Now that they knew where Tayy had been taken, Kaydu had the best chance of following. “I’ll find them,” she said, and handed Little Brother in his pack to Bixei, who slung it over his shoulder.

“Behave yourself,” he warned the creature. “If you give me any trouble, your mistress will find you in the stew pot when she comes back.”

No one believed him, of course, least of all Little Brother. They all watched as Kaydu leaped into the air, changing into a hawk as she rose. When she had reached flying altitude, she arrowed away in the direction of the sea.

Llesho turned his attention back to the god who stood watching him the way Habiba studied an experiment. “What part did you play in this, trickster?” His voice fell dangerously low. If he knew for sure . . . he didn’t know what he would do, but murder came to mind. Even the gods would answer to him if they had used him to harm the Qubal boy.

“It hardly takes a trickster god to create a falling out between princelings who jump to conclusions as quickly as they leap into their saddles.” Master Den sniffed indignantly and smoothed the sleeves of his coat as if he actually had feathers to ruffle.

The rebuke hurt almost more than Master Markko’s poisons. His fault. Stricken with guilt, Llesho turned an eye to the path in the dust.Why didn’t you tell me? It was on the tip of his tongue to ask, but he knew better. As a teacher, the trickster god had always believed he learned best from his mistakes. So he said instead, “No lesson is worth Tayy’s life.”

“See. You’ve learned something already.” Master Den gave an encouraging nod and grinned at him.

Llesho turned away, impatient with his teacher’s mood. “I think Shou must need your advice,” he said. “For myself, I have no appetite for your lessons.” He walked away, mounted his horse, and rode after the pirates who had too much head start.

Presently he heard the sound of horses following, but none had the thundering sound of the monstrous creature the trickster god had ridden. Good. Let him find someone else to torment with his smug tricks and hurtful lessons. Llesho didn’t have time for it anymore. And if he remembered, from step to step, that he had done this and not his teacher, he pushed the thought down deep and looked ahead to the sea. His cadre would free Tayy from the pirates who had taken him for the most evil labor known to a seafaring people.

 

 

 

Mergen had been right about the distance. They had lost the morning searching for Prince Tayy, but made up some of the lost time by resting only in the deep dark and riding again when Great Moon Lun rose in the sky. As they rode, the ground fell away from the heights of the grassy plateau. When they came to the sea in midmorning of the third day of their travels, they had again passed into lands on the very brink of summer, the air rich and thick with moisture. Or rather, when they reached the outskirts of the strange port city of Edris. Spread around a protected inlet, the city blotted out any glimpse of the Marmer Sea.

Kaydu joined them as they completed their descent to the coast, reverting to her true form as she landed lightly in her saddle. “Nothing,” she reported, as Little Brother screeched a welcome.

The monkey climbed out of his pack on Bixei’s saddle and leaped from one horse to the other as they rode. Her mount, accustomed to its rider coming and going in great leaps, chuffed indignantly but didn’t shy as she lifted the monkey onto her shoulder. It seemed to give them both some comfort against the bad news.

Together, their newly regathered company pressed forward, through a familiar circle of carts, to a cluster of round tents set in a series of half-moon curves around the landward side of the city. Black felt roofs washed like angry waves up against the city walls that rose in the distance. The Uulgar clans, who had sent raiders against Kungol and driven Llesho into slavery on the Long March, had come to market.

The Uulgar had aligned themselves with Master Markko’s mad purpose, though what they hoped to gain from the fall of heaven and the destruction of the living worlds in fire and chaos Llesho could not imagine. He wondered grimly, however, how many enemies he would have to fight for the life of one Harnish prince. Only the thought of Tayy, abandoned to pirates and a living death in slavery to the oar, kept him from turning his horse and running in the opposite direction.

His companions had their own memories of the black tents of the Uulgar. Hmishi had been tortured to death in one, and Lling had suffered her own captivity of mind as well as body. Kaydu and Bixei and Stipes had all fought with him in Tsu-tan’s camp to rescue their captive friends. They knew what the power of the magician could do when joined with the bloodthirsty ruthlessness of the Harnish raiders. As if of one mind, they drew closer to each other. For Tayy, whose unhappy plight lay on their consciences, they drove on.

Down the center cut the wide avenue that Llesho and his band had come to expect of a Harnish tent city. This was not a massing of warriors under the war banner of their khan, however, but a smaller gathering for trade and commerce. Llesho had never actually seen shops in the Qubal ulus, though he knew they must trade for the many foreign goods he had noticed in the camp. Here, however, wares of Harnish make were laid out on blankets at the side of the road. An old woman sitting in the style of the clans presided over each blanket, haggling with passersby and shouting gossip and prices from one to the other. Llesho saw worked leather and beaten metal buckles, and woolens made from the fleece of the sheep that grazed the grasslands. No silver or gold seemed to change hands at the blanket bazaar, but buckles went for beads and leath erwork for embroidery silk.

Farther on, they found Harnishmen with their horses. The Harnishmen watched the small band of riders with calculation in their eyes. They were selling the culls of their herds, however, not buying, and had no use for the outlander saddles and tack. Llesho’s cadre pressed on.

The road through the camp ended at a gate in a high wall of plastered rubble that carried on out of sight in the distance to either side. Since it was morning and well into the trading day, the gates stood open. At the center of a sweeping arch over the passway, a watchman noted the comings and goings into the city with a keen eye for trouble. Enclosed like a covered bridge, the arch had arrow slits and lookout windows cut at random along its length, from which the city guard might defend the gate.

For a moment, the watchman seemed to catch Llesho’s gaze and he wondered if the gates would suddenly swing closed on them. Would an army spill from the garrison to seize them when they passed and turn them over to the Uulgar traders pressed up against the defended city? That was long ago, he thought at the man, the Uulgar have no claim on the princes of Thebin. Whatever had been in the gatekeeper’s glance, he turned away and gave them no more attention as they passed inside.

 

 

 

Llesho’s experience with cities, from Kungol to Farshore and then back to the Imperial City of Shan, had all led him to expect spacious thoroughfares gracious with trees or banners or ribbons dancing on the wind. He knew about the poverty of cities as well, of course. In Shan, hidden out of the sight of the broad avenues, he had sidestepped slops pitched out of upper windows in buildings sagging in on one another like drunken revelers over streets so narrow a donkey cart would not pass. He wasn’t sure what to make of Edris, however. The streets were narrow and winding like the poor sections of the imperial city and like them too, water trickled thinly over slops dumped in open ditches.

The day was warm and the smell of ripening ordure overpowered the newcomers. Llesho cut a sideways glance at Kaydu, to find her wrinkling her nose in distaste just as he had. Bixei had handed over the pack where Little Brother usually rode, and the monkey had hidden himself away in it, indignant at the smell, so that he didn’t even show his face as they rode.

Behind the steaming ditches, however, whitewashed terra-cotta walls showed the pale blush of their blank faces to the winding streets. Protected by their walls the houses were hidden, roofs the color of burnt umber rising in lofty disdain well back from the noise and odors of the streets. Narrow windows high under the eaves peered mysteriously down on lush secret gardens with just the crown of a tree or a spill of bright blossoms on climbing vines visible on the street below. Llesho figured even the most highly perfumed flowers behind those walls couldn’t entirely protect the aloof residents from the smells of the ditches.

Visitors from every nation Llesho knew, and some he didn’t, filled the narrow avenue leading into the city. He was jostled by a Shannish merchant and bumped with more deliberate insult by a Harnish trader, while a camel drover in the coats of the Tashek people passed through the crowd without looking in their direction. There were men in half a dozen different styles of turbans and some in round little caps and women dressed in everything from veils to soldier’s pantaloons. He would have enjoyed the novelty of it, but the constricted passage reminded him too much of shuffling down the chute to the auction block at the now-banished slave market of the Imperial City of Shan.

Much as Llesho hated the feeling, he understood a bit of the reasoning behind the rabbit warren craziness of it. Any invading force would find a pitched battle in the narrow streets impossible to fight. Llesho had lived through two such attacks—in Kungol, and in the imperial city—and thought that was a pretty smart idea, especially given Edris’ neighbors on the grasslands. But even a cart with a broken axle could deadend the way into the city, causing panic as traffic continued to press in from the gates. Once that thought had planted itself in his head, he couldn’t shake the cold dread it fostered.

Eventually, however, the road emptied them out into a wide square paved with blocks of stone round as dinner plates, a fountain at its center. At each of the cardinal points rose a long building open at the street level. Kaydu flung her arm in a wide sweeping circle to take in every compass point. “The Edris market,” she declared. Their party dismounted, staring about them The space after the confines of the streets stunned them, and the market buildings themselves—

Llesho was impressed, as newcomers were intended to be. Arches held up by pillars—hundreds of them marching like paired soldiers down the length and breadth of the market—roofed the open street level while supporting the enclosed stories above.

“That’s where the real money changes hands.” Kaydu had followed his gaze to the upper stories of the north side market, each level decorated with its own motifs of arches and screened windows looking out over the square. “Leg end says that countries have changed hands in the trading houses above the market at Edris. Kings, surely, have risen and fallen as the needs of merchants dictated.

“Perhaps that is why Kungol fell,” Llesho mused aloud while his companions watched him nervously for prophecy. It wasn’t that, just common sense facing a market where Kungol would have temples. “The Uulgar wanted the riches of Kungol. The merchants would have wanted to attract the caravans away from the high passes and down to the sea. So it might have been arranged.”

“Worse now,” Kaydu figured, “with Master Markko looking to the gates of heaven in the mountains. You don’t take on the easy quests.”

“So Dun Dragon said.” He gave Kaydu the lead since she seemed to know the city She directed them toward the south end of the square, where the sound of cattle lowing and chickens squawking told them livestock was sold. “We can sell the horses here, and probably our tack as well.”

Llesho drew his horse after him, under a set of vaulting arches. Even though there were no sides to the market, the heat of animals and their buyers and sellers combined in an unwholesome stew that raised the sweat on Llesho’s brow and made it difficult to breath.

They passed by selling booths where chickens and geese flapped squawking in wicker cages stacked against the walls while frantic vendors shouted out their prices. Small yards housed pens of rabbits and other small animals offered to the wives and servants on their own quests to bring back dinner for their households. Voices ebbed and flowed with the bargaining; hands flashed with the exchange of coin.

“What will you take for the monkey,” a woman dressed in bits of finery from all the peoples who traded here shouted out as they passed.

“Not for sale,” Kaydu let her know.

“This is Edris market,” the vendor insisted. “Everything is for sale.” Her hand reached for Little Brother, who peeked solemnly back at her from his pack.

“I said ‘no.’ ” Kaydu emphasized her reply with the point of her sword. “Not even in Edris market.”

“No harm meant.” The vendor tucked her hands into her front pocket to show she meant no harm but gave their party a measuring look. As they walked away, Llesho heard a curse at his back. “Everything’s for sale at Edris market,” the woman muttered when he turned around.

“Not today.” As she led them away from the greedy vendor, Kaydu nudged a warning at the monkey. Veteran of many battles and no few spy missions of his own, Little Brother quickly ducked out of sight, sacrificing his curiosity for safety.

They went on in silence for a while, each occupied with his or her own thoughts. As they passed deeper into the market, however, Llesho noticed many empty stalls. The lingering odors of horse sweat or cow dung attested to the presence of the larger animals somewhere in the building.

“The auction block is down here, at the center of this market,” Kaydu led them forward until they could follow the sounds of the caller for themselves.

The missing cattle were being paraded around a sawdust-covered corral with bids following them through their paces. A tall man made even taller by his high turban was keeping a reckoning by turning down the brightly colored bits of paper that he had slipped between his fingers. A sign posted on a nearby column had a painted word on it in a script Llesho didn’t recognize. The roughly drawn outline of a horse beside the word made clear to outlanders what came next. In the distance, he heard the heartbroken wail of a child and knew with a chill in his heart that the slave auction would follow soon after.

Kaydu flinched at the sound, but she didn’t let any of her distaste show in her voice. “We can sell the horses here,” she said, “and probably our saddles and tack as well.”

Without horses, they had to lighten their load to what they could carry on their own backs. Like the others, Llesho went through his pack, gathering the basics of survival from his gear. Unlike them, he also drew out the strange gifts that he had brought with him through his travels.

If all went well they’d have money for passage by boat soon enough and be on their way. By putting their horses up for auction, however, they exposed themselves to more public attention than he would have liked. Master Markko’s spies or any of their enemies might recognize them. They could find themselves fighting a pitched battle in the marketplace. Or they might be followed and set upon in some rat-infested alley on the way to the docks. He trusted his cadre to win such a contest, but would rather not put it to the test.

And they still hadn’t found Tayy. “I don’t trust this place,” he said.

Hmishi darted quick glances around them as he emptied his own pack. “Neither do I.”

“We’re bound to call attention to ourselves if we stay together.” They still wore the uniforms of young cadets out to see the world that they had chosen as their disguise, which worked well enough on the road. Their presence in the market would seem a greater curiosity and gossip had a way of traveling faster than a dream-walk. Llesho cast a nervous look at the buyers and sellers gathered around the corral. Any one of them might be a spy.

“It’s time we split up and took the measure of this place,” Kaydu agreed. “I’ll need someone to help me with the horses and the tack.” She singled out Bixei for the task. “The rest of you, pair up and scout out the exits. Note where the aisles are blocked and where we’ll find good cover if we need it.”

“We aren’t likely to find the Harnish prince here, since the pirates don’t sell anyone they can put to the oar.” Bixei had started to gather the abandoned gear together. He dropped a saddle on the heap as if to emphasize his words.

“But they’ll know in the stalls if the red trousers have been buying or selling in Edris.” Kaydu must mean pirates by that, Llesho figured, though he hadn’t heard the term before. She went on with her instructions, “Ask for news of work for a young soldier. Say you’ll work for passage to Pontus—that should draw out any news of pirates.

Lling and Hmishi worked best together as a pair, so Llesho chose Stipes to accompany him. Bixei puffed up his chest with pride for his partner.

Stipes himself seemed less than gratified with the honor. “You might trust one of the others more to watch your back, two eyes being better than one.” As a reminder, he touched a hesitant finger to the eye patch over the empty socket.

