“Since I hope to speak with that same commander, we might as well travel together.” Yanko extended a hand in invitation toward the dinghy, as if Dak wouldn’t have hopped in it whether invited or not.
“Might as well,” Dak agreed. “You know where the Turgonians are camped? Or where the commander is?”
“More than ten miles away. That’s the extent of my range currently. I saw two men walking that way with a crate.” Yanko pointed toward the mountain range.
Dak nodded. “That’s what I expected. They may already be spread out in camps all along the mountains. Those ships could have brought hundreds of people.”
Yanko couldn’t help but feel bleak at the idea of hundreds of Turgonians on his continent. That seemed a far greater threat than a few pirate ships.
It wasn’t until they’d lowered the dinghy, rowed to shore, and were heading inland that Yanko considered Dak’s words further.
“Why did you expect your people to head to the mountains?” he asked as they maneuvered over the lumpy ground, dried seaweed, and dead lichen-like growth plastered to the rocks.
There was nothing akin to a trail, but there also wasn’t any growth to impede them. Just the roughness of the terrain itself and the veneer of dead sea vegetation over everything.
“A hunch.”
Yanko wasn’t surprised when Dak didn’t explain further.
“Your continent smells even worse up close, Yanko,” Lakeo said.
She walked behind Dak and Yanko. Jhali walked far behind her. Yanko had a feeling the two of them would never be friends.
“Why is it so disgusting?” Lakeo added. “Ew, what’s that?”
She pointed to a huge dark lump to one side.
“A dead whale,” Yanko said. “As to your first question, it’s the plant and animal matter that once lived in the sea. Unfortunately it all got trapped here when the land rose up, and it’s now decomposing.” Yanko wished there had been a way to do that without causing so much death, but he wasn’t sure he would have had the foresight or known a way to move all the creatures even if he’d been the one to control when the keystone was locked in. “Decomposing more slowly than typical, I think,” he added as Lakeo stared at the dead whale, “since there may not be any saprotrophs here to hasten things along. Everything, including bacteria and fungi, would have been adapted to live in salt water, and everything would have died when that environment was taken away.”
Dak looked at him. It was probably only in Yanko’s mind that there was judgment in that look, a question of whether they’d done the right thing in bringing this land back up for human use. Yanko didn’t know the answer to that, but when they came to some large, shell-covered pillars with skeletal limbs, he was reminded that this land had once belonged to the surface. They were trees, or what remained of them. Their dead frames. Perhaps not fossilized but preserved somehow in the icy depths of the ocean, far below the surface.
“This is where the Kyattese would be doing their research, if they were here,” Dak said as their group passed through the ancient forest. “Drilling holes in the old trees and examining all the exposed life that’s usually on the bottom of the ocean.”
“Everything’s dead,” Lakeo said. “What’s worth examining?”
“Their Polytechnic has entire wings devoted to archaeology and paleontology. They like dead things. Admittedly, the recently dead might not fall under either of those sciences, but I’m sure they have appropriately trained people who would run around here with tweezers and specimen jars to study what once lived and grew thousands of feet under the surface. I’ve heard the Kyattese were delighted when Rias built them research flugnugstica.”
“Your president built underwater boats for another nation?” Yanko asked.
“He wasn’t president at the time. He was trying to get himself invited to live on Kyatt and marry Tikaya.”
“So he bribed them with underwater boats?”
“That’s quite a wedding present,” Lakeo added.
“He’s never been one to do things in half measures,” Dak said.
“It sounds like you don’t think your people are here for the ancient dead trees,” Yanko said, wondering if he might tease out why Dak believed the Turgonian researchers had gone to the mountains.
“Doubtful,” Dak said.
“Why would the Turgonians want this continent, I wonder?” Yanko mused, looking at Lakeo and even back at Jhali, trusting she was staying within earshot. He wanted the answer from Dak, but he would be surprised if Dak shared his speculations.
“To keep Nuria from having it,” Jhali said.
