Dangerous Waters Read online

  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.

  CHAPTER TWO

  In the domain of Nahik Jagai

  23rd of For-Summer

  In the 8th Year of Tadriol the Provident of Tormalin

  CORRAIN 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.

  T
he 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.

  The man chained beside him on the inboard side of their shared oar sat up straighter. So did most of the rest of the rowers as the whip master’s trusted slaves began walking alongside the benches.

  The one with the basket was dipping torn hunks of what passed for bread in these nightmare islands into the flagon. The rowers were passing the dripping sops along to those sat by the bulwark pierced with oar ports, the chains fettering their feet jingling.

  It was some while before the slaves handing out the soaked bread reached Corrain’s bench, twelfth of the twenty five on this side of the galley. He was the middle of the five men forced to sit there, their feet shackled together and secured by a heavier chain running through the loop between each man’s ankles, secured at both ends with formidable locks.

  As the slaves with the basket and flagon reached them, Corrain held out his hand. His stomach growled with desperate anticipation. The man sat on his bulwark side laughed. Corrain paused before handing him the first sop, meeting his eyes with a warning stare.

  He couldn’t guess where this man had come from, paler of skin than the islanders though darker than the captured Caladhrians. Was that the touch of the sun or a natural burnish in his blood? Corrain had tried asking but if they shared some common tongue, the man was keeping that to himself. He didn’t talk to anyone, not that Corrain had seen.

  One of the trusted slaves said something and the man shrugged. He passed the sodden bread on to the youth sitting at the outermost end of their oar. Hosh stuffed it into his mouth, whimpering with gratitude.

  Corrain breathed a little more easily. While he reckoned he was stronger than the silent man, he didn’t relish the thought of fighting in the cramped space between the benches some dark night, in order to teach the silent man that Hosh was under his protection.

  He passed the silent man the next sop and then ate his own. He nearly choked. The bread had been dipped in wine harsh enough to clean old pots and liberally mixed with white brandy.

  But Corrain had always heard that the Aldabreshi scorned strong drink. That was what everyone said. They didn’t have the head for it, so Caladhria’s tavern warriors insisted with scornful amusement. So much for that homespun wisdom.

  The two slaves on his inboard hand exchanged a few words as the whip master’s lackeys moved on. Both were Archipelagans or of mixed blood, dark of hair and eye. Corrain couldn’t understand a word they spoke and they knew nothing of his own Caladhrian dialect or of formal Tormalin, used right across the mainland by merchants and traders, legacy of that long vanished Empire’s hegemony.

  Regardless, Corrain treated the inboard rowers with wary respect. It was self-evident that the strongest men were set to hauling the innermost ends of the oars. When the heavy chain at their feet was unlocked, releasing them from the oar to sleep, they were the ones who enjoyed the comparative comfort of the bench padded with flock-stuffed sackcloth and crudely cured goat hide.

  Corrain swallowed his pride and slept as best he could down on the planks with the others. That way he could keep an eye on Hosh. The stronger slaves would prey on the weakest, given half a chance.

  ‘Corrain,’ Hosh quavered. ‘What’s going on?’

  ‘Shut up and eat your bread,’ Corrain growled.

  He looked to make sure that Hosh was eating his sop. The lad needed every scrap of food to sustain him, to maintain the pace which the whip master’s flute player demanded. Corrain had earned his muscles through years of sword play whereas Hosh had only joined Lord Halferan’s guard at the turn of the New Year gone. Corrain had served nineteen years and risen to a captaincy before his own folly saw him thrust back down the ladder to serve as a trooper and be grateful for that leniency.

  Corrain’s heart pounded painfully in his chest. Of all those enslaved when that foul mage betrayed Lord Halferan, only Hosh remained of the handful purchased by this galley master.

  Greff’s leg had been accidentally gashed when they had first been fettered. The wound had ulcerated in the moist heat, leaving Greff weak and feverish. As it festered, the whip master had sent one of his two underlings to unchain him. Were they going to tend him? Corrain hadn’t shared Hosh’s hope. He had been right. Greff was stabbed in the back of the neck and his corpse thrown to the sharks that constantly shadowed the ship.

  Someone had strangled Orlon quietly one night, his body discovered the following morning. Hauled up onto the walkway, one by one his bench-mates were tied to the upthrust stern post. None would say what had happened, despite being brutally flogged by the overseers.

  As for Kessle and Lamath? Corrain only knew that replies no longer came from the far benches, unseen beyond the walkway dividing the deck, when he risked shouting their names in the darkness.

  ‘Corrain?’ Hosh begged for reassurance
.

  The whip master’s overseers had hauled a rower up from an oar some way ahead. His bound hands were tied to the stern post and the crack of the whip sent a shiver through the rowers from stern to prow. Somewhere behind, some corsair raider laughed callously.

  ‘You’ve done nothing wrong. You’ve nothing to fear.’ Corrain only hoped that was true. A flogging would most likely be the death of either of them.

  Beaten senseless, violent or recalcitrant slaves might be briefly revived by the agony of having vinegar and salt rubbed into their wounds to keep the flies away. Then they were thrown down the stern hatch into the hold, into the narrow space between the galley master’s cabin at the rear and the locked compartments for looted cargo.

  By Corrain’s count, fewer than one man in five emerged. The rest were hauled out lifeless, already gnawed by rats, and tossed overboard to delight the sharks. Corrain had taken his turn at that grisly task, as had Hosh. Corrain reckoned the whip master wanted the new slaves to see what fate awaited anyone contemplating disobedience.

  How long could Hosh endure this torment? A sword pommel clubbing him into submission when they had been captured had left a visible dent beside the boy’s broken nose. While his bruises had faded, he was now plagued with a constantly weeping eye and an oozing nostril.

  ‘Remember your oath, boy. Our allegiance to Halferan holds.’ Corrain had made the lad swear to return and see that treacherous wizard hanged. If Hosh died—

  No, he wouldn’t contemplate that possibility. They had come this far together. They would get back home. They would have their vengeance. The sour wine and liquor warmed his blood and limbs.

  The overseer finished flogging the man. To Corrain’s surprise, he was returned to his oar, still conscious albeit with blood coursing down his back. The other overseer shouted a warning, the tone unmistakeable even if the words were meaningless. The inboard rowers on their oar exchanged a cowed look.

  Corrain hastily swallowed the last of the sodden bread as the whip master blew his silver whistle. The flute-player replied with a piercing note. Like everyone else, the five of them hastily readied their oar before either overseer cracked a lash over some laggard’s head.