Guild Wars: Sea of Sorrows Read Online Free Page B

cabin, stepping out onto the polished decks. Their yellow coats, set off at neck and knee with green striping, glittered brightly in the sunlight. Vost stepped forward and blew the bosun’s whistle in a sharp, military pattern, snapping his arm down after the last blast of his signal. Cobiah stared. He’dnever seen the rough-and-tumble bosun act with such formality, and he found it a little disconcerting.
    On the balcony, an older man stepped forward, hemming and clearing his throat uncomfortably. In a long-winded, cheerily pompous sort of way, he introduced himself as Damran, the ship’s pilot. With his black hair slicked over his forehead in a swoop from one side to the other, Cobiah thought he looked very much like a crow. Damran peered past a thick pair of spectacles to check names in a large book, which he read out one by one to be sure everyone was aboard and accounted for. Every time a sailor answered to his name, Damran would squint at him and scribble notes on the manuscript pages.
    The second of the three officers on the balcony was a woman, stern-looking and hawkish, her brown mane tied back with a ribbon to keep the wind from mussing her near-immaculate curls. On her lapel she proudly wore the Krytan service medal that marked her as an official member of the king’s military. She spoke for only a moment, demanding good behavior and condemning “scoundrelous activity” to punishment and the brig. As she spoke, her eyes raked each man below like a tiger sharpening its claws. When she stepped back, Cobiah breathed a sigh of relief. “Who was that?” he whispered to the youth beside him. “Is she the captain?”
    “Naw, that’s First Mate Chernock,” the other sailor muttered, shushing him. “Don’t let her catch you talking in line. She means what she said about the brig.”
    At last, the third man on the balcony stepped forward to address the sailors. He was square jawed and burly, though he stood at least a head shorter than his lanky first mate. His pale coat had cream-colored ruffles at the wrists and neck, and over that he wore a wide baldric of emerald green. The baldric shone with trinkets andmilitary honors, markers of this sea crossing and that port, and the man’s heavy black boots were shined to a mirror polish beneath his clattering spurs. The man walked with a stiff, self-conscious gait, furrowing his brow quite purposefully to show an attitude of intense concentration. Sweat touched the powdered forehead beneath his three-pointed green hat. He looked so pompous and so silly that it took effort for Cobiah not to laugh.
    “Captain on deck! Full attention for Captain Whiting!” Vost called out. Cobiah stiffened a bit and looked around at the other sailors. This was as close as such a rabble ever came to full “attention.” Interesting, but where was the—
    Wait . Cobiah suddenly realized what Vost meant. That prancing ninny’s the captain?
    With a nervous gait, the squat little man approached the balcony rail, staring very fixedly over everyone’s head toward the front of the ship. The captain glanced about idly, looking at the masts and the rigging, then the ocean all around them, until at last he turned to the side and murmured something indistinct to the first mate. Cobiah strained to hear the words, hoping that the captain would say something inspiring like the great sea captains he’d always heard about in sailors’ tales.
    Instead, Captain Whiting spoke quietly to his first mate and then to his pilot and seemed completely uninterested in everything else. After a moment, he stepped back from the railing, wiping his hand on his sleeve with a forgetful sort of sigh. Without even a word for the assembled sailors, the captain turned his back to the crew and strode through the rear door of the forecastle, heading back into his quarters.
    “Dismissed!” cried Vost, lifting his whistle to his mouth again to blow the call to disperse. The two other officers congratulated themselves on