Onsulomulo was just not the kind of neutral one could kill with impunity, in the heat of battle or otherwise.
At the advice of Pavel Tonsho, former Chief Deputy of Kara-Est now the governor of the conquered city, the Sky Citizens had given Onsulomulo a ship, crew and a fat indemnity and sent him on his way.
The Wyvern seemed designed especially for Ortil Onsulomulo. Like him it was a freak, a crossbreed. Laid down in the Estil shipyards as a gigantic round-sterned cargo ship, its construction had been halted midway when the backing company had gone bankrupt. The receivers couldn't afford to complete a vessel of this size, but neither did they wish a half-constructed ship to go to waste. So the hull was cut down. The Wyvern was transformed into a cog. And it was ugly.
It had just slid – or waddled – down the ways into Kara-Est harbor when the Sky City appeared overhead. No one knew or cared if it was seaworthy; the crew sent aboard after the battle got horribly seasick on a bay as smooth as a mirror, which wasn't a good sign. But no one said the Sky City had to offer Onsulomulo guarantees, just a ship. He took it.
Perhaps no other mariner could have sailed the Wyvern. Probably none other skilled enough would have stayed aboard longer than three minutes. Onsulomulo fell in love with the ship at once.
He did more than sail her. He took her up the Karhon Channel to Tolviroth Acerte, a journey which made the refugee Estil seamen wonder if they wouldn't have been better off taking their chances with Prince Rann. At the City of Bankers, he took on a cargo so valuable that he hired a Shark class dromon from TMG to squire him to High Medurim, the port of delivery.
As the Wyvern's boats had warped her around the end of the breakwater, the fugitives had speculated among themselves as to the nature of the cargo. Moriana thought Wyvern carried strategic materials vital to Imperial security; Ziore, priceless art objects; Erimenes staunchly held out for aphrodisiacs. Knowing High Medurim and its Emperor Teom the Decadent, Fost tended to agree with Erimenes. As it happened, he'd been as wrong as the others. He felt the deck quiver under his feet.
'Good morrow, Magister Banshau!' called Onsulomulo, launching himself into space off a battered crossbeam. Fost shut his eyes as the dwarf dropped ten feet from where he had been inspecting the mast and landed jarringly on the deck. None the worse for the experience, the captain strolled past Fost to greet the newcomer who had emerged blinking and puffing into the daylight. 'I trust the morning finds you well?'
'I am not!' roared the corpulent man blocking the hatch. 'I couldn't possibly be well, forced to ride in this wallowing monstrosity. How you could think for one instant that I might be, completely eludes me.' 'I thought you Wirixers were used to boat as such,' said Eri menes. 'You live in the middle of a lake, after all.
The man glared at Erimenes with beady black eyes almost lost in a face like a full moon. He reached chubby, ring-encrusted hands to straighten the square green felt hat, then smoothed the golden silk cord fastening his purple robe about his vast equator. He shuffled bright orange toe slippers into a wider stance, as if bracing to attack the spirit, and blew out through his moustache like an angry walrus.
'Of all the nerve, you ghastly blue violation of the laws of nature!' he bellowed. 'You insult my vast intelligence! Wir is a lake, and this, as even the ghost of a discredited philosopher ought to be able to see, is an ocean.'
'A discredited philosopher, am I?' bristled Erimenes. 'You bilious cretin!'
'Justly are Wirixer sorcerers renowned for their wisdom,' Ziore declared in fervor.
In unison, Fost and Moriana sighed. This was the cargo Onsulomulo carried to High Medurim, the cargo that rated escort by the Tiger. A Magister of the Academy of the Arcane Arts in Wirix was a rare commodity, but not rare enough to justify the enormous expense of TMG protection. There had to be more to Zloscher Banshau than met the eye.
A three-way screaming match ensued among the two Athalar genies and Banshau. Captain Onsulomulo stood to one side smiling slyly. The mage's elephantine rage had been deflected from him. Truly, he was beloved of the gods.
With common accord, Moriana and Fost unslung their satchel straps. They looped them over a belaying pin and went below. The music had gone out of the day.
