Corsair

I

‘Let me show you my animals,’ the Corsair King said to Yulan. ‘Been the greatest labour of my life, they have. You should see them.’

Yulan did not want to see Kottren Malak’s animals. He would not have been interested at the best of times, and with his body still feeling rinsed out this was not the best of times. The stench of the creatures filled this crumbling stronghold and made him feel ill all over again. Getting closer to the source of the stink was the last thing he wanted to do. Even so, he followed as the Corsair King limped along the passageway.

‘Folks called me a fool to start bringing animals to this island,’ Kottren muttered. As he walked, he was working stubby fingers up the side of his chin, scratching them over the wiry hair of his beard. ‘But the idea crept up on me, crawled into my head like a spider.’

He scrabbled his fingers at his ear, and stopped and turned to grin at Yulan, his hand frozen there as if trying to get inside.

‘That ever happen to you, Free-boy? You ever get an idea that just came from somewhere, crept in and made a nest in your skull, all uninvited?’

‘Not really,’ Yulan said without inflection.

He was nineteen years old, big and strong. It had been some time since anyone called him a boy, and he had no idea whether Kottren was mocking him or just letting his tongue run as it would. He was beginning to suspect that the self-proclaimed Corsair King was mad. It was a rather dispiriting thought. When someone’s head was rot-riddled, trying to reason with them was not easy. Nor was trying to bargain with them, predict them or threaten them.

Kottren moved on again, leading the way towards the menagerie.

‘Maybe you’re too young,’ he said without looking round. ‘Might be you’ve not got the bedding in your head yet for an idea to make a nest from.’

Yulan could hear, somewhere up ahead, snuffles and shiftings. Grunts and snarls. The smell of dung and straw and fur and musk was getting stronger. He braced himself – or more to the point, his stomach – for the encounter. But his testing was delayed a little longer, for the Corsair King once more stopped, and he turned about in the narrow corridor so suddenly that Yulan almost walked into him.

Kottren glared out from narrowed eyes.

‘You sure you’re here to parley?’

Yulan nodded.

Kottren wrinkled his nose. ‘Never liked parley. It’s not a game for men, y’ask me. And I never did hear of the Free being paid to parley for peasants.’

The hope had been that this contract might be fulfilled without bloodshed. Yulan suspected that the day was loosening its arms, flexing its muscles, preparing to smack him in the face with disappointment. Of course, no disappointment would outweigh the relief of having solid ground beneath his feet. The day could knock him about all it liked and he would still be thanking it for giving him that wonderful respite.

‘There’s always room in the world for new things, don’t you think?’ he said.

Kottren did not seem inclined to reflect on such notions. He flicked the underside of his chin three times with his middle finger, absently but surprisingly hard, and looked over Yulan’s shoulder.

‘D’you see that beast behind you?’

Yulan looked round. There was no animal there, only the closest of Kottren’s mangy warriors. Older than the rest, with lines and loose skin and hair turning white with age. He wore, just as the rest did, a strange medley of clothes. Ill-fitting, mismatched. The paltry booty of their raids against people still poorer than they were themselves.

‘Calls himself Lake, but that’s not his name,’ Kottren said.

Yulan had not closely marked this man before, though he had probably been with them all along, in among the ragtag band of brigands which followed Kottren around. It was an oversight that Yulan now regretted. For all his years, the man had an air of competent concentration that the rest of Kottren’s pack most decidedly lacked.

‘Not his name?’ Yulan murmured.

‘No,’ said Kottren. ‘Don’t know his true name. Foreign. He used to be an Orphanidon, y’see.’

Yulan chose not to react. Not outwardly, at least. From somewhere up ahead, amid all the other bestial sounds, he thought he could hear teeth scraping on bone.

Lake stared flatly back into Yulan’s eyes. It seemed absurd that a petty pirate like Kottren could acquire the services of a former Imperial Orphanidon, but was it possible? Perhaps. The decadently strange Empire of Orphans was very distant, and was no friend to the Hommetic Kingdom upon whose fringes this island lay; any journey that had brought an Orphanidon here would have been extraordinary. But it could have happened. As descriptions of the day went, disappointing might yet prove too feeble.

‘Thought y’might want to know,’ Kottren continued. Not quite amiable, but not aggressive either. ‘Just … well, you’re the Free, y’say. Everyone knows it’s trouble when the Free stick a finger in a stew, don’t they?’

‘It doesn’t have to be,’ Yulan said, turning away from Lake with studied calm. ‘Depends how people deal with us.’

‘If they let you be the bully or not, y’mean.’ Kottren was smiling, in a manner of speaking. ‘Either way, can’t do any harm for folks to know I’ve got an Orphanidon at my back, right? If I want to, I can piss all over trouble.’

Another concern, cosying up against that regarding Kottren’s possible madness. Could it be that he was ignorant too? Yulan had not been riding with the Free for long, but he had already come to expect a certain … well, caution if nothing else, at the mere naming of the last of the independent companies. In the decades of its storied existence, the Free had broken entire armies, humbled mighty lords. Unmade and made real kings, not just broken-minded bandits who pretended to the title.

The Free might not be all it had been in its glorious past, but still it wielded martial and magical power beyond the dreams of most. And one thing the Free still knew how to do when necessary was make trouble, far more of it than one aged Orphanidon could quench with his stream. Perhaps Kottren did not know or understand that.

Which was all the more troubling given that Kottren and his grey-haired killer did not actually have to contend with the full might of the Free today. Just Yulan and one other. There was a touch of the bluff to this whole venture, and Yulan did not much like his chances of bluffing an ignorant madman.

It was, if nothing else, going to be interesting, he supposed. And what had the wandering that eventually brought him to the Free been, if not a search for the interesting?

‘Let’s go and feed the animals then,’ Kottren said.

‘Let’s,’ agreed Yulan, smiling thinly.