Corsair Read Free

The rain was passing, and a clear, bright moon was setting over the waters of the Moonsea. Sunrise was not far off, and he’d learn more about Kamoth’s treachery soon enough.

ONE
    11 Eleint, The Year of the Ageless One (1479 DR)
    Nearly fourteen years later and twenty miles from Hulburg, Geran Hulmaster rode over a steep rise on the coastal trail and found pirates plundering a House Sokol merchant ship.
    He halted and stared down at the two ships drawn up on the beach of the nameless cove below him before he recovered from his surprise. Then he spurred his mount down from the ridgeline to take cover behind an outcropping of rock. He was fortunate; the sun was setting behind him. Anyone looking up the hillside from the beach below would see nothing but an eyeful of bright sunshine.
    Geran patted his horse’s neck and whispered soothingly to it. He was a tall, lean man a little over thirty, dressed in a long, weatherbeaten cloak over a leather jacket, breeches of dark green wool, and high leather boots. At his hip rode a long elven backsword with a hilt fashioned in the shape of a rose. His trail clung to the hillside above the cove and didn’t come all that close to the beach itself, but there was no way he could continue on without being spotted.
    “Backtrack and go around?” he wondered aloud. “Or wait until it gets dark and then ride by on the trail?” He decided he preferred to ride past if he could. It should be safe enough if the pirates didn’t send out any foraging parties, but any way he looked at it, he’d be riding long after sundown and making a late camp with no fire. He scowled at the thought. The presence of a corsair ship only twenty miles from his home was not a good sign. Piracy had been bad this year, growing worse with each passing month. Hulburg’s ships were harried all over the Moonsea. Now here was another cargo that wouldn’t reach Hulburg’s storehouses. It would be a
    heavy blow to the Sokols and to the harmach’s coffers too.
    He dismounted, looping his horse’s reins around a bleached pine stump amid the boulders. As long as he was waiting for nightfall, he might as well see if he could learn anything useful about the corsairs plundering ships on Hulburg’s doorstep. Picking his way down the slope to find a better vantage point, he eventually settled under the branches of a wind-sculpted thicket of gorse about fifty yards up the hillside from the strand and studied the scene more carefully.
    The pirates were mostly humans, with a mix of other folk—a dwarf or two, some goblins, even one ogre that he could see. They had the Sokol ship’s cargo scattered all over the beach, sorting out what was worth taking and what they’d leave behind. Geran couldn’t see any of the merchant’s crew, but that didn’t surprise him. Most likely the pirates had killed them after capturing the ship and dumped the corpses over the side.
    He chewed his lower lip, thinking. He’d do something about it if he could, but for the moment it was no real business of his. It was only an accident of fate that he was in the vicinity at all. He’d spent the last few days visiting his mother, who resided in a Selunite convent in Thentia, and was on his way back to Hulburg. It was usually an uneventful journey, since no one lived along the coastland between Thentia and Hulburg, and most traffic between the two cities went by sea. There wasn’t even much reason for highwaymen or marauders from the wilds of Thar to come this way.
    “They probably chose this cove just for that reason,” he said to himself. They needed a quiet place where they could sort through their plunder, and they weren’t likely to be troubled here. He couldn’t do much about the Sokol ship now, but at least he could carry news of the attack to Hulburg and let the Sokols know what had happened to their ship. He settled in to study the pirates and their vessel closely while he waited for the sun to set. The pirate vessel was a