Stipes had lost an eye in battle, but he saw as much with the one remaining to him as most men did with two. In spite of his injury, he remained an able soldier and Llesho refused his offer to stand down with a firm shake of his head.

“We have all survived the same number of battles, and each with our own injuries. I’ll trust to your instincts—and to your one eye for danger—as quickly as to anyone’s.”

“If you see trouble, don’t take it on by yourself,” Kaydu insisted, including them all in her glance. “Find us, and we’ll handle it together.”

The reminder that he didn’t guard the husband of the Great Goddess alone seemed to reassure Stipes, who straighted his shoulders to a military correctness. “Best get on with it, then,” he accepted the task, and with that they broke up, each to his or her own assignment.

 

 

 

 

 Chapter Twelve

THE SOUTH Market traded only in livestock, but that they had in plenty and with a variety of sizes and shapes that Llesho had never seen collected in one place before. Horses and cattle had gathered at the auction block, but camels, with one hump or two, restively pulling against their tethers still spat disgusting gobs as they passed. There were cages with chickens for roasting and roosters for fighting, each in a rainbow of colors. Dogs and sheep and strange small lizards sold alongside hummingbird tongues and monkeys considered a delicacy for the sweetness of their brains. Llesho shivered, thinking of Little Brother.

Here and there they paused to ask about work, but each time they met with a shake of the head and another rant about the hardness of the times. Then, in a stall filled with baskets of rabbits, a woman answered their questions with a buyer’s eye. “No work,” she said, “at least not the paying kind.” She dismissed Stipes with scarcely a glance, but examined Llesho with more interest. “I know as some might be looking for a strong back, if a coin or two would see a bed under you at nightfall.”

He’d seen that look in the slave markets and it made his skin crawl. It was the first hint of pirates, however.

“I think I’ll keep my eye open for more honest coin,” he answered with a sneer appropriate to the suggestion. It would look far too suspicious if he asked for information himself, but Stipes could do it. He dropped back a pace so that Stipes blocked her view and pinched him hard on the arm.

The guardsman twitched, but his training kept him from reacting more obviously. “Where would a man look if he wanted to do a little buying or selling in that market?” He didn’t sound enthused about the prospect, but Llesho did a fair job of acting out his outrage at the suggestion.

“And who did you plan to offer in exchange for a plate of meat?”

“I meant nothing by it,” Stipes assured him, almost as good at the part as Llesho.

The vendor cackled and pointed a thumb toward the corner most deeply hidden in shadows. “Ask the doorman at the Gate of Despair.” Another joke, or perhaps no joke at all, which she found more humorous than otherwise.

She’d given him an idea, though. As soon as they were out of sight of her little shop, he pulled Stipes into an empty stall smelling of large animals. The sides were high and made of wide planks with only the narrowest of chinks between them. With Stipes blocking the front, no one could see him and he quickly stripped off his military coat and trousers.

“What are you doing?”

“Sell these for me,” he answered, holding out his uniform and his pack, all except for the Goddess’ pearls, and the gifts he had carried since Farshore Province. “Or trade them for a pair of farmer’s drawers, since we are in the wrong market for even road-worn finery.”

“You’re not making plans behind Captain Kaydu’s back, are you, Holy Excellence?” Stipes whispered with a pointed stress on his title; kings were supposed to weigh their actions.

“No one else has any plan at all for getting Prince Tayy back!” Llesho knew he had to be careful. Lord Yueh had taken Stipes when the rest of them had gone to Farshore. He’d come to be a part of the cadre later, as Bixei’s companion, and had always doubted his position among them. The Lady SienMa hadn’t chosen him for the task, after all. The trick would be to win his cooperation without bruising his soul, but they didn’t have time for discussion and debate. Even now, the pirates might escape them.

“It’s my fault this happened.” And it felt like ice in his belly when he thought about what he’d said that drove Tayy into such danger. “I have to fix it, but I need your help to do it. I’m not asking you to keep a secret from Bixei or the others. In fact, I’m going to need you to tell them. But right now we need to hurry.”

Stipes looked at him with pleading in his one remaining eye, as if that alone might soften Llesho’s resolve. Finally, with a defeated sigh, he gave in. “What do you want me to do?”

“I need a better disguise. I’ll explain when you get back.”

Shaking his head, Stipes made his way back out into the market while Llesho hid himself in the straw. He had only a few moments to wait, however. Stipes was back almost before he settled himself.

“They thought I was a black crow who had stripped the uniforms off the dead on some battlefield,” he grumbled, dropping into his purse the few small coins he had made on the deal. “I could have traded all our uniforms and made a list for next time!”

Llesho took the farmer’s pants. They fit as well as such things ever do, which he realized wasn’t very well at all. At least Stipes’ garb could pass for that of a retired fighter turned farmer. “I suppose it’s the eye patch. Most fighters who have lost an eye are happy to retire to their rocking chairs, trading stories instead of blows.”

“More sense they,” Stipes muttered as he handed over the shirt. “Now, however, you said you would tell me the plan.”

“Thank you.” Llesho’s head popped through the neck of his secondhand farmer’s shirt. “And, yes, I will.

“The rabbit-vendor gave me the idea, actually,” he explained as he worked his arms through the sleeves. “The ‘Gate of Despair’ she mentioned must mark the slave market. She thought that you might sell me there for the price of a night’s sleep.”

“I won’t,” Stipes cut off that direction with a sharp slicing motion of his hand. “I know you are smarter than I am, and higher above me than the sky above the sea. How can one as low as me pretend to sell you in the marketplace!”

“Not pretend, Stipes. It won’t work unless it’s true. You will sell me to the pirates who will in turn take me to their ship. When they move, follow them until you find out what ship we move out on and where they are going. Then you go back and tell Kaydu, who will lead the charge to rescue us. Simple.”

“Begging your pardon, Holy Excellence, but that’s the stupidest idea I ever heard!” Stipes managed to sound like he was shouting even though he kept his voice below a whisper. It cost him, though, as the vein pulsing at his forehead attested. “It’s bad enough we’ve lost one prince. How will I explain to Bixei and Kaydu, let alone Hmishi and Lling, that I’ve lost the other one to the same damned pirates!”

“Does anybody else have a better plan?”

“Yes! You can sell me instead. The cadre can rescue me more easily than you, since I don’t have a magician trying to make me his prisoner at every turn, and you will stay safe among your guardsmen. You’re the one who knows the plan anyway—they’ll need you to lead the rescue.”

“It won’t work.” Llesho shook his head, determined. “How long can you hold your breath underwater?” Stipes shrugged a shoulder. It wasn’t something a gladiator or a soldier was often called on to do. But he’d trained on Pearl Island and knew about the pearl divers well enough that Llesho’s next words came as no surprise: “It has to be a Thebin.”

“You’re not the only Thebin on this quest, though. Hmishi could do the same, right? Or Lling. Either one is Thebin.”

And expendable like himself. He didn’t say it, but Llesho saw it in the set of his guardsman’s jaw and the spark of hope in his eye. Unfortunately, that wouldn’t work either.

“It has to be me. Tayy won’t take orders from anybody else.”

“I have a feeling I don’t want to know this,” Stipes said, “but what do you want him to do?”

“When the time comes, he’ll have to jump overboard. You’ll be waiting to rescue us in the boat that Kaydu’s supposed to hire.”

“I was right, that’s a horrible plan.”

“I’ve heard better myself on occasion,” Llesho admitted. He didn’t much like it, he just couldn’t think of anything else and, as he pointed out again, “No one else has any plan at all.”

“They died like flies caught in honey when battle took them into the Onga River,” Stipes remembered. “Not a one of them could swim. Do you think Prince Tayyichiut will throw himself into the sea even for you?”

“I’ll find a way to get him in the water.” He’d figure out that part later. First, Llesho had to find him. He headed for the shadows where the Gate of Despair was waiting.

Stipes, however, wasn’t finished. “How are you going to keep the others from noticing their king on the auction block?”

“Not the auction. We’d have no control over who bids or who wins. No, we find the pirate captain and make a private deal.” He could handle a private sale, had played that part before with Emperor Shou. His courage failed him at the thought of the auction block, however. He couldn’t live through that again. This way had to work. “You can say that you don’t like the way your wife looks at me so it’s not enough to get rid of me, you want me far away. Or that I tried to escape and the sea will prove harder to run away from.”

Stipes didn’t like it. Now that he’d he agreed, however, he had suggestions of his own. “If you are seen to follow me through the market untethered I can hardly try to sell you cheap because you tried to run away.” He tugged the leather belt from his waist and tied a loop in it that he slipped over Llesho’s head. “That should convince the customer.” He tugged the knot up snug against Llesho’s throat, then slung his own pack at him. “Until the money changes hands, they’ll expect you to carry the burdens.”

Llesho sucked in a quick breath, fighting panic and the grim foreboding that he wouldn’t escape the noose as easily as his plan dictated. Necessary anyway, he reminded himself. He couldn’t ask the khan for help in the coming battle for Kungol if he lost his nephew to the pirates. That wasn’t his real reason, of course. Even if it gained him nothing but the life of his comrade, he couldn’t leave Tayy to that fate. But it seemed more kinglike to back the plan with a political motive. “Let’s go.”

Stipes gave him a last worried frown. “I have a bad feeling about this,” he said.

“Give me choices,” Llesho countered.

As he knew, there were none. Stipes took up the end of the tether and led him by a roundabout path through the market to the corner where slave merchants had their holding pens.

In the distance the auctioneer called for the horses in a language very like Thebin. “Get a good price,” he muttered, his mind blessedly on Kaydu and the horses as he followed Stipes through the marketplace. “This plan doesn’t work without a boat.”

Underwater, he could breath into Tayy’s mouth long enough to convince the pirates they had both drowned. But they’d be out of reach of shore. Without a boat to rescue them, he and Tayy both would die at the oar.

 

 

 

It wasn’t as bad as he’d thought it would be, Llesho decided. It was worse. The last time he’d tried this particular ruse, Shou had accompanied him to the market in the guise of a jaded merchant looking to buy slaves rather than sell him. He hadn’t known Shou for the emperor back then, but he’d had the comfort of knowing the man for a general of the Imperial Guard should the situation get out of hand. It had, of course, and he’d nearly died in the battle that followed in the streets of the imperial city. But he hadn’t had to worry about Shou bending to the pressure of a slave trader intent on separating him from the Thebin boy he claimed as his property. This time the plan called for Llesho’s pretended owner not to buy the freedom of his brothers but to sell him into hard labor.

He followed Stipes at the limit of the leather belt tied around his neck as he circled in on the shadowy quarter of the market. There they found a section separated from the rest by a tall privacy shield of woven lathing.

They didn’t dare to exchange even a word of encouragement as they hunted out the gate that would gain them entrance to the slave pens beyond. Stipes tugged on the leather thong and glowered at him with a sharp word of warning to make the masquerade more convincing.

“Hurry up there, before the trading is done. You were quick enough under my wife’s skirts when I was away at market.” He started grumbling low enough that only those nearest them could hear his words. Gradually, he raised his voice as if overcome with anger, until he ended at a near roar, “At the oar or with a stone around your neck, you are for the sea tonight!”

Rude snickers followed them, but Stipes merely glared and flailed his arm in a pantomime of rage. “Laugh all you want, jackasses, all of you. Then ask yourself who is sneaking into your wife’s chamber while you’re here making a joke of an honest man!”

Stipes pushed through and presented himself at the Gate of Despair, a simple construction of wicker and rice paper covered everywhere with the images of wailing bodies in torment. The gate stood open, a plump guard with dead flat eyes sitting cross-legged on a dusty carpet with his back against the fence post.

“Wishing to sell.” Dragging Llesho forward by the noose around his neck, Stipes showed him to the gatekeeper.

The man didn’t let him in at once but set down the stick that he’d been using to scratch under his wrapped head covering. He rose ponderously to his feet and shook out his thin linen coat over voluminous pants. Taking Llesho’s jaw in his hand he looked deep into his eyes, as if he could read his mind, or his soul, through them.

“He’s very frightened,” was his conclusion. Not a hard reach, Llesho thought, though the man added the observation, “Caught in the wild, I take it—” a captive taken from his village or clan, that meant, “—and not born under the yoke.”

Stipes shrugged. “Don’t know where he came from. Needed help with the farm and his price was cheap. He tried to run once or twice, but I beat him and he seemed to settle in. Turns out he wasn’t so cheap, now that he’s cost me a wife, but what can you do?” Llesho had accumulated plenty of scars in his short life. He wondered how many of them would pass for the discipline of a harsh master, but Stipes had thought of that.

“He’d been cut up a bit when I got him. Healed and all—hasn’t seemed to affect his heavy lifting or bending to the plow, but he doesn’t exactly put himself out for his master.” And Llesho hoped the calluses on his hands would support that lie with the gatekeeper, who might not be a guard after all, but something else entirely.

The man turned his attention from Llesho’s face to his hands, turning them over and inspecting both the fronts and the backs. “Too small for my use, I’m afraid.” He dismissed Llesho with a flutter of manicured fingers. “Will you be putting him to the block?”

“Not any chance of that.” Stipes shook his head, emphatically. “I don’t want him washing up at my door ever again. Private sale I’m looking for, someone just passing through on their way back where they came from. As far from here as a boat can take a man.”

The merchant, as it now seemed, released Llesho’s hands with no comment about the pattern of his calluses, but heaved a sigh. “Not much market in that,” he said. “Most who come in before a voyage are bent on ridding themselves of their excess baggage, not buying for the trip. Still, if you don’t care what price you get, you might find what you’re looking for inside. The red trousers came in a little while ago and they are always looking for muscle. He doesn’t have much of that in the way they measure a fighter in the ring.”

A hand wrapped around Llesho’s upper arm demonstrated his point. While his fingers did not meet his thumb, they came closer than they ought for an arm with any power in it. As a slave, Llesho had no status to speak, and Stipes kept quiet about his training as a gladiator. He had an eye for a different buyer, which the slaver seemed to understand.

“He seems wiry and strong for all that if you’re looking to put him to the oar. They won’t pay much, but you’ll get something for him, and of course the satisfaction of knowing he won’t be sniffing under skirts any time soon.”

