Excuses and Iron

OYUN-OGLU

Stealing an ox is simple work. You cut the lead rope, kick the beast in the ribs, and run like hell before the drover pulls his boots on.

Stealing a god takes a measuring cord and a tub of pig grease.

I drop into the cargo bilge with no lantern. Fire draws watchmen. Damp dark keeps secrets. The bilge water sloshes past my ankles, ice-cold and sour with pine pitch.

Ten paces ahead, the basalt idol looms in the shadow of the keelson.

The stone looks like a starved bull carved by men who hated cattle. Rough shoulders, square horns, no eyes. At dawn, the girl sat chained to its flank, singing until the current died. Now the straw beside it sits empty. Temurbek dragged her aft to his private quarters, locking his little pet behind three-inch oak.

Good for her. Bad for my schedule.

I pull a strip of oiled rawhide from my vest. Every knot on the cord marks two finger-widths. I crouch in the muck, running callused fingers over the first mooring ring bolted to the floor timbers.

The ring is pig iron, four inches thick. Solid forge work.

I dig my thumb into the mounting bracket.

A shear pin.

I coat my fingertips with mutton tallow, sliding them behind the iron collar. The grease catches on cold metal. I count the notches on the pin. Six ridges. A double-slotted wedge bolt.

Three blows with a hardened cold chisel will crack the wedge. Four blows will drop the master ring into the bilge.

I move to the rear bracket.

The idol has eight binding chains. Four anchor its torso to the keelson. Four pin the horns to the hull ribs. If I sever the lower four, the stone will tip during a hard turn. A three-ton block of river basalt tipping into the port bilge will roll the Kerevet belly-up in six heartbeats.

I need the aft brackets loose first.

My knuckles bump the stone. The basalt is colder than the river water around my boots. It hums. A faint, sickening vibration deep in the grain, like an engine grinding miles beneath the mud.

\"Admiring the masonry, mercenary?\"

A woman's voice cuts the dark.

I do not jump. Jumping gets your throat cut in close quarters.

I slip the rawhide cord into my sleeve, stand up slowly, and wipe greasy thumbs on my trousers.

Sarnai-tay steps from behind the spare timber strakes.

She wears no prisoner irons. To Temurbek, she probably looks like a common convict from the forward benches, just another mouth eating salted mutton until the cataract. But common convicts do not move across bilge water without a ripple.

She holds a sharpened iron cooper's draw-knife in her right hand. The blade is curved like a crescent moon, dull gray in the murk.

\"Bilge inspection,\" I say. My voice stays dry. \"Captain pays me to keep rot out of the timbers. Hate to see three tons of rock fall through the floorboards before noon.\"

\"You lie poorly, Oyun-oglu.\"

She stops four paces away. Close enough to smell the river weed in her hair.

\"I lie adequately,\" I reply. \"I charge extra for quality. What brings the temple choir down into the wet?\"

She points the curved tip of the draw-knife at my ribs.

\"Barlas went aft,\" she says. Her voice is low, flat as river slate. \"He went through the stern gallery two bells ago. He has not returned to his bench.\"

I keep my hands open at my sides.

Barlas. The lean forward rower with the cult ink on his neck. The idiot who liked prying hatch latches when the watch changed.

\"Maybe he slipped,\" I say. \"River is fast. Water is cold. Bad combination for clumsy rowers.\"

\"He did not slip.\"

Her dark eyes fix on mine. She does not blink.

\"Barlas had orders to bleed the anchor,\" she says.

The air in the hold turns thin.

\"Bleed her?\" I lean one shoulder against a wet oak frame. \"Temurbek has eighty men on deck. You think he lets convicts butcher his cargo before the falls?\"

\"The cargo is dead stone,\" she spits. Her knuckles whiten around the wooden grip of the draw-knife. \"The girl is the leash. You snap the leash, the river god wakes. It will tear this barge into toothpicks and drown the executioners in their own armor.\"

Fanatics are always exhausting. They never want to steal things. They only want to break them.

\"A charming plan,\" I say. \"Truly inspiring. One small flaw.\"

\"Name it.\"

\"If the barge becomes toothpicks, we drown too.\"

\"The river takes what belongs to the river,\" Sarnai-tay says. She takes half a step forward. The steel draws closer to my chest. \"You are an outsider. A sellsword hired with silver minted by the priests. Why are your fingers greasy with tallow, Oyun-oglu? Why were you measuring the keelson bolts?\"

She is sharp. Too sharp for a convict hold.

I tap my chest with two fingers.

\"My employer likes souvenirs,\" I say.

\"Your employer is Temurbek.\"

\"Temurbek pays for guard shifts. Other people pay for heavy rocks.\" I show my teeth in a tight, ugly grin. \"A dead god sitting in a cave is worth nothing. A living idol hauled into a private courtyard commands three thousand silver crowns. That buys a lot of warm mutton, priestess.\"

She stares at me. Her mouth tightens into a hard, venomous seam.

\"You want to steal the covenant.\"

\"I want to retire,\" I correct her. \"Somewhere with citrus trees and no executioners. But if you kill that dancer in the captain's quarters, the god goes inert. Sever the anchor with a knife, the magic dies with her. That basalt turns into ordinary gravel. My buyer does not pay three thousand silvers for gravel.\"

Her breath hisses between her teeth.

\"We do not sell gods to river-lords,\" she whispers.

\"Then we have a scheduling conflict,\" I say.

Above our heads, a heavy thump shakes the deck timbers.

Footsteps. Rapid, heavy strides pounding across the rowers' gangway. A bronze whistle shrills twice through the open hatchway.

The emergency signal.

Sarnai-tay steps back into the shadow of the timber strakes. The draw-knife vanishes under her tunic with practiced speed.

\"Barlas failed,\" she says.

\"Sounds like it,\" I say. \"Temurbek has a broadsword and very little patience. Your boy probably feeds the catfish by now.\"

She glares at me through the dark, her face pale with cold fury.

\"The anchor dies before we reach the falls,\" she says. \"With or without your silver.\"

\"I look forward to watching you try,\" I reply. \"Try not to get your head stuck on a pike before dinner.\"

She slips into the forward bilge crawlway without another sound. Fast, silent, gone like river fog.

I do not linger.

I climb the iron rungs of the ladder, kicking open the midship hatch.

Daylight hits my eyes like a slap. Cold wind rips across the gunwales, smelling of wet slate and spruce needles.

The rowing deck is chaos.

Convicts strain at the sweeps, their shoulders glistening with foul grease. The stroke master is beating his drum at double cadence, the ash mallet thudding like a panic-stricken pulse.

Temurbek is not on the rowing deck. The door to his stern cabin remains barred.

I push past two guards and scramble up the ladder to the forward sweep platform. The bow lookout stands frozen against the oak bulwark, his knuckles white around his halberd.

\"Lookout,\" I bark. \"What blew the whistle?\"

He points shaking fingers downriver.

The Kerevet is entering the Black Gorge. Two hundred cubits ahead, the river narrows between sheer granite walls rising straight into the grey sky.

Cutting through the gorge mist are three low-slung river skiffs.

Their hulls are wrapped in boiled bull-hide, built to ram and board in heavy white water. Mounted on their iron bowsprits, three long black reed banners whip in the gale.

The crest of the Iron Reach.

The river-lords have blockaded the narrows.

Temurbek's execution writ does not mean spit in these waters.

My retirement just got complicated.