All That Glitters

by Auston Habershaw

  A pebble hit Artus in the head, and he looked up to see Brana perched on the third story balcony of one of Saldor’s frighteningly tall apartment blocks. “The water!” Brana chirped. “We’re going to the water!”

  “Get down here!” Artus waved at the gnoll, who was balancing on the railing of the balcony in a way no sane human would. “Somebody will see you!”

  Brana cocked his head to the side and then jumped off. Artus almost screamed, but stopped himself. Brana slid down a clothesline and hit the ground, collapsing into a roll, and sprang back to his feet in one smooth motion. This display caused one man to jump in surprise and two others to hand him a few coppers for the show. Tongue hanging out like an idiot, the gnoll aped a ridiculous approximation of a bow and skipped off after their quarry.

  Artus sighed—­at least somebody was enjoying this.

  Despite Brana’s enthusiasm, he didn’t get closer than twenty paces from Andolon. Since Tyvian had sent him off unarmed, he wasn’t exactly spoiling for a fight. Evidently Andolon had, at one point, been a duelist, and furthermore this city had Defenders who could see the future and arrest you immediately after (or even sometimes before) you did something wrong. It was a harrowing thought—­it made Artus question Tyvian’s sanity for the hundredth time since he had brought them to Saldor. Why the hell would Tyvian’s mother frame Myreon? Why would that encourage Tyvian to bring them all into a trap? They were all going to end up petrified in one of those terrible penitentiary gardens, he just knew it.

  Andolon never looked behind him—­not once—­so the tailing was easy. So easy, in fact, it made Artus unreasonably suspicious of what was really going on. All kinds of Tyvian’s warnings came flooding back: a person who never looks behind them after committing a crime is never alone, never assume a man is drunk unless you see him drink, never assume you are in control of a situation unless you have vetted all the angles first (he wasn’t clear on what that last one meant, actually, but assumed it had something to do with having eyes in the back of your head). Artus put his hands in his pockets and sighed. He kind of hoped Andolon would turn around and start something. Getting in a fight would be a lot more interesting than this cloak-­and-­dagger nonsense, Defenders or no Defenders.

  He and Brana followed Andolon to the docks. From Tyvian’s primer on Saldorian geography, Artus knew they were somewhere along the West Mouth of the Trell River, nearing Crosstown Harbor. Across the glass-­still waters he could see the colored lanterns of a hundred ships bobbing at anchor out beneath the setting quarter moon. “Boats!” Brana said, pointing. “Big ones!”

  They hid themselves behind a stack of empty barrels outside a cooper’s shop and watched as Andolon marched himself out onto a pier and was met by some kind of large skiff with a fancy little house where Andolon could sit as two men wearing lace ruffs and shiny helmets rowed the boat. Tyvian’s friend settled himself amid a few cushions and, from there, the two helmeted oarsmen took to their oars and they began to slide out into the harbor.

  “Saints!” Artus swore, “How will we follow him now?”

  Brana’s eyes got wide for a moment before his grin followed suit. “Boat?”

  “I don’t know how to row a boat! Do you?” Artus asked, but it was a stupid question. Hool wouldn’t let Brana so much as dip his toe in a pond larger than she could jump across.

  “Boat!” Brana repeated, hitting Artus in the arm.

  “No, Brana! I can’t row . . . or swim. It’s a bad idea.”

  Brana pushed him and snarled in gnoll-­speak, “Coward!”

  Artus pushed him back. “I am not! It’s a stupid idea!”

  “Let’s go!” Brana barked. “Let’s go or you’re a rabbit!”

  Artus pushed Brana again. “I am not a rabbit! You’re stupid!”

  Brana sucker punched Artus just north of his groin. Artus, though, had enough experience with Brana that it didn’t catch him completely flat-­footed. He caught Brana’s arm with his and twisted it behind the gnoll’s back. Brana slammed his heel down on Artus’s instep hard enough to force Artus off-­balance, and then the gnoll simply twisted in such a way that Artus found himself falling toward the cobbles, shoulder first.

  Now it was Hool’s voice in Artus’s head. If you’re going to fall, fall. Let the power of the fall fill you and then change it into something good.

