The Lawkeeper of Samara (The Fourth Age of Shanakan Book 2) (24 page)

Gilan attached a shirt to one of the oars and waved. He reasoned that rowing would not be as effective as catching the eye of those aboard the approaching vessel. If they were not seen it would pass about a mile to the seaward side of them.

He waved the oar with its makeshift flag slowly from side to side. It was heavy, but he was up to the task.

“Do you think she’s seen us?” he asked. The sailor whose shirt he’d borrowed was squinting against the sun.

“Can’t tell as yet,” he said. “Probably not. No sign of her turning, at any rate.”

Gilan continued to wave the flag. The ship continued to hold its course.

“Can he see us from here?” Diara asked. “It seems to me that the waves are bigger than we are.”

The ship was sailing west, back towards Samara, and so coming up behind them and beating into the wind. To come to them she would have to turn soon or run past them and come back with the wind.

“She’s hoisted a flag,” one of the other sailors said.

“Really?” Gilan couldn’t see anything but a cloud of sail and the dark line of a hull.

“Aye,” the man said. “She’s seen us, all right.”

Gilan wasn’t sure, though, so the oar continued to wave as the ship sailed past. It was only when she turned about and began to run down the wind towards them that he put the thing down. It was surprising how quickly the ship closed with them. It seemed only a few minutes until Gilan could make out the detail of the sails, the hundreds of ropes that supported the masts – she was a two master – and the men who moved on her deck.

The sailor took his shirt back and donned it against the sun. They waited in silence as the ship approached.

It was still four hundred paces distant when it swung into the wind and stopped. It continued to drift towards them slowly.

“She’s no trader,” the bosun remarked.

Gilan didn’t bother to ask how they knew. There was no time for explanations. “What then?” he asked. The bosun shook his head.

“Nothing good,” he said.

There were a lot of men on deck – more than he’d ever seen on the Red Fox, and he could see weapons. There were a lot of bows. A voice called out across the water.

“You a ship’s boat?” it asked.

Gilan was about to reply, but the bosun tugged his sleeve. “I’ll speak,” he said. He stood.

“Aye, we are that,” he called back. “Off the Red Fox out of Samara. She burned and sank last night. We’re all that’s left.”

This started a discussion of the deck of the ship.

“Why don’t they just pick us up?” Gilan asked.

The sailor replied in a low voice. “Unless I miss my guess we’re better off if she don’t.”

Gilan looked again. This ship rode high in the water, so she was probably empty, and so many armed men. “Pirates?”

“Might be.”

It was improbably bad luck. Gilan knew, vaguely, that there were pirates on the sea, but all reports suggested that they were few and far between. Most ships sailed untroubled between ports.

“You got the captain there with you?” the voice asked.

The thought occurred to Gilan that this wasn’t a chance encounter after all. These men, these pirates were supposed to meet the Red Fox, to capture her. But it made no sense. If the captain had these brigands up his sleeve then why kill Ifan? But then he had probably thought that he was killing Gilan. It still didn’t make sense, though, unless the pirate ship was simply a backup plan.

“Captain died,” the bosun called back, and that caused another bout of chatter among the pirates. It was probably the wrong answer, Gilan thought, but there was no taking it back now.

Corban Saine moved onto the plank next to him. “If they’re pirates they’ll want to press the men and take me for a hostage, if they know who I am, and they might. Don’t tell them what you are.”

“You with the bow,” the voice from the ship called. “Throw it over the side.”

“Why would I do that?” Diara called back.

An arrow splashed into the water a few feet behind the small boat’s stern. The message was clear enough. Diara reluctantly threw the bow away, muttering to herself.

“I liked that bow,” she said. “Salt water’ll ruin it.”

The ship was close enough now that Gilan could make out the faces of the men aboard. They looked confident and relaxed. He had to admit they had every right to feel that way.

“You with the sword, over the side with that too.”

Gilan did as he was told and threw Diara’s blade into the sea. He used the movement to slip his dagger into the back of his waistband with his other hand. If it came to it he wasn’t going to be completely helpless. The more he thought about it the more he was certain that these men were in the employ of the captain. Now they were unsure what to do, but they would eventually sort out what served them best. It seemed probable that they’d either sail away or kill them all, despite what Saine had said.

Someone on the ship shouted, and some of the men ran from the side closest to the boat. Their easy confidence seemed to have been disturbed.

“There.” One of the sailors in the boat was pointing to the west, and Gilan followed the line of his hand to see another sail, another ship approaching. He could see no more than that.

“They’re dead in the water,” Saine said. “Their captain needs to get some wind in his sails.”

“Is he going to attack the other ship?” Gilan asked.

“More of a prize than us,” Saine said.

