The Rose Sea

by S. M. Stirling

  That finished, he rocked back on his heels to wait for results.

  The changes were not long in appearing. First, the high color faded from the captains cheeks. Then his breathing slowed. After a few moments, the rasping and gurgling that came with each breath the First Captain took disappeared.

  Eowlie looked over her shoulder at the law-speaker and said, "I see someone. Looks to ve coming this way."

  The First Captain wasn't better yet, but he looked less likely to die, Amourgin thought. The law-speaker looked up at the girl. "How many, and how far away?"

  "One f'erson on a horse, riding slowly. You have a few minutes."

  The law-speaker waited and watched, still squatting, shifting his weight from side to side to keep his feet from falling asleep. The First Captain groaned, and moved his arms and legs—swimming motions. "Karah," he mumbled, and then something else the law-speaker couldn't understand.

  "He's waking," Amourgin said. He poured a few drops of the liquid in his flask onto his sleeve, and wiped the captain's mouth with the damp cloth.

  "Is he well again?"

  "Better." The law-speaker shrugged "He's better. Lets hope that will be good enough."

  The First Captain rolled onto his side and groaned.

  Amourgin heard the thud of horse's hooves approaching. He shoved his little tubes back into the book cover and slipped the book into his pack.

  "Can you see who it is?"

  Eowlie was still watching, crouched in the middle of the stand of shrubs. For a long time, she gave no answer.

  Then, "Karah," she said.

  "Karah?" Amourgin smiled "Then in all probability, she's the person who tied the captain's shirt to a tree."

  Eowlie growled—the sound made the hair on Amourgin's arms stand up.

  The law-speaker asked, "What is it?"

  "She's hurt."

  Amourgin swore. "I'm running out of supplies," he muttered "Already."

  Eowlie stepped out of her hiding place and waved her arms. "Karah!" she shouted. "Over here!"

  The Grenlaarin girl was close enough for Amourgin to make her out easily. He saw her wave, then sway and clutch her mount's mane with both hands. He cringed. The girl was either exhausted or severely hurt—he could think of nothing else that would make her ride so poorly.

  "Ah—more vad news," Eowlie said softly.

  The law-speaker felt the muscles in his jaw tense. "What?"

  "Tide is coming in. Very fast."

  He stood then—turned away from the captain, whose breathing had improved enough Amourgin was sure he was out of danger—and walked to Eowlie's side. She pointed.

  lines of blue slipped between the hillocks and dunes and tidepools of the lowland. Little runs of breakers rolled toward him, coming closer with every wave. Even as he watched, the sea encircled another tiny island not far away.

  He looked up. Two of the three moons rode high in the sky—Mother and Son. For the tide to be rising so quickly, the Father must be on his way. He looked at the ground under his feet—low ground. But there was no higher ground in sight.

  "Is it going to cover this island?" Eowlie wanted to know.

  Amourgin wished he'd been thinking of the tides. Or—he shook his head angrily—that he'd been thinking at all. "Can't say," he said. The water was rising fast. The edge of the oncoming water licked around Karah's horse's hooves. "We'll have to hope it doesn't. We've no time to get to higher ground."

  Bren came out of the haze he'd been in for so long. He'd been someplace hot and dangerous—he vaguely remembered that The air around him was finally cool and smelled sweet—he took a deep breath, hoping to identify the scent, but it was foreign to him. He looked down at his feet and noticed they were floating above the ground. This seemed wrong and annoying to him, but he realized it was a minor point He couldn't be bothered with trivia. Something important was about to happen in front of him.

  Fog rolled back like curtains, and on the lake in front of him—Oh, I didn't realize I was standing on the shore of a lake, he thought—something moved A boat, he decided first Or perhaps a large bird, flying low.

  He realized what he saw was a horse, galloping across the surface of the water, with Karah on his back. She charged toward him across the lake. He kept expecting her to fall in, but she didn't. Something gold gleamed in her upraised hand—gleamed with its own light. Karah shouted, "A gift from the gods, your majesty!" and threw the golden thing.

