Pirate's Honor, page 1
Torius leapt down from the quarterdeck. He lunged at Joss's attacker, driving his cutlass into the creature's torso before it could free its spear. It screeched a warbling cry, and two tentacles writhed out to entangle the captain's legs.
"Torius!" Celeste's heart was in her throat as she watched him wrench his cutlass free and hack away one of the clinging limbs. Before he could strike again, the other one jerked sharply and he fell. Like Joss, he lay on the deck as his opponent raised its spear to strike.
With a wordless cry, Celeste lashed out with her most destructive spell. A spear of flame lanced out to strike the cecaelia. It shrieked and writhed as the heat seared its flesh, dropping its spear to bat at the smoldering wounds. Torius took the opportunity to drive his cutlass up into its chest.
Still the thing clutched him, tentacles wrapping his arm and snaking around his neck. Celeste darted forward, but before she could reach him, an arrow transfixed the cecaelia's head, and it fell. She looked up to the quarterdeck, where Thillion was already nocking another arrow. Flashing a smile, she turned to Torius, who was peeling away the tentacles and struggling to his feet, trying not to slip in the pool of blood, slime, and black ink that spread across the deck.
"Are you all right?" she asked, peering at the red wheals on his neck.
"Fine!" he insisted. "Celeste, you shouldn't—"
"Shouldn't what? Save your life?" A woman screamed and they turned to see a pirate struggling on the end of a spear. Celeste sent another searing line of flame at the cecaelia, which screeched in agony and retreated. "I am not so frail as you imagine, Captain Vin ..."
The Pathfinder Tales Library
Novels
Prince of Wolves by Dave Gross
Winter Witch by Elaine Cunningham
Plague of Shadows by Howard Andrew Jones
The Worldwound Gambit by Robin D. Laws
Master of Devils by Dave Gross
Death's Heretic by James L. Sutter
Song of the Serpent by Hugh Mattews
City of the Fallen Sky by Tim Pratt
Nightglass by Liane Merciel
Blood of the City by Robin D. Laws
Queen of Thorns by Dave Gross
Called to Darkness by Richard Lee Byers
Liar's Blade by Tim Pratt
Pirate's Honor by Chris A. Jackson
The Wizard's Mask by Ed Greenwood
King of Chaos by Dave Gross
Journals
The Compass Stone: The Collected Journals of Eando Kline edited by James L. Sutter
Hell's Pawns by Dave Gross
Dark Tapestry by Elaine Cunnningham
Prodigal Sons edited by James L. Sutter
Plague of Light by Robin D. Laws
Guilty Blood by F. Wesley Schneider
Husks by Dave Gross
Short Stories
"The Lost Pathfinder" by Dave Gross
"Certainty" by Liane Merciel
"The Swamp Warden" by Amber E. Scott
"Noble Sacrifice" by Richard Ford
"Blood Crimes" by J. C. Hay
"The Secret of the Rose and Glove by Kevin Andrew Murphy
"Lord of Penance" by Richard Lee Byers
"Guns of Alkenstar" by Ed Greenwod
"The Ghosts of Broken Blades" by Monte Cook
"The Walkers from the Crypt" by Howard Andrew Jones
"A Lesson in Taxonomy" by Dave Gross
"The Illusionist" by Elaine Cunningham
"Two Pieces of Tarnished Silver by Erik Mona
"The Ironroot Deception" by Robin D. Laws
"Plow and Sword" by Robert E. Vardeman
"A Passage to Absalom" by Dave Gross
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"The Box" by Bill Ward
"Blood and Money by Steven Savile
"Faithful Servants" by James L. Sutter
"Fingers of Death—No, Doom!" by Lucien Soulban
"The Perfumer's Apprentice" by Kevin Andrew Murphy
"Krunzle the Quick" by Hugh Matthews
"Mother Bears" by Wendy N. Wagner
"Hell or High Water" by Ari Marmell
Pirate's Honor © 2013 Paizo Publishing, LLC. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means digital, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, or conveyed via the Internet or a website without prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embedded in critical articles and reviews.
