Dante wasn't surprised. As a whole, norren tended to treat wealth with indifference or disdain, particularly the clans, who were perfectly able to fend for themselves. When it came to the galley slaves waiting below the Ransom's decks, however, he had no idea which way Orlen would break. He could see the norren chief, without a whiff of hypocrisy, ordering their slaughter as accomplices; just as likely, he would treat them as his most honored guests, leading them by the hand into the daylight and striking off their chains.
Instead, Orlen went to bed, leaving Vee, Varlen, Dante, and Blays to hash out an agreement that the slaves be freed and offered the option to sign on with the captain's crew; he'd lost three men to stray arrows. The families of the dead crew, meanwhile, would be compensated with whatever was found on the boat, minus half to be divided among the former slaves to give them a chance to make it once the Boomer made port in Dollendun. It was the kind of compromise that left both parties mad. Vee was talked out of whippings for the slave (she considered the lashes cleansing, for the slaves' own good). Meanwhile, Varlen demanded all the Ransom's wealth; Blays reminded him he'd had more than a little help wiping out the Bloody Knuckles, the most-hated local raiders of the last generation, and that by the way, greed had been the Knuckles' chief motivation, too.
By the end, Dante was frustrated, impatient, and exhausted, but helped search the captured ship anyway, both to ensure the agreement was honored (the ship's crew was noticeably more sullen than before the battle, giving the norren long looks of barely-concealed resentment) and to make a personal search of the captain's cabin, where he overturned drawers, smashed open chests, and knocked on walls for secret compartments until Blays asked him what the hell he was doing, which took several minutes longer than Dante expected.
"Somebody knew something." Dante stepped back from a bolted-down desk, surveying the scree of papers, gold-plated trinkets, and strings of what he suspected were knuckle bones hanging from the wall. "If the Ransom just attacked every ship heading downstream, the traders would have dug themselves a new river years ago."
"Think somebody tipped them off?"
"Unless Josun Joh is playing both sides, how else would they know to attack the Boomer?"
"So you're looking for evidence of this little theory," Blays said.
"Yes."
"Hard proof that someone told them we were after them and let them know how to find us."
Dante set down a curved ornate knife and stared at Blays. "Why the hell else would I be tearing the room apart? Should I go try yelling at their corpses instead?"
"Oh, just thought you might be interested in this."
Blays passed him a thick, grainy piece of paper, folded twice. Inside was a sloppy, almost childish drawing of a barge, wide and single-masted. It could have been any of the cargo vessels plying the river, but its prow extended into a figurehead of an owl, wings swept back, preparing to launch into flight.
"What are they doing with a drawing of the Boomer?"
Blays nodded. "And who drew it?"
There was, of course, no signature. No words whatsoever. The only way to determine the sketch's authorship would be to force everyone in a 500-mile radius to draw another barge and compare the output to this child's scrawl on a fuzzy sheet of pulp. In practical terms, that plan was only slightly better than attempting to snag the sun in a net and putting it in his pocket so Dante could have toast wherever he went.
They found nothing else of interest. The galley-slaves, a mixture of norren and human men, were transferred to the suddenly crowded Boomer. The Ransom was made to drop anchor. Clansmen piled the bodies of the Bloody Knuckles in its hold, spilled oil over them, and splashed its topdeck to boot. The grapnels joining the two ships were severed. The Boomer weighed anchor, letting the current carry it away. In the first light of dawn, a woman of the Nine Pines ascended the steps of the stern, bent her bow, and sent a flaming arrow winging toward the Ransom. It snapped into the topdeck, fire dwindling until it looked like it would wink out completely: then an orange wall flared across the former slaver. Thick white smoke roiled into the sky.
Dante emerged from his cabin late that afternoon. Mourn quickly informed him both Orlen and Lira were waiting to speak to him. Dante drank some tea, stretched the soreness from his muscles, and went to see Lira. Her cabin's scent had the moist, mushroomy pall of the wounded, but she looked better already, a touch of pink to her broad cheeks.
"You killed them without me," she said. Accusation gleamed from her eyes.
