Brian Murphy - The Search For Magic

“Well, gents, I hope you had a pleasant voyage,” the captain said genially. Mixun told him what he could do with his pleasant voyage. Balic promptly boxed the young man’s ear. He had a fist like a tackle block, and the blow drove Mixun to the deck. Laughing, the sailors dragged him upright again.

“What’s this about?” quavered Raegel. “Do you mean to kill us?”

Balic chuckled unpleasantly. “By my beard, no! If that’s all I wanted, I could have cut your throats back in Port o’Call.”

“Yeah, but murder’s a crime there,” Mixun said.

“So it is, and I am a respectable ship’s master.” Balic gestured, and the sailors behind Raegel and Mixun cut the bonds around their ankles. Their hands were left tied.

Instinctively the two men moved apart. “What are you doing, then?” Raegel asked anxiously.

“Dispensing justice,” said Balic. “Prepare the longboat.”

“What does he mean?” murmured Raegel.

“We’re being marooned,” answered Mixun. “The good captain is putting us ashore on the worst land in the world.”

Two sailors with drawn cutlasses prodded Raegel and Mixun to the rail. As they watched, the ship’s longboat was rigged and lowered over the side.

“Call it what you will, you’re murdering us,” Mixun said as he watched the preparations.

“No sir, I am not,” said Balic, sounding quite cheerful. “You shall leave this vessel alive and breathing. What happens to you afterward is between you and the gods who still live.”

“No!” cried Raegel. “Please, good captain, don’t do this! It’s all a misunderstanding! We never meant to cheat you-”

Balic crossed the deck in two strides and took hold of Raegel’s flimsy shirt. “Of course not! You didn’t know the casks of fine pearls you sold me were filled with old oyster shells, eh?”

“No, we didn’t! Our supplier from Schallsea duped us!”

“Enough lies!” Balic backhanded the frightened man. “Get this scum off my ship!”

Struggling and protesting, Mixun and Raegel were herded to the gap in the rail at swordpoint. With their hands tied in front of them, they were able to hold a rope as they descended the hull cleats to the longboat. Six oarsmen and the bo’sun, a quarter-elf named Tamaro, were waiting for them. Mixun missed a step near the bottom and fell into the boat. Raegel made his last step, then toppled over as a vigorous wave dashed the longboat against the caravel’s hull.

“Wear away!” Balic roared. “Look to your oars!”

“Aye, Captain!” Tamaro shouted back. He took his place at the tiller and ordered the sailors to dig in. Slowly, the longboat worked its way toward shore. Rowing into the wind made the bow leap and plunge, but Tamaro kept them on course for the flat, rocky beach beneath a frowning glacier. Mixun struggled upright as his tall companion slid down among the boat ribs.

Raegel’s lips were already turning blue. “I’m cold.”

“We’re going to be a lot colder,” Mixun said. He was glad now he hadn’t cut his hair in Port o’ Call. It was well below shoulder length and gathered in a thick hank. At least it warmed his neck a little.

There were no shallows near the beach. The dark water never lightened, never gave way to curling breakers as they rowed in. Tamaro ran the bow right on the stony shore, and the sailors shipped oars.

Drawing his cutlass, Tamaro said, “All right you two, out!”

“You’re murdering us! You know that, don’t you?” Mixun said.

“Captain’s orders,” replied the bo’sun. “If I didn’t obey, he’d have me put ashore with you.”

Sullenly, Mixun stood up and worked his way forward. He swung his leg over the bow post and dropped to the gravel. With much cursing, bumping, and thumping, Raegel staggered through the waiting rowers and joined his companion on the stark shore.

“Are you leaving us any food or clothing?” Mixun gasped, clutching his arms against the knife-sharp wind.

“I’ve none to give you,” Tamaro said. The quarter-elf s features were not without sympathy. He came to the longboat’s prow and opened his coat, revealing the hilt of a sturdy iron dagger. Concealing his movement from the sailors behind him, Tamaro flipped the weapon over the side. Mixun caught it before it clanked on the rocks.

“And now we’re done,” said Tamaro. “May you find the fate you deserve.”

He resumed his place at the rudder and ordered the sailors to backwater. The longboat grated off the gravel beach, spun around, and rowed briskly away. As it receded, Mixun saw Tamaro’s face, white against his dark wool cloak, as he looked back at them several times.

“Wretch!” said Mixun. “He should’ve used his dagger on Captain Persayer!”

Raegel took the weapon and began sawing through the cords around his wrists. “But it was very decent of him to help us,” he said. Lengths of cord fell at his feet. Free, he set to work on Mixun’s bonds. “I always had hope for Tamaro.”

Mixun raised a single eyebrow. His partner had the habit of making puns at the worst possible moment, like the time in Ergoth they were caught selling painted lead bars as real gold, and were thrown into a dank, rat-infested dungeon in Gwynned. Mixun remarked about having been in worse jails, to which Raegel said, “As prisons go, this wasn’t so bad, barring the windows.”

“Don’t start,” Mixun said. He shivered hard. His flimsy city finery, intended to impress the gullible, was no help against the climate. Already the brass buckles on his knee breeches were conducting blistering cold into his legs. His thin velvet boots offered little resistance to the insistent chill.

It began to snow.

“We’ve got to find shelter,” he said. “We’ll be dead in an hour if we don’t.”

Raegel stamped his feet, trying to warm them. “Maybe there are caves in the cliffs?”

There was nothing better to try, so they set off for the towering glacier. Before the snow completely closed them in, Mixun cast a last look. Seahorse, topsails set, was driving out to sea. Someday, he fumed, someday he and Captain Persayer would cross paths again, and the result would be much different.

“Come on,” Raegel was calling. He’d found a path to the glacier. Different layers of ice had fractured and fallen, creating a broad, slippery set of steps leading to the summit. Mixun untied the ribbon holding his hair in place and combed the long strands forward to protect his dark, frowning face from the raw wind.

Raegel, Rafe’s son, was a country boy from Throt. At twenty-four, he’d been on the run for seven years. While hoeing onions on his family’s farm one day, he was taken by a press gang from the Knights of Neraka. The Knights needed men to fill out the depleted ranks of their army, and lately they’d begun impressing free men rather than hiring expensive mercenaries. Raegel went along without a fight, and the press gang sergeant was the first of many to take him for a simpleton. He didn’t look like he had two thoughts to rub together. Tall, gangling, with a shock of red hair that had the habit of standing up on his head like a worn-out broom, Raegel learned at an early age to let people think what they wanted about him. While everyone discounted his wits, Raegel went about life with a peculiar grace, unhindered by conscience.

He escaped the unwary Nerakans, and after various adventures, made his way to Sanction, where he found work as a footman to the seer Gashini. Old Gashini did a lucrative trade in fortune-telling and dispensing advice to the high and low in Sanction, but his powers were not derived from magic. Gashini was a snoop, and he employed an army of lesser snoops to ferret out gossip and private news which he later dispensed as supernatural revelations. Raegel learned pick-pocketing and eavesdropping from Gashini, among other vices.