Aethersmith (Book 2) (29 page)

Jodoul paced. Faolen sat still and quietly, trying to
compose his thoughts:
If only it is true. This could go much better than I
had ever hoped. It will be delicate—

A noise outside had Faolen shifting his vision quickly into
the aether. Outside was a small Source but a powerful one. It had to be Anzik
Fehr. Something the boy carried made a wake in the aether as it passed through,
but was otherwise indistinct. Most objects of magic shone in the aether; the
Staff of Gehlen drew the stuff in upon command. It did not release its hold
except by the will of its wielder.

Faolen let his vision resume in the light as the boy
tentatively entered the shop. He looked just as Jodoul had described him:
small, slight, and entirely unthreatening, unless you knew what the staff he
bore was capable of.

“Hello, Anzik,” Jodoul greeted him with nervous cheeriness.
“This is my friend. His name is Faolen.”

Faolen had judged the risk too high to be lying to the boy
... much. If he was a clever one, he would catch them in any slip. Their lies
needed to be subtle and few.

“Nice to meet you,” Faolen ventured politely, smiling
disarmingly.

“You are old.” Anzik frowned, looking intently at Faolen.

Faolen’s eyebrows raised in mild surprise.
Well now, I
had not even thought about
that
casual little lie.

“None of us wishes to be old. Would you want to give up
being a boy to become an old man?” Faolen asked.

As he did, he let slip an illusion he maintained habitually,
with hardly any thought anymore. His hair greyed at the temples and retreated
slightly. His skin lost some of its boyish luster, and grew a few wrinkles
about the eyes and brow. Life extension had done well by him, but he hid its
deficiencies behind a layer of illusions that were hidden from view even in the
aether, though apparently not to such keenly observant young eyes.

“Who are you?” Anzik asked. Having already been introduced,
he could only assume the boy meant more than his name.

“A friend of Jodoul’s and someone who can help you,” Faolen
replied, picking the most promising of truths to share. “Jodoul can wait
outside and guard us, to make sure we are not taken by surprise. I want us to
be safe here.”

“Yeah, I’ll be just outside a ways, got it?” Jodoul said,
taking up a short bow and quiver and heading for the back door, leaving the two
sorcerers, young and old, Megrenn and Kadrin, alone to discuss their problems.

“You do not want the staff?” Anzik asked suspiciously, once
Jodoul had left. “You will not tell my father where I am?”

“I will not tell your father where you are, I assure you. As
for the staff, think of it as gold,” Faolen said. “Have a seat with me and I
will explain.”

He gestured to the empty chair that Jodoul had left vacant
for all his pacing. The large table that had earlier shown the expanse of
Zorren was now just barren. Anzik clutched the staff warily in both hands, and
accepted Faolen’s offer of a place to sit.

“Gold has value and men use it to trade,” Faolen said.
“Dishonest men kill for it, steal it, do whatever they can to get it. Honest
men trade and barter. They sell goods they make. They exchange it for services
they offer. It is the way of the world. Sometimes men who have no gold need to
barter instead. A man with bread but no gold can fill his belly, but will go
thirsty. A man with ale but no gold can quench his thirst, but go hungry. If
the two meet, with no gold between them, they can still meet both their needs
by trading some ale for some bread,” Faolen lectured. It was a speech he had
spent an hour working out in his head.

“I see,” the clever boy replied. “You want to trade the
staff for helping with the voices.”

“Yes, but I am an honest man. I will not take it from you. I
will not demand it from you. I will help you with the voices, and when we have
taken care of them, I would hope that you would give me the staff in payment,”
Faolen told him. He looked right at the boy, but Anzik did not make eye
contact, preferring to look down at his lap.

“Can you really make them stop?” Anzik asked after a pause.

“Yes. When I was a boy, I had the same problem. A kindly man
helped me and I intend to help you the same way.”

