“You ought to talk to them,” Harg said. “Sound them out.”
“You ought to talk to them,” Barko said seriously. “You’re the one who knows what the Grey Folk want.”
That remark gave Harg a feeling that he had gone too far. He said quickly, “I don’t know what they want. No more than you.”
The vehemence of his tone made them fall silent. Then Calpe spoke up out of the darkness. “You might not know what the Grey Folk want, Harg,” she said, “but it sure looks like they know what they want from you.”
“It might look like that,” he said. “It’s not true.”
He got up, so uncomfortable with this turn of the conversation that he couldn’t sit still. All evening he’d been thinking guiltily that he was leading Spaeth into danger, and now he realized it was the other way around. He wished he had never mentioned Spaeth, never gotten mixed up with her, never been seen in her presence.
They were all watching him, but no one said anything. To change the subject he said, “Calpe, do you have a room I could stay in? I can pay you—not tonight, but soon.”
“Sure,” said Calpe. “I’ll put it on a tab. You want to see the room now?”
“Yes.” He had to get away and think.
The tone changed back to normal as the party broke up and they all made plans for the next day. As Harg stepped out into the hall and heard the hum of conversation from downstairs, the feeling came back to him that he was straddling a crack—but this time it was a four-way crack. Torna, Lashnura, Adaina, Inning. He was going to have to dance fast to keep on his feet.
8
True Shapes
At a fundamental level of his being, Nathaway Talley had always believed that the universe was an orderly place. Despite the random cruelties and blunders of human beings there was a transcendent pattern of fairness and rationality underlying all of Nature.
Now, his faith had been uprooted.
He lay in his bunk on the ship, where he had spent most of the two days since the Tornas had fetched him back from the hillside. He stared at the wooden beams above his head through the cracked lens of his glasses, which made it look like there was a seam in the world.
His memories of the night at the Whispering Stones were jumbled and sore, like an unhealed bruise. He could not piece them together in sequence; it was as if the night had been more a succession of moods than events. He had considered dismissing the whole experience as a hallucination. It would have been easy to conclude that Spaeth had fed him a hypnotic drug. There were only two things wrong with this scenario. First, it meant that the horrors he had experienced had sprung from a buried level of his own mind and were still there. The second problem was that he didn’t believe it.
Deeply, instinctively, he felt that something real had been revealed to him that night. He had glimpsed a more fundamental layer of reality—a terrifying landscape that dwarfed him and all the artifice he had used to hide from it up to now. Everything that had seemed to make sense about the world—law, civilization, learning—was just a set of paper screens erected to hide what lay outside.
It made him feel empty, like a hollow bowl reamed out with an adze. All that had ever filled him was gone. He wanted to weep, or die, but he no longer felt any power to act. There was just no traction in the universe, no way to gain a purchase to pull himself out.
A knock on the cabin door made Nathaway realize that he had been hearing, and ignoring, activity out on the deck for some time. In a monotone he said, “Come in,” and a sailor leaned in with an envelope addressed in a firm, neat hand. “Mail for you,” the sailor said.
It was from Rachel. Nathaway sat up with a sharp ache of homesickness. The envelope seemed to come from another world, a world where everything made sense. He tore it open eagerly, but it was too dark to read in the cabin, so he pulled himself out of bed and mounted the companionway steps into the sunlight.
The letter was a chatty one, full of family news and political gossip.
The navy reforms have become hugely controversial, now that people begin to see their larger purpose. It has occurred to the Communitarians that the mass resignation of officers was exactly what Corbin was aiming for. Now that he is rid of the old officers, and replacing them with his own people, even some of our friends are growing alarmed at the prospect of a unified military, backing a single leader whose ambitions they are unsure of. To have a military genius off conquering new lands seems like a fine thing—but having an actual one underfoot, building a power base, is altogether different. Everyone but the public is beginning to wish he would go off to the Forsakens and be heroic somewhere else. The public still adore him. You should see the women throwing themselves at him—poor things, I wish them luck. Domestication is not on his agenda just now.
