A Plague of Swords

by Miles Cameron

When the Sant Graal had her head into the wind, all her sails down but a single driver forward that was full of mage wind to keep her steady, Ariosto gave a great cry and began to descend. He flew alongside the Sant Graal as she ran west into the world’s wind, and then Ariosto crossed the wind, coasting, descending, crossing the ship just above the mainmast and now descending downwind, and then the griffon turned, a few hundred paces aft, gave two mighty heaves of his wings and began to descend into the wind, the west wind passing over his wings and slowing his descent. Gabriel could feel the great beast’s fatigue, and he could sense the griffon’s fear for the first time.

  You’re fine. Look, almost there.

  The griffon began to waggle—left, right, its body moving, wings adjusting, pinions rippling in the sun.

  Down.

  Down.

  Down.

  Fifty paces from the stern of the ship, and Gabriel could read Sant Graal in letters of gold under the stern windows and there was Blanche, standing on the stern with Mortirmir and Michael and all the crew in armour.

  They waggled again.

  Damn, said Ariosto.

  His wings gave more of a heave than a simple beat.

  For a moment they skimmed the water.

  But even if his wingtips touched on the downstroke, the great avian powered himself up in the last ten paces and got his talons out, a little low, the catch a little desperate, and the pole swayed wildly and the whole ship fell off course two points, the stern driven round by the weight of the monster landing. Masts creaked.

  Don’t talk when I’m landing, the griffon said. He shuffled once and gave a little leap, and they were in his cabin.

  Feed me, he said.

  The ship rocked from the leap. But people were cheering, and Gabriel sat a moment, unable to move.

  Gabriel gathered his wits to hug his beast, and then he slipped from the saddle and Toby and Anne and Blanche, of all people, were there, pulling the saddle away, and two of Sukey’s girls had a sheep—a terrified live sheep. It had every reason for its terror, and in seconds it was gone.

  Gabriel didn’t stop to watch, even though he had a little trouble with his feet. And a very urgent need to relieve himself. Toby got the gauntlets and then the helmet and he stumbled up the ladder to the eighth deck. He saluted the cross and nodded to the master mariner.

  Mortirmir crossed the deck.

  “Our whale is back,” he said. “Nothing else.”

  Gabriel was having trouble breathing. Someone put a cup of wine in his hand, and he drained it before he tasted it. “Water,” he said. “I’m going to guess that someone nasty just got the surprise of their eons-long existence,” he said with the smug satisfaction that made him easy to hate.

  Mortirmir nodded. “We expected this,” he agreed.

  “I think our adversary just lost several thousand years’ worth of sea monsters in an hour.” Gabriel gulped water, spit over the side. Looked up at the sails. “Of course, the dragons didn’t warn us, and now they’ll fear us more.” But he couldn’t stop the grin.

  Two hours later, and the unarmed women were moving about with water buckets again, and the hard edge of preparedness was wearing off. There had been no attack; the gonne crews had practiced shooting at barrels, with their long bronze pieces, and they had crept north toward the other fleet, which lay at anchor, just a few hundred paces from the Elbow, in the curve of the cliffs.

  Gabriel watched as they came up. There was no fighting. Boats were moving over the water, and there were cheers.

  “Du Corse had a head on his shoulders,” Bad Tom admitted. “Covered his flanks, an’ shallower water, and all his bowmen could concentrate on yon.” He nodded his approval. “I couldna’ ha’ done better.”

  Gabriel looked under his hand. “Nor I,” he said.

  * * *

  On the deck of the Jesu e Maria de Harndon, the largest ship to sail from that city, Gabriel found Du Corse in his arming clothes.

  “I’m not sure I ever thought to embrace you,” Du Corse said. “But then, I’m not sure I expected to find you riding a monster.”

  “The Eeeague are gone?” Gabriel asked.

  “Fled as soon as...” Du Corse shook his head, struggling for language. “As soon as the one great thing dragged the serpent down.”

  “You were holding them,” Gabriel said.

  Du Corse tilted his hand: comme ci, comme ça. “Perhaps. They were very wary in shallow water, like trout on a sunny day.”