It seemed an age before the pirate vessel began to move. Men rushed about the deck hauling on ropes and one by one the sails filled and the wide hull began to plough slowly through the water. It swung away towards the sea, heeling over in a crosswind, trying to get ahead of the newcomer with enough speed to catch her.

“Should we row for it?” Diara asked.

“Might as well,” the bosun said. “She could be a couple of hours chasing yonder ship down, if she can catch it. She seems a quick vessel, but she hasn’t changed course, and she should if she wants to skip round the brigands.”

Two of the other sailors took up the oars and began to pull, and they slowly eased towards Samara. Gilan watched the two ships. The newcomer was closer now, and he could see that she was small, but a three master and packed with sail. The bow wave she put up suggested that she was quick indeed.

“What’s she up to?” The bosun asked. He was squinting at the new ship. “She ain’t no trader, either,” he said.

The pirate had clearly seen the same thing. She turned and began to run before the wind, cramming as much sail as she could onto her two masts, but it seemed to make no difference. The newcomer closed down on her swiftly.

“Do you see!” One of the sailors shouted. “She’s flying Samaran colours! It’s a warship!”

Gilan didn’t see, but he took their word for it. The new ship seemed certain to take the pirates, but with the distance between them cut to less than half a mile she suddenly turned and drove for their boat. She swung side on with practiced elegance, and nets were thrown over the side. A moment later ropes were thrown and the sailors caught them and hauled the boat against the ships hull. Gilan scrambled up the net and found himself on a narrow deck facing a small grey-haired man.

“What ship?” the man demanded. Already the nets were being hauled up, all in the boat having followed Gilan promptly onto the ships deck.

“Red Fox,” Gilan replied. “We sank last night.”

“And you are?”

“Gilan, lawkeeper officer,” he replied. The grey haired man nodded.

“The others?”

“Lawkeeper Diara, Trader Saine, Gannelan, bosun of the Red Fox and four of his men.”

For the first time the grey man smiled. “Captain Parl of the warship Sword of Samara at your service, officer Gilan. There was a dangerous man on board with you…?”

“Aye, the captain. He fired the ship, but between us we took his head.”

“So he’s dead?”

“Dead for sure,” Gilan agreed.

“Then I am at your disposal,” Captain Parl said. “Orders of the Do-Regana.”

“Really?”

The captain smiled. “Of course,” he said.

Gilan looked out across the sea. The pirate ship was still under full sail and heading south east by his reckoning, away from the land and Samara both.

“I’d like to discuss something with the captain of that vessel,” he said, pointing to the pirate. “Can you catch her?”

“That was my intent before we saw your boat,” Parl said. “The Sword can catch anything with a sail.” He turned and shouted to his men, and the ship was suddenly alive again, turning to the chase. “It will take an hour to catch her,” the captain said, looking over the bow. Will you join me to break your fast, and your lawkeeper and Trader Saine of course?”

Gilan accepted. The mention of food reminded him that he hadn’t eaten for hours, and he was hungry.

Sam sat in his office trying not to think. It was difficult. Ideas kept pushing their way into his head. They seemed random, but he didn’t trust them. It all had to do with the blue crystal he’d found in the mud under the burned warehouse in Gulltown.

That had been a bleak day, as it turned out.

Sam needed help, and it wasn’t the kind of help he could get in the city. He needed magic. As things stood he was useless, and worse. He was a liability, a danger, another thing for Arla to worry about. There was nothing he could do but resign, but after that?

There were two men outside his door, just in case, and that proved his point. There were so few lawkeepers that they couldn’t afford to leave two of them guarding him, but the other side of the coin was that they couldn’t let him roam around unguarded.

Sam closed his eyes and leaned back in his chair. There was blue behind his eyelids. It constantly expanded in geometric patterns, fascinating to watch. He opened his eyes again. He wanted to sleep. He was tired. But Sam was afraid he would awaken in the stone’s grip again, and he would have to start the fight from the beginning. He was sure, at this moment, that he was in control, but he didn’t trust that certainty. He’d felt that way before, and gone to buy weapons, and then nearly, so very nearly killed a child. If the boy had not turned…

He stood up, shaken once more by the memory. He looked out of the window towards Gulltown. He was a fool to have taken this job. He should have bought another boat, started fishing again. It was what he knew how to do. He tried to remember his old life, the simplicity of it, days spent out on his boat working in the sun and coming home at sunset with the catch. There had been good days and bad days, but each day finished and was done with, and the next day was its own. He knew the city was oppressed, that men and women suffered under the Faer Karan, but he hadn’t. Nobody had really bothered with him until the fall.

A wave of deep melancholy swept through him. That old life was lost, irretrievably broken by the march of history and by his own decisions. Many of the people he had known were dead. His old house had been burned. There was nothing left.

There was a noise in the corridor, but he ignored it. He was swallowed by self pity, drowning in a well of it.

