope was cleated next to a lifeboat bound under a broad tarpaulin. They slipped under
this rainproof cloth with ease. Dri found her people clustered about a message scrawled with charcoal on the deck. Ixchel words, too small for giant eyes: DOOR AT STEPRAIL, NO LATCH, 8 FT 9 IN. STARBOARD. WELCOME ABOARD, M'LADY.
Dri turned to look for the hidden door-and collapsed. The pain in her chest was like a swallowed knife. But at last it was done. Four clans brought aboard in as many days. Nine of her people killed on previous boardings, just one today. Nytikyn. He was to marry a girl in Etherhorde, wore her clan emblem on a chain at his wrist. Dri herself would have to tell her. And his parents. And the other parents, children, lovers of the slain.
Ten dead for this mission already. And we haven't left port.
The Master and His Lads
2-3 Vaqrin 941
On a skysail mast, three hundred feet over the deck of the Chathrand, a bird sat in the dawn drizzle, watching the ixchel's progress up the rope with perfect indifference. He was an extraordinarily beautiful bird: a moon falcon, black above, cream-yellow below. He was smaller than a hawk but a better hunter, and quick enough to steal a fish from an eagle's claw if he took a mind to. When the she-ix flapped about in her feather suit, the falcon thought idly of killing her, out of pride more than hunger, for she was offensively ugly in flight. Not her domain. But the falcon knew his duty, and did not move as the little people staggered under the lifeboat, and a few last rats hurled themselves aboard by the gangplanks, and a toothless prisoner from the Sorrophran jail dabbed hot tar on the mast just a few yards below him, chattering foolishly: "Lo, Jimmy Bird! Sailin' with the Great Ship, are we?"
There were prisoners all over the ship, sanding rough planks, tarring ropes against the months of salt spray ahead, driving brass pegs into transom and mast. The falcon noted them as he would cattle in a field: inedible, useless, no threat to him. In all Sorrophran, just one thing mattered: an ornate red carriage by the Mariners' Inn, eight blocks uphill from the water. The falcon's eyes were so sharp he could count the flies on the horses' rumps, but they could not pierce the tavern door, nor see who had arrived by that carriage in the night.
"'Ere's bread for a handsome Jim!"
The prisoner took a moldy biscuit from his pocket, snapped it in two and tossed half at the falcon. The bird did not deign to move. On the wharf, a great crowd was gathering before the Chathrand: street boys, staggering drunks, noncommissioned sailors with their pale wives and barefoot children, fruit-sellers, grog-sellers, Rappopolni monks in their mustard-yellow robes. All were held back from the Chathrand's main gangway by a wooden fence that cut the square in two. Imperial marines, their gold helmets winking in the sun, paced just inside the fence.
At last the door of the inn swung wide. The bird tensed. Onto the porch came a heavy, muscular man, slow of step, dressed in the uniform of a merchant officer: black coat, gold trim, high collar turned up at the back. Over his chest flowed a curly, rust-red beard. The man's eyes were bright and restless. He looked suspicious of the doorway, the horses, the very air.