  Artus tucked his shoulder and rolled, letting go of Brana but allowing himself to roll to his feet. He turned to face the oncoming attack, but it wasn’t coming. Brana had abandoned him and was running out on the pier. “Dammit! You stupid . . .”

  Artus ran after him, but Brana had a head start and was ten times as fast anyway. By the time Artus caught up, the gnoll had skipped down a gangplank to a dock at which a half-­dozen small skiffs, coracles, and longboats were tied up. Brana was pacing the dock, sniffing at each boat’s bow, his legs spread wide to adjust to the odd movement of the water beneath him.

  “Brana, I said no! This is a really bad idea!” Artus descended to the dock as well, his hands gripping the guiderails on the gangway for dear life as he felt the sway and bob of the dock. “Saints, Brana—­you’re going to get us drowned!”

  Brana gave him a devilish grin and then hopped into an eight-­foot skiff. “Rabbit!” he said.

  Somewhere behind them a dog barked. Artus turned to see the lights inside a shack by the pier light up. The sign above the door took a moment for Artus to sound out. “Dock . . . mast . . . er. Dockmaster.”

  He had five seconds to determine what a “dockmaster” was before the man himself appeared at the door to his shack, a knobby cudgel in one hand and the leash of an angry dog in the other. “What’s about down there! Hey, you boys—­you know what I does to boat thiefs on me dock? Eh? Come away from there!”

  Artus waved Brana out of the skiff. “C’mon!”

  Brana was busy untying the rope that held the skiff to the dock. “Rabbit rabbit rabbit.”

  “Stop! Thiefs! I’ll knock yer stinkin’ brains, ye Kroth-­spawned tits! Varner, boy—­have at them! Go!” The dockmaster loosed his hound, and the big dog shot down the gangway with all the speed of a crossbow bolt. Artus felt his arse tighten at the thought of the beast’s jaws clamped onto one of the cheeks. He jumped in the boat, lost his balance immediately, and nearly fell overboard save for Brana, who pulled him to safety.

  Assuming, of course, by “safety” one meant “a boat they couldn’t pilot.”

  The force of Artus’s jump had pushed them away from the dock. Varner the hound stopped short at the dock’s edge, barking until foam flew from his jowls. The dockmaster was behind his dog, shaking his cudgel and spitting almost as much. “I know your faces, ye stinking ragamuffins! I’ll find ye! I’ll have yer arses!”

  Artus managed to get himself right-­side-­up, but the thought of standing in the boat was too terrifying for him to contemplate, so instead he found himself peering over the gunwale at the receding form of the dockmaster. It took him a few seconds to fully realize what they had done, but when he did, all he could do was swear. “Kroth. Kroth’s bloody teeth. We just stole a boat, didn’t we? We stole a bloody boat.”

  Brana’s tongue was lolling out. “Yeah! Fun!”

  Artus sighed. “Right. Fun.”

  Whether it was the current, the tide, the wind, or some other nautical phenomenon Artus wasn’t aware of, something was drawing their little boat away from the dock and out into the harbor among the hulls of the big oceangoing ships. Artus, whose firsthand experience with watercraft was limited to riding on a river barge a few times, found himself marveling at the sheer size of most of the vessels that surrounded them. He knew terms like “galleon” and “brig” and “galley” were used to describe ships, and suspected that some or all such terms could be correctly applied to the watery castles of lumber that loomed over them, but there was no way he would be able to tell which was which. All he knew was that t
heir little boat floating amid such massive ships felt an awful lot like a leaf on a stream floating amid rocks and whirlpools.

  Brana barked at some of the vessels they passed, which made Artus want to strangle him, for fear that they’d be turned in to the dockmaster as the obvious boat thieves they were. Besides the odd curse shouted at them from windows and rigging far above them, nothing came of it. Their forward progress was slowing as well, but they were still moving, languidly and calmly, on a collision course with a big ship with two masts directly ahead of them.

  “Dammit!” Artus snarled, snatching up an oar. “If we hit that boat, we’ll sink! Row! Row!”

