‘Are you sure you want to do that?’ the Captain of Myntalo asked. ‘To throw a man into Leviathan’s Blood is no trivial thing.’
In the last light of the afternoon’s sun, Bueralan sat beside the solid, grey-bearded man on the deck of his ship. They had half a dozen bottles of beer before them, and it was from one of these that Bueralan drank while he nodded. ‘It has to look real,’ he said. ‘I can’t have you drop me off on the shore near Enaka. People in the town above will notice that. They’ll ask questions that I won’t want to answer.’
‘Yeah, but the black ocean,’ the captain protested. ‘Maybe you don’t understand just how that can kill a man.’
‘I don’t want to swim in it,’ Bueralan said. ‘In fact, I’d appreciate it if you gave me a boat to row my way to shore in.’
The captain did not reply.
‘I know it’s a risk, but it’s a calculated risk. The most important thing is that you can’t tell anyone in your crew about it. They have to really throw me off.’
The other man took a drink. ‘That was Mayor Kana I saw leave the other day, wasn’t it? With all those soldiers.’
The event had garnered a small amount of attention, as Bueralan had hoped. Word had to circulate that Kana was still alive, that he was returning to Zajce. Kae had left with Kana, and it would be his job to ensure that the word kept getting out – a job he’d thought Bueralan could have done as well as him. ‘There’s no need for you to go to Zajce,’ Kae had said, before he left.
Bueralan had stood beneath the night sky, later that evening, the quiet of the farmhouse drifting over him. ‘There’s a final push to be made in the town,’ he said. ‘Someone has to line everything up.’
‘One of the others can do that.’ Before he had become a saboteur, Kae had been the guard of an important woman, and when he spoke, Bueralan could hear shades of his own past. ‘You don’t need to make this job about yourself, my friend.’
Here and now, on the deck of Myntalo, Bueralan swirled the beer around in the bottom of his bottle. ‘Yeah,’ he said, finally. ‘It was Kana.’
‘I guess it’s true what they say,’ the captain said. ‘A man with a bit of a god in him is a hard man to kill. You got that same curse?’
He shook his head. ‘I’m just a man with all the normal problems a man has. So, we have a deal?’
‘It’s a damn fool idea, but it’s your gold.’