in the shelter of the hill. ‘Whose turn is it to do the cooking?’ Berit asked Sir Ulath.
‘Yours,’ Ulath told him with no hint of a smile.
‘You knew he was going to do that, Berit,’ Talen said. ‘What you just did was almost the same thing as volunteering.’
Berit shrugged. ‘My turn will come up eventually anyway,’ he said. ‘I thought I’d get it out of the way for a while.’
‘All right, gentlemen,’ Vanion said, ‘let’s look around and see what we can find in the way of firewood.’
Sparhawk concealed a smile. Vanion could maintain that he was no longer the Preceptor as much as he wished, but the habit of command was deeply ingrained in him.
They built a fire, and Berit stirred up an acceptable stew. After supper, they sat by the fire watching as evening slowly settled in.
‘Now then,’ Flute said to them, ‘we’re going to ride down to a cove. I want you all to stay close behind me, because it’s going to be very foggy.’
‘It’s a perfectly clear evening, Flute,’ Kalten objected.
‘It won’t be when we reach the cove,’ she told him. ‘I’m going to make sure that you don’t get too much chance to examine that ship. I’m not really supposed to do this, so don’t get me into trouble.’ She looked sternly at Khalad. ‘And I want you in particular to keep a very tight rein on your curiosity.’
‘Me?’
‘Yes, you. You’re too practical and too clever by half for my comfort. Your noble friends here aren’t imaginative enough to make any educated guesses about the ship. You’re a different matter. Don’t be digging at the decks with your knife, and don’t try to sneak off to examine things. I don’t want to drop by Cimmura someday and find a duplicate of the ship anchored in the river. We’ll go down to the cove, board the ship, and go directly below. You will not go up on deck until we get to where we’re going. A certain part of the ship has been set aside for us, and we’ll all stay there for the duration of the voyage. I want your word on that, gentlemen.’
Sparhawk could see some differences between Flute and Danae. Flute was more authoritarian, for one thing, and she didn’t seem to have Danae’s whimsical sense of humor. Although the Child Goddess had a definite personality, each of her incarnations seemed to have its own idiosyncrasies.
Flute looked up at the slowly darkening sky. ‘We’ll wait another hour,’ she decided. ‘The crew of the ship has been told to stay away from us. Our meals will be put just outside the door, and we won’t see the one who puts them there. It won’t do you any good to try to catch her, so don’t even try.’
‘Her?’ Ulath exclaimed. ‘Are you trying to say that there are women in the crew?’
‘They’re all females. There aren’t very many males where they come from.’
‘Women aren’t strong enough to raise and lower the sails,’ he objected.
‘These females are ten times stronger than you are, Ulath, and it wouldn’t matter anyway, because the ship doesn’t have sails. Please stop asking questions, gentlemen. Oh, one other thing. There’ll be a sort of humming sound when we get under way. It’s normal, so don’t let it alarm you.’
‘How …’ Ulath began.
She held up her hand. ‘No more questions, Ulath,’ she told him quite firmly. ‘You don’t need to know the answers. The ship’s here to take us from one place to another in a hurry. That’s all you need to know.’
‘That brings us to something we really should know,’ Sparhawk said. ‘Where are we going?’
‘To Jorsan on the west coast of Edom,’ she replied. ‘Well, almost, anyway. There’s a long gulf leading inland to Jorsan. We’ll put ashore at the mouth of the gulf and go inland on horseback. Now, why don’t we talk about something else?’
The fog seemed almost thick enough to walk on, and the knights were obliged to blindly follow the misty light of the torch Sephrenia held aloft as they rode down a steep bank toward the sound of unseen surf.
They reached a sandy beach and groped their way down toward the water. Then they saw other lights out in the fog – filmy, mist-shrouded lights which stretched out for what seemed an impossible distance. The lights did not flicker, and they were the wrong color for torchlight.
‘Good God!’ Ulath choked. ‘No ship could be that big!’
‘Ulath!’ Flute said sharply from out of the fog ahead.
‘Sorry,’ he mumbled.
When they reached the water’s edge, all they could see was a dark, looming shape lying low in the water several yards out, a shape outlined by those unwinking white lights. A ramp reached from the ship to the beach, and Ch’iel, Sephrenia’s white palfrey, stepped confidently onto that ramp and clattered across to the ship.
There were dim, shrouded shapes on the deck, cloaked and hooded figures that were all no more than shoulder high, but strangely squat and blocky.
‘What do we do with the horses?’ Vanion asked as they all dismounted.
‘Just leave them here,’ Flute replied. ‘They’ll be taken care of. Let’s go below. We can’t start until everybody’s off the deck.’
‘The crew stays up here, don’t they?’ Ulath asked her.
‘No. It’s too dangerous.’
They went to a rectangular hatchway in the deck and followed an inclined ramp leading down.
‘Stairs would take up less space,’ Khalad said critically.
‘The crew couldn’t use stairs, Khalad,’ Flute told him. ‘They don’t have legs.’
He stared at her in horror.
‘I told you that they’re not human,’ she shrugged.
The companionway they reached at the bottom of the ramp was low, and the knights had to half stoop as they followed the Child Goddess aft. The area below decks was illuminated by pale glowing spots of light recessed into the ceiling and covered over by what appeared to be glass. The light was steady, unwinking, and it definitely did not come from any kind of fire.
The quarters to which their little guide led them were more conventionally illuminated by candles, however, and the ceilings were high enough for the tall knights to stand erect. No sooner had Ulath closed the heavy door to what was in effect to be their prison for the next five days than a low-pitched humming sound began to vibrate in the deck beneath their feet, and they could feel the bow of the strange vessel start to swing ponderously about to point at the open sea. Then the ship surged forward.
‘What’s making it move?’ Kalten asked. ‘There’s no wind.’
‘Kalten!’ Aphrael said sharply.
‘Sorry,’ he mumbled.
‘There
