Traitor's Knot (2 page)

I
nside the Kittiwake, randiest of the dock-side taverns in Shipsport, two hunted men were unlikely to find the space for anonymous privacy. Raucous sailhands and sweaty stevedores jammed every nook, accosted by swindling tricksters, and the steamy blandishments of the whores. Rumours and gossip spread faster than plague. If the venue posed risks, Dakar, the Mad Prophet, need only eavesdrop to learn that the merchant brig,
Evenstar
, had weighed anchor from Tharidor and resumed her run down the eastshore last fortnight.

‘Well, what did you expect? We're a month overdue.' Fionn Areth shoved back from the trestle, chafed raw. One shout from a sailhand might see him exposed. The wide-brimmed hat just acquired from a riverman scarcely masked his striking, sharp features and black hair. The prospect of extending their journey for two hundred more leagues, over roads mired to mud by spring thaws, would but worsen his already desperate straits. ‘We should be leaving. Now.'

Yet the spellbinder stayed planted in moon-calf complacency. Slumped in his uncivilized, travel-stained jerkin, a pitcher of beer tucked in hand, Dakar crossed his mud-caked boots at the ankles. His stout bulk stayed wedged between a soused party of chandlers and a tattooed longshoreman amused by two doxies, who both vied for a perch in his lap.

Their giggling raised Dakar to soulful envy. Lacking the coin to indulge his male itch, but with no dearth of copper for drinking, he tugged his snarled beard. The cinnamon strands now showed silver roots. He would soon be grey-headed.
The legacy of his trials on Rockfell Peak: a harrowing entanglement in Fellowship magecraft that five brimming tankards still failed to erase from recalcitrant memory.

Already busy demolishing the sixth, Dakar swiped foam from his moustache. His jaundiced attention refused to acknowledge the anxious companion across from him.

Fionn Areth's impatience exploded. Above the tap-room's racketing noise, he let fly in his broad moorland accent, ‘If
Evenstar's
gone, then where in the name of thrice-coupling fiends do we go to seek news of your master?'

Heads turned. Laughter, dart games, and ribald conversation faltered at the teeming trestle. The Kittiwake's roisterers were always impressed by the prospect of a picked fight.

A fool's move, to draw notice, since the subject just broached involved a despised royal fugitive. The towns feared Prince Arithon of Rathain as a sorcerer who practised fell rites and dark magecraft. On suspicion, his associates were likely to burn, condemned out of hand as collaborators.

‘Want to visit Sithaer's eighth hell without setting foot out of Shipsport?' Dakar gripped his tankard. He gulped down the contents, then topped up Fionn Areth's half-pint. ‘Drink,' he urged, hoping the young idiot would take the safe hint and succumb to a glassy-eyed stupor. ‘Trust me on this! You don't want to risk disrupting the peace. The shoreside magistrate's got a dungeon more wretched than anything you saw back in Jaelot. Spring tides flood the cells farthest down. You haven't touched misery until you've languished neck deep, with hordes of rats scrambling onto your head to save themselves from a drowning.'

‘Given the untrustworthy company you keep, should I be surprised that you've sampled every Ath-forsaken gaol on the continent?' Fionn Areth shoved the filled vessel aside. ‘As for Sithaer's favours, I'm not getting sotted. Keep on as you are, and your fat skin could be stewed into soup grease right where we sit!' The moorlander caught hold of Dakar's moist wrist. ‘I'm using the good sense my grandame taught the goatherd. Will you haul your arse up and get out of here?'

By now, intrigued onlookers shouted for bets. Coins flashed, to the patter as someone made odds on which brawler was going to swing first. Here at the Kittiwake, fisticuffs and mayhem were counted as prime entertainment.

‘Young fool!' the fat spellbinder snarled. Now jostled as enthusiasts totted up wagers, he nursed his pitcher and, with sullen deliberation, refilled his dry tankard. ‘I'll wring your neck, you dirt-stupid Araethurian, before I move even one step.' Ignoring the whores, who stopped kissing to crane, and the growl from their displeased patron, Dakar nattered on. ‘Press me further, yes, beware! You'll see trouble on a scale you can't possibly imagine. Enough to make a verminous sink-hole seem blithe as a nurse-maid's picnic. Now, shut your mouth. Sit on your temper and swallow the beer set in front of you.'

‘Damn you to Sithaer before I take a drop,' Fionn Areth retorted.

