by David Drake
“Amusing, isn’t it?” said Gaur, pinching another fly out of the canister. “They must be alive, you see. My little pet may look like a bowl of water, but it’s only interested in living prey.”
He dropped the second fly.
Even Ilna who was sober or nearly so saw Chalcus’ movement only as a blur. His right hand came up from his sash with the curved dagger and swept across the table. Lamplight turned the steel edge into a shimmer of gold. The stroke was past before anyone else moved.
He slid the blade back into its scabbard.
Gaur snarled like a beast and leaped backward, knocking over his chair. “Ha!” Lusius shouted. He flung down the cup in his right hand and covered his eyes with his left forearm, as if he couldn’t be hurt if he didn’t see the threat.
There were two tiny splashes in the liquid: Chalcus had cut the fly in half as it fell. The portions sank to the bottom of the bowl: as the wizard had claimed, the livign fluid ate only live food.
Chalcus stood with an easy motion; Ilna rose with him, her fingers knotting a pattern swiftly.
“My pardon, Commander,” Chalcus said. “I fear I’ve drunk so much that I might become discourteous were I to stay. We’ll join you in the morning for a visit to the reefs to see the Rua.”
He offered Ilna his arm; they turned and walked out. The soldiers were babbling at increasing volume, but through that Ilna continued to hear the sound of Gaur’s bestial snarls.
***
Cashel threw the jewel against the slab of bare rock behind him; it should’ve been the mouth of the tunnel by which he’d left Lord Bossian’s manor, but by starlight at least it looked as much a part of the mountainside as any other. A stunted cedar tree had draped surface roots across one side of it.
This ruby shattered with the same silent flare as the first one. A tiny image of Kakoral scurried up, then down the rock face like it was a horizontal tabletop. Finally the homunculus paused and glared at Cashel.
“I want to go back to my—” Cashel began. He almost said, “home,” but he didn’t really know where that was any more. “I want to go back to my friends. Point me the way.”
Still without speaking, the sparkling homunculus made the sweeping introductory gesture of a showman. The shadowed rock became transparent, a window onto the cellar in which Cashel had seen Kotia’s mother with her demon lover. Laterna sat on a stool, reading from a thin beechwood plate which she held so that the light of the hearth fell on it. She was alone until the door behind her opened.
Laterna turned to glance over her shoulder. Her face had the look of an ivory carving; it became even harder, even colder.
The man who’d entered was small and trim, fit-looking rather than muscular. His flowing robes had vertical stripes of white alternating with many colors. In the dark cellar the white gave off light, illuminating both the man and his immediate surroundings.
As before, Cashel watched a silent pantomime. The man gestured curtly toward the door with his left hand. He was as angry as the woman, and far more busily so. Laterna flicked out the fingers of her free hand as if she were shooing a fly. She returned to her reading.
The man’s robes darkened. If her face had been ivory, his was a waxen death mask. He stepped forward, raising his right arm. He’d been holding a narrow-bladed ice axe along his thigh. He brought it down, spike forward.
Laterna leaped from her stool, flinging the beechwood plaque in the air. It bounced off the ceiling and spun back to lie face down on the black tile floor. A corner had chipped, but the sheet was mostly whole. Its back was decorated with a gilt sun in the center and a symbolic figure in each corner.
The woman tripped and fell forward. Her arms and legs jerked, the left side at a quicker tempo than the right. The axe handle waggled for a moment like a pigtail. The body arched, then lay flaccid.
The man hadn’t moved since he struck Laterna. Now he raised both hands to his face and stroked his eyebrows with his fingertips. As he started forward, Cashel’s window onto the past began to fade.
The last thing Cashel saw before rock replaced the images was the hearth that Laterna had been reading in front of. In its glowing embers, he saw the outlines of Kakoral’s face.
The homunculus bowed mockingly to Cashel. It held up both hands, then brought them together overhead in a soundless clap. Streams of red wizardlight curled from each fingertip, spreading into a net that converged on Cashel’s chest.