Their story had made it clear that they had come from the countryside, and the merchant or guard gestured them forward as a host might. “This is the market just for working stock,” he called after them with a wave of his hand to take in the whole building. He talked equally of the human and four-legged kind. “Quality trade you’ll find with the luxury items across the square.”

Stipes gave a knowing nod to signal his understanding but declined the invitation. “We have women at home,” he told the man, “but I would take a boy in trade to do the chores of this one. Do you know if the red trousers have brought in any such?”

“Maybe, but I wouldn’t want you to speak ill of this market in your town, sir. I would be cautious of that trade and take my money to a local vendor who hasn’t put as much use on any boy you wish for labor.”

The red trousers, who Llesho thought must be the pirates, weren’t likely to sell the strong young men they seized to row their ships. A slave near his own age offered for sale must already have broken under the oar. He’d be no use for heavy labor of any kind. With a companionable nod that he would heed the warning, Stipes tugged Llesho after him into the slave market.

The auction would take place in the same corral where Kaydu and their companions were selling the horses, but the slave market sheltered an array of booths and corrals like the ones they had seen filled with lesser creatures on the outside of the Gate of Despair. Each merchant displayed his wares, shouting out his trade to drum up interest for auction or to complete early private sales. A trader in an elaborate headdress of many-colored scarves braided and wound into a tall turban with ribbons hanging down his back displayed his human merchandise in mating pairs crouching in cages too low for them to stand and too narrow for them to sit.

Another in stark white from his tall round cap to his slippered feet showed half a dozen children with glazed expressions in their eyes tied by ropes to the support post of a shadowed booth. Llesho wondered if he read the sign above their heads correctly. The script was very like Thebin, but its advertisement, “for religious purposes,” made no sense.

Or he hoped it made no sense. Bolghai the shaman had sacrificed sheep and horses to fuel the khan’s pyre, and his burrow had been littered with the skulls of small animals. Without consciously willing it, he moved toward the booth with some half-formed idea of rescuing the innocent victims of this fearful place, but a warning tug at the noose around his neck pulled him up short. “He’s buying, not selling,” Stipes explained under cover of a warning glower. “It’s a rescue mission of sorts. The priests pay a small sum for them and raise them in the mission school. They’ll do more praying than a free man would put up with, but they stopped feeding children to the burning god long ago.”

Llesho wondered how he knew, but a slave didn’t ask questions, so he kept his mouth shut and his face blank. As they passed still more vendors with their human misery huddled in the backs of stalls or shivering cattle pens, Llesho heard a familiar accent in the crowd. Harnish, from the South. When he looked around him, he saw that they had passed into a corner of the market dominated by the raiders. In a smooth glide honed with long practice Llesho’s hand went to his sword, remembering too late that he came unarmed to the market as a farmhand and not a soldier. Quickly, he shifted his hand to rub at his hip with an aggrieved glare at Stipes, who marched ahead of him. With luck, any who had seen the move would mistake it for nursing the ache of a beating.

“Cut out the auctioneer’s fee; you won’t do as well if you wait,” Llesho heard a customer say, pointing out the flaws in a trembling man of middle years with no flesh on his bones to speak of.

“You’re right.” The raider sized up the huddled slaves crowded in the pen he guarded. “Maybe you’d like to take his place.”

The customer drew back in horror and departed at speed for the more “civilized” corners of the market while the raider laughed at his back. “I’ve sold his kind before—” The slaver had caught sight of Llesho and followed the noose back to where the belt ended in Stipes’ hand. He swaggered over with a gait calculated to set the long hair of his murdered victims swaying on the scalps sewn to his shirtfront and planted his gruesomely decorated chest in Llesho’s face. “This isn’t the best market for his kind, but I can get a good price for him if you’re interested.”

Llesho’s hand squeezed into a futile fist at his side. With no sword, not even his Thebin knife, he had no chance against this walking horror from his nightmares. He would die before he ever reached his target and that would put an end to their plan to rescue the Qubal prince from a slower death at the oar. It was just the memories that kept his mind leaping like a jerboa to act on his most fatal desires.

Stipes was shaking his head in a friendly but determined way, as if it didn’t matter that this man wore the skin and hair of his victims on his shirt. “This one’s going on a sea cruise.” He laughed as if he’d made a witty joke and pulled the noose tight when Llesho didn’t do the same. “Aren’t you, boy? A sea cruise, courtesy of old Red Trousers, hahaha!”

Llesho thought he was starting to enjoy the part a little too much, but even the raider wasn’t ready to contest with pirates for a scrawny Thebin slave boy.

“If you change your mind, we will be here until the end of business tonight, but you’ll get a better deal in trade before the auction starts.”

“I’ll keep that in mind,” Stipes promised, and resumed his search for the pirates.

“We must be close,” he muttered. “We’re running out of places to look.”

Llesho heard the words, but they didn’t come together to make sense in his mind. In the background, the cries of children rose above the murmuring roar of commerce to die abruptly again. Lost in his past, he remembered his own raw voice worn to silence on the Long March, so that he made no sound in the pens at all. The captain of the slavers had put his keepers on notice: “Shut him up, or I’ll cut his throat.”

The woman who carried him had handed him over to a man who had once been a soldier. That one had covered his mouth and his nose until, unconscious, he made no noise. After that, when he cried, the man always found them, and with his face wiped clean of feeling, would cradle Llesho in his arms and cover his face until, so near death that he had passed beyond the care of his mortal existence, he did not weep. Llesho had been a wise child, however. It hadn’t taken long to learn not to cry at all.

So entangled had he become in the horrors of his past that he didn’t realize they’d come to a halt in front of a corral with a small kiosk in its center. A small group of boys and men stood or sat at the limit of their bonds around a tall post set like a guardsman in front of the kiosk. “Is he touched in the head?” A woman reached out with a horny hand and grabbed him by the shoulder. With a hard shake, as if to rouse him to his senses, she added a caution, “If he is given to fits, we can’t have him among the oars.”

“No fits,” Stipes answered the question for him as his owner had the right to do. “But he’s slow-witted.”

Well, he had to be pretty stupid to come up with this plan, Llesho agreed. The slave dealer had skin like leather from the sun and the harsh winds on the water, and her lips were stained bright red from the nuts she chewed while she talked. A scarf aswirl in bright and clashing colors did a poor job at holding back her hair, a mix of brown and gray that seemed to be making a brave effort to escape the knot tied at the nape of her neck. She might have been any seafaring short-hauler from the clothes that any pas serby could see. Llesho knew she was a pirate, however, because he was looking down as suited a humble slave. Beneath her homely skirts peeked satin cuffs where wide trousers with red-and-yellow stripes were gathered in tight above her greasy slippers.

He had a feeling this one knew how to wield the short curved knife she wore at her hip and maybe practiced with it on slave boys who were a bit dull-witted. Did Kaydu knew that women roamed the Marmer Sea as pirates? His mind skittered away, down its own odd trails as it often did in times of peril. He tried to imagine his captain in red-striped trousers, swarming the side of a fat freight hauler. It scared him that the image came so quickly and fit so well.

“He doesn’t look very strong.” With the back of her wrist she wiped a trail of ruby-colored drool from her lip and then, like the merchant at the gate, she took his hands in hers. Turning them to look at his knuckles and back again, she ran rough fingertips over the calluses on his palms.

“He’s stronger than he looks,” Stipes bargained. “It’s the southern blood, off the mountains, that makes him look so scrawny, but his kind have a name for endurance.”

“Looks like he’s done a day’s work of some kind,” she agreed, and released his hands. Llesho wondered if she recognized his skill with weapons in the pattern of his palm and the ridges on the side of his hand, the horn on his fingertips and knuckles so very like her own, but she said nothing of it.

“Take off his shirt.”

That drew Llesho’s head up, the spark of resistance in the tilt of his chin which he had enough sense of self-preservation to point at her out of a very unkingly slouch. She had a sharp eye, and he had a feeling that she’d read the scars on his body like a map of his battles even if she hadn’t credited the calluses for what they were.

The pirate took his defensive bristling for a different meaning, however, and snorted rudely out of an overlarge nose. “You’re a bit old for that trade, boy.” Without further explanation, she grabbed the hem of his shirt and pulled it over his head to slip down the leather belt that Stipes still kept a grip on.

Reflexively Llesho’s hand came up to cover the scars on his chest. He didn’t want anyone to see, didn’t want the evidence of what had happened to him out there for the world to make its own conclusions about him. The pirate wasn’t giving him a choice, though. In front of anyone who traversed that part of the slave market she tugged his arm down. Tapping her foot thoughtfully, she examined him like a butcher assessing his value on the hoof.

“Somebody did a clean job on that arrowhead.” She poked at the scar on his shoulder. “Odd, in the front though.” She turned him around, inspected his back. “You’d think a running slave would have his scars here—” She swept a hand across his back, where he carried just a few light marks from his days in slavery. The worst of it had come in Markko’s workroom and didn’t show on the outside.

“Neighbors helped round him up. The local constable caught him in an ambush.”

The pirate nodded, accepting that for an answer. “I’m surprised you didn’t just leave it.”

“He would have been useless for the work. My wife had some skill with herbs and we thought to save the price of a replacement.” Stipes gave a hunched shrug, indicating much that wasn’t true. Llesho kept his mouth shut while the pirate peered over his shoulder with a knowing wink.

“Now this—” She turned Llesho around again, trailed a callused finger down the scar over his heart, his belly.

The marks told a story, of the claws of a giant bird that was no bird at all but the magician, Master Markko, tearing him open on the steps of the Temple of the Seven Mortal Gods. But he had no intention of recounting the tale for pirates.

“Does it pull much?”

“Hardly ever,” he lied, the first words he’d spoken in the bargaining. He couldn’t tell whether she believed him, but she signed away the evil eye with casual superstition.

“He reeks of dragons.”

“Not dragons, goodwife, but the hunting eagle of a great lord, who mistook the boy working in the fields for a coney stealing grain. The lord feared for the safety of his bird and would not call it off until it had satisfied its rage on the boy. But he healed well, and is as strong as he ever was.”

“And afforded your goodwife another opportunity to act the tender nurse,” she mused, as if his words had confirmed something she had already guessed. “Been covering himself in his master’s feathers, has he, and cockle-doodle-do-ing in the henhouse? He doubtless appealed to her sympathy. I suppose that explains why you’d like to rid yourself of him.

“Very well,” she decided. From a purse that hung from the scabbard of her sword she drew half a dozen coppers. It seemed too low a price.

He had no experience with the buying and selling side of slavery, having only been on the bought and sold side when a small and shattered child, but Llesho knew the price was low enough to make her suspicious if Stipes didn’t haggle. Fortunately, Stipes had his story ready.

“Not so fast, now. I don’t know much about city ways, and so I don’t know to haggle over the price for boys in the marketplace. But this one has already cost me more than he’s worth in trade. So I’ll take your coppers, if you make as part of the bargain that he is gone from this port by morning, and he never sets foot on dry land again.”

Llesho thought that was a bit strong, but the pirate shook her head as if the agreement Stipes demanded made a sorry kind of sense for the cuckolded farmer he pretended to be. “All right. He’s young for the work and not likely to survive past the first storm anyway, but he’s cheap enough. You’ve got your bargain. I claim him bought and paid for the Bayerenin.”

Llesho figured that must be the local name for the pirates. He was already thinking ahead to the next step in his plan. He scarcely noticed when the pirate stuck out her fat tongue and licked a bright red streak across her thumb. When she pressed the sticky thumb to his breast, right above the arrow scar, he twitched away in surprise.

“None of that, boy.” She tightened the noose threateningly around his neck. “You’ve got my mark on you now. I will not be best pleased if I lose my six coins for nothing, but the market guards have little care for that. They will kill you if you try to run and present me with the carcass when they are done.”

Stipes took a step with mayhem in his eyes, which would put them back to where they were when they had begun the search for Prince Tayy, but this time without a plan. So Llesho bent his leg and groveled in the dust at her feet.

“Sorry,” he croaked out of his constricted throat, and she let up on the noose with a righteous sniff.

“As you should be.”

When it seemed that he might survive long enough to reach the sea, Stipes took up both his and Llesho’s packs, and turned to leave.

 

 

 

 

 Chapter Thirteen

DON’T GO! As if he heard the unspoken words, Stipes turned around one last time. The pirate woman read it as easily as Llesho did.

“Too late now, young farmer.” She spat a fat red gob of slime onto the sawdust covered floor to emphasize her point. “Coin has changed hands, the deal is done. I can maybe trade you an old fellow for him, or a girl, but that’s only because I’m a good-hearted soul and hate to see a customer go away dissatisfied.”

Hate to strangle the merchandise when you can sell it,Llesho thought, but he dropped his gaze to the sawdust lest the evidence of his fear sway Stipes into doing something foolhardy.

“What’s done is done,” Stipes agreed, and with a heavy tread, he walked away.

Do something foolhardy. Get me out of this.Tayy must be thinking the same, with less hope, Llesho thought, and reminded himself that Stipes wouldn’t be far off. He knew the plan and he’d follow the pirates. Kaydu needed to know where they had taken him; not, however, before he found Prince Tayyichiut.

“I don’t suppose you’ve been fed or watered since morning,” the pirate muttered under her breath. It was clear she was talking to herself and not to Llesho. She took up the belt that Stipes had looped around his neck and tugged on it to get his attention.

“Come on. No food; food gives strength and strength gives a new slave ideas. But I can find a drop of water to keep you on your pins at least until we reach home. Then you can have something to eat, and all the ideas you want for whatever good they will do you.” She laughed then, and though she had said nothing of ships and the sea, Llesho knew the joke all right. With any luck at all they would turn the punch line back on the pirates. But he kept his expression humble and managed a quiver in his chin.

“Don’t lay it on too thick; there’s none but me to see it, boy. Keep it for a more gullible audience. You’re saucy enough when it suits you, I reckon.”

Llesho didn’t say anything, which was what she expected. “Drink, and don’t make trouble. I’ll wring your neck and mourn the loss of six pennies if you give me any trouble.”

