Act of Will

SCENE XVI Consequences

You’ve got guts, Will, I’ll give you that,” said Garnet obliquely as we sat down to a supper of dry biscuits and steamed mussels. He gave me a half-smile of encouragement, and then moved to where the smell of the food didn’t remind him of how awful he felt. Renthrette behaved as if the matter simply hadn’t happened, which was actually a pleasant surprise. She even passed me the salt as we ate. As if we didn’t have enough salt.

I saw the captain lurching around the galley in the evening and sort of smiled at him. He muttered something spiteful and gestured with his fist. I was not the Cormorant’s most popular person.

That night it transpired that there were two meetings. The party meeting consisted of Lisha reminding us that we should “keep our heads” (directed at me) and that when we docked tomorrow we should conduct ourselves with caution and dignity (also directed at me). Mithos sat out of the lamplight, almost lost in shadow. Once he nodded solemnly, but he said nothing. Garnet ground the bit of his ax, tracing small perfect circles with a flat stone. Renthrette was rebinding her sword hilt in the same tortuous manner. Her eyes would flash from Lisha back to the weapon in her hand as she wound the thin leather thong round and round the handle, spiraling slowly and immaculately up to the pommel.

The second meeting was held in the captain’s quarters, but we didn’t learn of that one until the morning.

Southern Shale was in sight shortly after dawn. Though it was a lengthy stretch of coastline, there was only one convenient harbor close by, and we steered towards it under the same prevailing wind that had made our trip so swift and easy. Trouble, however, has many guises. In this case, it had a scarlet jacket and a black beard full of muffled curses.

“The captain is up to something,” said Lisha as we finished breakfast. “He looks furtive.”

“He always looks furtive,” I said.

“But he also looks pleased with himself, and I fear he is planning to revenge himself on us for yesterday’s incident.”

I tried not to look guilty, but Renthrette met my eyes mercilessly. Then Garnet looked up and whispered, “Did you feel that? We’re changing course. He’s steering us out to sea.”

He was right. A long, anxious pause followed.

“I wouldn’t put it past the captain to just take us where the sharks can get us,” said Mithos darkly, “and toss us overboard. Or find somewhere he could sell us.”

“We’ll give him a fight,” added Orgos, feeling the edge of his shaving dagger.

“Could we not just grab the lifeboat and go?” Garnet suggested.

“We’re too far from shore,” Mithos sighed. “He could bring the ship about and plow us under.”

“Then we must take the wheel,” said Orgos, “and steer it in ourselves.”

“There are twenty-five crewmen,” said Garnet, “we couldn’t hold them all off.”

“Not if they were organized, we couldn’t,” agreed Lisha, “but we might be able to if we could somehow keep them in pockets of five or six.”

She fell silently thoughtful for a moment, and then carefully, pausing between sentences, laid out a course of action.

I had crawled my way to the lifeboat unseen. The crew were still wandering around, but while they had been listless before, they were now cautious and alert. On the deck where I had “fought” the captain, two burly men, bronzed by the sun, stood with shouldered pikes, looking about them. In the stern of the ship, rising like a pulpit above the racks of bound cargo, was the castle, and in it, the helmsman. Two floors below the castle were the captain’s quarters. He now shared them with five armed men, two covering the steps down to the door from the deck. I loaded my crossbow and kept as still as I could, the heat prickling on my salt-dried arms and sunburnt neck.

Lisha emerged from our cabins and fell heavily on the wet stairs. The crew watched, unimpressed. Garnet helped her to her feet, and then she ducked back inside the cabin and emerged with her spear. With this she supported herself conspicuously and hobbled out onto deck, Garnet at her side. He was wearing a dark green cloak over his tunic, and I knew what it concealed. Slowly they edged around the ship until they neared the castle.

The crew were armed with clubs, boathooks, and whatever else they could lay their hands on, but their demeanor suggested that they thought we hadn’t spotted the change in course.

So much the better.

I caught a glimpse of Orgos shinning up the castle ladder only because I was watching for him. He emerged, black against the sky, his swords spinning in his hands. He dodged an advancing guard, who fell heavily onto the massive bundles of timber below, and parried the cutlass of another, turning him promptly out of the wooden turret and down onto the deck.

A cry went up immediately and the crewmen started to move at random, shielding their eyes from the sun as they looked up to where Orgos was bringing the vessel groaning back towards the coast. Lisha twirled the spear in her hands and threw off the false injury like a cloak. In a second, she stood at the foot of the castle ladder with Garnet at her side, his ax drawn and ready. As they braced themselves for the inevitable assault, Orgos started down the ladder towards them.