“How?” Anzik asked meekly. “Father tried to make the voices
go away, but he could not.”

“First, I need to find where the voices are coming from.
Then I will go there to stop them directly. I cannot stop you hearing them; I
must stop them trying to speak to you,” Faolen explained.

“They are in my head. I hear them there. Everyone knows they
are in my head,” Anzik whined, frustrated that Faolen seemed not to understand
how the voices worked.

“No, they are not. If I stand across the room and shout to
you, I am not in your chair. That is merely where you are when you hear. Just
as you can see in the aether things that others are incapable of seeing, you
hear what others are incapable of hearing. The voices are someplace, and I must
find out where to go to stop them.”

“I don't know, then,” Anzik complained, sniffling. “No one
talks to me about the voices. Even Father hardly does anymore.”

“Ask the voices, then,” Faolen told him. For the first time,
Anzik looked up and met Faolen’s gaze. “Ask them and tell me what they say.”

“How do I do that?” Anzik asked, looking away again.

“Ask the question in your head. Ask it out loud, so you hear
it in there, just as you hear their voices. You have your own voice in your
head. Make it heard,” Faolen instructed him. He felt an echo of his own past.
He did not remember the words, but he had received similar instructions once,
many summers ago.

Anzik shut his eyes tightly, concentrating. “Where are you?
Where are you?” the boy repeated under his breath.

“You need to get a name for the place. Use their words, not
your own,” Faolen advised softly.

Anzik did not make any acknowledgment, but changed his
mantra. “What do you call your place? What do you call your place?” Faolen
noted with extreme interest that he had switched to speaking Acardian.

“Are they saying anything back?” Faolen asked eagerly.

“No! I will not be quiet! Tell me what to call this place!”
Anzik shouted in Acardian.

“Easy. Easy. Shout in your head, not with your mouth,”
Faolen cautioned.

Anzik was breathing hard, exerting himself mentally. His
eyes snapped open and he looked up at Faolen distantly. “Pious Grove
Sanctuary,” Anzik said, stumbling a bit over the Takalish words he was
mimicking, clearly without understanding them. He looked as if he had been
awakened from a nightmare.

Faolen took the shaking boy in his arms and hugged him
tight. “It will be all right. I know where to go now to make the voices go
away.”

“Anzik!” a voice outside shouted. “Anzik, please come home!”
The boy curled tighter against Faolen, seeking his protection. “Anzik, I
forgive you! I just want you safe! Anzik!”

“I can help hide you from your father as well.” Faolen
worked a bit of simple illusion to dim the boy’s Source from aether-vision. “If
you do not use the staff, this spell will keep you from his notice for a few
days. I take no payment until I have kept my end of our deal, do you
understand?”

Anzik nodded.

“Staying here may be dangerous. I will tell you when it is safe
to return. Go. Hide. Try not to hurt anyone until I have the chance to help you
quiet those voices,” Faolen told him.

Loosed from Faolen’s embrace, the boy did not speak another
word, but left by the back door, staff in tow. The voice, presumably belonging
to a desperate father, continued, but grew distant.

Faolen looked to the decanter, perched unsteadily on the
edge of the table, where it had slid when he thoughtlessly took Anzik in his
arms. He untied the decanter, and looked for something to pour the contents
into. He needed a drink.

Chapter 17 - Bait and Switch

The wooden planks beneath his feet swayed slowly, rocking
back and forth as the
Frostwatch Symphony
masqueraded across the Katamic
in the guise of a merchant ship. A day earlier, the ship had been loaded with
mindroot, Kheshi silks, and several casks of Simmeran Sunset, one of the
priciest Takalish brandies gold could buy. Shortly before putting to sea,
longshoremen had hastily unloaded the mindroot and silks. The brandy was kept
aboard in partial payment to the coinblades who had taken the place of the
offloaded cargo.