“Yes, ma’am.” He took the cup and drank, then let her lead him to the post where she tied him among the handful of young men who sagged dispiritedly around it. They gave him an incurious glance but said nothing. Sliding his back down the pole, Llesho sat in the way of the pearl divers taking their rest in the shade of a palm tree on Pearl Island, letting none of his time in combat show in his posture. The woman had made it clear that the pirates kept a watch for slaves plotting together, and he didn’t want to give them a reason to separate him from Tayy in the boats, in fact, he decided, it would be best to pretend hostility when they met again. What better cure for escape plans than distrust? He refused to consider that they might not be the same pirates, or they might not put him to oar on the same ship.

“Alph!”

Called by the pirate’s sharp cry, a man with a wide sashed coat over his pirate pants bustled out of the kiosk at the center of the corral. A hand of women trailed behind him on a lead. The pirate woman gave him a nod of greeting and took the lead. “Keep the boys quiet while I’m gone,” she said, and hauled on the rope to set the women in motion. “It shouldn’t take long to dispose of these, and then we head for home.” None of them were young enough or fresh enough to sell for wives in the luxury market, but they’d go for washerwomen or cooks, perhaps. In spite of their weeping they’d been fortunate to survive their encounter with pirates at all.

The man with the coat over his pirate garb nodded an acknowledgment. Like his companion, he said nothing to give away their destination or their identity. Anyone might know, however, who thought to look down at the ankles of their yellow-and-scarlet pants.

Left alone with the slaves destined for the oar, he sat on a stool and bounced the flat of a scimitar against his knee as a warning. When one of their number wandered too close to the end of his tether, their guard snarled threateningly with a yawn in his voice. Even here on land he expected no resistance. At sea, Tayy’s rescue from within the ranks of the slaves themselves would come as a complete surprise. Or so Llesho hoped. But Tayy wasn’t anywhere in the corral, and he hunkered in on himself, saving his energy for the night ahead.

 

 

 

The pirate woman came back as the market was closing up for the day.

“About time, Moll,” her companion grumbled. “A man needs some relief from time to time.”

“Tie a knot in it,” she answered him back. One way or another, she’d rid herself of the women she’d left with, bringing back one man about Bixei’s age but with a darker tan to his skin and a sneakier look around his eyes. “It will have to wait until we reach the docks.”

Instead of putting the new man into the corral, she hauled on the ropes and thongs that bound her earlier purchases, tying them together in a line that her whining cohort shoved into order. Llesho found himself toward the middle, tied by the neck and one ankle far too close to a much taller man in front and with another tied up close behind him.

“Left!” Alph the pirate called the cadence and Llesho tried to raise his foot at the same time as the man in front, put it down to the same rhythm. He was the only one among them who had gladiator training, however, and had learned to match the rhythm of an opponent. Their line was soon tangled again, since most of the slaves didn’t know what a “left” was.

“This one,” Llesho gasped out, tapping the left instep of the man who’d been to his rear a moment before. Then he’d lifted his right foot and knocked Llesho and himself down with it. All along the line nooses had yanked tight around the slaves’ necks, and they all pulled at their bonds as they struggled to breath.

“Fools!” The pirate, Moll, ranged up and down their sorry line, clipping at this one and that one with a shortprod meant as a reminder and not punishment. They had to be fit to work at the end of the day.

This time, when Alph called out the cadence, “Left!” they all managed to lift the same foot, if not at the same time. The line was learning to work together. Llesho recognized the method if not this exact version of it.

Still, panic threatened to rob him of the breath he needed to walk. He couldn’t, couldn’t, do the Long March again. Better to lie down and die where he stood. He considered doing just that, falling to the pavement and letting Moll mourn the loss of six small coins while she strangled him.

But ahead he heard the sound of the sea lapping against the stone of the wharf and the gentle slap of wavelets against the wooden prows of boats. Once or twice he caught a glimpse of Stipes matching their pace in the shadows. The pirates had no reason to suspect a plot, however, and paid no attention to what might be following. Alph called them to a halt and lined them up along the stone edge of the wharf. Looking down onto the dark water gen tled to a soothing lap against the piers and jetties, Llesho wondered if they were supposed to swim out to the pirate vessels, but Alph shifted his coat and his trousers and let a bright yellow stream arch out into the water below.

“Don’t take all day about it,” he ordered the men and boys who stared from the pirate to the waiting sea.

In his long travels, Llesho had learned never to waste an opportunity to eat, sleep, or relieve himself on the march, and Alph didn’t have to make the suggestion twice. Before long there were six streams arching into the night. And soon, they were done watering the sea and had settled their clothes again.

Moll had faded into the shadows while all of this was going on. As they prepared to march again, she reappeared, more impatient than ever with her prod and her cursing. “Come on, you lubbers! What do you think this is, a picnic? We sail on the falling tide if we ever reach the ship!” In fact they had only to walk a hundred more paces to reach their destination, a ship far larger than he’d thought any pirate ship to be. And this one had a gangplank resting on the shore with a name,Guiding Star, on an arch above the landing.

“Property for my master on the Islands,” Moll called out to the customs official standing under the arch. Not a pirate ship, then. He doubted they’d grown so bold, even in Edris. The pirate in disguise handed over a sheaf of papers and drew the new slaves forward, one by one, to have the thum bmark on chest or arm or shoulder checked against the one that filled the official circle in the documents. All legal, and Llesho wanted to kill somebody for it, to tear the market down and put it to the flame. The customs official, knowing nothing of these thoughts of blood and murder, held the papers up to Llesho’s breast and measured the prints one against the other.

“All watertight and seaworthy,” the official handed back the papers and turned to his next customer as Moll led her property up the gangplank. They’d meet the raiders of the sea somewhere between Edris and the Islands.

Stipes had vanished, going back to find the cadre and report, he hoped. In the meantime it was down, down, into a hold with water ankle deep on the floor and the light from a single lamp to find their way. Moll stopped halfway down the ladder, leaving Alph to slosh through the bilge to a long beam set low to brace the hull of the ship. Into the beam were set metal shackles and the same hung from the rafters over their heads. The pirate grabbed a loose chain draped over the Y of an upright supporting the deck over their heads and used it to fasten the slaves to each other by a metal leg ring. Only the last of their line, the one closest to the hatch, did he shackle to the beam.

Prepared for a quick escape. Llesho figured they’d never reach the Islands where theGuiding Star was heading, and Alph would only have one lock to deal with when they made their hasty exit. If the ship were breached in the hold, they’d all still drown, as they would if they hit the water so burdened with each other and the heavy chain. Most ships didn’t sink, of course. The knowledge would have comforted him, except that he didn’t think the pirates planned to off-load their cargo on land.

Then Alph was done with them and headed up the ladder after Moll. In his hand, he carried the lantern. Too soon, he had cleared the hatch, taking with him the last of the light. Above, hinges shrieked in rusted pain and the hatch slammed down with a crash of timbers meeting timbers. They were well below the waterline and so had no windows or vents for air or light. Llesho found himself in a dark more complete than he had ever known.

Not silence, though. They did not speak to each other, each as ill disposed to conversation as the next. But the soft sound of one man’s prayer mingled with the sibilant curses of another and the moans and sobs of yet another. Llesho tucked his legs up tight under his chin and clasped his arms around his shins.I will count the days of the season before I weep, he bargained with himself. When he had counted his way around the seventy-seven days of summer, he made a new deal for the days of spring, and so on into winter.

Halfway to midwinter’s day the boat lurched at its mooring and Llesho heard the shouted chant of sailors dragging in the lines. So they were on their way. Somewhere out in the night Tayy was pulling an oar under a sky thick with stars that offered him no hope but Llesho, who lay chained at the bottom of hell. For about the hundredth time since Alph had dumped them in the dark, he wondered what had possessed him to come up with such a stupid plan.

In spite of his terror, however, the exhaustion of the day and his almost-forgotten familiarity with the motion of the boat on the sea worked against him. He’d barely made it round to summer again when he lost his place in his count. Soon, to the rise and fall of the waves at his back, he fell asleep, only to wake again to the harsh thud of a boat ramming them amidship.

Another. Another. Llesho roused up to the shouts and sobs of his fellow slaves crying out in terror of being holed. The boats that had come alongside seemed to be nudging them along but were making no attempt to damage them, at least not yet. Pirates, Llesho figured, and unlikely to sink them while their own cargo rested in the bottom of the ship. Still, he huddled with the others in fear for his life and waited for a sign that they were rescued—from drowning, if not from the pirates—or left to die.

Confirmation of his guess came quickly. Above them, the hatch slid open with a heave. Sticking his head into the abyss, a stranger with a thick dark beard and his hair held up in a brightly colored turban held out a lamp to light the way. More pirates, their wide red-and-yellow pants billowing to the narrow cuffs at their ankles, started down the ladder. In the lead, Alph carried a scimitar between his teeth. One hand guided him down the ladder and in the other he carried a key.

By the dim light of the lantern, Llesho noticed that the newest of the slaves, the one Moll had brought back from her sale of the women, braced himself in a way Llesho recognized. He was going to attack the pirate and try to take the scimitar, which might have worked if Alph were alone, but would get them killed now.

Under cover of scrambling out of the way, he fell against the man and grabbed his arm with a muttered warning in Shannish, “If he drops that key, we will lie here until we die.” Then he tried again, in the few words of Harnish he could string together. While pleading for Radimus’ freedom he had learned the word for “shackles” and “release” but he couldn’t be sure that he’d strung them together in a way that made sense. The man might not speak either language, but there was still Thebin to try. Llesho sucked in a breath. Before he could get out the words, however, he felt the tension leave the slave’s body.

A slight nod, and the man gave him a thoughtful look, taking in more than Llesho wanted him to know. How another soldier in the mix affected his plan would take some thought. For the moment, the man had settled into a waiting mode. With any luck, Alph would never know how close they had all come to disaster.

The pirate had waited until they sorted out their apparent clumsy tangle before approaching, which he did with a grunt of distaste. On the open sea they had taken on more water—not enough to endanger the ship but too wet for most stored goods. Llesho figured that’s why they put the human cargo down here. Human flesh took longer to rot than flour or salted fish. The shackles by which the lead slaver had tied them all to the keel beam was now underwater and Alph reached for it with his nose pinched and a snarl around the scimitar in his teeth. Finally, the key turned in the lock and the leg ring fell open.

Quick as that, he moved the scimitar to his hand, waving it at the ladder. “This way, or die with the ship,” he said, and waded away.

Though free of the ship’s beam, the slaves remained bound to each other. Llesho curbed his panic, knowing if they rushed the hatch they would tangle and maybe die down here. With all the self-control he could summon, therefore, he waited for the sorting out that set the last man into the hold first in the line that followed Alph up the ladder. It seemed like forever, but in moments they were out of the bottommost hold. Through another hatch they found themselves on the lower deck, a long gallery that had once been a gun deck. The guns were gone. Between the cradles, passengers with their belongings in sacks and bundles had marked out spaces in family groups. Now they huddled together, clutching at each other in terror.

“Pirates!” went the whisper through theGuiding Star, and already the red trousers were moving through the clustered knots of cowering passengers, roaring curses and waving their scimitars. They were on their way out of port and had no need of market slaves, but sorted out the men who might be useful at the oar.

As they went, they opened bundles and scattered property in a careless search for valuables, though they were finding little worth their effort on this deck. A little girl began to cry. Horrified, Llesho watched helplessly as a pirate snatched her from her parents by one leg and tossed her out a gun port. Chained as he was, he could do nothing to stop the rampage.

Alph ignored the looting but gathered the new captives as he went and led them all up the next ladder, where open sky and chaos greeted them. Under the white glow of Great Moon Lun, the crew of the ship had closed in hand-to-hand combat with the overwhelming forces of the pirates. A dozen or more small galleys surrounded the larger but less agileGuiding Star. The merchant sailors did not give quarter easily but fought across a deck washed red with the blood of pirates and seamen alike. Metal clashed against metal to the cries of the wounded and the gurgles of the dying.

Smoke that began as a trickling irritation at the back of Llesho’s nose soon billowed over the deck in dense black clouds. He’d fought fire before and knew the devastation the flames could wreak in just a short time. If he were going to die, he preferred the sea to the flames. Better not to die at all, though, and Alph kept them moving in spite of the panic of the slaves and the carnage around them. Llesho crouched low under the smoke and followed as quickly as the boy in front of him could move.

Then the dead weight of a murdered seaman crashed into them. A single pass of a scimitar had severed his head from his neck, which bled out the last beating of his heart in great squirting gouts over the chained slaves. The boy ahead of Llesho stopped with a horrible scream, his bloody hands raised as if to cover his eyes until he noticed what they were covered in. Then he froze, pale as Great Moon-Lun herself.

“Come on!” Alph had continued moving and Llesho gave the panicked boy a shove before they were all strangled by the chains that linked them neck to neck. “Stay down and stay moving or you’ll wind up like that sailor!”

He didn’t know if the words sank in, but his hand on the boy’s arm seemed to calm him enough to follow where he was led. Llesho got him moving, realized the new man had done the same behind him. Keeping low and skirting the worst of the fighting, they scurried across the slippery deck. A thick rope with knots tied at regular intervals served as a ladder down to the pirate boats. With one leg over the side, Llesho scanned the deck littered with dead.

When he’d been imagining his plan, the pirates had taken them down to the docks and piled them into their own boats and rowed them out to sea. But the city was full of guards and customs officials who would seize the small boats and put them all in prison if they came openly to port. As with most of the plans that had brought him across half the known world, this had been almost a good one. The trickster always struck between the details, however. As if thinking of the old proverb could call up what it spoke of, a familiar voice called out of the gray mist.

“Ahoy, there, get those boys into the boat before the fleet sees the smoke and comes calling!”

Master Den, in the wide striped trousers of a pirate and a sash tied around his naked head, strode toward them with with a gleaming sword flashing in his hand. When he drew closer, Llesho saw that he wore a gold ring threaded through a hole in the side of his nose.

“Down you go, boy, by ladder or by air. Unless you can fly, I’d start climbing.” Not a flicker of a lash gave a clue that the huge figure was anything but what he seemed—a giant among pirates—or that he recognized Llesho.

“We have to help put out the fire!” Llesho called to him. Flames were leaping into the sky from amidships, and already smoke curled from just above the waterline.

“The fire will go out on its own soon enough,” Master Den the pirate said, as if this were an obvious fact.

“Magic?” Llesho asked hopefully.

