Knights of the Crown

Chapter 15

The world was storm for a time no human could have measured, and the only other being in the storm was a dragon too busy staying aloft to talk to his riders. Pirvan had never heard of the Abyss being an endless storm through which you rode on the back of a dragon, and in any case it ought to be an evil dragon.

He looked down and saw Hipparan’s copper scales unchanged. No, not unchanged. Brighter than they had been, as if they were wet, or had been polished, or-

The clouds turned from gray to white and then fell away as Hipparan soared into the sunlight.

Pirvan realized that he was as cold as he had ever been in his life. In the sudden silence of the high skies, he thought he heard teeth chattering.

“Haimya?”

“Y-Y-Yes?”

At least they were hers, though his own weren’t quite steady-not at all, in fact. His next words came out:

“Are you all r-r-right?”

He wasn’t sure if she laughed or stammered “Yes,” again.

“That’s as well,” Hipparan said. “I know it’s cold up here for humans soaked to the skin, and none too comfortable for me. But I don’t dare go back down for a while. Some of the clouds are right down to the water. I can’t see in the clouds, and I can’t skim the waves, not in this storm.”

“We weren’t asking you to do any such thing, believe me,” Haimya said. Now Pirvan wanted to laugh at her fervent tone. She was probably just as glad as he to see sunlight again, but she would doubtless rather have fingernails pulled out than admit it.

Hipparan wheeled in two full circles, peering upward at the sun to establish its position and his best course to the Crater Gulf. Pirvan hoped that the dragon knew navigation but would not let a word of doubt pass his lips.

He would have called Hipparan a young dragon even if Tarothin hadn’t said so. The dragon had a bright youth’s common vice of claiming to know more than he actually did, then sulking when one questioned his claim.

It was a vice with which Pirvan was too familiar-and those who had cajoled, argued, or beaten it out of him even more so. He hoped that Hipparan did not have as painful a journey on the road from youth to wisdom, but that was as the gods willed.

* * * * *

“Lady, it’s time to leave the deck. You’ll catch your death if one of those waves breaks over you.”

Lady Eskaia had to look well upward to meet Grimsoar’s single eye. He grinned down at her, like an indulgent uncle with a favorite niece.

“I can’t get any wetter, Grimsoar.” Indeed, she felt already as if she’d jumped into a pond with all her clothes on. From the looks she was receiving, she wondered if they were clinging in interesting ways.

She gripped the safety line and continued to stare into the clouds that had swallowed Haimya and Pirvan, as well as the dragon.

“Lady, I don’t want to pick you up and carry you-”

“I don’t wish you to. So we agree.”

“As you wish. But Tarothin’s wearing himself out with the sick we already have. It might be too much for him to heal you of lung fever.”

That was true. It also might be true that the lung fever would leave her weak, even with healing. Wet clothes, a wet bed in a wet ship, no hot food or even drink-it was not only the poor without healing who died of the lung fever, when it came on strongly enough.

She wanted to release Haimya to her betrothed standing and facing them both, not wheezing in a damp bed.

“Here.”

Grimsoar was pulling off his hooded shirt and handing it to her. He must not have been on deck long; it was still dry.

“Now who’s going to catch his death-?” she began, pointing at his massive bare chest.

Then a thunderclap hammered down from aloft. Half a dozen throats tore in shouts.

“Down!” Grimsoar roared.

Eskaia started to fling herself on the deck, then found herself flying through the air. Another sailor caught her, knocked her down, then covered her with his own body as the sky seemed to fall about everyone on Golden Cup’s deck.

It wasn’t the sky. It was only the mainmast going over the side, followed by the new foremast. The mizzenmast lasted just long enough for Eskaia to stagger to her feet, then it too joined the others in the water.

It seemed a minor eternity before the sky stopped raining ropes, blocks, spars, and all the assorted gear ships seemed to carry high in their masts. Most of it went mercifully straight over the side. Some of it came down like stones from a high roof, to hammer flat anything below.

Fortunately that included very few men. Those who’d been out to watch the dragon fly had mostly gone below, and duty kept only a handful in the open.

But some of those were down, among them Grimsoar. He lay against the bulwarks, water boiling over him as the ship rolled, more wildly than ever. A ghastly red line scored his chest. Eskaia looked for a handhold, couldn’t find one, and risked stepping unsupported out onto the deck.