Paizo, Paizo Publishing, LLC, the Paizo golem logo, and Pathfinder are registered trademarks of Paizo Publishing, LLC; Pathfinder Roleplaying Game, Pathfinder Campaign Setting, and Pathfinder Tales are trademarks of Paizo Publishing, LLC.
Cover art by Denman Rooke.
Cover design by Andrew Vallas.
Map by Crystal Frasier.
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ISBN 978-1-60125-523-5 (mass market paperback)
ISBN 978-1-60125-524-1 (ebook)
Publisher's Cataloging-In-Publication Data
(Prepared by The Donohue Group, Inc.)
Jackson, Chris A.
Pirate's honor / Chris A. Jackson.
p. : map ; cm. — (Pathfinder tales)
Set in the world of the role-playing game, Pathfinder.
Issued also as an ebook.
ISBN: 978-1-60125-523-5 (mass market pbk.)
1. Pirates—Fiction. 2. Piracy—Fiction. 3. Jewelry theft—Fiction. 4. Imaginary places—Fiction. 5. Pathfinder (Game)—Fiction. 6. Fantasy fiction. 7. Adventure fiction. I. Title. II. Series: Pathfinder tales library.
PS3610.A357 P57 2013
813/.6
First printing April 2013.
Printed in the United States of America.
This one is for the gamers.
Without the inspiration of roleplaying games, and all of you who spend endless nights around the table, rolling dice, arguing rules, and living alternate lives, I never would have put pen to page.
paizo.com #2495541, Ronald Hartman
Chapter One
The Stars Never Lie
Scales rustled across the hardwood deck of the corsair Stargazer as she plied the moonlit waters of the Obari Ocean. The crew of the ship had heard the sound many times before, especially on nights when the sky hung overhead like a black silk tapestry strewn with diamonds. This was her time, and they knew better than to bother her when her attention was on the heavens.
Celeste squinted through her sextant at the bright planet Triaxus, also known as the Wanderer, which had just entered the constellation of the Sea Wraith. That boded well, and she manipulated the stylus to scratch down the planet's angle to the horizon. Glancing at the neat array of hour- and minute-glasses—calibrated that very evening at the precise moment of sunset—she noted the exact time. She took another sighting, this one of the rising moon, and the stylus scratched down another pair of numbers. Lowering the sextant, Celeste performed the calculations to determine the ship's latitude and longitude. With a flick of magic so familiar that she barely had to think of the spell, she floated her plotting tools out of their leather case, rolled out the chart of the Jalmeray coast, and meticulously plotted their position.
"Well?" a gravelly voice asked as the stylus scratched an "X" on the chart and wrote down the time.
Celeste's tail gave an involuntary flick of annoyance at the interruption, but she stifled her natural response to rise on her coils and hiss. Most of the crew members were more cautious about interrupting the lunar naga during her reading of the stars, but Stargazer's half-orc bosun was an incautious fellow. Besides, he was just doing his job. They were sailing in dangerous waters, and he needed to know their position.
"You may turn to zero-eight-zero degrees, Grogul, or as close to that heading as the wind will allow." Celeste put away her instruments and folded the case closed against the salt air. "We're beyond Jalmeray's southern reefs, and can begin our approach of Kaina Katakka's south coast."
"Good!" Grogul turned away without a word of thanks, as usual, and started barking orders to the crew.
Stargazer turned to windward, her sails trimmed smartly, and began the slow beat to the northeast. When they settled on their new heading, Celeste noted the set of the stars against the foremast and yards; if they started to drift off course, she would know.
Though she had two hours until she needed to take another celestial fix on their position, Celeste retrieved her sextant once again and recorded the elevations of several more planets. She then traded the sextant for a finely wrought telescope and observed the heavenly bodies more closely. She noted every detail—every angle, rotation, and position of every moon—and carefully scratched them into her logbook. These observations had nothing to do with celestial navigation, but with the science of astrology: the intricate song of the heavens and its interaction with the events and beings of this world.
