Goddess of the Ice Realm (38 page)

“Aye,”
growled the king in Garric's mind.
“And when it's time to split skulls, we'll do that too, lad; you and me!”

Ilna awakened in her bedroll on the stern an instant before the lookout's cry roused everybody aboard the
Bird of the Tide.
The sky to the north rippled and flared crimson.

“Get the oars out,” Chalcus ordered calmly from the door to the tiny deckhouse. “Nabarbi and Tellura to port, Shausga and Ninon starboard. Kulit—”

Kulit was on watch; he'd sounded the alarm.

“—stay there in the bow to conn us through the passage.”

In a break from his usual blithe cheerfulness, Chalcus added in a snarl, “Sister take those bloody rocks, and may they not take
us
before we're even out of this harbor!”

Ilna glanced at the stars; it was past midnight. The moon was waxing and not yet visible in Terness Harbor, though on the open sea it would probably be above the horizon.

The weapons were stored in the deckhouse, sheltered from the weather. Chalcus took out a bow, set one end on the deck, and leaned his weight on the other until the staff curved; then he slipped the bow cord into its notch. Bowstaves cracked if left with the cord taut, so an archer only strung his weapon when he was about to use it.

Night lay on the drystone huts built up the hillside; the town was dark as only a peasant village or the deep forest can be. No lights gleamed from the fishing boats. A muted clang came from the
Defender,
moored across the harbor. The narrow-hulled patrol vessel rocked even in the still water of the harbor; the hammer hanging beside the alarm gong in the stern occasionally brushed it as they both swung.

“What's it that's happening out there, Captain?” Hutena
asked as he took the first bow as Chalcus began to string the next. The four crewmen told off to row were fitting their long oars onto the thole pins. They worked with their usual skill, never wasting a motion, but there was a silent tension to the task tonight.

“Ah, that's what we're going out to learn, lads,” Chalcus said. He passed the second bow to the bosun who gathered it with the first in his right hand. He held them by their tips. “Wizards' work, that we know from the sky.”

He nodded as he strung the third bow, a particularly stiff one. Its core of black wood from Shengy was laminated between a layer of whalebone on the face and a backing of ox sinew. “Which wizards those would be, and what their intent is—those things we need to be closer to learn.”

Chalcus grinned broadly at Ilna. “Not so, dear heart?” he asked.

“I can't tell anything from here,” Ilna said. Smiling faintly because the situation really did amuse her, she added, “Of course I may not be able to tell anything when we're in the middle of whatever unpleasant business is going on, either.”

“Indeed, we may not,” Chalcus agreed equably. “And we may all have our heads taken for trophies in the airy halls of the birdmen. If any of you lads would stay ashore tonight, the dock's a short step now but a very long one if you wait.”

“We're with you,” Hutena grunted. He reached for the third bow.

“This bow is for me, I think, Master Bosun,” Chalcus said mildly. He straightened, surveying the crew. “Does Hutena speak for you all, then?”

Nobody replied. Hutena said, “Cast off the bow line, Kulit. I've already gotten the stem.”

Kulit loosed the line, then took a boat-pike from the mast rack and joined the bosun in shoving the
Bird of the Tide
away from the quay. The rowers took up the stroke, falling into a rhythm without external command.

The bosun set a bow between each pair of oarsmen while Chalcus brought out bundles of arrows. Ilna thought about the attack on the fishermen; if the Rua chose, they could drive the
Bird's
crew into the hold as easily as they'd cleared the decks of the open boats. But she was increasingly less
convinced that the winged men had anything to do with the attacks on merchantmen in the Strait.

The
Bird of the Tide
made for the harbor entrance. Kulit called low-voiced bearings from the bow, but the oarsmen needed little correction. Their faces had the set, unhappy expressions of men about to go out in a drenching rainstorm. They didn't look frightened; and perhaps they weren't.

That there were no lights in the village of Terness was only to be expected; Ilna would've been surprised if any fisherman had been wasting lamp oil at this time of night. The castle was equally dark, though, and that was another matter. She'd seen enough palaces and noblemen's mansions to know that there should be the gleam of a lantern in the guardroom, the glow of fires beneath the ovens where bread for the company was baking.

