by Tim Pratt
"Oh, well—what's wrong with thieves?"
"The criminals in Numeria are worse, because they're actually the government," she said. "If the Black Sovereign's thugs don't get you, the Technic League's thugs do, and if you managed to avoid them, you'll still run afoul of the unaffiliated locals. Any of them will rob you, and if you put up a fight with the wrong bunch, they'll send you to work in a mine until you die." She shuddered. "Why, is that where you're heading? Whatever for?"
"Got a bit of business to attend to, you know."
She shook her head. "You were always a little too ambitious, Skiver. Why don't you stay here with me, take up a life on the river? It's good work, not too taxing, and even though we're a bit far away from civilization, every imaginable kind of freight comes this way for the river trade, so there's no shortage of luxuries. I've got Osirian spices and Chelish wine back at our camp."
"It's tempting," Skiver admitted, "but I'm not looking for a whole new life. I've got a pretty good situation in Almas. No, this is just a business trip, shouldn't take more than a few weeks of my time, or, at worst, months—but the thing of it is, this slow boat is a dismal sort of travel. Nobody in the crew will play dice with me anymore, even though I made a point of losing two times out of five, and I'm sick of looking at trees slide by. If you'd consent to give my friend and me passage to Numeria, I'd consider it a powerful gesture of friendship."
"Skiver, I'm a pirate captain. My crew doesn't get paid in friendship."
"What if I could make it worth your while?"
She snorted. "You'd still be asking me to take honest pay for honest work, and that's also not how pirates prefer to operate. If we wanted to ferry passengers to and fro, we wouldn't carry so many swords." Just then her mate came over to confer with her, and they spoke in low voices for a few moments, and then the mate returned to give the captain the bad news. "No, it was a pleasure to see you, old friend, but you'd best keep riding this slow pig of a ship—"
"What if you gave me a ride in exchange for a chance at some truly first-rate plunder?" Skiver said.
She looked around. "What, on this tub? My mate's looked over the manifests, and there's nothing in the cargo hold I need here—dried meat and barrels of beer? I've got better of both in camp already. Oh, I'll take some, it's the principle of the thing, but—"
Skiver shook his head. "I've been chatting with the captain, and I know that once he gets to Chesed, he's going to buy up a load of relics from Numeria to smuggle down south for some of the collectors there."
She frowned. "Thanks for the information, Skiver, and maybe we'll keep an eye out to hit the ship on its way back, but the relics that get sold out of Numeria are mostly fakes or junk. I don't think tipping me off to some dubious loot is worth a free ride to a place I'd never willingly go—"
He sighed. "Would I waste your time, Genthia? The captain isn't buying those relics, fake or not, with dried meat and bad beer, you know. He's got gemstones, a nice big bag of them. How'd you like to get your hands on those?"
Genthia stroked her chin. "Usually we just take the toll—we don't want to stop the captain from plying his trade on our river in the future, you know. It's never good to bleed a mark dry. You take a little, let them replenish, and then take a little more. But...your captain didn't mention any gemstones when he disclosed the contents of his ship. If he had, we'd have taken a tiny percentage, but since he didn't, and tried to keep it a secret..."
"He deserves to be punished," Skiver agreed. "Sometimes, you have to make an example, to teach future victims not to misbehave."
Genthia rose, removed her red sash, and waved it at her ship. Almost immediately, a small craft hit the water, filled with an especially vicious-looking bunch of river pirates. She tied the sash back around her waist, turned, and called out to the captain: "You've been holding out on us."
The captain walked over, trying to strut and stand tall, but he cut his eyes nervously toward the approaching boarding party. His crew sort of faded away, ducking behind heaps of crates or vanishing down to the hold. "What do you mean? We've negotiated an acceptable price—"
"The jewels," Genthia said. "You shouldn't have tried to hide them. Now I'll have to take them all."
The captain glanced at Skiver. "I—there are no jewels, I don't know what—"
"Sorry, captain. I may have let the news slip. Inadvertently, like," Skiver said.