"Would you have liked us to drag them in here for you to club from your bed?"
"You could have brought me out to watch."
"There were no guarantees we'd even win. If just one of them had broken through, you would have discovered that steel tastes a lot like horrible pain."
"I've been cut before." She gazed out the cabin's round window. "I hoped to be healed when you caught them. To pay them back. And you."
"The info you gave me about the attack on your ship is the reason we're here talking instead of sitting at the bottom of the river waving to each other for eternity."
"Still. I'll pay you back."
He folded his arms. "Enough of this 'debt of honor' nonsense. You don't owe me for saving you any more than you owe everyone else on this ship for not stabbing you in your sleep." He gestured in the vague direction of the other cabins. "Anyway, it was Blays who made us go to the wreck."
"Then my debts just doubled."
"For the love of—"
"Don't think of my life as dedicated to you. Think of it as dedicated to goodness. Your act deserves praise. Support. Protection. My debt's not to you, but the ideal your act of rescue embodies."
Dante narrowed his eyes, seeing her in a light completely separate from the waning rays angling through the window. "I'm not all good."
She leaned back into her blankets, weary. "Then may my devotion be a double-edged sword that inspires you to do better."
His reasons for objecting weren't yet shaped well enough to hammer into words, so he left it at that. It wasn't that he disagreed with the premise of a personal loyalty that ran so deep you'd put your own life in harm's way. He supposed he'd done that for Blays. More than once, in fact. Often enough that Dante's just afterlife would feature a full servant-crew composed entirely of Blayses. Meanwhile, he might not give up his life for Cally, but he'd probably give up a leg or an arm. His left arm, at the very least. For semi-friends like Mourn, he'd sacrifice a finger or two. Even for strangers—a woman being beaten in the street, say—he'd risk a black eye or a bloody nose, although he reserved the right to complain about it later.
But Lira hardly knew him. If she were serious, in a sense she already had committed suicide for him, submerging her identity and desires beneath a sea of principle. He and Blays protected and fought for each other because they believed in the same causes. Sure, the original cause they'd fought for had been basic self-preservation, but that was a pretty good one, he thought. On a deep-down level, Lira's desire to rid herself of her own personal goals disturbed him.
He headed belowdecks to snag Blays and find Orlen among the close, smelly yurts. Orlen insisted they head back upstairs to the foremost section of the bow, which aside from the ship's cabins was perhaps the one spot on the Boomer with any major privacy: not only could they see anyone approaching, but the rustle of water around the prow cushioned their words from anyone wandering too close.
Orlen sat on his heels and gestured them to do the same. "I think it's time to clear the air."
"Or at least to choke it with a different brand of smoke," Vee said.
"There aren't to be any more secrets."
"Certainly less secrets," Vee said. "We might inadvertently maintain secrets we weren't aware were secret."
Blays stared dumbly. "I hope the melted substance in my ears is wax."
"In short," Orlen said, "it's time we pool resources. Work together. Achieve as one."
"I'd complain that it's about time," Dante said, "b
ut it took so long to arrive I'm too puzzled to resent you."
Vee screwed up her orange eyes and gazed up at the gently flapping sails, which had been restored, with gruesome stitching, to an approximation of their pre-battle wholeness. "There are two reasons. At least two reasons. We may have others."
"First," Orlen said, "for the Clan of the Nine Pines, trust needs more than a handshake. I'm sure this seems quaint to you, or a series of pointless hurdles, but that is because when you look at yourselves, you see Dante the Noble and Blays the Also Noble. But when we look, we see two of the species that has enslaved so many of our own."
Vee nodded. "Better to look like the hole of an ass than to look from behind the bars of a cage."
Dante tapped his thumbs together. "That's all well and good, but wasn't the business at Cling enough to earn your trust?"
Orlen frowned, rippling his beard. "For blackmailing a mayor? Anyone can do that. Not everyone can save our ship from being rammed."
"Specifically," Vee said, "only you did."
"And fighting alongside the clan is, in a sense, to become a part of the clan."
Vee nodded again. "But only in a sense."