She smiled tightly again. In this particular place, she didn't suppose the lord would be reading far into the night; but it was likely enough that the wink of a rushlight through a shutter would indicate that a clerk had been late finishing his accounts.

The stars shone as bright points undimmed by a haze of wizardlight. Whatever had awakened her was over now. That part of it, at any rate.

Chalcus distributed short cutlasses to the crew, all but Hutena who had his own broad-bladed hatchet thrust through his belt. The short, curving cutlasses looked clumsy to Ilna, but they were as keen as Chalcus thought they should be—working edges rather than being sharpened chisel-thin and sure to break at the first hard stroke. They must have suited the men using them or else they'd have had something different. Blades were no business of hers, anyway.

Another gush of wizardlight stained the sky as the
Bird of the Tide
negotiated the last of the narrows. The cliffs on either side of the vessel stood out starkly against the scarlet glare above them. Ilna felt the hairs on the backs of her arms rise; her nose wrinkled in irritation at her body's inability not to react.

“Dead ahead on the horizon,” Kulit called, his voice strong but just a half tone higher than Ilna had heard it on
other occasions. “I saw a mast when the . . . when the sky was bright, you know?”

Chalcus hopped to the top of the deckhouse, the highest vantage on the
Bird
since they'd unstepped the mast and left it back on the quay. “Row on, lads,” he said in a tone of quiet excitement. “That's the
Queen of Heaven
or another so like her it makes no never mind. There's lights aboard her, and it's more lights than any captain would bum while anchored in calm weather. We'll learn something soon or I'll know the reason why.”

He dropped beside Ilna again and crossed his hands before him. “Had I left the mast up,” he said, “we'd have a better view as you doubtless are thinking. But we'd have been visible from farther out as well, and that concerned me more than what
we
could see.”

“I wasn't thinking anything of the sort,” said Ilna tartly. “I assumed you knew your business; and I certainly
don't
know your business.”

She was knotting and loosing patterns as she spoke. She'd taken the cords out of her sleeve almost as soon as she awakened, and she'd been working—and unworking—them ever since. She saw Chalcus glance at the latest version and quickly cupped it between her palms. He couldn't have gotten a clear enough look anyway, but—

“That wouldn't be a good thing to see,” Ilna said without letting her voice display her terror at what had almost happened. “I'm nervous, you see, and when I'm nervous my mind calms itself by thinking of dark places to send my enemies.”

“Ah!” said Chalcus. “I can understand how that might be.” He laughed merrily and hugged her with his left arm, though his eyes continued to scan the sea ahead of them.

The
Bird of the Tide
drove over the slow swells. The steering oar was raised and lashed to the rail where it didn't drag against the vessel's progress. Ilna knew there was a current because of what the sailors had told her and from the way bubbles of foam slowly drifted right to left, but Nabarbi and Tellura on the port side oars were compensating for it by taking longer strokes than their shipmates to starboard.

“There's the
Queen
or her twin . . .” said Chalcus, pitching his voice just loud enough to be heard over the faint squeal of the rowlocks. The crew had tallowed them just after nightfall, before they opened their bedrolls to sleep. “And there's boats in the water beside her, low ones. Hutena, were any of the fishing boats missing from the harbor tonight?”

“They were not,” said the bosun, standing with a hand on the tiller and a hand on his axe head, ready at instant need to drop the steering oar into the water. “Every boat that went out this morning came back to harbor, saving the one you say the demons took. And every boat that came back was there in her berth as we put out.”

“My thought as well,” said Chalcus with a smile. “And there's more and bigger vessels by the
Queen
than one poor fishing boat that was left for the Rua.”

Wizardlight pulsed in the deep sea, spreading outward like a ripple on a pond. It silhouetted the merchantman, now little more than a bowshot away, and two long, low barges moored to it. An instant later the
Bird of the Tide
was suspended in crimson purity. Fish, caught in the same clarity, hung lower in the light-shot void, and arrowing through the sea toward the merchantman was the great seawolf Ilna had glimpsed from the deck of the
Defender.

