The Fox

by Sherwood Smith

  Ramis sounded amused. “What else would you call it?”

  Inda feinted with Fox’s credo: “There is nothing but life, death, and power.”

  Ramis laughed as they entered the chart room.

  Inda flushed again.

  “I forget how young you are,” Ramis said. “Well, when I was young I understood the world, too. Until the world ended.” His voice had not changed; the scarred face, his reputation, were far more convincing than a dramatic alteration in tone ever could be.

  Inda’s neck tightened with a heightened sense of danger. “Are you in truth a Norsundrian mage?”

  “What will you really know about me if I say yes?”

  “That if you come from Norsunder you cannot have fought the Brotherhood out of any moral conviction. Therefore you could do to me and my crew the same thing you did to Marshig and his Brotherhood captains, if it suited your convenience. And so I should be suspect of your motives for this meeting.”

  Ramis’ good eye narrowed in amusement. “But would you not have come to those same conclusions had I said no?”

  “Dhalshev of Freedom Island was right,” Inda exclaimed, exasperated. “You do answer questions with questions. Here’s one that you can answer plainly. How did you cause those ships to vanish like that?”

  Ramis opened one well-shaped, rough-palmed hand, then clasped it with its mate behind his back. “I am watched by idle eyes from the Garden of the Twelve.” He shifted briefly to the archaic Sartoran when he named Norsunder’s power center. His accent was startling, almost singsong. “The former chief of the Brotherhood attracted those eyes by a degree of treachery achieved by very few. I was merely the agent of time and place.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean that the Brotherhood of Blood was in the midst of a noisy and vicious struggle for precedence, noisy enough and vicious enough to catch and entertain those idle eyes I spoke of. The necessity of meeting your coming fleet was the only thing unifying them. Ganan Marshig planned it all carefully, sending enough of his worst enemies within his fleet against you for you to destroy one another so that he could emerge and finish everyone off on both sides.”

  “Then I was right,” Inda exclaimed. “If I could have taken him—”

  Ramis raised a hand, and Inda fell silent. “The Venn also knew it,” Ramis said. “For they had a spy on board Marshig’s ship. This is why they rode there in the north, watching. Their plan was to prevent any of your fleet from escaping Marshig, until I drove them off.”

  So if Marshig hadn’t gotten him, the Venn would have. Inda felt sick. “Why did you not let them finish us? Was that not entertaining enough for Norsunder?”

  “No, it wasn’t,” Ramis said. “Too easy.”

  There was no understanding his motivations, Inda thought. Or those of the mysterious inhabitants of the Garden of the Twelve.

  Ramis said, “As for what I did, it was time for what you might think of as a demonstration of consequences—not just to the pirates, but to the Venn. I’m sure you will agree it was most effective.”

  Inda’s breath huffed out on his “Yes.” He breathed out again, trying to ease the tightness in his neck. “And so . . . Marshig, and the Venn spy as well, and everyone else on board those ships have been taken into the heart of Norsunder? ”

  “Oh, not the heart,” Ramis said, smiling a little. “Marshig and the remainder of his fleet are in one of the border-lands . . . we can call them holding areas, far from the heart—though even ‘heart’ is a misnomer for a place beyond time and physical space. Those who command merely have use for him, no interest.”

  Idle eyes. Archaic Sartoran. The casual power of some unknown hand ripping a curtain between this world and Norsunder vast enough to swallow six capital ships. Inda felt very much like a scrub again.

  Ramis glanced at the table, his one brow lifting. “Ah, you saved that, I see.”

  The oath book. “I was reading it.” Inda looked at the amusement still deepening the corners of Ramis’ mouth, and decided not to add anything about power or interest. He didn’t think the one-eyed man would be impressed.

  “Did you know that Gasthjanju, the one who wrote the long records, got faint at the sight of his own blood? Used to line up his followers to donate theirs when the poetic urge seized him.” Ramis picked up the book, hefted it, and then with a flick of his strong wrist, he spun it into the glowing remains of the fire.