That was Yanko’s fear. He remembered Dak saying that nobody, neither Turgonia nor any other nation, wanted to see Nuria with more land. Yanko had never known war, but he’d been born right after a long one with Turgonia, and he’d read enough history to know his people had battled often with the other world powers over the centuries.
“It’s a long ways from Turgonia,” Yanko said. “You’d think they might be deterred by the difficulty of guarding a colony, or whatever they would make it, from thousands of miles away.”
“It’s a long ways from Nuria too,” Dak said dryly. “Something for Zirabo and your future Great Chief to keep in mind. Guarding it is one problem. Keeping the people who settle there from breaking away generations hence is another.”
As they moved to other terrain, another stretch of barren land, this one dotted with salty pools that had survived the upheaval, Yanko considered his words and how he would feel if a continent he worked hard to change into a livable, farmable area, broke away from Nuria one day. He’d likely be dead by then. He could only hope that the inhabitants would continue to trade with their motherland and provide food and resources.
“Fire ahead,” Dak said, after they’d walked in silence for several miles.
Yanko lifted his head and spotted pinpoints of yellowish-orange light burning in the foothills of the mountain ahead. Campfires? Or simply lanterns? He couldn’t imagine what the Turgonians would have found to burn out here. Not some of those ancient trees, he hoped. He doubted they would burn after centuries underwater.
Regardless, he was pleased to see all the lights. Yanko had headed their group in the direction the pair of Turgonians had gone, but he hadn’t truly known if they would encounter a substantial camp.
He reached out with his mind and sensed more than a hundred people in tents, most sleeping. Another dozen patrolled the area, some carrying lanterns, others preserving their night vision by tramping in the dark. They all carried Turgonian-steel rifles.
Here and there, in the mountains above the camp, Yanko sensed smaller groups of people. He couldn’t tell what they were doing. Most seemed to be sleeping. Their activities would likely be more apparent after daybreak. At least one group was inside the mountain in a cave.
Yanko imagined that sea vegetation had lived in those caves and that the pervasive stench of decay would be even stronger inside. It would be like sleeping in a tomb.
He shook his head. He wasn’t sure why that was on his mind, other than all the dead fish and sea creatures they’d passed. It was like walking through some alien graveyard and reminded him of the war and plague that, history told them, had originally driven off the Kyattese. Would they find centuries-old human skeletons here if they looked long enough?
“Are we going to walk right up to their camp?” Lakeo asked quietly.
Dak stopped. “We would be wise to wait until daylight when they can see my uniform. They won’t likely expect more of their people to come out tonight and might mistake us for enemies.” He glanced at Yanko, as if to say it wouldn’t necessarily be a mistake.
Yanko spread his hands to appear unthreatening, but he couldn’t fight that label too hard since he was already thinking of sneaking off and seeing what the people in the mountains were up to. Sneaking off by himself.
“Shall we take a nap until dawn then?” Yanko asked.
“If we were planning to nap, couldn�
�t we have done that on the ship where the smell was less offensive?” Lakeo asked.
“Do you do nothing but complain?” Jhali had drawn closer when they’d stopped, and she glared at Lakeo.
“Sometimes, my complaining escalates to vitriolic anger,” Lakeo said. “Maybe I’ll show you later.”
“I’ll stand guard if you three want to rest,” Yanko said, hoping to stave off an argument—and also have a reason to be the one awake while Dak dozed off.
Lakeo and Jhali moved to separate boulders, removed their packs, and plopped down.
Dak faced the mountains—he also faced Yanko—and didn’t sit down. “I won’t stop you from snooping, if that’s what you wish to do, Yanko,” Dak said, “but my people may be prepared for mages showing up—they’ll certainly know the Nurians are aware of this place—and will likely be very alert.”
Yanko rubbed the back of his neck. Should he play stupid? Or just accept that Dak had come to know him well? And was smarter than he was?