Two steps, and it was tilting under her. She fought for balance, lost the fight, and slid on her bottom down the tilting deck straight into Grimsoar’s ribcage.

His burst of curses was a beautiful sound that she could hear even above the gale. Then he pulled himself to his feet with one arm, tucked her under the other, and lumbered back to the aftercastle.

She was too squeezed to talk for a moment after he set her on her feet. Then the ship rolled again, so far that Eskaia heard curses turn to prayer. It seemed impossible that Golden Cup could ever come back.

But the ship did. In the fleeting moment when they could talk without holding on for dear life, Grimsoar explained his wound.

“Just a rope that caught me across the chest on the way overboard. A beautiful rope burn and maybe a rib or two the worse for it, but nothing serious.”

Eskaia struggled out of Grimsoar’s shirt and handed it to him. His look told her too late that she’d also struggled out of her gown. She was standing there in two sodden shifts. They not only revealed more than she really cared to display, they were letting her freeze to death even belowdecks.

“Thank you, Grimsoar. I can find my cabin now, and some dry clothes.”

If there was such a thing left aboard, and if it mattered whether you changed into dry clothes when chances were you would die in wet ones within hours. That thought came and went swiftly through Eskaia’s mind. In its place stood a determination to die as befitted a daughter of House Encuintras. Their code of honor was not as rigid as that of, say, the Knights of Solamnia, but it did rule out dying in your bed, feeling too sorry for yourself to help those even worse off.

* * * * *

Hipparan rode the north wind toward Crater Gulf. He rode it faster than any ship could have, faster perhaps than the wind of the storm. Pirvan found the wind in his face so savage that most of the time he kept his eyes shut.

Both humans struggled to stay awake. They both knew that this was the sleep that comes with being chilled, the sleep from which few awake.

As the hours passed, the sun crept past the zenith and began its slide down into the west. Also with the passing hours, the canyons and hills of gray cloud below began to show patches of sea.

By sunset, they were flying low over an ocean that seemed restless rather than stormy. Although they were flying steadily south, their lower altitude made it warmer. Now they could dare to sleep, and did.

Pirvan awoke some time in the night, with a dim memory of a dream that must have been frightening at the time. Haimya was still asleep, and Hipparan’s great wings had slowed to a steady, almost lethargic beat.

By moonlight the thief saw that they were back down to wave-top height, following the moon trail across the water. The air was almost warm, damp with more than the sea, and hinting of land scents. They were flying much more slowly, so that he could keep his eyes open now against what was hardly more than a stiff breeze.

“We’re not far from the Crater Gulf,” Hipparan said. “But we have a problem.”

“Why am I not surprised?” Pirvan said. A yawn made his words almost incoherent.

Hipparan cocked his crest to one side and rumbled with mordant laughter.

“Do you really want to know? Pardon, this is not a time for jests.”

If that wasn’t the first apology Hipparan had made, it was close to it. Pirvan listened open-mouthed as the dragon explained.

“They do have a black dragon in the gulf. He was reaching out to see if there were other dragons about, and reached me.”

“Did he learn where you were?”

Hipparan was silent for a moment. “I doubt it. But if I learned that he was evil, then he had to have learned that I was good.”

Pirvan took a moment to digest this news. Before he could reply, Hipparan shivered.

“I wonder what he will make of it,” the dragon said, in an oddly distant voice. “He must have thought he was alone, too, serving some purpose that he would die without knowing.”

“Wouldn’t-if there’s a mage there-?” Haimya put in.

If dragons could spit, Hipparan would have done so. “That for mages! Even the most lawful folk haven’t always told their dragons what they need to know. We all remember that, and I could tell that the black had been left ignorant.”

“I feel sorry for him,” Pirvan said.

The silence this time lasted so long that Pirvan wondered if he had offended by sympathy for the black dragon. Then Hipparan quivered, and for a moment the beat of his wings almost stopped. He lost enough altitude to make Pirvan nervous before he resumed steady flight.

When Hipparan finally spoke, one might have said of a human that he seemed about to weep.

“Then it’s not a wonder that you have done by me as you have. You-there is nothing and nobody you will use like a tool, then throw away. What that means to me-when one is where I am-”

The dragon was silent, and in the silence Pirvan tried to make sense of what he’d just heard. It did not take him long, once he’d come to think of Hipparan as a boy sent on a man’s quest, in a world he did not know, where he could not expect to find other dragons or even human friends.

