by John Dalmas
Before going down to the carriage I'd hired, I looked out my living room window—I have an upper floor apartment—and saw the university burning. Guns were banging somewhere not too far off. And as for the last departmental rumor I'd heard—probably true, considering the source—Kelthos Province was in full revolt, some imperial police units there had been massacred, and the provincial constabulary was in mutiny and besieging the Kaitmar Military Compound.
I don't know how all this will end, but I fear it can never get back to the way it was.
Unless perhaps the fleet comes sailing back into Larvis Harbor. I most earnestly hope it does. But even if that happens . . . I don't know. I'm afraid that things may have gone too far.
Seventy-Seven
That day Tassi Vermaatio was more animated than he'd been for decades. Not only did he come down from the penthouse roof; he peered into the faces of disciples, peeked under the lid of the cookpot, dipped a finger into the bubbling contents with no sign of discomfort or damage, licked it to taste, smiled, nodded, smiled some more, went outside and squatted beside a planter to sniff, touch, examine. Then he went back up on the roof again, laughing.
He'd come back into the world, as if to refamiliarize himself with it.
But all of yesterday, he and Panni had continued unmoving on the penthouse roof. In midmorning a recent disciple, a boy in his mid-teens just back from an errand, climbed the ladder to see if there was anything he could do for the two sages. Neither showed any awareness of him.
The boy had lived in a monastery briefly, and had seen masters in trance; he was used to near totality of transcendence. But these two beweirded him this morning: Their eyes were not simply unfocused, unseeing. They looked as if there was nothing left behind them.
As for himself, he was beginning to feel drowsy. They must be alive, he insisted as he scrambled down the ladder. They still sit upright.
Sleepiness intensified abruptly as his feet found the surface below the lowest rung. Shuffling, he entered the penthouse. Everyone there was in trance, save one who was just arranging his mat by the wall as if to nap. The boy barely managed to roll out his own mat and lay down on it before he fell asleep.
In the monasteries that morning, no masters strolled the aisles with long batons. They all sat in trance. There were no resonant Hrums, no movement, no sounds at all. Throughout all Theedalit, everyone who could was in trance or asleep. Shopkeepers lay down in back rooms or amidst their merchandise and slept. Hansom drivers dozed on their seats as soon as they could unload their yawning fares. People who had no choice but to move about, did so unalertly. Fires dwindled in forges. Pottery wheels stood still. At his work table, Brokols sat with his head on his forearms, mouth open loosely, his breathing regular but slow.
To a lesser degree it was true in the Djezes too, and in Almeon. At sea, sullsi and serpents drowsed on the surface, and no sarrka molested them.
* * *
Brokols and Juliassa's servants, a middle-aged couple, normally went home after supper, and the newlyweds fended nicely for themselves in the evenings. Which came much sooner now than in early summer, and could be rather chilly for sitting in the garden, even as far south as Theedalit. So they sat at opposite sides of a table in their sitting room. Juliassa had returned to her project of writing down stories that Sleekit and K'sthuump had told her. Brokols was working on a project, diagramming and making lists.
The pull-bell jangled above their front door, and he got to his feet, crutching briskly off to answer.
Juliassa heard his near shout: "Eltrienn! My, it's good to see you! Come in! Come in! Juliassa, it's Eltrienn!"
She cleared her pen tip and capped her inkwell, then hurried to greet their guest. Eltrienn was grinning broadly. "So!" he said to Juliassa, and embraced her. "I turn my back and look what happens!"
He'd hardly blinked at her scar. It was far less conspicuous than it had been, though still plainly visible.
He turned to Brokols. "I got in late yesterday and had a good night's sleep. Then this morning I stopped at the Fortress to see if you were there. I wondered if you'd had anything to do with what happened to the Almaeic Fleet, and they told me all about it. Well, not all I'm sure, but the main features. I wasn't smart enough to ask if you were still at your old address. I had to go and find out for myself. Bostelli told me where you are, and that you two were married."
"Why don't we go in the parlor and sit," Brokols said. "You may know what we've been doing, but I'm afraid we know nothing about your activities. No one was talking about them. Perhaps no one knew."
"Would you like something?" Juliassa asked. "Wine? Cheese?"
Eltrienn was still grinning. "By all means. Both. And I promise not to say anything worth hearing till you're back."
She left for the pantry, and Eltrienn looked Brokols up and down. "So you did it! And she looks happy! That's good, that's good. I'll have to tell you, I was surprised. You were so, so un-Hrummean."
Brokols grinned back. "In your Hrummean idiom, I was something of a stick. Still am, I suppose, to a degree. But it's a condition that rather easily reduces, living in Hrumma. Especially with Juliassa."
Eltrienn laughed. "You must have shed quite a bit of it before she agreed to marry you. She's always been, or always was, a bit impulsive, but she's also smart. Wouldn't have agreed to marry someone she wouldn't be comfortable with. Or who couldn't have her the way she is.
"By the way. How is she? I saw a rather impressive scar."
"I'll let her tell you. We have a lot of talking to do, all of us."