  Inda gasped. Ramis’ single eye met Inda’s, his smile gone. “Don’t tell me you had limited your vision to perpetuating this absurdity?” He pointed at the curling pages, now burning in blue and gold flames. “The legends grown around the Brotherhood will no doubt produce fleets of greedy or disaffected people in the future, and they’ll fall to death and defeat after fighting their way to a pinnacle of stupidity. Is that really how you wish to squander your life?” Before Inda could say anything, he indicated the glass doors. “Come. Show yourself on the balcony. They are all watching.”

  Inda stepped through the doors, looking down. There was Tau, now with a half-hidden bow team behind him. And Jeje too, also armed with a bow, black-haired Gillor next to her, hefting a cutlass. Fox was there as well, at the intersection with the side street, his fighting scarf hiding his red hair, his knives not in their sheaths but in his hands, visible as cold steel gleamed up the inside of his forearms as he leaned casually in an arched doorway watching both entrances. No doubt with bow teams hidden out of sight but ready to attack either entrance on a signal.

  Inda backed into the room, observing, “Fox wants a fight.”

  The man didn’t respond. Instead, he closed the door-length shutters, then flicked something silver through the air. Inda caught it. It turned out to be a piece of metal, thicker than most coins, with carving on both sides. “Say ‘Knife.’ ”

  Inda said it, and a black wind ripped sight from his eyes, burned away skin and bone, then restored them, all in the space of a heartbeat. He staggered, his vision clearing, to discover he was not in Pirate House but standing on the deck of a gently rocking ship. His entire body tingled unpleasantly, though the sensation faded fast.

  Forward curved the high prow of a Venn ship instead of the angled bowsprit of southern vessels.

  He was aboard the Knife.

  Sailors moved about, ignoring him. Inda stared around in amazement, then faced Ramis. “So that’s how Ryala Pim vanished so quickly!” And frowned at the memory of the shipowner’s daughter accusing him of piracy and theft after the loss of the last of the Pim trade ships.

  Ramis gestured toward the silver disc Inda gripped in his fingers. “Transfer token.” Ramis gave Inda a slight smile. “For sale everywhere but at the west end of your continent. ”

  Inda rubbed his forehead, trying to press away the last of the transfer reaction. “Expensive?”

  “Very.”

  “And leave you feeling like a mountain fell on you.”

  Ramis gave a silent laugh. Behind him, Ghost Island rose from the deep blue of the water, its mountain crowned by cloud.

  Inda sighed. “Are there really ghosts there?”

  “I thought you knew what was real and what was not?” Ramis retorted. But not cruelly. He moved aft to the binnacle; Inda was distracted by the sight of a real Venn whipstaff— what they called a koldar—instead of the wheel common to all ships of the south. This straight spar was as tall as the two mariners standing at it, both attentive despite the ship being at anchor.

  Ramis retrieved a glass and moved to the rail, which was pale gold oak carved with a pattern of leaves. Inda looked around again. The Knife was beautifully made and scrupulously clean. “Look,” Ramis said, holding out the glass.

  “I did when I first arrived,” Inda said.

  “You did not expect to see anything. Look again. Do not tell your mind what it is to see.”

  Inda did not question him. Somewhat apprehensively he leaned against the rail, raised the glass, and swept that coastline once again. He viewed white sand gently mol
ded by wind and rain, and ferny plants, and glistening rock with striations of many colors.

  “Look again,” Ramis said from just behind him.

  Inda blinked. The coruscation was not the rock but lay over it; when he gazed into that sun-bright shimmer, the sparkles resolved into many figures, faint outlines as if formed of smoke and sun refraction.

  Ghosts?

  He could almost make out individuals: men and women, children at times, some dressed in outlandish fashion, walking, drifting slowly as a dream, forming in shafts of dazzling light, then vanishing in blue shadow.

  Wonder bloomed, withering into chill. This was no life, only a distortion of life. “I don’t understand.”

  “There are places all over the world where the temporal bindings, shall we say, are very thin. This is one.”

  “I can’t count them. Why are they there? What do they do?”

