Red Seas Under Red Skies: The Gentleman Bastard Sequence, Book Two (Gentleman Bastards 2)

‘At least that jackass finally stopped ringing the bell,’ muttered Jean. He had taken a spot on the last rowing bench, next to Big Konar, so he could chat with Ezri. She was trailing one of her hands in the water.

‘Is that wise?’ Jean asked.

‘What, fiddling with the water?’ Ezri hooked a thumb over her shoulder in the direction of the Parlour Passage outlet. ‘You can’t see them by night, but at the entrances to the bay there are rows of huge white stones set across the bottom. Regular lines of them.’

‘Eldren stones,’ muttered Konar.

‘They don’t bother us,’ said Ezri, ‘but nothing else will pass them. Not one single thing lives in this bay; you can swim at dusk with bloody cuts on your feet and nothing will come along for a taste.’

‘But not too close to the docks. Piss,’ said Konar, almost apologetically.

‘Well, damn,’ said Jean. ‘That sounds nice.’

‘Sure, I suppose,’ said Ezri. ‘Makes fishing a pain in the arse. Little boats crowd the Trader’s Gate Passage and muck up the works there more than usual. Speaking of mucking up the works . . .’

‘Mmm?’

‘I don’t see the Red Messenger anywhere.’

‘Ah.’

‘But she was crawling like a snail,’ she said. ‘And we do have some interesting company in her place.’

‘Such as?’

‘See that first row of ships? Starboard to larboard, that’s Osprey, Pierro Strozzi’s lugger. His crew’s tiny and so’s his ambition, but he could sail a barrel through a hurricane. Next to that, Regal Bitch, Captain Chavon Rance. Rance is a pain in the arse. Has a real temper. Next is Draconic, Jacquelaine Colvard’s brig. She’s reasonable, and she’s been out here longer than anyone.

‘That big three-master on the far end is the Dread Sovereign, Jaffrim Rodanov’s lady. Nasty piece of work. Last I saw she was on the beach being careened, but now she looks ready for sea.’

With six people pulling at the oars, they made short work of the trip. In just a few moments they were alongside a crumbling stone jetty. As Jean secured his oar, he spied a man’s corpse bobbing gently in the water.

‘Ah,’ said Ezri. ‘Poor bastard. That’s the mark of a lively night in these parts.’

Drakasha’s shore party tied the boat to the very end of the jetty and went up as though boarding an enemy vessel, with wary hearts and hands near their weapons.

‘Holy gods,’ exclaimed a mostly toothless drunk cradling a wineskin in the middle of the jetty. ‘It’s Drakasha, isn’t it?’

‘It is. Who are you?’

‘Banjital Vo.’

‘Well, Banjital Vo,’ said Drakasha, ‘I’m making you responsible for the safety of the boat we just tied up.’

‘But . . . I—’

‘If it’s here when we come back, I’ll give you a Verrari silver. If anything’s happened to it, I’ll ask around for you, and when I find you I’ll pull your gods-damned eyes out.’

‘I’ll . . . I’ll keep it like it were my own.’

‘No,’ said Drakasha, ‘keep it like it’s mine.’

She led them off the jetty and up a gently sloping sand path bordered by canvas tents, roofless log cabins and partially collapsed stone buildings. Jean could hear the snores of sleeping people within those decrepit structures, plus the soft bleat of goats, the growls of mongrel dogs and the flutter of agitated chickens. A few cookfires had burned down to coals, but there were no lanterns or alchemical lights hung out anywhere on this side of town.

A pungent stream of piss and night soil was trickling down the right-hand side of the path, and Jean stepped carefully to avoid it, as well as a sprawled corpse damming the flow about fifty yards up from the jetty. The occasional semi-lucid drunk or pipe-smoker stared at them from various nooks and shadows, but they weren’t spoken to until they crested a rise and found stones beneath their feet once again.

‘Drakasha,’ shouted a corpulent man in leathers with blackened-iron studs, ‘welcome back to civilization!’ The man carried a dim lantern in one hand and a bronze-ringed club in the other. Behind him was a taller fellow, scruffy and pot-bellied, armed with a long oak staff.

‘Handsome Marcus,’ said Drakasha. ‘Gods, you get uglier every time I come back. Like someone’s slowly sculpting an arse out of a human face. Who’s the new charmer?’

‘Guthrin. Wise lad decided to give up sailing and join the rest of us big swinging cocks in the glamorous life.’