A knock sounded on the door.

“Sam?”

He turned and looked. It was Ella Saine. Well, at least he would not have to go to the citadel to resign. He bowed slightly. But Ella wasn’t alone. She stepped inside and a man followed her, a man he knew from Samara Plain, and the last man he had expected to see in Samara. His shallow bow became a desperately deep one.

“Mage Lord,” he said.

Cal Serhan, Mage Lord of White Rock, stepped into the room. He looked at Sam for a moment in silence.

“Sam Hekman,” he said eventually. “What a mess.”

*

Serhan could hardly believe his eyes. Those eyes, of course were quite different from the eyes of a normal man. It seemed an age since he had been tricked into the Shannish death mating ritual, and he had grown used to the ability he had acquired as a consequence of that, but it was not often that seeing magic, and hearing it after a fashion, shocked him so profoundly.

Hekman was wrapped about in the most disordered threads of magic he had ever seen. It was not like the tidy purposefulness of the Faer Karan, or his own magic, or even that of the human mages of old. It looked as though it had grown about him like some ethereal creeper, an ivy of constraint and suggestion. It was the sound, though, that disturbed him most of all. Usually he could hear words, spell casting, but not here.

The sound was the sound of pain – children in pain.

He turned to Ella. “You said this was done with a crystal?”

“That’s what Arla told me,” Ella said. She looked at Sam.

“A crystal, yes,” he said. “Arla took it away and locked it up somewhere.”

“I will need to have the crystal,” Serhan said. “But I think we can do something about this here and now.” He was angry to see a man in this state. Any man. It was an obscene kind of magic that bound him, and he liked Hekman. The Gulltowner had served well in the discussions on Samara Plain. His advice to his chief, Hagar Del, had been moderate and wise, and Serhan’s own general, Darius Grand, had thought highly of him. When the news came that they had made Hekman chief lawmaker, Serhan had thought it a clever and worthy appointment. He drew his blade. The room grew darker.

This was no ordinary blade. He had brought Soul Eater, the black sword, with him. It was the weapon he had used to banish the Faer Karan. He had made Soul Eater out of the ancient mage blade Shadow Cutter, and it still housed the soul of a man.

We fight again?
the blade asked.

There is a thing that must be destroyed
, he replied.

He laid the blade on the table before him. The hilt was ornamented, but it was the blade that caught the eye, dragged the eye to its smooth, black surface. But no eye could stay upon it, for it drank light as it drank magic. He had made the thing to drain away the power of the Faer Karan and to hurl them from this world, and it had worked, at a price.

“Put your hand on the blade, Sam,” he said.

Hekman hesitated. Serhan could feel his fear of the blade. It looked evil, and he could not disagree with that. What kind of a man do you choose to put into a sword? Not a good one, not a man with kindness and compassion.

“Just lay your hand on it,” he said. “It will not harm you.”

Hekman reached out, slowly, as though afraid the thing would burn him, and laid his hand upon the darkness.

To Serhan’s eye the world was suddenly wreathed in flame, a shriek echoed in a place beyond hearing. Nobody else, he knew, had seen or heard anything.

*

Sam snatched his hand away. It had been a most strange sensation, touching the blade, almost as though the blade had looked inside him. He felt exposed. The feeling made his skin crawl.

As he sat back in his chair something else happened. His mind cleared. That, too, was strange, like the sun bursting forth on a cloudy day when there is no gap in the cloud. The confusion and doubt melted away.

It was gone. The power of the thrice damned crystal was gone. He held up his hands and looked at them. They were once more his own hands. Just a moment before he could not have been certain of that, but now he was. He looked at Ella – she looked concerned, worried. Serhan looked confident. He was smiling. Sam looked down at the sword. It was like looking at a sword-shaped hole in the world, as though he could put his hand through it and reach… something else. It hadn’t felt like a hole. It had been cold and hard, like steel. It had freed him, but he still didn’t like it. He instinctively felt that the black sword was, if not exactly evil, then wrong in some other way.

“Thank you,” he said. With the words came a flood of emotion. He was free. In a moment he had been lifted from a terrible place and restored to himself, but Sam Hekman would not weep. He bowed his head until the rush subsided. He had a job to do – his duty – but there was something else. “I am in your debt, Mage Lord,” he said.

Serhan inclined his head. “I do not keep a tally, Sam Hekman. You and I are on the same road. It serves us all to do what we can.”

“You can end this,” Sam said.

Serhan returned his gaze steadily, but shook his head. “I cannot.”

“You have the power of ancient mages. You defeated the Faer Karan. You destroyed the Saratan army.”

“Aye, those things I did, and could do their like again, but you tell me – who should I kill? Where should I go to find them? What are their names?’

“We do not know.”

