Curse of the Mistwraith

The wreck victim raised listless, glassy eyes, but said nothing. Quite likely cold water had dulled the fellow’s wits. Weary of senseless ruin and the rescue of ravaged men, the bosun snapped impatiently, ‘Bring him in. We’ll get the other second, if he still breathes.’

A crewman hooked the spar with his oar shaft to steady the boat. Others leaned over the thwart to lift the half-drowned sailhand aboard.

The victim reacted with vengeful speed and doused his rescuers with seawater.

Stung nearly blind by the salt, the nearer oarsman yelled and lunged. His hand closed over a drenched mat of hair. The man in the water twisted against the restraint. He kicked clear of the spar, ducked and resurfaced, a flash of bare steel in one fist. The oarsman recoiled from him with a scream of pain and surprise, his wrist opened stark to the bone.

‘Ath, he’s Karthan’s!’ someone shouted.

The longboat’s crew erupted in confusion. Portside, those seamen within reach raised oars like clubs and retaliated. One blow, then another struck the enemy sailor’s head. Blood spilled from his nose and mouth. Chopped viciously on the shoulder, he floundered. His grasp loosened and the dagger dropped winking into the depths. Without even a curse of malediction, the Karthish sailor thrashed under, battered and finally drowned by the murderous hatred of enemies.

‘Man the oars!’ The bosun’s bellow restored order to the wildly rocking longboat. Men sank down at their benches, muttering, while seawater lapped tendrils of scarlet from the blades of the portside looms. Too tired even to curse, the officer tossed a scarf to his wounded oarsman. Then he pointed at the unconscious survivor who drifted still lashed to the spar. By now the smoke had cleared enough to see that the Karthish dog still breathed. ‘Fetch that one aboard. The king will want him for questioning, so mind you handle him wisely.’

Sailors sworn to the pirate king’s service seldom permitted themselves to be taken alive. With one casualty wrapping his wrist in the stern, no man rushed the task. Amroth’s seamen recovered the last crewman of Karthan’s brigantine from the sea with wary caution and dumped him face-down on the floorboards. The bosun regarded his prize with distaste. Barefoot, slightly built and clad in a sailhand’s patched tunic, the man seemed no one important. Only the silver ring on his left hand occasioned any notice at all; and after hours of thankless labour, the oarsmen deserved reward for their efforts.

‘Beer-booty,’ invited the bosun. He bent, caught the captive’s wrist, and tugged to pry the ring from a finger still swollen from the sea.

‘Cut ‘er free,’ suggested the crewman who nursed his slashed forearm.

Feud left no space for niceties. The bosun drew his rigging knife. He braced the captive’s hand palm upward against the stern seat, and lifted his blade to cut. That moment the longboat rocked. Dying sunlight caught and splintered in the depths of an emerald setting.

The bosun gasped. He snatched back his knife as if burned, for the ring he would steal was not silver, but white gold. The gem was carved with a leopard device, hatefully familiar.

‘Fate witness, he’s s’Ffalenn!’ Shocked and uncertain, the bosun straightened up. He had watched the enemy brigantine burn, her captain sprawled dead on her quarterdeck; but a glance at the black hair which dripped ignominiously in the bilge now belied that observation. Suddenly hand and ring were tugged from his grasp as an oarsman reached out and jerked the captive onto his back.

Bared to the fading light, the steeply-angled features and upswept browline of s’Ffalenn stood clear as struck bronze. There could be no mistake. Amroth’s seamen had taken, alive, the Master of Shadow himself.

The sailors fell back in fear. Several made signs against evil, and someone near the fore drew a dagger.

‘Hold!’ The bosun turned to logic to ease his own frayed nerves. ‘The sorcerer’s harmless, just now, or we’d already be dead. Alive, don’t forget, he’ll bring a bounty.’

The men made no response. Tense, uneasy, they shifted their feet. Someone uttered a charm against demons, and a second knife sang from its sheath.

The bosun grabbed an oar and slammed it across the thwarts between sailors and captive. ‘Fools! Would you spit on good fortune? Kill him, and our liege won’t give us a copper.’

That reached them. Arithon s’Ffalenn was the illegitimate son of Amroth’s own queen, who in years past had spurned the kingdom’s honour for adultery with her husband’s most infamous enemy. The pirate-king’s bastard carried a price on his head that would ransom an earl, and a dukedom awaited the man who could deliver him to Port Royal in chains. Won over by greed, the sailors put up their knives.