The captain's mustaches trembled. "You—you scum! I gave you passage, I took you on board—"
Skiver shrugged. "Couldn't be helped. Genthia here's an old friend of mine. Honor among thieves, and all that. Or not honor, but, well, you know."
"I'll have you cut into fish bait!" the captain roared.
"Ah. I won't be continuing on the journey with you after what you might call the aforementioned betrayal, obviously. That would be rude, even for me. I'll tell you what, though—consider your debt to my organization totally discharged. Call it even, eh?"
The captain clenched his hands into fists. "I didn't owe you that much—"
"If it consoles you," Skiver said, "I was going to crack open your lockbox and steal the gems myself before I disembarked, so really, you haven't actually lost anything."
The river pirates boarded the North Wind and spread out across the deck, slouching with lazy menace.
The captain hung his head. "Fine," he spat. "The strongbox is under the bed in my quarters."
"True," Skiver said, nodding to Genthia. "He's got it bolted to a steel plate sunk into the deck, so no one can cut a hole from below and run off with the box. Nobody can just pick it up and run away and crack it open at their leisure, either. There's a nice little bag of stones in there."
The captain took a key from his pocket and flung it at Genthia, who deftly snatched it from the air. "Take it, and begone."
"We'll also want the strongbox hidden in the first mate's cabin." Skiver grinned when the captain went pale. "You know, the one in that hollow space in the rafter, with the nice big bag of stones?"
"How—how did you—"
Skiver touched the side of his long nose. "I've got a way of sniffing these things out. The mate didn't even know it was there, did he? That's the bag of jewels you want, Genthia—the ones in the captain's cabin are mostly just paste."
"You really should have become a pirate, Skiver." Genthia clapped him on the shoulder.
"Eh, boats," he said, and let that suffice for an answer. "Let's go down to the mate's cabin. My partner Alaeron is in there, so it shouldn't be any trouble getting in."
"You mentioned him. When you say...partner?" She flickered her tongue at him and wiggled her eyebrows.
Skiver snorted. "Ha. Not even. He doesn't like men, not that I'd necessarily cozy up to him even if he did—he'd get distracted halfway through, and anyway I'd get ink stains all over me. No, Alaeron prefers women, when he stops a minute to think about them, but mostly he loves his bottles and books and concoctions. He's an alchemist, one of those scholarly types. He'll be coming along with me on your lovely fast ship there."
"A thief and a thinker, off to Numeria? My, my. Won't you two get yourselves into trouble."
"Nah, our troubles are over. Smooth sailing from here on out, isn't that what you seafaring types always say?"
Chapter Seven
The Sea Snake
The door's locked." Genthia pounded again on the entrance to Alaeron's cabin. "Is he dead in there?"
Skiver regarded the solid slab of door to the mate's cabin thoughtfully. "Ah. Probably not dead."
"Deaf, then?"
"He's got tolerably good hearing, as far as I know."
"Is he an incredibly deep sleeper?"
"He's an incredibly deep thinker, mainly. And he's been known to get so caught up in his work that you could scream in his ear and the most he'd do is maybe sort of blink, look at you for a moment, and then go back to it. I've had whole conversations with him looking right at me, and he didn't hear a single word." Skiver didn't mention that Alaeron someti
mes also imbibed certain substances that helped his concentration—and enabled him to go days without sleeping. They made him even more focused than usual, and if he was riding high on the effects of such a potion, the ship could probably sink without him noticing until his parchment got wet. "I'd try to pick the lock, but it's probably barred, or otherwise protected. Alaeron gets a little...nervous...about some of his special apparatuses and such, and he usually makes security a priority, so it could take me a while—"
"Don't worry," Genthia said. "I've got a key that will open any door."
"Magic?" Skiver said.
"In a way," she said.
∗ ∗ ∗
Because of his antisocial tendencies, and also because of all the drugs he was using, Alaeron didn't realize anything was amiss until the head of an axe came smashing through the upper half of his cabin door. He'd been vaguely aware of shouting and thumping and the odd splash for a while, but such sounds weren't unheard of on the ship—the captain had a tendency to hurl crew members who disappointed him over the side, though he almost always let them back on board again after a few minutes.
