The Orphans of Raspay Read online

  No guards up here; the distances to the nearest other rooftops, too far even for a sailor to jump, made an effective moat of air. The drop straight down to the cobbled streets and flagged courtyard invited leg-breaking. More enticing was an odd tower Pen recognized after a puzzled moment as part of a mast and its crow’s nest salvaged from some ship, set up to be a lookout. Yielding to the urge to climb, he lodged himself in its basket fifteen feet above the roof. Not a bad perch—when it was standing still. He imagined it swinging back and forth in high seas; Des, who loathed heights, whimpered at the vision.

  He surveyed the town, which the cook had said held some eight thousand souls. Closely crowded stone, stucco, and whitewash in the central sections tailed off to scattered mudbrick, stucco, and thatch on the uninviting hills up behind it. Across the town, diagonally upslope, a dome topped a six-sided stone building not much higher than its neighbors—an old Quintarian temple built in the Cedonian style. A Quadrene temple must also be tucked somewhere, but its architecture was less obvious to Pen’s eye.

  The snowless mountains would not store water against summer drought. Fishing, not farming, was likely the mainstay of the island people. Piracy was a logical extension of the land’s dearth.

  He turned back to the sea, glittering in the morning light, deceptively serene. Vilnoc and home lay some two-hundred-fifty miles to the southwest from this spot. It was about four hundred miles south to Lodi and then Trigonie whence, hah, he had started. Three hundred miles north and east, entirely the wrong way, would find Rathnatta-to-be-avoided. Less than two hundred miles straight across, due west, would strike the coast of Cedonia. Currents and cross-winds aside, it was a country. Even the rankest amateur navigator could not miss it. Turn left and keep the coast in sight, and eventually one must come to the border of Orbas.

  Steal a small boat? That would have been a tempting thought, before Pen’s experience of the tempest. Pen had sailed such nimble craft on canton lakes, and even those limpid waters could drown the unwary in storms. Pen and two children in anything he could handle by himself? He might bet his own life on the weather holding fair, but theirs? Were they naive enough to follow him into that danger?

  Bribing a local fisherman to ferry them across would require the man to take them on credit, on Pen’s bare word that he would be paid on arrival in Orbas. Finding someone that kindly and credulous on this island seemed improbable. Pen also suspected that while for the pirates stealing from others was all in a day’s work, that insouciance did not apply to anyone caught stealing from them. The fisherman’s risks could be much sharper than merely that of losing his labor, up to losing his head. Hm.

  The Darthacan broker Marle would own, or have passage on, some seaworthy ship heading in the right direction, and have Seuka already with him. Could Pen sneak himself and Lencia aboard, stow away until it was too late to turn around? The news that Pen was sometime-court-sorcerer to the duke of Orbas would catch the man’s greed; his sailors might be more inclined to throw Pen overboard. Embarking in any ship that Pen did not himself control bore the same risk.

  He’d better find out more about Marle. And Falun. So much depended on which of their flesh-brokers first filled his quota and sailed, and how soon.

  Contemplating the sunlit scene, he realized that every possible course of action he might evolve converged to the same point, the absolute need for a boat. So what I require is the shortest route to one.

  And here came a new one, furling sails and sliding into the harbor. Its draft was shallow enough that it could warp in to the unblocked pier on the farther end of the harbor, where half-a-dozen men came out to catch and loop lines and pull it to a halt. A sturdy gangplank was thrown across to the dock and its deck grew busy, with crew, stevedores, and wharf rats combining to carry off cargo like a line of ants. The line terminated in another customs shed, where Pen was fairly sure harried port clerks took inventory for the town’s cut, and perhaps the further divisions among captain’s guild, officers, and crew. Some of the nearby buildings must be warehouses for the pirates’ ill-gotten cargos. The goods seemed too miscellaneous, the unloading too random and raucous, to be the work of some prudent merchant. Was the ship a pirate’s prize? Lencia’s and Seuka’s first ship, perchance?

