Huge Ajax's Arc

Chapter 550 of 619

Marcus sailed north to the harbors with Ajax's silver and a name he needed to find. He returned three days later with a man Ajax had never seen. The pilot walked the dock at Silvermoor slow, watching the water more than the men. He was gray at the temples, thin, with hands that never stopped reading the sea's color even on flat harbor. Marcus said his name was the only shoalman in four northern ports who had crossed the deep reefs and lived. Ajax brought him to the hall. Ajax laid it plain. There was a reef, wide as a harbor, hiding an island past the bay. He needed a man who could read the gaps. The pilot listened and asked for coin. Then he asked what he would swear to. Ajax told him: silence about the gate, the canal, the sea road. The pilot took the silver chain without flinching. He swore the oath by the fire, and Chalam charmed the chain to Ajax's gold, so betrayal would burn through the sea itself. "He's clean," Marco had said before, and Ajax trusted it. At dawn they crossed the bay in the Seraphine. Rowan read the shore from the bow. Chalam knelt with his bone staff. Kael and Torren stood ready at the rail with the crew. Elara sat amidships, her band charged, in case something waited on the far rocks. The cliffs of the island rose ahead, pale in the morning light. The swells turned wrong. The pilot leaned over the water and watched the color shift from blue to green to a pale, sickly gray. He raised one hand. "Left," he said. "Follow the dark line. Where it goes pale, that's rock." Marcus turned the hull. The pilot called the way, gap by gap, his eyes never leaving the surface. Chalam's staff hummed once, then went quiet. "He's finding what I couldn't," the wizard said flat. "The stone's right beneath us. He steers us past it." The reef closed on both sides. Rowan called depth from the bow. The pilot answered with turns. Twice the hull scraped nothing but shadow. Then the water opened blue and deep, and the island's shore lay clear ahead. "Through," the pilot said. He did not smile. Ajax gripped the rail and felt the ground gained under him. The reef had beaten his scout. Now it lay behind. The island waited with cliffs and fresh water, walls he could raise, a crew he could set. Another town for the brotherhood, answering to him and no one else. "We land at the beach," Ajax told his men. "Rowan reads the tracks. Chalam checks for old workings. Kael and Torren hold the boat." The crew rowed for shore. Ajax stepped onto ground no lord had claimed. He had sworn a pilot by chain, and the pilot had opened the door. The island was his to take.