The Rose Sea

by S. M. Stirling

  The Rose Sea

  S.M. Stirling

  &

  Holly Lisle

  Content

  CHAPTER I

  CHAPTER II

  CHAPTER III

  CHAPTER IV

  CHAPTER V

  CHAPTER VI

  CHAPTER VII

  CHAPTER VIII

  CHAPTER IX

  CHAPTER X

  CHAPTER XI

  CHAPTER XII

  CHAPTER XIII

  CHAPTER XIV

  CHAPTER XV

  CHAPTER XVI

  CHAPTER XVII

  CHAPTER I

  First Captain Sir Bren Morkaarin, Hereditary Guardian of Timlake, yawned enormously, leaned back against his saddle and pulled his cloak over his legs. The deck was hard, but better than mud, which was something he'd slept in often enough on campaign; summer nights in the clear dry air of the central provinces were just cool enough to make sleep comfortable.

  The barge rocked, water chuckling against its bows. All three moons were up, silver coins in the sky—stately Falcon Father, Wolf Mother near Him and The Child moving below, in their eternal dance. The river was high as a result—no worry of sandbars for a while.

  The towing cable curved away to the bank, black against the star-shot, moonlit water. The low-slung, pillar-legged shape of the twofork leaned into its harness with ponderous deliberation. The towing beast was a formless lump in the darkness until it threw up its head and showed the Y-shaped horn on its nose; it trumpeted a complaint through thick, blubbery lips.

  Bren stretched and shifted position on the hard deck; it was the twenty-first hour, an hour past sundown in summertime. Nobody was awake save the watchstander at the tiller, leaning silently on the long pole. Easy night for him, Bren thought, and grinned. Behind his barge came ten more, equally quiet, dark save for the great glass-globe lanterns that hung from the sternposts above the steering oar. Ten barges of men and women, pikes and halberds and muskets, barreled gunpowder and barreled salt pork and hardtack, tents and bandages and boot grease and the boxed Shrine of the Three that moved with the standards. The whole of the XIXth Imperial Regiment of Foot was on the move from garrison duty in the foothills of the North Shield Mountains to the seaport of Derkin in the far south, on the shores of the Shoban Yentror, the Imperial Sea.

  Well, not quite the whole of it, he thought sourly. Lord Colonel Feliz Gonstad, Overlord of Maldard and commander-in-chief of the XIXth, was not along for the trip. He'd gone ahead in a well-sprung carriage, with his hangers-on and aides, leaving Bren to do the work.

  Nothing new in that.

  Lights were coming up ahead, as the canal curved southward through the great riverine plain of the Olmya. Villagers with lanterns, moving like fireflies amid the apricot trees of an orchard, getting in the early harvest and not stopping for sundown. For a few minutes the strong sweet smell of fruit filled the air, and then they were through into an endless rustling of barley, stretching white beneath the moons and table-flat to the horizon. Nearly ready for the reapers.

  Nothing but corpses to be harvested where we're going, he thought, his head nodding back against the saddle he was using as a pillow.

  A woman came screaming at him out of darkness and dank heat, running toward him. Running toward him with a sword in her hand, plastered with mud and sweat and blood, looking over her shoulder down a pathway through jungle deep and rank and alien. Closer and he could see details, that she was young and dark and probably pretty when she wasn't gasping with effort and terrified. She had Tylassian markings like his on her face, the tattoos on each cheek and between the brows, despite her southron looks. His heart knew her, and his heart leapt in recognition—she shouted for him to beware—and he roared an answer.

  His shout woke him.

  Waking, the knowledge faded, slipped through the fingers of his mind as he reached for it. So did the warning she shouted; only the desperate urgency in her voice remained.

  "Not asleep, sor?" Sergeant Ddrad asked quietly.

  "Dreaming," Bren said shortly, wrapping his cloak about him. After a moment "Dreaming about women."

  The noncom grinned and sketched a half-salute. "Good luck then, sor," he said, before moving back to his own bedroll.