  Pen’s guess was confirmed when a group of men in manacles was marshaled on the deck and marched across the gangplank in chained pairs. Some much more alert-seeming guards than Pen had yet encountered prodded them along at sword’s point. Squinting into the salt-hazed distance, Pen counted about thirty heads. They were paraded not to that pier’s customs shed, but to a more squat and solid building farther up the shore; they disappeared within. The sturdier slave prison, no doubt, and now Pen knew just where it was.

  So, there was a ship. And over there was a crew. All Pen needed to do was bring them back together. Des could go through locks, chains, and manacles like so much paper. And his rescuees would be grateful to Penric, a coin he might actually bargain with.

  Ooh, said Des. I fancy that plan.

  Pen wasn’t sure if that meant she thought it was the best plan, or just the one that would leave the most chaos in its wake.

  No reason it can’t be both, she protested.

  “There you are,” called a peeved young voice from below him.

  Pen looked down. The Corva sisters stood looking up in vexation.

  “You’ll get sunburned,” reproved Lencia, and “I want to climb, too!” cried Seuka.

  Seuka matched actions to words, and Pen’s breath hitched when she nearly slipped while stretching for the pegs spaced for a sailor. By the time he’d mustered squeaks of caution, she’d joined him, eeling into the basket. Lencia jittered a moment before swarming up after her. Well, Pen wasn’t a heavy man. Their crammed platform probably wouldn’t break, though it creaked ominously.

  “You can see everything from here!” said Seuka, who likely seldom had an advantage of height.

  There was no reason for them to be left as disoriented as he’d been. Pen repeated his little tutorial on regional geography, arm out in a long explanatory sweep. They seemed especially interested in the route to Lodi. Lencia’s gloomy glance east, back toward distant Jokona, was blocked by the hills behind.

  Lencia repeated her fears for Pen’s pale skin in this sun, and Pen let her bid him somewhat imperiously back indoors. He then bethought of a way to divert them from all their anxieties with those otherwise-useless old accounts. Gathering the papers, he led them back to the kitchen where, under the amused eye of the cook, he showed them how to make a serviceable ink with stove soot, water, egg yolk, and a bit of honey, and shape the ends of twigs from the firewood to make writing sticks. At this point, the cook ran them and their mess out, so Pen set up again at a trestle table.

  Pen started with a list of useful words in Adriac and Cedonian, and soon had the sisters, heads down and biting their lips charmingly, printing them in two alphabets. They sopped up the new vocabulary with the enviable speed of the young. Seuka drifted from the lesson by drawing a quite recognizable menagerie of a horse, rabbit, dog, and cat, so Pen showed her the words for them as well. He finished by teaching them to recite a short girls’ bedtime prayer to the Mother and Daughter, common in both its Adriac and Cedonian versions. This made a useful preamble to easing them back upstairs for the nap in the heat of the late afternoon that was customary in these summer countries for children and adults alike.

  He figured he’d be glad of having taken it himself, come midnight.

  * * *

  The rest of the day passed quietly, with another dinner, and the captives left to putter around the building but not, of course, leave. Under the guise of checking his bandages, Penric managed to slip the feverish Aloro another general boost of uphill magic against infection, leaving the merchant feeling mysteriously eased. “I’m told I have gentle hands,” Pen misdirected this attention.

  Unlike everyone else in the chamber later that night, the Corva sisters slept the enviably solid sleep of youth.
Lencia, Pen was able to wake in the deep dark with a shake to her shoulder and a whispered, “Follow me.” Seuka he had to carry out to the hallway, easing the door shut behind them.

  “What?” said Seuka drowsily, as he poured her onto her feet.

  “Here, hold your sandals and be very quiet. We’re leaving.”

  “I can’t even see where I’m stepping,” complained Lencia. “How can you?”

  The hallway was indeed black, although not to Pen. “I have very good night vision. It’s, um, the blue eyes.”

  “Oh.”

  “Just take my hands.”