“It’s disconcerting when the unschooled Turgonian reads your mind better than a mind mage,” Yanko said.
“Unschooled?”
“To use magic,” Yanko rushed to say. He knew well by now just how much of an education Dak had. He’d seen the man speak and read numerous languages, pilot an underwater boat, and solve all manner of real world math problems that would have stumped Yanko.
“Depending on what kind of negotiating you want to do with the commander—” Dak’s tone suggested that negotiating better be what Yanko had in mind, “—you may be better off walking in openly, rather than being caught.” He held up a hand, forestalling the protest Yanko had been about to make that he wouldn’t get caught. “Even if you don’t get caught, they may detect you out there and be suspicious when you show up in the morning. Knowing they might encounter Nurians, they could have brought artifacts along to help them detect magic.”
Yanko peered at his face, though the moon had set, and even daylight wouldn’t have helped him read Dak. “You are still unschooled, aren’t you? Tynlee hasn’t been teaching you to read minds, right?”
Dak grunted. “As I’ve been told in the past, I have the aptitude of a rock when it comes to magic.”
“Most Turgonians do, but you’re… unique.”
“That sounded like a diplomatic way of saying I’m strange.”
“You know I wouldn’t presume to denigrate my elders. I just want to know what your people are looking for in the mountains.” Yanko thought Dak knew. If he could draw the information out, he might not need to snoop.
Dak sighed. “What do you think my people are looking for in the mountains?”
It took Dak giving him that expectant, exasperated look of his—Yanko could tell it was exasperated without any light—for the gears to start turning.
Unlike the Kyattese, who valued science of all kinds, magical and mundane, the Turgonians valued technology and engineering, anything that could make them more efficient warriors and help them maintain the thousands-of-miles-wide continent they’d taken, not to mention their various colonies around the world. And everything they invented and built relied on…
“Ore?” Yanko asked.
“Ore.”
Yanko had been so fixated on the potential of this new land to grow food that he hadn’t considered that the mountains might hold iron, gold, silver, and other valuable metals and perhaps precious gems. If they did… that might be more likely to win his people’s interest than the idea of crops in the distant future. Many of the fights with Turgonia, at least in the last couple of centuries, had been spawned out of a desire to claim some of their land—and resource-rich mountain ranges.
“Don’t your people have enough ore? Or—” Yanko’s mouth twisted with bitterness, “—would they want to take it just to keep my people from having it?”
“Our industries use tremendous amounts of steel, and they’re growing every year. We’ve recovered most of the easily accessible resources and are now doing exploratory mining along the inhospitable northern frontier. While we’re not out, there’s nobody who would object to acquiring more, especially in mountains that haven’t been mined before. The ore will still be near the surface and easy to access.”
“But wouldn’t they have been mined before? When the Kyattese lived here—”
“They were using bows and obsidian arrowheads when my people first encountered them seven hundred years ago,” Dak said. “It’s possible they had some rudimentary bronze and iron usage that they weren’t able to continue on their ore-desolate volcanic islands, but mining techniques were so simple back then that any ore left behind would be easy to reach with today’s steam-powered machinery.”
Yanko grimaced at the idea of shiploads of Turgonians coming and sticking their ugly mining equipment all over this new land. He wanted to turn it into a beautiful green place full of trees and lush vegetation and fertile soil, not leave it a lump of rock only to be exploited for its resources. Admittedly, his people, who had never found an abundance of ore in their own mountains, would likely be eager to mine it for themselves if they got it.
Stoat's teats, how had he not thought of that? Was it possible this was at least part of the reason Zirabo wanted the continent?
Yanko slumped forward, gripping his thighs like a runner catching his breath after a race. “I am naive.”
There was a reason everybody kept saying that. Because it was true.
Dak rested a hand on his shoulder. He couldn’t have been privy to Yanko’s thoughts, but he’d proved adept at guessing them. “Maybe optimistic. Optimism can keep us from seeing reality.”
“Is that a better flaw?”
