“You don’t sound too overjoyed.”
“You may not have killed Pernicus, but you play a dangerous game with Murad, child.”
“That is my business.”
“All right, but it seems that the impossible is true: there is another shifter aboard the ship.”
“Another shifter? How can that be?”
“I have no idea. You have not sensed anything, have you? You do not have any suspicions?”
“Why, no. I have never in my life met another sufferer of the black disease, though folk said the Hebros were full of them.”
“Then it seems there is nothing we can do until he chooses to reveal himself.”
“Why would another shifter take ship with us?”
“To cause the abortion of the voyage, perhaps. That would be his motive for killing Pernicus. Murad told me something today which intrigues me. I must go down and consult my books.”
“Tell me, Bardolin! What is going on?”
“I don’t yet know myself. Keep your eyes open. And Griella: do not let the beast free for a while, not even in the privacy of Murad’s cabin.”
She flushed. “You saw that! You pried on us.”
“I had no choice. The man is bad for you, child, and you for him. Remember that.
“I am not a child, Bardolin. You had best not treat me like one.”
He stroked her satin cheek gently, fingers touching the tawny freckles there, the sun-brown skin.
“Do not think ill of me, Griella. I am an old man, and I worry about you.”
“You are not so old, and I am sorry you worry.” But her eyes were unrelenting.
Bardolin turned away and scooped up the watching imp.
“Come. Let us see if this not-so-old man can make his way down this labyrinth of ropes without cracking open his grey-haired skull on the deck.”
T HE carrack inched westwards painfully, towed by the labouring men in the ship’s boats. They made scarcely two leagues a day, and the sailors became exhausted though the boat crews changed every hour. Hawkwood began to ration the water as though it were gold, and soldiers with iron bullets in their arquebuses guarded the water casks in the forward part of the hold day and night. The ship’s company became subdued and apprehensive. Salt sores began to appear on everyone’s bodies as the allowance of fresh water for washing was cut and the salt in garments began to abrade the skin. And still the sun blasted down out of a flawless sky, and in the clear green water below the keel the shadow of hanging weed grew longer as it built up on the carrack’s hull.
The sailors trolled for fish to eke out the shipboard provisions. They hauled in herrin on their westward migration, wingfish, huge tub-bodied feluna, and sometimes the writhing, entangled sliminess of large octopuses, some of them almost big enough to swamp the smaller of the longboats.
Weed began to be sighted in matted expanses across the surface of the sea, and on the weed itself colonies of pink and scarlet crabs scuttled about seeking carrion. The weed beds stank to high heaven and were infested with sealice and other vermin. Inevitably some made their way aboard, and soon most of the ship’s company had their share of irritating red bites and unwelcome itches on scalp and in groin.
In the dark of one middle watch a great glistening back rose like a birthing hill out of the sea alongside the carrack, and for half a glass it rose and sank there, a bulk that rivalled the ship in size. A long-necked head with a horny beak regarded the astonished ship’s watch before diving below the surface again in a flurry of white foam. A knollback turtle. The sailors had heard of them in old maritime tales and legends. They were supposed to have been mistaken for islands by land-hungry mariners far from home. The crew made the Sign of the Saint at their breasts, and the next day Brother Ortelius’ sermon was better attended than it had ever been before, affording the Inceptine a grim kind of pleasure. He called the voyage a flight in the face of God, and with Murad looking on declared that God’s servants could not be muzzled by threats or fear. God’s will would be done, in the end.
The same evening Hawkwood had two men flogged for questioning the orders of the ship’s officers.
The men in the boats rowed on through the humid nights, watch on watch, their oars struggling through the stinking, matted weed with its population of crabs and mites. And on the gundeck the talk was turned to Pernicus’ death and its possible author. Wild theories were hatched and did the rounds and it was all Bardolin could do to keep the Dweomer-folk calm. As it was, there were more manifestations of magic now. Some of the oldwives were able to purify small amounts of salt water whilst others worked to heal the salt sores everyone bore, and still more ignited white were-lights and left them burning through the night for fear of what would creep about the decks in the dark hours.
And then, eight tense, airless, back-breaking days after Pernicus had met his end, a wind came ruffling over the surface of the undisturbed sea. A north-easter that gathered in strength through the morning watch until the carrack’s sails were drawing full again and the white foam broke beneath her bow. The ship’s company drew a collective sigh of relief as the wake began to extend ever further behind her and she set her bowsprit squarely towards the west once more.
It was then that the killing began.
TWENTY-TWO
V OL Ephrir, capital of Perigraine. A city considered by many to be the most beautiful in the world.
It sat on an island in the midst of the mighty Ephron river. Here, three hundred miles from its headwaters, the Ephron was a glittering blue expanse of water over a mile wide. Ephrir island was a long, low piece of land that curved with the meanders of the Ephron for almost three leagues. Centuries ago the Fimbrians had walled it in against the constant flooding of the river water and they had reared up an artificial hill a hundred feet high in its midst so that a citadel might be built there. The city had grown around the fortress, fisher villages coalescing into towns, merchant wharves taking up more and more of the riverfront, fine houses and towers springing up in the island’s interior—until one day the entire island had been built over, a sprawl of houses and villas and warehouses and taverns and shops and markets with no discipline, no order. A long-ago king of Perigraine had decreed that the city must be better regulated. The fisher slums were demolished, the streets widened and paved, the harbours rebuilt and dredged out to accommodate the deep-bellied grain lighters that came upriver from Candelaria.
The city had been reconstructed along the lines of an architectural ideal, and had become a marvel for most of the western world: the perfect city. And Vol Ephrir had never known war or been besieged, unlike many of the other Ramusian capitals.
There was something peculiarly innocent about the place, Abeleyn mused as he rode along its wide streets and inhaled the fragrance of its gardens. Perhaps it was the balminess of the climate. Although a man might look east and see the Cimbrics thirty leagues away, white with early snow, here in the Vale of Perigraine the air was neither warm nor cold. It could be bitter in the winter, but this slow slide into autumn suited the city, as did the millions of red and yellow leaves that floated in the city’s ponds and upon the surface of the mighty Ephron, having fallen from the birch and maple woods that were flaming everywhere. The drifting leaves heightened the impression of quietude, for though Vol Ephrir was a busy, thriving place, it was nonetheless sedate, dignified. Somehow ornamental. The population of the place, at a quarter of a million, was almost as great as that of Abrusio, but there was something about Abeleyn’s home city that was more frantic. Its teeming colour, perhaps, its vibrant cheek-by-jowl disorder. If Vol Ephrir was a dignified lady who welcomed guests with regal stateliness, then Abrusio was a bawdy old whore who opened her legs for the world.
King Abeleyn of Hebrion had been two days in the Perigrainian capital. Already he had been feasted by young King Cadamost and had tried his hand at hunting vareg, the vicious, tusked herbivore which haunted the riverside forests. Now he was impatient for the conclave to convene. The major rulers had arrived: himself and Mark of Astarac, their alliance a secret between the pair of them; white-haired, irascible Haukir of Almark, Inceptine advisers flapping around him like vultures eyeing a lame old warhorse; Skarpathin of Finnmark, a young man who had assumed his throne in rather murky, murderous circumstances; Duke Adamir of Gabrion, the very picture of a grizzled sea-dog; and Lofantyr of Torunna, looking harried and older than his thirty-two years.
There were others, of course. The dukes of the Border Fiefs were here: Gardiac, Tarber, and even isolated Kardikia had sent an envoy, though Duke Comorin could not come in person. Since the fall of Aekir, Kardikia was cut off from the rest of the Ramusian world; the only links it had with the other western