Through the portholes of his cabin I could see the captain shouting as he felt the Cormorant speeding towards mainland Shale.

Orgos took a position between Lisha and Garnet, his swords whirling about his wrists. The crew hesitated and then began to close in on them. I thought I noticed the deep green of Garnet’s eyes as he flashed a look of concern from Lisha to the growing semicircle of armed men that edged closer to them, but Lisha, spreading her feet apart a little, just raised her dark spear purposefully and nodded to Orgos. As Lisha and Garnet lowered their eyes, he raised his sword, the one in his right hand, the one with the amber stone in the pommel, and there was a flash of light.

Actually, it was more than a flash. It was as if something had been dropped into a still pool, the ripples coursing out from the pommel of Orgos’s sword, yellow-orange, like tongues of flame. They radiated out in a single pulse that lasted less than a second and traveled no more than a few yards from where they stood, but the crew touched by the light faltered, lowered their weapons as if stunned or unsure what they were doing. And in that second, Garnet and Lisha struck.

What the hell?.

Three of the enemy fell bleeding to the deck before they knew what was happening. Then Orgos was among them, his swords spinning, and two more collapsed screaming.

While I was trying to get my brain around what had just happened, Renthrette appeared from our cabin, armed with her broadsword and shield. She stalked unnoticed by the men who continued to close around the castle until she reached the captain’s quarters. Mithos followed and took up a position behind the cabin door as Renthrette opened it. I sat up, crossbow at the ready, and my heart pounding fast.

Three guards exploded out of the cabin. She stepped back quickly and I had a clear shot. I followed the first one unsteadily with the bow for a split second before pulling the trigger. The weapon bucked slightly in my hands as the bolt left it. It wasn’t a good shot, but it would do. My target crashed to the decking, clutching his hip. Renthrette raised sword and shield to meet the next, and Mithos engaged the third.

Renthrette’s assailant crashed into her, hewing madly at her raised shield. She stood her ground, then lunged with her broadsword under the rim of her shield. The steel tip of her sword pierced his chest and, with a short-lived scream that turned every head on the ship, he crumpled at her feet. She looked absolutely controlled, even calm.

Then Mithos’s man went down and he was in, flinging the captain back against the wall.

I scrambled to my feet. There was a sudden churning sensation in the pit of my stomach, and my hands were shaking like poplars in a high wind. In a few strides I was almost with Renthrette, drawing my rapier as Mithos hissed, “Call them off or you’re a dead man!”

He bundled the wild-eyed captain onto the deck. I grabbed his cutlass and held on to it as the crew moved to see what was going on. Mithos showed them.

The captain had sagged against him, too frightened to hold himself vertically. He was babbling to himself and growling. Mithos let him slip to the deck and placed the tip of his sword against the back of his neck.

“Tell them to steer us into the harbor,” he hissed to the scarlet-jacketed bundle at his ankles.

The captain hesitated only a moment before following Mithos’s command.

“Men like him value nothing more than their own necks,” Orgos remarked. In his mouth and in that situation, the words sounded pretty scathing, but it raised an awkward question in my mind. Was I any different?

An hour and a half later, as we eased between the shipyard buildings of Shale, which rose up on each side of us, I still had no answer to that. I did have another question, though, and the moment I could get Orgos alone, I asked it.

“You going to tell me what happened there?” I demanded, nodding to where Orgos had held off the sailors. “That light. And don’t bother telling me that little gem in your sword hilt is just for decoration.”

Orgos frowned, hitching his equipment duffel over his shoulder. “What do you want me to say?”

“The truth,” I said.

“Before he died,” said Orgos, “my father used to say ‘Never ask a question unless you know you can handle the answer.’ ”

“Very touching and profound,” I said. “So. About that sword?”

“It’s magic,” said Orgos. “Enchanted.”

“Bollocks,” I said.

“All right.” He shrugged.

“What am I? Five years old?” I said. “Magic? There’s no such thing.”

“I told you, Will. You should have listened to my father.”

And that was that. He walked away and I stared after him, finally shouting, “Fine! Don’t tell me.”

He kept walking.

It was late afternoon by the time we got everything unloaded, and we were too tired to think or move. Finding a tavern, we settled there for the rest of the day and left the procurement of a pair of wagons to the innkeeper. I drank several pints of watery beer in big wooden mugs and followed them with a glass of what was supposed to be whiskey but tasted like paint thinner. By the time I stumbled off to my bed, the ground felt like it was undulating beneath me, coursing in great alcoholic ripples. It was, I had already decided, the closest I would ever get to being at sea again.