Zellisan sat in the hold with a dozen of his new
compatriots, waiting for the ship to be attacked. Parjek Ran-Haalamar had hired
twoscore guards for his bait ship, counting on Captain Zayne’s informants in
the trade city to have already marked the
Frostwatch Symphony
as a
target. If they reached Zayne’s hunting grounds before word of the exchange,
the pirate would walk into a trap that he thought was his to spring.

“Ain’t learned me to swim anyway. Why not wear mail, am I
right?” one of the other coinblades remarked, trying to break the grim mood
with conversation. He was a scraggly man, all arm and leg, with an egg of a
face and a week’s unshaven scruff covering it. His posture suggested a military
career to Zellisan, who knew the type all too well. Boring assignments, petty
tyrants for commanders, and meager pay. Soon enough, any man good enough with a
blade or bow starts wondering how much more coin he could pocket working for himself.
A few even went through with it.

“Me, I swim just fine,” Zellisan replied after an awkward
silence that no one else seemed inclined to break. “You’ll see me strippin’ to
my skivvies fast enough, if’n I go in that water out there.” He smiled, scanning
the hold for signs of anyone with a sense of humor, or at least the bravery to
show it.

The men in the hold were the ones who would fight armored
upon the deck, once the ship was boarded. They were to hold the middle ground,
and keep Zayne’s pirates from gaining the helm, defending the ship’s captain.
Almost to a man, they had agreed to keep well away from the railings, lest they
plummet to a near certain death in the Katamic, pulled under by the weight of
the steel they wore.

* * * * * * * *

“Open this thing up a little wider. I can’t breathe in
here,” a bare-chested Feru complained, a note of rising panic and frustration
in his voice.

A sliver of bright daylight shone in through the wooden
door, just enough to cast the inside of the crate into a stark contrast of
light and dark that kept the eyes from fully adjusting to either. They were
crowded inside with just a common bench to sit on and not enough room to stand.
Sweating bodies rubbed uncomfortably together. Stowed weapons poked neighbors.
The air was hot and more humid than the fresh sea air just outside. The door to
the crate was disguised from the outside to look like any other side of the
wooden box. It had leather hinges on the inside that let it swing wide open,
and a rope handle to let the occupants pull it closed tightly to complete the
disguise. Until pirates were sighted, they were leaving it open just a bit to
get more air and alleviate the heat.

The Feru coinblade reached out for the dark-skinned hand
that kept custody of that handle. Before he could wrench that hand away from
the door, another hand had a finger to the man’s throat. “Sit down,” Rakashi
commanded sternly. “There is air enough to breathe. The fear is in your mind.
Do not shame yourself with cowardice just before a battle.” The Feru man
grabbed for the finger at his throat, but the hand it belonged to shoved him
roughly back toward his seat. In the cramped confines, he was not welcomed back
gently.

“Who put you in charge here, anyway?” someone else asked
snidely. Apparently the Feru man was not the only one growing impatient with
the accommodations.

“I am not in charge. I am just following the orders given by
the captain, the man who will tell Parjek Ran-Haalamar who gets paid and who
does not. No man on this ship is strong enough to defy all these hired blades.”
Rakashi spoke the truth carefully, for he rather suspected that there was a
woman who could. “Thus we will follow our orders. The door does not open more
than to allow a fist through.”

Glares met Rakashi’s answer. Rightly or wrongly, they went
unnoticed, lost to the glare from the taunting sunlight.

* * * * * * * *

“I don’t like having ya up here, or on the ship at all, ya
know,” Captain Rangelord groused, not so much as looking in the direction of
the object of his ire.

“You’ve mentioned it a time or two,” Soria commented dryly,
standing next to him by the ship’s wheel. It was late afternoon, and with
Frostwatch
Symphony
heading south, the sun was slowly beginning its descent to their
starboard side. “But if the pirates attack with the sun at their backs, it will
be any time now. This is the best view besides the nest.” She had said much the
same that morning, when the expected attack would have come from the east, with
the rising sun.