The rabid pack of gamblers shoved back to make space.

Dakar shut his eyes. He sucked a martyred breath. Then in one lightning move, he elbowed erect and dumped his brimming tankard over his tangled head.

The run-off doused the longshoreman, to ear-splitting shrieks from his harlots. They hiked up scarlet petticoats and fled. Their swain's irate bellow clashed with the clerks' howls and rattled soot from the Kittiwake's rafters.

Dakar freed his captive arm. While the trestle skidded, upsetting the pitcher and smashing two lightermen's dinner plates, he skinned through the clerks' snatching grasp and used his tankard to parry the stevedore's battering fist.

Crockery smashed. Fragments pelted over the dicers crammed elbow to elbow on the seat just behind.

Yelling murder, and unnaturally quick for a stout man grown tight on the Kittiwake's twopenny brew, Dakar ducked a dock-walloper's left hook. Then he lost his balance and sat. The brute's knuckles hammered into the clerks' outraged charge. The leading one crashed with a bloodied jaw, and flattened two of his fellows. Their thrashing upset the adjacent trestle. Bowls and hot chowder went flying. The four brawny fishermen deprived of their meal unsheathed flensing knives, screamed, and plunged in. Their vacated bench upset with a bang, toppling a drunk, who bowled into a circle of overdressed merchants. Lace tore; spilled food and spirits rained over fine velvets. The outraged peacocks redoubled the noise, bewailing their despoiled finery.

Trapped in the breach, Fionn Areth clambered upright. Disaster overtook him. Bedlam exploded like froth on a pot, and the Kittiwake's tap-room erupted.

Tankards sailed. Broth splashed. Elbows and fists smacked against heaving flesh. Beneath the soaked tits of a gilded figure-head, an agile pack of sail-hands laid into their neighbours with marlinspikes, knuckle-bones, and clogs. Their sally encountered the longshoreman's kin, who had levelled a trestle for use as a ram. Card games whisked air-borne. Stew bones and cutlery showered the brick floor, stabbing toes and tripping combatants. Three prostitutes scuttling for cover went down, then another man, who became mired in their skirts. Their squeals drew the lusty eye of a galley-man, who dived in to lay claim to the spoils. While the landlord at the tap screeched threats and imprecations, the three heavies the Kittiwake employed to toss drunks at last stirred themselves to take charge. Brandishing cudgels, they waded in, dropping bodies like beef at a knacker's.

By then, Dakar had vanished, swallowed into the battering press.

Fionn Areth found himself trapped, all alone, mashed against the rocked edge of the trestle. The burgeoning riot cut off his escape, a rip tide that raged without quarter. The Kittiwake's brawlers were a Shipsport legend, vicious with drink and seething with the age-old bad blood between galley-men and blue-water sailors. Crews seized on the chance to hammer their rivals. Enraged
coopers shied bottles at all comers, while a reeling topman snatched lit candles from the sconces and flung them at random targets. Sparks flurried and ignited a puddle of spirits. Beset by fire and windmilling fists, the Kittiwake's strongmen yelled to summon reinforcements. The cooks, the pot-boys, and two muscled butchers burst out of the kitchen, armed with bludgeons and cleavers. Their vengeful flying wedge suggested an experience well primed for this afternoon's frolic.

At risk of being crippled, or knocked senseless for arrest, Fionn Areth grabbed the rolling pitcher as a weapon. But the body he slugged was a knife-bearing rigger, who whirled around, swore, and accosted him. His sally was backed by his ship's bursar, and another sailor swinging a belaying pin.

Fionn Areth fell back on sword training, ducked the club, and used a guarding forearm to parry the wrist of the dirk-wielding assailant. The slash missed his gut and deflected upwards, the follow-through skewered his hat brim. He snatched, too late. The snagged felt whisked away. Bare-headed, and wearing the flawless, spelled features of a notorious criminal, the moorlander panicked.

His last feckless brawl had sent him to a scaffold, mistakenly condemned as a sorcerer. A blade through the heart, followed by fire would give the most stalwart man nightmares.

Haunted by dread since that narrow escape, Fionn Areth ducked in blind terror. He dodged the swift stab of a marlinspike, desperate. Unless he recovered the hat, now impaled on the point of a maniac's dagger, he risked being falsely arraigned once again as the most wanted felon on the continent.

