“I… don’t really remember,” Calliope replied as she settled the diadem onto her head. It held some kind of arcane power, that was for certain, but the patterns it showed in her mage sight gave no hint as to what they might be. For a moment she tried to focus on exactly what had happened to her in the darkened chamber beneath the colosseum but her mind seemed to skitter away from specifics. Dimly she recalled a voice, and she was suddenly ravenous with hunger.

“It was something from the spell book, but what exactly I can’t seem to dredge up,” she explained, shrugging her shoulders. Arcane shock was not unknown and wizards sometimes forgot entire spells when they unleashed too much power too quickly. 

“As for the map…” she unrolled the map and peered at the strange designs tracing them with the tip of her finger. It seemed to her to be gibberish then she reached for her empty wine glass and held it between her and the parchment. The runes changed into a swirl of different but equally incomprehensible garbage.

“I thought so,” she said with a hint of satisfaction in her tone.  

“You need a seeing stone to read it,” she explained. Seeing stones were clear quartz crystals inscribed with magical glyphs that allowed them to penetrate arcane codes that were otherwise unreadable. Such stones were rare and valuable, taking years of work by the most skilled enchanters to create. She leaned back on her chair considering and then a slow smile spread across her face.

“The sultan’s vizier had one,” she recalled. He had worn it on a chain around his neck, mostly concealed by his robes, but she had seen it when he bowed to the Sultan. 

“Which might solve our other problem too,” she mused. The Bloodaxes were cowed for the moment but they would find their spines eventually, the more so once they were back on their ships. They had no mages and so would struggle to fight the Weather Witch and her crew, but there would be little they could do to stop them from fleeing to the high seas. They needed something to help forge the pirates into a group. The Bloodaxes were not patriots or men of principle, they might object to following a foreigner but provided it led them to loot and pillage they would probably swallow their pride and fall in line.

“Dalib Sahara is maybe two days sail from here?” Calliope speculated. It had taken closer to  day and a half to reach the Bloodaxe’s cove but the prevailing winds  made the return journey a longer and more arduous proposition. 

“We can keep out to see, keep their ships between the coast and our guns, and we can give them a taste of battle and victory.” That presumed they would win of course, but Calliope always presumed she would win. Some of them would die of course, and some would probably run off to escape service with Markus, but those weren’t the type of men they needed anyway. The survivors would follow Markus after he led them to victory, and they would get a chance to avenge the viziers betrayal.