Tonight, she was concerned with the stars' attitude regarding one particular being: Torius Vin, captain of the Stargazer.
With the harmonies of the planets and constellations singing in her mind, and all the numerical data she needed to interpret them, she consulted her astrological texts. This was the hard part; the stars never lied, but interpretation of their message was often fraught with uncertainty. She knew Torius's astrological signature—the position of every celestial body of significance at t
Nothing of significance had changed since her previous reading: The planet Liavara, the Dreamer, still traversed the constellation of the Lantern Bearer, Torius's birth sign. The Wanderer would soon cross the constellation of the Key, the symbol of Abadar, the god of wealth. The planet Castrovel was ascending into the Lantern Bearer, denoting desire, lust, love, or life. The reading seemed straightforward; Torius's dreams, his desire for wealth, would be realized.
Celeste crooked a smile and bent to the chart. If the prophecy still held, then so did their course. Her readings of the other planets—Eox, the Dead, traversing the Wagon, beneath the constellation of the Throne—had pointed to the long-dead indigenous peoples of the island nation of Jalmeray. Those who had not perished or been enslaved when the great Vudrani maharajah Khiben-Sald introduced his foreign gods and elemental creatures to the island had fled to Kaina Katakka. There they had lived for a time, until the governance of Jalmeray fell into the hands of the Arclords. Wanting no potentially rebellious natives so near, the Arclords had exterminated the entire population, leaving Kaina Katakka a devastated ruin.
That was their destination.
Destiny resides in the stars, she thought, closing her texts and stowing them. She gazed up into the endless tapestry of the cosmos and sighed with pleasure. Out here, far from land, the veil of the heavens shone so clearly that it seemed close enough to touch. Here under the stars—aboard a pirate ship, of all places—she had found her own dreams' desire: a home. These people trusted her, relied upon her expertise and appreciated her talent in reading the secrets of the firmament. She belonged. She was loved.
Celeste swayed with the easy motion of the ship, reveling in a peaceful night under the stars, her favorite place in the world. Her mind drifted, and she contemplated her other favorite place. A smile touched her pale lips, and her forked tongue flicked out to scent the night air. There it was, that heady fragrance of leather, spice, and human, as signature as his stellar harmonic.
Torius Vin ...
The ship's bell chimed, interrupting her thoughts. Eight notes in two-stroke pairs, which meant the watch change. As if her thoughts had conjured him from the air, she heard his approach, his soft leather boots brushing the deck with a faint whisk not unlike that of her own scales. She did not turn, but waited, knowing how he would greet her, longing for that familiar touch.
"Celeste," he said, his voice singing the song of the heavens in her mind as his hand ran through her alabaster hair.
"My captain." She turned and smiled at him, her coils shuddering in an involuntary shiver of delight.
"Are we on course?" He glanced at the chart on the deck.
She scanned the stars and nodded. "There's a slight northerly set to the current, but we're not far off the plot line. I'll take another fix to confirm my calculations, but we should reach Kaina Katakka's coast before dawn. We will reach the cove by late morning."
"Good." His fingers slipped from her hair and he left her to make his rounds of Stargazer's quarterdeck, checking the hundreds of details that kept the ship running smoothly. She neither knew nor cared much about these details. Her milieu was above, while his was here—his ship, his crew, canvas and wood, steel and rope, lives dependent on his every decision. She might chart their destiny, but he sailed it. He returned to her and asked quietly, "So, you're sure about this?"
She smiled at him again. In front of his crew, he was always decisive and confident; only with her did he let down his guard and expose his uncertainties. "The stars never lie, my captain."
"I know, but the truth they tell is often only clear in hindsight."
"Torius," she said, brushing against his shoulder, "the prophecy is clear; your dreams and desires for wealth will be realized here."
"Good, because I've been dreaming of gold a lot lately. A pirate's got to eat, after all. After our last little problem, money's been hard to come by." He turned away and began to pace the quarterdeck, his hands clenched firmly behind his back. She watched, admiring the preternatural grace that made his movements so fluid, almost serpentine, even on the rolling deck of a ship.