  Bren Morkaarin's eyes stayed open, long after his sergeant went from quiet repose to deep, resounding snores. He lay on the deck absently rubbing the medallion at his neck—old habit; the medallion was the only remembrance he had of his long-dead father. It was a soothing token and a soothing gesture, after that less-than-sweet dream.

  Bren did not believe that all dreams were omens. Most were the mind scratching itself, or the result of a bit of bad sausage or too much wine the night before.

  He wasn't sure about this one. The stink of hot jungle air hung in his nose even waking. And the girl…

  He touched his markings, thumbs to the cheeks, index fingers pressed together between his brows, sending a wordless prayer to the Three Above.

  Sleep, he told himself. The work of the day won't wait on your dreams.

  "Twenty-two hundred forty-six silver crowns, drawn on Bemmah and Daughters of Derkin," the Imperial agent said, handing over the elaborately sealed parchment.

  Karah Grenlaarin snatched the rolled document from him and looked at it closely. The stamp on the seal read "Shemro IV, of the Strekkhylfa line, Emperor by Grace of the Three" with the signature of the fisc's agent beneath it. Good as a bag of silver coins, she thought. Better, since it's easier to carry and harder to steal.

  "Done," she said.

  Godsall, but that was a lot of money. She'd gotten better than seven crowns per horse for the whole herd—and back home on the ranch in Farbluffs County, one crown was a good price for a saddle-broken four-year-old. Cash money especially. Prices had gone completely crazy with the war coming on.

  Best go before the fisc comes to his senses, she told herself. Get out of this office and out of this city. Great-Uncle Jaiwan, the busybody, would get his report on conditions down here in Derkin, for what it was worth… and Ma and Pa would get the bankers draft. The Grenlaarins could finally get that dam built on Sungren Creek and refinish the roof—and pay off the back taxes besides.

  "Father, Mother and Child witness it," she said, spitting on her hand and holding it out in the traditional deal-sealing gesture of the horse trade.

  She grinned when she saw the clerk swallow—Derkin bankers were a citified bunch. Fit to be geldings, she thought. Not much else.

  The clerk slapped palms with her, then surreptitiously wiped his hand on the hem of his frippish overtunic. Karah pressed her lips together to keep from laughing out loud, tucked the document into an inside pocket of her jacket and clattered out the door.

  Konzin wasn't waiting where he said he'd be. Karah frowned. That wasn't like him at all. She unhitched her horse, swung into her saddle and looked over the heads of the crowd for him. She thought she saw him and his horse partly hidden down a side alley, but there was no sense yelling—or chasing after him, either. A military unit of some sort was thundering toward her down the narrow street, drums and pipes making a terrible racket, and everyone around her clambered up onto the raised walks and against the walls to get out of the way.

  Karah urged Glorylad onto the walk, then watched with interest as ten hitch of big platter-hoofed draught horses lugged a cannon down the cobblestone streets. The gun was a breechloader—a fancy new bit of craftwork her uncle had told her about. The big gun rumbled between the high, whitewashed walls on its way to the docks. The huge northern horses dripped sweat and tossed their heads as they bent to the traces, and the nail-studded wheels of the field carriage clattered counterpoint to the drums.

  Karah squinted into the glare. Behind the ca
nnon, pikemen marched five abreast, heads straight forward and chins jutting; sweat ran off their noses and flushed faces and matted their hair to their heads. They looked almost as uncomfortable as the horses. Krevaulti yokels from up around Dire, she judged. She counted rows and guessed the length of the line; her estimate put their numbers at five-hundred strong. All in steel back-and-breastplates, helmets slung to their belts beside their swords, heavy packs on their backs.

  Phew! Uncle would find that bit of gossip fascinating. He was always talking about what grand warriors the bloody mad Krevaulti mountaineers were. Warriors and tinkers, she thought. In between revolts.

  Not everybody in the New Empire of Tykis liked playing second flute to the Tykissians, her own people. The Krevaulti were about the only ones who tried to do anything serious about it, though.

  The soldiers' long pikes swayed to the rip-thrip-rip of the drums and the whine of sackpipes. Sergeants with half-pikes marched at their sides, snapping orders to them and the bystanders alike. The troops went by with a swing and the crash of hobnails, and then they were gone and the crowds closed in behind them.

