“Told ye he had too much to drink,” another pirate said. “Probably start cheatin’ any minute now.”
“If’n I see them loaded dice of his one more time,” another pirate said, “I swear I’m gonna cut his nose off.”
Darrick glanced up the slight rise of land toward the ruins of Tauruk’s Port. No one came down the trail that wound through the wreckage.
“Four men left,” Darrick whispered. “Once one of them makes a noise, there’ll be no more hiding here for us.”
Mat nodded.
Maldrin slitted his eyes and ran a thumb across the knife in his fist. “Better they not have a chance to make noise, then.”
“Agreed,” Darrick whispered. “Maldrin, hold the steps. They’ll come from below as soon as we announce ourselves. And we will be announcing ourselves. Mat, you and I are going to see about setting the ships on fire below.”
Mat raised his eyebrows.
“Barrels of whale oil,” Darrick said. “Shouldn’t be that hard to get them over the edge of the riverbank. They’ll fall straight to the ships below. Get them on the decks of the one port of Barracuda, and I’ll target the one starboard of her.”
Smiling, Mat nodded. “They’ll be busy tryin’ to save their ships.”
“Aye,” Darrick said. “We’ll use the confusion to get aboard Barracuda and see to the king’s nephew.”
“Be lucky if’n ye don’t get yerselves killed outright,” Maldrin groused. “An’ me with ye.”
Darrick smiled, feeling cocky as he always did when he was in the thick of a potentially disastrous situation. “If we live, you owe me a beer back at Rik’s Tavern in Westmarch.”
“I owe ye?” Maldrin looked as though he couldn’t believe it. “An’ how is it ye’re a-gonna buy me one?”
Shrugging, Darrick said, “If I get us all killed, I’ll stand you to your first cool drink in the Burning Hells.”
“No,” Maldrin protested. “That’s not fair.”
“Speak up first next time, and you can set the terms,” Darrick said.
“Timar!” one of the pirates bellowed.
“He’s probably fallen in,” another pirate said. “I’ll go look for him.”
Darrick rose slowly, looking over the stack of crates as one of the pirates peeled off from the game. He held his cutlass in his hand, signaling Mat and Maldrin to stand down. If fortune was going to favor them with one more victim before they set to, so be it.
When the man stepped around the crates, Darrick grabbed him, clapped a hand over the pirate’s mouth, and slit his throat with the cutlass. Darrick held the man as he bled out. A look of horror filled Mat’s face.
Darrick looked away from the accusation he found in his friend’s eyes. Mat could kill to save a friend or a shipmate in the heat of battle, but killing as Darrick had just done was beyond him. To Darrick, there was no remorse or guilt involved. Pirates deserved death, whether by his hands or by the hangman’s noose in Westmarch.
As the pirate’s corpse shuddered a final time, Darrick released it and stepped away. Blood coated his left arm and warmed him against the chill wind. Knowing they were working on borrowed time, Darrick caught the edge of the crates in front of him and hauled himself around them. He lifted his knees and drove his feet hard against the ground, sprinting toward the three men still occupied with the dice game.
One of the men glanced up, attracted by the flurry of motion coming toward them. He opened his mouth to yell a warning.
SEVEN
“Kabraxis is the demon who created the Black Road,” Lhex said.
“What is the Black Road?” Raithen asked.
The boy shrugged, bathed in the golden light of the lantern the pirate captain held. “It’s all just legend. Old stories of demons. There’s talk that Kabraxis was just an elaborate lie.”
“But you said if a demon was involved,” Raithen said, “it was all truth once.”
“I said it was based on something that was supposed to be the truth,” Lhex replied. “But so many stories have been told since the Vizjerei started supposedly summoning demons from other worlds. Some of the stories are based on incidents that might have or might not have involved demons, but many are total fabrications. Or a story has been fractured, retold, and made more current. Old wives’ tales. Harsus, the toad-faced demon of Kurast—if he even existed—has become four different demons in the local histories. The man who taught me history told me there are sages at work now trying to piece together different stories, examining them for common links that bind them and make only one demon exist where two had stood before.”
“Why would they bother with something like that?”
“Because there were supposed to be other demons loose in the world according to all those simpleminded myths,” Lhex said. “My teacher believed that men spent so much time trying to name the demons in mythology the better to hunt them down instead of waiting for them to act. To pursue their quarry, the demon hunters need to know how many demons were in our world and where to find them. Sages research those things.” The boy snorted. “Personally, I think demons were all named so that a wise and wizened sage could recommend employing demon hunters. Of course, that sage would get a cut of the gold paid to rid a place or a city or a kingdom of a demon. It was a racket. A well-thought-out scary story to tell superstitious people and separate them from their gold.”
“Kabraxis,” Raithen reminded, growing impatient.
“In the beginning years,” Lhex said, “when the Vizjerei first began experimenting with demon summoning, Kabraxis was supposed to be one of those demons summoned over and over again.”
“Why?”
“Because Kabraxis operated the mystical bridges that stretched from the demon worlds to our world more easily than many did.”
“The Black Road is a bridge to the Burning Hells?” Raithen asked.
“Possibly. I told you this was all a story. Nothing more.” Lhex tapped the drawing of the elliptical lines threaded through by the solitary one. “This drawing represents the power Kabraxis had to walk between the Burning Hells and this world.”
“If the Black Road isn’t the bridge between this world and the Burning Hells,” Raithen asked, “what else could it be?”
“Some have said it was the path to enlightenment.” Lhex rubbed his face as if bored, then smothered a yawn.
“What enlightenment?” Raithen asked.