They heard her feet in the uncarpeted hall, and turned to the door. She carried a cutting board with cheese and knife, and a bottle of wine. Then she got glasses from a cabinet and poured.
"So," said Brokols, "what did they tell you about our sink-the-fleet project?"
"Well, they said that after you and Reeno had developed a formula for gunpowder, and gotten grenade production underway, you'd come up with an idea to make what they referred to as 'mines,' like grenades as big as wine urns"—he gestured to indicate size—"that would blow a huge hole in a ship's bottom. That you took three schooners of them to Haipoor l'Djezzer and blew up the fleet at anchor there. That sullsi attached them to the hulls, underwater, and clockwork set them off after you were safely done."
He laughed again. "Simple enough to say, but how in Hrum's name did you ever pull it off?"
Brokols grinned. "Well, first of all, I didn't take them to Haipoor. When the time came, I was left here in Theedalit with my broken leg. Juliassa was in charge of actually destroying the fleet."
Juliassa told Eltrienn the whole story then, all but the rape, including Tirros's attempt to murder her, of Sleekit killing him, and of his burial at sea. Juliassa still trembled a bit, telling it, and when she'd finished, Eltrienn exhaled gustily through pursed lips.
"A person might be excused for wondering how Tirros got that way. Probably came into this life like that."
They'd almost neglected the wine, a dark and rather full-bodied vintage. Now Eltrienn refilled his glass. "I suppose it's my turn to tell." He chuckled. "It doesn't start out like much, but it had a considerable climax."
He described it all, from the landing at Agate Bay to his activities at Theedalit. "At about noon on the day we left the vicinity of Haipoor, Vessto told Killed Many we needed to speed up, that the southern army was getting close. That if we didn't move fast, they'd catch us between themselves and the army of the Haipoor District. Well, none of us wanted to find out what would happen if they did. The Haipoor forces might or might not consider us as friends; there'd already been some nasty little skirmishes when the tribesmen tried to go back through Gorrbian lines to their own camp. But to the southern army, beyond a doubt, we'd be a swarm of barbarian raiders.
"And Killed Many and his people had come to realize that an army of five thousand really wasn't very big after all, not in the open by daylight. So he never questioned Vessto, just had his signalman blow the signal, and the w
hole barbarian army began to jog. We jogged till midday, with a couple of short ten-minute breathers, staying on the north side of the Hasannu. The river.
"Finally Vessto said it was safe to slow down. I wondered at the time if his having had less than two hours rest had anything to do with that. But a little while later we could see a long train of dust, far off to the southeast, that had to be the southern army on the military road from Kammenak. It would hit the river behind us a ways. We seemed to be safe.
"At the next break, I said goodbye to Vessto and Killed Many. I'd decided I wanted to get home the quickest way possible, and that was through the isthmus to Kammnalit, where I'd be able to get a kaabor from the army. First I curled up by a haystack and slept till after dark. Then I started hiking, hard. I followed the military road most of the way, and made the two hundred-plus miles to the isthmus, on foot, in six nights on short rations. Comes from living with the Innjoka for all those weeks. During daylight I hid out and rested; got so I could doze instantly when I wanted.
"And I didn't have to hike all the way to Kammnalit. The army was already back at the north end of the isthmus, rebuilding the strong points, and I got a kaabor there. It took me six more days to get here, with a change of kaabors at Kammnalit."
He chuckled again. "The Gorballis left their cannons not far down the isthmus, where they'd been when we opened the dam. I knew what they were at first sight, even lying on their sides the way they were. I'm told they never fired them after the first two days, and they must have had a terrible time pulling them up the canyon as far as they had—rocky and rutted as it was. When they'd pulled out, they hadn't even righted them; just poured melted lead down their openings.
"I can't figure out why they made the wheels the way they did. They weren't much more than a foot in diameter, and ten inches wide. I'd have made wheels four feet high; they would have worked a lot better."
Brokols smiled. "Kryger no doubt designed them that way on purpose, and they must have followed his design exactly. With wheels like those, they'd never get them back to fight the Imperial Army. And I'll bet his design called for heavier barrels than they needed, too."
Brokols straightened. "So. What will you do next?"
"Enjoy three weeks leave. And then—I'm being posted as deputy commander of intelligence here! With the rank of major. An office job; it'll give me a chance to find some nice reckless young lady and court her.
"What about you?"
Brokols laughed. "I'm not really cut out to be a soldier. Of course, most people aren't."
He turned serious then. "The threat from Almeon isn't over, you know. What we won was time. Probably quite a lot of it, hopefully enough to prepare. I'll be working with Venreeno and a team he's assembling, to build a rifle, the shoulder gun you saw at Haipoor. We'll need them in large numbers. And cannons that can be set on the headlands to defend the firth, and small, mobile cannons for the army.
"I hate to say it, but things will have to change in Hrumma. And in the Djezes too, of course. I still have most of a small casket of the emperor's gold and jewels, and I'm going to start a college in Theedalit. To begin the teaching of Almaeic knowledge. If we stay as we are here, the emperor will have us yet, sooner or later."