“Water,” the trickster scoffed, “When the ship sinks. Now go before I change my mind about you and feed you to the fishes.”

There couldn’t be two of them. Master Den’s warning, so like the threat of becoming food for the pigs on Pearl Island, told him this must be the teacher he knew. As he began the long climb down to the pirate ship bobbing below, however, Llesho wondered. Could the trickster have an evil twin? Or had he grown so used to Master Den the teacher that he’d forgotten the nature of a trickster god? What was he supposed to learn from this, or had all the time from Pearl Island to Edris been some elaborate prank? Would he pay for his adventures not only with Tayy’s life, but with the lives of all aboard theGuiding Star? With the freedom of all Thebin, too, if he didn’t get out of this in one piece?

He doubted anyone less familiar with his moods would notice, but it suddenly struck him that the trickster god looked more nervous than Llesho had ever seen him. He glanced over his shoulder as if to hurry his fellow pirates to their work, but his eyes strayed to the bridge of the ship. Llesho stole a glimpse in the same direction and felt his heart stutter in his breast. The fighting had moved on and Master Markko stood alone above the fray, looking down on the clash of swords on the deck.

Reflexively, Llesho ducked his head below the rail, letting his mind process the information as it could. What was the magician doing here? The answer struck him as forcefully as the mind of the magician. Pontus, of course; Menar was on the other side of the Marmer Sea. It had always been a race to find him first. If Kaydu was right, Master Markko was going back to the place of his own first enslavement in search of Menar and the prophetic rhyme that would tell him how to win the gates of heaven.

Master Markko wasn’t looking his way, but seemed to be focused on the fire burning amidships with a combination of frustration and anger that made him wonder how the fire got started in the first place. The magician had the power to conjure flames, but he’d never seen him put a fire out, by magical or any other means.

Master Markko had always been capable of mistakes. Llesho figured setting fire to your own boat had to be one of his smaller ones. That didn’t help the innocents who huddled together at the stern, unsure where their greater danger lay—the sea or the burning ship. When he turned back, Master Markko had disappeared, but in his place a monstrous bird rose out of the flames. No phoenix, he guessed, but the magician himself escaping his own fire in the shape that had nearly killed Llesho in the battle of Shan market. With a blood-chilling cry the horrible creature wheeled overhead. Catching sight of Llesho, he dove to the attack.

Llesho pulled at his chains but bound to his companions, and with no weapon but the chains that held him, he could do nothing to protect himself.

“Ahhhh!” screamed the boy who had lately stood in shock at the blood of a dead sailor on his hands. Llesho grabbed his shoulder and pulled him down to make a smaller target of them all. The stranger who moved like a soldier narrowed his eyes as if measuring an enemy in combat, but weaponless against the magician he was as helpless as the rest of them.

Master Den had to do something, however; why else was he here? From the trickster’s direction he heard a whistle, as master might call a favored hunting bird. Across the looming disk of the moon the sleek shadow of a great-winged osprey passed. Kaydu! It had to be, and he watched as she dove at the awful half-bird, half-beast creature that Master Markko had become.

“Awk!” The great sea eagle screeched her terrible battle cry. With talons extended, Kaydu dove on the creature’s neck, shaking him in her beak as he lashed about him with his scaly tail. He escaped her hold on him but left a bleeding chunk of flesh which she spit out onto the deck below. Llesho ducked as the steaming flesh fell on the hot planks.

Master Markko advanced his own attack, but Kaydu, in her osprey form, stayed just out of reach, harrying the monster when he dove for Llesho who watched from below. It might have gone on longer, but each bird had suffered wounds in the battle that sapped the strength they needed to hold their magical shapes. With the ship in flames below and hostile pirates everywhere in the sea around it, there could be no safe landing place. Soon Master Markko broke off, heading back in the direction from which theGuiding Star had come. When it seemed that he had been vanquished for the moment, Kaydu likewise made for shore.

Llesho wished that she could have delayed for a word before leaving him again to fate, but he knew that was impossible. Her father might have taken on the shape of a dragon and plucked him off the ship in his talons, but Kaydu didn’t have that skill or that strength yet. He was stuck here until his cadre came for him in a boat, and only now did he begin to wonder if he’d live until that help came.

But the string of chained slaves was moving again and Llesho had to move with them or take the whole line down in a heap. Slowly he made his way down the knotted ladder to the high prow at the front of the pirate galley. The little boats, he saw, had decking only at the two ends. At the stern, the helmsman and the beater sat. The high prows on their galleys acted as a bridge over which the pirates could swarm their prizes like an army of ants rising out of a dozen tiny anthills. From there, pirate captains directed the boarding and as was happening now, the return with loot and slaves.

“Not there.” Master Den leaned over the rail. With his sword he gestured directions at his fellow pirates. “I want the young brown one—no, not him, the other one. Right,” he said when Alph grabbed Llesho’s shoulder. “And that one, with the scar.” He pointed to the man Moll had brought back with her after selling the women at market. The one with battle-tested nerves.

“Aye, Captain ChiChu,” Alph answered with as much of a bow as he could manage in a bobbing boat. He held Llesho steady long enough to unlock his chains, then he gave him a shove in the direction that Master Den had indicated with his sword.

It wasn’t the next boat over, but the galleys were set with their sides one against the other. Old reflexes learned on Pearl Bay took over. Llesho measured the roll of the swell and the movement of the boats. At their closest point he stepped down with his right foot and up with his left, matching the pitch of the sea. He reached the boat that was his goal without incident while the second man followed him over. His new companion had the sea legs of a native sailor and moved from boat to boat as if crossing the unmoving floor of some rich mansion on shore.

The pirates herded Llesho and the new man onto the fore-deck, pushing them down to sit out of the way of the slave who beat a drum to set the pace of the oars. Suddenly, a shout went up, “Captain, ’hoy!”

Llesho looked around him, trying to find out what the warning was about. What he saw left him slack-jawed and speechless: Master Den—Captain ChiChu to the pirates, who might know the trickster as a god or as a man named after the patron god of pirates—stood on the burning deck of theGuiding Star. When the shout went up, he hooked a loop of rope around his foot and swung far out on it, over the sea. More precisely, Llesho realized with horror, over the boat he himself sat in. The rope was attached to a boom, and as ChiChu the pirate dropped toward the boat, a burning sail rose on its mast behind him, slowing his fall. A second before his foot touched down Den slipped from the rope and stepped lightly to the deck.

Freed of his massive weight, the rope whipped back up again, releasing the sail which bellied and fell with the sound of strained rigging and beating canvas.

“To the oars!” Captain ChiChu called out. The galley slaves didn’t ship oars, however, but instead used them like punts to nudge their light, swift vessel away from the burning ship. When they had cleared their own boats as well, the beater set up a flurry of sound on his drum that signaled the order of the stroke. Oars rose and fell in sequence and the boat leaped forward, paused, leaped again. If Llesho hadn’t been sitting down, he’d have fallen. With only a hand resting lightly on the side to steady him, however, Master Den shifted his weight into the motion, as unmovable where he stood as a lighthouse.

“We can at least save the people in the water!” Llesho cried as the galley moved into the night. In their wake, the burning ship shed an orange glare over the black water. “You can’t just leave them to die!”

He stretched his arm to the hapless few who had escaped the massacre by leaping into the sea. The desperate passengers splashed helplessly in the water, calling to their loved ones over the thunder of the flames and the deceptively gentle sound of the surge striking the wood of ships.

The pirates near enough to hear him snorted at his distress but said nothing. Master Den, however, turned a cold eye on him. “Pirates are not known for their mercy,” he pointed out in icy tones. “Nor could we take on any more if we wanted to. We would sink under the weight of those we tried to save. Or their fellows would overturn our boats in their desperation to board us themselves.”

The trickster god stared out into the night of terror with a look that had no mercy in it—that was the province of a different god—but something more than indifference.

“Some lessons are harder learned than others,” Master Den finally said. “When the fighting is over, the innocents have always paid the highest cost.”

His teacher seldom gave him the answers to his lessons, leaving it to Llesho to figure out the meaning. This time, however, the cost for his tutelage was too steep to leave to the usual methods. “This will, I think, prove an educational voyage for you, oarsman.”

With that, Master Den turned away. But Llesho wasn’t finished. “And what of Justice?” he demanded of the trickster god. In his journeys he’d found traces of the seven mortal gods wherever he looked. Some, like ChiChu himself, and the Lady SienMa, mortal god of war, he had met in person. Others he felt only in their touch on the land and people that crossed his path. In all this traveling, however, it seemed that this one god, the avatar of Justice, was marked most by his absence. Where was Justice?

“When you know that,” Master Den answered with a glint in his eyes of secrets and lessons still to teach, “you will have solved the puzzle of your quest.” So much for confidences.

They were well out from the wreck now. The beater struck a flurry on his drum like a warning to his rowers and then lifted his padded drumstick to his shoulder. As if each represented a single arm of one body, the rowers raised their oars in place. Suddenly, the boat was still except for the gentle rise and fall of the sea and the lazy movement of unseen currents. In the lull, Moll came rolling toward them. The disguise of her skirts gone, her pirate trousers hung about her thick legs in folds in the still air.

“Last found, first claimed,” she said, jerking her chin at Llesho and her most recent purchase. “You owe me ten copper coins for the boy, old pirate. The man cost more—I had to trade a strong young woman and her crone for him at the market and transport him all the way from Edris. If you want him, it will take a plump and comely girl for the concubine market in trade, the next from the ship’s allotment.”

“A fair price,” Master Den agreed. Llesho would have told him that she’d cheated him on his own price, and the other slave’s as well. Moll gave him a warning glare, however. He kept his mouth shut, remembering that she would mourn the loss of six coppers but not the loss of his sorry life if she felt the need to pitch him overboard. When it was clear that she would get her price, she added, “Where do you want me to put them?”

“Set the youth to work next to the Harnish boy—” which explained what Llesho was doing on this particular galley. “I recognize his kind. Thebin, they are called, rare enough in the marketplace but stronger than they look. And he knows his way across a deck. At least he won’t capsize us when he drops his load over the side.”

“You’re the expert.” Moll gave a noncommittal shrug. She wouldn’t sink a sale by naming her doubts, but he clearly hadn’t shown any signs of this Thebin strength to her.

“His people have a grudge against the grasslands, so they are unlikely to conspire foolishness together,” Master Den added as if he were working out the placement at the oars as he spoke. “But they are of an age and well graded for height. Put him on the outside position, next to the block, the Harnish boy in the middle, and an older, more experienced hand to guide them on the aisle.

“This one will take more watching, I think,” he added with a nod to the other man he’d brought aboard. “But he seems resourceful and strong. Not too resourceful,” he added a sharp warning in the glance he cast on the stranger with the eyes of a soldier. “Put him on a short chain, between two experienced hands. That will keep him from disappearing when the wind is ripe.”

That meant, when the smell of land beckoned. The new slave looked back at the trickster god with cold calculation in his eyes, but said nothing. Llesho wondered who the stranger was, and why Master Den had wanted him nearby. It seemed unlikely he would find out until his old teacher wanted him to know, so he followed Moll down the narrow center aisle of the galley to his place on the bench.

 

 

 

 

 Chapter Fourteen

LESHO HAD never seen a galley ship before. Lord Chin-Shi had used fat, wallowing sailing boats in Pearl Bay, with oars on board only for the rare days when they found themselves becalmed by a freak of the weather. Most days the boats rode with the prevailing winds which blew out with the tide of a morning and in with the tide at night. His journeys since he left the pearl beds had been mostly overland, with the exception of a memorable river crossing on the back of Golden River Dragon.

He’d heard of galleys, of course, but in stories they were great longboats each manned by hundreds of rowers pulling on oars long enough and thick enough around to form the corner posts of a seven-story temple. The narrow, sleek trim of the pirate galley seemed dangerously unbalanced and he walked cautiously, as if a misstep would overturn the small boat and land them all in the water. Moll had no such worries, however. She pushed him along, past a slim bronze gun affixed to the forward deck, into a cradle that took the recoil down a center aisle just wide enough for one to walk with caution.

On either side of the aisle were benches of rowers resting at their positions while the pirates settled the newcomers. There were more rowers than pirates, but not the hundreds that rumor claimed. Across each bench the pole of a single huge oar was drawn, holding the blade out of the water at a pivot point off the side of the boat. The stories hadn’t lied about the size of the oars. Llesho tried to imagine the giant from which such a monster might be cut; only in the oldest forests might one find such a tree.

Under direction of the pirates, rowers at the front carried loot from theGuiding Star to the rear, disappearing into what he assumed to be a shallow hold. A second gun amidships divided the groups of rowing benches across the narrow width of the boat. This gun was smaller than the forward artillery, since the cradle could only manage a lesser recoil on firing. Llesho knew about guns. The principle was similar to the fireworks of Shan, except that instead of explosions of colored lights, the guns hurled balls of iron or stone. He wondered if he might get a closer look, but Moll stopped just past the forward deck and nudged at the rower on the aisle.

“Wake your center.” She pointed to the rower in the middle. When he had roused from his dazed stupor, she gestured to the rear with her thumb. “You to the back,” she said, and leaned over to unlock the shackles that chained his right leg to a small step in front of the bench.

At first, the man didn’t move, as if he’d been stunned by a blow to the head and couldn’t hear for the ringing of his ears. Llesho could see the bones standing out on his arms and across his throat. The rower’s ribs showed through the laces on his tattered shirt like the steps on a ladder. There were open sores on his hands and blood on the oar he had held.This will be me, if we don’t get out of here, Llesho thought.This will be Tayy. He wondered how his teacher could be party to the anguish that had passed beyond expression on the man’s face, into the numbness that preceded death. He wanted to believe that Master Den wouldn’t let it happen to him or to Tayy even if his plan didn’t work. But he wasn’t as certain of ChiChu the pirate.

“Put this one in the middle for a shift or two,” Moll shoved Llesho forward. “When he has the knack of the oar, I’ll move him to the outside as suits his size.”

The slave on the aisle seemed to have a higher status than those who manned the inner grips on the huge oar. Sensible, when all their lives depended on the rower who controlled the pace and the power of each stroke. The oarsman seemed to have that in mind when he turned a disgusted eye on Llesho.

