In the end, it would be simple. Loyal merchant captains and fishermen would keep their ships—and would prosper since they would have fewer rivals for their business and could set a higher price for their goods. They would need that income to pay for the license each ship would be required to carry in order to prove that loyalty—income that would build ships, as Wolfram had done, to keep the harbors and seaports clean of unsuitable traders or visitors. Income that would finance an estate for the Inquisitors who would have to remain here to keep the barons under control and continue the search for escaped witches.

Right now, however, his goal was to flush out the witches and witch sympathizers who had fled from Durham and the southern counties of Sylvalan, flooding into Seahaven in the hope of finding any kind of seaworthy craft that would take them away from the Inquisitors’ justice. Rats and witches. Both vermin. Both plague carriers in their own way. He’d find plenty of both on this waterfront. And when he was done cleansing Seahaven, only the rats would remain.

Right now, his eyes were on that merchant ship at the far end of the docks—a ship, according to the harbor master, that had slipped in and out of Seahaven several times in the past few days, taking on some cargo, but nothing like the usual amounts. And having nothing to unload to speak of. Most unusual, the harbor master had said, since the ship was one of several belonging to a well-to-do merchant family.

A merchant family that was also a filthy nest of witches and men so ensnared by the bitches that they pumped good seed into foul wombs to produce more filth. Oh, plenty of those vermin had already been eliminated, burned in their very ships or taken by the Inquisitors and the barons to be questioned and exterminated. But that nest was being rebuilt somewhere by the witches who had escaped, and he suspected the captain of that ship would be able to tell him the exact spot—after he’d softened the man sufficiently.

“Why do you accost me this way?” said a loud, panicked voice. “I’ve done nothing. Nothing! I’m an honest merchant just trying to catch the evening tide to take my goods to Wellings-ford!”

Ubel hesitated. Stopped. Finally, with a last look at the merchant ship at the end of the docks, he motioned the guards to continue on as he turned toward the commotion behind him.

“You shouldn’t have come back,” Craig whispered fiercely, his tone a mixture of gratitude and anger. “You shouldn’t have waited for me.”