The Greedy Pay

It was a merchant ship bound for Volantis. Its captain was a middle-aged man with a hooked nose and the sour temper to match.

He was not pleased to see a stranger on his deck. Only when Ronan handed him a gold coin did that pinched, unpleasant face loosen into grudging hospitality.

The voyage was not a pleasant one.

"Damn this weather! Damn it all! Did I fail to make the gods their offerings? Why are they doing this to my Little Jeyne?"

In truth, the stingy hook-nosed captain had not considered making any offerings before he sailed. He cursed at the waterspout behind them while his eyes kept flicking toward Ronan on the deck.

For reasons convenient to himself, Ronan's presence had become awkward. A storm had pursued them for too long, the ship's cargo had suffered badly, and the captain had decided the uninvited stranger was to blame.

He even tried to take Ronan's freedom and belongings by force. Unfortunately for him, he had badly misjudged his passenger.

The sailors were not ordinary hired hands. They were slaves the captain had bought cheaply, and they had no right to refuse his commands. Years of abuse had left them thin and weak.

Even with fish knives in their hands, they obeyed more from habit than courage. Ronan stood, took one sailor's crude blade away with laughable ease, and spun it in his hand as though it were a toy.

The captain saw enough to understand that Ronan was not easy prey. His trapped, resentful expression made it clear he wanted to back down without admitting defeat.

Ronan did not want trouble. He only wanted to reach Volantis without being stranded on the sea. A large part of that restraint came from the fact that if he killed everyone aboard, he might have no idea where to sail.

When Ronan did not continue the fight, the captain seized the excuse and shouted at the sailors to keep rowing. Then he fled into his cabin.

The Little Jeyne looked small, but it was still an ocean-going merchant vessel, and it carried more labor below than its deck suggested. In the lower hold, slaves strained at the oars.

So long as those rowers endured, the ship would not lose its drive. That advantage was also its greatest danger in a storm.

The rowers were already in poor condition. Endless labor and the captain's cruelty had dragged them to the edge of collapse. One exhausted slave blacked out and fell. His fall rippled through the rest of the oarsmen.

The ship's speed dropped visibly. Ronan noticed first. The waterspout behind them was closing in. He turned to the sailor from earlier. "What happened?"

The man looked just as lost, then stammered out an answer. "It must be the rowers below."

"Rowers."

Ronan understood without asking. With a captain like Hooknose, this was hardly surprising. But there was no time to judge blame. The waterspout was almost upon them.

Ronan hurried to the captain's cabin, dragged the man from his rest, and hauled him onto the deck.

Hooknose thought Ronan had come to punish him, but when he saw the wall of storm and spinning water nearly on top of them, terror wrote itself across his ugly face.

"No. Faster! Make them go faster!"

He ran below like a madman. At the sight of collapsed slaves, rage and fear overtook him. He snatched up a whip and lashed them, trying to force the oars back into motion.

But the slaves were already hanging by a thread. Pain no longer reached them properly. No matter how hard the captain struck, they lay like corpses.

Only then did true fear seize him. He stopped whipping, kicked a useless rower aside, and tried to work the oars himself.

One man's strength meant little. He collapsed quickly. Then worse news arrived.

A wave dozens of yards high, driven by the waterspout, struck the Little Jeyne. The ship did not last a heartbeat before the sea smashed it apart.

Men, cargo, timber, and screams were thrown into the cold water together.

Ronan had found a broken plank before the worst of it hit. He clung to it as the sea rose and fell around him. One moment there had been a ship.

Now there was only Ronan, alone on the black water, unsure whether he would be buried beneath it.

Lightning flickered through the storm, offering brief shards of sight. In one of those flashes, Ronan saw something strange.

A ghostly blue glow bobbed above and below the surface. It took him a moment to understand what he was seeing.

"You've got to be joking."

Thick tentacles were already sliding around him. Was this how he died? In the mouth of some sea monster?

Ronan tightened his grip on his only weapon and watched the writhing limbs. The waves were battering the creature as badly as they battered him, and even it could not fully control its body.

Then he saw the missing captain and a few sailors wrapped in other tentacles. The monster must have been feeding on the wreck.

Another wave hurled the creature closer. A tentacle finally reached Ronan. He drove his dagger into it with everything he had. When that was not enough, he bit down like an animal. The result was immediate.

The wounded monster abandoned that troublesome morsel and tried to drag the captain and sailors beneath the sea. It had forgotten the storm.

The waterspout was strong enough to tear it toward the sky. Near the center of the pull, Ronan understood the situation at once. He had no better choice. He threw himself onto the tentacle and held on.

A moment before, the thing had been a horror. Now it was his only lifeline.

Fish, shrimp, and broken pieces of ship were drawn upward by the waterspout. The sea monster fought hard, its long tentacles clinging to stones below, willing to abandon its prey if it meant survival.

But living strength was nothing before the force of the storm. The struggle lasted only a short time before a stronger pull tore both monster and Ronan into the air.

Debris and sea life smashed together around them. If Ronan had not wrapped himself in the tentacle, the collision alone might have ended him.

He saw Hooknose and the sailors shredded by the storm, their bodies torn open as disoriented fish thrashed into the ruin of them.

The sea monster fared little better. A splinter of timber drove into its head, several tentacles were severed, and blood darkened the water around it.

Ronan held on until consciousness finally slipped away. He woke much later floating on the sea, his arms wrapped around a pale length of dead flesh. Water slapped and sloshed nearby, as if something was moving around him.

When his awareness returned enough to see, the sight nearly made him curse again.

If not for the sea monster, he truly might have drowned. Its huge corpse floated around him now, letting him see what it had been: an enormous squid, near enough a kraken for any frightened sailor.

Now it was food. Familiar triangular fins crowded the surface, too many to count. Ronan saw at least a hundred sharks, and that did not include the shapes beneath the water tearing at the carcass.

He was surrounded by the dead monster and by the things eating it. If he did not find a way out soon, the sharks would digest him with the rest of their meal.

But when Ronan dragged himself onto the corpse and looked around, the world remained nothing but open sea.

For the first time in a while, despair came very close.

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