This intrusion into his personal space was annoying, however, and Alaeron turned around on the wooden bench to look at the door, frowning. He hadn't slept in three days, and that tended to put him in an ill temper, though it also allowed his mind to make impressive intuitive leaps, so it was a fair trade-off. He felt he was very close to figuring out the mechanism by which the black box expanded and collapsed, and if he could master that technology, he could make all sorts of things, from canoes that folded up and fit in a backpack to shields that collapsed small enough to fit in a pocket—
The axe tore free of the wood, then came slamming down again, taking out another chunk of the door.
There were axes on the ship, of course, but they were mundane things, hatchets and the like designed for hewing wood or chopping through heavy ropes—tools, rather than weapons. The head of this axe was curved, covered in elaborate scrollwork, and rather pitted and tarnished. A nice weapon wielded by someone who didn't take proper care of it.
Bandits, then. But since they were on a river, the particular flavor of bandits was probably pirates. So this ship—what was it called, the Ill Wind?—was under attack, and the attackers weren't content with plundering the rest of the ship, oh no, they had to bother Alaeron. Ah, well. Pirates were not renowned for their good sense.
The alchemist had a few options available to him. He could let the pirates in and see what they wanted; that one didn't appeal much, since they probably wanted pillage, and would either kill him and take his possessions, or just knock him down and take his possessions, both of which resulted in him losing his possessions. No good. He could activate the magic box and hide inside it, but he'd have to poke his head out eventually, and when he did, there was a good chance he'd be in a pirate lair, or at the bottom of the river, or surrounded by curious men with large weapons.
Or he could kill all the pirates, save the ship, and continue his journey, ideally with a minimum of fuss and delay.
"Bother," Alaeron muttered. He swept together the papers he'd been working on and placed them in a neat pile, then opened his bag to consider his bombs, acids, and extracts as the axe fell against the door again and again. He lifted out a small vial with a wax stopper, marked with the imprint of a jagged tooth. Hmm. Using that one would ruin the door—
The axe came down again, this time tearing open a hole big enough for Alaeron to see the face of a pirate with a scar across his long face, smiling and showing off teeth of silver and gold.
Ah, well, the door was pretty well destroyed anyway. Alaeron uncapped the extract and tossed it back.
∗ ∗ ∗
"He's awake in there," Genthia's first mate, who went by the name Bugbear for some reason, held an axe that Genthia assured Skiver was magical—"Never loses its edge, and cuts through stone nearly as easily as wood, not that it did the man we stole it from much good."
Bugbear peered into the cabin where Alaeron was locked away. "He's drinking something. Hope he brought enough to share."
"Oh no," Skiver said. "Don't—"
But Bugbear didn't hear, or else didn't listen, and he swung the axe again, knocking the hole in the door even wider. Then he grunted, and the axe was jerked roughly out of his hands, disappearing through the crack in the door, leaving Bugbear gaping. "He's—he's—"
The hardened river rat screamed and turned and ran down the corridor.
"Oh dear." Skiver shook his head. "I should have warned you. Genthia, love, you'd better go on up—"
"What happened? Did your friend just take the axe away? Why did Bugbear scream like—"
A strong smell, like the musk of a large animal, drifted out of the cabin. A low, growling noise came along with it. Skiver took a few steps back. Best not to be too close to the door. "Questions later, Genthia, but for now—"
The cabin door burst off its hinges, sending jagged splinters of wood flying. The figure in Alaeron's cabin was so hulking it could barely fit through the doorway, and when it shouldered through, the doorjamb splintered and cracked. The monster resembled Alaeron, more or less, but it was hairier, bulkier, red-eyed, with fangs crowding its mouth, fingernails grown out to ragged claws, and muscles on top of muscles. The monster held the axe in one hand, and the weapon seemed the size of a toy in his grip.
"Gods, he's a werewolf!" Genthia fumbled for a sword on her back, but had trouble drawing it over her shoulder in the low-ceilinged corridor. "A werebear!"