  They followed him to the stairs in blurry obedience, yawning. Pen had been of two minds about this. Leaving them more-or-less safely here while he scouted the situation risked problems in coming back to collect them, if events went well and fast, not to mention having to get out of the building unobserved twice. Taking them along would expose them to unknown dangers along his route. Neither choice seemed good.

  He padded barefoot down the stairs and stopped short, getting his hips bumped by his followers.

  There was not one guard as there had been earlier in the day, posted outside the closed front door on a stool, but two, sitting cross-legged on the floor inside the entry. In the light of a candlestick, they were passing the time dicing with each other for, apparently, olive pits, judging by the little arrays before each. They both looked up with unalarmed interest at Pen and the girls.

  “Why are you folks stirring?” the elder inquired.

  “Cook said she’d leave a bite for my nieces,” Pen blurted the first plausible tale that came to mind. He half-raised his hands, each gripped by a sister, to exhibit the supporting nieces. “They’ve had a hungry time of it.”

  “Huh!” said the younger guard. “She never leaves us anything! How do you get the love?”

  The older guard snorted. “Look at him. You need to ask? Women!”

  Pen turned toward the kitchen. To his intense dismay, the guards rose and followed them.

  The pantry was locked, but fell open quietly to Pen’s hand. The older guard set his candlestick down on the scarred kitchen table and went to check the back door. It was firmly bolted, to his evident satisfaction. He returned to thump down on a stool, amiably gesturing the girls to the bench, where they were joined by the younger guard.

  Pen rummaged in the pantry, bringing back a bag of figs, a pot of olives, and half of a small wheel of cheese wrapped in cloth. Inviting themselves to the impromptu repast, the guards passed the food around; the younger pulled his wicked belt knife and sliced cheese for his tablemates, kindly handing chunks across to the girls first. The girls both watched Pen big-eyed.

  “Oh, look,” said Pen hollowly. “Here’s the wine.” He lifted the jug and plunked it in front of the men. Could he get them drunk enough to pass out?

  The younger waved it away. “We don’t drink on duty.” The elder nodded, though he looked regretful. And possibly a touch resentful of his partner’s rectitude. The ban did not seem to apply to the food, each saving their olive pits aside.

  The guards then proceeded to chat, asking Pen and the girls leading questions about their travels and lives somewhere other than this island. Pen diverted attention from his immediate background by repeating some of his childhood stories about snowy mountains that had fascinated the cook, and which also engrossed the Corva girls. Lencia produced a pared version of their own misadventures, remembering to claim Pen as their mother’s long-lost half-brother, so miraculously found. Pen didn’t think the bemused guards believed it either.

  Evidently, talking to their prisoners in the night watch was a better entertainment for these islanders than dicing for olive pits, and one they’d diverted themselves with before, because they traded back some striking tales from other captives. Rather slyly, the older guard threw in a few descriptions of prior ill-fated escape attempts, variously and sometimes violently thwarted.

  Pen was learning a lot about the lives of night-guards in Lanti, but valuable darkness was slipping past outside. He suspected the pair would cheerfully gossip till dawn and the arrival of the kitchen crew, along with all the other hazards of a new day. If Captain Falun decided, tomorrow, that the captured sailors would fill his hold and thus he could sail at once, Pen didn’t want to still be here having to navigate twisty new challenges.

  Maybe he should have devised some way to lower them all down from the roof despite the height.

  Really, said Des, sharing his growing exasperation with this sociable delay. Those girls are light and young, they would have bounced…

  Pen found himself actually missing his distant eunuch friend, Surakos, and whatever dozen subtle poisons and drugs he would doubtless have successfully concealed about his person. Not to mention that his sale price would probably have topped Pen’s own by half. Pen wasn’t sure if wishing pirates on Surakos was any more evil than wishing the eunuch on pirates. But the memory of those apothecarial skills did allow him to settle on a course of action at last.

  About time, growled Des.

