“That is for me to decide. Search the ship.” Ubel nodded to two archers as several warriors turned toward the ship’s gangplank. From a special pouch, the archers carefully withdrew a thick shaft of wood with the glass ball secured to the end. They fitted the shafts into their bowstrings and looked at him, waiting for the signal.

“No!” The merchant captain broke through the warriors and ran for his ship, his crew shouting now, panicked as other archers nocked arrows in their bows and took aim.

Ubel waited until the captain had reached the gangplank, gave the man that moment to think he’d escaped. “Now.”

Arrows flew, finding their mark in the captain’s back. He teetered on the gangplank, his hands reaching for the hands his crew held out to him. More arrows flew, and the men who had tried to help were felled. The captain tumbled off the gangplank and into the water.

“Now,” Ubel said again.

The archers with the glass-balled arrows took aim. As the glass balls hit the mast and deck, they exploded, spraying a liquid that burst into flames, burning men, burning wood.

“The ship’s on fire!” someone screamed.

Two more glass-balled arrows flew, and more liquid fire washed across the deck, caught the sails.

People rushed on deck now—women, children, old men, young men. Some jumped into the water. Men, mostly. The women were too burdened with long skirts and arms full of children. They knew they had no chance in the water, so they ran down the gangplank to the dock, as terrified and mindless as rats, uncomprehending that there was nowhere to go, no way to escape.

And his archers exterminated them as efficiently as they would any other vermin.

A howl of rage suddenly filled the waterfront. Ubel spun around as sailors, armed with boot knives or clubs, and dock workers, with sharp hooks, threw themselves at the warriors, turning an extermination into an ugly fight.

Suddenly surrounded by screaming, fighting men, Ubel pushed his way to a clear space on the dock, falling to his hands and knees as he tripped over a dying woman crawling away from the other bodies.

He’d miscalculated. He should have used the Inquisitor’s Gift of persuasion to quiet that merchant captain, should have handled the extermination more carefully. He should have realized that the sailors had helped sneak people onto the ships, that the dock workers had looked the other way when supplies in the warehouses had gone missing. Should have realized that some of them might have family or friends hidden on the ship.

As he got to his feet, he noticed two men walking swiftly toward the last dock. The ship he knew belonged to a witch-loving merchant family was already quietly slipping back with the tide.

“Stop those men!”