  Karah caught the flash of red out of the corner of her eye, and looked across the street. That was Konzin; Karah was almost certain. The man's back was to her and he was still dickering with one of the runty little Derkinoi over some piece of local tripe. But he wore a red hat She knew no one else who would taunt the gods in such outlandish garb. Karah cupped her hands to her mouth and bellowed over the noise of the crowds, "Heya! Konzin! I'm ready t' get outta here!"

  Konzin's head jerked up and around, and his eyes narrowed "A moment, madine!" He turned back to the Derkinoi. Karah waited, watching him above the bustling crowds in the street. She'd never known Konzin to be much of a shopper—she wondered what a seedy backstreet vendor had to offer that would interest him.

  The chief herdsman on the Grenlaarin ranch finished his dicker, swung into his saddle, and trotted down the street toward Karah's inn without so much as looking back at her. Karah had to fight her way through the crowds and hurry her mount over the damned cobbled road to catch up with him. She sighed. Konzin had carried a burr under his skin the whole trip—this was the first time Karah had done the trading instead of him. He wasn't happy. She knew it. But there wasn't a thing she could do about it.

  At least he'd have to admit she got a good price.

  She caught up with him. "I got seven crowns a head for the herd."

  He raised his eyebrows, then shrugged. "War prices," he said, then looked straight ahead and kept riding.

  Just be that way, then, Karah thought. It's not like I don't know they're war prices—and not like I don't know you could have done the same thing. She tried not to let him make her angry. He'd been in charge of trading the horses for the Grenlaarin ranch for a long time. She knew she had to understand it was hard for him to let go.

  She and Konzin rode in silence. Karah forced herself not to rubberneck as they moved through Derkin's narrow back streets, breasting the crowds like water at a river-crossing. Derkin was big, full of twisting streets and alleys, nearly all paved. A person could ride all day and barely cross from the north gate to the south, and many of the buildings were four and even five stories high, all stone or brick-built.

  They crossed the narrow wood bridge over an evil-smelling canal, passed one of the Temples of the Three—small, since most of the locals were still heathen—and turned off into the walled courtyard that fronted Karah's inn.

  Karah said, "Well, then. Have everyone here first light" She touched cheeks and brow—a gesture of both courtesy and dismissal. Family dignity demanded that she stay under a roof in town. Konzin would be camping with the other herders out on the outskirts. "See you tomorrow."

  "Madine," he said. He touched a finger to his brow and smiled—the first smile she'd seen on his face all day. Then he wheeled his horse around and cantered out of the courtyard.

  For all that she liked Konzin, Karah was glad to see him go. He'd been damned prickly the whole trip, and kept giving her funny looks. If he'd said she was too young to be put in charge one time, he'd said it a hundred.

  She'd shown him, though.

  She swung down from the saddle and stood gratefully in the shade of the arcade that ran around three sides of the little square. There was a fountain in the center, running into a stone horse trough and shaded by a jacaranda. She scooped her broad-brimmed leather hat full of water and dumped it over her head. Then she rested her hand for just an instant on Glorylad's breast, checking to be sure he wasn't overheated before she let him drink. Not that she'd run him hard, but Tykis' southernmost province was hotter than either of them were used to.

  He was fine. She checked his hooves, then sat on the edge of the fountain and watched him drink. The ostler peered out of the stables, and she waved him over. "Brush him good," she told the man. "Rub him down. Don't feed him till you're done, and when you do, it's to be bean mash and oats!" The man listened and nodded but didn't speak. He was one of those piebald thralls from across the sea. Karah had never been easy trusting a horse to a thrall. They were fairly common along the coast, so there was no avoiding them—still, she had little faith in work done by those who weren't freemen.

  She studied Glorylad's gait as the thrall led him off; he walked easy and straight. No limps, no fumbles. She smiled. He was the better of the two horses she'd ridden this trip, though Windrush was a solid mount, too. With a sigh, she turned, and went inside looking for food.

