Scott Lynch - Red Seas Under Red Skies

True to her word, the carriage rattled to a halt just a few heartbeats later. Locke planted his hat over his hair once again, fumbled for the door mechanism and squinted as it opened into bright morning light. "Out," said Merrain. "Don't waste time."

They were down on the interior docks at the very north-eastern tip of the Savrola, with a sheer wall of black Elderglass behind them and several dozen anchored ships on the gleaming, choppy water before them. One boat was lashed to the nearest pier, a sleek gig about forty feet long with a raised and enclosed gallery at the stern. Two lines of rowers, five to a side, filled most of the rest of its space.

Locke hopped down from the carriage and led the way toward the boat, past a pair of alert men wearing cloaks as heavy as his own, quite inappropriate for the weather. They were standing at near-attention, not lounging, and Locke caught a glimpse of a sword-hilt barely hidden beneath one cloak.

He all but scampered up the flimsy ramp to the boat, hopped down into it and threw himself onto the bench at the rear of the passenger gallery. The gallery, fortunately, was only enclosed on three sides; a decent forward view of their next little voyage would be vastly preferable to another trip inside a dark box. Jean was close behind him, but Merrain turned right, climbed through the mass of rowers and seated herself in the coxswain's position at the bow.

The soldiers on the dock rapidly pulled back the ramp, unlashed the boat and gave it a good push away from the dock with their legs. "Pull," said Merrain, and the rowers exploded into action. Soon the boat was creaking to their steady rhythm and knifing across the little waves of Tal Verrar's harbour.

Locke took the opportunity to study the men and women at the oars — they were all leanly muscled, all with hair neatly trimmed short, most with fairly visible scars. Not one of them looked to be younger than their mid-thirties. Veteran soldiers, then. Possibly even Eyes without their masks and cloaks.

"I have to say, Stragos's people put on a good production," said Jean. He then raised his voice: "Hey! Merrain! Can we take these ridiculous clothes off yet?" She turned only long enough to nod and then returned her attention to the waters of the harbour. Locke and Jean eagerly removed their hats and cloaks and piled the clothing on the deck at their feet.

The ride across the water took about a third of an hour, as near as Locke could tell. He would have preferred to be free to study the harbour in all directions, but what he could see out through the open front of the gallery revealed enough. First they headed south-west, following the curve of the inner docks, past the Great Gallery and the Golden Steps. Then they turned south, putting the open sea on their right, and sped toward a huge crescent island of a like size with the one on which the Sinspire sat.

Tal Verrar's south-western crescent wasn't tiered. It was more like a naturally irregular hillside, studded with a number of stone towers and battlements. The huge stone quays and long wooden docks at its northwestern tip comprised the Silver Marina, where commercial vessels could put in for repairs or refitting. But past that, past the bobbing shapes of old galleons waiting for new masts or sails, lay a series of tall, grey walls that formed enclosed bays. The tops of these walls supported round towers, where the dark shapes of catapults and patrolling soldiers could be seen. The bow of their boat was soon pointed at the nearest of these huge stone enclosures.

Til be damned," said Jean. "I think they're taking us into the Sword Marina."

The vast stone walls of the artificial bay were gated with wood. As the boat approached, shouts rang out from the battlements above and the clanking of heavy chains echoed off stone and water. A crack appeared in the middle of the gate, and then the two doors slowly swung inward, sweeping a small wave before them. As the boat passed through the gate Locke tried to estimate the size of everything he was seeing; the opening itself had to be seventy or eighty feet wide, and the timbers of the doors looked to be as thick as an average man's torso.

Merrain called instructions to the rowers and they brought the boat in carefully, coasting gently up to a small wooden dock where a single man waited to receive them. The rowers had placed the boat at an angle, so that the end of the dock barely scraped the hull of the boat between the rowers and the passenger gallery.

"Your stop, gentlemen," called Merrain. "No time to tie up, I'm afraid. Be nimble or get wet."

"You're the soul of kindness, madam," said Locke. "I" ve shed any lingering regret about failing to leave a tip for you." He moved out of the gallery and to the gunwale on his right hand. There the stranger waited with one arm held out to assist him. Locke sprang up to the dock easily enough with the man's help, and the two of them in turn yanked Jean to safety.

Merrain's rowers backed water immediately; Locke watched as the gig made sternway, aligned itself with the gate and then sped back out of the little bay at high speed. Chains rattled once again and water surged as the gates drew closed. Locke glanced up and saw that teams of men were turning huge capstans, one on either side of the bay doors.

"Welcome," said the man who'd helped them out of the boat. "Welcome to the most foolish damn venture I ever hear of, much less got pressed into. Can't imagine whose wife you must" ve fucked to get assigned to this here suicide mission, sirs."

The man could have been anywhere between fifty and sixty; he had a chest like a tree stump and a belly that hung over his belt as though he was trying to smuggle a sack of grain beneath his tunic. Yet his arms and neck were almost scrawny in their wiriness, seamed with jutting veins and the scars of hard living. He had a round face, a woolish white beard and a greasy streak of white hair that fell straight off the back of his head like a waterfall. His dark eyes were nestled in pockets of wrinkles under permanent furrows.

"That might" ve been a pleasant diversion," said Jean, "if we" d known we were going to end up here anyway. Who might you be?"

"Name's Caldris," said the old man, "Ship" s master without a ship. You two must be Masters de Ferra and Kosta." "Must be," said Locke.

"Let me show you around," said Caldris. "Ain't much to see now, but you'll be seeing a lot of it."

He led the way up a set of rickety stairs at the rear of the dock, which opened onto a stone plaza that rose four or five feet above the water. The entire artificial bay, Locke saw, was a square roughly one hundred yards on a side. Walls enclosed it on three sides, and at the rear rose the steep glass hillside of the island. There were a number of structures built on platforms sticking out from that hillside: storage sheds, armouries and the like, he presumed.

The gleaming expanse of water beside the plaza, now sealed off from the harbour once again by the wooden gates, was large enough to float several ships of war, and Locke was surprised to see that there was only one craft tied up. A one-masted dinghy, barely fourteen feet long, rocked gently at the plaza's side. "Quite a bay for such a small boat," he said.

"Eh? Well, the ignorant need room in which to risk their lives without bothering anybody else for a while," said Caldris. "This here's our own private pissing-pond. Never you mind the soldiers on the walls; they'll ignore us. Unless we drown. Then they'll probably laugh." "Just what is it," said Locke, "that you think we're doing here, Caldris?"

"I" ve got a month or so in which to turn two ignorant straight-legged fumblethumb landlubbers into something resembling phoney sea-officers. All gods as my witness, sirs, I suspect this is all gonna end in screaming and drowning."