Moriana yelped as a wave clawed at her feet before falling back to lose itself in the chaos of the sea. A few more quick heaves on the line by grinning Tolvirot sailers and she was swaying above the decks of the Tiger, dripping legs dangling from the boatswain's chain.
She was too high up for Fost to reach her. Tiger's first officer stepped up beside him, reached, plucked the tall blonde woman from the chair and handed her down as if she were a child. Tim Devistri was the tallest human Fost had ever seen. He had the mahogany skin of a Jorean tanned the black of Nevrym anhak by the sun. It was all but unheard of to find a Jorean serving as a mercenary of any kind, not that the TMG sailors thought of themselves as mercenaries.
'Why so skittish?' asked Fost. 'I thought you were used to being up in the air.'
'Over land,' the princess told him. 'That doesn't come right up and grab you.'
Ignoring a lewd comment from a female Tolvirot sailor, Fost said, 'You know, you've turned the most amazing gray-green. Almost as if you had Vridzish blood.'
She turned deathly pale. He let go, stepped back and watched killing rage in her eyes change into shocked hurt. 'Forgive me, I didn't know. That is, I was thoughtless…'
'No,' she said, shaking her head sadly, 'I'm the one who is sorry. I don't know why I reacted like that.' She gave him a wan smile and squeezed his arm.
He watched her turn, wondering what had happened to her in Thendrun. It couldn't have been pleasant, he decided.
Captain Nariv Shend took them for a tour of her ship. She was a stocky woman of middle height and years. Incredibly broad shoulders and back showed she still took her turn pulling an oar, as did many TMG captains. There were no slave rowers on a TMG ship, only skilled and highly paid professionals.
At the moment, those professionals lounged about the narrow deck, the men barechested, the women in scant black halters. Others slept in the crowded hammocks slung between the benches below while the Tiger beat southwest under sail.
Bareheaded so that her short-cropped black hair was ruffled by the breeze, the captain herself led them on a tour of the ship.
'A Tolvirot dromon's the epitome of the naval architect's art,' she informed them in a voice gone husky from bawling orders over the years. 'Tiger's the latest design. She lives up to her name, too. You'll not find a tiger shark sleeker or deadlier. We're only fifteen feet shorter than the tub Wyvern -' She gestured with contempt at the larger ship, which even in the mild sea wallowed worse than the slender warcraft. '- but we're less than half as broad beamed and don't displace a fifth of what she does. And look at this.' She bent over the starboard rail and pointed down at the hull. When the ship surged up as it came off the crests, they saw shiny yellow streaked with green. 'Copper sheath. Cuts through water like a knife. And our spur up at the prow can punch through an enemy's hull like a spear.' If Erimenes were here, Fost reflected, he'd make some comment about the captain's propensity for metaphor. Which was only one of the reasons the genie wasn't here.
She straightened and looked at them. Her eyes were pale blue and almost hidden in wrinkles etched by squinting against the harsh sunlight blazing down and glancing off the broken surface of the sea.
'That's with rowers, of course. Peaceful times, when there's any kind of wind, we sail and let the rowers off.'
Fost thumped a boot heel on the stout anhak deck that covered the ship from rail to rail. 'I thought most rowed vessels were open.'
'Tiger's fully armored. The deck gives us a good fighting platform in a boarding action. And you see our gunwales are pretty high, and we've these stout mantlets for added protection from archers.'
She led them around her ship while they looked on and tried to ask informed questions. The Tolvirot sailors watched with amusement but no contempt.
'And up here in the forecastle, we've got the pump for our flame projector.' She nodded to her first officer, who stood by the forward mast directing a sail drill in a voice like a thunderstorm. He acknowledged and went back to the drill. Like this captain and everyone else aboard, he wore a short blue kilt with a dagger at his belt. But he didn't wear a short-sleeved blue tunic like Shend. His titanic chest was bare. Fost eyed him, hoping that no turn of events pitted them against one another. And in the same thought, he hoped Moriana wasn't eyeing the enormous sailor too closely, either.