  Thick adobe made the common room of the inn almost cool, even in midafternoon. The room was nearly empty. In Karah's brief experience, it would stay that way until near dark, when the locals left off work to gather and drink and carouse until the early hours of the morning. Karah tossed her gear down onto one of the adobe benches, adjusted the tattered rug that covered it, and settled at a table near the wall.

  "What's going?" she shouted.

  One of the inn's workers ambled in, scratching her bare stomach. "Roast a' mutton, sliced, wit' greens," she said, speaking Tykissian with a thick Derkinoi accent; Derkin Province had only been added to the New Empire a century or so ago. "Or yestiddays roast a' pork, minced inna pie. Wit' t' same greens."

  "Today's wit'—I mean, with—wine and water," Karah said, flipping a tenth-crown bronze coin. The local coffee smelled wonderful but they brewed it thick as stew and strong enough to melt a spoon. "Keep the change," she added expansively.

  That speeded up the service considerably. Karah cut the too-sweet lowland wine with half water; more wine and less water was the rule down here in the coastal plains, unless you wanted a case of belly-fever or the runs and an expensive trip to the priest-healer. The mutton arrived, greasy and heavy with garlic and buried under tomatoes and onions.

  Southron food would give me eternal heartburn she thought, mopping the plate with a heel of loaf. With enough wine, even it wasn't unbearable, and now that everything was wrapped up—all but the boring journey home, anyway—she felt entitled. But she'd be glad to get back to real Tykissian cooking.

  Twenty-two hundred crowns, she told herself again, pouring another slug of wine-and-water into her earthenware mug. The few others in the common room were a mixed crew. Small dark locals, mostly.

  She wished she were tall and blonde like the classic Tykissians, instead of short and ruddy. A bit less enthusiasm on her ancestors' parts, she thought, and a damn sight more selectivity, and she would have been as lithe and fair and thin as she deserved. She slugged back a large draught of the wine and scowled at no one in particular. The migrations were five hundred years past, so there was nobody to complain to.

  Two of the Derkinoi scowled back. Probably resentful of the upcoming war on their kinsmen in Tarin Tseld south over the Imperial Sea. Probably they'd rather be ruled from An Tiram than from Olmya.

  Piss on them, then, she thought. Heretic-lovers.

  Over in one corner, two enormously tall black men with glossy shaven heads and sweeping white robes played some for
eign card game; Karah finally guessed them to be Shborin traders, who were notoriously standoffish. She glowered at them, as well.

  The man at the next table was Tykissian. He had thinning red hair and freckles across his snub nose—she guessed him to be midding thirty. He dressed in citified clothes, but from the look of his hands, he'd done real work in his life. He was reading a little leather-bound book, peering down his nose at it through small spectacles and eating forkfuls of meat pie at the same time.

  She noticed the man was wearing a ring with the totem head of the Running Wolves. "Evening, lodge-brother," she said.

  "Ah?" He looked over at her, and then past her, his expression puzzled. Karah flushed—she had been embarrassingly mistaken for a native several times since arriving in Derkin. But he focused on her again, and she saw his eyes flick from her ring to the three blue dots tattooed on her face.

  He touched thumb and forefinger to his own cheek marks and both together between his brows. "Good evening to you, lodge-sister; the Three be with you." He started to turn back to his book, but Karah, lighthearted from the success of her hard-driven bargain, and a bit giddy from the wine, suddenly didn't want to eat her meal alone.

  "So, lodge-brother, what do they call you…and what brings you to this hot, stinking mourye-hole of a city?" she asked the man.

  He closed his book with a faint air of regret, leaving one finger between the pages to hold his place. "I am Amourgin Thurdhad, a law-speaker of Olmya. I am here on…business."

  He had a capital-city accent, slightly pedantic to her ears; the profession explained the book, at least.

  Karah felt bold and successful at that moment. If she could outbargain the Imperial fisc, surely she could hold her own in conversation with a scholar from the capital.

  "Yah—business." She winked and raised her glass to him. "Then here's to business. Karah Grenlaarin."

  The law-speaker smiled politely, and raised his glass just off the table in recognition of her gesture, but he didn't drink. So maybe, she thought, his business hasn't been as successful as mine.