‘Yeah? Well,’ Drakasha said, holding out a closed fist and shaking it so that the coins inside clinked against one another, ‘I found these in the road. They belong to you?’

‘I got a happy home for ’em right here. See now, Guthrin, that’s the style. Show this lady some favour and she returns the compliment. Fruitful voyage, Captain?’

‘Belly so full we can’t swim any more, Marcus.’

‘Good on you, Captain. You’ll want to hear from the Shipbreaker, then?’

‘Nobody wants to hear from that waste of a working arsehole, but if he wants to open his purse and bend over, I’ve got a little something in wood and canvas for his collection.’

‘I’ll pass the word. You in for the night?’

‘Toehold, Marcus. Just here to fly the flag.’

‘Fine idea.’ He glanced around briefly, and then his voice grew more serious. ‘Chavon Rance has the high table at the Crimson. Just so you can look all-knowing when you walk in the door.’

‘Obliged to you.’

When the two men had strolled on their way down the path toward the jetty, Jean turned to Ezri. ‘Guards of some sort?’

‘Maintainers,’ she said. ‘More like a gang. Sixty or seventy of them, and they’re what we have for order around here. Captains pay them a little out of every load they bring in, and they beat the rest of their living out of public nuisances. You can pretty much do as you like, long as you hide the bodies and don’t burn anything down or wake up half the city. Do that and the Maintainers come out to do a bit of maintaining.’

‘So what’s “flying the flag”, exactly?’

‘Gotta play these games sometimes,’ said Ezri. ‘Let everyone in Prodigal know that Zamira’s back, that she’s got a hold full of swag, that she’ll kick their heads in for looking at her cross-eyed. You know? Especially her brother and sister captains.’

‘Ah. I’m with you.’

They entered the city proper; here, at least, were the lights they’d seen from out in the bay, pouring from open windows and doors on both sides of the street. The buildings here had started as respectable stone homes and shops, but time and mischief had marked their faces. Broken windows were covered over with planking from ships or scraps of tattered sailcloth. Many of the houses sprouted leaning wooden additions that looked unsafe to approach, let alone live in; others grew wattle-and-daub third or fourth storeys like mushrooms from their old roofs.

Jean felt a sudden pang of grudging nostalgia. Drunkards lying senseless in the alleys. Larcenous children eyeing their party from the shadows. Maintainers in long leather coats thumping some poor bastard senseless behind a cart with no wheels. The sounds of swearing, argument, laughter and ale-sickness pouring from every open window and door . . . this place was, if not quite a fraternal relation to Camorr, at least a first cousin.

‘Orchids,’ hollered someone from a second-storey window. ‘Orchids!’

Zamira acknowledged the drunken shout with a casual wave and turned right at a muddy crossroads. From the dark mouth of an alley a heavyset man stumbled, wearing nothing but soiled breeches. He had the glassy, unfocused eyes of a Jeremite powder-smoker, and in his right hand was a serrated knife the length and width of Jean’s forearm.

‘Coin or suck,’ said the man, threads of saliva dangling down his chin. ‘Don’t care which. Got needs. Give us a—’

If he was oblivious to the fact that he was facing eight opponents, he wasn’t oblivious to Rask knocking his blade-hand aside and shoving him back into the alley by his neck. What happened next took only a few seconds; Jean heard a wet gurgle, and then Rask was stepping back out into the street, wiping one of his own knives on a rag. He threw this rag into the alley behind him, sheathed his knife and hooked his thumbs nonchalantly into his belt. Ezri and Drakasha didn’t appear to think the incident worthy of comment and they strolled on, casual as temple-goers on Penance Day morning.

‘Here we are,’ said Ezri as they reached the top of another small hill. A wide, half-paved square, its muddy sections crisscrossed by overlapping wagon tracks, was dominated by a fat two-storey building with a portico constructed around the chopped-off stern facing of an old ship. Time, weather and no doubt countless brawls had scuffed and chipped its elaborate scrollwork, but people could be seen drinking and revelling behind the second-storey windows, in what would have been the great cabin. Where the rudder had once been mounted was now a heavy double door, flanked by alchemical globes (the round, thick kind that were nearly impossible to break) in an approximation of stern lanterns.

‘The Tattered Crimson,’ Ezri continued. ‘It’s either the heart of Port Prodigal or the arsehole, depending on your perspective.’

