A kick rapped his ankle. He gasped and shoved straight, snatched the swimming impression of a vaulted ceiling above a railed dais. There, a number of corpulent, robed men sat arrayed in stern judgement against him.
‘Shut up, you fool!’ Dakar hissed in his ear. ‘Handle this wrong, and we’re dog-meat.’ To Shipsport’s gathered tribunal, he temporized, ‘This time, to our sorrow, we haven’t the coin to pay fines for disorderly conduct. We can’t make amends to the Kittiwake’s landlord, beyond our respectful apologies.’
‘Well, sorry’s no recompense!’ The stout table jounced as the tavern’s greybeard owner thumped an indignant fist. ‘I’ve suffered enough of your hot air already to bore me past Daelion’s Wheel! The last time, your friend played his lyranthe for hand-outs. He sang, forbye, like a silver-tongued lark! Caroled until every last mark cleaned his pockets, and bedamned to your pleas that you’re penniless.’ To the magistrate rapping his gavel, he railed, ‘My tap-room’s in shambles! My son broke his arm. I demand satisfaction. Grant the Kittiwake use of the bard’s talent for one month. The house takes his proceeds until the debt’s paid, with the extra for punitive damages.’
The town clerk waggled his pen in remonstrance. ‘The accused in the dock broke the peace, don’t forget! Shipsport’s coffers are due a steep fine for their act of civil disturbance. These charges must be met beforetime.’
While the magistrate stroked his suet chin, and the spring’s nesting wrens cheeped in the eaves outside, Fionn Areth stirred to a sour clank of chain. ‘But I don’t—’
Dakar jammed an elbow into his ribs, then spun lies with pressured invention. ‘The bard has a head cold. Can’t sing a note. Force him to try, his sick croaking is likely to rile your patrons past salvage. You said yourself, the Kittiwake’s crowd likes to toss inept singers through the window. That won’t meet your fees, and my friend lies at risk of suffering a crippling injury’
Truth and impasse; the magistrate smothered a yawn. The victimized landlord glowered, arms folded, while the clerk licked his thumb and flattened a clean sheet of parchment. ‘Hard labour, then? Incarceration? Public whipping? The brawling was started without provocation.’ He tapped the scroll bearing the transcribed statement. ‘Disrupting the peace calls for a harsh sentence.’
Shipsport’s magistrate laced his prim knuckles and delivered the final verdict. ‘The accused have no money. Therefore, the bard will perform until the debts to the town and the tavern are discharged.’ He silenced objection with the superior glare he reserved for the low-class condemned. ‘No reprieve!’
‘I won’t sing for any man!’ yelled Fionn Areth, a mistake: his broad grasslands vowels displayed no congestion. ‘Not for a penny, not for struck gold, and not ever for settling damages over a riot that I didn’t start!’
The Kittiwake’s landlord stared down his beak nose. ‘Upright men don’t keep the company of smugglers.’
Since such shiftless character was the s’Ffalenn bastard’s legacy, the slung mud was going to stick. By luck alone, none of Shipsport’s officials connected today’s face with the infamous Master of Shadow. Draw undue attention, and some sharp-eyed busybody might come forward to point out the oversight.
Fionn Areth slumped in the prisoner’s dock, cowed by his fear as the steps of due process saddled him with the arraignment.
Experience taught him the futility of argument. His just plea would only fall on deaf ears and earn him a savage beating.
‘You dare the impertinence of claiming to refuse?’ The magistrate flicked a glance toward his clerk, then granted the case his sharp quittance. ‘Call back the guards to remove the offenders. Lock them in the dungeon on bread crusts and water till the singer sees fit to change heart.’
The dungeon in Shipsport outmatched even Dakar’s revolting description. Flood-tide clogged the drains with green slime, coating the floor with decomposing shell-fish, strained through the wracked straw and stranded kelp. Fionn Areth gagged on the nauseous stench. Too miserable to curse the rough handling of the wardens who hauled him into confinement, he sagged as they bolted his manacles to a chain spiked in the sweating stonewall.
Head tipped forward, shoulders hunched to avoid the damp masonry chilling his back, the Araethurian squeezed his eyes shut. The pound of his pulse split his skull to white agony. To make matters worse, the Mad Prophet had burst into a fit of inebriated singing. The cell had an arched ceiling. Within closed confines, his racket raised echoes fit to drive the dead to screaming torment.
Oblivious, Dakar belted on through a ballad expounding the exploits of two whores, a blind cobbler, and a goat. Cuffs from the guards failed to silence his noise. Dakar grunted, undaunted, through his tone-deaf rendition of the repetitive chorus.
‘He’s sloshed to the gills on the Kittiwake’s rotgut,’ the long-faced turnkey observed. Anxious to leave, he jangled his keys. ‘If you bash him unconscious, he’ll just wake back up. I say, let him bide. Locked in without recourse, his wretched companion is going to be driven insane. He’ll either pay up the charged fine for relief, or he’ll kick the brute’s bollocks clear through his throat. If such doesn’t kill him, the mutton-head jape won’t be left in a fit state to breed.’
Dakar widened his brown eyes, unfazed. Limp as a roped walrus in the hands of the guards, he forced them to tow him up to the ring to fasten his prisoner’s shackles. As they wrestled the bolts, puffing vile curses, his chained posture proved no deterrent. Dakar followed the ballad with warbled, scurrilious doggerel extolling the virtues of gin.
‘That’s it!’ snapped the turnkey, ears plugged with his thumbs. ‘The tide floods apace. Tarry much longer, and we’ll have wet boots.’ He fidgeted until the last guardsman filed out, then clashed the grille shut on the miscreants. His malicious grin flashed by the glare of held torch-light as he secured the rusty lock. ‘Enjoy the Lord Magistrate’s sweet hospitality!’
The squelching tread of officialdom retreated, plunging the cell into darkness.
Fionn Areth stifled his impulse to shout. The icy air settled like a batt of inky wool once the upstairs portal banged closed. The reek of sea rot and urine overpowered, as the flow of fresh air was cut off.
A large insect scuttled over the Araethurian’s scraped wrist. His jerk of revulsion clanged the fixed chain, and his curse snatched the break between choruses. ‘May the furies of Sithaer’s eighth hell plague the day that your dam spread her knees and gave birth!’
Through the hitched pause to recover his breath, Dakar chuckled. ‘You might as well sing along with me, bumpkin. Stay cheerful, you won’t have to think overmuch, or listen to the skittering wild life.’
‘Damn you for a sot!’ Fionn Areth lashed back. ‘Without your loose habits, we wouldn’t be dangled like carrion, nose to nose with the starveling rats.’
‘Ho!’ Dakar whooped. ‘Starveling rats! That’s poetic’ Buoyed to euphoria by the Kittiwake’s ale, he nudged his companion’s ankle. ‘Know this one, do you?’ He plunged into another obscene recitation, at a pitch fit to mangle the ear-drums.
‘Shut up!’ Fionn Areth kicked back, cleanly missed, and clunked his head against the wall with a yelp of anguished frustration. ‘Just how are we to get out of this fix? They think I’m Athera’s Masterbard! In truth, I don’t sing any better than you. If you’re going to insist that we work off our fine that way, the Kittiwake’s roughnecks might as well batter us straight to perdition right now. Better I give my consent to such madness, before we pickle in this cesspit, drowning in rat crap and sea-water.’
‘Well, practise a bit first.’ Dakar hiccoughed in brosy hilarity. ‘Might as well test your talent before we’re marched out to get diced by a mob of drunken sailhands.’
‘You should care, numbed as a dolt on cheap beer,’ Fionn Areth cut back in ripe sarcasm.
‘Actually