Eltrienn nodded slowly. What Elver was saying made him uncomfortable, as if something dangerous was hidden there. Yet it seemed unarguably true, and he felt things stirring vaguely in his mind. To do with Gorrbul. And the barbarians.
"If you say so," he replied, and pulled his attention to Juliassa. "And you. What do you have planned?"
She smiled. "I'm still looking at a possibility; I haven't even talked with Elver about it yet. I want to be certain myself before I do."
* * *
When Eltrienn had gone, Juliassa refilled her husband's glass. "Dear," she said, "tomorrow I'd like us both to go and thank Panni for what he did for my face." Unasked, Panni had come to their home, laid his hand on the deep and vivid scar, and looked at her. Then both of them had seemed to disconnect from life for a long minute, standing blank and motionless, even to their eyes. When he took his hand away, the angry color was gone, and instead of a deep crease, all that was left was a white line of scar tissue.
It had awed Elver, and for the first time he began really seriously to think that there might be something to this belief in Hrum. Afterward though, he decided that the credit really belonged to Panni. Hrum or not, Panni was the one who'd done this thing.
"I thought you thanked him quite nicely at the time," Brokols said. "Especially after you'd looked in a mirror. But if you'd like, I'm quite willing."
"I would like. And I didn't know then that the nightmares would be gone too. Besides, I'd like to ask him something."
"Ah." About what she'd been so privately pondering, he supposed. "Very well. Right after breakfast?"
She nodded, then kneeling by his chair, embraced and kissed him.
After that she picked up the cheese and kitchen items and took them away. Meanwhile Elver crutched into his wireless room and did something he hadn't done before; he called Glembro Dixen at Haipoor n'Seechul. And told him what had happened to the fleet, not saying how or specifying his own role.
It wasn't new to Dixen, who it turned out had monitored wireless messages on the night of the sinking and intercepted others on ensuing days, from the fleet admiral and CIC across the ocean to the ISB in Larvis Royal.
He knew parts of the story that Brokols didn't, including the execution of Kryger and the imminent destruction of the invasion army; the last message had said it was a matter of hours at best before they were all dead or captured. That had been days ago.
Since then, Dixen had managed an appointment as advisor to King Labdallu, and been given two lovely wives. The ex-ambassadors agreed to stay in touch as long as their wireless equipment remained functional. It seemed to Brokols that Dixen and Djez Seechul might play an important part in what had to be done before another fleet arrived from Almeon.
* * *
Brokols and Juliassa went first to Tassi's penthouse, and learned that Panni had moved back to his cave, so they'd borrowed saddle kaabors at the palace and started out. Now, riding along the mildly upsloping ridge crest, Brokols and Juliassa could see far out over the ocean. The summer monsoon was well past, and the footfalls of their mounts raised puffs of dust. The sun stood at noon, not high as in early summer, but warm enough, even given the light seabreeze ruffling the empty seedheads of the thigh-deep grass.
They didn't find Panni at his cave. The man who met them said the sage was meditating somewhere along the ridge. He wasn't though. He was walking, looking out to sea, and when they spotted him, he turned as if he'd felt a touch, and waved. Brokols drew his crutch from the saddle boot, and they dismounted, leaving their kaabors to graze with reins trailing. Together they walked to meet Panni.
"We went to Tassi's to find you," Juliassa told him. "We hadn't known you'd moved."
"Yes. Tassi and I had finished what we were doing."
"What was it? That you were doing?"
"Two things. One, we were influencing the war."
Brokols' eyebrows popped up. "Influencing the war?"
A grin wreathed the sunbrowned face. "Did not things go well? Very few mistakes? Luck remarkably good?"
"One can hardly argue with that. Things with that many factors impinging almost never go as planned." Still Brokols didn't let himself believe it then. "What was the second thing?"
The eyes grinned too. "Do you not remember?"
"Remember? What do you mean?"
"Was there a day you slept? The middle part of one? Recently?"
"Why, yes. Last Foursday. I couldn't stay awake, although I almost never nap. I've heard other people comment, too; they'd had the same sort of experience. It was as if something had blown in on the air. Some sleeping powder."
Panni laughed and looked at Juliassa expectantly. She nodded.
"I was practicing a dance for Harvest Festival," she said, "when suddenly the grass
looked so inviting I had to lie down on it. I slept for about two hours. What was it?"
"Hrum called a great meeting. Everyone was there. You, me . . . all humans, the sullsi, the serpents . . ."
"Wait a minute," Brokols interrupted. "Where was this meeting?"
The clear old eyes twinkled at them. "On the other side of reality."
Brokols simply stared, nonplussed.
"And there were beings there I hadn't been aware of before, that run on two legs, with scales instead of skin or fur, great teeth like the sarrho, and hands with claws. They live in a land across the ocean, but not the one you came from. A vast land, I believe."
Brokols stared. "The sauroids. They hunt in packs. Close as it is, we've never settled on that continent, because of them. Them and the climate, and the harsh land itself."
He frowned. "But how could I have been there if I was sleeping at home?"