But the passage that struck Nathaway most strongly came near the end.
Your letters cheer us all, Nat, and make us confident that you will be sensible and not reckless. The only thing I’m still afraid of is that you will come back changed. Please don’t change, Nat—at least, not without my permission. It is very lonely here without you, and I long to talk and hear how things are really going.
He longed to talk to her, as well. He needed someone to confide in, to help him figure out what he was feeling. The Torna seamen who were even now glancing at him with suggestive grins were no help. They had made no secret of what they thought he had been doing alone in the hills with a lovely, ardent Lashnura woman; and his subsequent moodiness had only made the snickering innuendoes more unbearable.
He stood up, looking for someone in charge. The boatswain was the only one on deck, so he said to him, “I need to go ashore. Have someone bring round the boat.”
“Yes, sir,” the man said, but looked hesitant. “Going into the village?”
“Yes.”
“Let me fetch someone to escort you.”
“No!” Nathaway said peremptorily. “I’m going alone.”
“Yes, sir.”
When his long strides had taken him into Yorabay, Nathaway began to understand why the boatswain had made the offer. There was a change in the atmosphere. People had regarded him with curiosity or indifference before; now he attracted glances of pure hostility. He didn’t feel unsafe, exactly—just unwelcome. He walked faster and avoided eye contact as he mounted the path to Spaeth’s cottage.
His estimation of Spaeth had done a complete turnaround. On that night, in her own sphere, she had not seemed like the innocent, childlike being he had taken her for. As Nathaway had shrunk into helpless insignificance, she had grown into a majestic figure, terrifying and wise. She had turned his world inside out, and now he needed her to explain.
Her cottage was deserted. Frustrated, he returned to the path, unsure whether to look for her in the village or in the hills. A woman was standing where the path branched off to a nearby house, watching him with arms crossed. He recognized Agath, who had hosted the barbarous healing ceremony that had precipitated everything, and he turned uphill to avoid her. But she called out something to him, so he dutifully turned back and said, “I beg your pardon?”
“I asked if you were satisfied now,” she said.
Approaching her cautiously, Nathaway saw that she looked half crazed with anger and grief. He tried to speak calmly. “I don’t know what you mean.”
“You’ve driven her away,” Agath said, tilting her head at Spaeth’s house. “Just like Goth before her. You’ve brought death back to Yora. Are you happy now?”
“She’s gone?” Nathaway said. “Where?”
“I thought you Innings knew everything,” Agath said contemptuously. “But maybe all you know is how to maim and kill.”
“Look, I’m very sorry about your son. But he—” He was about to launch into an explanation of medical procedures when something told him to leave it be. “He fought bravely to uphold justice,�
�� he finished, acutely aware of how clichéd it sounded.
Her face crumpled. “That is so much slop,” she said. “He fought for nothing. If you think it’s so noble what he did, then why weren’t you fighting with him?”
Nathaway had no answer to this question. He mumbled “I’m sorry” again and set off down the path, his shoulders hunched defensively.
The encounter had unsettled him. He walked blindly toward the harbour, the cool wind grating against his skin. A thousand questions were crowding his head—what was he doing here, how had it all gone so wrong, what could he have done any differently—but above all, where was she?
When he reached the shipwright’s house, Strobe was in his workroom, rhythmically planing a board. The older man looked up and frowned when Nathaway entered. “I’m looking for Harg,” Nathaway said.
Strobe set his plane aside and brushed off the board. “He’s not here.”
“Where is he?”
“He left Yora.”
It felt like everything was falling apart. “Why?” Nathaway said blankly.
“Your goons came and beat him up,” Strobe said. “It was pretty clear they weren’t going to leave him alone.”
The Tornas had never breathed a word of this. “I never authorized that!” Nathaway exclaimed, outraged. Strobe only shrugged fatalistically and began to rummage on a shelf for some varnish.
“Where has he gone?” Nathaway demanded.
