Brian Ruckley - Corsair

Directly above the calm waters of the cove, atop the sheer cliff, was the rear of the castle’s keep. There were balconies there, built out from the stonework. Intended no doubt to give the place’s original inhabitants a fine view, a refreshing breath of the sea air. Yulan did not see the appeal. He brought his gaze down again, to focus upon more immediate and pressing concerns. And to his considerable relief, found Corena and the rest waiting just ahead, at the edge of the little bay.

They stood on a wide platform made from vast slabs of worked stone. It had been laid over a tiny beach of shells. Ahead, cupped in the protective embrace of curving lines of boulders, waited the boats. On the left, to Yulan’s surprise for it had been invisible from above, a deep cave sank into the body of the island beneath the castle. The sea reached in there, too far back to make out its end. There must be a quay or landing stage within, he reasoned, for the stair was no fit way to load or unload ships. The Sorentines had burrowed through the body of the island itself to connect castle to ocean.

Yulan felt something he would not have thought himself capable of: an urgent desire to get aboard a boat and set sail. He glanced at Corena.

‘We all follow you now, captain.’

At which, without hesitation, she plunged into the water and began wading towards the nearest of the Corsair King’s orphaned vessels. The gentle waves lapped at her chest as she leaned into them and strode on.

‘Wait there until I tell you it’s seaworthy,’ she called back over her shoulder.

Yulan squatted down on his haunches beside the three children. They looked at him, all of them, with wide eyes.

‘One of your sisters is a Clever. Is that right?’

‘Her name’s Enna,’ the oldest of the three said.

‘What’s your name?’ Yulan asked the girl.

‘Navene.’

‘Listen, Navene, do you think your sister might really want to hurt us, or you? Can we talk to her, perhaps?’

‘I don’t know. She’s not … she’s not the same as us. She’s strange.’

Yulan ran a hand back through his long hair. For all that he had half-expected that answer, he did not like it.

‘She was father’s favourite, once he saw what she could do,’ Navene murmured. ‘He wanted us all to be like her then. Really wanted. He said he would scourge it out of us, make us wake up just as he did her.’

‘Scourge?’ Yulan said.

She tugged the collar of her ragged shirt down from her shoulder, twisted a little to show him the top of her back. There were scars there. Old ones, laid into her skin by a whip.

Hamdan was watching too, and Yulan heard the archer sucking in breath through clenched teeth. Wordlessly, Hamdan reached out and took Navene’s hand in his own for a moment. He pushed her sleeve up a little way. Her forearm was slightly crooked, a knot in the bone halfway along its length. Neither he nor Yulan said anything, but they both recognised a break that had never been allowed or helped to heal properly.

‘Man needed killing, just like you said,’ Hamdan muttered. He said it to Yulan, though he was smiling gently at Navene as he spoke.

‘Does Enna know your father’s dead?’ Yulan asked.

And Navene nodded. ‘She’s very upset.’

At the very moment she spoke the words, the castle above them gave a muffled, sonorous boom. Yulan looked up – they all did – in time to see a plume of brownish dust and debris spouting out from one of the high windows.

‘Upset, right enough,’ Hamdan said.

He edged away a short distance and beckoned Yulan to follow him.

‘If this Enna doesn’t know what she’s doing …’ Hamdan whispered softly enough that no one else should hear, ‘if she loses control of the entelechs she’s playing with, we could get a Permanence here. Then, most likely, there’s not one of us getting off this piece of rock alive.’

A Permanence. Yulan had heard tales of them, never seen one. He knew only what everyone knew: a Clever overwhelmed by the raw power they wielded could be snuffed out like a candle flame, becoming only the vessel by which a Permanence was born. Not a merging and mingling of the entelechs such as was all the normal substance and sentiment of the world, but a pure and potent expression of a single entelech. Ungovernable, unpredictable, set loose in the world. And once loosed, something no sword or bow could ever hope to oppose. Some, like the Bereaved, had killed thousands. Some, like the Unhomed Host, had reshaped the history of the world. It was not a possibility Yulan wanted to contemplate.

He stared up at the castle above them. Dull thumps and groans were emanating from it still. Breakings and grindings. He could not shed from his mind the thought of a frightened girl, grief-stricken and enraged. A power she must barely understand coursing through her, giving form and strength to the feelings that possessed her. Trapped, as much as any of them, by her father’s death.

He sighed and lowered his gaze. Hamdan had moved away, and when Yulan looked for him he found him standing at the edge of the water. He had his bow in one hand, the smallest and youngest of the children in the other. She sat on his supportive arm and had her hands locked behind his neck. She looked comfortable there.

‘Too deep for the little ones,’ Hamdan said. ‘This here’s Estrell, and it seems she’s decided to come with me. You’d best get one up on your back, too.’

Yulan turned to the two other children: Navene and a boy, smaller and frailer than her. Navene was glowering at him.

‘I can manage,’ she said stubbornly.

Perhaps she could. Yulan was not sure. Her frame looked devoid of strength. She probably did have the height to keep her head above water, though. He beckoned the boy to come closer, and tried to smile reassuringly.

‘What do I call you?’ he asked.

‘Tessunt.’

The boy’s voice was rough and thin, as if he had a throat sickness. His cheeks were sunken.

‘Climb up on my back and hold on tight, Tessunt.’

Yulan knelt and turned his back to the boy. The movement set his face towards the open sea and that was why he was the first to see the death of their hopes. He felt Tessunt’s arms come across his shoulders, felt the boy’s knees clasping around his waist, and even as he was feeling those things he was staring at the boats rounding the rocks at the mouth of the cove and heading in. Lake’s sleek raider and lumbering along behind it, quite some way behind it, Corena’s scow.

He stood up so suddenly that Tessunt almost slipped from his back, and he had to reach back to hold the boy there.

‘Corena!’ he shouted, only to find that Tessunt had such a tight lock on his neck the sound came out half-choked.

‘Loosen off a bit there,’ Yulan said, and as soon as the pressure on his throat grew less he cried out more heartily: ‘Corena!’

She stopped, with the water up almost to her shoulders now, and turned. Yulan nodded out towards the approaching vessels, and Corena waded a few paces back to get a clear view. He saw her cock her head slightly to one side. There were men, perhaps half a dozen of them, gathered near the prow of the leading boat. Yulan could see swords and spears at the ready.

Corena began striding back towards the platform on which the rest of them stood.

‘Can’t get past that,’ she called.

Yulan threw a quick glance back up the stairway to the postern gate. That did not, to put it mildly, look like a promising or quick path to safety. He sprang down into the water, almost falling as his feet sank into sand and Tessunt’s weight jolted on his back.

‘Into the cave,’ he shouted.

He did not look back as he ploughed through the water. He could hear others plunging into the sea, and struggling just as he did to move towards the dark oval of the cave. Little more promising than the vertiginous stair, he knew, but there must at least be doorways and passages in there that would be defensible, and less exposed.