Tome of the Undergates

She paused, her lips pursing thoughtfully, then asked, ‘Does duty necessarily equate to purpose?’

‘That’s a decent question,’ he admitted. ‘I became an adventurer to avoid most accepted forms of duty. I like to think I manage to serve that purpose.’

‘Don’t lie to me,’ she snapped. ‘You became an adventurer because you were a fugitive.’

‘True, but that’s not saying much, is it? Prison sentences are a form of duty.’

‘For you, perhaps.’ Her sigh was long, tired and laden with thought. ‘I need more. I need. . to know that I’m doing the right and proper thing.’

‘You’ll never figure that out,’ he answered decisively. ‘There’s no way to know what the right and proper thing is, you see. Ask a Karnerian, a Sainite, a shict and a dragonman the same question, they’ll all tell you something different.’

‘I suppose,’ she grunted. ‘Then again, I suppose I shouldn’t be consulting a felon about matters of spirituality and moral rightness.’

‘Moral righteousness, perhaps not, but I find myself in a unique position to analyse most matters of faith due to my general offensiveness to all Gods, religions and servicemen and — women thereof.’

‘Fine, then.’ Her patience was a pot of water, boiling as the sun insultingly decided to rise with a hot and yellow unpleasantness. ‘What is the right thing, if you’re such a genius? What are we doing here? What are we about to do?’

The question was only half-posed to the rogue; she stared and addressed no small part of it to the sun. It was fully risen now, Talanas’s great, golden Eye broad and fully awake, ready to accept her struggle. Yet still no answer came and, as the water rippled beneath it and cast its shifting hues upon the sky, even the great fiery disc itself seemed to blink.

‘We’re about to go on an adventure.’

His voice was soft, the words spoken with no particular zeal, yet it echoed in her mind. She turned and found herself jumping with a start as she looked into his dark eyes. He stood before her, perfectly still and unmoving, barely a finger’s length of space between them. He did not blink.

‘And. . what does that mean?’ she asked.

‘It means that whatever happens is incidental.’

‘What do you-’

‘We kill a demon, we get a book, we get rich.’ He held up his hands in a shrug. ‘By that same token, we use that money for whatever good we think it’ll do, we prevent that book from being used in anything wicked and whatever demons die as a result will not result in more people dying like Moscoff.’

The image of the boy was another wound in her mind: his still corpse, drowned on dry land, the death that should not have been.

‘And, as it is an adventure. .’ His hands slid down past his waist, tightening his belt and adjusting his breeches. ‘Whether you choose to come or stay, and should you find your purpose — or not — as a result, is also incidental.’

With that, he turned towards the stairs of the helm. At the top, he cast a glance over his shoulder. A smile creased his lips, so swiftly and suddenly as to cause her to start.

‘Something to think about the next time you squat.’

With silent footsteps, he was gone.

She strained to hear his boots upon the wood, strained to hear over the sounds of sailors rising on the deck and gulls upon the wind. She strained to hear, as though hoping he would mutter some last bit of advice, some solid stone of wisdom that would crush her with the weight of decision.

Such a sound never came. She glanced up; the sun was not providing anything else today. It had risen lazily and now stood stolidly, firmly resigned to another day of golden silence.

On the decks below, life returned to the Riptide.

Eleven

BERTH

Kataria leaned over the railing, balancing on the heels of her hands as she stared at the restless sea below. It churned listlessly against the ship’s flank, sending up spray that attached to her flesh like swarms of frothy ticks. The small escape vessel looked so insignificant now, in the light of their new intentions. She could hardly recall it being such a salvation when they tried to run the day before.

It had been a temptation then, a betrayal that had beckoned them with promises of redemption from the chaos raging on deck. Today, it threatened her, flashing a smarmy smile of timber as it promised to deliver the companions into the eager, drooling mouth of carnage.

Or perhaps I’m giving it too much credit, she thought. It’s just a boat, after all.

At the far end of the ship, sailors busied themselves with a pulley, lowering crates and various sundries into the boat. She watched with a frown, noting her bow amidst the mess: unstrung, a bit of its perfectly polished wood peeking out from the fur she had delicately wrapped it in. Her left eyelid twitched as a pair of careless hairy hands plucked it rudely from the spot where she had so carefully placed it and tossed it against the vessel’s edge as though it were a common branch.

They did that on purpose, she thought scornfully.

Human hands were without conscience or the ability to lie; what a human desired to say with his mouth, but was prevented from doing by his mind, he did with his hands. Their hands were maliciously clumsy. The whole round-eared race held a grudge over the shictish superiority with a bow.

We can hardly be blamed for that, she told herself. We did, after all, invent archery. They stole it from us.

Envy was an instinct for humans, as natural to them as rolling in foulness was to a dog. . a human-trained dog.

‘You’re going to fall if you keep leaning like that.’

The voice was thundering, even in so casual a mutter. Gariath regarded her impassively, as he might an insect. He snorted, as though waiting to see if she would actually tumble headlong over the railing.

She offered him half a smile and half a sneer, pulling herself backwards.

‘Shicts don’t fall,’ she declared smugly.

‘Shicts don’t do anything right.’ He stalked to her side, making certain to shove her aside with a wing as he looked over the rail. He cast a contemptuous frown at the bobbing vessel. ‘What is that?’

‘They call it a companion ship; it’s used for foraging on islands. Supposedly, it can be manned by two men.’ She winked. ‘Considering we’ve three men, two women and one dragonman, we should have an advantage.’

He merely grunted at that, unaware of her resentful scowl. Lenk would have at least groaned.

‘Five humans are two and a half times as worthless as two humans,’ he muttered.

‘Four humans,’ she replied, twitching her ears.

‘Pointy-eared humans are still humans.’ He didn’t even bother to dignify her threatening bare of teeth with a glance. Instead, he merely kept a disdainful eye upon the craft. ‘This is a stupid idea.’

‘I thought you wanted to chase the demon.’ She knew that speaking so coyly to a creature whose arm was the size of her waist was not, by any race’s standards, a good idea. Still, she was hungry for a reaction; Lenk would have insulted her back by now. ‘Scared?’

He turned to face her, not with any great need to rip her face off, and regarded her through cold, dark eyes. She tensed, ready to leap aside at the first sign of an angry fist. Instead, he merely grunted, ignoring her flicking tongue as she shot it at him. Her sigh was exaggerated and bored, not that he likely heard it.

‘Fear is something for lesser races,’ he rumbled. ‘It’s the only gift their weak Gods gave them, since they sought to deny them intelligence.’ He thumped a fist against his chest. ‘The spirits gave no gifts to the