The Curse Giver

by Dora Machado

  No mercy. Bren took on another warrior, this one more grizzled than the others, but also more skilled. His elegant style and elaborate footwork drew Bren out of the pack. He hesitated before breaking the line, but Hato fought at his back, so Bren plunged into the enemy line. The fight was even and hard. When he finally dispatched his opponent with an oblique thrust below the ribs, he did it with respect.

  Nothing like a righteous fray to put wrongs to right. He had the right to defend his men’s lives and Laonia’s property from thieves and tyrants.

  The barge looked like a scene from one of his nightmares. The deck was slippery with blood. The wounded and the dying cried out in pain. Smoke and fire bracketed the confined battlefield while death reigned supreme in between.

  The death toll included all of the assailants. Bren wished he could have kept a man or two alive. He commanded his jubilant men to spare the last survivor on deck, but the battered man decided that braving the Nerpes was the better option. The man jumped from the barge. His encounter with the famished yearlings was as gruesome as it was deadly.

  With the fighting done, Bren and his men concentrated on securing the barge, cutting off the burning boats and clearing out the deck. The yearlings got yet another set of treats. Before they threw the dead bodies overboard, Bren inspected each one for clues. It was clear that whoever had commanded this attack had wanted to kill Bren and steal Laonia’s tribute. But who was it?

  Neither he nor Hato found conclusive evidence that could answer the question. Bren was sure it had been Riva. The men were highly trained and expensively equipped. The plan had been timely and sophisticated. Hato looked hard for a sign that the assailants had been some of Teos’s infamous mercenaries. He found no gold from Teos in their pockets and no golden assassin’s badges.

  Something else was bothering Bren. The sails had been shredded shortly before the attack, in preparation for it, he was sure. His men had been on watch the entire time that the barge had been tied to Khalia’s galley. A stranger would have had no way of stealing onto the barge. What if the person who destroyed the sails was not a stranger?

  “Four crew killed, two of the Twenty dead,” a weary Clio reported. “Severo is missing, and so is the little monkey man.”

  “Elfu?”

  “We can’t find them anywhere. We fear their throats may have been slit at the beginning of the raid. Their bodies may have been thrown overboard.”

  Damn the Twins. Severo had been his best scout. Bren loved all of the Twenty, but he was partial to Severo and Lusielle would have his hide if something happened to Elfu. Another question came to mind. What if the men were not dead? What if Severo caught Elfu shredding the sails and was killed in the fight with the ferocious little man? Could it have been the other way around?

  What would have been either man’s motive? How could he consider one of his pledged followers, let alone faithful Severo as a traitor? Was the ague already turning him into a mad, mistrustful fool?

  The entire barge lurched. Bren grabbed onto the gunwales. Men spilled like bottles on the deck, horses tripped, barrels broke from their bindings and rolled about, crashing everywhere. Adrift on the river current, the hull staggered and rustled against a sandbank. The ship moaned like a wailing woman.

  “We’re drifting too close to shore!” Hato shouted.

  “The tillers!” The horrified pilot held the detached handles in his hands. “They’ve been disabled!”

  No tillers. No sails. No way to fight the Nerpes’s capricious currents. Up ahead, the frothy current licked the smooth pate of a rocky outcrop glistening in the night. As the shallows scraped at the hull and the outcrop charged at the ship, Bren realized the danger.

  The same river that had taken him this far on his journey, the blessed waterway that fed the land and led the faithful home, was about to put a swift and catastrophic end to all his ventures.

  Chapter Fifty-eight

  SOMEWHERE IN THE REALM OF THE gods, Lusielle found no air to breathe. She sprinted through a busy lane paved with alabaster stones and flanked by opulent high-storied shrines.

  Help. She needed help.

  The familiar faces of a crowd of gods and goddesses crammed her vision. She knew a lot of their names, but she had no time for greetings. She was drowning, dying in their divine midst and yet unable to scream. Some of the gods smiled as she passed. Some frowned. Some laughed. Some barely glanced at her.

