Read Online The Red Wolf Conspiracy by Robert V S Redick - Free Book Online Page B

ablaze?
    He raised his eyes—and saw the answer looking back at him. Across the Terrace, at a table outside the oystermen's pub, sat Dr. Ignus Chadfallow. In the squalid crowd he looked nobler than ever, like a prince wandered into a ragpickers' fair. Pazel would have run to him at once, but the sergeant grabbed his elbow.
    Bending close to his ear, the old warrior said, not unkindly, “The sea's better than chains, lad, but it's a deadly place to be anyone's fool. Beware of smiles, eh?”
    “What kind of smiles?”
    “You'll know.”
    With that the sergeant lurched away, and Pazel sprinted to the pub. But Chadfallow was no longer at the table. Pazel rushed inside but found only soldiers and the regular boisterous girls, bouncing on Arquali instead of Ormali knees now. He fled, ran from the shipyard to the stockades and back to the pub, yet saw no trace of Chad-fallow, nor ever again caught sight of him in Ormael. But on the chair where the doctor had been he found his mother's ivory whale and the skipper's knife—honed now to the sharpness of a razor.
    Captain Faral took him on without question, and Pazel served more than a year on the merchant ship
Swan
as cook's aid and cabin boy.Just as the sergeant promised, the old sailors taught him his rigging, and knots, and a thousand unfamiliar words.
Capstan, spritsail, binnacle, boom:
he learned them all, and the roles they played in the great collective struggle that is sailing. Pazel was quick and good-mannered. His book-perfect Arquali made them laugh. But it puzzled them that he knew nothing of Arquali customs. Ormalis as a rule are more mystical than religious: Gregory Pathkendle had taught Pazel and Neda the sign of the Tree (the fist against the chest, opening smoothly as one raised it past the forehead), and drilled them in the first Nine of the Ninety Rules of the Rinfaith, and left it at that.
    The old men of the
Swan
were indignant. “Tie him up! Leave him ashore! We'd be better off with crawlies aboard than this little savage!”
    But few of them meant it. They taught him the simple but all-important prayer to Bakru, God of the winds, and were pleased when he swore to repeat it at every launch. They taught him never to laugh in the presence of a monk, never to turn his back on a temple door, never to eat at night without a glance up at the stars of the Milk Tree. They taught him his own job, too: how to fight the other tarboys for the right to freeze in a gale, swabbing rain out through the scuppers before it could leach into the hold, spreading sawdust on the quarterdeck for footing, mending ropes before anyone ordered him to do so.
    They were patient, these old men. They had survived plague, scurvy, wax-eye blindness, the talking fever that killed one sailor in three during the reign of Magad IV, cholera, cyclones, war. Being old and penniless meant that they had also survived their own ambitions, and no longer blamed the world for each thwarting incident, as young men do. In his heart Pazel thanked the nameless soldier a thousand times for directing him to their care.
    The
Swan
took him east, into the heart of Arqual. She had been pressed into service as a troop-carrier, but with the seizure of Ormael complete her captain returned quietly to trade, mostly in the bays of Emledri and Sorhn. Pazel supposed he would never see his mother or sister again, even if they had somehow dodged slavery and death. It was dangerous to think of them too often: when he did he became clumsy with grief, his mind filling with a bright, cold fog that frightened him. In any case there was nothing he could do.
    When Captain Faral became a drunkard, Pazel found himselftransferred to another ship, the
Anju
, so abruptly he had no time even to take leave of the old men who had taught him the ways of the sea. This time rumor preceded him: the other tarboys knew that some wealthy doctor had paid off the
Swan
and arranged for Pazel to be seized like a mailbag (as indeed he was) and flung