Tanner had won a contest that morning just after they set
sail, and proved he had the best eyes of the bunch. That had earned him the
honor of being the one to watch from up on high, in the crow’s nest. Soria did
not begrudge him his victory, but neither would she accept being stuffed in a
box or stowed in the hold as the rest of them had. Instead she watched and
waited, giving vague license to the crew to go on about their work around her
without actually getting out of their way.

“If you weren’t a woman, I’d—”

“—end up feeding the sharks,” Soria finished for him, but
not in any way as the captain had intended. “There is a reason I commanded
three times the sum of the others for this job. When this battle is won, you
will see why.”

“Tez-u-won Master—or Mistress I oughta say,” the captain
spat on the deck. “Sack o’ fish feet, that’s what that’s worth. Got folk scared
of ’em cuz they can fight without a blade. Well, them pirates’ll have blades
and you’ll see what’s what. Not sure how ya snookered a man like Parjek
Ran-Haalamar, but ya won’t fool me.”

“Listen here, root-peddler,” Soria warned. “You’ve got a
half dozen of your crew that could likely captain us back to shore somewhere.
If you have a problem with me, I don’t mind settling it.”

Soria was not so foolish as to think that the mindroot Parjek
Ran-Haalamar and his associates offloaded would not be sold elsewhere. Trading
in mindroot was a high crime in almost any place with a functioning government.
When inhaled, it was a potent and addictive hallucinogen, vile enough to
warrant universal disdain, though that was not the use that kings and governors
feared. When ingested, it reacted with the stomach’s fluids, and killed
horrifically in just moments. That was the sort of thing folk took a really
strong stance against. Pirates, thieves, assassins, and—to a lesser extent—coinblades
like herself, were all unsavory types that respectable folk kept away from.
Poison-sellers were a level of scum below even those, and Soria might have
considered doing the world a service being rid of a few, had she not a more
immediate need of them for transportation to a meeting with Denrik Zayne.

* * * * * * * *

The tiny speck on the horizon could have been anything. It
might have been the peak of a mountain on some island he had yet to spot. It
might have been a whale, or a shark, or some other sea creature breeching.
Scale was impossible to judge due to the vast distance Tanner could see through
the spyglass he had been given. From a wooden bucket built around the central
mast of the ship, he had a splendid vantage, but no experience in spotting
ships. The ship was staffed with a miser’s crew, or some real sailor would have
sat watch. It mattered little to Tanner’s thinking, since the whole idea was to
be found by Denrik Zayne, and not the other way around. He had taken the job
just for the novelty. He had traveled many a time across the Katamic without
ever having so good a view.

The motion of the ship made it difficult to keep the long,
tubular contraption of aligned lenses pointed where he wanted to look. It was
Tanner’s first time using a spyglass as well, since he was a mere passenger on
all his previous voyages, and there was little call for the things on land.
Fiddling with the lenses to keep his vision from blurring vexed him. Had he any
real talent for magic, he would have used that instead of the troublesome
device.

“Ship!” he called down to the captain, when finally he was
able to discern white sails against the pale blue of the horizon sky. “Way, way
off in front and left of us, that way.” He pointed when the captain looked up.
It was hardly the most nautical of exchanges, but Tanner got the necessary
information relayed.

Captain Rangelord took up his own glass, and confirmed the
sighting as they drew close enough to see it from the quarterdeck. It was too
far to tell much about it, but it appeared that it was heading west, across the
course the
Frostwatch Symphony
was following. It was also far enough to
the port side that it would pass quite close to them. The captain took the
wheel, and turned it gently to steer them just a bit eastward of their previous
heading. It was a common enough maneuver on the open seas, if one captain had
no wish to parley with another, to veer to pass behind another ship instead of
meeting it.

