Dangerous Waters (3 page)

As soon as Jilseth learned his name, that noble lord would be answering to the Archmage and the Council of Hadrumal alongside the renegade mage. The edict was absolute. Wizards did not engage in warfare. No matter how grievously these coastal regions had suffered at the hands of the raiders, Minelas had no business taking Caladhrian gold in return for unsanctioned magic killing the corsairs.

So what exactly had happened? Jilseth concentrated on her spell. Once she knew the extent of his guilt, Minelas would learn the true meaning of the Archmage’s wrath.

‘This is salt marsh.’ The dead man was pointing something out to the man riding beside him. The captain of the troop, judging by his finer linen and padded green tunic. ‘See, samphire and spearweed.’

As the man nodded at the saw-edged plants, blue magelight flickered. Minelas’s magelight. His affinity was with the air. Lightning flashed across Jilseth’s spell. Another burst of radiance followed. Water and mud exploded all around.

The dead man yelped with pain as an arrow bit deep into the back of his shoulder. The Caladhrian troopers were shouting and drawing their swords. Their mounts plunged and snorted, obedience sorely tested by their terror.

More arrows struck men and beasts alike. A cry went up to dismount but the dead man was desperately clinging on as his horse reared up. It lashed out with iron shod hooves as black clad raiders emerged from the marshes.

Jilseth’s contempt for Minelas deepened. He had led these men straight into an ambush. So much for his wizardry giving them an edge against the corsair raiders.

Worse, his lurid magecraft was doing far more harm than good. One Caladhrian’s swinging sword cut through a floating ball of lightning. The magic killed him in an instant.

The wounded man’s horse reared again and this time he lost his grip. He screamed as he hit the ground. Blood gushed from the ragged wound and he couldn’t reach to staunch it.

Corsairs clubbed the surviving Caladhrians into submission on all sides. Jilseth leaned forward, brow furrowed, her careful hands never slowing. The black-clad raiders were carrying chains.

‘What do they want?’ a boy with a bloodied face quavered.

‘We want slaves,’ a swarthy rogue grinned.

‘No!’ The boy raised defiant fists.

The Caladhrian trooper beside him sent the youth sprawling into the mud. ‘Don’t be a fool.’

‘Listen to him,’ the raider advised as he chained the older man’s unresisting wrists and claimed his weapons. ‘You might live to see tomorrow.’

The necromantic spell flickered horribly. The wounded man wouldn’t see another day.

Jilseth gasped, shocked. The Caladhrian baron lay face down in the mud, his captor’s boot on his neck. A heavy-set corsair strode towards Minelas with his welcoming hand outstretched. The wizard brushed fragments of azure light from his gloves and nodded a greeting.

The spell-crafted vision was cut short as the dead man’s head was wrenched backwards. The Caladhrian’s last sight was the cloudless spring sky as a corsair cut his throat. Abrupt as a slamming door, the necromancy died.

Had she truly understood what she had seen? Jilseth licked dry lips as she reshaped the mingled magelight and smoke. The illusion of the dead man returned and the same events unfolded. Fighting a growing tremor in her hands, Jilseth strained her ears to pick every word from the confusion. She searched the fading edges of the vision for Minelas to see what he was doing.

She would have done so a third time but weariness defeated her. Her hands sank into her lap and the amber radiance in the oil faded. She closed her eyes for a moment. Only a moment.

A sweep of her hand sent the oil back to its bottle, leaving the silver bowl spotless. A flick of sapphire air magic tossed the dead man’s finger into the reeds. As long as she kept weaving the spell, she could watch the men die time and again. Once she let the magic unravel, there was no recalling their fate, not from that bone anyway. Necromantic visions could only be summoned once from any mortal remains.

Though the faint scent of cooked meat lingered, that wasn’t what made Jilseth nauseous. She took a brass mirror from her leather sack and kindled a stub of candle with a crimson spark springing from the snap of her fingers. Ruby reflections swirled around the polished metal.

‘Jilseth?’ A distant voice floated through the circling magic.

‘It’s worse than we thought.’ She wasted no time on courtesies. ‘Minelas took the Caladhrian baron’s gold but then he betrayed him. He led the whole troop into a trap so the corsairs could take them as slaves. The raiders’ captain hailed him as a friend.’

‘A friend who will doubtless reward him.’ The Archmage’s anger rang across the countless leagues bridged by the spell. ‘Minelas is out to make money from the Caladhrians’ fight without redeeming his pledge to use magic.’

‘His spells foiled all their attempts to fight back.’ Jilseth was still appalled by Minelas’s treachery. She’d long known he was greedy and lazy, but it had been a shock to realise that he had no hint of a conscience.

‘That breaks the edict as surely as using his own magic to kill,’ The Archmage said grimly. ‘What of the noble baron?’

‘He’s dead.’ Jilseth had seen him murdered by the raiders’ leader as she revisited the vision.

‘Then he’s beyond our chastising.’ Planir sighed. ‘I see no reason to add to his widow’s grief by accusing him, not when that could see this whole disgrace dragged into the daylight.’

Jilseth looked around the ravaged marsh. Her necromantic sight indicated more corpses. ‘Should I do anything more here?’

‘Find his body, you mean?’ The Archmage’s intuition wasn’t hampered by the distance between them. ‘No, regrettably. The less anyone knows of your presence there, the better. There’ll soon be a search, when the baron and his troop don’t return home. Follow Minelas. Our business is with him now.’

