A Plague of Swords

by Miles Cameron

  Kronmir looked at the sailors, the dock, and the captain. “In fifty days, the world may have ended,” he said.

  Parmenio frowned. “Bad as that?” he asked.

  Kronmir shrugged. “An unfortunate turn of phrase, Captain.”

  Parmenio straightened his mustache and looked at his cargo. “I will do my best,” he said.

  Kronmir nodded. “We’ll be aboard in two hours. There will be three of us.”

  Parmenio nodded.

  * * *

  Kronmir came aboard with Lucca and one other man, a nondescript servant who was not introduced to anyone and went directly below. Each man brought two small leather trunks and no other gear besides signed parchments from the port captain that they were free of the plague. Already, the Alban authorities were acting on the queen’s orders. Kronmir was astounded and a little pleased that Alba was not as barbaric as he had feared.

  As the sun began to set in the west, the tide changed and, without any fuss, the round ship dropped her lines and slipped out under sweeps into the offing, dropped her sails in a neat way that spoke of a good crew despite Parmenio’s pronouncements, and heeled slightly in the fine breeze. Water began to gurgle along her tubby sides almost immediately. Kronmir went below, as he was sharing the captain’s cabin, and there he browsed the captain’s truly stunning collection of books, from the latest romances of history to books of mathematics. He chose a historical romance about the times of Empress Livia and her legions and opened it.

  It was the lookout who spotted the strange bird and hailed the deck. Kronmir was summoned and came on deck, and a heavy black-and-white messenger bird circled the ship twice and came to his fist.

  The sailors watched with a sort of awe. Imperial messengers were the very epitome of information transfer, and, in a way that knowledge is power, the possession of one indicated power more clearly than fancy clothes or magnificent armour.

  Kronmir took the tubes from the great bird’s legs. He gave the bird to Lucca to feed and slipped below. He’d been offered the prize accommodation, the second cot in the captain’s gallery, and he had accepted, and it was there, by the light of a swaying lamp of beaten gold with eight Saffish seraphim beating their six wings in hermetical majesty, that he read the message appointing him Logothete of the Drum and granting him the master code.

  But there was more, a whole second sheet, and he decoded as quickly as he could, his work interrupted by incipient seasickness as the ship hit the chops of the open ocean and the ship’s motion changed accordingly. It was difficult to concentrate. But Jules Kronmir did many difficult things, and he bore down. He had the presence of mind to take his work with him when he went topside to vomit over the side, and then he went back to the captain’s cabin and continued. He had reason to believe that the Red Duke had penned the message himself, and in some detail. Kronmir, who had killed more men than most, found his hands shaking as he read. Kraal...Odine...dragons...nexus...pillars...Necromancer...

  The stern windows showed stars before he came to the end of the second sheet. When he was finished, he folded the results into his jupon and went on deck. There, he bowed to the captain, who stood on the high quarterdeck and invited him up the ladder.

  “Captain, I request a word,” Kronmir said formally.

  “At your service,” Parmenio said. “You are, if I may say, very pale. Seasick?”

  “What do you know of the Kraal?” Kronmir asked. He was, he thought, information sick.

  Parmenio fingered his beard. “I know we do not generally name them, at sea,” he answered.

  “I am to warn you that...forces of the sea may attempt to intercept us.” Kronmir felt odd saying this. He was relatively unversed in the ways of the Wild. His life had been lived in the world of men.

  Parmenio looked at the star-filled heavens for a moment. Kronmir had had suspicions that the man had deep intelligence. Most of the Venikan sea lords were thinkers. He walked up his deck and back with the ease of many repetitions, never glancing at the bulkhead or the binnacle and moving past them with a rolling gait and a finger’s width to spare, and then he returned by the same route.

  “This is related to the business in Arles?” he asked.

  Kronmir bit his lip because he hated to share intelligence, but the captain had his life in his hand and seemed an ally. And Kronmir was not travelling as a spy. He was travelling, in a way, as an official person. Almost an ambassador. “So it appears,” he said.

