Chapter 62: The Sea Does Not Care
The coast road took three days, and the sea got louder every hour.
Mataon had never seen the sea. He’d read about it. He’d audited fishing-tithes and salt-levies and the ledgers of ports he would never visit, and none of it had told him the truth, which was that the sea did not care.
It was the first thing in Gaiark that reminded him of the System. Vast, indifferent, and honest about it.
"You’re doing the face," Barni said, trotting at his heel.
"The one where you meet something bigger than you and start trying to weigh it."
"I’m not weighing the sea."
"You are absolutely weighing the sea. It’s very like you. Give it a year and there’ll be a tide-table nailed to the Hearthroot wall in your handwriting."
Mataon didn’t argue. There would be.
They came off the road on the third evening, and Ivara was waiting where the pines gave way to salt grass, lying flat on a rise with her bow unstrung and her whole body still.
She didn’t look back at them. She just lifted two fingers and pointed down the slope, at the thing the road had been carrying them toward the whole time.
The holdfast sat on a tidal island.
At high water it was an island. At low water a stone causeway rose out of the mud and joined it to the shore, and along that causeway ran everything the coast had ever stolen.
Mataon lay in the salt grass and read it the way he read everything.
He didn’t need the Spear for this. The crooked line was the whole place.
A curtain wall, old and well-kept. A counting-house at the center, taller than it needed to be, the only building with glass in its windows. And low against the seaward side, half-sunk, roofed in tarred wood, the pens.
He made himself look at the pens for a long time.
"Two hundred and eleven," Souk said quietly, beside him.
She had ridden through the night to be here.
"The scrip was three days old when we took it. The number’s only gone up."
"How long do they stay?"
"Until a ship comes."
She nodded at the water.
"One’s coming. Deep-draft trader, Nharad colors, standing off the point since noon. It runs on the tide. Next high water it comes in, loads, and leaves for the inland rivers."
"When’s the next high water?"
"Tomorrow night."
So that was the clock. Mataon had wanted a week. He had a day.
He didn’t let it show, because Ivara was watching him for it, and a scout who sees her commander flinch starts counting exits for the wrong reason.
"Then it’s tomorrow night," he said.
"Before the tide. Maelor."
The old smith had been quiet the whole three days. He was quiet now, lying in the grass with his ruined hand flat against the cold ground, looking at the holdfast the way other men look at a grave they dug.
"Sea-gate," he said.
"Under the counting-house, seaward side. Every Deunan clearing-house has one. It’s how the ships used to load at low tide before they built the causeway. Nobody uses them now. Nobody bricks them up either, because a Deunan lock is supposed to be enough."
"Is it?"
"For anyone else."
Maelor flexed the ruined hand.
"I made that pattern. Tumbler-and-bar, sea-fouled, the kind you can’t force without waking the yard. There are maybe four men alive who can open one in the dark without a sound." A pause.
"Three of them are still in Deuna, making more. I’m the fourth. That’s not pride, auditor. That’s just the count."
Mataon nodded slowly.
"Then you and I go in the sea-gate. We open the pens first. Souk comes behind us for the counting-house. Ivara keeps the exits. Rhavena—"
"The packs take the causeway," Rhavena said.
She had come up through the grass without a sound, which for a woman her size should not have been possible, and her amber eyes were fixed on the holdfast with six years of arithmetic in them.
"When the pens open, thirty-odd professional slavers are going to run for the one road off that island," she said.
"They’ll find my packs on it. We don’t have to beat them. We just have to be there, so the men who own two hundred people decide that tonight, the price of leaving is higher than the price of staying home."
She finally looked at him.
"You free them. We make the leaving cost. That’s the whole shape of it."
"That’s the whole shape of it," Mataon agreed.
That night they made a cold camp in the pines, no fire, the sea grinding away below them in the dark.
Souk sat apart, writing by moonlight. A courier-bird waited on her wrist, patient and hooded.
"Corvane?" Mataon asked.
"Already answered."
Souk didn’t look up.
"She rode to the Marches border-post the day we left and she’s holding a writ of lawful seizure with the ink dry. The moment I put the buyer-book in her hands, every name in it becomes a warrant. She was very clear about one thing, though. She said to tell you exactly this."
Souk finally looked up.
"’Bring me the book. Not the bodies. If he turns my writ into a massacre, I burn it and I never met him.’"
"She’s right," Mataon said.
"She usually is. It’s insufferable."
He almost smiled. Then he lay back in the needles and looked at the cold stars, and did the thing he always did the night before, which was run the whole plan again looking for the crooked line inside his own design.
He found the same one he always found.
Two hundred and eleven people, and a day, and a garrison of professionals, and a sea that did not care. If the timing broke, if a lock stuck, if a single guard looked at the water at the wrong moment, people died. Not slavers. The people in the pens. The ones he’d come for.
He’d built the whole plan to make that unlikely. He couldn’t build it to make it impossible.
"You’re weighing it again," Barni said, from the dark beside him.
"Yes."
"Good."
The old hybrid’s odd eyes caught the starlight, one pale, one dark.
"The night you stop weighing it is the night you’ve become the kind of man who can afford to be wrong about two hundred and eleven people. Stay afraid, Matski. It’s the only thing you and the Lycan agree on."
[Level 25 → Level 26]
[Stat points available: +3]
[Allocated: Perception +1, Intelligence +1, Endurance +1]
[STR 20 · AGI 18 · END 27 · INT 32 · PER 30 · WIL 33]
Mataon closed his eyes.
He didn’t sleep. But he rested, which was a skill Maelor had taught him at the forge, the way you rest a blade between the fire and the hammer.
Tomorrow night, the doors.