Read Online The Gorgon's Blood Solution by Jeffrey Quyle - Free Book Online

anything, he was in danger of being caught himself, if any curious Corsairs were to decide to explore the empty spaces beneath the docks.
    He needed to go back into his room, blow out his lamp, and wait for the raid to finish, he concluded.  He couldn’t get out of the waterfront to either run away or raise a warning, so he needed to sit silently, let time pass, and let the Corsairs to go on their way when they finished grabbing all the plunder they could lay their hands on.  And then The Lion City would, like Marco himself, crawl out of its state of shock and assess the damage that had been done.
    Algornia’s shop wasn’t likely to suffer any troubles, Marco suddenly thought, as his mind skittered around various aspects of the raid.  The shop wasn’t particularly close to the docks, so it wasn’t going to be an easy, early target.  Nor was it particularly inviting-looking from the outside; it had a musty appearance in Marco’s eyes – he had always secretly wished his master would improve the exterior of the shop to make it look more inviting, exotic, and mysteriously alluring.  As it stood, there was nothing about the plain dark exterior that would be likely to catch the eyes of the Corsairs and invite them to imagine wealthy plunder within.
    He thought about what the raiders were likely to visit.  There were warehouses adjacent to the docks; those would be easy and obvious targets, though he didn’t know how much actual value would be contained among all the ordinary and everyday inventory of wool or other mundane commodities.  There were also a number of large, well-furnished houses not far past the warehouses, the homes to the families of the traders who profited from their fleets going in and out of the city’s harbor.  Those houses were likely to be extensively ransacked, Marco guessed.  And then there was just random chance as to what was inviting enough and close enough to draw the attention of the Corsairs, depending on how long they planned to stay in the city and loot it, certainly not more than a few hours he assumed.
    Marco fumbled with his hand behind him, the hand that held the knife. He found the edge of the blanket without looking, as his head continued to face directly upwards, looking at the dark underside of the pier where the Corsairs were walking.  Just as he got ready to duck into his room, a bright flash of yellow light lit up the entire area.  He could see the posts and the beams and the structures that all existed around his room, as the reflected dim yellow light penetrated down to where even sunlight never reached in the shadows beneath the dock.
    The footsteps overhead momentarily faltered, but then resumed their movement, though they were growing less dense.  Presumably most of the raiders had actually left the pier, Marco guessed.
    The light dimmed within seconds, but remained at a low level, equal to the light of a sunny day down where Marco stood in the damp underside of the dockyards.  He released the blanket, and stood.  The light was astonishing, and frightening, especially coming as it did in conjunction with the Corsairs.  Marco couldn’t imagine what they could have done to create such illumination; there was no heat, or crackling sound to indicate a huge fire burning.
    As the number of footsteps continued to dwindle, Marco decided he needed to see what was happening overhead.  He gently reached into the room and placed his wineskin within.  He then searched around in the dim light, looking for the most discrete and indirect way he could travel to avoid detection, and set out.  He walked along the top of a beam, then jumped over to another one, and made his way to the edge of the pier, where empty space stood between him and the next pier over, which jutted out from the shoreside docks just as his pier did.  The gap between the two piers was close to twenty yards, wide enough for a ship to tie up at each pier, side-by-side as they conducted their exchange of