“This bank already has a new fish.” He snorted, a sound wet with snot, and thrust his jaw to the side where Prince Tayyichiut of the Qubal people huddled in his chains.

“They are suited by size and too clever by half.” Moll took the time to answer his objection, but made it clear she would hear no more about it. “This one will pick up the pace quickly enough or Cook will grind him up into pies for the captain’s table.”

He guessed that she exaggerated the punishment for failure. The man he replaced had looked like walking death, however, and Tayy’s shirt bore the scars of a struggle earned during his capture. He also wore the bloody stripes of the lash. If the plan worked, those open wounds would make his time in the water that much more painful. But the Harnish prince didn’t look up when his bench mate departed, and he didn’t look up now, when Llesho sat down next to him. The Harn avoided all bodies of water larger than a teacup and Prince Tayyichiut, for all his bravery on land, kept his eyes on his feet as if not seeing it could keep at bay the terror of water lapping at their sides.

It wasn’t going to be easy getting him over the side. He’d live, though, if the plan worked. Determined to learn the trick of the oar and save them both from further lessons drilled into their flesh by the lash, he slipped into his place.

“How about a look under my skirts, boy?” Moll laughed at him as she snapped the shackle around his leg. “Not so full of spit and vinegar now, are you?”

Llesho knew the old pirate didn’t mean him to answer the question. He kept his mouth shut, looking as much as possible like the cocky youth who had finally discovered the wages of sin were more than he could pay.

“Singer will show you what to do. Mind him and you may survive the trip.” She gave him a good-humored pat on the shoulder, as if she had not just condemned him to slow death as a galley slave, and left them to make her way to the rear, shouting, “Stow that barrel before you kill somebody with it!”

“I’m Singer,” the head rower on their bench introduced himself with a warning: “Do what you’re told and keep your head down or it will be the lash for all of us.”

Llesho gave him a brief nod. “So what do I have to do?”

That did bring up Tayy’s head, astonishment widening his eyes. And then he caught sight of the pirate captain newly arrived on the forward deck. At first, it seemed that he did not trust his eyes, or his surmise, since Master Den had his back turned to them. With a shout to bring them about, however, Master Den scurried to the side, showing his profile clearly to the rowers at rest on the forward bench. There must have been another captain when ChiChu was crossing the grasslands with Llesho’s cadre, but the trickster god was clearly in command now.

Prince Tayyichiut closed his eyes, but when he opened them again, Master Den still called out the orders to set to. No dream, then. Llesho sympathized with the feeling. He wasn’t happy with where he found himself either.

“So it was a trap all along,” Tayy said. “Pointless, though. My uncle will never pay ransom to get me back. I am at best an inconvenience to him.”

“Ransom!” Llesho snapped with all the contempt he could fake in his voice. He had to stop the prince from saying anything that would give away the fact that they knew each other.

“Who would pay ransom for Harnish scum! Old Stipes said he would see me pay for pleasing his lady wife, which was more than he could do. I was ready for death, but this is more than insult! I’d rather feed the fish right now than share a bench with damned Harnish scum!”

That did it. Tayy’s head snapped back as if he’d been struck, but it stopped the hasty words for a moment. They communicated in silent glares and speaking frowns for a long moment. Llesho wasn’t at all sure what the prince made of his desperately rolled eyes, but Tayy only said, “I didn’t think it could get any worse.”

“I don’t know anything about it. I’ve got problems of my own,” Llesho retorted gruffly. He ducked his head between his shoulders, hoping the pirates hadn’t heard them argue while he tried to figure out how he could explain it away to Singer, who watched them with ill-concealed contempt.

“You two know each other?”

“He’s Thebin,” Tayy answered with a superior sniff. “If there’s trouble, you’re bound to find a Thebin at the heart of it.” His grim expression may have passed for race-hatred in front of the rower, but Llesho read it rightly as a warning. He had, after all, come on board in the company of Master Den, his own trusted adviser, who now wore the breeches of a pirate. Tayy finished with a wary glance at their captain. “I know him, though.”

“We are lucky,” Singer agreed, though Prince Tayy hadn’t meant it that way. “The trickster god himself favors our boat with his presence.”

Fortunately, Tayy asked the question that burned on the tip of Llesho’s tongue: “You know him for the god ChiChu?”

“Of course. The pirates honor him for bringing them good fortune on their raids, which is no good fortune for us at the oar. But no boat with ChiChu on board has ever lost its oarsmen to the sea. This trip was a risk. The monsoons will be rising soon. With storm season upon us, I’m happy to see the old trickster on our decks.”

“Huh.” Llesho looked over at his teacher wearing pirate garb instead of his usual loin wrap and simple coat. This man could be a stranger. He’d assured Tayy that he’d had no part in whatever scheme the trickster had up his voluminous sleeves, however, which was all to the good. Now they just had to survive long enough for Kaydu to rescue them both.

The beater had set up a flurry on the drum and Singer rose to his feet, grabbing onto the handhold at his position on the oar. “Set oars!” he called in a singsong voice that explained his slave name. The oars came forward with a snap on the benches, all but their own.

“Grab hold!” he cried, and powerful muscles pushed on the great timber oar. “Right foot up!” he called out the pace. Llesho fumbled for a moment, watched what Singer did, and found the footboard. He set his right foot on it and lifted.

“Left foot up!” Singer called again and Llesho paid attention as Singer pressed forward, raised up on his right foot and set his left down on the narrow band of another footboard, this one across the back of the bench in front of them. Tayy had no sea legs and the motions were foreign to him as even a small boat would have been. They heaved forward on the great oar and he stumbled, struggling to keep up. Llesho took the weight of both their positions on himself and realized that Singer, too, was pulling more than his weight.

“Pull!” With a mighty heave against the oar, the rower threw himself backward, falling down onto the bench and dragging the oar after him.

Llesho did the same, discovered the bench wasn’t hard as he’d expected but cushioned against the repeated rise and heavy fall as he rowed. He soon felt as if he’d been beaten with a stick, but years in the saddle had toughened his behind and he didn’t think he would blister where he sat. At least if he managed their escape when night fell. He didn’t have another day to find their way out of the chains, he realized. Tayy was a skilled horseman, well versed in a variety of military arts. He had no aptitude for the sea, however, and his dread of the water tightened all his muscles into rigid bands, doubling the effort it took for even the simplest action of the oar.

Llesho and their lead rower could only do the work of their comrade for so long. It took all the self-control he had not to rail at his teacher. Master Den stood at the prow with a glass trained on the horizon and spared not a glance for his pupils suffering at the oar.

Sometime during his duty shift the pirate galley slipped into a prevailing current that ran through the sea like a river through the land. The rowers to the front and behind his own bench sat down to rest in a pattern that reduced the number of working oars to a quarter of their full strength. If they’d continued to row as they had in the pirates’ escape from the vicinity of their prey, they would have hit the men in front of them in the head. Singer showed them a new pace that was easier on all their backs, however. At quarter strength on the oars, the current carried them forward at much their former pace, except the boat no longer paused on the forward stroke. Old reflexes learned under sail on Lord Chin-shi’s boats snapped back into play and Llesho adapted his balance to the new motion.

Prince Tayyichiut struggled with the change in their conditions. Unable to keep to his feet on the forward motion, he fell against the oar and would have driven it into the heads of the men in front if Singer and Llesho hadn’t pulled back on their handholds. In saving the men in front of them, they missed the beat for dipping the blade of their oar, however. Alph was there, suddenly, with a lash to their backs to remind them of their jobs while they waited for the next beat of the drum to fall into the rhythm the beater had set. Tayy, who had never suffered the abuse of angry overseers, cried out in surprise, but Llesho kept his head down and put his back into the stroke.

“Hush!” he muttered under his breath. “Don’t draw attention to us!”

Singer threw his full weight against the oar, but he looked at Tayy like he was dead already.

Llesho pulled at the oar until his shoulders burned and his back screamed for rest. Then he pulled some more, but he wasn’t strong enough or expert enough to make up for a missing oarsman. Blood speckled the footboard in front of him—travel on horseback hadn’t prepared him for the shift and beat of his feet as he pushed off, pushed off. When he thought he would lie down and die from the pain, a whip cracked over their backs and he snapped to, pulling with arms that felt like they were on fire. It went on, forever it seemed, until his mind fogged and he felt the part of himself that measured things like pain and exhaustion grow distant.

Then, suddenly, it stopped. Tayy fell into a heap at the bottom of the well between the rows of benches, but there was work still to be done.

“Help me with this!” Singer pivoted their oar against the thole pin so that the shaft dipped low in the well. “Grab that chain and lock it down.”

Llesho did as he was instructed, locking the oar to a stanchion set in the bottom of the well for that purpose. With their station secured, the blade of the oar rode safely out of the water.

Sagging to the bench with a weary sigh, Singer grabbed Llesho by the shoulder and hauled him off his feet as well.

“Rest.”

“No problem with that one,” he acknowledged the welcome order. He ached all over. His hands were bloody, though not as bad as Tayy’s, and his feet looked like someone had been pounding on them with a stick. Which he sort of had, he figured.

Calluses would take care of the problem eventually, if he planned to stay, which he didn’t. But he needed water, he realized with a sudden sweeping desire that would have knocked him off his feet if he’d been standing. His mouth was dry right down to his sandals and his teeth felt gritty. Not since waking up slung over the back of a camel in the middle of the desert had he been this thirsty. Half-drowning in Pearl Bay had taught him what would happen if he drank any of the seawater just beyond his reach, though. Not a good idea.

Just as he had decided to ask about the problem, Singer reached under the bench and rolled a barrel into the well.

“Water.” The oarsman filled the dipper he took from its side and poured it into a cup which he handed over to Llesho. “Drink it all, or you’ll die of the heat.”

Llesho did what he was told without thinking, the way he’d trained as a slave child to respond to Lord Chin-shi’s overseers. He wanted more, but knew better than to ask. The water revived him, however. Surfacing from the darkness of his own exhausted mind, he found that Prince Tayyichiut had curled as far from the side of the galley as he could get.

“I can’t do this!” Tayy cried. His hands were callused from weapons practice and the reins, but the new work still found bits of soft skin to shred. Blood dripped from the handhold carved out of the side of the secured oar.

“Take it.” Singer pressed a cup of water on him, but Tayy brushed it aside.

“Just let them kill me and be done with it! Who cares whether I take days to die like the last person in my seat or die immediately? He curled his blistered ringers into loose fists and tucked them protectively up under his arms.

“And what do you think they will do with your sorry carcass if you can’t row?” Singer jeered at him. “I thought you didn’t like the water.”

Tayy was a Harnishman, the son of a people well known for their dread of deep water. The wandering clans would walk the length of a river to avoid wetting their shoes in the crossing of one. No Harnishman had ever learned to swim and dozens had died when the battle with Tsu-tan had pushed them into the Onga River. Nothing could be more terrifying than the sea washing the side of the boat at Tayy’s shoulder. At Singer’s goading, however, he gave a shuddering glance over the side, as if he could not yet believe that a man of the Qubal clan had wandered out of reach of land. He quickly turned away, braver if he didn’t have to look at the water under their boat.

“I would prefer to die in my own ger-tent of old age with a proper funeral pyre and a good shaman to guide me to the underworld. But there is only one way to get off this boat, and it’s clear even to me that I’m bound for a watery grave sooner than later.”

Turning his gaze on Llesho, his face was void of expression in a way that had become all too familiar. After their last argument, Tayy wouldn’t have expected Llesho’s cadre to travel for days to find him, or that they would set a rescue plan in motion. He’d given the Harnish prince a clue, but Master Den, Llesho’s most trusted adviser, walked free as the captain of the boat that enslaved them. So he must wonder what truth he might find in the pantomime being played out on the pirate vessel, and if it had anything to do with him at all.

Tayy wouldn’t parade his shattered hopes for the world to see, not even the tiny world of their small bench. In case he was wrong, he waited for a sign to tell him what he should do. Action was still hours away, however. At the moment, they had a more pressing problem. If Llesho didn’t find a way to tell his friend that theyhad a plan, he was going to get himself killed.

Fortunately, Singer had his own method for keeping his young bench mate alive. He sneered in a way that seemed calculated to make the newly enslaved young grasslander angry. “If they made it easy to die, everyone would do it,” the oarsman said. “You foolishly assume that the pirates who rule your life on the bench would waste the energy it would take to kill you with a knife or a sword.”

“I have seen men tortured before.” Tayy firmed his chin, but his skin was very green, whether from the sea, which had become choppy while they talked, or from the memory of Radimus’ torture at the hands of his uncle, Llesho couldn’t tell. In spite of the memory, he seemed ready to endure the attentions of his slavers if it would end the misery of his waterborne existence.

“Torture, too, takes energy our pirate captors are loath to spend on the wind,” Singer pointed out.

Llesho figured the rowers, in the absence of sails, were the wind that moved the galleys. No torture seemed like a good thing to him, but the punch line must be coming. Apparently Tayy had the same thought. He cast a baleful glare at their head rower and waited for the explanation.

“If you will not work, some enterprising pirate, or perhaps your rowing mates, will pitch you overboard to sink or swim.”

Singer gazed out toward the pale gray clouds that obscured the horizon, leaving little doubt as to the likely outcome if one should land in the water. Land lay under the mist, more distant than the mainland had been from Pearl Island. Even with all the skills of a pearl diver, Llesho had almost died trying to reach his own far shore. He wondered how many others on the galley were like Tayy and couldn’t swim at all. They were all chained to the footboard, of course, and could neither leap over the side nor be thrown over until the pirate with the key unlocked the chain. Or until somebody picked the lock.

“I don’t want to be here!” Tayy shivered miserably and huddled at the bottom of the boat.

“Nor do we all,” Singer agreed. “But between the sea or the boat, we generally choose the boat.”

“I don’t want to die,” the prince admitted.

“Then see that you don’t,” Llesho instructed him tartly. With luck, the sharpness of his tone would alert Tayy to be cautious. “There are worse things even than the sea.”

He meant it as encouragement, but the mist that hid the horizon seemed to stir, clotting into clouds before his eyes. Edris lay in that direction. Llesho felt the whisper of a familiar, dreaded consciousness moving in the distance and wondered. Storms were worse, especially magical ones, and a magician whose ship had burned out from under him might take that shortcut to his goal. He kept the thought to himself.