  “I suspect they find themselves there, the ones who are not bound to a place by their own passions or will, however fragmented. I was reliably told that the single trait they share is violent death. I was also told that those who do not find a reason—however that can be defined to a ghost—to cleave to a specific place any longer will eventually wander here, gathering, drawn to others of their kind. Human beings are by nature social when they are not busy murdering one another. Their numbers increase until those who first lived in this world before we came notice them. And send them out beyond the temporal bindings.”

  Inda drew in a deep breath, now searching those glimmering forms for fallen shipmates. Was that Yan, there, on the shore, watching? Sunlight dappling the water dazzled his vision and the form, familiar or merely seeming so, was gone. Inda lowered the glass, and blinked away the blue afterimages leaping across his vision.

  For a moment he felt a presence at his side, as if Dun the Carpenter—killed by Fox when Walic’s pirates attacked their ship—stood at his shoulder, sword in hand, as he had just before his death.

  Inda turned his head and saw only the rope-and-metal shrouds webbing down to the rail, supporting the towering mainmast, and beyond the rail, the calm blue sea.

  A flush of foolishness burned his ears as he faced Ramis. “Why did you bring me here?”

  “What do you want?” the man returned.

  Inda fingered his jaw, looking out to sea again. Easier than meeting that steady gray-green-brown gaze. “The satisfaction of a good fight. Why not? It’s what I’m good at. Most of my crew believes there is no real meaning past that . . .” The words, almost convincing to Inda when contemplated during the nights since his conversation with Fox, seemed absurd now, when he considered that strange shoreline nearby.

  “What do you want?” Ramis repeated.

  Inda’s mind began sifting words, images, and he faced Ramis once again, this time with a narrowed, considering gaze. “What do you want?”

  “Freedom,” the man said, smiling a little.

  Inda thought over their conversation and put together the clues. He said, “You mean Norsunder . . . runs you in some way?”

  Ramis said, “I made a very bad bargain once. They will let me live as long as my actions provide entertainment, after which they will exert themselves to destroy me.”

  Destroy? Soul-eating. Not just the unthinking invective of anger, the real thing—that which comprised damnation, another word used so freely, with no thought to what it meant. But Inda had read enough to comprehend a little: to be violated not physically, but in mind and memory. Each secret routed out and devoured, each memory. First your will and then your identity stripped deliberately away by those who savored terror and resistance, consumed by those Ramis had referred to as “idle eyes” until you diminished to . . . what? Nothing? Or did some essence remain, terribly, in the heart of the enemy, for all time?

  Ramis said, “This will be our only meeting. Ramis of the Knife will vanish within the year. My value as entertainment has waned, and my harvest has garnered them enough for their present wants. So I ask again, what do you want?”

  Inda’s awareness shifted to that rapid flow of images, possibilities, connections, the running stream that pushed into the future and became a path: a plan. That, once acted on, became real. Ramis, whoever he was, whatever his past, had in reaping souls for Norsunder’s mysterious rulers managed to do the world some good.

  Inda said, “You could have beaten Marshig. Taken over, run the Brotherhood yourself. Attacked Iasca Leror yourself. Even taken over as king.”

  “Yes.”

  “And Norsunder, wouldn’t they like that?”

  “If whatever I did was sufficiently entertaining, of course.”

  No moral truth lay there, yet Inda sensed its presence underlying the man’s words, like a lake beneath parched land.

  Ramis said, “I ask for the last time: what do you want?”

  “I want to go home,” Inda whispered.

  Ramis did not reply to that, just returned his gaze steadily as the rising salt breeze fingered their hair and clothing.

  Inda looked past him to the ghost-ridden island, where no living soul willingly walked. He thought past his answer, his true answer.

  Even if I can’t make meaning, I can make nets. As always, when he thought of the net-making of civilization, there was Tdor’s child face, steady and true. The Venn intended harm to his homeland as much as the pirates had, so wasn’t it net-making to get rid of them if he could?

  “The Venn,” he said. “They are looking for me, aren’t they?”

  “Yes. I believe there is a considerable force on its way here right now.”

  They have a spy here? Inda almost asked, but the answer was obvious. As well as the answer to How do you know? A Norsundrian would have access to information as well as magic.

