of her finger, which tilted the flask up to lengthen his measure.
“If I knew, I’d not be here,” Kartholome said. “I’d be sipping lemon liqueur from a cliffside estate in Manil, with two redheaded whores named Benda and Fenda.”
“He’s partial to redheaded whores,” Geena explained. “An experience he had as a lad, see. Give him enough drink and you’ll hear more about it than you want to know.”
“Anyway,” Kartholome continued, “what I’m saying is that I’d be rich, is what. Nobody knows how they make it. Could be a process the Lothan Aklun clued them to. Wouldn’t surprise me. It’s the only thing that made the mist trade possible.”
The mist trade? Melio mused. He never calls it the quota trade.
“So,” Melio asked, “should we ever get moving again and come up against these sea wolves, will the skin protect us or won’t it?”
“That’s right,” Kartholome said.
“Which?”
“It will and won’t. You were there when we bought and loaded the harpoons. You didn’t think we were going whaling, did you?” He held up a hand to stop Melio’s response. “Let me finish. You asked a question. Let me answer it. Once the league had the skin, their big ships were safe. Little ones not so much, but the big ones could sail as they pleased. The sea wolves just can’t grasp the stuff. They slip off it. Tentacles and beak and teeth and everything. So the brigs just slid on by. That’s all right if you’re two hundred feet above the water. But when you’re down low like we are… that’s a different story. They’ll jump clear out of the water and smash down on the deck. They’ve got these tentacles with grippers all up and down them. They get one of those around your leg and you’re heading for their mouth. Beaklike, the mouth is. Ugly thing so sharp it serrates the flesh like two curved knives angled just so. You maybe should have asked more about them before you signed on for this trip.”
Melio, remembering that he did not always like this man, met his gaze without humor. “You knew all that and you still came.”
“There’s more,” he said, after a long draft of ale. “The league wasn’t satisfied with just being able to get across untroubled. Spiteful bunch, they are. They took to slaughtering the beasts whenever they could. Harpoons. Those big crossbow bolts of theirs. They even threw out barrels of pitch and set seas full of the wolves alight.”
“They still do that?”
“On occasion, I suppose. Did it for generations. Never did any good, though.”
Kartholome dabbed at the moisture at the edges of his lips. For some reason this prompted him to flash a sly smile at Geena. She responded with a finger gesture threatening his manhood with an unfortunate break. They did that every now and then. A game, Melio assumed.
“I haven’t made a scientific study of it,” the pilot continued, “but I don’t think so. What I heard is, it never changed things in the slightest. The league got tired of the effort. Now they just sail through them.”
“As we’ll do as well,” Clytus said. “Might have to tack a bit, but-”
“ ‘Tack a bit’?”
The brigand, thickly muscled, masculine-featured in a blocky, weathered way, tried to shape his large hands into a demonstration of the maneuvering he had planned. He looked like a bear trying to explain the use of a pottery wheel.
Kartholome chuckled. He started to say something but found it too amusing to put into words. Geena flicked a spoon at him. He found that hilarious as well. He got up, coughing out an overflow of humor as he headed back on deck.
Geena reached across the table and patted Clytus’s hand with a solemnity that-on her-could only be in jest. “I’m sure the wolves have never seen the likes of how an Outer Isle brigand tacks. They’ll wet themselves.”
This sat a moment in the room before the dubious humor of it got Melio wagging his head. Geena slid her chair toward his and leaned into his shoulder. Clytus began to explain that it was not just tacking he had in mind. There was… He stopped midsentence. Melio turned, ready to nudge him back into it and feeling it best he get Geena’s head off his shoulder. He caught sight of Kartholome.
The man stood framed in the door. The blood in his face had drained out of him right along with the good humor he had stepped out choking over. His eyes searched the room without actually focusing on anyone.
Geena started to say something. Stopped. It was Clytus who asked, “What?”
Kartholome said, very softly, “Come outside.”
Stepping from the dim passageway onto the deck, Melio thought a full moon must have risen, so bone-blue was the light. A pungent scent invaded his nose. It flared his nostrils as it pushed inside, a sea stink so heavy he could barely breathe it. As he stepped on the slick deck, he heard the sound. Not silence anymore but a hushed slithering, a moist friction of something all around the boat, a wet sound like an enormous tongue licking his ear: all of these at once. Then he saw what made the noise, and the light and the smell. The sea was in motion around them again. Only, it was not the water that was moving.
CHAPTER THIRTY
When he learned what the task would entail, Tunnel chose his tools accordingly: two mallets, each of them rectangular blocks of solid steel, with thick hardwood shafts wrapped with black leather. Leaving Avina, he carried one of them in each hand, a feat that few could have managed and that strained even his brawny arms and shoulders. He did not care. He was in a bad mood and did not mind if it showed. He did not like being sent away from Skylene, sick as she was. Nor did he plan to be away from the worsening turmoil of the city any longer than he had to. But the Lothan Aklun relics were part of the dance of power at play in Ushen Brae now. The league wanted them; Dukish wanted them. They all wanted to use them to gain Lothan Aklun powers, all except the Free People, who knew better. If the messenger had found what he claimed to have found, it needed to be dealt with fast, before it fell into the wrong hands.
Outside the gates of the southern end of the city, a small party waited for him: the vessel messenger himself, three youths true to the Free People, and a man who had recently left the Antok clan’s service. This latter was the only one of questionable loyalty, but he brought with him a prize that could not be ignored-one of this clan’s totem animals.
The antok was young, half the size of an adult, but it still stood a hulking bulk of muscle and hide and tusks. The harness on its back was not the standard issue-as usually younger antoks were not ridden-but was a crosshatch of thick leather cords and even thicker lengths of rope. Tunnel was not at all sure just how to mount it. The antok’s tender, Potemp, convinced Tunnel to secure his mallets along the beast’s side. “So they don’t brain anybody,” he said. Then he had each of them climb into the weight arrangement he thought best. This put Tunnel right atop the beast’s shoulders.
If he had not been in such ill humor, he might almost have enjoyed the vantage point it provided him as they set out at a canter. Tunnel-who was still a member of the Antok clan, even though he had broadened his allegiance to include all the Free People-had never ridden one of the beasts upon whose form his own gray skin and prominent tusks were fashioned. He rather liked the feel of it. Looking forward over the mount’s coarse hide, he watched the creature’s tusk jut into and out of view as his head swayed back and forth with his strides.
He is strong like me, he thought, but young. Just a young one.
They made good time the first day, seeing nobody on the road. What a land this is, Tunnel observed, so much of it empty of people. We should change that.
It was not, however, empty of reminders of the civilization that had once thrived there. The second day, they traveled a section of old track called the Bleeding Road. On each side, erected at regular intervals, stood the decrepit remains of the stakes the Fumel clan had been impaled upon. All of them: every Auldek of that clan for the crime of altering their quota slaves to look like them. To be children instead of slaves. The crime was a hard one for Tunnel to wrap his mind around, and the sight of stout spikes and the small piles of bones still at the bases of some of them, half hidden among the weeds, did not help. Auldek bones lasted a very long time. Strong as iron.
None of the small company chose to comment on the sights or the history behind them.
They reached the bank of the Sheeven Lek on the third morning. A little farther downstream the river broke into the main channels of the delta, but here it stretched wide before them, at the full breadth of its single channel.