‘Of course.’ Jilseth was already wondering what penalties the renegade would face, accused before the Council of Wizards.

‘Be careful.’ The Archmage’s warning ended the bespeaking spell.

Putting candle and mirror in the bag, Jilseth stood up to shake the wet mud from her cloak. A feeble crackle of grey magelight carried the dirt away. Folding the pristine cloth, she stowed it away and pulled the drawstring tight.

As she took the ensorcelled lodestone out of her pocket, her innate affinity reawakened the spells within it. The darkly glistening gem led her onwards until scant moments later it dangled, limp and useless.

Jilseth didn’t need to examine her magic. She had felt the snap of the spell in her bones, a thread broken beyond mending. Minelas’s air-born wizardry had carried him away, directly in opposition to the earth magic underpinning her own sorcery.

Did he know that he was pursued? But Planir had only shared his suspicions with her. Minelas could have no reason to suspect he’d attracted the Archmage’s attentions.

On the other hand, he’d know the Caladhrians would be out for his blood once they knew his promises of magical aid were lies, worse than lies, if they ever learned the true depth of his betrayal. If they didn’t have magic to find him, they had scent hounds and experienced huntsmen, well able to track him through this wilderness.

Jilseth glared at the spreading salt marsh. If she sought any other mage, it would be the work of moments to ensorcel some water with ink or oil and scry out the renegade’s hidey-hole. But Minelas had studied all the ways to hide himself from scrying and devised new ones of his own. Such diligence in an otherwise indifferent student had been one of the first things to catch Planir’s interest.

She would have to return to Hadrumal and wait for the Archmage’s discreet allies ashore to send fresh word of the treacherous mage. Every one of Planir’s enquiry agents would be seeking him now.

As soon as Jilseth could stand where he had once stood, the lodestone would find him again. Sooner or later she would catch up with Minelas. As long as herons and toads were the only witnesses to this depravity, Hadrumal’s reputation would remain unsullied.

In the next breath, she was gone.

C
HAPTER
T
WO

In the domain of Nahik Jagai

23rd of For-Summer

In the 8th Year of Tadriol the Provident of Tormalin

C
ORRAIN LOOKED UP.
The whip master was striding along the walkway that cut the deck of the galley in two. The raised width of planking ran from the stern platform to the prow, a solid barrier between these rowers and those on their benches on the other half of the deck. Shouting in his southern barbarian tongue, to someone on the prow platform which the rowers couldn’t see as they sat facing the rear of the ship, the whip master sounded like a cat choking on a hairball.

The brute took his orders from the galley master; Corrain had worked that much out. The galley master relaxed in a comfortable chair up there on the stern platform beside the steersman who wrestled the single vast oar that did duty instead of a tiller.

Two slaves scurried to do the whip master’s bidding. Trusted slaves; not chained like the rest even if they remained marked out by their ragged heads and beards. Only the galley crew enjoyed the luxury of razors and shears, some going so far as to shave themselves bare as a newborn babe.

Corrain didn’t blame them. He’d have done the same given half the chance. Lice were a constant torment for the rowers, especially for the mainland captives who had far more body hair than the darker skinned Archipelagans. With everyone stripped to the waist that was painfully apparent.

The piping flute which he’d come to loathe slowed and stopped with a trill. Though Corrain couldn’t understand the Aldabreshin language, he’d learned those signals soon enough. Along with the rest of the fettered rowers sitting at this oar, he raised its blade free of the water and drew it inboard to rest on the bulwark running along the side of the ship.

Corrain seized the respite to reckon up his count of everything that had happened since the corsairs had enslaved him. Sixteen days after that and he’d been sold like some fattened hog on an auction block, on a nameless beach in the Archipelago. That was when he’d lost sight of half of those to survive the wizard’s treachery back in Caladhria.

Eight days after that and he’d arrived at the anchorage where, forced to fight for the corsairs’ entertainment, more of his comrades had died. Were they the lucky ones, or those like himself, who’d won their fights and been shared out among the galley captains to be chained to these oars?

The dead weren’t going to be whipped into helping the very raiders who plagued Caladhria. It had taken Corrain some while to realise it, but the anchorage was home to yet more of those accursed corsairs.

A contingent of warriors had embarked on the galley for this voyage. They wore no chains, and though none were clean shaven like the mariners, they kept their hair and beards cropped short, offering no hand hold to a foe in a fight. These were free men, as far as Corrain could tell, even if they lived in little more comfort than the rowers, bedding down on the decking at prow and stern.

They all looked to a man who could only be their captain. Corrain had spent his adult life as a trooper in his lord’s service. He knew fighting men when he saw them. Raiders, every last one of the scum.

How long before they were forced to row north so these savages could pillage and rape? The sailing season was well advanced now, even if in the fifty one days since they’d arrived at the corsair anchorage, the galley had only rowed from island to island within the Archipelago. Fifty one days? Fifty two? Uncertainty gnawed at his gut as cruelly as hunger.

What was happening now? Every few days they were released from their oars to haul water from the sea and to wash down the decks but they’d done that just this morning.

Corrain watched the trusted slaves open one of the lockers beneath the walkway. One dragged out a basket while the other uncapped a battered leather flagon, tall as a top-boot and doubtless plundered from some mainland tavern.