Power's Shadow

by Richard Parks

  “Well, you can’t let that happen,” Sela said. “We have to find this ‘Fifth Law’ you’re looking for.”

  “I have to find it,” Marta pointed out. “I’m the one who owes the debt.”

  Sela shrugged. “That’s as may be, but it’s not as if I have anything better to do.”

  Marta took a deep breath. “Thank you,” she said.

  “You’re welcome. Besides, if I help you discover the Fifth Law, our accounts may be settled.”

  Marta frowned. “You don’t owe me a bond debt. Not like Longfeather and Bonetapper do, anyway.”

  “Maybe not,” Sela said. “But it’s a debt just the same. So. What now?”

  Marta judged the height of the sun and estimated the remaining daylight. “The craja is gone and the hot spring is safe to use. I say we have that bath now.”

  Ω

  3 Well begun is halfway to disaster

  “Any fool can turn a friend into an enemy. Turning an enemy into a friend? That’s as good a trick as there is.” – Galan I, Called Wizardbane.

  Sela was worried and she didn’t bother to conceal the fact. “Do you really think you can find an honest ship captain willing to take us to the Isles?”

  “Of course not, but we’re not looking for an honest ship captain,” Marta said. “We’re looking for a pirate.”

  For a moment Sela just stared at her. Marta had the feeling that, if Bonetapper and Longfeather had been around rather than scouting the docks farther ahead, they would have done the same.

  Marta and Sela stood on the crest of a high ridge. Below them, nestled against the coastline, was the main port town of the kingdom of Denelos—Shalas. Marta had heard it referred to as Shalas City, but clearly that was from people who didn’t know any better. Even so, it had serviceable deep water docks which made it a resupply stop for trader vessels, and was home port to a small fishing fleet, and had the craftspeople and merchant presence to support both. Plus it was the closest mainland port to the Five Isles where, if Longfeather was telling the truth, they would find Shave the Cat’s companion sword, Sunset.

  “Would you explain to me why we’re looking for a pirate, rather than an honest merchant captain?”

  “Because, as you obviously realized, no honest merchant captain would sail anywhere near the Five Isles. Boranac can call himself ‘king’ if he likes, but by reputation he’s not much more than a puffed up pirate chieftain with delusions of grandeur,” Marta said. “And if he had any sense he’d know that trading with the mainland would be much more lucrative than piracy. Still, one doesn’t fight tradition. Which is why we have to find a pirate. Or at least a smuggler, or someone else of questionable repute to take us to Boranac’s lair.”

  “You mean someone who’ll take your gold, slit our throats and throw the bodies to the sharks?”

  Marta smiled. “I mean the sort of person who might be tempted to try.”

  Sela shook her head. “I know I’ve seen only a fraction of what you’re capable of, Marta. I just wish I had your confidence.”

  So do I, thought Marta. In her heart, she was not confident at all. But she had not been able to come up with a better plan. She had considered buying or hiring some small seaworthy craft and transforming Longfeather back to human long enough to sail it, but Longfeather as a human was too easily recognized, and had a price on his head from both the mainland authorities and Boranac himself. Any vessel they met, pirate or otherwise, would attack them on sight. No matter how Marta looked at the matter, it came back to these simple facts—to reach the Five Isles, she needed someone with connections, working relations, and safe passage agreements already in place, and she needed for Longfeather’s identity to remain hidden. That meant, more or less, a pirate.

  Bonetapper returned first, landing on Marta’s shoulder. “There are two inns, but I’d recommend the Red Sunset. It’s relatively clean and the traders seem to favor it, so it might not be too dishonest. Plus it has an attached stable that can take care of the cart and horse while we’re away. Apparently a lot of the merchants meet their ships here and have to do the same thing.”

  “That’s what I was hoping. We’ll attract less attention that way.” Marta had expected no less, but it was good to get confirmation of it. She didn’t like leaving either the horse or her mother’s cart, but there, too, she didn’t have a great deal of choice.