“Many poets would say so.”
“Oh? And what do Turgonians say?”
“Turgonian poets?”
Yanko snorted. “Are there such people?”
“Yes.”
“Do they write about topics other than war and bloodshed?”
“Occasionally. I recall having to memorize a poem in school about a flower.”
“Was the flower on a battlefield?”
“A graveyard full of dead soldiers.”
“Good fertilizer, no doubt.”
“You really are a gardener at heart, aren’t you?” Dak patted him on the shoulder and lowered his hand.
“That’s what I’ve been trying to tell people.”
Yanko straightened and stared at the mountains, feeling far more exasperation than curiosity now. He had to hope that the Turgonians wouldn’t find any ore up there. Maybe then they would voluntarily leave the continent. What were the odds that, even if there was ore here, Yanko could trick them into thinking there wasn’t?
“Depends on whether they already have a pile of it in their camp,” he muttered.
“Hm?”
“Nothing, Dak. I’m going to heed your warning and stay put tonight, then walk into that camp openly tomorrow morning.”
“Why am I not convinced that this will keep you out of trouble?”
“Because you’re not optimistic.”
“This is true.”
6
As dawn broke, Yanko let Dak and Lakeo lead the way to the Turgonian camp—Dak because he was in uniform, and Lakeo because her bare arms rippled with Turgonian-style muscles. Nobody would mistake Yanko and Jhali as anything other than Nurian, so they walked behind. Maybe someone would assume they were prisoners. Yanko had brought his crimson robe along, but it was in his pack. He still remembered Dak’s words from the first time Yanko had worn it, about how clearly it marked him as someone Dak felt he should shoot.
Faint plinks and clanks drifted down from the mountains, lending evidence to support Dak’s hypothesis. Exploratory mining, indeed.
The canvas tents of the camp were visible now, as drab and gray as the rocky ground under them and the mountains behind them. There was no soil here, not in the traditional sense, only dead organic material and a silt-like sediment that dusted everything. Yanko wondered what the Turgonians had
stuck their tent stakes into. Or maybe they hadn’t been able to use the stakes, and a stiff wind would blow the tents over. Yanko knew it was immature to contemplate causing such an event. Maybe nature would do the job for him.
Alas, there hadn’t been much of a breeze since they’d left the coast. Gray clouds still hung over the mountain peaks, and he wondered if he would see rain while they were here.
“Halt,” came a call from one of the Turgonian soldiers patrolling the perimeter. Yanko interpreted the words that followed as, “Identify yourselves.”
“Colonel Dak Starcrest,” Dak called back, followed by, Yanko assumed, his unit designation. Either that, or a request for coffee and biscuits.
Yanko was a little surprised Dak didn’t hide his identity but supposed he wasn’t here to secretly spy on his own people. And he might get preferential treatment by using his surname.
As Dak approached the guard, a few more soldiers trotted over to join them, and Yanko wished he’d gotten a bit further in his efforts to learn Turgonian. He reached out with his mind in time to sense the soldiers’ surprise at Dak’s appearance. Yanko might not understand thoughts formed with spoken words, but he could sense emotions. He also detected uncertainty from the soldier. Dak was wearing the uniform he’d been given when he’d been a putative prisoner in the intelligence building in Port Morgrant. It lacked his name and rank. Would anyone here recognize and vouch for him?
The soldiers looked curiously at Yanko and even more curiously at Jhali. She hadn’t bothered hiding her distinctive mage-hunter uniform, perhaps because she had no other clothing along. Or at all. Had all her belongings been in that cavern that the Swift Wolves faction had destroyed?
The soldiers surrounded Yanko’s group and used their rifles to point them not toward the camp but toward some spot parallel to the mountains.
“They’re not taking us out back to shoot us, are they?” Lakeo asked.
“The expedition commander is at a lake,” Dak said. “They’re taking us to see him.”
Great Chief (Chains of Honor, Book 4) Page 7