  It spun through the air, end over end, growing brighter and more radiant as it flew towards him.

  He held out his hands.

  The glorious golden thing tumbled closer, slowing as it approached.

  He grabbed for it.

  It slipped between his fingers and fell into the surface of the lake with a terrible hiss—

  —Bren shouted and sat up. The world around him was dark, illuminated only by the merry flickering of a campfire.

  Karah, Amourgin, and Eowlie all turned to stare at him. Light from the fire gave them all a ruddy glow and threw long shadows across their faces. The shadows emphasized the length of Eowlie's jaw and threw her gleaming fangs into sharp relief. Beside the wolfish woman, Karah and Amourgin held long sticks over the fire and roasted small animals speared on the tips.

  "The sleeper wakes at last," the law-speaker said, and chuckled.

  "I was beginning to think you would never wake at all," Karah added Her smile was bright, but Bren could see real concern in her eyes. He realized that some of the darkness on her face wasn't shadow. Her nose was swollen, and both her eyes bore dark bruises that spread from the bridge over the outer edges of her cheekbones.

  Bren frowned "Karah—your nose—"

  She waved a hand and laughed "Tell while wandering all over the flats looking for other people."

  Something about her laugh didn't ring true to the First Captain—something about the laugh, and about the narrowing of her eyes when she spoke. He let it pass. In private, later, he could find out where she'd gotten her bruises. For the moment, he'd act as if he believed her explanation.

  Eowlie smiled at him, too. Bren could see nothing but friendliness in her broad, toothy grin and glittering yellow eyes, but he still shivered. Those teeth seemed sharper every time he saw them. "I caught some little animals that came onto the island to escape the tide, sir," she said. "I already ate mine. Vut I caught extra, so we have some left for you."

  Bren stood. He was surprised that he felt so good. He thought he remembered being sick—but perhaps that was part of the dream. "I'm starved," he said Then he started upright.

  "My troops—"

  He stopped at the look the others gave him and sank back. The law-speaker handed him a sharpened stick and pointed to a lumpy pile of something built on several large leaves. The First Captain discovered the pile consisted of many more of the little animals the others were eating, already skinned and gutted.

  He skewered one on his stick and went to sit beside Karah. He remembered closeness between them—shared kisses and perhaps even her saving his life. He hoped that wasn't part of the dream.

  As he sat beside her, she gave him a shy smile.

  Good, he thought. Not part of the dream at all. He thought about it for a moment—thought about the implications of being in love with one of his scouts. Then he considered everything that had gone before; the army's refusal to promote him, Willek's attempt to kill him off, his situation—shipwrecked and lost and likely to die at any time—and he leaned over and kissed her low on her cheek, well away from the bruises.

  She scooted closer to him and kissed him back—but hers was no chaste peck on the cheek. She kissed him on the lips, firmly and with considerable passion.

  He got caught up in the kiss—pulled her against his chest with one arm and held her there, relishing her warmth and the firmness of her body pressed against his. Amourgin and Eowlie made comments to each other, but he ignored the joking remarks.

  He heard hissing and pulled away from the embrace to see what was c
ausing the sound. His dinner had caught fire. Appropriate, he thought. Amourgin and Eowlie laughed, and when he pulled his intended meal out of the flames, the law-speaker tossed water on it from a little flask.

  "Gods, don't waste the water!" Bren said.

  "Seawater," the law-speaker answered "We had a nice bit of woala in it, but that's gone now. Besides putting the fire out," at that, Amourgin laughed again, "the seawater adds some flavor to the meat—it's rather gamey." He put the flask down and picked up his own cooked beast, and tore strips off with his teeth.

  "Better than starving by far," Karah said.

  "I won't starve unless nothing lives within the distance I can walk," Eowlie said. Her smile was smug. "I hunt vetter than anyone—and I don't use guns or vows and arrows or nothing like that I just catch the animals with my hands." She grinned again and flexed her fingers so the claws extended They were sharp and gleaming white, with none of the paint on them Bren remembered from the first time he saw her.

  "We're lucky to have you with us," he told the odd woman, and he meant it.