To the left of the entryway was a ship’s longboat, mounted to the building by heavy wooden struts and iron chains. A few human arms and legs were sticking out of it. As Jean watched, the doors to the Tattered Crimson slammed outward and a pair of brutes emerged, carrying a limp old man between them. Without ceremony or pity, they heaved him into the boat, where his arrival caused some incoherent shouting and flailing of limbs.

‘Now watch your step,’ said Ezri, grinning. ‘Get too drunk to stand and they throw you overboard. Some nights there’s ten or twenty people piled up in that boat.’

A moment later Jean was squeezing past those brutes into the familiar smells of a busy tavern at an hour closer to dawn than dinner. Sweat, scalded meat, puke, blood, smoke and a dozen kinds of bad ale and wine: the bouquet of civilized nightlife.

The place looked to be constructed for a clientele that would be waging war not just on one another but on the bar and pantry. The bar itself, at the far side of the room, was enclosed from countertop to ceiling by iron panels, leaving only three narrow windows through which the staff could serve drinks and food like archers letting fly from murder-holes.

There were only floor-tables down here, in the Jereshti fashion: low surfaces around which men and women sat, knelt or lay on scuffed cushions. In the cavelike fug of the dimly lit room, they played cards and dice, smoked, drank, arm-wrestled, argued and tried to laugh off the attention of the prowling heavies who were obviously looking for candidates to toss into the boat outside.

Conversation wavered as Drakasha’s party appeared; cries of ‘Orchids!’ and ‘Zamira’s back!’ could be heard. Drakasha nodded to the room at large and slowly turned her gaze up to the second floor.

Stairs led up on either side of the common room; at the sides, the second floor was little more than a railed walkway. Above the bar and the entry, it expanded into wider balconies with Therin-style tables and chairs. Jean presumed that the ‘high table’ was the one he’d glimpsed from the outside. A moment later Drakasha began to move toward the stairs that led in that very direction.

A sudden current of excitement rose in the air; too many conversations halted absolutely, too many eyes followed their passage. Jean cracked his knuckles and prepared himself for things to get interesting.

Atop those stairs was a railed alcove backed by the windows overlooking the darkened square from which they’d just come. Red silk banners hung in niches with alchemical globes behind them, giving off a low, vaguely ominous rose-tinted light. Two wide tables had been pushed together to accommodate a party of twelve, all clearly sailors and toughs much, Jean realized to his own amusement, like themselves.

‘Zamira Drakasha,’ said the woman at the head of the table, rising from her chair. She was young, roughly Jean’s own age, with the sun-browned skin and faint lines edging her eyes that told of years spent on the water. Her sand-coloured hair was drawn back into three tails, and though shorter than Zamira she looked to outweigh her by about two stone. Tough and round, this one, with a well-worn sabre hilt visible at her belt.

‘Rance,’ said Drakasha, ‘Chay. It’s been a long night, love, and you know full well you’re sitting at my table.’

‘That’s damn peculiar. It’s got our drinks on top of it, and our arses in its chairs. You think it’s yours, maybe you should take it with you when you’re out of town.’

‘When I’m away on my business, you mean. Fighting my ship, flying the red flag. You know where the sea is, right? You’ve seen other captains coming and going—’

‘I don’t have to break myself month in and month out, Drakasha. I just pick richer targets in the first place.’

‘You’re not hearing me, Chay. I really don’t care what sort of dog gnaws bones at my place when I’m gone,’ said Drakasha, ‘but when I come back I expect her to crawl under the table where she belongs.’

Rance’s people exploded out of their chairs and Chay raised a hand, grinning fiercely. ‘Pull steel, you dusty cunt, and I’ll kill you fair in front of witnesses. Then the Maintainers can haul your crew back to the docks for brawling and Ezri here can see how your brats like the taste of her tits—’

‘Show your hand, Rance. You think you’re fit to keep this spot?’

‘Name the test and I’ll leave you weeping.’

‘We’re going to have the house brutes on us—’ Jean whispered to Ezri.

‘No,’ she said, waving him to silence. ‘Calling out isn’t like plain brawling. Especially not between captains.’

‘For the table,’ shouted Drakasha, reaching for a half-empty bottle, ‘all the Crimson as our witness, the contest is drinks. First on her arse takes her sorry crew and moves down to the floor.’

‘I was hoping for something that’d take longer than ten minutes,’ said Rance, ‘but I accept. You be my guest with that bottle.’

