Thieves' World: Enemies of Fortune Read Online Free PDF Page B

the wind back the boat off a little, and the old man turned and splashed toward the rock, where he hauled himself up, dripping, onto the sole safe refuge.
    “I’ve started a raft there,” he called to the old man. “Good luck to you.”
    “Damn you,” he thought he made out for a reply, but he’d been, overall, polite. He bowed, and turned the boat before the wind, bringing the sail close, and sailed away, sweet as could be, with a wind off the quarter and a lubberly old boat that could even sing a bit, once the wind got behind her.
    There were the fishing villages—not necessarily a good thing, to come sailing into such small places with another man’s boat—but there was plenty of coastline to choose from and there was net and line. He’d not starve.
    But as the shore came nearer he saw a smudge of smoke, smoke which proved to cover a broad spot on the horizon.
    A signal fire, he thought. Was it a smoky signal fire, someone summoning other survivors?
    He aimed the little craft for it, and sailed, even kicking up a little spray from the bow as the wind blew inshore. He was wet. He was cold, and the wind grew colder as the boat ran, so that he sank down as much into shelter as he could get, and wrapped a dirty tarpaulin about himself, leaving only his hand on the tiller and his face exposed to the chill.
    The smudge came clearer, as the haze above a settlement, but such a settlement. He saw other boats, and kept clear of them; and he saw taller masts, and a huddle of buildings big enough to been seen from a distance through the haze.
    It was no village. It was a whole damned town. A city, where no city ought to be.
    Anonymity was possible, in such a place of size.
    But his charts had been wrong. There was nothing here. There could be nothing.
    He sailed closer, no longer quite trusting his senses—his charts, he had greater faith in, but they had proved false. He sailed closer and closer, beyond a short breakwater, to a ship-channel and what was a fair-sized deepwater harbor, with quays all brown, weathered board and precious little paint, the town rising, all brown boards, beyond it. He felt far from conspicuous as he nosed his stolen boat up to the side of a long, sparse boardwalk, tied onto a piling beside a boarding ladder, and climbed up onto the level of the town.
    People came and went. Chimneys gave out smoke. Nobody’s clothes were in much better case, his having lost most of their color. The harbor stank of fish and the dockside was as scurvy a place as Pirate’s Rest up in the Isles. It felt, in short, like a homecoming of sorts.
    He walked, still sodden, but no longer quite so cold, down the boards and onto the stony walk of solid ground, walked with a sailor’s roll to his step, but not the only such hereabouts.
    A harbor with room for ships of size, though he saw nothing larger than a channel-runner in port at the moment in this backwater place. The Widowmaker was lost, taking with her the best crew a man could ask, but he was alive, he had gold in his pocket, probably more than adequate for a start in this town, and he could live, gather a small crew about him—and wait for a likely ship to come in. He’d buy new charts, too. Damn the mapmaker.
    All around him he heard the fisherman’s accent, a handful of words discernible and those few uninformative. He could read signs, spelling as indifferent as any in the Rest. One sign marked an inn, as he took it. It said, THE BROKEN MAST, with a piece of cracked spar above the door.
    If a man was looking for fellow seamen, that looked apt enough. Broken Mast it was. He needed a dry place, food, and a bed.
    He walked into the mostly deserted inn at this hour, picked the scarred table nearest the fire, and threw himself into a creaking wooden chair.
    “Wan drink?” the bartender yelled, and something that sounded like come here. Every man in this damned town talked with marbles in his mouth—a dialect, and a muddy one, like the town itself.
    There was,