“Seems like a lot of trouble to go to for a barrel or two of
dried herring,” Rudi said, advancing on the young man, who backed away from him,
clearly terrified. The speed with which his armed companions had been dispatched
had evidently come as an unwelcome surprise. Rudi gestured towards the
companionway with his sword. “Up on deck.” He wasn’t expecting any serious
resistance, since the lad was obviously no fighter. He hadn’t even drawn the
dagger at his belt, his attention apparently still focused on the tiny object in
the palm of his hand.
“Sure, fine.” The young man grinned insincerely. “No
problem.” His eyes flickered around the darkened hold, as if looking for
something, but he began to move towards the hatch nevertheless. As his eyes
began to adjust to the lower light levels down here, Rudi found he could see
more clearly than before. Then he gasped. The thing in the young man’s
leather-gloved hand was glowing faintly, like Hanna’s skaven stone, but with a
duller, pulsating radiance like the beating of a heart. Rudi stared at it.
“Sorcery,” he said, unable to prevent the word from slipping
out, and an edge of apprehension from colouring his voice.
The young man smiled lazily, evidently thinking he had some
kind of advantage after all.
“That’s right,” he said, his voice suddenly sounding more
confident, “and if you mess with it, or me, this boat’s going straight to the
bottom. Understood?” Rudi glanced across at Hanna, who stared back, her face
blank. He’d been hoping for a lead from her, some hint as to whether the young
man was bluffing or not, but she remained impassive. Berta was making the sign
of the trident, her face white.
“Let him go, Rudi.” Hanna edged around the line of boxes, her
expression growing grimmer by the moment. “No telling what that thing might do.”
“Right.” Rudi stood aside, giving the young man a wide berth.
His experience of sorcery had been limited so far, but he knew enough to realise
that it could be extremely dangerous, and if Hanna thought there was a
significant risk he wasn’t about to take any chances.
“What’s going on down there?” Busch’s face appeared in the
hatchway, framed by a rectangle of darkening sky, and Rudi glanced upwards.
“Everything’s taken care of,” he said, trying to sound
confident. “This fellow’s just climbing back up to the deck. Give him some
room.”
“I’ll give him a dent in his skull,” Busch said grimly. The
young man held up the glowing talisman.
“That wouldn’t be wise,” he said. As he edged nearer to the
steep flight of steps leading up to the open air the light grew more intense,
the pulsations faster, as if the heartbeat it so resembled was becoming panicky.
Despite himself, the young man glanced around, catching sight of Hanna, and his
eyes widened. “It’s you! You’re—”
Before he could complete the sentence, Hanna stepped in, and
drove her bloody knife up under his ribcage. The young man looked surprised for
a moment, and then folded, his heels drumming on the deck.
“Merciful Shallya, you killed him!” Berta stared at the young
healer in stupefied astonishment.
“Damn right I did.” Hanna threw a blooded scrap of Pieter’s
shirt over the glowing talisman, and wrapped it up carefully. “There’s no
telling what he might have done with this.” Rudi suspected she knew perfectly
well, but followed her lead anyway; she must have had good reason to act as she
did.
“Better chuck it over the side,” he suggested.
“That’s just what I’m going to do,” Hanna said.
“What about the other two?” Busch asked.
Hanna glanced at the pirate who’d broken Rudi’s fall, still
slumped beneath the open hatch.
“Dead,” she announced after a cursory inspection. “Broken
neck.” The man beneath the barrel stirred fitfully. “And this one’s in no state
to fight. Can somebody bring him?”
“I’ll do it,” Berta offered, hoisting the fellow none too
gently across her shoulders. The man’s incessant groaning intensified for a
moment, and then choked off with a faint whimper of pain.
“Good.” Hanna clambered up on deck, and Rudi followed. From
Busch’s relatively relaxed demeanour, he assumed that the immediate danger had
passed, an impression reinforced by a quick glance around the deck. Yullis was
sitting against the cabin wall, still looking dazed, but otherwise none the
worse for wear, and Shenk had clearly won his own fight; the female pirate was
backed up against the rail, her sword on the deck, and the point of Shenk’s
cutlass at her throat.
“All right there, skipper?” Busch asked. Shenk nodded.
“I can manage.” The woman licked her lips, a little
nervously.
