Something wrapped around the biceps of his left arm, something that felt like a band of steel. Gareth felt helpless as a fish on a hook as he was lifted clear of the edge, hauled a few feet over sodden wood to the comparably solid surface of the dock, and deposited in a boneless heap on the slats.
He looked up at his rescuer, who stood over him, fists on hips and side-lit by the moon. Anyone would seem tall from Gareth’s position, but this man was well above average height, and broad shouldered to match. Instinctively Gareth noted the wide-bladed dagger thrust through a double-thick belt, the outline of a longbow slung across the man’s back, and also the fact that he made no move toward his weapons.
The man wore a simple garment that recalled robes Gareth had seen merchants from Imaskar wear, with wide strips of fabric that crossed the shoulders and chest. There were no sleeves, however, even in the chilly night breeze that soughed from the water, and the man’s muscular arms were left bare. The robe parted at the waist, allowing access to the weapon at his belt and no impediment to the legs.
All this Gareth noted in an instant, his gaze traveling up the man’s form. When he stared into the figure’s face, he gasped.
He looked like a man, albeit orc-tall and similarly broad. But his face, otherwise human of feature, was striped like the hide of the beast Ping had on the floor of his chambers, a great cat from the jungles of Durpar. In the moonlight, he couldn’t tell what color the stripes were, but they were dark and looked painted over the pale surface of the figure’s face. His hair, long and thick, was tied back, but Gareth could see that the stripes that marked the face continued where they met the hair, which likewise alternated pale and dark.
A muffled grunt made him turn his head, and he saw Ivor a few feet away, similarly sprawled on the wide planks of the dock. A second figure grasped him firmly by the collar. This one was slightly smaller than the first, but still imposingly tall, with a similarly draped garment with loose sleeves. The figure let go of Ivor and straightened, and Gareth saw it was female. She wasn’t tiger-striped as her companion, but she wore a wide mask of some pale, thin fabric stretched across her eyes. From two oblique holes in the mask her wide, liquid-dark eyes surveyed the scene. Her dark hair was partially braided in rows back from her face, and the ends fell free over her shoulders. Gareth could see the hilt of the sword she wore strapped across her back, and his quick eyes noted that she, too, carried a dagger thrust beneath her belt.
Gareth heard Ivor coughing and, drawing his cramped legs beneath him, focused on standing up without falling over. Their rescuers, imposing as they might be, didn’t seem to intend them any harm—at least not yet. And if they did intend to attack, he’d rather meet them on his feet.
Getting his balance on the gently rocking dock was easy after the months aboard the Orcsblood. He untangled his traveling cloak from his sword belt and scabbard, but he was careful to make no sudden movement toward the hilt. The tall, striped man didn’t move as Gareth inclined his head slightly.
“My thanks to you, goodsir,” he said, then, with a nod to the female figure, added, “And to you as well, fairlady.”
Ivor was also standing, but his coughing kept him from replying. He hit his own chest with a balled fist and nodded his agreement.
The man tilted his head.
“What think you, Lakini?” he called to his companion, in a deep voice that had something of a tiger’s growl to it. He never took his eyes off Gareth. “Pirates, or fleeing from pirates?”
“Both, as I see it,” she replied, in a soft, clear alto. Her masked eyes stared unblinking at Gareth, then flicked back to Ivor, as if looking for clues.
“We’re not pirates,” Gareth said, trying to sound indignant. Both of their strange rescuers turned to regard him, their gaze unblinking and their bodies absolutely still, even on the swaying dock. The seconds stretched out, and he sensed they were ready to stare him down forever. He opened his mouth again and closed it, unsure of what to say.
Ivor cleared his throat. “We’re not pirates now,” he said in a hoarse voice, shaking his head at Gareth’s frown. “But I will admit to you fair folk that yesterday night we were. But we are no longer.”
“Reformed pirates, then,” said the woman. Both she and her companion fixed Ivor with that steely gaze, and Gareth saw him shrink beneath it.
“As it happens, we’re looking for pirates,” said the tiger-striped man.
