48

The man who had ordered soldiers to arrest Regnus hadn’t been much use. They’d captured him coming out of an inn after lunch. His interrogation had been short if not kind. He’d given them his commanding officer’s name, one Thaddeus Blat.

Thaddeus Blat was currently being entertained upstairs in a brothel called the Winking Wench. Regnus and his men were waiting downstairs, seated at various tables, and not doing a good job of remaining inconspicuous.

It all made Regnus nervous. He didn’t know this man, but soldiers tended to visit brothels in the middle of the afternoon only when they knew something big was going to happen. Something from which they might not return. He also didn’t like being out in public. Years ago, he wouldn’t have been able to go anywhere without people recognizing his face. He had been presumed to be the next king, after all. But that had been years ago. Few people looked at him twice now. He was a big, threatening man in the Warrens. Apparently, that outweighed the fact that he was a rich nobleman in the Warrens.

Finally the man came downstairs. He was swarthy, with a single thick black eyebrow and a face etched with a permanent glower. Regnus stood after the man walked past and followed him to the stable. They’d already paid the stable boy to abandon his post, and by the time Regnus got there, Thaddeus Blat was bleeding from his nose and the corner of his mouth, disarmed, held by four soldiers, and cursing.

“That’s not what I want to hear coming out of your mouth, Lieutenant,” Regnus said. He gestured and the men kicked the back of Blat’s knees so he dropped in front of the trough. Regnus grabbed a handful of hair and pressed his head under water.

“Tie his hands. This may take a few minutes,” Regnus said.

Blat came up gasping and flailing, but the soldiers bound his hands in short order. Thaddeus Blat spat toward Regnus, missed, and cursed him.

“Slow learner,” Regnus said, and heaved. The man went under and this time Regnus waited until he stopped flailing. “When they stop fighting,” he said to his men, “it means they understand for the first time that they might actually die unless they really concentrate. I think he’ll be a little more polite this time.”

He pulled Blat up, his dark hair plastered to his forehead down to his single brow, and Blat saved his air for breathing for a long moment. “Who are you?” he asked.

“I’m Duke Regnus Gyre, and you’re going to tell me everything you know about my people’s death.”

The man cursed him again.

“Turn him a little,” Regnus said. They did, and he drove his fist into the man’s solar plexus, driving the wind from his lungs. Thaddeus Blat only had time to suck in half a breath before he went under.

Regnus held him below the water until bubbles burst on the surface, then he dragged Thaddeus up, but only for a moment. Then he pushed him back down again. He repeated the process four times. When he pulled Blat up the fifth time, he released his head.

“I’m running out of time, Thaddeus Blat, and I’ve got nothing to lose by killing you. I’ve already killed my wife and all my servants, remember? So if I have to put your face under that water one more time, I’m going to hold it there until you’re dead.”

Real fear was painted across the lieutenant’s face in dripping watercolors. “They don’t tell me anything—no, wait! I swear it. I don’t get my new orders until tonight. But this one goes all the way to the top. To the top of the Kin, you know?”

“The Sa’kagé?”

“Yeah.”

“Not good enough. Sorry.”

They plunged his head back under the water and he thrashed like a demon, but on his knees, with his hands tied, there was nothing he could do. “You set a limit, and then you break it,” Regnus said. “Most people can hold out if they’ve been given a limit. They tell themselves, ‘I can hold out that long.’ Let him up.”

The man spluttered as he came up, spitting out inhaled water and wheezing. “You think of anything else?” Regnus asked, but he didn’t give Thaddeus time to respond.

He dunked the man again. “Sir,” one of the soldiers said, looking a little queasy. “If you don’t mind my asking, how do you know all this?”

Regnus grinned. “I got captured by the Lae’knaught during a border raid when I was young. But we don’t have the time to use everything I learned from them. Up.”

“Wait!” Thaddeus Blat cried out. “I overheard them saying that Hu Gibbet’s next deader was the queen. Her and her daughters. That’s all I know. Gods, that’s all I know. He’s going to kill them tonight in the queen’s chambers after the banquet. Please don’t kill me. I swear that’s all I know.”

They had promised Kaldrosa Wyn a man-o’-war and put her on a sea cow instead. The Sethi pirate hadn’t been able to say no to the money. Damn the mother who whelped me, why didn’t I say no? Looking over the port side, she barked an order and men scurried to adjust the sails to catch another cupful of wind. Sails? Bedsheets, more like. The sails were too small. The ship and its sister were too fat and ungainly to outrun a rowboat piloted by a one-handed monkey. In short, the Cenarian warships would be on them in minutes, and there wasn’t a damn thing Kaldrosa Wyn could do about it.

“If you’re going to do something, now might be a good time,” she told the circle of wytches sitting on the barge’s deck.

“Wench,” the leader of the wytches said, “no one tells a meister his work. Understood?” The man’s eyes didn’t rise from her bare breasts until the last word.

“Then to hell with ya,” Kaldrosa said. She spat over the side, not betraying the queasiness that rose in her at the touch of that wytch’s eyes. The bastards had been staring at her breasts for the entire trip. Normally around foreigners, she’d have covered herself, but she liked making the Khalidorans uncomfortable. Wytches were another matter.

Kaldrosa reefed the sails and had the men below decks start rowing, but even that was hopeless. Khalidoran craftsmanship. They’d even designed the oars poorly. They were too short. Even with the hundreds of men she was carrying, she couldn’t translate their strength into speed because not enough men could man the oars at once, nor was there room below for full sweep. She cursed her greed and the wytches—quietly.

In minutes, the three Cenarian warships were on them. It was a shame. In all the ocean, Cenaria couldn’t have had more than a dozen ships in her navy, and Kaldrosa had found the three best ships of it. In her Sparrowhawk or any Sethi ship with a Sethi crew, she’d be safe.

The wytches finally stood as the first Cenarian ship drew within a hundred paces. They were going to ram her sea cow at an angle and sheer off the oars. Eighty paces. Seventy. Fifty. Thirty.

The wytches had their hands twined. They were chanting and it seemed darker on deck than it had been a moment before, but nothing was happening. The sailors and soldiers on the Cenarian ship were shouting to each other and at her, getting ready for the collision and the battle to follow.

“Damn you,” she yelled, “do something!”

Out of the corner of her eye, she thought she saw something immense pass by, under the ship. She turned to brace for the impact, but instead only got a face full of water. There was a tremendous crack, and when her vision cleared, she saw pieces of the Cenarian ship flying through the air. But not many pieces. Not enough to account for an entire ship.

Then she saw the rest of the ship through the shallow blue waters. Somehow, it had been sucked down in an instant. The flying pieces were merely what had broken off the decks and the sails as the water broke over the ship.

The sea went black, as if a thick cloud had passed in front of the sun, but it undulated. It took Kaldrosa a moment to realize that something enormous was passing beneath her ship. Something absolutely immense. She saw the wytches chanting, more than their hands intertwined now. It seemed as if the black tattoos that all of them wore had torn free of their hands and were holding each other, pulsing with power. The wytches were sweating as if under tremendous strain.