Blays twirled his hand in a let's-move-it-along gesture. "Let's get to the second reason before we forget what we're talking about and who we are."
"We're about to pass into human lands," Orlen said. "We'll need humans to move us forward."
"Our trust will still be circumscribed," Vee said.
Blays cocked his head. "Well, you should at least get it drunk first."
"What more can we do?" Dante said. "Should I put the king of Gask in a headlock and knuckle his scalp until he renounces norren slavery forever? We're here to help."
Orlen nodded, eyes closed. "So you keep repeating. We're very grateful. There is no question of your sincerity."
"The question is whether Narashtovik might be angling for independence of its own," Vee said.
Dante smiled in disbelief. Not at the question itself. The question was good enough that Dante had considered it several times himself. Cally's entire support of norren independence stemmed from a single promise to a single norren who'd helped Cally reclaim his seat at the head of the Council of Narashtovik. That debt deserved repayment, no doubt, but if that were the only source of Cally's motivation, the scale of his repayment was somewhere between generous and a level of insanity normally associated with bottling your own urine.
Maybe the old man just believed in liberty. In Cally's own cynical way, he did believe in the principle of self-rule. At the very least, he thought it was pretty stupid to decide rulership of an empire based on which blueblood's family tree had the most tightly-snarled and inbred branches. But neither was Cally a banner-waving proponent of the islands south of Mallon, where they appointed leaders based on some sort of common vote—when the matter had once come up in passing at a council meeting, Cally had dismissed the notion by asking "Why not just put a pig in charge?"
In other words, Cally wasn't leading the charge for norren freedom on the basis of principle alone. To further muddy the waters, the old man bristled whenever some new tax or formality had to be paid to the palace at Setteven, forcibly dispelling any illusions he held of Narashtovik's autonomy. Dante had no doubt this resentment fueled Cally's dedication to freeing the norren from their sometimes literal yoke. And if that were true, it was easy to imagine Cally had another motive in mind: that if the Norren Territories gained independence, Narashtovik could easily follow.
"Outrageous," Dante said to Vee's accusation. "Cally's done nothing but help the norren."
Orlen glanced between the two humans. "It is settled."
"Great," Blays said. "Then in honor of our newfound mutual trust and appreciation, I'd like to let you know one of your people is a dirty, rotten turncoat."
Vee didn't move, didn't even lean forward, but her presence seemed to increase in the same way the full moon grows larger the closer it comes to the horizon. "If this is a joke, human humor is stranger than the beasts that wash up from the deep sea."
"It's no joke. Except maybe one of those cosmic ones."
"Then be very, very precise about what you say next."
The corners of Blays' mouth tucked in a subtle way that usually presaged the breaking of objects and sometimes people. Without removing his eyes from Vee's, he reached into his pocket, removed the drawing, and smoothed it on the deck, holding it in place against the steady breeze of the boat's passage.
"We found this in the captain's quarters on the Ransom," Blays said. "Either Banning hedged his bets and warned the Bloody Knuckles they were about to have to rename themselves the Bloody Spinal Stumps, or someone from the clan wanted to give them an extra-sporting chance."
Vee surged forward. Orlen barred an arm across her large chest. Her face hung before Blays like an angry moon.
"Excuse her," Orlen said. "She is a staunch advocate of Vorgas' Three C's."
"Vorgas' Three C's?" Dante said.
"Clarity of thought, clarity of speech, and crushing the skulls of those who slander your clan."
"Then let's add a fourth: Considerately not assaulting your dear, dear allies."
Vee relaxed to her original position. "Your proposition is not a binary either/or. There is also the possibility someone saw you bumbling around Cling, recognized the clan, and surmised our purpose."
"Fine," Blays said. "It could be literally anyone, up to and including me and my evil twin I've never met. That's a very useful way of honing in on who actually did it."
"We will keep our eyes open," Orlen said.
Vee restrained a sigh. "And conduct our own investigation. It will have to be a passive one until more information allows us to turn aggressive."
Dante nodded. "Unless there are any more accusations or fists to be thrown, what, then, do you have for us?"