With a cackle of laughter, the little creature vanished. Wizardlight continued to play across Cashel’s—
Oh. Not his chest. The lump of coal blazed with cold scarlet light to which the close-woven wool was transparent. Cautiously Cashel reached down the throat of his tunic and brought the coal out. He sat on his haunches, examining it with a care he hadn’t taken in Lord Bossian’s workroom. The wizardlight slowly faded.
Like any other piece of coal, this one had fracture lines. Even if it’d been whole while it lay in the ground, the process of smashing chunks out of the seam would’ve twisted it, spreading tiny cracks from where a leaf stem or a grain of sand had been trapped in the mass.
Cashel saw the patterns with great clarity despite having no light but that of the unfamiliar stars. Maybe there was a map? Or....
He squeezed with his thumb and forefinger at opposite corners of the irregular lump. Another man would have used a hammer, but steady pressure was enough if you saw the fracture lines as he did, clear as furrows in a fresh-plowed field; and if you were strong enough.
Cashel had always been strong enough.
The lump popped faintly, shearing along a seam too fine for human eyes. Cashel lifted the upper half, holding the lower portion in the palm of his left hand. Inside was a cavity not much bigger than a walnut. Something stirred in it; then, very carefully it extended a long hind leg and splayed its webbed toes.
There was a toad within the block of coal. It was still alive.
The toad turned its head, looking up at Cashel with one eye, then the other. It drew its outstretched leg back under it.
“It must have been a very long time,” the toad said in a rusty voice. “Tell me—who is the King of Kish in this day?”
Chapter 12
Commander Lusius’ Defender was similar enough to the Flying Fish that they might have been built in adjacent slips. Ilna hadn’t liked travelling on the Flying Fish, but it was as clean as you could expect of a wooden box that carried so many men.
The Defender was stinkingly filthy. Even Freya, the wife of Ilna’s uncle and as lazy a slattern as ever was born, would have said the ship was disgusting.
Ilna smiled faintly. It would’ve been embarrassing if a man she disliked as much as she did Lusius turned out to share her passion for cleanliness. Not that she’d foreseen much danger of that.
A seawolf was following close astern. It was a big brute, twice the length of a tall man. It swam with lazy sweeps of its tail, back and forth.
Chalcus chatted in the stern with Lusius as one man to another. As one pirate to another, very possibly, so Ilna had made her way to the far bow where her presence wouldn’t constrain the discussions. Like her, Chalcus was gathering information which would fit into a pattern—eventually.
Besides, standing in the bow meant she breathed the sea air instead of the Defender’s stench.
The fishing fleet was in sight, many handfuls of boats whose crews were a few men apiece. Though they were no more than half the size of the Bird of the Tide, they had small central cabins; a skiff was tied to the stern of each one. The crews groped over the sides with long poles.
The Sea Guards rowed the Defender, cursing, sweating, and fouling one another, but moving the vessel forward nonetheless. Most people weren’t very good at their jobs; Ilna wasn’t surprised to find that was true of oarsmen as surely as it was plowmen or weavers. It was neither accident nor charity that caused other women to bring the yarn they’d spun to Ilna, who did the weaving for all Barca’s Hamlet. For the most part people arranged things so that
a lot of them did the same thing. That way it got done well enough that everybody survived; more or less, and for a time.
A crack crew of men chosen and trained by Chalcus could do much better than these Sea Guards managed, but they were good enough. There was only one Chalcus; and one Ilna, for that matter.
And one Prince Garric, Ilna was quite sure. They each had their place in the pattern Someone was weaving.
“The shallows are just ahead!” cried the lookout clinging to the masthead. Neither the spar nor the sail were aboard, but the Defender’s mast was stepped to provide a vantage point. Lusius hadn’t bothered to fit a platform, though. The sailor shinnied up unaided and clung to the stay rope with his legs wrapped around the pole. “We’re entering the shallows!”
Chalcus and the Commander walked forward, Lusius in the lead because there wasn’t room enough for two to walk abreast on the catwalk between the oarbenches. He carried a light buckler in his left hand.