“Nor do I. I cannot solve this for you. I am here for a day at Ella’s urgent summons, and I will do what I can, but other things, other places have their call upon me, and I must go.”

“Then we must make do with that and be grateful, my lord,” Sam said. He only half believed what the mage lord said, but the man had no cause to lie. It seemed impossible that the mage lord was so helpless in a matter of this kind.

“My Lord, there is one thing you could do,” Ella said.

“If I can, I will.”

“There is a ship between here and Pek, the Red Fox. My brother and three lawkeepers are aboard, and possibly one of the killers. Can you find it and warn them?”

“One ship upon the sea,” he said. “I suppose it is not as impossible as it seems. When did she sail?”

“Last night,” Ella said. “She was a two-master.”

“That will help.” He pulled a bowl from somewhere inside his jacket. It was a simple, crude wooden thing, fire blackened and shallow. “I will need water,” he said.

Sam handed over a flask and Serhan sat cross legged on the floor with the bowl in his lap. He poured about a cupful into the bowl.

“This may take some time,” he said. “It will take longer if I am distracted.”

Ella took the hint. She excused herself and left. Sam stayed where he was. He was more than curious. He had never seen magic before, apart from Samara Plain, and the black sword, of course. “I will stay,” he said. “I will be still.”

Serhan looked at him for a moment, then nodded. “See that you are,” he said. He bent his head over the bowl and muttered a few words. The water began to glow. It was not, Sam quickly realised, a uniform glow. The water had become a window. From where he was Sam could make out waves, seen from a great height.

Serhan muttered again and the image blurred, and steadied once more. Again it showed waves on an empty sea.

This was going to take a while.

*

Arla arrived back at the law house in a black mood. She had achieved nothing. Delantic’s house had been devoid of interest, apart from the white room and she could make nothing of that. The document recording his purchase of the Red Fox strongly suggested that he was the man she had shot in the street the night before, and that now he was gone. If he ever came back they might take him, but it would be many days, even weeks, before the Red Fox came back to Samara.

Once more she was at a dead end.

Arla had left four men to guard the house, and to pick up and question anyone who came calling. She had brought back the servant, Hummel, as a prisoner. She would question him, and perhaps learn something from that, but he seemed perversely loyal to his evil master, and probably would reveal little. The law forbade the use of torture as a tool of interrogation. Ella Saine had insisted on it, or so it was rumoured.

Arla thought there should be exceptions.

She walked through the door of the law house ready to share her woes with Ulric, but the fat man was not in his accustomed seat. She walked on into the corridor that ran across the building and found him there, peering down the corridor as though trying to eavesdrop on a conversation.

“Ulric?”

He jumped. He had been so intent on what was going on down the corridor that he had not heard her approach.

“Arla.” He sounded about as guilty as she had ever heard him.

“What’s going on?”

“The mage lord is here,” Ulric said.

Arla was stunned. “The mage lord? Cal Serhan?”

“Aye!”

“Here?” She pointed.

“In the chief’s office.”

Arla should have seen him before. There had been so many problems between Borbonil’s Ocean’s Gate and White Rock, so many of her friends had been lost in ill advised actions against Serhan and his erstwhile lord, Gerique, that almost every guard had been involved, but not Arla. She counted herself lucky.

Now he was here. To Arla he was a mythical beast, his name a curse that had become a prayer.

Ella Saine appeared in the corridor and walked towards them. Arla couldn’t read her face, but she knew that Ella had seen the mage lord before, and more than once.

“The mage lord?” she asked.

Ella nodded. “He has put right what was wrong with Sam.”

It was news, but Arla was not surprised. Like everyone else at Ocean’s Gate she had acquired a firm belief that Cal Serhan could do anything. They had feared him almost as much as they had feared Borbonil, and now that Faer Karani was the mage lord’s servant. It was a world turned upside down with Serhan at its reinvented apex.

“He’s looking for Gilan and the others,” Ella said. “And my brother.”

“On the ship?” Arla wanted to slap herself. She was asking stupid questions, like a child. Of course he was looking for the ship, and he would find it.

“Yes. It will take some time, he thinks. We should wait somewhere.”

Ulric was clearly reluctant to abandon his position in the corridor where he had a faint chance of overhearing something, but he could hardly ignore what Ella said. It would have been impolite. They went through to the commissary, and Arla noted that it had changed. Almost everything in the law house seemed to change every day, and it was Ulric’s doing. The fat man never seemed to leave his desk, but somehow worked his own magic from where he sat.

The three of them sat at a table that would not have shamed a trader home and the cook laid food before them without being asked for it – a plate of the kind of snacks that Ulric favoured – greasy twists of pastry with a spicy filling. Arla watched Ulric eat. It was almost an unconscious act. His glance seemed to touch the plate only briefly, and from that moment his hand had learned the route and repeatedly lifted the fatty offerings to his mouth.