The noise, of course, drew his crew away from the distractions at the railing, plus a servant-or-slave from the cabin, and then Pen was put to putting all of them down. Fortunately, there were only half-a-dozen men aboard at present, and their mystification at what was happening gave Pen a marginal advantage which he used to the full.
He surveyed the resultant heap of humanity, flopping around at his feet like a catch of fish. He could shove them all overboard into the harbor to drown like a betrayed sorcerer. He could. At least physically. Theologically borderline, such murders, hurrying souls unripe to their gods.
Instead he stepped over the groaning bodies to the base of the mainmast and looked up. A line of pegs for gripping, a crow’s nest at the top. Des whimpered.
Yes, yes. The ship is barely rocking. Endure, love. He stretched and climbed, realizing about halfway up just how exhausted he was when his arms started shaking. Des whimpered some more, but he made it up to the bare perch of the lookout without falling, wrapped his legs around the last of the mast, and clung.
He first checked for the Corva sisters in their rowboat. There they were, still bobbing about in the shade of the galley. He waved. They waved back, upturned faces puzzled but reassured.
Next, he swiveled around to observe the shore.
Goodness, said Des. One might take the remark for surprise, but to Pen it sounded more like glee.
Three columns of black smoke boiled skyward, blending in the upper air, one from the warehouse, one from the customs shed, and one from the pier. The two docked ships and their pier were all afire now. Well, one ship was having a conflict between rising water and descending flames. Pen wasn’t sure if fire or water would win, but it was plain the ship was going to lose. In all three locations, people had given up running around yelling and hauling buckets, and just stood back in little groups watching in morbid consternation.
The rich pirate ship nearby was not faring fortunately either, or else was coming along quite well depending on one’s point of view. Pen thought it was lovely, and so, by her approving hum, did Des. The fire had spread from the collapsed rigging to the deck and below, and the sailors were in process of abandoning it, crowded into a teetering rowboat or swimming with the aid of planks or spars tossed overboard.
Pen studied his trail of chaos. We aren’t going to be welcome back in Lanti, are we.
Shouldn’t think it, no, agreed Des.
That’s fine. I didn’t like the town anyway.
Pen blew out his breath and started looking around the harbor for something, anything, that floated, had a sail, and was smaller than a whale. They now possessed a rowboat to get to it, so they were that much to the good after all this effort. With all his running, had he only succeeded in running them into a blind alley?
A wink of light and flash of color at the broad harbor mouth drew his attention away from the spectacle of the shore, and he swung around and squinted.
It was a galley. The color had been a sail being furled, the light a reflection off the long double bank of wet oars as they rose and dipped, turning the ship in toward the town. Another Roknari slaver? No, too narrow, too swift…
That’s a war galley, said Des. She couldn’t sit bolt upright in alarm, but Pen could rise for both of them, standing on the support and peering out under the edge of his hand.
No… not a war galley… One, two, three… six, with others occluded behind, seven, nine, ten… A couple of fat freight cogs sailed after, the nautical equivalent of a baggage train. The Carpagamons finally coming to reclaim their island? Some Rathnattan prince doing the same? The ships were actually more in the Cedonian style of current naval architecture.
A breath of breeze in the mild afternoon blew the lead ship’s pennants out straight.
…What was half the duke of Orbas’s fleet doing here?
And, oh yes, Pen recognized the commander’s banner. Nikys had painstakingly and lovingly sewn it for her dear brother, after all.
General Adelis Arisaydia, scourge of the Rusylli and pride and terror of his troops. Pride because terror, Pen gathered, because soldiers thought like that.
He sat with his mouth hanging open and watched in stunned fascination as the Orban fleet paraded into Lanti Harbor.
* * *
In another moment, Pen overcame his paralysis and scrambled down the mast so fast it made Des yip. He pounded across the deck, leaping the groaning, swearing bodies who had not yet begun to find their feet, and thrust his head over the rail.
“Lencia! Seuka! Come get me, quickly!”
Alarmed, the girls rowed near as Pen swung out onto the netting and dropped into the boat, making it dip and pitch. “I’ll take the oars now.”
“Are they after you?” asked Seuka, with a fierce look up at Falun’s galley.