Captain Rangelord returned to his spyglass and watched. Most
ships would think nothing of their change in course; a navy ship might
investigate, had they any reason to suspect smugglers or pirates. A troubled
ship or one bearing a message might have enough need of parley to turn to
intercept. And of course there were pirates. Pirates most certainly would not
let such an opportunity slip away just behind them.

Through a trick of the eye or a calming wind, the vessel in
the distance seemed to slow; Captain Rangelord saw no change in their sails. As
they drew closer, he recognized the ship’s profile in the water and the cut of
its sails, and knew it for an Acardian vessel. It was a frigate, but an older
design than the
Fair Trader
that Zayne sailed.

“Rot it,” the captain swore softly.

One way or another, if that ship tried to board them, be
they Acardian sailors or pirates, their only option was to repel the boarders
and take their ship. There was no way the Acardians would tolerate a ship such
as the
Frostwatch Symphony
trolling the waters with a hold full of
coinblades, looking for ships to plunder, pirate or no.

When the second vessel deemed the time right, they swung
around and openly made straight for the
Symphony
. Captain Rangelord spun
the wheel hard, taking evasive actions. As prepared as his mercenaries were for
being caught, the trap would not be so convincing if they gave up without
resistance.

Breaking her silence as she had stood watching the vessel
approach from the forward railing of the quarterdeck, Soria called over to the
captain: “They are dropping their colors and raising the blacks.”

Rangelord looked briefly her way before he pulled out his
spyglass once more to get a look at the ship’s flags. In her eyes, he caught a
glimpse of an eagerness that sat ill with him. In his experience, a gleam in
the eye before a battle was the mark of a murderer, not a fighting man—or
fighting woman, he amended mentally. Any sensible sort, hoping to live, win,
and collect a purse afterward, had the sense to have his guts curl up inside
him when about to wade into a clash of swords, knives, and pistols.

Through the spyglass, he saw something that he was not sure
how to take. On the one hand, the Acardian ship had raised a black flag
emblazoned with a white “Z,” the simple sigil Zayne had used for years. On the
other, it was clearly not the
Fair Trader
that had left Marker’s Point
some months ago. Rangelord had seen it and marked it well, and this was not
that vessel, unless his eyes were betraying him.

“Wretched whoreson has himself a fleet.”

* * * * * * * *

The
Frostwatch Symphony
had a wide, rounded hull,
excellent at hauling cargo for a ship its size. The wide beam and deep draft
kept it stable in the water, and made for a safe, seaworthy vessel. It also
made it slow. It was ideally suited to being caught and so it was.

As the two ships came close, the crew abandoned their posts
and grabbed belaying pins. This gave them the appearance of desperate men,
determined to die fighting, rather than surrender to the questionable mercies
of the pirates of the cheekily named
Merciful
. The pirate ship sidled up
to them without firing a shot, and threw grappling hooks, snaring the
Frostwatch
Symphony
and drawing the two ships together. The
Merciful
’s railings
were lined with armed men, bristling to leap the gap and sink their blades into
the outnumbered crew of their prey ship. For their part, the men with belaying
pins backed away from the rails.

When the first dozen or so set boot to deck, the captain
sprang their trap. “Now!” he shouted in Kheshi, a language most of the
coinblades spoke, whether natively or from having traveled. The large crates on
the deck sprung open and cramped, sore, irritable, and well-armed men poured
out. Men thundered up the stairs from the holds below. From the
Merciful
,
surprised but undeterred men continued their crossings over to the
Symphony
.

Amid all those men, one woman reached back, pulled two
blades from their hidden sheaths, and leapt into the heart of the fray. At
first, Soria’s bold charge had gained her the advantage of surprise, allowing
her to bury her blades into two pirates before they could react. The black
lacquer on her blades concealed runes she had carved there herself, leaving
only the razor edges gleaming, bare steel. It was crude work by the standards
of Veydrus, but stood her in good stead punching through mail and plate on
Tellurak. Blood ran off them like red waterfalls.