“How much time do we have for rest?” Llesho asked. They couldn’t escape during a work period or while daylight showed their every move to the watchful pirates. When they did go, they’d need to be as rested as possible. To have any hope of success, he had to know the rhythms of the boat and their own cycle of sleep and rest.

“Count on the same period of rest as of work.”

The situation could have been better, but Llesho thought they could live with that. Singer had his gaze turned away from the land, however, and stared out over the water as if measuring something the rest of them couldn’t see. “We are at quarter shifts right now, but I think we will leave this current before long. Expect the rowing to go harder in the next shift.”

A slave was passing down the aisle, feeding the rowers on rest break. Llesho held out his cup while the slave filled it with a runny soup of beans and rice and topped it with two hard biscuits. He ate them, scarcely noticing their bland flavor, staring into the same distance as their lead rower. When he squinted, he could just make out the ripple of the current running inexplicably faster than the general run of the tide. It would loop them back toward land if they rode it much longer.

Come nightfall, both tide and current would pull toward shore. If their rescuers didn’t find them in the dark, they might still float in with the tide. He turned to warn Tayy to conserve his strength. The Harnish prince was already asleep, curled where he had fallen in the bottom of the boat, his dinner scarcely touched.

“You’d better do the same, boy,” Singer admonished him. He scooped up the abandoned food, tucking the biscuits in Tayy’s pocket and finishing off the soup for himself. He wasn’t cruel, just practical. Tayy wouldn’t survive another day as a galley slave and there was no point wasting any more food or time on him. Singer’d left him his biscuits in case he decided to live, but more than that just hurt their own chances of survival. If Tayy were a stranger, if they didn’t have help coming, Llesho might have felt the same way. He hoped not, but he might think differently after a few more shifts at the oar.

“I get the bench.”

The oarsman’s voice brought him out of his silent contemplation. Briefly, among his own followers, Llesho had been a king. With a notable breakdown of good sense where Prince Tayy was concerned, he had been learning measured judgment with a mind to his subjects and those who looked to him for leadership. But Llesho didn’t even consider disputing Singer’s claim to the most comfortable bed. Some things learned at an early age come back quickly when they mean life or death.

In the hierarchy of the slave pens he was lowest of the low. Newest to the bench, he needed sound advice and the goodwill of his fellow slaves if he wanted to stay alive. And in the politics of their bench, Tayy was even lower than that, written off in the accounting books of a slave’s head as drowned already. He wondered how long it would take chained to an oar before he was eyeing Prince Tayyichiut’s biscuits for himself.

Tayy was taller than Llesho, but neither of them were tall by Singer’s standard. There was plenty of space in the well between the benches for both of them to sleep if they curled up a bit. Worn out by the labor and his terror of the sea, Tayy had already wrapped himself in a tight ball and was sleeping fitfully with his back pressed against the side of the boat. Llesho shifted around a bit, trying to get comfortable, but decided that wasn’t going to happen. He had worried that his mind, abuzz with plans for their rescue and anxious about Markko following somewhere behind them would keep him awake. But the impossible weight of his lids dragged them down over his eyes almost before he had settled his arms and legs about him.

Singer’s voice followed him into sleep: “You did well, boy.”

 

 

 

Exhausted from his labors at the oar, Llesho longed for deep, dreamless sleep. In his days as a pearl diver, the rise and fall of the swell had often soothed him, but it wasn’t working now. He was pretty sure he’d only dozed off for a few minutes when his eyes popped open. He tried to close them again, but they stubbornly refused to obey. Logically, his restlessness shouldn’t have surprised him. Tayy was in bad shape, and Llesho hadn’t caught sight of a rescue boat since they’d left Edris.

To make matters worse, the mist over the harbor city was growing darker and more ominous. Even at a distance the storm, in its birthing, stirred up a choppy sea that cut across the current in which they ran. With the tug and hesitation of the oars, it seemed like they were being pulled in three different directions at once. More frightening to Llesho was the restless mind reaching out from within it. Master Markko was in there somewhere, and the magician was looking for him.

Llesho gave up on sleep. He sat up and looked out over the water, wondering where Kaydu was with their rescue and fretting at the absence of the pearls he had carried at his throat for so long. He was just wondering if his crowded mind could handle even one more crisis when a strange sound at the side of the boat shocked him to attention. Something was out there, climbing out of the depths and scrabbling determinedly to board the low pirate galley.

Terrible monsters inhabited the sea, fearsome creatures with rows of teeth in lines one behind the next like a phalanx of skeletal soldiers. The overseers on Pearl Island had encouraged tales about them as a warning against escape: they would snap a man in two and grind him up like pie filling between those terrible teeth. Or vast, shapeless horrors with snakes dangling from their heads would crushed a man to paste, feeding gobs of entrails into their great huge mouths like the most devoted servants. His own attempt to flee would have ended in his death if Pearl Bay Dragon hadn’t rescued him, but not all dragons were as friendly. Certainly a dread of such beasts had stopped many an escapee from ever setting out.

He was on the very point of waking Singer to alert the ship to their new danger when Pig popped his head over the side.

“There you are.” The Jinn climbed into the boat and shook the water off the silver chains that wrapped his bristly black hide. “I’ve been looking for you. I see you’ve found Prince Tayyichiut.”

“What are you doing here? I’m not asleep and I’m not dream-walking!”

“Of course you’re asleep. You need it, too, but we don’t have any time to waste. There’s a storm coming.”

 

 

 

 

 Chapter Fifteen

“WHAT ARE you doing in my domain, Jinn?”

Llesho whirled at the sound of a voice behind him. No one had seemed to notice that he was standing in the well of his bench talking to a soggy black pig wrapped in fine silver chain. Undetected, however, the slave whom Master Den had chosen to accompany Llesho from theGuiding Star had stepped up behind him. He looked much the same as he had in the waking world, both competent and dangerous. As proof of both, he had escaped his shackles.

“You know each other?” the slave asked Pig, who ducked his head as if he didn’t want to answer.

“Not if it displeases you, Master Dragon.” The Jinn bowed, but not before Llesho caught the shifty slide of his eyes.

“Dragon?” Llesho saw no changes in the captive’s features that would prove the conclusion, but he didn’t doubt Pig’s word. He’d met enough dragons in his travels to be cautious in their presence, however. Particularly over water.

In his human form, the dragon inclined his head in the affirmative. “Permit me to introduce myself,” he said, but his deep, silvery gaze never left the Jinn. “I am Marmer Sea Dragon, king of this sea and the shores that mark its boundaries.”

Llesho accepted the introduction, inclining his head with diplomatic precision in the same degree as the dragon-king had done. “Llesho, King of Thebin in exile and husband of my lady the Great Goddess.”

“You are welcome, young king. Your companion, however, is not.”

Pig shuffled his two back feet uneasily and rubbed at his nose with a forefoot in a display of nerves that Llesho had never seen in him before.

“You were thrown out of the Beekeeper’s gardens for your actions, beast.” The dragon-king growled his displeasure with a rumble in his throat that made Llesho glad the magical creature couldn’t spit fire in his human form. “What makes you think you are welcome in the domain of the very one you have injured beyond measure?”

There could be only one beekeeper a dragon would mention in that company. The Great Goddess. Pig had told him a very different story about his departure from the heavenly gardens.

“Thrown out?” He wanted the Jinn to deny the accusation. The thick silence that followed was more damning than any words. First Master Den, and now Pig. The harrowing disappointment of one more betrayal fed Llesho’s anger. Did he have any friends in this wide world, or was he a fool, trusting in his enemies as they used him like a dupe for their purposes?

“You said you escaped to bring help for the Goddess. What other lies have you told me?” He kept his voice low, but even Pig must hear the iron in it.

“No lies.” The Jinn gave a phlegmy snort, his version of an indignant sniff. “You didn’t need all the details and my lord dragon’s version isn’t exactly true in all its particu lars either.”

The sea itself had grown still as lamp oil beneath them: waiting, it seemed, for the tale to erupt in storm and fury.

“Did my lady, the Great Goddess, expel you from the heavenly gardens or not?”

“She was displeased with me, yes. I departed her company by mutual agreement, to seek redress for the wrong I had done by my actions. I’ve returned twice in your company since then—did I seem unwelcome?”

He hadn’t, but that could owe more to the need of the moment than the status of the Jinn. Llesho turned his head, looking from Pig to the thunderous dragon-king and back again. When he thought he was braced for the worst the truth might bring, he asked, “What did you do?”

Pig didn’t answer, so the dragon-king did it for him. “The magician who follows you,” he said, “who would take all of heaven for himself.”

“Master Markko,” Llesho agreed. “What about him?”

“He was but a mountebank doing tricks for coins in the market square when he met our friend the Jinn.”

“You released the demon from the underworld!” The air went out of Llesho’s lungs with a whoosh. He couldn’t believe it. Wouldn’t believe it. “It’s your fault that heaven is under siege!”

“No!” Pig drew back, rattling the fine links that wrapped him. Llesho had wondered about them before, but now they made sense. The Jinn had escaped heaven but not the chains that had bound him there.

“Not exactly. And that’s not the whole story. If I’d known what Markko intended, I’d have done it all differently.”

Lluka’s dream swept over Llesho with heart stopping intensity. He saw the fireball rise again in the sky, felt the flames sweep over him, consuming all the worlds in destruction and chaos. He remembered the seductive question—“Is that a wish?” Pig had asked it so many times that Llesho had come to look on it as a game, which it had never been. His country in ruins, friends facing death yet again, his brother Lluka driven mad by the future Master Markko intended for them, a future that would see the end of all creation: had it all happened for the twisted pleasure the Jinn took in playing games with human hearts? With their greed? And not only humans. Marmer Sea Dragon had his own grievance.

Pig had denied that he released the demon that held the gates of heaven under seige, but he still hadn’t answered the question: “What did you do?”

“Markko was born the child of a slave girl in the court of a minor dignitary on the outskirts of Pontus.” The Jinn gave a little shrug, mimicking, perhaps, the way he had dismissed their most feared enemy in the past. Kaydu had guessed he might have had his training there.

“This official never acknowledged his parentage but kept his son in the household as an educated slave. Growing up as the property of his father, he trained himself in the dark arts—for revenge, I thought. I’d have been happy to help him out there; his father was a petty tyrant and deserved any retribution his son might concoct. But Markko wished to be a great magician. He had some romantic notion of wooing the Great Goddess with the hope that she would grant him eternal life. For a price, I could have granted even that wish, but his mind was twisty even then.”

Llesho’d had more than a taste of slavery. He wondered if that long-ago Markko the mountebank had made his wish out of pride and vanity, or because he could see no other escape in the life he’d been given? Too late now to know if a different turning then might have saved them from the end of all their worlds; Markko the magician had done too many loathsome things since to feel sorry for him. Questions still begged for answers, however.

“And how did a lowly slave with romantic dreams of winning the attentions of my lady wife become a magician with the fate of all the kingdoms of heaven and earth and the underworld in his hands?”

“You need dragon’s blood in your veins to be a real magician,” Pig explained with a little shrug. Llesho knew that.

“Markko had none.”

“That can’t be so,” Llesho objected. He’d seen for himself the scales that mottled the magician’s skin.

“There was this young dragon—” The sea rocked the pirate galley as if the water had a mind of its own and, like a horse with a blanket of nettles, wished to throw them off. Llesho grabbed hold of the oar secured by its stanchion to steady his balance.

“My son,” the dragon-king said.

Pig had the courtesy to look dismayed, but this had come as no surprise. He maneuvered his great bulk so that Llesho stood between the dragon-king and himself, keeping a hold on the oar against the pitching of the boat. On the bench, Singer had started to snore. Tayy frowned in his sleep and curled a little tighter in on himself. Neither woke. The fate of worlds might hang in the moment, but on the bench in front of them the rowers stepped up and fell back, stepped again in the quarter-pace stroke.

“This young dragon,” the Jinn persisted in his tale, “fell in love with a girl and wished to be human. It seemed a perfect solution for them all.”

Llesho had known Pearl Bay Dragon as the healer Kwan-ti for most of his young life among the pearl beds. He had only seen her in her dragon form twice: once when she had saved him from drowning, and again, when she had come out of the sky like a silver arrow in the battle against Master Markko in the capital city of Shan. The dragon-king himself appeared before them in the shape of a man. “I don’t understand,” he therefore said. “Dragons can appear in any form they want, even human.”

“And so would my son, if he had waited. Shapes are a gift of a dragon’s maturity.”

“Which comes slowly as humans measure such things,” Pig explained. “The young dragon did not feel this lady had such patience in her.”

Llesho figured that meant she’d have died of old age before her dragon-lover had the power to approach her as a handsome young man. A tragedy for the embroideries of storytellers, but something you were supposed to accept and get over in real life.

“What did the dragon-boy do?” He didn’t really want to hear the answer but knew it must figure in his own saga somehow. Otherwise, why this particular dream?

Pig avoided his eyes when he answered, “He wished to be a man.”

“And so to kill two birds with one throw, your friend the Jinn fused the dragon who is my son with the man who wished for dragon blood, and made them into one being,” the dragon-king answered, and tears stood in his human eyes. “My son is trapped inside that madman, who used his stolen powers to call forth a demon-king of the underworld. No more can a young dragon control such a thing than he could become a man for the love of a girl!”

“Merciful Goddess!” Once, when Llesho had just begun his training in dream traveling, Master Markko had snatched him off his path and held him captive in his command tent. The magician had awakened the old poisons in his blood and Llesho’d had the satisfaction of being sick all over the the magician’s robes. Markko had held his head until he settled, then changed his soiled robe for a fresh one.

In those moments with his skin exposed, Llesho had seen Master Markko’s great secret—thick patches of dragon scales mottled his sickly flesh. At the time, he’d thought the magician an unfortunate child of a mating gone awry between a dragon and a human, driven mad by the strangeness of his own body. Now, the truth made him ill. No wonder Master Markko was insane!

“I have given up hope of rescuing my son.” The dragon-king choked out the words through a throat clogged with tears. “I wish only to end his misery.”

