The Charnel Prince - J. Gregory Keyes [159]
“That one I saw, three days ago. She caught that storm and was listing hard, needed a new mast.”
“Storm?”
“Tho, a bad one. Some ships went down in that one—one of ’em out of here, the Tunn Carvanth.”
“Maybe the Della Puchia came by and you didn’t notice?”
“Maybe,” Nel said dubiously. “You can ask around in the Moyr Muc. Why? You have kin on it?”
“Something like that,” Neil replied. “Thanks.” He got his things and started toward the inn.
Beside the door was hung a placard with a painting of a porpoise on it, confirming Neil’s idle suspicion that “Moyr Muc” was the same as meurmuc, which was what they called dolphins on Skern. It meant “sea-pig,” which he’d always thought was a poor name for such a beautiful creature. Of course Neil meant “champion,” a name he didn’t much deserve, either. He had lost his armor and his sword, and now it might be that the princess he had been sent by his queen to retrieve was at the bottom of the Lier.
None of the handful of people in the Sea Pig allowed that they had seen the Della Puchia, but they pointed out that the shallow-drafted Vitellian ship could have made port at half a dozen other places to weather the storm. That made Neil feel a little better, but the larger problem remained—if Anne was still alive, it was because the Della Puchia had done just that, which meant once again he had lost her trail.
Not too surprisingly, no one in the village of Torn-y-Llagh owned a sword, but he managed to buy a fishing spear and a knife, which was better than nothing. He ate a supper of boiled cod and bread, enjoying the simple familiarity of it. The next morning, feeling even stronger, he set out once more for Paldh.
Paldh was an old city. When the great harbors of Eslen were still marsh, before the building of the great Thornrath wall, it had been the only deepwater port of any size for a hundred leagues in either direction. In those days before the Crothanic Empire, Crotheny, Hornladh, and Tero Gallé had all relied upon Paldh for their shipping. They had battled over it with their navies, and before them the Hegemony and the Warlock Kingdoms.
How many thousands of ships lay rotting in the channel of the Teremené River, no one could know, but the oldest of them had not been built by human beings.
Nor had the oldest walls of the city, most of which appeared to stand on a regular gray cliff thirty yards above the highest tide. Neil had never before seen them, but now that he paddled alongside he saw that what he had heard was true; above the barnacled high-water mark, one could still discern the faint seams that stretched between the original blocks of stone. When he reached the harbor, the massive barrier swept in an enormous semicircle that was something over a league in length, and here an ancient quay of the same stone provided the anchor for the floating docks.
The quay was perhaps a hundred yards in width, and a sort of sailor’s city had grown up on it—taverns, inns, gambling houses, and brothels all crowded against the artificial bluff. Even from afar Neil could see that the dock town was teeming with colorful life.
He made out the brimwulf almost immediately, because he passed the dry-docks on his way in, and there she was, up on scaffolding with workmen scurrying about, making a music of hammers and saws. There were a number of other ships there, none of them the one Anne had sailed on.
He thought back to his fight in z’Espino. The brimwulf had been far down the docks from the Della Puchia. The sailors on her wouldn’t have seen the fight—and he’d been in armor anyway.
He paddled his boat over to the quay and tied her up near the ship, then climbed out onto the time-smoothed stone.
He waved at one of the nearer sailors.
“Hello, there,” he attempted in Hornish.
“Ik ni mathlya Haurnaraz,” the sailor replied.
Neil forced a laugh, and switched to Hanzish. “Neither do I,” he said. “It’s good to hear you speak—I’m so tired of trying to understand the gibberish around here.”
The sailor smiled and poked a rough finger at Neil’s boat. “You come all the way here in that?