  None acknowledged her or her distress. None reached out to help.

  A small, decrepit shrine stood before her. An open door beckoned. The sound of dripping water echoed in her ears. The dread that had long taken hold of her surged, a loud warning. Lusielle didn’t want to go through those doors, but she did.

  Air. She needed air.

  A sun-dappled countryside rippled before her eyes as if it were part of an underwater world. A shimmering lake. A lonely whitewashed house on a bluff, modest but tidy. A blue door, beckoning to be opened.

  Lusielle opened it.

  A fire burned in the hearth. A black lute lay on the window seat. A woman sat, writing at a desk with her back to the door. The quill in her hand rustled as it journeyed across the page, trailing sparkling lines in its wake. Lusielle could only see the short dark hair growing around a cowlick at the top of the head, the long neck perched atop an exquisite pair of bare shoulders and a small globular scar at the base of her neck.

  The stylus froze over the page. It dripped a blot of ink, splotching the words. “Who’s there?” the woman said. “Why have you come?”

  Lusielle wouldn’t have been able to answer that question even if she had been capable of words.

  “Whoever you might be,” the woman said. “Be gone. You cannot defeat me.”

  A racket came from the door. Lusielle turned to see the God of fire bursting through the threshold. “Am I too late?”

  She fell into in his arms, gasping for air. She knew the scar on his face. His lips sealed around her mouth, as if he was an expert inhaler of airs.

  Air, she wanted to say. She needed air. But when he blew, it was only fire that scorched her lungs.

  “Wake up,” a gruff voice whispered in her ear. “Wake up, or else we shall all die!”

  “Quiet,” another voice whispered. “Be still!”

  “Breathe, child. Breathe!”

  A humid scent moistened her throat and jerked Lusielle’s reluctant lungs into action. A pervasive stink left her gagging. Still, it was better than no air at all.

  She opened her heavy eyelids. At first, she spotted only gloom. As her eyes adapted to the darkness, she confronted the tenuous outline of a most improbable sight.

  “Elfu?”

  “Shush.”

  “Severo?”

  “You must be very quiet, mistress.”

  “But—”

  “They’re almost done.”

  Lusielle smothered a coughing fit. She realized that the three of them were cramped into some sort of confined space. Ropes coiled beneath her legs and wood pressed against her back. Muffled voices came from the outside, where steps rattled the deck amidst the sounds of men talking, wood banging and water sloshing.

  Elfu’s profile shifted, revealing that his face had been covering a tiny beam of light squeezing through a small knothole in between boards. Shifting in the crowded darkness, Lusielle put one eye to the knothole.

  A pair of lanterns illuminated a crammed space. By the chamber’s low ceilings and narrowing shape, Lusielle surmised they were on the galley’s lowest deck, by the stern. Huge barrels took up most of the space. A group of strapping servants surrounded one of the barrels. Working with impressive efficiency, servants filled the buckets then passed them on to other servants, who tossed the contents into what appeared to be portholes cut into the deck’s timbers.

  The stink offending Lusielle’s nose wafted from those barrels and buckets. It must have bothered the servants as well, because they were working fast to dispose of the barrel’s fetid contents.

  L
usielle waited until the loud, bucket-laden servants moved on to dump their cargo in the floor openings located at the opposite side of the room. “What’s this place?” she whispered.

  “It’s the lure compartment,” Severo whispered back. “This is where they store the bait.”

  “The bait for what?”

  “To lure the yearlings,” Severo said. “How else can the sacred galleys entice the yearlings to follow the White Tide procession to the sea?”

  “You mean they—?”

  “They lure the yearlings with rotten bait all the way from lake to sea.”

  That explained the awful stink. “I thought it was a sacred migration, the will of the gods.”

  “Maybe in Suriek’s time. These days, it’s more like the will of Teos.”

  It made sense. Lusielle didn’t know why she was shocked. Even nature was running amuck these days. Why should she expect any miracles from the gods?