The problem he mentioned had cost them virtually their entire stake, including the profits of their last successful job. She slithered to his side and whispered, "Don't worry."
He laughed quietly, running his hand slowly through her hair again. "Telling the captain of a ship not to worry is like telling the desert not to be dry or the ocean not to be wet, Celeste. Until we get a solid stake again, enough to pay the crew and provision the ship properly, I'm going to worry."
"Very well, my captain," she said, leaning in to nuzzle his neck. That was another reason she loved him: he might be a pirate, but he truly cared about his people. He cared about her. She turned to her navigational instruments once again and floated the sextant up to her eye. "You worry, and I will consult the stars."
∗ ∗ ∗
Torius squinted into the glare as the island's barren coast coalesced from the thinning morning mists. As always, Celeste's navigation was flawless. She had already retired to his cabin for the day, so he would have to compliment her later. He just hoped her astrological prophecy was as accurate.
"This cove got a name, Captain?" Grogul asked, as the brigantine eased slowly nearer under reefed topsails alone.
Torius glanced up at the half-orc; he was taller by a wide hand and probably outweighed the captain by half, but Torius knew that he was more than the brute he appeared to be. Grogul was a fine bosun, a skilled sailor, and a good tactician, even if he did disdain the more esoteric points of seamanship. More than anything, Grogul was solid, dependable, and unfailingly loyal. The captain wouldn't trade him for a half-dozen fancy, rapier-wielding swashbucklers.
"Not on the chart." Torius scanned the rocky beach with his spyglass. There were no visible signs that the place had ever been inhabited. "Used to be a village or town or something here. Seems way back when Nex gave Jalmeray to the Vudrani, the indigenous population hightailed it and came here. Then the Arclords blasted the entire island to cinders." He wasn't about to tell Grogul the rumors that the island was haunted.
"And they brought their treasures with 'em?" Grogul squinted skeptically at Torius as he ran a thumbnail down the gleaming edge of his axe. "Just waitin' in a big pile for us to pick up?"
"That's what we're here to find out. More likely to find a smuggler's stash or some such."
"As long as it spends, I'm not picky, sir." Grogul knew as well as anyone the dire straits they were in when it came to ready cash.
Torius pointed to the northeast corner of the sheltered cove. "Drop a stern kedge and bring her in close there. The tide's on the rise, so drop the bow anchor when there's a fathom under her keel, and keep her hove short. Oh, and have Snick get her babies ready, just in case we have to dissuade any pursuit."
"Aye, Captain!" Grogul grinned. "You want me to tell her she's in command while we're ashore, since we're short a first mate?"
"Sure. It'll make her day." Torius smiled, knowing his gnome engineer would revel in her authority, short-lived though it might be, driving the crew crazy with all manner of inane orders. Snick was an invaluable member of the crew; she kept the ship functioning and her babies—the twelve beautifully crafted ballistae nestled below the deck—working perfectly. But she wasn't much of a sailor. "Launch the boats when we're anchored. I'll be in my cabin."
"Aye, sir."
Despite the daylight outside, Torius's cabin was as dark as midnight, with black curtains drawn tight over the transom windows and a shade pulled over the skylight. Celeste lay coiled on her collection of thick pillows and rugs, only the waves of her white hair visible in the gloom. He moved silently to his bunk and lit a lamp, keeping the flame low. His sword, a beautiful silver-hilted cutlass, hung from a peg. He lifted it down and clipped it to his belt, then pulled a brace of knives from a drawer. He clipped the long fighting dagger with a sword-catching crosspiece to the other side of his belt, and slid the heavy throwing knife into his boot. He retrieved a couple of his standard surprises, trinkets and potions that could distract an enemy or save a life if they ran into trouble, and tucked them away. One last adjustment of his belt and a glance in the mirror—just to make sure that his mustache and goatee were trimmed and combed properly and his hat had just the right rakish tilt—and he was ready.