“The Commander says that the bottom rose into these shallows when the Rua appeared for the first time,” Chalcus called cheerfully, indicating the water with a wave fo his hand. “I’ve seen such a shade only once, in a lagoon far to the south.”
The railing didn’t extend to the far bow; Ilna touched a forestay and leaned over. Though clear, the sea had a violet cast and seemed to be no deeper than the height of a tall man. Pinkish sea lilies waved their jointed tentacles; holes for the breathing tubes of clams pocked the sand covering most of the bottom. She saw no fish.
“It doesn’t look like the water I saw on the way north from Donelle,” Ilna said, speaking for the sake of politeness rather than because she thought she had any useful knowledge to add. “I’ve never seen plants like these either.”
“Plants?” repeated Lusius. “Not a one of them, mistress! All these are animals, whatever they look like.”
Rincip, the one-eyed man who commanded the Sea Guards and acted as Lusius’ chief lieutenant, snarled an order from the stern. Ilna couldn’t understand the words, but the crew seemed to. The rowers of the upper bank brought their oars aboard and began arming themselves with weapons stored under the walkway. Most of them strung bows, short but stiff-looking.
“I’ve got Guards aboard the fishing boats too,” Lusius said, “but they’re not much use—as you’ll see, I shouldn’t wonder. Sometimes they’ll keep the Rua away till the Defender can come up, but mostly they’re just there to make sure the men are really bringing up the shell. The bloody cowards are afraid that if they make a good haul, they’ll be attacked!”
The Defender continued toward the fishing boats, driven by the lower bank of oarsmen. Though they were obviously trying to keep together, the boats had drifted some ways apart. A man couldn’t shout from one side of the straggle and be understood on the other.
“What happens if the Rua attack before the Defender joins the fishing fleet?” Chalcus asked, his voice a little flatter than usual. He and Ilna had expected to go out at first light when the fishing fleet did, but the warship wasn’t ready till midmorning. If Chalcus hadn’t been careful, his tone would’ve held a sneer for the indiscipline of the Commander’s force.
“Oh, they never do that,” Lusius said, scanning the heavens. “They’ve no reason to attack till the boats have a good load of shell, so we sleep in ourselves.”
The sea had become even shallower than when Chalcus called Ilna’s attention to it, and the bottom now was coral. She still didn’t see fish, but there were any number of odd-looking creatures both crawling and attached to the rock. Among them were the little belemites, walking on clumps of tentacles and dragging their brilliant shells behind.
The reason that patrol vessels wobbled so unpleasantly was that they drew very little water, but even so Ilna wondered if the Defender would grind a hole in her hull on the coral. As shallow as this was she could probably stand on the bottom and breathe even though she couldn’t swim, but it would be a very long walk to dry land.
“I’d thought your Red Wizard might be with us today,” Chalcus said, blocking the sun with his left hand as he surveyed the upper sky. “Struggling with the wizard-demons as he assures us he does.”
The Commander looked at him sharply, thought there’d been nothing of open mockery in Chalcus’ tone. “Gaur has his sanctum in the castle,” he said, still frowning slightly. “He works there. Never fear, he’s doing whatever he can.”
“When do the—” Ilna said, but she swallowed the remainder of the sentence, “—Rua arrive.” She suddenly understood what the dots Chalcus was watching really were. “I see,” she corrected herself. “The Rua have been here all along.”
“Aye, the devils!” Lusius said with real venom in his voice. “They pick their time, too. They must have eyes like hawks!”
The Defender passed within a stone’s throw of a fishing boat, close enough that Ilna got a good look at what they were doing. Two men used small nets on the end of poles to scoop belemites out of the coral. The little shellfish didn’t move fast enough to evade the nets, but they were still hard to winkle out from between the coral and hard-shelled anemones. When a fisherman succeeded, he whisked the belemite aboard and dropped it into a large wickerwork basket in front of the deckhouse.
The third man in the boat was a Sea Guard with a strung bow and three arrows stuck through his sash. He watched with a morose expression as the Defender sloshed past.
Now that Ilna had recognized the dots in the high heaven as winged men circling, it was she who noticed when their motion shifted. “Something’s changed!” she said. “The Rua are diving, or....”
