Chapter Five
Night had fallen in full by the time Donan and Keldon reached the inn.
They found Tyrael and Lorath pacing before the fire, nearly ready to start a search of the city for him.
Donan explained his tardiness by introducing them to the old sailor, omitting any mention of his run-in with the thieves; he generally tried to avoid giving Lorath any excuse to scold or gloat.
The four of them sat at a corner table, away from the inn’s other patrons, where they spoke in murmurs and whispers.
“Where exactly is your ship?” Tyrael asked.
“The Harbormaster has an estate on Pincer Point, at the mouth of the bay. She has a private boatyard.”
“Why does she keep it there?” Lorath asked. “What’s so special about this ship?”
Keldon shook his head. “It ain’t about the Arabel to her. If I were a merchant, she’d have seized my shop. If I were a farmer, she’d have claimed my land. All she cares about is my debt to her.”
“Why hasn’t she just killed you?” Lorath asked.
“She might, one day.” Keldon spoke matter-of-factly, without any apparent fear or interest in that eventuality. “For now, I suppose it suits her purposes to keep me alive.”
Donan understood Lorath’s and Tyrael’s reasons for skepticism, and he shared them, but he also knew that any captain they hired in a place like Port Justinian would be no more trustworthy, and likely much less.
“Why have you not simply left Kingsport?” Tyrael asked.
Keldon said nothing at first, bouncing his leg while avoiding the man’s gaze. “I need a drink.”
“Please.” Tyrael leaned toward the sailor, gazing at him with gentle insistence. “Something has kept you here. What is it?”
When Keldon finally looked up, his eyes and his voice held vast anger. “I’ll not leave Kingsport without the Arabel, all right? That’s all I have to say.”
Lorath scoffed. “In other words, you would use us to recover your ship and escape your debt.”
“I’d use you?” Keldon scratched at his matted beard.
“You think I want to sail to bloody Skovos? That ain’t no pleasure cruise, boy.
I’d be risking my life alongside yours. So I’d say we’re using each other, wouldn’t you?
” He stood, fists clenched. “You know, I didn’t ask for your friend to sit at my table.
You don’t want my ship, that’s fine by me.
I’ll walk out that door and not give you another thought. ”
“Wait, don’t leave.” Donan stood and pressed more coin into Keldon’s hand. “Go and buy yourself an ale while we talk things over.”
Keldon took the money, but he glowered as he walked away.
After he was gone, Lorath leaned in, shaking his head. “I don’t like this. We don’t know anything about this man’s debt, or how he came by it.”
“But you have met the Harbormaster,” Donan said. “Do you trust her more than you trust him?”
“I don’t trust either of them,” Lorath said.
“Nor do I.” Tyrael steepled his hands, touching his lips in thought. “But I do believe Keldon is a good man. Even good men make mistakes, and I sense that he has suffered for his. I do not think an evil man would continue to carry the weight that Keldon seems to bear on his shoulders.”
Lorath propped both elbows on the table and rubbed the knuckles of one hand in the palm of the other. “Well, how can I argue with that ?”
When Keldon returned, he carried two mugs in each hand. “I regret the loss of my temper,” he said, sloshing the drinks as he set them down on the table. “My offer stands: Help me get the Arabel, and after that, I’ll sail you wherever you want to go. Even to Skovos.”
Lorath looked up at him for a moment, then claimed an ale as he stood. “You have a deal.” Then Donan and Tyrael did the same, and the four of them sealed their compact with a drink.
Pincer Point lay southeast of the city proper.
The Harbormaster’s estate occupied a spit of land in the shape of a thick bear claw that extended into the bay.
An earthen jetty lengthened and curled that claw to enclose a small personal harbor.
The estate itself consisted of several wooden barns and outbuildings surrounding a main hall, which had been built from stone like a fortress to withstand the violent tempests that regularly slammed into the shore.
Gnarled and stunted trees grew there, with thick branches and deep roots, a nesting ground for ravens and crawling scavengers.
Away from the city’s waste and the industry of the wharf, the wind off the sea smelled of deeper currents and more ancient forms of life.
After securing provisions for the voyage, Keldon led the Horadrim there that very night; the moon was bright, he said, and the tides were in their favor.
The path they traveled followed the edge of a bluff, with brambly forest on their left and a rocky slope down to the bay on their right.
Some distance from the estate, they left the road and climbed down to the water’s edge, scrambling over the boulders in the shadow of the bluff, toward the Harbormaster’s private boatyard.
As they drew closer, the dark forms floating on the water acquired the shapes of the prows, sterns, and masts of several vessels.
Soon, Keldon spotted his ship, anchored to a mooring buoy out closer to the jetty than the shore, and they paused to consider their plan.
To reach the Arabel, they would have to steal a rowboat anchored to the quay near the estate, on the opposite side of the harbor from the jetty.
Donan counted only two guards with torches patrolling the dock, keeping watch over the ships and several stacks of crated goods awaiting stowage, but the lights gleaming from the great hall above suggested that reinforcements would arrive quickly enough if the alarm were raised.
“We will have to do this quietly,” Tyrael said.
“We could do with a distraction,” Keldon said.
Donan looked at the nearest of the hall’s barns. “I have an idea,” he said, and after explaining his plan, the others got into position while he crept off on his own.
He threaded his way through the bramble toward the outbuildings, taking note of the surrounding terrain, mapping the escape route he would take when he ran back down toward the docks.
As he approached the hall, he could hear voices, coarse laughter, and the clinking of ale mugs through the open windows.