The bosun stepped back and rapped orders, and men jumped to obey. Before the s’Ffalenn bastard regained his wits, his captors bound his wrists and legs with cord cut from the painter. Then, trussed like a calf for slaughter, Arithon, Master of Shadow and heir-apparent of Karthan, was rowed back to the warship Briane. Hauled aboard by the boisterous crew of the longboat, he was dumped in a dripping sprawl on the quarterdeck, at the feet of the officer in command.

A man barely past his teens, the first officer had come to his post through wealth and royal connections rather than merit or experience. But with the captain unconscious from an arrow wound, and the ranking brass of Briane’s fighting company dead, none remained to dispute the chain of command. The first officer coped, though shouldered with responsibility for three hundred and forty two men left living, and a warship too crippled to carry sail. The bosun’s agitated words took a moment to pierce through tired and overburdened thoughts.

The name finally mustered attention.

‘Arithon s’Ffalenn!’ Shocked to disbelief, the first officer stared at the parcel of flesh on his deck. This man was small, sea-tanned and dark; nothing like the half-brother in line for Amroth’s crown. A drenched spill of hair plastered an angular forehead. Spare, unremarkable limbs were clothed in rough, much-mended linen that was belted with a plain twist of rope. But his sailhand’s appearance was deceptive. The jewel in the signet bore the leopard of s’Ffalenn, undeniable symbol of royal heirship.

‘It’s him, I say,’ said the bosun excitedly.

The crew from the longboat and every deckhand within earshot edged closer.

Jostled by raffish, excitable men, the first officer recalled his position. ‘Back to your duties,’ he snapped. ‘And have that longboat winched back on board. Lively!’

‘Aye sir.’ The bosun departed, contrite. The sailhands disbursed more slowly, clearing the quarterdeck with many a backward glance.

Left alone to determine the fate of Amroth’s bitterest enemy, the first officer shifted his weight in distress. How should he confine a man who could bind illusion of shadow with the ease of thought, and whose capture had been achieved at a cost of seven ships? In Amroth, the king would certainly hold Arithon’s imprisonment worth such devastating losses. But aboard the warship Briane, upon decks still laced with dead and debris, men wanted vengeance for murdered crewmen. The sailhands would never forget: Arithon was a sorcerer, and safest of all as a corpse.

The solution seemed simple as a sword-thrust, but the first officer knew differently. He repressed his first, wild impulse to kill, and instead prodded the captive’s shoulder with his boot. Black hair spilled away from a profile as keen as a knife. A tracery of scarlet flowed across temple and cheek from a hidden scalp wound; bruises mottled the skin of throat and chin. Sorcerer though he was, Arithon was human enough to require the services of a healer. The first officer cursed misfortune, that this bastard had not also been mortal enough to die. The king of Amroth knew neither temperance nor reason on the subject of his wife’s betrayal. No matter that men might get killed or maimed in the course of the long passage home; on pain of court martial, Briane’s crewmen must deliver the Master of Shadow alive.

‘What’s to be done with him, sir?’ The man promoted to fill the dead mate’s berth stopped at his senior’s side, his uniform almost unrecognizable beneath the soot and stains of battle.

The first officer swallowed, his throat dry with nerves. ‘Lock him up in the chartroom.’

The mate narrowed faded eyes and spat. ‘That’s a damned fool place to stow such a dangerous prisoner! D’ye want us all broken? He’s clever enough to escape.’

‘Silence!’ The first officer clenched his teeth, sensitive to the eyes that watched from every quarter of the ship. The mate’s complaint was just; but no officer could long maintain command if he backed down before the entire crew. The order would have to stand.

‘The prisoner needs a healer,’ the first officer justified firmly. ‘I’ll have him moved and set in irons at the earliest opportunity.’

The mate grunted, bent and easily lifted the Shadow Master from the deck. ‘What a slight little dog, for all his killer’s reputation,’ he commented. Then, cocky to conceal his apprehension, he sauntered the length of the quarterdeck with the captive slung like a duffel across his shoulder.

The pair vanished down the companionway, Arithon’s knuckles haplessly banging each rung of the ladder-steep stair. The first officer shut his eyes. The harbour at Port Royal lay over twenty days’ sail on the best winds and fair weather. Every jack tar of Briane’s company would be a rich man, if any of them survived to make port. Impatient, inexperienced and sorely worried, the first officer shouted to the carpenter to hurry his work on the mainmast.