  It wasn’t long before Longfeather also returned from his scouting mission. He landed on a nearby pine branch and gave his report. “There’s not a lot of activity at the docks just now. There are two merchant ships making ready to set sail, but of course they aren’t going anywhere near the Five Isles. They’ll hug the coastline until they reach Borasur.”

  There was an aspect of the debt-bond that made it difficult, even painful, for the one who was in bond-service to work against the interests of the one who held the debt, in this case Marta. She could see how uncomfortable Longfeather was, and she easily guessed the reason.

  “Is that really all you saw?” Marta asked, and she put the power of the debt-bond behind her words.

  “No,” Longfeather finally admitted. “There was someone else.”

  The way he’d phrased his response wasn’t lost on Marta. Not ‘something else’ but rather ‘someone else.’ “No more dancing around the subject, Longfeather,” Marta said. “Tell me who you saw at the docks.”

  “I saw a vessel called Blue Moon. Her captain is a woman named Callowyn. She’s mostly a smuggler and does errands for Boranac, and so operates under his protection, but she’s a pirate, too, at opportunity. I do not trust her.”

  “And is there a pirate or smuggler that you do trust?” Marta asked.

  “Well…no,” Longfeather admitted. “Most of them are like me.”

  “So why did you feel it necessary to point out this particular lack of trust?”

  Longfeather apparently gave up. “This Callowyn…we have a history, of sorts.”

  “What sort?” Sela asked. “Or shall we guess?”

  Longfeather shrugged, and briefly displayed his wings. “She’d probably cut off my privates with a dull knife and spike them to her mast as a trophy before bothering to chop off my head Boranac for the reward. That sort.”

  Marta smiled then. “A woman of taste and judgment. I think I like her already. But do not worry, Longfeather. She’s not going to see you. She’s going to see a goshawk.”

  Longfeather sighed, which was a very strange sound indeed, coming from a goshawk. "She'll figure it out. I know she will."

  Marta sent Bonetapper and Longfeather off on their own with instructions to meet them at the docks later. Sela packed her mailshirt away in the cart and wrapped Leafcutter in oiled cloth and then again in plain rags until it looked less like a sword and more like a bundle, though she didn’t do either without a bit of grumbling.

  “You expect me to set foot on a pirate ship without a sword?”

  “We’ll take Shave the Cat—discreetly—but there’s no point in taking both swords, nor in attracting more attention than we have to. You in that padded jerkin and breeks? You attract attention.”

  Sela crossed her arms. “So do you, with that red hair and…well, just being you.”

  “I can’t do anything about that,” Marta pointed out. “We can do something about the way you’re dressed. Come on, I think I have something that will fit you.”

  “I don’t suppose you have a tunic in that cart anywhere?” Sela asked wistfully.

  “It’s nothing you’re familiar with, I know, but wearing a skirt for a little while won’t kill you.”

  “It might if I have to fight someone!”

  “There’s a certain ease of movement in this attire which might surprise you.”

  Sela finally acquiesced, though not with the best grace. Marta found a yellow and blue patterned skirt with a solid yellow blouse for Sela, got her into them, and then tied her hair back with a blue ribbon. Marta studied the effect for a moment, then reached for a small metal box of trin
kets. She selected a pendant of black coral hung from a thin gold chain and handed it to Sela.

  “Wear this.”

  Sela blinked. “Why?”

  “Because any young woman with the means would be wearing at least some jewelry. This isn’t flashy enough to attract thieves, but it is the kind of thing normal folk might expect to see.”

  “It’s pretty,” Sela said finally, as she placed the chain around her neck. She sounded surprised.

  Marta smiled. “Yes, that too. Come on. We’ve got to get matters settled at the Red Sunset before nightfall.”

  §

  It was an hour after nightfall when two people, a grizzled older man and a dark-haired young woman, stood near a rear door to the barn attached to the Red Sunset. They took care to avoid a patch of moonlight filtering through the branches of a gnarled old oak but otherwise were making little effort to be stealthy.

  “Are you sure the stable boy is asleep, mistress Dena?”

