Corsair by Chris Bunch Page A

his free hand open as a block, the knife held on his hip, point up.
    Gareth obliged him by slashing the man’s palm open, leaping back before the poignard strike could land.
    He circled toward the man’s weak side, saw an opening, cut hard into the man’s arm, saw blood drizzle down onto the wet stones.
    Gareth stepped back, back again, as the Slaver came in on him. Then his foot slipped on some muck, and he fell backward, rolling left as the Linyati pounced. The poignard clashed against the paving stones, and Gareth was on his knees, cutting again, this time down the side of the man’s face and deeply into his neck.
    The Slaver cried out, rolled on his back.
    Gareth got up, breathing hard. He stared down at the semiconscious seaman, saw the blood drain from his body.
    If I was a proper bastard, he thought, I’d save the maybes and cut his throat.
    But he couldn’t bring himself to it.
    He wiped the blood from his knife, sheathed it, and disappeared into the night, back toward the
Zarafshan.
    This wasn’t the first time he’d fought the Linyati, always remembering his parents’ bodies, sprawled in their looted house.
    A thin, almost invisible scar now ran from the corner of his mouth up his left cheek, disappearing in the hair above his ear, a souvenir of one encounter.
    After that, he’d spent more time offwatch in the foc’sle, learning more than seamanship from the hardbitten sailors. He’d learned to swing a cutlass, fight with the unpointed knives seamen carried, to use a marlin spike, a broken wineglass, almost anything that could be found on a ship’s deck or — more often — in a tavern, for a weapon.
    The Slavers were getting cockier, bolder. More and more, if a Linyati ship was in port, there’d be a brawl. None of these fights was ever friendly, and most Sarosians had taken to carrying some sort of weapon when they went ashore.
    And there were more and more Slavers at sea. Not in Sarosian ports, where they were not met with friendliness, in spite of King Alfieri’s continued policy of peace. But they had a dozen or more countries allied with them, which Gareth couldn’t understand. Doing business with demons, or men little better than demons, would always end in disaster.
    Gareth had been to enough lands now to learn where the Linyati traded their human cargoes. He’d even chanced, when he could, asking these slaves if they were from Saros, but so far all he’d been met with was uncomprehending looks, fear, and, occasionally, the muttered name of another country or city.
    He remembered, long ago, a beggar telling him the only way to deal with the Linyati was at swordpoint. He wondered if, with this new round of raids against Saros and its neighbors, enough would finally be enough, and someone would declare war against the hated Slavers.
    If anyone did, he thought, he’d find a way to join that expeditionary force.
    He knew there was a time coming to stand and be counted, when the allies of the Linyati would also be forced to make a reckoning.
    • • •
    The
Zarafshan
rode the cresting title up the Nalta, through the center of Ticao. Gareth stood in the bows, feeling more tired than he thought possible.
    It had been a good voyage, at least until the last port Some sort of disease had struck down the purser and both mates. Gareth had not only taken over the purser’s duties, managing the unloading and sale of the cargo, but negotiated for a new shipment for Ticao: ensorcelled trinkets he knew would go for a high price when Saros’s nobility saw these new toys.
    Then he’d stood watch on, watch off with the captain on the three-week voyage home.
    During the long sleepless hours, he found himself thinking of Cosyra. He vowed, if the damned
Zarafshan
didn’t fall apart under him, or if he or the man at the wheel didn’t fall asleep and the ship go at full sail onto a reef, that this time he’d attempt its magic, find out just what had happened to the woman. She’d be, what, seventeen to his