“Would that we still were, for your good people’s sake,” said Gareth. “But, alas, we have thrown off the life.”
“Lusk and I are looking for particular pirates,” said the woman. “Or, rather, a particular pirate ship and her crew.”
“A ship that kills other ships, leaving no survivors,” said the man. “A ship well-known for her cruelty, even in these wicked days. With a master with no respect for the sanctity of life or mercy for those who would surrender.”
“Or desire for the ransom that might be earned from surrender,” said Ivor ruefully.
“Even so,” said the man.
“Leaving such a ship might have been a wise choice for one who chooses to be an ex-pirate,” said the woman. “And an even better decision for two.”
“We hope as much,” said Gareth. “And begging your pardons, but the sooner we can slip up a back road and find a place to roost in Mulmaster, the happier these expirates will be.”
The woman stepped toward him, and, hypnotized as a sparrow by a snake, he couldn’t help looking into her eyes. With an inner start, he realized that she wore no mask at all—the band across her eyes, paler than the color of her face, was either painted on or part of her facial coloration. The hair braided back from her temples continued the pale stripe.
It didn’t look like paint.
“We have business with these pirates, although they don’t know it yet,” she said, looking down at him, for she topped him by two fingerbreadths. “We would like to know where to find them.”
Gareth considered lying, but there was something very compelling about her request. If Ping heard they’d put mercenaries on his track, however …
“Very much like to know,” she said.
Gareth made a quick decision. “The Orcsblood lies at anchor there, two degrees from the light of that barge tethered there.” He pointed at the tenuous point of yellow light that looked like a tarnished star fallen to the ground. “And if you visit that fair vessel tonight, you’ll find that two of the watch were careless of their wine this night.” He swallowed and continued. “There’s a boat, late of the Orcsblood, made fast to a pier beneath this dock, if you’re of a mind to clamber down and get it. I don’t think we’ve a need for it anymore.”
Gareth’s eyes met Ivor’s questioning glance. He understood without words—it was one thing to slip away, to desert the ship in the middle of the night. It was another to put this pair of—what were they, anyway? Paladins, sworn to rid the world of Ping and his ilk? Thieves, in search of the treasure a pirate ship might hold? Pirates, looking to seize a vessel for themselves?
Whatever they were, it was another thing entirely to put them on Ping’s wake.
The woman smiled. “Many thanks, for the information and the means.”
She backed away a few paces. “I hope you prosper well, and honestly, in Mulmaster.” Her companion ignored them, staring intently into the purple-tinged darkness of the Moonsea as if he could see the Orcsblood if he concentrated enough.
It was clearly a dismissal, or at least Gareth chose to take it as such. The strangers watched them in their strange, stone-still way as Gareth took Ivor by the arm and pulled him toward the dim, irregular line of lights that marked one of the streets of Mulmaster.
The breeze was stronger now, and cold. His arms ached where his perilous climb had skinned them. His shoulders and legs were sore, too—in fact his entire body protested its treatment this night.
But it was good to be off that ship.
“They mean to destroy Ping,” said Ivor, breaking in on his thoughts as t
hey hurried along. “And I don’t say he doesn’t deserve it. But the rest of the crew …”
“They had the same choice before them as we did,” said Gareth curtly. “And with luck it’ll distract Ping from hunting us down. And do you think that pair could take down the entire crew of the Orcsblood?”
Ivor looked behind him. “It wouldn’t surprise me.”
Gareth couldn’t help a backward glance at the abandoned dock and the crescent moon hanging low in the sky. There was no one there now. It was as if the strangely marked couple had never existed.
Something moved around his neck and he jumped, startling a curse from Ivor. It was the chain, unhooking itself from around his neck and slithering down his arm, snakelike, under his filthy sleeve. When it reached his wrist, it coiled around it and solidified, thickening until it again took the shape of a torque.
“I still think you should get rid of that thing,” muttered Ivor.
“Not yet,” said Gareth. “Not till I’ve found its uses.”