  “Christ and Saint Mark,” the Venike captain spat. “Very well. My wife was speaking of this three months ago, when we first had word of your sorcerer. I will see what can be done. We wanted speed anyway. Atkins! All hands on deck.”

  In minutes, half a hundred irritated, sleep-deprived sailors were expertly spreading canvas. The bow bit deep and the captain grunted in dissatisfaction over the lading of his ship.

  “The bow is too high and the stern too deep,” he said. “I’ll move the cargo tomorrow, perhaps put something heavy in the bow.” He shrugged.

  “You can outrun them?” Kronmir asked.

  Parmenio shook his head slightly. “No,” he said. “Or rather, yes, but only over time. For a short sprint, a sea monster can take any ship. But for a day, no. And unless they’re waiting off the harbour mouth”—he rubbed his mustache—“it becomes a problem of geometry, Master.”

  He laid it out for Kronmir with a straightedge and a lead pencil, and the spy understood even as the numbers were laid down.

  “The faster you go, the less chance they have to make an intercept,” Kronmir said, impressed despite himself.

  Parmenio shrugged. “So the theory runs. The last year has seen more monsters attacking ships than in all my life ere this. Are they in league?”

  Kronmir looked at the distant stars. “It is not for me to say,” he said.

  Parmenio bowed. “Or you cannot, and I can respect that, Master.” He exchanged quiet words with Atkins, the Alban mate, and left the Alban at the helm. “My watch below. I recommend sleep. If the monsters want us, tomorrow will be the day of highest danger, and then four days hence, when we raise Iberia. If God loves us and this magnificent breeze holds, I think I can promise you a fast run and relative safety.”

  Kronmir put his head down and had the best sleep he’d experienced in fifty days, free from seasickness and worry. Someone else was in charge. It was the greatest relaxation a spy could have.

  * * *

  The sun rose on an empty ocean all round the compass, and the little round ship raced east into the rising red orb.

  The sky was just moving from salmon pink toward a golden yellow when the lookout hailed the deck that he could see movement on the sea’s surface to starboard.

  Kronmir awoke to the rattle of a drum over his head and a hundred voices shouting. He’d undressed to sleep and he lost valuable time lacing his doublet to his hose; then he got out the cabin’s main door and, at a nod from the captain, raced up the starboard-side ladder to the high quarterdeck castle.

  “Three of them,” Parmenio called. He pointed, and Kronmir’s sense of scale did a flip inside his gut.

  “Watch ’er spout,” grumbled an old salt at Kronmir’s elbow.

  Kronmir watched under his hand. Parmenio told Atkins to summon the weather mage on deck.

  Kronmir’s experience of the sea had been limited to a youth spent in fishing boats. He leaned well out, shading his eyes. “How do you know they are not whales?” he asked.

  Parmenio smiled, but the smile didn’t reach his eyes. “I do not know,” he said. “But there are three, and they are fetching our wake and accelerating, so it seems likely to me that they are sea monsters.”

  “Weather mate, sir!” Atkins reported.

  The weather mate was young—absurdly young for such an important post. He was Alban, like most of the hermetical practitioners, who all seemed to come from Alba or Ifriquy’a. He had sandy red hair and thin arms and looked too small to be taken seriously.

  “Can you make a worki
ng to see clearly across distances?” Parmenio asked.

  The boy—it was absurd to call him a man—looked under his hand; paled, if a person as white as ivory could be said to turn pale; and then flushed, his freckles seeming to burn with inner fire.

  He raised his right hand and sang a few notes, and the air before his hand seemed to shimmer and take on shape.

  Parmenio grunted and bent to look, but the boy waved him away and cast a second time, and then a third, spectacularly, casting a rod of pure light that seemed to hold the two air shimmers together. And a fourth casting, something very small indeed, and the whole hermetical artifact began to move slightly as if it had a life of its own.

  Parmenio was looking through it. He raised his head. “Have a look,” he said. “By God, young man, you have just earned your full pay.”

  The boy flushed again, this time with pleasure. “That’s how they teach it at the academy,” he said. “I’ve never been, but I read all the books.”