The Rua dipped, then rose instead of plunging down on the fishing fleet. They’d modified their ceaseless circling, but that didn’t mean they were attacking.
“They’re dropping something!” Chalcus cried. “They’ve each one let something go as they dived!”
Rincip shouted angry orders; the flutist blowing time for the rowers in the stern swung into a faster tempo. Both helmsmen leaned into their tillers; with only one bank of oars manned, the Defender didn’t accelerate quickly enough to heel the outside—starboard—steering oar out of the water even in a sharp turn.
“They drop chunks of volcanic glass,” Lusius explained grimly. “Big chunks, some as long as your forearm, and the edges sharper’n knifeblades. From that height, they can stave in the decking when they hit.”
“But can they hit?” Ilna said, frowning. “Surely the Rua can’t really aim from that far up?”
“Can’t they?” said Lusius. “They’ll split your eyeball if you’re fool enough to stand watching it come at you!”
With a curl of his lip he said to Chalcus, “Tell me, captain—will you fill our demons up there with arrow fletching?”
“That I cannot,” Chalcus admitted easily. “And do your Rua reach down long nets and snare the shell from your boats, now?”
The crew—the two fisherman and the archer as well—off the stern of a boat that’d drifted to the northern fringe of the fleet. The Sea Guard swam in a noisy crawl, keeping his head above water till he reached the skiff. The fishermen couldn’t swim, so they pulled themselves hand over hand along the painter.
Four Rua dived like stooping hawks. The Defender continued to wallow forward, but Ilna could see that the Rua would reach the boat long before the patrol vessel came within bowshot.
The chunks of glass smashed into the vessel with the sharp crack of lightning bolts. Shards flew in all directions, catching the sun. A broken plank lifted and spun over the side. Ilna nodded, now understanding why the crew had abandoned the vessel before the missiles struck. Flying pieces would’ve badly gashed anybody on deck, and she was quite sure that each missile hit within a handsbreadth of where a man had been standing.
There was a stir behind her. The Sea Guards were lifting wicker shields like siege mantlets out of the hull. Ilna eyed them critically. The woven willow-splits would stop missiles like the ones the Rua were dropping and cushion the impacts besides, but she didn’t s
ee how the men on the narrow deck expected to fight with all this defensive truck in the way.
Well, that was probably the answer: the Sea Guards didn’t expect to fight, any more than the archer aboard the boat that’d been attacked did. Lusius and his men were putting on a show—for the fishermen as well as for her and Chalcus, the spies who Prince Garric had sent. The last thing Lusius really wanted was to defeat the winged men; they alone justified his continued power as Commander of the Strait.
The Rua came out of their dive by arching their chests as if they’d plunged into water, not air; their wings spread only after their bodies had started to curl upward. Quicksilver sunlight danced over the vanes which stiffened the wings’ thin membranes.
“Beware to starboard!” Chalcus shouted toward the stern. Because the vessel being attacked was a little off the port bow, Ilna hadn’t been paying attention to what was happening on the right side of the ship. Neither had the Defender’s officers, apparently, because the fishing boat a stone’s throw ahead of them couldn’t possibly get clear despite the desperate efforts of the two fishermen on their oars and the Sea Guard who screamed and waved his arms toward the patrol vessel.
Rincip was gabbling something Ilna couldn’t understand—she doubted anybody else could, either—and Lusius bellowed, “Sister eat your livers, you fools!” to the fishermen. The men clogging the Defender’s deck raised their own racket, trying to see what was happening or just trying to learn from somebody else. None of that was going to help.
“Back port oars!” Chalcus called in a voice that could’ve doubled for a rock drill.
Only about half the rowers obeyed, and even those didn’t all react at the same time. Nonetheless dragging blades and fouled oars pulled the Defender enough to the left that she didn’t smash straight into the fishing boat. A bow oar struck the boat’s stern; the shaft broke just above the blade, and from the scream under Ilna’s feet the loom must’ve slammed into the oarsman’s chest hard enough to break ribs. That was a cheap alternative to a crash that could’ve sunk both vessels.