  “Trout fear herons and eagles,” Gabriel said. “For good reasons.” He smiled. “And now, their fear is renewed.”

  “You still mean to land in Galle?” Gabriel asked.

  Du Corse blew out his cheeks. “No,” he said. “I do not think my people are ready to face that again. We lost four ships. They were just working out how to fight us when you came. It was...” He looked at the floating wreckage. “It was terrible. They went for the ships at the ends of the formation first, of course. Men started to know they were next.” He frowned. “I will land in Iberia.”

  “You have all my messages about the not-dead.” Gabriel was looking at the sky. The wind was changing.

  “I have them. And I understand you are the emperor.” Du Corse paused to kneel by a young man who had received the full blow of an Eeeague’s acid in his face. He was blind, and very brave.

  There was nothing to be done. But both men knelt by the boy, helpless before his helplessness.

  Gabriel had plenty of time to consider that he had used the Galles as stalking horses for his own fleet. And what that cost was.

  “Yes,” he said. “I have taken the iron sceptre.”

  Du Corse nodded. “Well—I warned Rohan about you, and my king. Back in Arles. What, five years ago?” He shook his head. “I confess I didn’t expect to find you my liege lord.”

  “Who is the King of Galle, now?” Gabriel asked.

  Du Corse took a breath and rose to his feet. “The Duke of Arles, if he is alive,” he said. “And then I suppose his daughter, Clarissa.”

  Gabriel looked out at the gulls, who were gathering in an ugly flock over a piece of the carcass of the sea serpent. “Do you ever think that there is a higher power?” he asked the Gallish knight.

  * * *

  Du Corse frowned. “I’m sure of Satan,” Du Corse said. “God is harder for me.”

  Gabriel was watching the sun set in the west. “Five years ago, we faced each other in Arles.”

  “And you saved the duke and his daughter,” Du Corse said. He shrugged. “It was a large and convoluted circle, Your Grace.” He bent his knee.

  Gabriel, unused to such things, stepped past him. “Oh, a plague on it, Du Corse. Our war is over. Go save what can be saved. But for the love of God, if a God there is...be cautious. This thing we face is more puissant than anything. It takes people. And uses them as puppets.” He took Du Corse’s hand. “You know?”

  Du Corse’s demeanor cracked, and the man smiled. “I know, my lord. We will take care.”

  Then the emperor was away, in a heavy longboat crewed by very scared Alban and Morean oarsmen who rowed very rapidly through a sea flecked with bits of sea monster and the floating wreckage of ships and men, all harried by scavengers.

  Back on his own ship, Gabriel ordered the fleet to turn south on the new breeze. “We will not anchor for the night,” he insisted.

  Then he watched the great bay of the Elbow until the sun set and the moon rose.

  When Michael brought him wine, he drank it and turned back to watching. “It’s the Wild,” he said to everyone and no one.

  Blanche, who had never seen him in such a mood, put a hand on his shoulder. “What’s the Wild, love?” she asked.

  Almost at their feet, over the stern, a floating mass of blubber was savaged by a dozen sea creatures.

  “All of it,” he said. “Apparently, the whole universe.”

  She paused. “This ship,” she said. “You and No Head were drawing it, two months ago in Albinkirk.”
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  He nodded.

  “How long have you planned all this?” she asked.

  He shrugged. “Two years,” he said. “Or my whole life, depending.”

  She led him below. She had never seen him so tired, or so open.

  * * *

  The Galles coasted with them all night, but dawn revealed the entrance to Laluna Bay, and with several signals the Galles turned for the land.

  As soon as the sun was well up, Gabriel was mounted on Ariosto and aloft, but there was little to see beyond the clear blue sea and the coast of Iberia. He made another landing, a much more comfortable landing, and went out again before last light. They suspected that they had companions deep beneath them, but they didn’t have spears to waste, as Morgon’s workings were complex and took him hours to prepare. But each day, dolphins sported off their bows, and blue whales, rare in these seas, were seen to spout off to seaward.

  Lying with Blanche, watching a whale spout far astern through the gallery, her head on his shoulder, Gabriel stroked her hair. “The wonders of the deep,” he said.