“You wouldn’t kill an unarmed woman, would you?” Shenk
shrugged.
“That depends.”
“Depends on what?” the woman asked, shrugging too, in a
manner designed to emphasise the goods on display in her abbreviated shirt.
Shenk grinned.
“On whether you can swim,” he said, kicking her legs out from
under her and shoving hard.
“You bas—” The rest of the sentence was cut off with a
splash, and after a moment, the pirate surfaced, spluttering furiously.
“Oh, you can.” Shenk shrugged, as if the matter was only of
academic interest.
“This one too, skip?” Berta asked, and the captain nodded.
“If you wouldn’t mind, I like my decks kept clean.” The
injured pirate followed his female companion over the side, and after a moment
she stopped shouting abuse in favour of trying to keep his head above the water.
“Ah, that’s a good sign.”
“What is?” Rudi asked.
“They don’t leave their wounded. A lot of them do, but that
means their boat will stop to pick them up.”
“That gives us a good head start,” Ansbach supplied
helpfully. Rudi nodded. “What about the others?”
“All dead,” Berta said. Shenk raised an eyebrow, and glanced
at Rudi.
“Your handiwork, I take it?” He sounded impressed.
“Mostly,” Rudi admitted. In the distance, the pirate vessel
had come about, and seemed to be engaged in recovering the last forlorn remnants
of its boarding party.
“Hanna got one,” Berta supplied, “and a good thing too. He
was a witch, and he was summoning a daemon to sink us, and—”
“A witch?” Shenk’s voice was disbelieving. “I’ve seen a lot
of strange things on the river over the years, but I’ve never known one of their
kind turn pirate.”
“He had this,” Hanna said, holding out the bundle of rags in
her hand at arms length, “and it’s definitely magical.” Even through its
wrapping of bloodstained cloth, the light it emitted could still be seen,
pulsing obscenely. Shenk nodded.
“Is it worth much?”
“Probably.” Hanna locked eyes with the captain for a moment.
“He said it could sink us too. If you want to keep it on board while you search
for a buyer…”
“It’s only a few more days to Altdorf, skipper,” Busch
coughed nervously. “You could probably find a wizard there who’d buy it.”
“Or a witch hunter who’d burn us just for having touched the
damn thing.” Shenk recoiled from the bundle. “I don’t trust magic, never have,
never will. Chuck it over the side.”
“With pleasure,” Hanna said, and did so. Rudi watched the
little object sink, half expecting the sinister glow to follow them through the
water, but it simply sank out of sight with a faint
plop!
as if it had
been nothing more inimical than an ordinary pebble. As it hit the water, Rudi
thought he heard Hanna sigh, as if with relief, but the gurgling of the water
against the hull and the snap of the wind in the sails made it hard to be sure.
“What was that thing?” Rudi asked, the first time he was sure
that he and Hanna were alone and unlikely to be overheard. The
Reikmaiden
was tied up at another of the riverside settlements, on a wharf identical to
most of the others he’d seen on their progress up the river, and the familiar
huddle of huts surrounded it. The only difference was that this one was deep in
the heart of the forest, its inhabitants apparently scratching a living by
logging, and the presence of the trees so close at hand lifted his spirits more
than he would have believed possible. Impatient to go ashore, he’d returned to
their improvised quarters in the boat’s hold to stow his bow and arrows, and
found Hanna sitting pensively in her hammock, her legs swinging. She shrugged.
“A talisman: nothing special, just a basic enchantment on an
old symbol of Mannan. You can buy something similar anywhere there are wizards
with time on their hands and a hole in their purses. Crude, but they do the job
they’re made for.”
“What job is that?” Rudi asked again. Hanna hopped out of the
hammock.
“There are all sorts. Ones like that detect the aura of
magic,” she said. Rudi felt his blood run cold.
“You mean they were witch hunters?” That didn’t make sense.
There had been no sign of Gerhard or any of his associates on the vessel that
had attacked them, and surely witch hunters would have ordered the
Reikmaiden
to heave to before boarding, relying on the authority of their office to enforce
compliance, rather than simply attacking without warning. Hanna shook her head.