  Kronmir bent his head, and there, in vivid detail and suffering only from a slight heat shimmer, were three innocent whales basking in the sun.

  “How long will this thing last?” Parmenio asked his weather mate. He turned, not waiting for the answer. “Watch below can go back to their hammocks. Whales and no Eeeague.”

  “As long as I concentrate on it, and perhaps a little more.” The boy shrugged. “I’m more of a scholar, so far, Lord Captain.”

  Kronmir looked again. “This is better than any distance device I have ever seen. You say this is from the academy? In Liviapolis?”

  The boy smiled. “Just this spring, they sent a whole manuscript of these things, each better’n the last. My maître got us two whole days to read it, before the Galles killed him in the riots.”

  “How old are you?” Kronmir asked. At a remove, he wondered when children had begun to slip through his armour of indifference and cynicism. He also wondered if the government in Morea knew that the academy was sharing hermetical secrets with...the world.

  That would be a revolution, of sorts.

  “Fourteen, and it please you, my lord,” the boy said.

  “I’m no lord,” Kronmir said.

  The boy bobbed.

  “How much wind can you make?” Parmenio asked the boy.

  The redhead shrugged. “Never tried,” he admitted. “I mean, I know how.”

  “How much ops can you master?” Kronmir asked. “What’s your name, anyway?”

  “Kieron Hautboy,” the young man answered. “I can master a fair amount. But...” He looked at Parmenio as if fearing rebuke.

  Parmenio shrugged in a very Venikan gesture. “My old weather mate was lost in the last storm.” He shrugged. “Mage craft is common as dirt in Alba compared to Venike, but just try to hire a master!”

  “Let me try, gentles,” the boy said. He went to the foot of the towering mainmast and began to chant. It had a religious sound, and he went twice through his piece before anything manifested, and then the effect was gradual. The breeze stiffened and the only exact evidence was from the tell-tales, hanks of yarn that hang at the end of the booms to show wind strength.

  “Perfect, lad,” the Venikan captain shouted. The boy turned his head to listen, and the new breeze died away.

  “What?” he asked. “What, sir?”

  Parmenio’s face flushed, and anger turned down the corners of his mouth...but he mastered himself in an instant, and Kronmir, who prided himself on his imperturbability, felt a kindred spirit.

  The captain put his arm on the boy’s shoulder. “You have to be able to hold your working and listen for my orders, or Master Atkins’s. You’re no use to us if you can only do one thing at a time. But that was a fine breeze. How long can you hold that?”

  The boy rubbed his chin. “An hour?” he said. “It would be quite painful,” he admitted. And then he waggled his head, a curiously feminine gesture. “But on the other hand, excellent practice. An exercise in concentration. Lord Captain, please allow me to raise the wind again, and then you give me an order.”

  This time Kieron was swifter at raising his breeze, and the captain nodded to Atkins at the tiller.

  Atkins looked fore and aft. “Ready,” he called.

  “Turn us four points to starboard,” Parmenio said in a conversational voice.

  “Four points to starboard it is, Cap’n,” Atkins said.

  “If this boy is as good as he seems, he and Atkins will alone have made my crossing worth my while. My former mate was a drunk,” Parmenio said.

  Atkins moved the tiller. Half a dozen men immediately began to trim the sails, as the round ship did not like to point off the wind at all.

  “Can you bring the wind around four points?” the captain said to the redheaded boy.

  The boy listened. This time, he hummed throughout the captain’s explanation.

  “Right behind us, then?” the boy asked.

  Parmenio shook his head. “That is not the ideal,” he said.

  “Just point where you want the wind,” the boy said tersely.

  It was quite possible that Captain Parmenio was not used to being told what to do on his ship, but he merely glanced at Kronmir and winked. Then he walked to the rail and pointed his right arm directly at the boy from ten paces away, a little to the side and well behind.

  Almost immediately, the breeze came round, alarming the sailors and forcing a new rush of sail trimming on the mainsail and the headsails.