“Would you care to repeat that?” Pig hunched his shoulders as the dragon-king’s shape flickered and changed. Llesho kept his eyes on the blurred form through the dizziness of mind and eye rejecting what they saw. If the creature settled in the shape of a dragon, his great size would sink them on the instant, unless he burned them to a cinder with his breath first.

Pig made no excuse for his untimely offer, but told the truth that Llesho hadn’t wanted to hear: “It is in my nature to ask.”

“It would be worth the price to wish you dead for what you have done,” the dragon-king replied, settling firmly into his human form again, “but no, I do not wish it so.”

They were saved, if one could consider it that, by the sudden appearance at Marmer Sea Dragon’s elbow of Master Den in his full pirate garb. “Ah, I see you three have met at last. Good, good.”

“I see no good in this at all!” Llesho exclaimed. “Pig, whom I trusted as the loyal servant of the Goddess sent to guide me, now proves to be the enemy of my lady wife, banished for his crimes.”

Visions of chaos and fire filled his mind, and he turned on the Jinn, shouting into his woebegone piggy face, “Do you know what you have done? Can you imagine the destruction your actions have brought down on all our heads?”

“I’ve been remiss in my hospitality,” Marmer Sea Dragon said with an ironic bow to Llesho. “Are you fond of ham for dinner, or perhaps ribs in barbecue sauce?” Pig he snubbed, a dangerous thing to do to a Jinn. Unless you are a dragon-king.

Pig glared at Master Den. “This is your doing, old fool. What in all the kingdoms of heaven and humans and the spirits below did you think you were doing by bringing the boy here, to meethim! ”

“I wasn’t fast enough to stop a foolish tongue,” Master Den admitted, “though for a change it was not my own.”

Llesho flinched at the reminder. His hasty words to Prince Tayyichiut had put them on this path.

“We had to cross the sea anyway.” The trickster gestured to his own billowing scarlet-and-yellow pantaloons with a flourish. “And no quest is complete without pirates. As for our friend Marmer Sea Dragon, he was on the trail of a prophetic rhyme that would put in his hands the power to stop Master Markko and release his son from his torment. It seemed only logical to bring him along.”

Something about Master Den’s sly innocence made Llesho wary of hidden truths in that introduction. Dragons, after all, could take the shapes of many things.

“Have we met before on this quest, my lord dragon? Do I know you by another name?” he asked with a polite bow as befitted a supplicant in the halls of a great king. The Marmer Sea was the dragon’s domain.

With an exasperated sigh, the dragon-king let his glance slide sideways, where Master Den waited with mischief curled in the corners of his grin. “I had to think of something quickly,” the trickster god apologized. “I looked down and there they were right to hand. Or foot, actually. Bluebells. The word just popped out of my mouth, and then we were stuck with it, so to speak.”

“One of us was, at least,” Marmer Sea Dragon shook his head. In the shape of a great horse, he had carried Master Den on his back for a time. And had suffered the indignity of a flowery alias. “Avoid the company of Jinns and trickster gods,” he warned Llesho, “They are nothing but trouble.”

“I had noticed that.” Bluebell. Llesho had traveled in the company of kings and gods for a long time now, and knew to keep his smile to himself.

The dragon-king studied Llesho thoughtfully. “Plots within plots, I see, Master Trickster,” he murmured. “Is he truly the one?”

Intruding upon the conversation at great peril, Pig answered the question. “He is, and late for an appointment. Her ladyship, SienMa, the mortal goddess of war, sent me to fetch him.”

“And what are we to do about the young heir who lies dying at his bench, or this magician who holds my son prisoner within his own body?”

Master Markko! “He’ll follow us. He wants that rhyme, and my brother Menar, as much as we do.” Llesho stared out at the sea, wishing he knew what the magician was up to.

Marmer Sea Dragon followed his glance with more purpose, as if he could be everywhere at once upon the watery surface and below. Which perhaps he could. After a moment, however, the life returned to his eyes and he shook his head.

“He is searching for you. He knows, of course, that you are on the water, but his fight with your friend the osprey has sent him back to shore to find another way. His main purpose seems to be to reach Pontus ahead of us, but I don’t know how he plans to do that on the land, which is outside of my own kingdom. For whatever reason, he now conjures a storm which may be more powerful, I think, than he knows.”

From the start Master Markko had set into motion powerful spells that quickly spun out of his control. That weakness had released the demon bent on destroying all the realms of mortals gods and spirits that had started Llesho on his quest. Storms were tricky business, and it seemed likely he had done the same again, reaching for magics just beyond his grasp.

Llesho wondered if this time his lack of control was all the magician’s fault. Marmer Sea Dragon ruled here, over the waters above and below, and had an interest in seeing Master Markko fail. He didn’t want to risk offending his host with the suspicion, however, but instead offered a gentle reminder that friends rode before that wind as well as enemies.

“What of my cadre?” he asked, thinking of Kaydu and Hmishi and Lling, of Bixei and Stipes somewhere out on an angry sea. He wondered if Little Brother got seasick.

“I see all that passes within my domain.” The dragon-king confirmed what Llesho had suspected, but then revealed a limitation, “But not what will happen in the future. Someone has trained your witch well, and the blood of dragons runs true in her veins. She is young and inexperienced at weather working, however. Her familiar has powers of his own, but he won’t be able to help her there. If your enemy loses control, as I think he must, then your friend stands little chance of success.”

He didn’t ask how the dragon-king knew of the plan; he’d already said he knew of everything that took place upon these waters. Llesho hoped the dragon was wrong about Kaydu, though. She was even stronger than their watery host suspected, but he’d never seen her try to work a magic that powerful before. Wasn’t sure he wanted to see it, but knew he had to find her before he met with her father. Habiba would have questions.

“I have to find her and then report to Lady SienMa. But I’ll come back,” he insisted. “I won’t leave Prince Tayyichiut to die alone in the company of pirates.”

“I’ll make sure our young king gets back in time. You have my word.” Pig sealed the oath with a solemn bow. No one trusted his promises, least of all Llesho, who had just lately discovered the depths of the Jinn’s deceit.

If Prince Tayy woke to find that Llesho had gone, despair would surely kill him. “Help them if you can,” he begged.

“I’ll see what I can do.” The dragon-king didn’t seem happy about it, but he, too, gave his promise.

Llesho accepted with a grateful bow. Dragons always honored their word. “Then I am off with our villainous friend.” With that he shook his head, imagining into being the antlers on his brow, and leaped into the sea . . .

 

. . . which disappeared from under him as he ran.

 

 

 

Llesho had dream traveled to places he’d never been in the waking world before and he knew to center in on something or someone familiar where he wanted to go. As he’d been trained in her ladyship’s service long ago in Farshore Province, he looked to his captain for direction. Kaydu stood on the deck of a small ship with two masts stripped to a minimum of sail. At her back, the cloud bank he’d been watching from the pirate galley boiled more ominously on the horizon. Wind blew her hair in manic tangles and snapped the full sleeves of her uniform like the pennants racing from the topmast to the bowsprit in front of them. She seemed to be staring abstractedly out to sea, but concentration drew tight lines around her mouth and her eyes. In her arms, Little Brother stared into the same distance. The same air of concentration gave an almost human cast to his wizened features. Once again, Llesho wondered what powerful secrets hid behind that monkey face and what Marmer Sea Dragon knew about them.

The clatter of his hooves on the deck distracted her from whatever magics she was controlling. “Llesho!” she cried even before he had returned to his human form.

Slipping into his pack, Little Brother gave a last enigmatic monkey look that took in all of the deck and Llesho lying on it before hiding his head. Llesho wondered what that meant, but Kaydu gave him no opportunity to discuss the thoughts of her familiar, or Marmer Sea Dragon’s opinions on the subject. Taking advantage of her suddenly free hands, she knotted them at her hips with the air of a village scold and tapped her foot just inches from his nose where he had fallen. “What are you doing here?”

“I’m looking for you,” he explained as he struggled to his feet. The little ship pitched angrily and Llesho wondered if Marmer Sea Dragon had been wrong about Master Markko. The eye of the storm had not yet moved out to sea, but even at a distance it didn’t feel like anything had control of it. He grabbed hold of the rail, afraid of tumbling off the pitching ship or merely falling on his backside again in front of Kaydu.

“You found me.” She gave a furtive look behind them, where a line of rain marked the edge of the shore. “Look, I can’t really talk now. Hmishi and Lling are belowdecks and they can report if you want, but I’m worried about this storm.” With that, she turned her face into the wind and reached an outstretched hand to hold back the rain with a staying gesture. Llesho felt unseen forces clash out beyond the ship as the storm pressed to leave the land behind and Kaydu pushed it back. For a moment the wind stuttered and paused. Llesho felt the whisper of a mind he knew too well, and at his peril. Then their few sails filled and the ship surged forward on an angry swell again, more steadily but still at a headlong pace.

“Marmer Sea Dragon says that Master Markko raised the storm but won’t be able to control it,” he shouted over the sound of the wind snapping in the sails. “It’s getting too big!” He left his question unasked. Could she do what the magician couldn’t? She answered it anyway, in Kaydu style, with no surprise that Llesho had turned up another dragon when most people went their whole lives without even meeting one.

“Then tell Marmer Sea Dragon to get his ass over here and stop the damned storm himself! I need a calm sea and a steady wind, not a critic grading my skills.”

Llesho considered explaining his own conclusions about quests and tests, but figured with Habiba as her father she already knew. “I’ll tell him,” he said, and left her to her contest with the sea.

Ducking down the ladder to the gangway below, he met Lling on the way up. “Llesho! Is this a dream?”

“It was a dream when I left the pirate ship, but I don’t know what it is now,” he admitted. “Pig is around somewhere.”

Lling nodded, accepting that answer. They’d met like this before, when Markko’s henchman, Tsu-tan, had held her prisoner. “Did you find Prince Tayyichiut?”

“Yes, and Master Den, too, who captains the pirate ship and seems to think that rowing a galley should be part of every prince’s education.”

“Never trust the trickster god,” she agreed, though they had both put their lives in Master Den’s hands in the past. “We’re on our way, as fast as we can move, but a storm has complicated things.”

“Master Markko’s doing.” He kept to himself that Tayy was dying in bondage on the pirate galley. Kaydu’s ship had to stay in one piece to rescue them. If his cadre knew how bad things were, they might take chances that would endanger them all.

“Where’s Hmishi?”

“He’s below, in the quarterdeck cabin, trying to calm the ship’s captain. She seemed capable enough of coping with a normal blow at sea, but fears magic on principle and magical interference with the weather in particular. Your appearance on board won’t improve her nerves, but it would help if you could get rid of the antlers.”

“I forgot,” he admitted, shaking his head to focus on the weight of the branches. In a moment he had his senses centered on the itch just above his forehead and then the antlers were gone. “I was just talking to Kaydu and she never said a thing about them.”

“Kaydu is a witch. She has ridden with gods and kings, and has seen you in antlers before. Our captain, however, is a simple sailor with only the blood of human ancestors coursing through her bones.”

“The world isn’t simple anymore, not even for sea captains.” Remembering the pirates’ attack on theGuiding Star, he wondered if it ever had been. Certainly not since Master Markko had called a demon from the underworld to hold the gates of heaven hostage. He didn’t ask if Kaydu could control the storm the magician had conjured. For all their sakes, they could only hope their captain was as powerful a witch as her ladyship, the mortal goddess SienMa, seemed to think when she put them in her captain’s command.

He found Hmishi in a cabin that extended the width of the ship’s stern, with tall windows looking out over a gallery protected by an elaborately carved rail. Brocaded fabrics draped the walls and the furnishings, falling in folds where they were pulled away to let in whatever light the windows gave them. On the right, tucked into a protected corner of the cabin, feather cushions covered in bright silks were heaped luxuriously on a bed rack. Two matching chests in dark, satiny wood were clear of breakables in the high seas. Nevertheless, they showed the captain’s taste in the carved and painted scenes that decorated their tops and sides.

Under the windows at the center of the cabin stood a spacious table covered with charts. Five chairs were set around it, all occupied but one. Bixei, Stipes, and Hmishi sat at one side of the table. A muscular woman Llesho didn’t recognize sat on the other, gripping the table with white-knuckled fingers.

“She hasn’t let us down yet,” Hmishi said as he stared out at the storm moving on the horizon.

Bixei and Stipes nodded their support, but the stranger gave an emphatic shake of her head. “I am a simple merchant sailor and have no business with secret missions or witches who control the wind and rain.”

“No evil will come to this ship.” Llesho stepped into the cabin with a little shake of his head just to reassure himself that the antlers were gone. “I have it on the word of Marmer Sea Dragon himself.” That wasn’t quite what the dragon-king had said, but Llesho had taken it for his meaning.

“Llesho!” His companions leaped to their feet, careful not to give away his title but unable to entirely still their bows.

“More magic!” The sea captain made a warding sign which had them all speaking at once to reassure her.

“He’s a friend.”

“Llesho won’t hurt you.”

“You can trust him.”

“Safe, he says!” the captain remained unconvinced. “If by safe you mean swallowed down the gullet of a dragon and digested in the fire of his belly. For myself, I choose not to call that safe, if it is all the same to you, young master. And I’d like to know where you came from yourself. If a stowaway, you owe passage on this ship. Her few cabins are full, so you will bunk on the deck or with the seamen.

“If you are some magical creature like yon witch and the dragon from whom you claim promises, then you can find your way off this ship the same way you got on it. And you can take that girl with the uncanny way with a storm as well. I won’t have any more magic on my ship!”

“Pardon my intrusion, good captain.” Llesho gave her a low bow as to one of greater station, but it did little to pacify her. “The witch on your deck didn’t raise the storm. Even as we speak Captain Kaydu strives against the evil forces that rise against us in that wind. If she leaves her post, you’ll likely lose your ship and all hands aboard her before long.”

The captain was already as pale as her skin would go, but she blinked several times, as if the news had snuffed her mind like a candle. Llesho waited as, her jaw clenching slowly, she came back to herself.

“So, then.” Pause. “I suppose I had better get Cook to send up something warm to eat.”

Hmishi gave her a brief smile and a suggestion: “Captain Kaydu requires a hand free at all times for her working.”

The sea captain didn’t like the reminder of the magic on her deck, but she acknowledged the need with a curt nod. “And you, master messenger?” she asked of Llesho.