  Brana picked up the other oar and the two of them did their best to change the course of their little vessel. The thing was, though, they had no clear idea how this was to be achieved. Oars, it turned out, were less intuitively used than one might imagine. Artus and Brana thrashed about, slapping and stabbing the oars against the water in a variety of ways but never with quite the desired effect. About the only thing they managed to do was make themselves rotate around backward for a second before turning back the way they started. Then Brana dropped his oar.

  “Kroth!” Artus yelled. “You idiot gnoll! You’ve killed us!”

  Artus could see Brana’s teeth gleam in the moonlight. He howled in mock dismay and then cuffed Artus across the head. “Rabbit!”

  The big ship now loomed over them, blocking out the moonlight, blocking out everything with its midnight-­black bulk. Artus found a rope and wrapped it around his hands, not certain if by so doing he was guaranteeing his survival or just the opposite. If a boat fell apart, did its pieces sink to the bottom or did they still float? He closed his eyes. He could hear the water slapping against the sides of the ship’s hull; he could smell something fishy and salty at the same time. Brana gave off a little whimper just before they hit.

  . . . bump. . .

  They struck the side of the great ship gently, causing their boat to shudder slightly, but nothing else. Nothing cracked, nothing leaked, and Artus did not find himself dumped in the harbor. Slowly, he exhaled and opened his eyes. “Oh.”

  Brana was glaring at him, he could tell. “Stupid rabbit,” Brana muttered in gnoll-­speak.

  Artus scowled back. “Oh yeah, like you knew we wasn’t about to die, huh? I heard you whimper! I know that whimper—­that was your ‘call for mommy’ whimper.”

  “Shut up.”

  Artus stuck his chin out and mimicked Brana’s gravelly voice. “ ‘Waah, waaah! I’m Brana and I miss my moooommy!’ ”

  Brana took a swing at Artus, but the boat rocked and he missed. The gnoll lost his balance and almost fell over. He was only saved when he reached out and touched the hull of the ship they were floating beside for balance. It pushed them off that ship and sent them slowly drifting toward another one.

  This gave Artus an idea of how to get around the harbor, if not back to shore. Using the oar, he pushed against the hull of the next boat that came close, thereby bouncing them off in another direction. The two of them spent the next quarter of an hour taking turns bouncing themselves from anchored ship to anchored ship, trying somehow to get closer to a dock somewhere.

  The sun was rising, pink light spilling across the calm waters of the harbor. Above, the calls of sailors and the cries of seagulls began to fill the early morning air. In the distance a spirit engine wailed its way out of its berth. Ships rang their bells, and the harbor, virtually dead a few moments before, was slowly coming to life.

  It was in this early dawn light that Brana pointed out the boat Andolon had taken from the dock. It was tied up to a gilded, polished abomination of wood and lacquer, with four big masts and a bowsprit so elaborate, Artus worried that the figure of the selkie clinging there might actually jump down and come after them. The ship was longer and taller and broader than any they’d seen so far, but it had more of the look of a floating palace than a ship built for the sea. On its back side (stern?) were written the words Argent Wind.

  Artus looked at Brana, and Brana nodded enthusiastically. Taking a deep breath, Artus pushed them off the next vessel and made directly for the big ship. “If anybody talks to us, let me do the talking, okay?”

  Brana nodded and yipped his agreement.

  “No gnollish either! And stop sitting like that—­stick your legs out in front of you and sit like a human. Pretend.”

  Brana frowned, slowly dumped himself on his arse and stuck his legs out in front of him like a human sitting down. In that position he was nearly passable as a real person. If only he’d stop sniffing the air.

  The Argent Wind looked even more ostentatious the closer they got to it. Artus spied gold fittings on almost every part of the ship, from the spokes of the ship’s wheel to the knobs on the balustrades. The windows, which ran along the entire length of the vessel rather than just at the back, had the strange, oddly still translucence that indicated mageglass. There were two men on deck, both dressed in the same stiff lace ruffs, colorful red-­and-­yellow livery, and gleaming steel helmets they had seen in the skiff. They stood at attention, barely sparing Artus and Brana’s little boat a look, though Artus got the sense they were more alert than they appeared. Of Andolon, there was no sign.