  On the far side of the lure compartment, the servants finished the feeding and, abandoning their buckets, fled the room. Elfu and Severo stayed put, gesturing for Lusielle to do the same.

  “We must wait until we’re sure they’re done with the baiting,” Severo said.

  Lusielle tried to make sense of the last few hours of her life. Her recollections were fuzzy. “What are you two doing here?” she asked.

  “You are my mistress,” Elfu said in his harsh throaty accent. “I go where you go.”

  “Severo?”

  “My lord charged me with your safety.”

  “He did?”

  “I wasn’t about to fail him again.”

  “But … how did you two manage to—”

  “It wasn’t easy,” Elfu said. “I followed him.”

  “When I saw you leaving the barge,” Severo said, “I went down into the hull, clambered out of a vent and climbed onto the galley. Security was very tight except here, in the lure compartment. I guess no one can survive this stink for long. The rest was easy. I secured garb to match Teos’s golden guardians from the stores next door and went looking for you.”

  “We followed the airs’ scent,” Elfu said.

  “We found you and the Chosen unconscious in the witching fire’s chamber,” Severo said.

  “Was the Chosen—?”

  “She was alive, if that’s what you’re asking,” Severo said. “She was clutching a knife in her hand.”

  “She tried to murder you.” Elfu grumbled. “I would’ve killed her, but he didn’t let me.”

  Thank the gods. Laonia didn’t need a high charge of murder to add to its troubles. The potent airs had less of an effect on Khalia than on Lusielle, but Lusielle had conspired to add a touch of sweet tamaria to the drink she had brewed for Khalia, a slow acting ingredient which relaxed the muscles and induced sleep. Khalia must have passed out right after Lusielle.

  Elfu and Severo must have arrived shortly thereafter. They were the only reason Lusielle had survived the lethal concentration of foul airs.

  She recalled her last moments with Khalia, the blade seeking her flesh. Dear gods. Was she still naked?

  She checked. To her relief, she found her valuable spoils from her battle with Khalia intact in her pocket and the rest of her mostly—if not perfectly—clothed.

  “Did you dress me?” she asked Elfu.

  “Mm-hm.”

  “Thanks,” Lusielle said. “By now, hordes of golden guardians must be after us.”

  “Nary one of those high-strutting peacocks is looking for us.”

  “No?”

  “We staged a mock trail,” Severo said. “The guardians fell for it. We even helped in the search. We made it look like you jumped.”

  “Jumped?”

  “Over the gunwales. Into the Nerpes. We pitched your cloak, along with a slab of cured mutton into the river. They think the yearlings ate you. They think you’re dead.”

  There was nothing safe or easy about what Elfu and Severo had accomplished. What they had done was beyond amazing, incredible.

  How was she supposed to return the favor and reverse the feat? And most importantly, how by the Thousand Gods was she going to get them out of this galley alive?

  Chapter Fifty-nine

  SEVERO CRACKED THE LID OPEN AND surveyed the hull. The servants had been gone for a few long moments. Slowly, Severo stole out of the storage bench and, gliding silently across the room, put his ear to the door. The servants were truly gone. He gave the signal. Elfu leapt out of the bench and helped his mistress out.

  She straightened her rumpled clothing while negotiating the slippery deck. “How long before they come back?” she asked.

  “Not long,” Severo said, offering his flask. “They bait the yearlings every hour. Stretch your legs. Have some drink. We can’t afford to be found. We’ll have to wait until we get to the next port to make our escape and even then, it’s going to be tough.”

  Tough? More like impossible, he thought. No matter where they docked, guards would be posted on deck and along the pier, and several heavily defended gates would stand between them and freedom. That is, if they could survive the stench. Besides, it could be days before the White Tide procession veered to port, if it did at all.

  How he’d gotten stuck with taking care of a reckless mistress was a mystery to Severo, but his lord had said he had to guard her life, and by the Twins, he was going to do it, even if she wasn’t helping.