“No, but I need to catch my brother-in-law.”
“What?” said Lencia, giving up her seat to Pen’s urgency. “…You have a brother-in-law?”
“Yes, and he’s here. Somehow.” The boat surged as Pen dug in the oars. He only had time to blast a few fist-sized patches of rot below Falun’s waterline in passing, which did not nearly relieve his feelings.
As they rounded the slaver, Pen glanced over his shoulder and tried to select a course that would intercept the flagship. Unfairly, Adelis had far more oars than he did, but then the general—or was he appointed an admiral for this venture?—also had a boat measured in tons. Many tons. With great momentum, and a bronze rostrum that could rip through enemy hulls even faster than Pen could.
And, if those ships were full of his seasoned Rusylli-campaign veterans, he led a gang of brutes who could eat pirate rowdies for lunch, and possibly intended to.
As the two vessels converged, Pen stood up on his knees on his seat, shouted, and waved frantically. Lookouts observed, conferred; in a moment, a broad, tough, familiar figure in an army cuirass of boiled leather plates and a thrown-back red cloak came to the rail, saw him, and called orders over his shoulder. After a moment, all the churning oars rose in unison and paused. Men hurried, and a climbing net was flung over the bow ahead of the oar banks.
Pen rowed faster, the ship slowed, and he managed to bump the rowboat into the right spot. “Grab on!” he yelled at the girls, who reached for the netting. They didn’t quite match speed before they were pulled out right over the thwart; Pen hastily followed, ready to lunge or if necessary dive for a falling young body, but they clung on and climbed. The rowboat thunked off the hull and spun away, and Pen spared a hope its poor owner would eventually find it.
Many strong arms reached down to pull them up and inboard, and Pen in turn. “Ah!” Clutching the rail, he hauled himself to his feet and looked around.
Boots clumped across the deck, and Adelis stood before him, hands on his hips, shaking his head in exasperation. “There you are. Why am I not even surprised?”
“However did you know where to find me?”
“I thought the columns of smoke were a good guide.”
“Well, yes, but—” Pen became aware of the sisters shrinking to his sides, staring in fear at Adelis.
Pen didn’t find Adelis in the least fearful, but then, he was used to him. Muscular build, Cedonian brick-colored skin, black hair in a military cut, clean shaved, all very normal up to the top half of his face. There, severe red and white burn scars framed his eyes in a pattern like an owl’s feathers. His irises were a strange deep garnet color, glowing like coals under the black mantel of his eyebrows when the light caught them. Pen knew every inch of that face, since he’d healed it after the murderous boiling acid that had been meant to steal Adelis’s sight permanently. That Adelis had smoothly refitted both miraculous recovery and horrifying scars into support of his commander’s reputation was all Adelis, though.
Pen granted the effect was a bit shocking when one first encountered it. He didn’t think his brother-in-law would enjoy little girls screaming at the sight of him, though, so he hurried his introductions, first in Roknari, of which Adelis
had a good working grasp.
“Lencia, Seuka, this is my wife’s twin brother, General Adelis Arisaydia.” Pen made his voice deliberately cheerful, by way of guidance. “He serves the duke of Orbas, as Nikys and I do.”
Well, not quite the same way, suggested Adelis’s eyebrow twitch.
Switching to Cedonian, “Adelis, this is Lencia and Seuka Corva, late of Raspay, orphans and wards of my Order. And so of me, for the moment. I haven’t been able to teach them much Cedonian yet, though we’re working on it.”
“Ah,” said Adelis. He looked down wryly at the sisters. In passable low Roknari, he said, “Welcome to my flagship the Eye of Orbas, Lencia and Seuka Corva. How did you come to meet our Penric?”
“He… dropped from the sky?” Seuka offered hesitantly.
“The pirates threw him into the hold where we were prisoners,” Lencia clarified this. “Then we were all brought to Lantihera and sold, and we’ve been trying to get away ever since.”
“It’s a long tale that I can tell later,” said Pen. The merest glance confirmed Adelis had his hands full right now, from the anxious officers clustered around him like bees tending their queen to the trail of ships following on their stern, signal flags flapping. “But—how did you chance to come to Lantihera? Do you mean to conquer the island?”