  “I may never cross so much as a stream again,” Blanche murmured.

  There was a silence.

  “What are you thinking?” she asked.

  He took a breath. “I’m thinking that I’m an arrogant fool, Blanche. I didn’t really plan this. I’m thinking that there are many, many heroes. That many hands shaped these events. I’m wondering what effect it has on the aethereal when so many minds desire the same thing. I’m thinking that the great beast coursing through the water behind us is something’s son or daughter, and that even the sea serpents...” He shook his head. “I’m thinking a great deal of nonsense. Because I’m...” He ran out of words.

  She rolled off him and sat up. “I’m not the captain-general of a great alliance,” she said. “But I think that you are in a black mood, and it has to do with the sea creatures.” She waved a hand at the darkening sky astern. “You watched them for a long time.”

  He lay back and scratched his beard. “I confess to some dark thoughts,” he said.

  “Tell me,” she said.

  He shrugged. “I watched the sharks eat the serpent. I listened when Ariosto called the dying thing prey.” He paused.

  She was listening intently.

  “And I thought, That’s us.” He shrugged again. “That’s all. It’s all the Wild. Even us. We are the Wild. How old do you think the sea serpents are?”

  Blanche wriggled. “No idea,” she said. “Old.”

  “Hundreds, maybe thousands of years, according to Mortirmir.” Gabriel sat up. “Never mind, love. Black thoughts. Nothing to them.”

  “That’s crap,” Blanche said. “Don’t fob me off. You didn’t sleep last night.”

  Gabriel drank some wine from the cup next to the bed. “What if this is all there is?” he asked. “A war inside a war, inside a war? Things eat things, and other things conquer things, rape things, eat things, enslave things...” He was breathing hard.

  Blanche was looking out the stern windows. “I think you are tired of fighting,” she said. “For me—I confess to have eaten a great many fish the last days. But...” She rose, and stepped up next to the long table in the coach, so he could see her lithe figure silhouetted against the stern windows. “But for me, the last tenday has been an adventure, a terror, a few days of boredom, a little triumph, the fun with Kaitlin’s baby and the miracle of his pudgy thighs and then more terror during the battle. And some other kinds of fun.” Her voice was almost disembodied in the half dark. “Love, you fight, and you see war everywhere.” She shrugged. “I am coming to find the sea beautiful, and yet I know it is full of fish and sea serpents.” She turned. “That is all my wisdom.”

  Gabriel laughed for the first time in two days. “That was—amazing.”

  She slapped his naked chest. “You only say that because you think I’m an empty-headed laundress,” she said. But her voice was playful, not angry.

  “I think you are the most confident person I have ever known,” he said.

  “Me?” she said. “That’s a laugh. You just like that I’m afraid of different things to those you are afraid of.” She lay down.

  “Now you’re cold,” he said.

  “Make me warm, then,” she said lazily. “Really, sweet, there’s more to life than fighting.”

  * * *

  The next day saw them raise the Eagle’s Head and all three great ships were at arms, the gonnes loaded and run out amidships, and the crews and passengers armed. Gabriel was aloft on Ariosto.

  Toward noon, with the Eagle’s Head on their port side and the Joseph of Arimethea leading the turn into the straits, Gabriel saw shadows on the water to starboard, in the deep water off the north coast of Ifriquy’a.

  He circled in the fierce winds that exited the straits and the ships waited, rising and falling on the choppy water, waiting for the change of tide that would take them into the Inner Sea against the wind. Until then, they were saving their magisters for fighting. The effort of moving three heavy round ships against the wind and tide would have used up even Master Morgon.

  It was a long, hot day, and tempers were short. Blanche did laundry again. It was not so exciting the second time, and the girls cursed and mumbled, but the baby needed clean clothes, and so did Blanche.

  Morgon boiled water, so casually that Blanche tapped him on the shoulder. “I thought,” she said, privy, as usual, to the emperor’s inner thoughts, “that you were being kept in reserve?”

  “Oh,” Morgon said. “It’s so little potentia.”

