VIII. SNAKE

Corwyn Jaffe had always been a failure, and like many failures he felt that he had been treated unjustly and that he ought to do as much injustice as possible to even the score. At first, piracy seemed like a lucrative form of injustice. His first boarding netted him wealth beyond his wildest dreams. But a crew is expensive to keep loyal, and a ship is expensive to keep seaworthy, and piracy might as well be taxed because a pirate captain has to pay a lot of bribes. When the burden was almost too much he made a discovery that changed everything–a tunnel leading from the coast to a cave below Melvaunt. At first just intrigued, he soon became hopeful: Wouldn’t it be useful to have a tunnel that ran from the coast to a place beneath the city? Not just useful–It would be a smuggler’s dream! Corwyn promptly named his first mate captain and bought the derelict building that would become the Devil’s Fire, hoping to excavate a connection between its basement and the cave. This he accomplished with surprising ease and efficiency. The cargo of a slave ship from Mulmaster would be the first booty his men smuggled through the tunnel. For the first time in years, he felt the wind at his back.

But the slaves on that ship were owned by a powerful Red Wizard, and the Red Wizard killed half his men, including the new captain. And his boat was badly damaged. And a fire sparked by the wizard’s fireball consumed everything else of value. And the slaves were a sad lot–malnourished, amnesiac, and subject to strange seizures that would make their eyes twitch and their heads roll from side to side. Corwyn had sold several, but he still had a dozen or so. He hoped the merchant he’d been talking to in the tavern was serious. He doubted it.

He emerged from his tunnel into the clay room. Immediately, he saw that something wasn’t right. The rugs he used to wipe the sea mud from his boots were disarranged. He slowed down and crept to the hall with the trapdoor at the end. One of his guards lay there, dead, apparently killed by the falling brick trap he’d installed to keep intruders out. “I showed him where to step! How could he forget?” said Corwyn to himself; when he bent over the body he saw gashes made by bladed weapons. The guard hadn’t been killed by bricks.

His blood ran cold. It was likely that the killer was still here. 

He opened the door to dry storage. Four dead rats lay inside. He closed it. Then he remembered the viper. “From Chult,” the merchant had told him. “Very deadly. Please, take it. A more than reasonable trade; there are no vipers the color of jade in the north.” He had kept the snake down here with some of his loot. Berhilde hated and feared the creature, with good reason. With any luck…

He opened the door to the treasury. The jade-colored viper lay stretched out on the floor. Above it stood four people he half-recognized. One of them was an armored, bearded giant of a youth with a forbidding countenance. He spoke.

“Corwyn Jaffe, you are a pirate and a slaver. Will you yield?”