“Brother of Autumn avert, no.” Adelis tapped his fist over his heart in unironic prayer. “It’s much too far from Orbas’s coast to defend, and has no strategic value to us. Quite the reverse. We don’t need to let them know that, though.” A sardonic jerk of his head toward the burning waterfront. “But the Lanti pirates have been annoying Orbas for some time. Yours was the third Orban ship captured this year, and they lately raided a village on Pulpi.” One of the dukedom’s few coastal islands. “Duke Jurgo was fed up, so he sent me to persuade them to stop.”
Along with a couple thousands of his friends, evidently.
“He granted me discretion as to how. Extracting you, which I figured for the trickiest part, is unexpectedly accomplished. And razing the town in revenge for you seems… redundant. Is that chaos all your doing?”
“More or less.” Penric rubbed his tired, smoke-stung, itching eyes. “It’s been a bad day.”
“I see that.” Adelis tilted his head, lightened his tone. “And do I also find you well, Madame Desdemona?”
“Yes, indeed, General,” said Des through Pen’s mouth, which he politely yielded to her. “I’m having a delightful outing.”
A scimitar glint slipped across Adelis’s mouth. Initially appalled, Adelis had only gradually become reconciled to Penric’s demon, but lately he’d begun to treat her as a sort of invisible sister-in-law. It was their shared bloody-mindedness that had finally broken the ice, Pen decided.
“But,” said Penric. “How did you even know I was here?”
Adelis snorted. “First was that ship you’d boarded in Trigonie, which sailed into Vilnoc complaining of their mishandling. Its crew had retaken it in the night, and it probably arrived not long after you reached Lantihera—though the description of their missing passenger took about a day to reach anyone who actually knew what you were. Next was your travel-box, which some fishermen had hauled up in their nets and couldn’t get open, so brought to Nikys. Who did not react well.” Adelis grimaced. “Third was an Adriac merchanter with damaged water casks and a lurid tale of their escape in which you featured almost, but not quite, unrecognizably. Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. Three times begins to seem like a message to be ignored at one’s peril.” He cleared his throat. “And Nikys, of course. Very upset. Also to be ignored at one’s peril.”
“Oh,” said Penric. Warmed. Disturbed, but also warmed.
Adelis rubbed the back of his neck and huffed. “Fishing you out of the harbor first upends my tactical plans. Not that they aren’t always. Eh, but I think I can do something interesting with this.” He didn’t look very discommoded.
He motioned over a beardless young officer and detailed him to escort Penric and the Corva sisters to his own cabin. “Get them whatever they need.”
The lad led Penric and his charges off, picking their way over the deck. Adelis, gesturing, was the brief center of a new flurry, men departing this way and that, more signal flags urgently rising. Handling ships, Pen reflected, seemed a much more complicated matter than sinking them. But at least he seemed unlikely to be tossed overboard from this one.
* * *
Adelis’s cabin, tucked down in a corner by the stern, proved an even smaller closet than the coffin on Pen’s first ship. It did feature a solid bunk, not a hammock, which was soon put to use with its fold-down board as table for the basin and wash-water the aide brought at Pen’s earnest request, plus food or at least rations. Pen gave the girls their pick and then, famished to the point of tremors, snacked on olives, rather stale bread rounds, dried fruit, cheese curds, more olives, and even ate his fish plank.
He and Des personally supplied much purer drinking water all around, worth the heat-price, taming the harsh red army wine. Everyone frugally shared basin, soap chunk, and washrag, and Pen sacrificed the last of the limited ewer of cask-water to lather and rinse his crusting hair.
Clean sailors’ tunics, belted with braided cord, made neat modest dresses for the girls, though they made it plain they meant to preserve their boys’ togs as precious plunder. Pen did not miss the tunic and trousers he’d been captured in, not new to start with and last seen much worse for wear, but he wondered how soon the girls would realize the sack of food and clothes they had lost when attacked on the beach included the last work of their mother’s hands.
About to redon, with distaste, the damp, muddled-green cast-offs, Pen was startled when the aide brought out and handed him a neat bundle of his own clothes from Vilnoc.