  The captain ran up his quarterdeck ladder and leaned out over the side. He took the tiller from Atkins and stood there for several long minutes while Kronmir watched the distant horizon.

  “Perfect!” the Venikan said. He relinquished the tiller and came back down his ladder to the half deck. “Let it go, young man. I do not wish to use you up. Master Atkins, four points to port.”

  “Four points to port, aye,” Atkins called.

  An older sailor with gold earrings and a deeply tanned, deeply lined face and a superb baselard at his belt, laughed and said something to his capitano in the liquid Venikan dialect. Parmenio grinned and shrugged, and both men laughed.

  “Antonio, who has been with me since I was a newly entered noble archer on my uncle’s ship,” he said. “Antonio says that if I hire more Albans, he will have to learn to grunt as you do. He means no offence.”

  He put his arm around young Kieron. “I think that you will have to learn how a ship works,” he said. “But your skills are excellent.”

  Kieron flushed again. He seemed to go from red to white to red very easily. “I thought they would be,” he said. “But then, I was afraid they wouldn’t. That probably doesn’t make any sense.”

  Kronmir nodded. “It makes perfect sense. An experience I have almost every day.” When the captain began describing his ship as a box pivoting on a single point, and the different aspects of wind, Kronmir withdrew to the romance in his cabin. The author was very capable and his fancy suited Kronmir.

  Later, he came on deck to find young Kieron aloft in the crow’s nest with a sailor, and the sun setting rapidly off to the west over Alba. Lucca came on deck with a pair of practice swords, and the two of them fenced up and down the deck. Lucca was better than merely competent, but Kronmir was better yet, and he would stop to teach his apprentice the finer points of timing and, in most cases, the judgment of distance.

  When Kronmir went to see if he could keep a cup of wine down, Lucca began to practice his cuts against the foremast until Antonio came and moved him along. He mimed sanding and painting the mast, and Lucca, appalled at the damage he’d done, went and confessed to the captain.

  Kronmir returned to the deck to find a hardened killer patiently sanding away with a bucket of fine sand and a big piece of flax tow. Parmenio was standing at the foot of the mainmast, exchanging hails with a countryman in the tops.

  Kronmir offered a greeting. “What’s the trouble?” he asked.

  “Our young weather worker has rigged his far-seer in the crow’s nest, and n
ow we find that our three whales have stayed with us all day.” Parmenio shrugged. “Whales are probably smarter than men. I cannot guess what drives them.”

  “But none of the deadly Eeeague,” Kronmir said.

  “Very difficult to tell at this distance,” Parmenio said. “At darkness, I will try a little trickery that I usually save for the Iberians.”

  As soon as it was full dark, the mate set a barrel adrift with a lit lantern in it. The ship then turned north, almost eight points of course change, and the boy powered them for almost an hour before the captain ordered a return to their original course.

  In the morning, the horizon was empty in every direction. Parmenio was particularly satisfied with himself, and after he took his noon sightings, he had young Kieron drive the ship with a mage wind for a little more than an hour, which caused the boy to look like an Etruscan ascetic saint but made the captain very happy indeed.

  Atkins, newly risen from his midday nap, went forward and threw a small floating log attached to a line. He let line off until the captain ordered him to stop from the stern.

  Kronmir, for whom any form of science of mathematics was fascinating, came aft. “You are measuring speed?” he asked.

  Parmenio smiled with pleasure. “You are just right.”

  Kronmir bowed. “My childhood on fishing smacks did not include all this scientific seamanship.”

  Parmenio nodded. “The log is simple enough. I have a set distance—the length of my ship. I have a minute glass. But I don’t need it—I am no longer green behind my ears, and I can count the time in my head, like any musician. Eh? And I can check my work against Master Atkins, as he has knots on the line by which to measure speed.”

  “Eight knots and a touch,” Atkins reported.

  “I make it more like eight and a half,” Parmenio agreed. “It is not an exact science, but it is better than no measurement at all.” He nodded aft. “If the boy can move us at eight knots, I suspect we can outdistance most pursuit.”