Skiver shook his head. "Just an alchemist. He drank something, what's it called, a mutagen? Makes him a bit...beastly." Alaeron must have refined this potion since the last time Skiver saw him take it—he was far bigger and nastier this time around. Skiver wondered if he was stupider than last time, too, since Alaeron had told him the increase in strength and savagery came at the cost of his higher functions.
The thief stepped forward, tentatively, and raised up both his hands. "Alaeron, old son, it's only just me, your friend Skiver, right?"
Alaeron growled, hunched, and pounded his hairy fists against the floor. He caught sight of Genthia and snarled. Was it the red of her sash, infuriating the beast within Alaeron?
"Don't run," Skiver called over his shoulder. "He might chase you, just by instinct."
"As if I'd run." Genthia had managed to get both her swords unlimbered, and held them at the ready.
"Now, now, no need to let things spin out of control!" Skiver took another step toward Alaeron, though it made him as nervous as walking up to a bear in a fighting pit. "Come on, now, it's me, your partner. Sorry about the axe and all—we knocked, but you were deep in your studies, you see. This nice lady—" Genthia said "Ha!" and Skiver glared at her. "She's an old friend of mine, she's going to help us get to Numeria. You remember, Numeria, yeah?"
Alaeron lifted one of his enormous hands—more like a paw—and Skiver braced himself for a slap or a swipe, but instead the monster absentmindedly scratched his nose, a gesture that was familiar from the alchemist's human form. "Skiver?" Alaeron's voice was like a growl through a mouthful of broken glass, but was just comprehensible. "Do I need to kill anyone?"
"Not just now, my friend."
"Oh." The beast-man shrugged. "I can go back to work?"
"Maybe better let the mutagen wear off before you work on anything that requires heavy thinking, yeah?"
Slowly, the beast nodded. "Oh. Yes. Right. I'm very tired."
"Yes, well, I've told you about taking that stuff that keeps you up all night, it catches up with you. You have to sleep sometimes."
"Mmm." Alaeron curled up in the corridor like a great hound, head resting on his forelimbs, and closed his eyes.
Skiver exhaled. "All right, then. Shall we get the gems before he wakes up? And I'll pack his things."
"You want me to let that creature on my ship?" Genthia said.
"Of course. He's not usually so monsterish. Normally he's very mild."
"If
he breaks anything of mine, you're paying for it," the pirate captain said, and followed Skiver into the cabin.
∗ ∗ ∗
"Wait, so we're traveling with the pirates now?" Alaeron had awakened from his nap naked in the corridor, with Skiver in the cabin packing up his things. The alchemist felt somewhat refreshed, but mostly just disoriented.
"Probably for the best, since you broke part of this ship. Genthia's an old friend of mine, she'll see us to Numeria faster than this old wreck."
"Oh." Alaeron nodded slowly. "I didn't kill any of her pirates, did I?"
"If you had, you'd know it, because you'd be cut up into a lot of pieces, you see, all bobbing around in the river."
"Oh. Good, good. Sorry about all that. I was just...the axe startled me."
"Axes have a way of doing that. I think the pirates have a healthy respect for you now, at least."
"Will I have my own room on their ship?" the alchemist asked.
"We'll make that a point of negotiation," Skiver said.
"This fine vessel is the Sea Snake." Genthia stood on a raised section of the deck with Alaeron and Skiver, gesturing proudly at the long, sleek craft, riding low in the water. The North Wind had been left far behind, the curses and dire threats from the captain gradually fading to inaudibility, and the pirate ship was skimming along the water at speed.
"Sea Snake, eh?" Skiver looked around, nodding appreciatively. "Lovely, has a nice ring."
Alaeron wondered why it was called the "sea" anything when they were on a freshwater river, but ships were named all sorts of strange things. He'd been on a ship once called A Song of Stone even though it was actually made sensibly of wood and rope and metal and canvas. A stone ship would sink, probably, though the issue of course wasn't really weight, but density and surface area, so if you made it properly—
"I named her the Sea Snake because she's slippery as an eel, and has a worse bite." Genthia winked.
As so often happened, Alaeron's mouth began spilling out words before he'd even willed it to open. "But eels aren't snakes."
