Liar's Island: A Novel Read Online Free PDF Page A

gold from the bag, scattering it on the chest, and then put Hrym on top of the coins. He knelt and examined the lock on the sea chest, just out of professional interest, though he didn’t touch it.
    â€œMmm. Last year, when we were trying to find that magical key. I don’t think anyone threatened it, exactly, but the subject came up.”
    â€œKeelhauling. Is that the one where they put you on a rack and attach your hands and feet to things and stretch you out until your bones break?”
    â€œNo, that’s just called the rack ,” Hrym said. “Keelhauling is when they tie a rope around you and—”
    â€œOh, right. Throw you overboard and drag you along underneath the ship, scraping you against the barnacles on the hull, and drag you back up the other side. And if you didn’t drown, they beat you and then do it all over again. It’s coming back to me now. People must get bored at sea, to think of doing something like that.” He sighed and stood up. There was probably nothing he wanted in the chest anyway, and it would be a shame to let mere habitual larceny ruin his chance to reach Jalmeray and get his own weight in gold.
    He stretched out on the bunk—hardly the best bed he’d slept in, but a long way from the worst, insofar as it was a bed, and not a ditch full of leaves or the stone floor of a dungeon cell. He felt the ship jerk as it left port, and settled into sleep as the voyage began.
    Rodrick woke some unknown time later—there was still daylight in the tiny porthole, so he hadn’t lost the whole day—and sat up with a groan. His head was full of thunder, his mouth was dry, and he was simultaneously ravenous and nauseated.
    â€œSleep well?” Hrym said. “I don’t know how you could with all the snoring you were doing. How a noise like that doesn’t wake you up is beyond me.”
    â€œThe sleeping was fine. It’s the waking up that’s proving difficult.” He stretched as well as he could in the confines of the cabin, then blinked. His battered knapsack was resting on the floor, tied closed, along with his bedroll and lantern. “Are those my things?”
    â€œApparently a djinni delivered them,” Hrym said. “Fetched them from our inn, though how it knew where we were staying, I couldn’t say, and don’t like to think about. I told the crewman to leave it there. You were sleeping like the dead. Only the dead are quieter.”
    Rodrick opened up the pack and dug through it. Spare clothes, a couple of knives, and the usual odds and ends—and, down at the bottom, his most valuable possession: a cloak of the devilfish, which would transform him into the eponymous vile, tentacled, and hard-to-kill sea creature if he donned it and gave the right command. That cloak was a great comfort to have on a ship, as such things had a distressing ability to sink with all hands lost, or so he gathered. Rodrick had owned some other wondrous items, once, but he’d sold them for enough to live like a lord for a few months. They’d been good months, but maybe a little boring, if he was being totally honest. The good months were followed by some hard ones, but that was the life he’d chosen—feast alternating with famine. At least this way he got the feasts. Most honest men had to settle for a steady diet of famine.
    He was rather cheered, having his possessions back. Who knew djinn were so considerate? “Want a breath of fresh sea air?”
    â€œI’m happy here.”
    â€œToo bad. I don’t want to leave you unattended.” He scooped up the scattered coins, counting to make sure none had rolled away during the voyage, though this ship was large enough he barely felt it sway.
    â€œI was using those.”
    â€œI’m not going to leave the gold unattended, either.”
    â€œNo one could take it—or take me, for that matter—without me freezing them into a lump of