“I don’t think so. They were looking for something hidden
among the cargo.” She pointed. “There’s a hollow space in that bulkhead there,
behind the fish barrels. There’s something magical inside it; powerful, too.”
“How do you know?” Rudi asked, and Hanna looked at him
scornfully.
“I’ve got the sight, remember?”
Rudi recalled how she’d been able to recognise Alwyn and Kris
as fellow mages the first time she’d seen them, and read the marks on the
enchanted cards in Tilman’s gambling den. “I noticed it as soon as I woke up in
here.”
“So that’s what Shenk’s up to,” Rudi said. He’d been certain
that the riverboat captain was smuggling something, ever since their encounter
in the rooming house the Black Caps had been raiding back in Marienburg, and
this seemed to confirm it. “Do you think he knows his contraband is magical?”
“I doubt it.” Hanna shrugged. “You saw how skittish he was
with that gewgaw I threw over the side. He wouldn’t go within a league of what’s
hidden back there if he knew how powerful it is.” Her tone became speculative.
“Unless he’s being paid an enormous amount of money for shifting it, of course.”
“Maybe.” Rudi felt the good mood that the scent of the
surrounding woodlands had kindled in him begin to evaporate, displaced by a
formless sense of unease. Once again he was surrounded by secrets, which could
get him killed without even knowing the reason why, or finding the answers to
the questions that continued to plague him. He’d had enough of that back in
Marienburg. “I’ll talk to him if I get the chance, see what I can find out.”
“Be careful,” Hanna counselled. “You might not like what you
uncover.”
Rudi nodded, certain that she was right.
“So it was just bad luck, the thing flaring up when you got
close to it,” he said.
Hanna echoed the gesture. “That’s right. It picked up on my
aura instead of that thing behind the barrels. Luckily, I was close enough to
shut him up before he cried witch on me.”
“No one seems to have noticed, anyway,” Rudi said, while a
small part of his mind watched appalled at the casual way they were both
accepting the killing of another human being as a regrettable necessity. “Pieter
was well out of it the whole time, and Berta thinks you saved the boat from a
hell-raising necromancer.”
“Good,” Hanna said. “That avoids any more difficulties.”
Her matter-of-fact tone sent another shiver down Rudi’s
spine. Would she really have been willing to murder their friends to keep her
secret if she’d had to? He forced the thought away. Life on the run was changing
both of them, he knew, but he couldn’t believe that Hanna would kill in cold
blood simply because it was expedient. She looked at him, an odd expression on
her face. “Are you all right?”
“Fine,” Rudi assured her, hoping that it was true.
Night had fallen completely by the time Rudi returned to the
deck, and flaring torches lit the wharf, picking out golden highlights from the
rippling darkness beneath the gangplank. It was the first time Rudi had seen
such a display at any of the riverside settlements the boat had put in at, and
after a moment’s thought he recognised the resinous branches in the crudely-made
sconces as by-products of the local timber trade.
“That’s right,” Shenk confirmed when he voiced the thought
aloud. “Nothing gets wasted out here.” He glanced at Rudi. “Finally put your toy
away?” Rudi nodded. The pleasantry had been delivered in a tone, which, if no
warmer than before, seemed a little more relaxed than Shenk had been around him
hitherto.
“I don’t think I’ll be needing it now,” he said. Despite the
fact that the pirates, if that was what they really were, had clearly been
driven off, he’d kept his bow handy until the
Reikmaiden
was safely tied
up at the quay. No one aboard had objected. After the ease with which he’d
apparently dispatched the majority of their attackers, the crew had taken to
watching him with wary respect, and even Busch and Ansbach spoke to him with a
little more warmth in their voices. “Not tonight, anyway.”
“We’ll have seen the last of them,” Shenk said. “Scum like
that won’t risk another savaging. They’ll wait for an easier target to come
along.”
“Maybe,” Rudi said, following the riverboat captain to the
gangplank. “If they really were pirates, of course.”
“What else would they be?” Shenk asked. Rudi shrugged.
“Fog Walkers?” he suggested, using the common nickname for
the covert agents of the ruling council of Marienburg. He couldn’t be sure in
the guttering light cast by the torches on the wharf, but for a moment he
thought a flicker of surprise and apprehension appeared on the captain’s face.
Then it was gone, and Shenk’s expression became studiedly neutral.