Orlen glanced over his shoulder at the wide gray river. "Where this river passes through Dollendun marks the border between the Norren Territories and Old Gask. Are you familiar with the border?"
"Big black line, right?" Blays said.
"Very invisible, in fact, but people behave like their nightmare's own nightmare waits for any who cross from one side to the other. Norren do, anyway. Humans are free to cross the river as they please."
"So you've enlisted us for any duties on the human side."
"Which we believe will be considerable. This man Perrigan is a beefer, meaning a trader of meat, meaning a dealer of norren slaves. We'll need you to find out who he sold our cousins to."
Dante scratched the base of his neck. His hair was getting long again. "Do you expect that will be difficult?"
"How should we know?" Vee said. "Do you think we've met him before? Perhaps he is a braggart, and will tell you for the swell of telling you that he is a man who owns other, lesser men. Alternately, the secret of a client could be a thing he wouldn't reveal on pain of pain."
"Again, very helpful to have such hard details," Blays said. "Now we know he could react in any conceivable way."
Orlen ran his thumb along his scarred cheek. "We'll send clan-warriors with you to pose as servants. They can help with any unexpected situations."
"Or attempts to murder you," Vee said.
"We'll take Mourn," Dante said.
"We will send Gala, too. She is one of our finest warriors."
"I think Mourn will be sufficient."
Orlen pressed his palms together and glared at Dante over his fingertips. "One servant among two men of means will diminish you both. Gala goes, too."
Dante held up his hands, already regretting being brought into their outer circle of trust. "Fine."
"Good. We are scheduled to arrive in Dollendun late tomorrow morning."
"That's it?" Blays said.
Orlen gave another of his monkish nods. "There is only ever so much."
Dante stood, knees popping. He wandered with Blays along the railing, stopping once they were out of easy earshot of the norren or any idling c
rew.
"That last thing didn't even make sense," Blays said. "And did you get the impression they were pushing another babysitter on us?"
"Guaranteed. They still don't trust us."
"Maybe they're right not to. I've always wondered why Cally was so interested in this whole business. The only reason I've never pushed him on it is because he's finally doing something I agree with."
They hunted down Mourn to bring him up to speed and to pump him for more information about the border city of Dollendun. The Clan of the Nine Pines almost always stuck to the wilds, hunting the hills and fishing the lakes, but the clans frequently delegated unpartnered young men to roles as wandering scouts, both for the specific purpose of keeping up on the doings of rival clans and for the much broader aim of seeing whatever there was to see. As it turned out, Mourn had also spent a couple weeks in Dollendun, which was two more weeks than Orlen or Vee had spent there. According to Mourn, it was, for the most part, your typical large city: a scab of nobles, wealthy merchants, and shipping tycoons crusted over a great messy wound of laborers and peons.
The difference was Dollendun was literally split down the middle, norren to the Eastern Shore and humans to the Western, and the only norren allowed to cross westward were slaves—in other words, some tenth of the total populace of Dollendun, a figure Blays found incredulous ("Why don't they just flex their biceps, pop their bonds, and start smashing skulls?") and Dante found dubious. With that many slaves running around, how could you tell which norren on the Western Shore were owned and which ones were free?
Mourn explained. Slaves were branded on their right cheeks. All norren citizens were lawfully obligated to restrict their beards to an inch in length so the slaves couldn't comb them over their brands. Any norren man with a longer beard could be arrested on sight and (in the best-case scenario) deported to the eastern banks. Permits were allocated to allow norren leaders, traders, and diplomats to handle their business on the human side, but there were never more than a few dozen permits active at any one time, and even the permanent ones—most were day passes—had to be renewed annually at a steep fee. And yes, free norren had tried to thwart this system by branding themselves, wandering the Western Shore, and passing as slaves out on the errands of their masters, but all brands were registered at the Chattelry Office. Meanwhile, norren sporting unknown brands were eligible to be captured and held in the Office's cells, and if they weren't claimed within a month (at the cost of a claimant fee and, naturally, a second fee for registry of one's brand), to be auctioned at the monthly market to the benefit of Dollendun's coffers.
The Great Rift Page 9
