There he was, out under the bowsprit, incorruptible, as good a guide as a pirate’s instinct to the whereabouts of the Fortunate. They didn’t check him often, but he was there, arm outstretched, glassy eyes open, mouth still stretched wide with his dying curse, and where he pointed, there they sailed.
There was a Yenizedi wizard on board the Fortunate, likely in better shape. And they’d tried the soft approach—used Widowmaker’s Yenized-built outlines and her old Yenizedi flag to get close to the Fortunate the first time, but that trick would never work twice. Hada Korgun had laid his curse, burst his heart doing it, and now forget all the old bastard had said about duty to the king of Enlibar and the pardon they’d get if they only got his treasure back. A dead wizard didn’t keep promises any better than a live king, and Camargen never had liked that part of the bargain.
The Fortunate carried a number of items along with a scoundrel of a Yenized wizard, a man after Camargen’s own heart, who’d stolen this treasure from Hada Korgun by an act of hospitality betrayed … clever man, who had a very well-known ruby, the Heart of Fire, along with a book of spells and a gold-headed wand.
The Enlibrite, Hada Korgun, had lost his court job over that theft, the ruby being the property of the king of Enlibar. He desperately wanted his king’s property back, along with the head of the offender, that being the condition of his reinstatement. He’d approached them in the free port of Anbec, offered them considerable inducement to pursue the fugitive—for starters—and claimed the magical ability to track this prize.
All this was useful until they had the ship in sight and Korgun tried some rite or another attempting to link the two ships. He died in the magical backlash—died, or something like it. The crew had lashed him to the mast and kept him there four days, in the hopes he’d come around and blast the ship that now ran them a merry chase. His arm moved. Where that ship went, when it tacked or wore, it tracked, no matter the weather. But he’d begun to have an effect on the crew, just standing there in the way of hands on business, and it seemed less and less likely he’d come to and be himself again.
So they’d lashed him under the bowsprit, down where hands bound for the head could look out and wish him a good day, if they wanted. At night he had a wan kind of bluish glow about him, and for his part, Capt. Camargen would just as soon cut him free for fish bait, being averse to wizardry from the start and convinced by a long shot he didn’t need a wizard-compass to run down a bloody great Yenizeder merchantman in the middle of the ocean.
But the captain of that vessel was a right seaman, no question. They’d used all their tricks on each other, setting out decoys at night, muffling up their wizard-compass with sailcloth and dousing all lights to creep closer on a following breeze. They’d gotten the most of every wind that would serve, crept through a maze of islands and chartless reefs, turned tricks of light and weather, and all he’d done had kept the bastard from any civilized port, at least. Run as he would, every time he came close to land, he’d gotten between and chased him out to sea.
They’d be rich. The law of the Brotherhood was share and share alike, and they’d be rich when they ran that beggar down.
So the crew put up with misery, put up with a chase that dragged into days and weeks, into calms and blows and heat and frozen, deadly rigging. The deep calms had set them in sight of one another, the weed growing thick on both their bottoms, until they both sailed like slugs, and no time for either of them to heave down and scrape clean. The chase took on a nightmare slowness at times, every scrap of sail aloft and the log running slower, slower, while they blazed away at one another with Yenized Fire, and flung glass bombs, trying to set sails or pitch-soaked wood ablaze. Crew were scarred with burns, to a man.
Then they reached latitudes where storms grew deadly icicles in the maintop, that plunged to deck and dented the planks, where men took horrible falls, and thus far survived them. “’Cause he’s dead, we ain’t,” was the common wisdom, and the crew didn’t want to look at their wizard—all frozen up with icicles, one report said, but still moving—but they had acquired a superstitious belief that old Korgun was their luck as well as their compass.
A sensible captain might have called it enough. Widowmaker’s situation had gotten desperate, running them low on provisions and on water, the bitter latitudes wearing the already thin sails and rigging to a perilous state. At times they thought they’d have lost their quarry, and Captain Camargen began to think of ordering the Widowmaker to some wooded shore, some foreign port where they might forget the foolishness and get it out of their blood.
But there was that damned wizard-compass up under the bow, their figurehead. And just when they thought they’d lost her, there was the thrice-damned Fortunate. At times a glass showed her clearly, let them see that cursed Yenizedi wizard walking around, talking to the crew, sometimes just lingering back by the stern and watching them, just watching, silver hair streaming in the wind—a live wizard, to their dead one.
“We can find other prey,” Capt. Camargen had said. Even he had a conscience, and when water itself ran short, when they could take no time to send boats ashore: “We’re down to a ton of water,” he told the assembled crew, “and even the hardtack is running slim.”
“We ain’t et all the rats, yet,” the crew shouted back. “We’re goin’ on, Cap’n!”
The log itself had gone strange. What Capt. Camargen thought he’d written turned out written differently when he checked his course. His charts showed frayed and lost lettering just where it might have been most useful.
But now they were closer than they had been in weeks. The Fortunate was hull-up, and lagging, the wind deserting her sails as she bore close to a shore where the charts warned of reefs and shoals, another of her tricks, but not one she could play to great advantage: The Widowmaker could skin through channels where the Fortunate risked her bottom, and a xebec’s sails gave her much more maneuverability in the tricks of wind.
Around a headland, skimming close, close to shore, and now there seemed to be a spot on the lens. Capt. Camargen closed the glass, polished the lens with his cuff, and tried again.
Not a spot, after all. A spot of bluish haze, the sort of color that ought to belong on the horizon, but that had set down on the sea, right near that coast, and the sea beyond it all wrinkled with wind.
Camargen snapped the glass shut and glared, not needing a glass now to see that situation, the dog.
They had the wind off their starboard quarter, carrying them along at a good rate, no danger of a lee shore while this wind blew, but that riffling of the blue water out there was a white squall of the sort infamous in the southern sea, a brutal shift in the wind, in this case bearing right toward the coast, and the Fortunate sailing right along that coast. The Fortunate had that squall in their sights, too. Had it in their sights, bloody hell! That blackguard wizard might have stirred it up as a favor to the captain.
Hammer and anvil, the coast for the anvil and the squall for the hammer, and them a good long ways behind. The Fortunate was meaning to skin through, pass by that deadly rocky headland before the squall came sweeping down on that coast, and leave them in her wake. It intended the squall to cut them off, to force them to veer out to sea and sail wide of the weather.