  He tried his own meal and found, aside from the charcoal taste of the burned places, that it was not bad at all.

  Amourgin said, "The Mother and Son are up, but setting, and the tide is just below washing over the top of this island. I sat down and figured out the rising time on the Father. It conflicts with the Mother and the Son right now, keeping the tide from going as high as it could. Next time the Family comes around, all three are going to rise together, and this island will be under water. We need to get out of here as soon as the tide starts going out Run straight for the mainland without stopping for anything. Otherwise, we'll be trapped here—or worse, on some sorry stretch of ground even lower than this between here and the mainland."

  Karah finished swallowing the last mouthful of her beast and grabbed another one to roast "Are we even sure there is a mainland? What if we've wrecked on a cluster of low islands out in the middle of the sea, and this is all there is?"

  Amourgin shrugged. "Then next moonrise, we're all going to drown. Let's hope there's a mainland and that we can find it."

  Bren said, "I don't suppose there's a chance one of you managed to salvage an astrolabe from the ship."

  Amourgin laughed "None at all."

  The First Captain nodded. "Ah, well. It was a hope. And this is all who survived the wreck?"

  "Can't say. This is all we've found I can't believe no one else made it—but we've seen no signs. We've been watching for fires, too—hoping some of our people landed on different islands and just stayed put."

  Karah started to say something, then stopped. She stared thoughtfully into the fire, and Bren wondered what she was thinking. Finally she said, "I found the bodies of a number of the crew." She touched her nose gently and kept staring into the flames. "None alive. Found Glorylad drowned."

  "I thought that was Glorylad," Eowlie said, pointing to the horse tethered behind them, who was asleep on his feet.

  "That's Windrush." Karah got out the words, but swallowed hard when she said them. Bren saw the glitter of tears slipping down her cheeks.

  He slid an arm around her shoulders. Odds were that he would never see his own friends and comrades again—Ddrad and Mercele and the other men and women who'd served under him for the past several years. He feared them all dead.

  He could sympathize with Karah's grief, too. A horse didn't seem so important to him—but horses had always been her life. He wondered if she'd ever had time for human friends.

  "What direction will we have to go?" he asked Amourgin.

  "Tide came in from the north. Our hope of escaping it will be to run south."

  Bren nodded "So if we've reached mainland, we could be near Tarin Tseld—even near An Tiram."

  Amourgin said slowly, "It could mean that. Although this doesn't look like the Tarin Delta; from what I've heard, that's mostly mud. Could mean we're on the Spectre Islands, too. Considering the crew that was manning the ship—" He broke off the sentence, and Bren saw him shiver.

  The First Captain nodded, not liking that idea at all. "We could be just about anywhere within the Imperial Sea, I suppose." He gnawed on one of the tiny bones, cracked it, and sucked on the marrow while he thought. "Considering who—or what—sailed our ship, I suppose we can't even say for sure that we're still within the confines of the Imperial Sea. We could be anywhere."

  "The gods know," Karah said.

  Both Amourgin and Karah touched the dots on their cheeks and forehead, and quickly ducked their heads. Bren, from a far less conservative branch of the religion, merely pressed three fingers to his forehead.

  "The gods may know, but men must act in any case," he said, and the others nodded. "I'm setting watches over the tide. I'll take the first, since I've had some sleep. Eowlie, you have the second, Amourgin the third, and Karah the last."

  Karah protested. "I slept the sleep of the dead when I got back here. I feel fine now. Besides, I wasn't sick—"

  So he had been sick. He thought as much. No matter. He felt fine right then, and he intended to keep the watches short.

  "That was an order, scout," he said. He smiled when he said it, but left no room for argument.

  Karah proved she truly had learned to follow orders. She nodded and didn't say a thing. Bren was impressed.

  Willek had no need to summon a blood demon this time. The working she chose had nothing to do with demons; she would simply build an energy circle, which drew power from a single chosen target, and send it on its way. What she planned was the tiniest of spells—-unobtrusive, silent, completely lacking in flash and drama.