Zamira looked around, then snatched two small clay cups of equal size from places previously occupied by Rance’s crewfolk. She tossed their contents onto the tabletop, then refilled them from the bottle. It was white Kodari brandy, Jean saw, rough as turpentine, packing quite a sting. Rance’s crew backed up against the windows, and Rance herself came around the table to stand beside Zamira. She lifted one of the cups.

‘One thing,’ said Zamira. ‘You’re gonna take your first drink Syrune-fashion. ’

‘What the hell’s that?’

‘Means you drink it through your fucking eyes.’ Drakasha’s left arm was a blur as she whipped her own cup from the tabletop and dashed its contents into Rance’s face. Before Rance could even scream, Drakasha’s right arm came up just as fast. Her gloved fist, rings and all, met Rance’s jaw with the sound of a cracking whip, and the younger woman hit the floor so hard the cups atop the table rattled.

‘Are you on your arse down there, love, or is that your head? Anybody think there’s a difference?’ Drakasha stood over Rance and slowly tipped the contents of the second clay cup into her own mouth. She swallowed it all without flinching and tossed the cup over her shoulder.

‘You said it was gonna be—’

Before Rance’s angry crewman, probably her first mate, could finish his protest, Locke stepped forward with his hand upraised.

‘Zamira kept her oath. The test was a drink, and your captain’s on her arse.’

‘But—’

‘Your captain should’ve had the wit to be more specific,’ said Locke, ‘and she lost. You going to take her oath back for her?’

The man grabbed Locke by the front of his tunic. The two of them scuffled briefly and Jean darted forward, but before the situation went to hell Rance’s sailor was hauled back, grudgingly but firmly, by his friends.

‘Who the hell are you, anyway?’ he shouted.

‘Orrin Ravelle,’ said Locke.

‘Never fucking heard of you.’

‘I think you’ll remember me, though.’ Locke dangled a small leather pouch in front of the man. ‘Got your purse, prickless.’

‘You motherfu—’

Locke gave the purse a hard toss backward, and it landed somewhere down among the hundred or so patrons watching the action on the balcony with eyes wide and mouths open.

‘Oops,’ said Locke, ‘but I’m sure you can rely on all the upstanding folks down there to keep it safe for you.’

‘Enough!’ Zamira reached down, grabbed Rance by the collar and hoisted her to a sitting position. ‘Your captain called it and your captain lost. Is she your captain?’

‘Yes,’ said the man, scowling.

‘Then keep her oath.’ Zamira dragged Rance to the head of the stairs and knelt in front of her. ‘Not such a very regal bitch after all, eh, Chay?’

Rance reared back to spit blood in Drakasha’s face, but the older captain’s slap was faster and the blood spewed out across the stairs.

‘Two things,’ said Zamira. ‘First, I’m calling the council for tomorrow. I’ll expect to see you there at the usual place and time. Nod your silly head.’

Rance nodded, slowly.

‘Second, I don’t have brats. I have a daughter and a son. And if you ever forget that again, I’ll carve your fucking bones into toys for them.’

With that, she heaved Rance down the stairs. By the time she landed in a heap at the bottom, her chagrined crew was hurrying after her, under the triumphant stares of Drakasha’s party.

‘See you around ... Orrin Ravelle,’ said the purseless sailor.

‘Valterro,’ said Zamira sternly, ‘this was all business. Don’t make it personal.’

The man looked no happier, but he moved off with the rest of Rance’s crew.

‘That bit about your children sounded very personal,’ whispered Jean.

‘So I’m a hypocrite,’ muttered Drakasha. ‘You want to protest, you can take a drink Syrune-fashion.’ Zamira moved to the rail overlooking the main floor and raised her voice to a shout. ‘Zacorin! You hiding down there somewhere?’

‘Hiding’s the word, Drakasha,’ came a voice from behind the windows of the armoured bar. ‘War over yet?’

‘If you’ve got a cask of anything that doesn’t taste like pig sweat, send it up. And some meat. And Rance’s bill. Poor dear needs all the help she can get.’

There was an outbreak of laughter across the floor. Rance’s crew, carrying her out by her arms and legs, didn’t look even vaguely amused.

‘So that’s that,’ said Zamira, settling into the chair Rance had just vacated. ‘Make yourselves comfortable. Welcome to the high table at the Tattered Crimson.’

‘Well,’ said Jean as he took a seat between Locke and Ezri, ‘did that go as you hoped?’

‘Oh yeah.’ She smirked at Drakasha. ‘Yeah, I’d say our flag is flown.’