The flash spread on and vanished. It hadn't affected Ilna's night vision.

“Dear one, do you know what it was that just happened?” Chalcus asked in a voice all the crew could hear. He held his bow in his left hand with an arrow between his fingers, but his right hand wasn't on the cord. The light had shown everything nearby; the air was empty of Rua and of every other thing beneath the clouds.

“Beyond the obvious, that there's a wizard working,” Ilna said, “I know nothing at all.”

She tried to keep the irritation out of her voice. She realized that the crew, brave men though they were, needed or at least deserved reassurance, so she had to be willing to offer it.

A question formed in Ilna's mind and resolved itself; she chuckled, but she didn't explain the reason when Chalcus raised a quizzical eyebrow. She'd thought,
How can telling
the men that we're completely ignorant be reassuring?
And the answer came as swiftly:
We've told them they're as well off as the people putting them to this risk; and that's not what they'd assume if we failed to tell them.

“A hard pull and we'll come up alongside the barge at the stern,” Chalcus said. “Hutena, have you seen ships like that before?”

“Grain scows on the River Erd,” Kulit answered in the place of the silent bosun. “A hundred feet long and forty broad, but they'll swim in water that won't come to your waist.”

“There's marshes on the west side of the castle where you could land a barge,” said Shausga. “I sailed the Carcosa run when I was a lad. Though why you'd want to berth there with Terness Harbor so good, I don't see.”

“Indeed, a marsh?” said Chalcus. “It'd conceal your barges from an agent of Prince Garric with his eye on the
Defender,
would it not?”

“They're not hidden now,” said Ilna. “Wherever they land and sail from, we can see the barges as soon as they're used.”

“Aye, my love,” said Chalcus. “And so could anyone else who put out when he saw wizardry in the sky at night. But would, do you think, every agent choose to do that? And if he did, or she did—would their crew obey the orders to put out?”

Chalcus laughed, but quietly. They were coming up on the
Queen of Heaven
and her attendant barges. In a conversational tone he went on, “Conn us around, Kulit, starboard to starboard with the barge. Not that I think they'll try to chase us down, this lot, but for the craftsmanship of the thing.”

He grinned at Ilna. She smiled back, touched by the humor but aware also of the patterns that formed and scattered under the play of her fingers.

There were many lights on the merchantman's deck, more than Ilna could count with both hands. She heard men's voices, often that of Commander Lusius himself, shouting angry orders.

“Won't they see us coming?” she asked in a quiet voice, almost a whisper.
“Don't
they see us?”

Things splashed into the sea, followed moments later by a swirl of water and the
clop
of great jaws. Ilna'd seen the seawolf; now she knew why it followed whenever Lusius put out to sea.

“Not this lot,” Chalcus murmured. “Not till we tread on their toes, and maybe not even then.”

“We're going aboard, Captain?” asked Hutena as the
Bird of the Tide
slipped toward the barge with a soapy ease. Shausga and Ninon shipped their long oars; crewmen on the port side backed water to kill the vessel's remaining momentum. “We know who the pirates are already, don't we?”

“I think we know who,” said Chalcus. “But not how, and just possibly not who either—since our Lusius wouldn't be one to leave a derelict with a full hold. You and I will board her, Hutena, while the others will wait ready to cast off.”

“And I'm coming, of course,” said Ilna. She'd made a choice of the pattern to have in her hands; she'd chosen or her fingers had, either one. She sometimes thought that her hands had not only more skill than her conscious mind but more wisdom as well. If she'd been wise, she'd be rich and powerful beyond all other folk—but she wouldn't be Ilna os-Kenset anymore, and that was a greater price than she was willing to pay for anything in the world or beyond it.

“Of course you are, my heart,” said Chalcus, striding forward to hand his bow and the bundle of arrows to Kulit. “Of course you'll come with us, or there'd be no reason for us to be here at all.”