He leapt up onto the low wall, then dove into the water below.
We must have traversed several miles that way, busting down doors, swimming across channels, sprinting through narrow alleys. Four or five times I thought we’d lost the boat, but in each case Ruc was able to come up with a shortcut, a leap of faith, an educated guess that led us back to our quarry, sometimes a few paces ahead, looking down from a window or balcony, often quite a bit behind. The Asp was both fantastically careful and staggeringly paranoid, her watery path wandering in great loops, doubling back on itself three times to shadowy alcoves where she could watch unseen for pursuit. As Ruc predicted, however, she was watching the water, not the insides of the houses. Not the fucking roofs.
In the end, evidently satisfied, she charted a more direct path southeast, finally arriving in Old Harbor. Centuries earlier, the harbor had been the city’s heart, the one basin deep enough to accommodate the draft of the oceangoing vessels that brought trade from as far away as the Bend and Anthera. As Dombang grew, however, as more and more ships came to dock and trade, the harbor became overburdened. When Anho the Bald completed the massive dredging project that became New Harbor, the old port fell into disuse. Warehouses began to rot, then crumble. Ships damaged by storm and abandoned at the dock by destitute owners slowly settled into the mud as the river silted up the neglected basin. It made a surreal sight. What had once been an open body of water five hundred paces across had become a wide mud flat divided by a few narrow channels and punctuated by the hulks of stranded ships.
The boat we’d been trailing and another of similar make and coloring were tied up alongside the shadowy hull of one of the largest wrecks, a huge schooner, three of the four masts snapped off or chopped down, the one remaining stabbed up into the belly of the night sky, shreds of rotten rope that hadn’t been scavenged twisting idly in the breeze. I could just make out the name in faded gilt up near the prow: Heqet’s Roar. A ladder of much newer rope hung from the rail of the listing vessel thirty feet above, where two guards stood watch. I could make out the outlines of flatbows in the moonlight, the bulky shape of armor, the swords strapped to their hips, but nothing of their faces.
“Quen’s men,” Ruc murmured, laying a hand on my shoulder, then pointing.
The two of us had fetched up a few dozen paces away, behind a pile of waterlogged roots and branches, detritus washed down the Shirvian from the north, dragged out of the canals by the maintenance crews, and dumped here to be burned later. My legs ached from the chase, and my shoulders screamed, ready to rip from their sockets after so much swimming. At the same time, I felt bright in the darkness, warmed by the chase, alive. I couldn’t tell if my heart’s hammering came from Ruc’s momentary touch or my own exhaustion. Maybe both. Whatever the case, it felt good to be close to him, to be hunting. Amazing how fast an old intimacy can come back. When I first set out from Rassambur, I hadn’t dared to hope for so much.
But is it love? I wondered, sliding my gaze along his moonlit skin.
“What are you looking at?” he asked, narrowing his eyes.
I hauled my mind back to the work at hand, wiped a smear of blood from his shoulder—we were both covered with a dozen minor grazes and cuts.
“Just making sure you’re not about to collapse on me. You hit some of those doors pretty hard.”
“The doors didn’t have flatbows,” he said, then gestured to the ship once more. “They do.”
“Where’s Lady Quen?”
“Down below, I’d guess. Somewhere in the hold.” He shook his head. “It’s a son of a bitch to sneak up on.”
I nodded slowly, studying the scene. The only approaches were over the open mud or up the canal. The gibbous moon gleamed like silver on the wet flats. Anyone trying to cross might as well carry a lantern and bang a drum. There was no subtle way to do it.
“The far side?” I asked.
“She’s not an idiot. She’ll have someone posted there, too.”
“We’ll have to float in.” I gestured to the logs in front of us. “There’s more of this back around the last bend, out of sight. If we drag a few branches into the water, we can drift in behind them.”
“It’s going to be ugly,” Ruc said, “but if we come in on this side, we could cut free the boats, hope to create some commotion. Maybe lure them down the ladder. We’ll be in the shadows, and the bastards won’t have much of an angle.”
The bastards in question hadn’t moved since we first arrived. They weren’t talking, or pacing, or sitting down.
“They’re vexingly disciplined,” I pointed out. “Not exactly the type to go chasing off after the nearest distraction.”
“If you’ve got another way inside that hull, I’m listening.”
I tapped the knives strapped to my thighs as I contemplated the situation. Then, I smiled.
“Let’s get floating.”
*
It was all a question of angles and rot.
If the planking of the ship was too steep or too sound, I wouldn’t be able to drive the knives in far enough. If, on the other hand, the boards were too rotten, they wouldn’t hold my weight, let alone Ruc’s. The curve of the ship’s hull shielded us from the guards above, but I moved slowly all the same, testing a few different places before driving my blade into the chink where the planking had sprung loose. It flexed when I pulled on it, but held. Slowly, I slipped another knife from its sheath, pulled myself up on the first, so that only the lower half of my body remained in the water, reached up as high as I could with my free hand, and slid the second blade into the wood. From there, it was easy enough to get a foot on the first knife, stand up, slip a third from the sheath at my waist, and place it half my body height higher than the last.
Back at Rassambur some of my brothers and sisters had teased me about carrying so many blades—Giving people to the god is a great devotion, Pyrre, but you don’t need to give them all at once. Four knives, however, had always struck me as a reasonable number: one on my belt where everyone could see it, one on each thigh, and one strapped high on my arm.
I vowed, after that night scaling the ship’s hull with Ruc, to carry more, as soon as I could return to Rassambur and have them made.