  “It’s what he wanted, Kel. I just gave him permission. Sort of. Now then….”

  That was all the preamble there was before the man was suddenly not a man anymore, but a common ratsnake.

  “You didn’t need to make me a snake, you know,” the snake said. “I am perfectly capable of getting into a locked wagon cart on my own.”

  Dena reached down and the snake coiled itself around her slim arm. “Your way tends to leave traces,” she said. “I don’t want the witch to know.”

  The snake attempted a sigh, but it came out more of a hiss. “Fine. How do you plan for me to steal anything when I don’t have pockets? Or Hands. I’m not swallowing anything pointed, if that’s your intent.”

  She held up her arm so that the snake was at eye level. “You will if I tell you to, but no, this time you won’t swallow anything, you won’t take anything. If you do, she’ll know. I just want you to see what’s there.”

  “Ummm…how will she know?”

  “The same way I knew about the wine you filched last week, fool! You take something that belongs to a witch, you create a debt-bond proportional to the worth they attach to the item. That gives them power over you in the same way a contract would. I’d keep that in mind, if I were you.”

  “I wondered about that,” the snake muttered. “How much did I increase my debt with the wine?”

  “Not as much as you will if you keep asking silly questions. Now let’s go.”

  The door resisted at first, but she gave it a tap and muttered something under her breath, and the inside bolt slipped out of its catch. She pushed the door open, slowly, and slipped inside the barn, closing the door behind her. The inside of the barn was unlit and blacker than pitch until her eyes adjusted, but she had sent Kel earlier in the day in the form of a pigeon to scout the barn, and she knew the layout already—horses and mules stabled to her right, carts and tack stored against the wall to her left. The smell of manure was present but not overpowering—apparently the stable boy kept up his duties when he wasn’t otherwise persuaded to take a nap. Dena heard the soft nicker of one of the horses, made out their dim outlines in their stalls, and after a bit she noted the stable boy asleep on a pile of hay in the rightmost corner.

  “Don’t wander off after I put you down,” she whispered to the snake, “I don’t want the horses to notice you and get nervous.”

  She brought the snake to the cart she recognized from earlier that day. “This is it. Go, and be quick about it.”

  The snake, which was really a man named Kel, crawled off onto the rear step of the cart and then through a small gap between two boards, tasting the air with his tongue. Dena watched him go, and settled down to wait.

  When she’d spotted the cart earlier in the day, her suspicions were immediately aroused, and it hadn’t taken too long to discover who the owner was. Now Dena was more concerned now with finding out why Marta was there. Dena well knew that witches traveled for very few reasons, and a whim was never one of them. One common reason was to answer the summons of a supplicant in need, and the other was when she was in the search for a Law. Dena knew of Black Kath and her daughter—their home was a long way from Shalas, so the chances of Marta having witch’s business here was remote. She had to be in search of a Law, which meant that Marta had followed the trail to Shalas.

  As had Dena.

  Whatever you’re looking for, Marta, I hope you left some clue about why you think it might be here, and where.

  It was several minutes before Kel slithered back through the same crevice he had used to enter the cart. When he was on the ground again, Dena changed him back to his human form, and almost regretted it. Kel immediately sat down hard on the step of the cart, a couple of the horses, startled, whinnied an alarm and the stable boy murmured and turned in his sleep. Dena warned her servant to silence, and after a moment everything settled down.

  “Sorry, mistress,” Kel said, “for a moment I forgot how legs work.”

  She suppressed a curse and helped him to stand. When they were outside the barn again and the barn door locked, she turned to him again.

  “Well?”

  Kel shrugged, a gesture made easier by the fact that he now had shoulders once more. “There’s a cache of gold, not huge but substantial. Clothes, some flour, cooking utensils…oh.”

  “Oh? Oh what?”

  “Some armor and an overly-wrapped sword. It seemed an odd thing for her to have. Since when does a witch need weapons?”

  Dena frowned. “A nice sharp knife is a handy thing for anyone to have. But you did specify a sword, yes? And armor? That is a little strange, as you said. What sort were they?”