Night fell before Briane was repaired enough to carry canvas. Clouds had obscured the stars by the time the first officer ordered the ship under way. The bosun relayed his commands, since the mate was too hoarse to make himself heard over the pound of hammers under the forecastle. Bone-weary, the crew swung themselves aloft with appalling lack of agility. Unbrailed canvas billowed from the yards; on deck, sailhands stumbled to man the braces. Sail slammed taut with a crash and a rattle of blocks, and the bow shouldered east through the swell. Staid as a weathered carving, the quartermaster laid Briane on course for Amroth. If the wind held, the ship would reach home only slightly behind the main fleet.

Relieved to be back under sail, the first officer excused all but six hands under the bosun on watch. Then he called for running lamps to be lit. The cabin boy made rounds with flint and striker. Briane’s routine passed uninterrupted until the flame in the aft lantern flicked out, soundlessly, as if touched by the breath of Dharkaron. Inside the space of a heartbeat the entire ship became locked in darkness as bleak as the void before creation. The rhythm of the joiners’ hammers wavered and died, replaced abruptly by shouting.

The first officer leaped for the companionway. His boots barely grazed the steps. Half-sliding down the rail, he heard the shrill crash of glass as the panes in the stern window burst. The instant his feet slapped deck, he rammed shoulder-first into the chartroom door. Teak panels exploded into slivers. The first officer carried on into blackness dense as calligrapher’s ink. Sounds of furious struggle issued from the direction of the broken window.

‘Stop him!’ The first officer’s shout became a grunt as his ribs bashed the edge of the chart table. He blundered past. A body tripped him. He stumbled, slammed painfully against someone’s elbow, then shoved forward into a battering press of bodies. The hiss of the wake beneath the counter sounded near enough to touch. Spattered by needle-fine droplets of spray, the first officer realized in distress that Arithon might already be half over the sill. Once overboard, the sorcerer could bind illusion, shape shadow and blend invisibly with the waves. No search would find him.

The first officer dived to intervene, hit a locked mass of men and felt himself dashed brutally aside. Someone cursed. A whirl of unseen motion cut through the drafts from the window. Struck across the chest by a hard, contorted body, the first officer groped blind and two-handedly hooked cloth still damp from the sea. Aware of whom he held, he locked his arms and clung obstinately. His prisoner twisted, wrenching every tendon in his wrists. Flung sidewards into a bulkhead, the first officer gasped. He felt as if he handled a careening maelstrom of fury. A thigh sledge-hammered one wrist, breaking his grasp. Then someone crashed like an axed oak across his chest. Torn loose from the captive, the first officer went down, flattened under a mass of sweaty flesh.

The battle raged on over his head, marked in darkness by the grunt of drawn breaths and the smack of knuckles, elbows and knees battering into muscle. Nearby, a seaman retched, felled by a kick in the belly. The first officer struggled against the crush to rise. Any blow that connected in that ensorcelled dark had to be ruled by luck. If Arithon’s hands remained bound, force and numbers must ultimately prevail as his guardsmen found grips he could not break.

‘Bastard!’ somebody said. Boots scuffled and a fist smacked flesh. Arithon’s resistance abated slightly.

The first officer regained his feet, when a low, clear voice cut through the strife.

‘Let go. Or your fingers will burn to the bone.’

‘Don’t listen!’ The first officer pushed forward. ‘The threat’s an illusion.’

A man screamed in agony, counterpointed by splintering wood. Desperate, the first officer shot a blow in the approximate direction of the speaker. His knuckles cracked into bone. As if cued by the impact, the sorcerer’s web of darkness wavered and lifted.

Light from the aft-running lamp spilled through the ruptured stern window, touching gilt edges to a litter of glass and smashed furnishings. Arithon hung limp in the arms of three deckhands. Their faces were white and their chests heaved like runners just finished with a marathon. Another man groaned by the chart-locker, hands clenched around a dripping shin; while against the starboard bulkhead the mate stood scowling, his colour high and the pulsebeat angry and fast behind his ripped collar. The first officer avoided the accusation in the older seaman’s eyes. If it was unnatural that a prisoner so recently injured and unconscious should prove capable of such fight, to make an issue of the fact invited trouble.

Anxious to take charge before the crew recovered enough to talk, the first officer snapped to the moaning crewman, ‘Fetch a light.’

The man quieted, scuffled to his feet and hastily limped off to find a lantern. As a rustle of returned movement stirred through the beleaguered crew in the chartroom, the first officer pointed to a clear space between the glitter of slivered glass. ‘Set the s’Ffalenn there. And you, find a set of shackles to bind his feet.’