No one would believe the fact he was innocent. The uncanny likeness he wore was too real, a permanent imprint aligned by the wiles of the Koriani enchantresses. They had altered his face, then played him as bait. Their crafting was seamless: even his mother presumed the change was no less than his natural birthright. His late capture in Jaelot might have seen him dead for the deeds of his look-alike nemesis.

Arithon Teir's'Ffalenn, known as Spinner of Darkness, was too well renowned for obscurity. His horrific record of wanton destruction had dispatched fifty thousand armed men, sworn to serve the Alliance of Light.

‘Furies take Dakar for a witless wastrel!' Fionn Areth gasped, sorely beset. Both marlinspike and dagger thrust in concert to maim him. He dodged the first, caught a gash on his forearm. His dive for the hat ran afoul of the brute with the cudgel dispatched to clear out the tap-room.

Fionn Areth crumpled, glassy-eyed and raging, into the dark of unconsciousness.

Roused by the throb of the bruise on his head and the stinging slice on his forearm, Fionn Areth groaned, limp and queasy with vertigo. Spinning senses revealed a small, panelled chamber, lit by a clouded casement. The fusty air
smelled of ink and hot wax, while an old man's voice stitched through his fogged thoughts, gravid with accusation.

‘…same pair wrecked the Kittiwake's tap-room before, in the company of a known smuggler.'

Someone unseen cleared his throat and replied in the sonorous drone of state language.

While the debate sawed onwards over Fionn Areth's head, he absorbed the fact that he slumped face-down, cheek pressed to a battered table. Iron manacles circled his wrists, which were draped like dropped meat on his knees. Somewhere nearby, a quill-nib scraped.

He tried to sit up. The effort spiked fresh pain through his skull, jogging the memory of terror. Where else could he be but in a magistrate's custody? His despair was confirmed by the crack of a gavel, then a man's bitten phrase, that the miscreants' infractions were anything but a moot point.

While Fionn Areth mustered the shaken breath to assert his abused state of innocence, Dakar's unctuous speech intervened.

‘Captain Dhirken passed the Wheel years before you took office. Lord Magistrate, the past charge was not left outstanding. Yes, her crew wrecked the Kittiwake. But the damages were settled in full at the time, paid off by the singer responsible.'

Fionn Areth shut his eyes.
This was Shipsport, not Jaelot.
His panic still haunted with visceral force. The nightmare repeat of prisoner's chains
could not
be happening again. Through rising nausea, he tried to protest. ‘But I wasn't th—'

A kick rapped his ankle. He gasped and shoved straight, snatched the swimming impression of a vaulted ceiling above a railed dais. There, a number of corpulent, robed men sat arrayed in stern judgement against him.

‘Shut up, you fool!' Dakar hissed in his ear. ‘Handle this wrong, and we're dog-meat.' To Shipsport's gathered tribunal, he temporized, ‘This time, to our sorrow, we haven't the coin to pay fines for disorderly conduct. We can't make amends to the Kittiwake's landlord, beyond our respectful apologies.'

‘Well, sorry's no recompense!' The stout table jounced as the tavern's greybeard owner thumped an indignant fist. ‘I've suffered enough of your hot air already to bore me past Daelion's Wheel! The last time, your friend played his lyranthe for hand-outs. He sang, forbye, like a silver-tongued lark! Caroled until every last mark cleaned his pockets, and bedamned to your pleas that you're penniless.' To the magistrate rapping his gavel, he railed, ‘My tap-room's in shambles! My son broke his arm. I demand satisfaction. Grant the Kittiwake use of the bard's talent for one month. The house takes his proceeds until the debt's paid, with the extra for punitive damages.'

The town clerk waggled his pen in remonstrance. ‘The accused in the dock broke the peace, don't forget! Shipsport's coffers are due a steep fine for their act of civil disturbance. These charges must be met beforetime.'

While the magistrate stroked his suet chin, and the spring's nesting wrens cheeped in the eaves outside, Fionn Areth stirred to a sour clank of chain. ‘But I don't—'

Dakar jammed an elbow into his ribs, then spun lies with pressured invention. ‘The bard has a head cold. Can't sing a note. Force him to try, his sick croaking is likely to rile your patrons past salvage. You said yourself, the Kittiwake's crowd likes to toss inept singers through the window. That won't meet your fees, and my friend lies at risk of suffering a crippling injury'