Corsair by Brian Ruckley

Author:Brian Ruckley
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Orbit
Published: 2015-10-12T04:00:00+00:00

IX

The Sorentines had been a strange people in many ways. Their ascent from being just one more people among many to lords of a vast realm had been so rapid that they carried many of their oldest traditions up with them, barely changed. It was the evidence for one of those that told Yulan he had been right about this castle being their handiwork.

The postern gate at the base of the castle’s rearmost corner tower was framed by the gaping maw of a bull. Carved from the same hard stone as the walls themselves, its horns stretched an arm’s length on either side. To open the iron-bound door and walk through was to enter into the great bull’s mouth. Its flared nostrils formed the lintel, its tongue the step. Quite why the Sorentines had been so wedded to the image of the bull, Yulan did not know or care. That this one might give him a way out of the trap sprung by the Corsair King’s death, he did care about.

The sight that greeted them as he and Hamdan passed through the bull’s mouth was not as comforting as he might have hoped, though. They stood upon a precipitous high ledge, suddenly exposed to the buffets of the sea breeze. Down below, what felt dizzyingly far below, was the little cove in which Kottren had kept his humble, motley fleet. And between ledge and cove ran a steep, narrow staircase cut into the very face of the near vertical cliffs that held the castle aloft. The steps were rough-hewn and lacked the width for more than a single file descent.

The prize they sought was there waiting for them, though. Down in the cove at the foot of the stair, where the sea was blue and calm, rested three vessels. They rocked gently at anchor. Corena and the rest – the three children and four others of Kottren’s former subjects – were already halfway down the stair, racing for that prize.

‘Nice of them to wait for us,’ Hamdan grunted as he slammed the door shut behind them.

‘I wouldn’t have wanted them to,’ Yulan said.

He was regarding the steps that waited him uneasily. To his eye, they looked perilously uneven, slippery and generally treacherous. He had never been greatly enamoured of heights.

‘You’re sure it’s a child?’ Hamdan asked him gravely.

‘That wasn’t anyone who really knows what they’re doing, was it? Did you ever see one of our own Clevers do anything so imprecise, so wild?’

‘I suppose not,’ Hamdan conceded.

‘No. That was all instinct. Nothing measured or practised about it.’

Yulan’s mind was back in those moments in the menagerie when he had first seen the children. The girl Kottren had summoned to fetch food, with her pallor and scabs and crooked fingers and eyes that looked diseased. He had thought her appearance a result of hardship and an uncaring father, but of course it could have been the signs of a Clever ravaged by the flowing through her of a power no one had ever taught her how to properly ration or control.

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