But he had found them, humans who had freed him from captivity, healed him of wounds that might have led to his death, and told him the truth. Or at least as much of it as they knew, so he could decide for himself whether to help them learn the rest or not.

But there was no decision to make. All the while Hipparan had been muttering about the human debt to him, his debt to the humans had been growing. An honest dragon could not deny it.

Of course, a good dragon had to be honest. But this honest? Pirvan wondered if he had just learned something new about good, evil, and neutrality, and wished Tarothin were here.

“Very well,” Pirvan said. “I think we’ll land on the slopes of that mountain to the east of the Ewide River. Not the high one with the lake in its crater, but the lower one closer to the shore.

“We’ll just untie our bags and let you fly while we hide ourselves and unpack. If anyone does strike back, we’ll be hard to find and you’ll be well out to sea.”

“I thought I was the soldier,” Haimya muttered.

“So you are. But neither of us knows much about war on dragonback, so both of us can speak.”

“Quite right,” Hipparan said. “Haimya?”

She laughed. “It’s a good plan. I’m only worried about dragonfear. I’ve heard that evil dragons can use that. Do you know if the black can?”

“No, and I can’t learn without his learning as much or more about me. There are times when mutual ignorance is safest.”

This went against everything Pirvan had ever learned, and he suspected it raised his companion’s hackles as well. But under these-call them, peculiar-circumstances, it seemed the best course.

* * * * *

As if the storm had exhausted even its giant strength in dismasting Golden Cup, the wind began dropping soon afterward. Sailors risking their lives wielded axes and knives, cutting away the wreckage of the fallen masts before they pounded holes in the hull.

Other sailors managed to set a scrap of sail on the stump of the foremast. This brought the ship’s bow around enough to keep it from rolling wildly like a log, until it rolled herself under. It became possible to stand and even move about without the four limbs of an ape, and even do work without risking bone-breaking falls.

Eskaia worked until after nightfall, helping Tarothin with lesser and greater healings until she was as exhausted as she could ever remember being. But Tarothin was even more so, from working so much magic in so short a time. The mate of the tops and Grimsoar One-Eye had to carry him to his bed in Lady Eskaia’s cabin.

By the time the cook had wrought, with no magic whatever, the miracle of hot tea, the wizard was just awake enough to drink it. Then he lay back on the pillows, smiling feebly up at Eskaia.

“Thank you is-inadequate,” he said.

She returned his smile. “It’s enough until you have the strength for more.” Then she flushed as she realized what an opening she had left, for a bawdy jest.

The jest never came. Tarothin was a gentleman. Instead he beckoned to Grimsoar One-Eye.

“Friend, if you can go to my cabin and remove from the chest under my bunk the largest of the three books there, the one with the silver quatrefoil on the cover-”

“A spellbook?” Grimsoar said dubiously.

“Quite safe for picking up and carrying,” Tarothin said. “I travel a good deal, and there’s small point in slaughtering innkeepers and hostlers’ boys by accident.

“No, the book is safe, as long as you pick it up and bring it straight here. Don’t drop it, don’t try to open it, and don’t let it get wet in wild water. That means water falling from the sky, in case you didn’t know.”

“None of that belowdecks, or if there is, we’ve more trouble than I care to think about,” Grimsoar said, and he stood with a grunt.

“Is your rib hurting?” Eskaia asked.

“A bit,” Grimsoar said. “But it was good enough to carry this hulk of a wizard in here. It’s certainly fit for carrying his books. Besides, even if it wasn’t, right now our friend couldn’t heal a sick cockroach.”

Eskaia grimaced. “Who would want to?”

“A neutral … wizard,” Tarothin said, and fell asleep again.

* * * * *

Hipparan swept in over the coast well to the north of Crater Gulf, keeping low. He could have as easily gone inland to the south of the gulf, but that would have meant a longer flight at low altitude, in darkness, over unknown terrain. More chances of accidents, and likewise more chance of giving the alarm, to human eyes, the black dragon, or even whatever odd ogres, gully dwarves, and the like might roam the jungles.

Pirvan had not seen jungle before this quest, and now that he had, he would not wish for even a gully dwarf to live in one. Anybody deserved better than an eat-or-be-eaten battle for life, in a perpetual combination of steam-bath and maze.

Hipparan seemed to hurl himself at the northern slope of the mountain, which was more heavily forested than the southern. Just at the line where the trees thinned out, he flung his wings wide and settled into a clearing as neatly as a log sliding down a greased trough into a stream.