  So Inda said, “What can you tell me about the Venn? Why us? Why now, and not thirty years ago, a hundred years ago?”

  “There are fierce political divisions in the land of the Venn,” Ramis said. “Due partly to the need for better land to feed a breaking empire and partly to ambition. But these problems lead to the fact that the Venn system of kingship is at stake.”

  Inda’s mind streamed with images, questions, possibilities. “The Venn created the piracy problems here in the south,” he said. “I mean, besides their using the Brotherhood as their front-line chargers to weaken coastlines, Iasca Leror especially,” he said, and when Ramis inclined his head, his manner implying conditional agreement, Inda said, “Their stranglehold on trade—forcing the southern kings to comply with their tolls and rules—brought on piracy. No one can raise a fleet big enough to get order on the seaways. The Venn smash them first.”

  Ramis said, “All true.”

  Inda stared sightlessly at the island, then faced Ramis, who had waited patiently, his one-eyed gaze uncomfortably acute. Inda said, “Who is my chief enemy? Their Prince Rajnir?”

  Ramis said, “Among the Venn you have three. Prince Rajnir needs a war triumph to win back their king’s regard; he has problems not just in the Land of the Venn, but much closer to home. Your second is Hyarl Fulla Durasnir.”

  “Hyarl,” Inda said. “Sounds like our ‘Jarl.’ ”

  “The titles, similar in meaning, share the same root. He commands the southern fleet of the Oneli, the sea lords. The Oneli is the oldest and most prestigious of their forces. He would actually like to see an end to further invasions, but he does not make those decisions; he is oath-sworn to carry them out once made.”

  Inda was briefly distracted by a word that sounded so unfamiliar. His mother’s lessons about the history of language made him wonder if the word “Oneli” had vanished from the Marlovan version of Venn when the latter turned inland after their exile and adapted to the plains.

  “The Hilda—the army—has been traditionally seen as support, which causes its own tensions. Durasnir is the most able commander they have had in generations, which is why the king sent him south to accompany Rajnir.”

  “That’s who I—we—a fleet, I mean—would face
in battle. Assuming I can raise a fleet,” Inda said, and on Ramis’ gesture of agreement he laughed at himself inwardly. He had to be dreaming, talking so easily about raising fleets and personal enemies in the world’s most dreaded empire. Digging his thumbnail into his palm, he said, “That’s two. You mentioned three.”

  Ramis lifted a hand northward, a gesture Inda could not interpret because he was distracted by memory of Ramis making a similar gesture to rip a hole between sky and sea.

  “Your third,” he said, “is a mage. The Venn call them dags. Erkric seeks to become the Dag, the supreme magicwielder at the side of the future king. It was he who negotiated with Ganan Marshig to loose the Brotherhood against the south. He is aware of you now, and would do anything to destroy you.”

  Inda realized he’d drawn blood and wiped his hand down his old, scruffy deck trousers. The other palm was equally damp, he discovered: sweat.

  “There is no one else trying to gather against them?” Inda asked.

  “The answer is complicated,” Ramis said.

  Inda retorted impatiently, “What forces are trying to fight the Venn? I don’t see any complication in that.”

  Maybe not, but Ramis seemed to consider the question further before saying, “Forces. Those in the north are disorganized, and not well led,” said Ramis. “Here in the south all that stands against Venn sea power is the Guild Fleet struggling to form out of Bren, but now that the Brotherhood has been materially defeated, their purpose, to fight the red sails, is—according to the Venn—nullified. The Venn have made it clear there is no more reason for the Guild Fleet to exist. The guilds themselves are split over this question. The only thing they agree on is this: if the Venn ever deem them a threat, they will smash them.”

  Inda said, “How can they not know that the Venn are the biggest threat to trade, bigger even than pirates?”

  “They do know. But doing something about it is another question entirely.” Ramis turned his palm up. “The guilds involved are not stupid people. Their ships are not well led as a force. And they know it. The Guild Fleet expeditions have been mostly confined to watching Venn Battlegroup maneuvers on the pretext of pirate-watches and noting down various outrages in hopes some king will back them.”