Strobe didn’t answer.
An inspiration struck Nathaway. “He took Spaeth, didn’t he?”
Strobe gave him a suspicious glance, then shrugged again. “I don’t know.”
This only made Nathaway more certain he was right. It made sense. They shared the bond of their common parentage. Surely they would stick together.
“Can you take me to Thimish?” he blurted out. It was the obvious place for them to have gone. Leaving Yora was against his instructions, but at that moment it seemed like a course of action that might drag him out of his morass.
Strobe found some imaginary flaw in the board and started smoothing it with a pumice stone. Frustrated, Nathaway turned to leave, but then turned back. “Is he in trouble?”
“No. But he thinks he is.”
“Look, I know I’m not the person Harg wants most to see—”
“Actually, you might be wrong about that.” The shipwright brushed off the board, then said, “I can take you there. As long as you don’t tell Tiarch’s men it was me.”
“I won’t say a word if you don’t,” Nathaway said. “Wait here. I have to fetch some things from the boat. I’ll be back shortly.”
As he hurried down the beach, Nathaway felt not exactly optimism, but a sense of purpose.
*
“Impregnable, my ass!” Harg said to Barko. “You can’t have been serious.”
“I wasn’t looking at it from this angle,” Barko said in his own defence.
Just like a pirate, Harg thought, to think if a fort couldn’t be attacked by sea, it couldn’t be attacked at all.
They were standing in the high meadows behind Harbourdown, looking down at the Redoubt. From this perspective they could see the whole town sprouting like a growth of kaleidoscopic lichen between the harbour and the hill. It was a mongrel town, half rude fishing village and half emporium of a far-flung pirate network. “Everything is for sale in Harbourdown,” so the saying went. As Harg and Barko had passed along the streets that morning, bangled women and keen-eyed artisans had beckoned to them from street-side displays of bright carpets, glassware, brass, and ivory. Now and then shuttered windows showed where a shop had dealt in weapons or fortune-telling or dreamweed before Inning regulations had come to Thimish. Not that the Inning presence had truly halted Harbourdown’s age-old traffic. By mutual agreement, every shop that dealt in black market goods had hung out a wind chime, and the streets were now musical with outlawed solicitation.
When Harg had looked up at the Redoubt from the town, it had made his heart sink, for its dark, seamless walls rose atop a ninety-foot sandstone cliff with only a narrow switchback road for access. But as they had circled round behind it, climbing the bluff behind the town, the fort had dwindled. Now they stood looking down into the small, pentacle-shaped courtyard. The Redoubt was all grand façade, and nothing behind.
“I’ll wager it was never even intended as a fort,” Harg said. “If it was, the Altans didn’t fear attack by land. They put all their strength toward the harbour and left their backs exposed. Get an army on top of this hill, and with a couple of ten-pounders you could blast them into the sea.”
“But we don’t have any ten-pounders,” Barko pointed out.
To this, Harg said nothing. Lying down in the long grass, out of sight of any sentinels, he raised the Inning spyglass he had borrowed from Torr. There were only two gates. The main one on the southern, seaward side stood open for the almost continuous arrival of donkey carts, wagons, and visitors who had business with the military. The small north postern closer to them was shut at the moment, but was clearly used for access to a level, grassy parade ground behind the fort.
“What do they use that field for?” Harg asked.
“It looks like they’ve been grazing their mules out there.”
“How many mules?”
“Two teams. They used them to get the big guns up the hill.”
Harg located the placement of the guns. They were all aimed toward the harbour, and still mounted on the carriages that had brought them up here. He swung the spyglass around to study the frigate they were protecting, anchored below. A small vendor’s boat was pulled alongside it, the proprietor dickering with some sailors for his wares.
He collapsed the spy-glass with a click. “No, we don’t have any ten-pounders,” he said. “We’ll have to think of something else.”
“Harg, the fort may be weak, but we can’t attack it with pitchforks and fillet knives.”