  Then he froze. Blanche had enough experience of them all to know the young man was in his memory palace.

  “Of course,” he said aloud. “I boiled water,” he said.

  * * *

  A thousand feet above the straits, Gabriel saw the serpents move, a hundred fathoms deep.

  Did someone just do a weather working? he asked in the aethereal.

  Morgon shrugged. “Of course,” the magister said. “I boiled water.”

  “The sea serpents can see or feel or hear your emanations,” Gabriel said. “They’re coming.”

  “Drop a spear,” Morgon said.

  In the real, Gabriel used his knees and gentle pressure on Ariosto’s beak to turn the big avian a little west. They descended rapidly, trading altitude for speed, running west a few long heartbeats, and then Gabriel lobbed a small spear with a float attached by a silken cord.

  It vanished into the deep sea, a mile west of the sea monsters.

  In the water, he reported.

  Mortirmir played with the strings on his fingers. “Let’s try this,” he said. “In the name of philosophy.”

  A pulse of pure ops flashed out of the spear, which was held fifty feet below the surface by its float and tether.

  All three of the sea serpents turned as one and began racing west.

  In his palace, Gabriel and Morgon watched together.

  “Fascinating,” Morgon said. “I wonder if they prey on the little fish. The ones we use in school.”

  Gabriel shook his head, amazed.

  “Drop another farther west,” Mortirmir said, and Gabriel turned Ariosto and flew west again, this time several miles. He expended another spear.

  Behind him, Mortirmir cut the first spear and it plunged into the depths, now silent.

  And lit the new one.

  The sea serpents turned once and then, like dogs picking up a scent on a deer hunt, turned west again.

  They were now miles to the west of their true prey, and the tide was changing.

  Ariosto grumbled, and Gabriel turned for the ship, having learned his lesson about staying aloft too long.

  I wanted another fight! Ariosto said.

  We have other business first. I promise you, there are many fights ahead.

  * * *

  Two days later, and they reached Dar as Salaam in the evening sunlight. Blanche and Kaitlin both thought it was the most beautiful city they’d ever seen, and th
ey stood at the railing in relatively clean kirtles, watching the minarets and the superb onion-shaped domes rise out of the sea with an incredible, heady array of smells, human and exotic, a staggering olfactory feast of spices and sewage and seawater. Morgon Mortirmir came and leaned on the railing with them, and one of the archers. The girl archer.

  Kaitlin took a moment, but she knew the archer. She shifted a little. “You are Tancreda,” she whispered.

  The smooth-faced archer turned, flushed.

  But then she smiled.

  Kaitlin shrugged. Out loud, she said, “You danced at my wedding. With this fellow.”

  Blanche looked blank. Mortirmir looked offended that his cleverness had been penetrated.

  But then, as was his wont, he lost interest and looked at Dar as Salaam. “Now,” he said, “we will see something. How I wish Harmodius were here.”

  * * *

  They approached the port in late evening and a pilot boat visited them. Blanche stayed in the aft cabin, but she saw the men in their baggy trousers, and she saw how they fawned on Pavalo Payam, treating him like a great lord.

  He came aft to her Gabriel, who was sitting in braes and a shirt, reading. He’d seldom looked less like an emperor.

  “My lord, I beg your leave. My master will want to see me.”

  Gabriel got up and pressed Payam’s hands between his own. “We are friends, and I am not your lord. Come and go as you wish,” he said. “Only carry my respectful salutation, and Magister Harmodius’s...”

  “Yes, yes,” Payam said, a little impatient.

  Gabriel grinned. “There’s a girl,” he said.

  “More than one,” Blanche added.

  Payam bowed, all mock ceremony now. “It is possible,” he said, in his deepest, most reverent voice. He winked at Blanche, who winked back.

  “Go, then. Send us word,” Gabriel said.

  When he was gone, Gabriel kissed her, and began various other preliminaries. It was incredibly hot. Blanche liked his attention but was almost completely uninterested, although she knew that if she let his hand continue, her interest might recover.

  “Will you really marry me?” she asked.

  Gabriel’s hand didn’t even pause. “Yes,” he said.