The mage’s chamber was dimly lit and smelled strongly of chemicals, with an underlying prickle of burned hair. Gareth stifled a sneeze. Mulmaster’s air was not the most refreshing, but the honest smells of the street overhead would be less oppressive than this. Mage Magaster stood, arms folded, on the other side of a battered worktable. Beneath his blue-black robe, stained here and there with streaks that might be the result of experiments gone awry or perhaps simply sloppy table manners, his lank frame seemed to be trying to stretch as tall as possible. In the shadows beside the door stood the hooded figure of the mage’s apprentice, head bowed and ready to answer Magaster’s summons. It was impossible to determine the sex or race of the slight figure beneath its robes, but the soft voice that had greeted Gareth at the door suggested it was female.
Gareth cleared his throat. “I want to know what this is.” He took the bracelet from an inner pocket and placed it on the acid-charred wood of the tabletop. The mage looked at it, unimpressed.
“I should think that was obvious,” he said in a voice that implied he’d seen many worthless goods and fools in his life. “It’s a bracelet.”
Gareth grinned humorlessly. “Sure it is. Except, Master Mage, when it’s a necklace. Or an armband. Or none of those things, particularly.”
From the corner of his eye he saw the hooded figure shift slightly. The mage raised an overgrown eyebrow. “This object changes shape? On its own?”
“And hence my understandable curiosity. Also, its previous owner died rather than give it up, and I’d like to know why.”
To be entirely honest, Ping would have ordered the weird creature in the ship’s hold killed, whatever he did. But Gareth didn’t feel it necessary to go into all that. The less said about Ping, the better.
The day after he and Ivor had taken refuge in the dubious safety of Mulmaster, word had come of a pirate ship, the scourge of the Moonsea, found adrift with all on board slaughtered. Stranger still, rumor said that the slain had not been left to rot where they fell, but that they had been laid out neatly, their weapons at their feet, as if somebody had taken the time to commend them to their respective gods. Ivor and Gareth had looked at each other over the greasy tavern table when they heard the word, silent by unspoken mutual agreement. The news was a relief, but the idea that they had set the mysterious, otherworldly strangers upon the ship they’d served was uncomfortable.
The mage grunted skeptically, unfolded his arms, and poked at the bracelet with a long sharpened fingernail, stained ocher and yellow with the chemicals of his trade. The metal around Gareth’s wrist remained a bracelet. The mage rubbed his calloused finger on the front of his robe as if Gareth’s questionable treasure were no more than particularly unpromising fewmets.
“The gems are unknown to me, and doubtless of no particular Power or value,” he declared in his sonorous voice. “I am unfamiliar with these chicken scratchings on the metal, and I doubt if they even come from the alphabet of any advanced race. It’s a trinket some charlatan cobbled together, either to gull a mark or to give a sweetheart, and has no intrinsic magical Power whatsoever. You could give it to some trollop if she fancies it. Otherwise it’s worthless.”
Indignant, Gareth snatched up the bracelet before the mage could say more.
“Very well,” he said. “You’ve made your point. I should have saved my coin for the whore. I would have had more enjoyment from it.”
He was irritated at more than the man’s dismissal of an object he’d hoped to prove valuable, and, as he blinked in the sunshine outside the mage’s dim lair, he realized why that was. By saying the bracelet was valueless, fit only to buy a doxy’s favors, the mage implied the strange creature on the ship died for nothing. And Gareth realized he was obscurely offended at the insult.
He tucked the bracelet away in a pouch beneath his shirt and made his way down the greasy cobbles, automatically avoiding the refuse that ran down the ditch in the middle of the street. He’d return to the Throatcut Sparrow Tavern that afternoon, and see if he and Ivor could hire on as mercenaries or even mule-hands with a caravan headed south. He didn’t see much chance of their establishing a foothold here, unless …
He passed a queer sigil burned into a splintered door and shivered despite the noontide heat. No, there wasn’t much chance, unless they were willing to join the lower echelons of Bane’s dark brotherhood. And Gareth wasn’t that desperate—not quite yet. He hadn’t left Ping’s murderous ways behind to join the Dark Lord’s ranks.
