Tuabir cursed. «Another ship coming out,» he muttered. «Back your oars!» he yelled. Thunderbolt crabbed her way clear of the channel and waited. Soon the boom of an oarmaster's drum and the thump of oars came to their ears, echoing off the high walls of the passage; then a ship came in sight. Tuabir grinned when he saw the bow emblem-a stylized female figure, green and surrounded by flowing black robes.

«Sister Cayla's Sea Witch. Coming out to exercise her rowers after refit, no doubt. Aye, there's a lusty lady. And you'd best take her for the fighter and captain she is, if you want to keep those cods you've been keeping so busy. I've seen her duel a man half again her size and slice him up until he was as well-gelded as any cony. She'll not find much happiness in learning we've taken Khystros and all his while Witch was hove down for a bottom-clean.»

Sea Witch was a small galley, rowing only twenty oars a side, low-built and almost bare of ornamentation. As she came abeam of Thunderbolt the oars slapped down into the water to lie there while the crew ran smartly to winch the masts into their sockets. A small figure in green popped out of a hatch aft and strode forward through the men. They gave way to either side as the figure passed up to the bow and hailed Thunderbolt.

Somehow, Blade had been expecting that any woman who could captain her own ship among the crowd of professional tough customers that was the Brotherhood would be large, tough, and disagreeably unfeminine. Instead, the lethal Sister/Captain Cayla was visibly at least half a head shorter than most of her crew. She wore a trim green tunic-and-breeches outfit with black leather belt and boots that would have carried a fifty-guinea price tag in any Chelsea boutique. Face and figure were at least presentable, as far as Blade could tell across fifty yards of water, while her close-cropped blonde hair shimmered in the sun like a cap of gold. Her voice as it came across that gap was roughened by many years of shouting above battle and storm but no worse than Blade had heard from ticket takers on a score of London buses.

«Hoy, Tuabir! Back so soon? Pickings that slim where you went?» Tuabir stiffened at the mocking note in her voice.

«Good pickings indeed. We were of those who fell in with Grand Duke Khystros and all his. You know the reward promised for that?»

«Wha-?»

«Aye. We took his ship. The Grand Duke, or what the fire left of him, is down among the fishes now.» Tuabir gestured over the side.

Cayla turned in an instant from fashion plate to fishwife. The stream of curses that poured out of her mouth and spattered about the ears of those aboard Thunderbolt would have made any sergeant-major turn green with envy.

Finally she ran out of curses, or more likely out of breath, and shouted, «All right, you bastards. You made sure I wouldn't get any part in this! You didn't want to let me have any more reputation, so I could be a threat to you and the other big boys!» She paused again, then, sharply:

«Where's Oshawal?»

Tuabir shook his head and jerked his thumb over the side in another down-with-the fishes gesture. «Dead. You see beside me the one who killed him. And he wouldn't take Oshawal's place, because he said he would be leading a crew into danger through not knowing our seas. He wants a chance to serve as a mate before taking Thunderbolt out on his own. Aye, his head's as good as his arm, and his arm's a thing like you've never seen.»

«Indeed.» The interest in Cayla's voice sounded clearly. Blade wished the two ships were close enough for him to see the expression on her face. But Cayla had apparently seen and heard enough. She barked an order, and the crew scrambled back to the oars, which began their steady beat again, carrying Sea Witch out to where the wind could fill her sails.

As the other ship pulled away, Tuabir turned to Blade and said softly, «Master Blabyd, I think she has her eye on you. As for me, I'd be happier with a sea adder having its eye on me.»

Cayla's own word seemed a reasonable answer. «Indeed?»

«Aye. She has ambitions beyond being a mere Captain. She would sit on the Captain's Council of the Brotherhood. And what she would do then, Druk alone knows. It's said she was once a Serpent Priestess in Mardha and would still see the Serpent Cult rising on all shores of Ocean.»

Alixa came out in time to hear Tuabir's last words and stare after the departing Sea Witch. The pirate looked at her, drew Blade farther off to one side, and muttered to him in an even lower voice than before, «Take care for your lady. I don't know what she is to you in truth, whether your betrothed or not. And I care little. But if Cayla has her eye on you and sees another woman standing in her way, the lady'll have great need of prayers, for nothing else will help her. Among the Free Women of the Brotherhood there's the Woman's Duel when two desire the same man, and it's to the death. Cayla fights with a dagger and a little whip no longer than your arm. But I puked myself empty for a day and a night after seeing what she did with them the last time she fought, and I wasn't the only one. Had you but passed the lady off as your sister, she'd be ten times safer. Cayla'd stand beside you to defend her from insult then. But as it is. .» Tuabir shrugged.

Blade shrugged too, a gesture far from reflecting his true feelings. To become involved with yet another woman, and this one a sadistic she-pirate with vast and nameless ambitions, would weaken even further the tightrope on which he was going to have to walk for a painfully long time. He hoped Tuabir was mistaken, but his own reading of Cayla's voice left him little hope of that.

However, for the moment there were other things to think of. The oarmaster began his drum beat, the oars swung forward and splashed down, and Thunderbolt surged forward up the channel towards the gap in the rocks. As they passed the entrance and slipped into the shadow, Blade noticed that the rock on either side showed signs of extensive working. Railed galleries and slits had been carved at several levels on both sides, from just above the water to nearly a hundred feet up. Blade guessed that from those galleries and slits arrows, stones, burning oil, and many other sorts of nastiness could be hurled down on any ships foolish enough to try breaking into the Brotherhood's fortress through the channel.

Farther on, they came to a broad ledge, partly natural but also extended by more carving. On it were piled a score or more of enormous logs, blackened with tar and grease, and coils of rope as thick as a man. There was yet another barrier for the passage-an enormous boom that could be easily fastened in place in any emergency, to rip out the bottom of any ship.

Blade tried to calculate the amount of work that must have been involved in all the excavations from the living rock he had seen. He found himself appalled at his most conservative estimate. No wonder the pirates had an insatiable demand for slaves, and no wonder the slaves died like flies! The more he saw of the fortifications of Neral, the more he realized how justified the pirates were in their casually arrogant assumption that the island was impregnable. And, more personally, the more he realized how difficult making his own escape would be when the time came. Possibly getting out of the channel would be easier than getting in, but he doubted it.

Thunderbolt crept up the passage. The thump and splash of the slowly moving oars echoed from the looming gray walls. Blade shivered in the chill shadows and wrapped his cloak more tightly about him. Finally they glided out into the sunlit inner basin. Blade looked up at the heart of the Brotherhood's fortress rising all about him.

Although he had looked at the symbol-crowded map of the area many times, Blade was still awed by the scale of the whole thing now that he saw it in reality. At the water's edge docks and piers jutted out into the harbor, some of them covered, enough of them to accommodate four hundred ships. Just above them lay the building ways and their auxiliaries-the storage sheds for timber, masts, rope, metalwork, and everything else needed to build ships. Mixed in with them were the storehouses for loot, the barracks for the dockyard and rowing slaves, their rank smell drifting across even the miles of water to attack Blade's nose, and the forges and foundries puffing up their clouds of black smoke. On a terrace farther up the slope stood the shops, taverns, gaily painted brothels, and the living quarters for the free sailors and the servants. Higher still were the homes of shopkeepers and mates, and highest of all, surrounded by its own walls and served by its own shops was the street of the Captains, the rulers of the Brotherhood.