Camargen caught it and pulled, the two of them working the boat closer to the rock until it bumped and he jumped aboard, instinctively finding his footing in a slovenly tangle of rope and net.
The old man said something about a ship, a wreck, he made that much out. And then the old man picked up a pole in a menacing way, and held out his hand palm up.
The hell, Camargen said to himself, and several things occurred to him: one, that this man wanted money, which he had; that the old man had a weapon he might then use, having said money; and third, that this was a perfectly serviceable, if stinking, boat.
He grabbed the threatening pole in one bloodied hand, grabbed it with the other, and wrenched over hard, which carried the startled old man overside.
He strode aft and grabbed the tiller, hauled the rope in, and watched the old man splash toward the boat. He let the wind back the boat off a little, and the old man turned and splashed toward the rock, where he hauled himself up, dripping, onto the sole safe refuge.
“I’ve started a raft there,” he called to the old man. “Good luck to you.”
“Damn you,” he thought he made out for a reply, but he’d been, overall, polite. He bowed, and turned the boat before the wind, bringing the sail close, and sailed away, sweet as could be, with a wind off the quarter and a lubberly old boat that could even sing a bit, once the wind got behind her.
There were the fishing villages—not necessarily a good thing, to come sailing into such small places with another man’s boat—but there was plenty of coastline to choose from and there was net and line. He’d not starve.
But as the shore came nearer he saw a smudge of smoke, smoke which proved to cover a broad spot on the horizon.
A signal fire, he thought. Was it a smoky signal fire, someone summoning other survivors?
He aimed the little craft for it, and sailed, even kicking up a little spray from the bow as the wind blew inshore. He was wet. He was cold, and the wind grew colder as the boat ran, so that he sank down as much into shelter as he could get, and wrapped a dirty tarpaulin about himself, leaving only his hand on the tiller and his face exposed to the chill.
The smudge came clearer, as the haze above a settlement, but such a settlement. He saw other boats, and kept clear of them; and he saw taller masts, and a huddle of buildings big enough to been seen from a distance through the haze.
It was no village. It was a whole damned town. A city, where no city ought to be.
Anonymity was possible, in such a place of size.
But his charts had been wrong. There was nothing here. There could be nothing.
He sailed closer, no longer quite trusting his senses—his charts, he had greater faith in, but they had proved false. He sailed closer and closer, beyond a short breakwater, to a ship-channel and what was a fair-sized deepwater harbor, with quays all brown, weathered board and precious little paint, the town rising, all brown boards, beyond it. He felt far from conspicuous as he nosed his stolen boat up to the side of a long, sparse boardwalk, tied onto a piling beside a boarding ladder, and climbed up onto the level of the town.
People came and went. Chimneys gave out smoke. Nobody’s clothes were in much better case, his having lost most of their color. The harbor stank of fish and the dockside was as scurvy a place as Pirate’s Rest up in the Isles. It felt, in short, like a homecoming of sorts.
He walked, still sodden, but no longer quite so cold, down the boards and onto the stony walk of solid ground, walked with a sailor’s roll to his step, but not the only such hereabouts.
A harbor with room for ships of size, though he saw nothing larger than a channel-runner in port at the moment in this backwater place. The Widowmaker was lost, taking with her the best crew a man could ask, but he was alive, he had gold in his pocket, probably more than adequate for a start in this town, and he could live, gather a small crew about him—and wait for a likely ship to come in. He’d buy new charts, too. Damn the mapmaker.
All around him he heard the fisherman’s accent, a handful of words discernible and those few uninformative. He could read signs, spelling as indifferent as any in the Rest. One sign marked an inn, as he took it. It said, THE BROKEN MAST, with a piece of cracked spar above the door.
If a man was looking for fellow seamen, that looked apt enough. Broken Mast it was. He needed a dry place, food, and a bed.
He walked into the mostly deserted inn at this hour, picked the scarred table nearest the fire, and threw himself into a creaking wooden chair.
“Wan drink?” the bartender yelled, and something that sounded like come here. Every man in this damned town talked with marbles in his mouth—a dialect, and a muddy one, like the town itself.
There was, however, a universal shortcut. Camargen felt at his waist for his purse and, among its currency of various climes and kingdoms, extracted a coin of small size … gold, however. It winked in the general gloom of the place.
“You want this?”
The barkeep drew a big pewter mug and brought it to the table.
“Room,” Camargen said, keeping converse to small words, and the barkeep made a try at the coin. “Food,” Camargen insisted, retaining it.
They made do with few words, which turned out to involve a small roasted fowl, nondescript greens—welcome, after months at sea—and a bowl of grayish duff, not to mention an upstairs room for an indeterminate number of days, all for the same small coin.
Left to his own devices, Camargen wedged the chair in front of the door, pitched the filthy sheets onto the floor, and slept, rusty sword in hand, for a good number of hours.
Deadly Ritual
Mickey Zucker Reichert
Dysan awakened to sunlight streaming through a high window, dust motes swirling in the beam. He yawned and stretched luxuriously across his pallet of piled straw, enjoying the soft touch of a knitted blanket against his naked flesh. Though a small room, barely three paces across, it seemed like a mansion to him. It still carried the sawdust and mortar scents of new construction, and he could faintly hear the sounds of movement and light murmurs of conversation in the other rooms of Sabellia’s haven. He had no furniture, just his two sets of clothing lying in neat piles in each far corner, a chamber pot, and a bowl of water for washing. He could never remember feeling so content, so fabulously wealthy. All this, and the five ladies who spread Sabellia’s word, every one of whom he called “Mama.”
For the first time, Dysan appreciated the disease that had damaged him in the womb. Its effects, combined with the poison he had unwittingly consumed along with the other Dyareelan orphans slated to die, had stunted any chance he had ever had for normal height The size of a seven-year-old, he passed for one without much difficulty, though he was already a decade older. The priestesses babied him and worried that he never ate enough to pack weight onto his skinny frame. Someday, they would notice that he never grew at all and begin to wonder about his true age; but, for now, he intended to enjoy their pampering for as long as possible.
Dysan wriggled out of bed and dressed in his regular clothing. Though patched and faded, his tunic lacked the filthy crunchiness to which he had become accustomed; his mothers insisted on regular washings. Thin and soft, it barely kept out the soggy dankness that defined Sanctuary, but it no longer scratched or abraded his skin. He appreciated far less the frequent scrubbings that finally seemed to have banished the mites and fleas that had plagued him most of his life. Though no part of him had properly matured, tooth gritting and mental distraction could not dispel the unholy thoughts that assailed him whenever the youngest of his mothers, SaKimarza, washed certain places.