  Pen would have preferred to have been touching the guards’ heads for this delicate work, but didn’t expect they would let him get so near without some violent fending-off. If they continued to sit still, he might manage it safely enough from across the table. He held himself in a moment of unbreathing concentration, called up his full Sight, and ghosted his magic deep into each one’s ears, there to gently stroke the interior surfaces of the tiny looping labyrinths in their encasements of bone that seemed to control balance. When he’d been studying medicine back in Martensbridge, injuries and infections in that mysterious organ and their ghastly vertiginous effects had been fascinating problems brought to him for magical healing. It worked just as well in reverse.

  Both men’s eyes widened, then squinched in nausea. They swayed in their seats, reaching out for support from the table and missing. The aborted motions made it all worse, and they tumbled from their perches onto the kitchen floor. The elder opened his mouth to bellow, but vomited instead. The girls, startled, jumped to their feet.

  “Hurry, help me find things to tie them up,” Pen diverted them before they could panic.

  The younger guard managed to get up as far as his knees before flopping helplessly down again. His cry came out a heartbreaking moan.

  “Sorry, sorry,” said Pen under his breath, as he hastened around the kitchen looking for strong bindings. A washing line coiled at the bottom of the pantry would do. Hands tied behind backs, feet bound together and hitched to hands, snapping of cords to the right lengths with a touch of chaos. It was a bit redundant—Pen didn’t think either man would be walking again for a while—but convincing, which was what he needed. A major value of his magic as a defense lay in its continued secrecy. Once his enemies knew what they were dealing with, they would be much more effectively on guard.

  Pen hunkered down by the distressed men’s heads. “The poison won’t kill you,” he told them. “You won’t need an antidote. You’ll just need to wait out the sick. It will help to lie very still with your eyes closed.” He added after an inspired moment, “And don’t try to talk or cry out. That would make it worse.”

  Ungrateful glares, fair enough.

  Pen considered, doubtfully, the inadvisability of gagging a vomiting person versus the risks of their shouting for help. Of course, the only people in the building who could hear them were Pen’s fellow prisoners still sleeping upstairs. If any woke, and came down, would they be foolish enough to untie the guards? He wanted at least till sunup for a lead-time. Maybe leave a note?

  Just go, snapped Des.

  Pen nodded and started to shepherd the girls to the back door, the bolt quietly shearing off beneath his concealing hand. At the last moment, he darted back to kneel over the younger guard.

  “You really need to get yourself off this dreadful island while you still can,” he advised the youth, while helping himself to his sandals and donning them. Pen’s long toes stuck out over the soles, b
ut the other guard’s boots were even shorter. “Before the life here ruins you. Adria would do. Go to Lodi, and present yourself to my friend Learned Iserne in the curia of the archdivine. Tell her Penric recommended you. She can find you some decent work that doesn’t rest on theft, kidnapping, murder and rapine.”

  A pie-eyed groan was his only reply. Pen patted the young fellow encouragingly on the shoulder and hurried out after the Corva girls.

  * * *

  Wary of taking a wrong turn in the narrow, crooked streets of Lanti, Pen hugged the harbor shore. The sisters kept a good grip on him. Very few lights relieved the darkness: a mere slice of setting moon, and the lanterns glimmering above the doors of a scattering of inns or brothels that faced the waters. A pair of drunken men making their way home paid them no heed at all. The night air was cool and moist, thick with the dubious smells of the port, fish and salt and tar and dung.

  As he led the girls around occasional piles of drying nets and other boat gear, Penric meditated upon rats. Quite by chance, he had lately hit upon a way of brushing light chaos across one spot in the backs of their little rat brains that had dropped them into deep sleep instead of killing them. Sometimes he could repeat the effect. Sometimes the poor creatures just died. Helvia, one of the two prior physician-sorceresses who had possessed Des, had failed to see the value of producing well-slept rats, but Amberein, the other, had been intrigued. She had once treated, with indifferent success, a man who had been brought to her afflicted with sudden, uncontrolled sleeping. That the two effects shared a cause, making the trick extendable to humans, was a plausible guess.

  When he reached home again, he must cultivate some Vilnoc knacker to let him experiment on his stock of larger beasts. Because if Pen could work out how to do that to people without killing them, it might replace his cruder and more painful tricks, more reliably.