He sensed something move behind him and swung around, his hand on his sword hilt. All he saw was a double row of shadowed doorways and the cobbled street, empty save for some dull-colored fowl that pecked at a pile of refuse.
Gareth shifted his pack and continued his course. As the sun reddened in the east, the near-empty streets began to fill with all manner of folk going about their business after the midday warmth. Instinctively, Gareth let his right hand hover near the coin pouch on his belt, under the fold of his shirt, for the pickpockets had left their noontide rest and returned to their trade as well.
Before a dark archway overhung with a tavern sign that depicted a bird in flight with a scarlet splash across its neck, Gareth paused. He’d been walking uphill, and here, through a gap between two tumbledown buildings, he had a good view of the pink-streaked waters of the Moonsea. A sluggish warm wind working between the buildings was tainted with the stench of tar.
He and Ivor had made inquiries about the drifting pirate ship and her load of corpses. Only two of that dread crew concerned them. The first was Ping, who was found laid out on his own quarterdeck, an arrow wound in his throat. The second was Helgre.
Rumor said nothing of the body of a woman with a scarred face.
If Helgre lived, they were not safe in Mulmaster, or anywhere on the Moonsea’s shores.
He put a hand on the great slab of oak that served as a door for the Throatcut Sparrow, then paused. Out of the corner of his eye he caught the flicker of a dark-clad figure ducking into a doorway down the street behind him.
It wasn’t his imagination, then. Someone had been tracking him ever since he left Mage Magaster’s rooms. Could it be a local thief, suspecting he had something valuable and following him in case he proved inattentive and therefore vulnerable to sly fingers in his purse or to a slim blade between his ribs? Or might it be a spy of Bane’s fellowship?
Or could it be Helgre, with vengeance on her mind?
Despite the warmth of the day, Gareth shivered.
Two sturdy fellows, dockworkers, judging by the bulk of them, clattered up behind him and interrupted their banter to call out to him that if he insisted on being a door, he’d better open. He grinned at them good-naturedly and opened the door with a flourish, bowing and gesturing for them to precede him into the tavern’s dark interior. With a guffaw and a slap on the back they did. Before he entered himself, Gareth glanced quickly down the street. There was no sign of his follower.
Very well. He hadn’t survived t
his long by not being alert at all times. It was a reminder to always stay alert, to always check behind him, and never assume he hadn’t attracted the interest of something malevolent.
Once his eyes adjusted to the gloom inside the tavern, he spotted Ivor talking to the innkeeper, a dwarf of gloomy mien and a magnificent braided beard. Ivor dropped a couple of coins in the dwarf’s palm and nodded to Gareth. He had sold two of the tattooed creature’s rings to one of the least dishonest jewelers in the Mulmaster gold district—evidently his education in a merchant town in Turmish had given him a fair instinct for when he was being cheated. The platinum coins would bring unwanted attention, he had told Gareth, especially with the possibility of Helgre on the loose, so they had divided the elongated coins between them and used the proceeds from the rings for day-to-day expenses.
But that store of coin was going fast. They needed to find a way to replenish it or get out of Mulmaster—preferably both. He was tired of looking for Helgre behind every corner.
It was the faint scrape of iron on iron that woke him. Every muscle in his body tensed, but he remained still. He reached for the knife he kept beside his bed, his hands tight on the sheath.
His cot was on one side of the room, Ivor’s on the other, equidistant from the door. Gareth had barred and bolted it before retiring. Now in the darkness he saw a faint green glow around the bolt. He watched, fascinated, as the forged metal cylinder worked itself free as if by disembodied hands and slid back from the loop affixed to the doorway. The light faded, and there was a pause, as if the spellcaster on the other side were taking a deep breath.
Gareth made himself breathe deeply as he counted: one, two, three. He’d reached fifty when a tiny worm of green light insinuated itself from the crack where the door met the doorsill and snaked around the thick, heavy slab of wood that served as a bar. He wondered if Ivor was awake.
Dawnbringer: A Forgotten Realms Novel Page 3