By the sound of it, the Harbormaster kept quite a large company of foot soldiers at her personal command.
Donan scouted out a place he hoped would be out of view from any window or guard post, keeping the large barn between himself and the hall.
Then he crouched down and held his cupped hands before him as if holding an invisible sphere.
As he spoke the incantation, a small tongue of violet flame sprang to life between his palms, and then it swelled into a compressed blaze, churning and lighting up the surrounding thicket and the bare branches overhead.
A startled raven cawed nearby as he hurled the burning mass.
The ball of flame arced through the air and struck the barn, exploding in a shower of sparks and viscous fire, igniting the wooden timbers in an instant. Then he turned and ran, scrambling back down toward the dock as cries of alarm rose up behind him.
He made it back through the thicket but paused at the tree line with a view of the wharf, waiting. When the two guards patrolling there left their post to combat the fire, he saw Tyrael, Lorath, and Keldon skulking toward the rowboat, and he broke into a run toward them.
“There!” someone shouted behind him. “Take him down!”
Donan raced harder, head ducked and shoulders braced against the arrows he imagined were now aimed his way.
He reached the pier, boots hammering on the wooden planks, but his pursuers had closed the distance fast. Tyrael and the others had already boarded the dinghy, ready to heave away, and Donan leapt from the dock.
The impact of his weight set the little boat rocking precariously, but the other three managed to steady it as he rolled over onto his back and looked up at the pier behind them.
The Harbormaster and a few of her thugs had reached the wharf, but not in time. As the rowboat pulled away, the barn blazed behind them, throwing its harsh glow across the entire harbor.
“Keldon!” she shouted after them. “I see you, Keldon, you ungrateful cur! Did you tell them what I did for you? Did you tell them what you did? You Horadrim just threw in with a murderer! He killed three unarmed men in cold blood! You ask him if that’s not true!”
Donan hoped the Harbormaster was lying. He and Lorath both glanced at Keldon, who gripped his oar with a clenched jaw, staring hard into the night. It seemed Lorath was about to say something.
“Not here,” Tyrael interjected. “There will be time for questions after we are gone from this place.”
The Harbormaster and her enforcers did not remain standing on the quay for long.
The fire posed a far greater threat, just as Donan had assumed it would, and she had already left to battle the blaze by the time the rowboat reached the Arabel.
Lorath tied the dinghy to the mooring buoy, and the Horadrim and Keldon climbed aboard the larger ship.
“She’s just as I left her,” Keldon said. “The winds are with us, girl.”
Having been raised in a port city, Donan possessed some knowledge of seafaring and sailing vessels, but only in the abstract.
His family’s wealth had removed any need to labor on a ship, but even to his untrained eye, the Arabel possessed something innately elegant in the sweep of her hull.
She was not a large ship, stretching only fifteen paces in length with a single tall mast, but she felt strong.
Toward the bow and stern of the vessel, hatchways led down to cabins belowdecks.
Much of her timber had been painted a rich midnight blue, with yellow trim and brass fittings that glinted like warm stars in the moonlight.
Tyrael and Lorath appeared to have more familiarity with the complex network of ropes, allowing them to assist Keldon in hoisting the mainsail and the headsail before it, while Donan tried his best to stay out of their way.
He felt the rocking of the boat, still mild in the shelter of the small harbor, and for the first time he truly contemplated the voyage ahead of them.
The few times he had been to sea had been short and leisurely.
But as the Arabel departed from the harbor and the bay, riding out with the tide, he found the waves did not feel completely unfamiliar.
Rather, they called to mind the rolling dunes of Kehjistan, and Keldon’s ship was not altogether unlike a merchant caravan setting off to cross a vast and forbidding expanse.
Keldon stood at the tiller, setting their course southeast toward Skovos beneath a sky full of stars.
“Now that we’re underway,” Lorath said, “I’d like to know if the Harbormaster spoke the truth. Did you murder three innocent men?”
“She did not say they were innocent,” corrected Tyrael. “She said they were unarmed.”
“It’s true they were unarmed,” Keldon admitted. “But they were not innocent.”
“Care to elaborate?” Lorath asked.
Keldon stared ahead at the horizon. “No.”
Lorath moved into the sailor’s line of sight to force a confrontation.
Donan stepped between the two men, hoping to pacify the situation, but in doing so, he inadvertently laid his hand on the tiller.
This made Keldon’s face twist up with instant rage, though he held himself still and spoke with unsettling calm. “Take your hand off my ship.”
Donan almost flinched as he pulled his hand from the tiller, while Lorath came to his defense from behind. “He meant no disrespect, and I think you know that. I also think we’re entitled to some explanation. The Harbormaster said you murdered those men.”
“Aye, I killed them,” Keldon said. “How many have you killed with that wicked polearm of yours?”
Donan could not count the number of cultists and monsters he had personally witnessed Lorath execute, sometimes in a state of such blind fury that Donan became frightened of his comrade.
“I can account for my actions without shame,” Lorath said. “Can you?”
Keldon sneered. “I am not accountable to the likes of you—”
“You are right.” Now Tyrael stepped forward and placed a steadying hand on Lorath’s shoulder. “You are not accountable to us. All we must know is whether we can trust you.”
“I have the Arabel back.” Keldon rubbed his hand along the tiller. “You have my thanks for that. I swear to you, I’ll hold up my end of our bargain. You can trust me to sail you to Skovos safely.” Then he added, “So long as the seas are in agreement.”