  “Excuse me?” Artus twisted his head to see the face of a man with a thick moustache and a crystal eye above them. He had poked his head out of a porthole. “Are you in need of assistance?”

  Artus looked at Brana, only to find Brana looking at him the exact same way. Artus shrugged. “Uhhh . . . we lost an oar.”

  The mustachioed stranger nodded as though this was the least surprising thing in the world. “Stay right there.”

  Artus clung to the side of the Argent Wind. “What do we do now?” he hissed at Brana.

  Brana let his tongue hang out. “Tricky tricky!” He nodded, as though that was somehow useful information.

  A second later a rope ladder unfurled over the side of the big ship, landing quite near their little boat. The man’s voice echoed from somewhere above, though they couldn’t see him. “Climb aboard, please!”

  Artus looked at the ladder—­it was a trap. It had to be a trap. Right? What if Andolon had seen them stealing the boat and knew he was being followed? If they climbed up, they could be captured. Of course, if they didn’t climb up, they might just float out to sea. Even if they did get back to dry land, Tyvian might be pissed if they didn’t capitalize on this opportunity to investigate.

  While Artus was still mulling this over, Brana climbed the ladder. “Wait!” Artus scowled. “Idiot gnoll.”

  Artus followed him. The deck was broad and spotlessly clean. Up close, the guards had the sun-­browned, spotted complexions of sailors more than soldiers, but their garb was no less impressive. Artus found himself standing before a small, potbellied man in expensive velvets and a lot of gold chains. His bearing was stern and professional—­something like that of an accountant or government minister. His crystal eye shone in the dawn light like a piece of ice. He put a hand on his stomach and another behind his back and gave them a shallow bow. “I am Ito DiVarro. Pleased to meet you.”

  “Artus. Just Artus.” Artus extended a hand to shake.

  DiVarro ignored the hand and motioned toward a pair of liveried guards. “These gentlemen will escort you below. Mr. Andolon would like to speak with you.”

  Artus eyed the men suspiciously. “Aren’t you coming?”

  DiVarro shook his head. “I already know what you are going to talk about and I am very busy. If you’ll excuse me . . .”

  Artus nodded slowly, trying to look confused. “Who is this Andolon guy anyway?”

  DiVarro shrugged. “The man that you followed from the Cauldron this evening, of course.”

  Artus’s breath caught, but before he could ask any follow-­up questions, a rough hand grabbed him by the elbow and escorted him away. They went down som
e stairs and a hatch was closed behind them, to Brana’s soft whimper. It was the boom of the wooden hatch over their heads that finally settled it for Artus. “Brana,” he whispered, as they were escorted down a narrow corridor. “I’m pretty sure we’re prisoners.”

  CHAPTER 11

  APPOINTMENTS WITH IMPORTANT (RICH) ­PEOPLE

  Artus and Brana were led to a sumptuously appointed room that had to occupy a full third of the length of the huge ship and was probably two decks tall, assuming it all hadn’t just been Astrally expanded—­something that Artus had grown so used to that he hardly even reflected upon. It was done up as an audience chamber for some kind of royalty, though he didn’t see any coat of arms displayed anywhere that would have indicated as much. The floor was carpeted in plush vermillion wool, save for the center of the room, which was tiled in white alabaster around a fountain that bubbled pure freshwater from the mouths of carvings of full-­breasted, pointy-­eared selkie women. This fountain was set between two sweeping staircases, also carpeted, with gold-­lacquered balustrades carved in the elaborate shapes of other nautical beasts—­great eels, serpents, and kraken. Along the walls, mageglass windows gave a grand view of the harbor; above, skylights filtered the dawn sun through unlit crystal chandeliers.

  As Artus and Brana gaped at this opulence, Andolon appeared and descended one of the stairways. He had changed his lacy, ostentatious attire for clothing somehow even more lacy and so bedecked in jewelry so that he sparkled to outshine the stars. His golden doublet was studded with diamonds, his hands flashed with gemstones, and his long cape was embroidered with even more glittering things. He proceeded down the stairs on his four-­inch heels with all the haughty confidence of a king arriving at a party in his honor.

  “Ah!” he said to them. “My young guests! How good it is to see you again!”