Ship of Magic

Ke

“You don't deserve these people,” a small voice said quietly. “Why they love you is beyond me. I would tell you that I would rejoice in your downfall the day they find you out, save that is also the day their hearts will break. By what luck do you deserve the loyalty of such folk?”

Wearily he lifted his wrist. The little face, strapped so tightly over his pulse point, glared up at him. He snorted a brief laugh at its indignant expression. “By my luck. By the luck in my name and the luck in my blood, I deserve them.” Then he laughed again, this time at himself. “The loyalty of a whore and a brigand. Such wealth.”

“Your leg is rotting,” the little face said with sudden malignance. “Rotting up the bone. It will stink and drip and burn the life from your flesh. Because you lack the courage to cut your own foulness from your body.” It sneered a grin at him. “Do you wit my parable, Ke

“Shut up,” he said heavily. He had begun to sweat again. Sweating in his nice clean shirt, in his fresh clean bed. Sweating like a stinking old drunk. “If I am evil, what shall we say of you? You are part and parcel of me.”

“This piece of wood had a great heart once,” the charm declared. “You have put your face upon me and your voice comes from my mouth. I am bound to you. But wood remembers. I am not you, Ke

“No one… asked you… to.” His breath was coming harder. He closed his eyes and sank away.

Chapter Thirty

Defiance And Alliance

Her first slave death happened in early afternoon. The loading had gone slowly and poorly. A wind from the east had churned up a nasty chop in the water while the building clouds on the horizon promised yet another winter storm by morning. The coffles of slaves were being ferried out to where Vivacia was anchored, and the slaves were being prodded up the rope ladder hung over her side. Some of the slaves were in poor condition; others were afraid of the ladder, or simply awkward getting from the rocking boat to the ladder on the side of the rocking ship. But the man who died, died because he wanted to. He was halfway up the ladder, climbing awkwardly because his legs were still fettered together. He suddenly laughed out loud. “Guess I'll take the short road instead of the long one,” he sang out. He stepped away from the ladder and let go. He dropped like an arrow into the sea, the weight of chain on his ankles pulling him straight down. He could not have saved himself even if he had changed his mind.

In the dark waters far below her hull, a knot of serpents suddenly uncoiled. She sensed their lashing struggle for a share of the meat. The salt of a man's blood flavored the seawater briefly as it washed against her hull. Her horror was all the deeper that the men on her decks suspected nothing. “There are serpents below!” she called back to them, but they ignored her just as they ignored the pleas of the slaves.

After that, an angry Torg had the slaves roped together. This made it even more awkward for them to climb aboard, but he seemed to take some vengeful delight in reminding them that any man who jumped would have to answer to the rest of his coffle. No one else tried it, and Torg congratulated himself on his slyness.

Inside her holds, it was even worse. The slaves breathed out misery, until a miasma of unhappiness filled her from within. They were packed like fish in a barrel, and fastened to one another as well, so that they could not even shift without the cooperation of their chain-mates. The holds were dark with their fear; they pissed it out with their urine, wept it out with their tears until Vivacia felt saturated with human wretchedness.

In the chain locker, vibrating in harmony with her and adding his own special note to the woe, was Wintrow. Wintrow, who had abandoned her, was once again aboard her. He sprawled in the dark on the deck, ankles and wrists still weighted with chains, face pocked and stained with her image. He did not weep or moan, nor did he sleep. He simply stared into the blackness and felt. He shared her awareness of the slaves and their misery.

Like the beating of a heart she did not have, Wintrow thrummed with the slaves' despair. He knew the entire gauntlet of their despondency, from the half-wit who could not comprehend the change in his life to the aging sculptor whose early works still decorated the Satrap's personal quarters. In the lowest and darkest of her holds, scarcely above the bilge, was a layer of those least valuable. Map-faces, little more than human ballast they were, and the survivors would be sold for whatever they might bring in Chalced. In a safe dry hold that had oftimes held bales of silk or casks of wine, artisans huddled. To these were given the comfort of a layer of straw and enough chain to stand upright, if they took turns at it. Kyle had not secured as many of these as he had hoped for. The bulk of his cargo in the main hold were simple laborers and tradesmen, journeymen fallen on hard times, smiths and vineyard-dressers and lacemakers, plunged into debt by illness or addiction or poor judgment, and now paying the forfeit of their debts with their own flesh.

And in the forecastle were men with a different sort of pain. Some of the crew had had reservations about the captain's plan from the begi

She and Wintrow echoed one another's misery. And working inside her despair was the deep conviction that this never could have happened to her if her family had only been true to her. If one of her true blood had captained this ship, that captain would have had to share what she was feeling. She knew Ephron Vestrit would never have exposed her to this. Althea would have been incapable of it. But Kyle Haven heeded her not. If he had any misgivings, he had not shared them with anyone. The only emotion Wintrow recognized from his father was a cold burning anger that bordered on a hatred for his own flesh and blood. Vivacia suspected that Kyle saw them as a double-pronged problem: the ship that would not heed his wishes because of a boy that would not be what his father commanded him to be. She feared that Kyle was determined to break one or the other of them. And both, if he could.