An Opportunity for Profit

Chapter Six

After the stunning impact with the water, Sharessa could feel and see nothing. Her senseless limbs were numb and floating. She heard the sound of the river and knew she must be drowning. Death by water, she thought. The river would quench her life and carry her body out to sea. That was a fitting doom, she decided, since she had spent much of her life sending others to wet graves.

"Can you speak?" asked Belmer. Sharessa blinked and realized that she wasn't drowning. Her thoughts tumbled in her head, the last stones rattled by the fall from the bridge. She felt Belmer's arms around her, the slender muscles hard and fine, supporting her. Together they drifted with the current, their bodies weightless in the darkness.

"Ah," began Sharessa. Her tongue was thick in her mouth. "Ah-I think so," she slurred.

"Good," replied Belmer.

"I can't feel my arm," said Sharessa. The feeling was returning to the rest of her body, though the river seemed icy cold.

"Is it broken?"

"I'm not sure." Sharessa tried moving her right arm but couldn't feel a thing. She touched it with her left. In the cool water, the arm felt puffy and dead. She squeezed her upper arm slightly. The pain was bearable.

"No, I don't think so."

"Anything else?" asked Belmer. He shifted behind Sharessa, giving her more room to move while still supporting her in the water. Sharessa was glad for his help, and not only because she needed it. It was her experience that any man who held her in his arms was much more susceptible to her persuasion, when it became necessary. Unlike most other women pirates Sharessa had met, she knew both how to take care of herself and when to let a man think he was taking care of her. Brindra would have been kicking the man away already, spitting that she could damned well help herself

Thinking of Brindra reminded Sharessa of something else. She felt for the dead woman's sword. There it was, safe in her belt. It would need a new hand, now that Brindra was dead. That thought hurt, surprisingly.

The river glittered before them, and they drifted into a field of milky luminescence. Sharessa saw that the cliff face here was pale stone, probably granite. Its face reflected the moonlight down into the water. She turned to face Belmer, and he shifted his grip to hold her arms, keeping her from drifting away from him. He stared back up at the granite, dark eyes scanning its lines and shadows.

"Here's a likely place. Can you swim now?"

"I think so," said Sharessa. She kicked her legs, treading water. While she ached everywhere, only her right arm was still useless. "Yes. Let's go."

They swam to the rocky cliff. At its base was a narrow shore of stones and mud, with a few small patches of thick river grass and reeds. Sharessa began to climb up onto the rocks, then winced as she placed too much weight on her bruised arm. Belmer helped her to her feet, and she leaned against him. She thought she felt his muscles tense defensively at her gesture. Then he softened and slipped an arm around her waist.

She knew he was tallying physical injuries. "I have the sword," she said. Brindra's sword."

"Good."

"Here," said Sharessa, trying to draw it from her belt. "You take it."

"Don't you want to keep it?"

"I've seen you fight," said Sharessa. "It's more use in your hand than mine." Then she asked, "Have you ever met your match with a blade?"

The long silence that followed made Sharessa think she had offended him. Just before she was about to take back the question, Belmer replied. "Maybe. Once."

Sharessa smiled in the darkness. That admission sounded hard for him. Was he so proud? "Well, at least he didn't manage to kill you," she said. "Nor I him," said Belmer. "And he used two swords, which was cheating." Now there was amusement in his voice. Self-mockery? Sharessa wouldn't have imagined that before, but she was beginning to see beyond Belmer's shifting facades. At least, she liked to think she was.

Sharessa had never had trouble penetrating the veils that men use to obscure their motives. Black-fingers had also been a mystery to her, at first. It hadn't taken Sharessa long to insinuate herself into his council, earning his trust and later his affections. He was much more likely to listen to her opinion after they had begun sharing a bunk most nights. She liked to think that her motives were never entirely selfish. Never did she misuse Blackfingers's trust, nor did she betray the secrets he had shared with her. As whether she was merely using him, Sharessa truly had cared for Blackfingers-far more than she realized until it was too late, and he was dead. Unlike Kurthe, who sought to punish Blackfingers's killer, Sharessa wanted only to replace the loss, to fill the void.

At first, Belmer was exciting and impressive. While most of the other Sharkers hated his mysterious agenda and private council, Sharessa found him the more intriguing for it. She always loved the shadows more than the daylight. Was Belmer smiling in the darkness, too? Sharessa couldn't see his face. The moon had fallen too low to spill light this far into the ravine. She craned her neck to see that the upper half of the far cliff side was still illuminated in the ghost light.

"Did the others get off the bridge?"

"I couldn't tell. There was some more shouting after you fell, but I think they fled."

"How will we find them?" "I don't know."