  Had she been addlebrained when she had agreed to go with the Chosen? Had he been insane when he had followed her into the galley?

  “We have to go now,” the mistress said. She seemed tired and disheveled but the look in her eyes brimmed with determination.

  “Go where?” Elfu asked.

  “To Teos, of course,” she said. “We must find the Lord of Laonia right away.”

  “No more highborn thugs,” Elfu said in his gruff accent. “No more evil pretenders. It’s not Suriek they revere. It’s greed and decadence.”

  Severo hated to agree with the monkey man, especially since he had such a low estimation for highborn, but Elfu was right. Going to Teos would be very dangerous for the mistress, for all of them.

  “I supposed if we stayed in this vessel we would eventually arrive to Teos.” The mistress was thinking aloud. “But we need to catch up to Bren and if we stay here for too much longer, we risk poisoning from the bait’s foul stench. Not even the servants will risk more than a few moments at a time down here. You know what will happen if we’re caught.”

  Elfu drew his fingers across his neck.

  “See?” the mistress said. “We have to go.”

  “I’m afraid it’s not possible,” Severo said, trying to instill some sense in his wayward charge. “The galley is sailing at a full clip. It tows no small boats we can sail. The Nerpes is wide, the currents are treacherous, and the yearlings are famished—”

  “Severo,” the mistress said. “If we’re going to help your lord, we have to get to him and soon.”

  “What good would we be to our lord if we all get killed trying to leave this galley?”

  “We are going to be killed if we stay here,” she said, “either by the toxic fumes or by Teos’s guards when they find us. It’s only a matter of time.”

  “But mistress,” Severo said. “There’s no way of getting off this ship.”

  “There might be a way,” she said.

  The mistress stepped to the edge of one of the rounded holes cut into the deck. Severo came to stand next to her and looked down. A thick glaze of gore and slime coated the slick chute below. Decaying bait, rotten animal parts and decomposing matter clung to the narrow, filthy channel. After a couple of spans, the dark tunnel twisted at an angle. Severo could see no further, but he could hear the ship’s groans echoing from the tunnel’s depths and the current hissing somewhere below. A puff of humid air blew on his face, the river’s most fetid breath.

  Elfu pointed down to the chute then to himself, asking what Severo didn’t dare ask. “You want me—us—Are you cr
azy?”

  “We don’t know how wide those chutes are,” Severo said. “We could get stuck. I think that the safest course of action is to stay here until we veer to port.”

  “He’s right,” Elfu said, “It’s too dangerous.”

  The mistress didn’t look dissuaded.

  “Look,” Severo said. “Even If we manage to somehow make it down the chute, it would dump us into the river.”

  “The river is our only means of escape,” she said. “I know Elfu can swim. What about you, Severo?”

  “Of course I can swim.”

  “Well, then, we can do it,” the mistress said.

  “May I remind you?” Elfu said. “It is you who cannot swim!”

  The Twins be damned. The woman couldn’t swim? She was proposing a course of action that would surely kill her!

  “I can manage,” she said, but she didn’t look confident in the least.

  “What about the yearlings?” Severo said.

  “Yes,” the monkey man said. “What about them voracious little beasts?”

  “Maybe we can somehow avoid them.” The mistress paced around the deck holes. “Maybe we can find a way to evade them. Maybe ….”

  She groped for her remedy case, which was not slung over her shoulder. “Did you—?”

  Elfu dug through the bench and came up with the case. “I knew you’d be unhappy if I forgot to retrieve it.”

  “You’re a treasure.” The mistress secured the case over her shoulder and knotted it to her belt. She rummaged through it, shifting some things around until she came up with a small earthenware bottle. She ripped a chunk out of the hem of her skirt and tore it into three long strips.

  “What are you doing?” Severo shifted nervously.

  “You’ll see,” she said.

  He didn’t like it when she started playing with her potions. He didn’t like the way she was so single-minded and focused on whatever it was she was doing.