Now Pirvan and Haimya had the trouble of getting themselves and their gear off the dragon to which all had been securely fastened for the best part of a day. For a while, it began to seem that they had defeated themselves, especially as they wanted to avoid cutting any more than necessary. If all went well, they would need three people’s worth of harness when they flew out.

Pirvan was sweating and Haimya was using language eloquent even for a former mercenary by the time everything was free. He realized that sailors really did know more about knots than thieves, even thieves who prided themselves on their skilled hands.

“The next time we do this, we’ll use chains and locks,” Pirvan said with a grunt as the last bag came free and nearly toppled him. “Those I understand.”

“Do I discern that you have everything?” Hipparan asked.

“I would say Haimya has everything,” Pirvan said. “As for me-”

Haimya hooted with laughter, until night birds fell silent and Hipparan’s crest stiffened.

“If you must laugh at the man’s jests, my lady,” he said, “aren’t there better places? And times, for that matter?”

For a moment, Pirvan thought Haimya was going to kiss either him or the dragon. Hipparan forestalled any such demonstration by taking wing in a thunder of air and a spray of dust, gravel, and twigs.

“You grow stranger each day,” Haimya said, punching the thief lightly in the ribs.

I grow fonder of you, Pirvan thought. He hoped the second was not leading to the first. There were better places and times for that, too.

* * * * *

Shilriya was the first to sight the abandoned merchant vessel wallowing in the choppy sea left by the dying storm. Jemar was the first to come alongside, as the wind favored his ship more than Shilriya’s. Neither of them wished to break out the sweeps in this kind of sea.

That the ship had fallen to pirates was evident a hundred yards off. The deck was strewn with wreckage, every visible door and port had been forced or smashed, and sea birds were fighting over the more edible parts of half a dozen human bodies in sailor’s garb.

Jemar sent a boarding party over, and it reported no surprises. At least none, save the fact that all the men were horribly wounded, and that, in spite of the damage to the cabins, nothing had been taken.

“It’s as if the pirates were berserkers on a rampage,” the petty officer said.

“Go back and search the ship from tops to bilges,” Jemar said sharply. “See if you can find any more bodies or abandoned weapons.”

“The pirates seem to have taken all theirs,” the man replied. “Leastways I didn’t see any more than what a ship like that might commonly have. Do you think-?”

“I will think, if there’s need for it. That’s part of what a chief is paid for. You save your thinking for later and go search.”

It was Zygor who solved the mystery. He’d been just barely hull-up when the other two ships came alongside, and soon afterward the wind turned dead foul. He broke out the sweeps and came thrashing up, halting a hundred yards away and putting over a boat almost at once.

“We found a few bodies,” he said, the moment he reached the deck.

Jemar heard more than the words. “Human?”

“All of them. But one of them had this in him.”

He handed the find to Jemar. It was a dagger about as long as Jemar’s hand, with an odd hilt, mostly hollow with a crossbar for gripping. Two side hilts jutted out on either side, and the thick blade tapered to a sharp point.

“A katar,” Jemar said.

“Minotaurs,” Zygor added.

The katar dagger was one of the weapons unique to minotaurs. Minotaur weapons common to all races could be used by humans, if they were strong enough. Weapons intended for a minotaur’s towering strength turned up in human hands once in a century, and even less often in human bodies-unless minotaurs put them there.

“I wonder why they didn’t retrieve that one,” Jemar mused. He explained the scene aboard the abandoned ship to Zyrub.

“The poor wretch probably fell overboard after they stabbed him, before even a minotaur could jerk it free. We said rites over him and put him back in the water with his fellows.”

Jemar was barely listening. Minotaurs in these waters were not unknown. Sometimes they appeared as peaceful traders. Even then they had the minotaurs’ vast arrogance and ferocious temper, and there had been bloody incidents.

Not, however, the massacre of a whole merchant ship’s crew. That told a tale of minotaurs on some warlike purpose, which might make less than no sense to humans.

The minotaurs did not have to make sense, however, to be dangerous. Dangerous especially to Golden Cup, which might not have survived the storm in a condition to either fight or run.

“We double the lookouts at once, wait until the others come up, then form a line of search with all five ships.”

“The usual intervals?”

“Yes.”

“It’ll be a good fight, avenging these poor bastards.”

“I hope that’s all we have to avenge.”