"They need Brindra's sword, or they don't have a chance." Sharessa began to fear for their lives. It was hard to lose Blackfingers, but Ingrar's blindness and Brindra's death shouldn't have hurt so badly. Sharessa often had seen companions die in her years as a pirate. She knew it could happen to her or to one standing beside her. If Tempus was asking Sharessa who would die next, then the answer was always, "Thankee kindly, but I'll have mine later." Now, however, Sharessa was beginning to think she'd trade her life just to make sure that Anvil or Belgin had Brindra's enchanted sword to use against the fiend that stalked them.

Belmer looked up at the cliff. "I can't make it up there and carry you," he said.

"You can leave me here," she replied.

"Well wait a while first. If the others don't come along after half hour, I'll try the climb."

"What makes you think they'll be able to search for us with that fiend behind them?" Sharessa didn't like the idea of being left down here while Belmer ascended the cliff, but she knew she couldn't make the climb with her wounded arm.

"Without me, no one collects their money," he replied with a little shrug.

"I thought you weren't worried about the money anymore," said Sharessa. She saw the black line of Belmer's smile in the reflected light.

"What's the point of our being here, if not for the money?"

"After what you told Anvil, I thought you cared more about just…"

"Oh, Shadow," Belmer said, chuckling. "What would you have told him? It was the only thing he would hear from me. Perhaps you could have found a subtler persuasion. You have a greater talent for it than I."

Sharessa pushed away from him, standing apart. She didn't like the way he was laughing. Was he mocking her? Did she seem so transparent? Her frown must have told him what she was thinking.

"Besides, it was true," he said soothingly. "How can we enjoy our reward if we don't survive to collect it."

"I saw the way you looked at Ingrar when we stopped," countered Sharessa. 'You weren't worried just about the money then."

Belmer chuckled again. "What? Did you think I'd gone paternal on the boy?"

"So why didn't you order him left behind?"

"And spark a mutiny? Come, Shadow, there's no profit in mercy. Taking Ingrar with us kept Anvil and Brindra from fighting me. He was valuable, so we kept him."

'You don't really think that way, do you?"

"Of course I do. So do you. What did you do before we met? You killed people for their cargo."

"I'm not denying that," said Sharessa. Her own bitterness surprised her. "But Ingrar's a mate. We're loyal to each other."

"Loyalty is just another contract," Belmer stated.

"What?"

"What's loyalty but a promise of help in return for the same? You're loyal to Anvil and Rings and the rest because you know that they'll watch your back in return. It's an informal agreement, but it's just a contract, no different from the one you signed for me."

"It's completely different," said Shar. "It's a matter of trust."

"Isn't trust what a contract is for?"

"Of course not! Contracts are for when you don't trust someone."

Belmer laughed again. "The only difference is that contracts are written, and your promise of loyalty is never spoken."

"Even so, that's a big difference in itself."

"I don't think so," said Belmer. "Every man does just what pleases him, and contracts are a way to keep others from interfering with his wishes."

"So what about priests and lords who give their money to the poor?"

"They do it because it pleases them." Belmer shrugged again, but he was no longer looking at Sharessa. He seemed bored with the conversation and turned his attention to the cliff above.

"How can it please someone to give up all his wealth and live like a beggar, just to spread a few coins around a crowd that'll live and die in filth anyway? What's the pleasure in serving others who don't have the strength to take for themselves? That's sacrifice. It's charity."

"No, that's foolish," said Belmer, still watching the cliff. "But it pleases those who think their gods will reward them for it. Even a priest behaves kindly because he thinks there's spiritual profit in it for him." Belmer stopped staring at the cliff and looked straight at Sharessa.

"There's nothing good in this world, Shadow. Everyone seeks profit, whether that's gold, power, pleasure, or passing crusts to beggars because II-mater will love you for it. You get what you take by your own strength and cunning, and when someone interferes with that, you kill him. That's what I do, and that's what you do. It's what we are."

Sharessa stared back at Belmer, wanting desper ately to argue with him. If he'd put it another way, if they'd laughed at the misfortune of some ship they'd robbed together over cups of ale in a Tharkaran tavern, then she'd smile or laugh or make a joke in response. But put so seriously, examined so plainly, this life didn't seem exciting. It seemed wicked and cold, like the fiend that hunted them for its own pleasure. Cruelty was that monster's profit.

Her damp clothes seemed suddenly cold, and Sharessa hugged herself against an imagined wind. The sudden pain in her right arm made her wince, but it warmed her slightly. That twinge made her think that maybe what set her apart from the fiend was that she sought profit in pleasure rather than pain. Maybe that was the important difference, the thing that made her human.

She looked up to renew the argument with Belmer, but he had already crouched low against the cliff wall. She felt his cool hand touch her belt, tugging her gently to join him. Sharessa crept into the shadow beside Belmer, and he leaned close to whisper.

"Something's coming."