“I wasn’t thinking of pitchforks,” Harg said. “I was thinking of catball rackets.”
He got to his feet and started off across the hills toward the west, leaving Barko scrambling to catch up. Harg felt totally focused; he loved the sheer intellectual challenge of the problem before him. Coming up here, he had only intended to see if any portion of the puzzle were soluble, but now the pattern was falling into place in a chain reaction, and the whole thing was lying open before him. As they walked, he peppered Barko with questions: How far to Rockmeet Straits by boat? By land? Was there a road? How many people could Barko recruit? What skills did they have? Any boats?
After walking over grass hills for ten minutes, they plunged into a pine forest. Around them, scaly trunks towered to the sky, ancient presences whose majestic silence made them lower their voices. Underfoot, a carpet of needles cushioned their steps, and the wind whished eerily in the treetops far overhead. There was little undergrowth; it was like a hall of pillars. They walked for forty minutes and only had to cross a single ravine before they heard the sea ahead and came out atop a high stone cliff. Across the narrow strait lay the sand flats of Ekra.
“How deep are the shoals over there?” Harg asked.
“Oh, it varies a lot. They’re like rolling sand hills under water. Pilots try to stay as close to the east side of the channel as possible.”
So the warships would be hugging the cliffs as they came through. Not perfect, but manageable. Scouting along the cliff, Harg chose a spot and started piling some loose rocks in a cairn.
“What are you doing?” Barko asked.
“Marking gun emplacements,” Harg said.
“For what guns?”
“Don’t worry, we’ll have guns. Sharpshooters as well.”
“Harg, would you mind explaining?”
So Harg laid it out, in all its crazy inspiration. By the end Barko was shaking his
head. “I don’t know,” he said.
“What don’t you know?”
“Whether we can pull it off. If we do . . .”
“If we do, we’ll give the Northern Squadron a taste of real South Chain hospitality,” said Harg with a grim smile.
*
Spaeth sat on the threadbare carpet of Anit the Bonecrafter’s home, staring at her nails. They looked black and bruised, as if hit by a hammer. The tips of her fingers were beginning to darken; when she pressed them she could feel nothing.
It was the morning after her first restless night there. Around midnight she had roused with a sense that the darkened room was full of the eyes of small, scurrying things. The fire had settled into a bed of ashes that gave some heat but little light. She had lain awake listening to tiny scrabblings and footfalls, and now and then the flutter of a wing. It had been a long time before she could fall asleep again.
The lump of blankets that was Tway stirred on the floor beside her. No longer fearing to disturb her, Spaeth rose and went over to make a new fire in the grate.
A soft footfall made her look over her shoulder. Anit was standing in the doorway, leaning on his gnarled stick.
“Did you sleep well?” he said.
Spaeth glanced at Tway. She looked as tousled and sleepless as Spaeth felt. Tway pushed her hair back out of her face, then got up and went to the back door, which opened onto the yard where the pump and outhouse stood.
Anit came over to his chair. He looked hesitant and fragile. Spaeth was about to sit down in one of the chairs facing his when Anit warned, “Take care you don’t sit on Tassie.” Spaeth looked down to see the ivory cat curled on the cushion, looking content and well-fed. She picked it up and placed it on the windowsill, distinctly remembering that Anit had done the same the night before.
“Your carvings—” she said.
“Ah yes,” Anit chuckled. “They aren’t really mine, you know. I just find them and set them free.” He reached out to pick up an ivory mouse from the side table. His hand shook slightly. “They are imprisoned in the ivory, you see. My creatures are much like people that way: when you first look at them, they seem to be only a block of raw stuff; but that is because so much dross surrounds their true nature. Once the excess is removed, what beautiful shapes we find! But sometimes a single piece is not complete in itself; it needs another to reveal its true shape.” To demonstrate, he picked up two shapeless sticks of driftwood from the kindling bin, held them together, and suddenly there was a sandpiper in his hands, hesitating before it sprang forward across the beach. “That’s like people, too,” he said.
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