  “It was difficult to reach, but the sword was fairly short, completely sharp along one edge, but only about halfway down the blade on the back side. It was maybe just over two feet long, not counting the hilt. And there was a shirt of mail. Both of very good quality, I think. I’m no expert on weapons, but I’m a better than decent judge of what’s worth stealing.”

  “Speaking of which?”

  Kel grinned. “Nothing, I swear.”

  “You’d best be telling me the truth. For your own sake, not mine.” She nodded, then. “All right, let’s go before the stable boy awakens or someone else sees us. I have some thinking to do.”

  §

  It was early on a chilly gray morning when Marta and Sela went out to the docks. They carried little except for bundled provisions. A few old men were mending nets and swapping lies where the fishing boats came to unload their catches, and gulls squabbled over some pungent offal left from the previous day, but most of the fishing fleet had departed earlier that morning. Which made the two large merchant vessels and the one smaller boat hard to miss. Marta, just by listening to the talk of the other guests at the Red Sunset the previous evening, had managed to learn that the merchant vessels were awaiting the arrival of a warship from Conmyre that was assigned to escort them for the first leg of their journey. Which made it very easy to identify the third vessel.

  The Blue Moon may have been dwarfed by the fat merchantmen, but for anyone needing to escape pursuit or get anywhere in the Southern Sea quickly, Marta had no doubt which vessel she’d have chosen. The ship was low and sleek as a dolphin, with a deep, narrow hull for stability in rough seas and two lateen-rigged masts to slice through the wind. A few members of the crew were about, one splicing a rope and another mending a sail, but otherwise all was quiet as Marta and Sela approached the moored ship and stopped about a stone’s throw from gangplank.

  “So,” Marta said. “Do they look like pirates to you?”

  Sela shrugged. “What does a pirate look like? When Longfeather came raiding, his men looked little different from any other scruffy sailors I’ve ever seen. Our home was on the coast, so I saw a lot of them, as I was growing up.”

  “I didn’t realize you had been that close to the raiders. How did you escape?”

  “I didn’t have to. Father was away, and I was in the woods at the time, picking up chestnuts. I watched them through
a thicket, but they knew what they were after, and it wasn’t me.”

  “Your father’s swords.”

  Sela nodded. “You can ask him, but I think so. Master Solthyr’s swords were famous and thus valuable. Longfeather was expecting to steal whatever was there. Leafcutter and Sunset were the only two left in the house. I always carried Shave the Cat with me in case I met anyone in the woods. It tended to discourage…misunderstandings.”

  Marta smiled. “I imagine so.”

  “Ummm, are we going to just stand here?” Sela asked. “Shouldn’t we hail the ship?”

  “I was giving Captain Callowyn time to inspect us. You did know we were being watched, didn’t you?”

  Sela blushed. “I missed that.”

  “Hallo the ship. I need to speak to your captain,” Marta shouted.

  The crewmen, having already glanced at the two of them briefly during their chores, otherwise paid them no attention, but the door to the rear cabin slowly opened and a woman stepped out into the morning sunlight.

  Longfeather’s description of Callowyn, Marta admitted to herself, was accurate in every detail: hair almost as red as Marta’s, though a bit sun-streaked. Surprisingly, her skin was paler than Marta would have expected, considering her profession, and freckled. Marta would not have called her pretty—that was too brittle a word. “Striking” was closer to the mark, but closer still was “formidable.”

  That Longfeather chose to tangle with this one doesn’t speak well for his judgement.

  On top of that, as soon as Marta saw Callowyn she felt that she had touched a Law, but one she already knew. The Fourth Law. “Changing Appearance Does Not Mean Changing Nature.” Yet there was nothing about Callown that spoke of illusion. Marta did not know what it meant, but she made a mental note to consider the matter further.

  “I am Callowyn, the master of this vessel,” the woman said, her expression as blank as that of a stone. “What is your business with me?”

  “My friend and I seek passage to the Five Isles, as you seem to have no more pressing engagements at the moment. Our business there is our own.”