  If her guesses about Darkist's age and general health were anywhere near correct, it ought to kill his current body within the week. Then he'd be forced to jump to the new body—a young, healthy, magically inept body.

  She chuckled One of her spies in his court, at her behest, had sent her a little packet with a few tiny clippings of his nails and hair, a bit of his spittle dried on a piece of paper, and a single drop of his blood Willek wondered how her spy had collected that last. But Shaad Shaabin was a wonder.

  She smiled. It certainly paid to hire clever help.

  She laughed, "Darkist, now you find out what youth and cleverness can do to doddering, feeble old age."

  The ship rocked from side to side, and waves slapped against the hull. Soothing—so soothing, the pulse of the world In her cabin in the forecastle, Shemro lay in a spelled coma, eyes open but seeing nothing. The last of the Morkaarins was dead; Tarin Tseld hung on the edge of internal collapse; Darkist was doomed.

  Willek held the whole of the civilized world in her hand, and she was ready to tighten her fingers around it.

  She wove up the energy spell—a tiny swirling ring born of Willek's magic, but of Darkist's body. At first it was so energy starved it flickered with its own light, but she slowed it down, made it invisible—and then sent it streaking over the sea on a path to the wretched old man.

  "By the smallest of magics, the mightiest fall," she whispered.

  Then she rose, and left her cabin to walk among the crew. It was her job to encourage them, to spur them to greater efforts while they repaired the fleet—and it was her desire to win their admiration and their loyalty. When Shemro suffered her sad demise—soon, wonderfully soon—Willek wanted none to question her authority.

  Darkist cackled over the vast, black circle of a huge bloodstone. A tiny circle was carved out of one side of it, along the thick edge—the missing circle might have been a bit of decorative work… but it wasn't.

  "Like calls to like," Darkist whispered, stroking his fingers over the smooth, cold surface. "Like calls to like," he said again, and touched the place where the circle had been carved out. The stone glowed, and the circle glowed brighter. Out of the stone, a dark red mist oozed, and coalesced on the stones surface into the fat, shapeless mass of the blood demon.

  "Has she fed you well, then?" Darkist asked the spawn of hell.

  "Yes
, master. I am rich with her blood."

  "Give me a drop of it."

  The demon shrank back from Darkist's reaching hand. Silly, stupid creature, he thought, to begrudge me a single drop of blood. Fire crackled from his fingers, and the demon's blood-engorged tentacles hissed and blackened. "One drop," he said again. He could not take from the demon, but he could make it want to give.

  "Yes, master," it finally whimpered. It excreted a single drop of blood onto the flat surface of the stone and backed away as fast as it could, its tentacles flopping and squishing as it moved.

  Darkist despised the blood demon. It was weak and cowardly—but in some circumstances, it was very useful. He scraped the blood off of the stone into a tiny crystal vial, and told the demon, "Go back now. Go back and wait on her every wish. But whatever you tell her, be sure to come afterwards and tell me."

  The blood demon oozed back into the surface of the stone, until no sign was left that he'd ever been there.

  Then Darkist held up the sparkling vial to the rays of two moons. "The time has come to send you a final gift, my dear girl," he told the tiny container. "I send havoc to you and your people, and even the ground you stand on, since you skulked away from battle with your tail between your legs."

  "Like calls to like," he whispered to the blood, and hurried out of the bloodstone room and down one hall, and then another, and then a third, until he reached the salt baths. The tide was high, and the baths were full to the next highest level. When the moons pulled the tides out, other baths, carved in lower levels of stone, remained full.

  Darkist stripped, then lowered himself into the seawater. He sat on the carved stone step, feeling the power of the sea swelling around him. He touched the surface of the water, and said softly, "Live, O terror from the deeps, O avatar of the face of the Thousand Faces; creature that is the soul of the madness of watery graves; monster with the strength of the sea. Come forth and serve me."

  The surface of the water swirled and darkened, and then began to swell and bulge in front of him. A watery monster rose up, and howled with a drowned and bubbling howl, and then sank back into the pools until only its liquid head broke the smooth surface.