“Madame Nikys sent them with the general,” the young officer informed him proudly. “She had great faith in him.”
Fine linen drawers. Slim tan trousers. The summer tunic of his rank and Order: sleeveless pale linen, its high neck supported by the silver-plated torc that was the only uncomfortable bit of it. Split down the sides from the hips, it fell to his calves in two panels, slits and hems weighted with a band embroidered with a frieze of creatures sacred to the Bastard in Orbas: rats and crows, gulls and hill vultures, some ambiguous insects, all much more endearing than in real life. It was cinched with a braided sash intertwining white and cream, proclaiming his rank as a senior divine, and its third strand of silver marking, or perhaps warning of, his status as a Temple sorcerer.
Every stitch of it lovingly spun, woven, and sewn by Nikys. Putting it on was like easing into her embrace. It also allowed him to slip in a small lesson in Quintarian theology to the girls, intrigued by its meaningful details but mostly taken with the cavorting needlework creatures.
His rank and calling seemed to settle again on his shoulders with his garb; not inwardly, whence it never strayed, but certainly outwardly, judging by the way the aide stepped back half a pace in new respect. Or possibly caution.
Good, purred Des. About time we received our due.
No furious fighting had erupted outside, obviously. Pen had heard the rattle of the ship’s stone anchor being let down a while ago, the very opposite of rowing like mad to ram some doomed target. Had there been any left.
Adelis, he shortly learned when they ventured back out onto the deck, had gone ashore for a parley with whatever quorum of the Guild and the town council could be hastily gathered. He’d trailed an honor guard of a few hundred sturdy, heavily armed soldiers. The rest of the fleet hovered on the water, temporarily quiescent but alert. Any lesser Lanti vessels had scattered away like frightened ducks.
Pen hung on the landward rail. The port was in utter disarray. Five ships sunk at their moorings—Falun’s galley now lay on its side, waterlogged—three still smoldering, the remains of one pier falling in blackened chunks into the water, a major segment of the waterfront burnt to the ground; really, the work the Orban fleet had
come to do was already near-complete. With half its ships and captains out to sea, the Guild was in no position to offer resistance. They had apparently leapt on the offer of a negotiation.
While waiting for developments, Pen persuaded the aide to conduct the girls and himself on a tour of the war galley. Adelis had shown him around its fascinating complexity once before, a few months ago when it was in dock for winter maintenance in Vilnoc’s navy yard, so not a few of the men recognized their general’s Temple-man relative, compelling Pen to return salutes with a polite tally-sign and blessing. The rowers idling at their benches were military volunteers, no slaves here, and they and the soldiers seemed inclined to take Pen as more mascot than threat, along with his wards, who amused them. Although a number of the men, returning from a visit to the railing to study their erstwhile target of Lanti, cast him unsettled looks.
Adelis never believed in wasting time, so Penric was not too surprised to see him rowed back out to the Eye of Orbas at sunset. The faint Adelis-smirk on his face as he climbed back up the netting indicated the general was in a good mood, which seemed to hearten his welcoming men. Pen felt more cautious about that, but he didn’t get an explanation till they were sitting down for dinner together.
Beneath a hooped canopy that sheltered a portion of the stern, illuminated by hanging lanterns, they perched cross-legged on cushions and were brought an onboard picnic, a cut above the lunch rations. The girls settled close at Pen’s feet. Pen topped up Adelis’s wine, not over-watered, and prodded him for his report from shore.
Adelis grinned and held his news hostage for Pen’s tale first. Pen started with the dawn attack, though with a short doubling-back to complain of the archdivine of Trigonie whose delays had put Pen on that ship in the first place. He left out mentions of his brushes with the gods, though the bemused narrowing of Adelis’s red-sparking eyes suggested he observed the lacunae. The collapses of Pen’s first plan for ransom, and his second for the prison escape, he detailed but briefly; Pen thought it unnecessary of Adelis to laugh like a drain at the picture of Pen left swearing on the dock. Then a synopsis of their sojourn in the temple.
The Orphans of Raspay: A Penric and Desdemona novella in the World of the Five Gods (Penric & Desdemona Book 7) Page 12
