Red Tide

by Marc Turner

Kolloken went back to his drawing, sketching in the line of the woman’s jaw. “Sacrosanct’s still standing, if that’s what you’re worried about. Gill Treller’s still haunting that tower of his. Though I reckon he might be getting a bit lonely, what with Borkoth and Amerel having come over to the emperor.”

  Senar covered his surprise. Borkoth’s defection he’d known about, but now Amerel too? It shone a new light on the woman’s presence in the Rubyholt Isles—though as to what that light revealed, Senar had no idea. “Were any more Guardians sent through the Merigan portal after I was?”

  “No.”

  “Meaning Avallon first found out about the stone-skins shortly after I left.”

  Kolloken said nothing.

  “Who else knows about them? Has the emperor told the Senate? The Black Tower?”

  “Of course. It ain’t the sort of thing you can keep secret for long.”

  Though doubtless Avallon had given it his best shot. “And have any Guardians returned since the news broke?” Before Senar went through the portal, the slide of the Guardian order had seen several of his once colleagues disappear into self-imposed exile. With the Augeran shadow now hanging over Erin Elal, perhaps some would return to the fold.

  “One or two crawled out of the woodwork, yes.”

  “Who?”

  “Myr Mellisan, Jeng Elesar.”

  Senar smiled. Names to remind him of how much he missed home. “Jeng was sent through the Merigan portal before me.”

  “Yeah. Seems it took him to one of the islands in the Southern Reach. Could have made it back to Arkarbour in a few weeks, but for some reason he only shows up last month—after he heard about the stone-skins.”

  “You think he should have hurried back for another go through the portal? Maybe next time he’d have got lucky and come out on the other side of the world.”

  Kolloken shrugged. “Would’ve been a risk worth taking. When the stone-skins come, we might need the portals to move men around.”

  “And how many Breakers have been sent through the gateways?”

  Kolloken did not answer.

  Through the window Senar saw Airey falling behind off the port quarter. The heat in the cabin was building, and he wiped a hand across his forehead. “How did Avallon first find out that the stone-skins were coming?”

  “From one of your Guardian friends. Nova Quan. She was scouting a Tresson tribe when they got a surprise visitor.”

  “The Augerans are trying to stir up trouble among the clans?”

  “Wouldn’t you?”

  He had a point. Since the Exile, Erin Elal had assimilated a dozen different peoples into their empire, and it wouldn’t take much encouragement for those peoples to rise up against their conquerors. “What about the Kalanese? Any suggestion the Augerans have made contact with them yet?”

  Kolloken had to think long and hard about the answer. Or perhaps he was thinking that he’d already revealed too much, for rather than answering the question, he said, “When I met our ambassador in Olaire, he mentioned you’d come round to see him earlier that day, asking for news. Said he was surprised you hadn’t dropped by sooner to pay your respects.”

  “Imerle was watching me. She’d have thought I was a spy if I did.”

  “But I’m guessing she got less watchful after she died, eh?”

  It was Senar’s turn not to answer.

  “The way the ambassador told it, you’re Mazana’s right-hand man now. That about right?”

  If so, no one had bothered to tell the emira. “Having Mazana’s ear has its advantages,” the Guardian said. “After Dragon Day, her first thought was that the stone-skins had done her a favor. She saw their sabotage of the Hunt not as an attack against the League, but as a move aimed at stopping the Storm Lords from interfering in a future war between Erin Elal and Augera.”

  “And now?”

  “Now she’s at least prepared to withhold judgment—to listen to what Avallon has to say.”

  “So when the time comes, you’ll be on hand to convince her to join forces with us. And to report to the emperor on her plans.” Kolloken nodded. “I see it now. Quite a clever thing you’ve done, setting yourself up as her follower.” He looked across. “A part you played so well in the throne room, I might say, that you had me completely convinced.”

  Senar was spared having to respond by approaching footsteps in the corridor. As they reached Kolloken’s door, they paused as if their owner was considering whether to knock. Then they continued on.

  The messenger’s attention was back on his drawing. His charcoal hovered over the parchment as if he was struggling to recall some detail of his subject’s face. “Be sure of your loyalties, Guardian,” he said after a while. “A man can’t ride two mounts at the same time. Emperor ain’t gonna take chances with the safety of the empire. If he has to raze every city in the League to save Erin Elal, he won’t hesitate, and I’ll be happy to strike the first spark. Can you say the same?”

  * * *

  Romany stepped off the chattering gangplank and onto the Gilgamarian quay. The harbor was all but empty of ships, what with the dragons having cut off Sabian trade at the ankles. But the waterfront itself was thronged with people. Together with the usual froth of beggars, hawkers, and whores were gangs of unshaven men—laborers, most likely—gathered around upturned barrels, playing cards and smoking blackweed. As Mazana’s party assembled for the walk to the Alcazar, the whole verminous mob descended on them like a flock of starving redbeaks, shouting their wares or their services in a dozen different tongues.

  The Gray Cloaks closed ranks to meet the surge. For a while Romany knew what it must be like to be on a battlefield, jostled and screamed at, surrounded on all sides by a scrum of dirty faces, heaving and sweating, pushing and cursing. A man with half his teeth missing thrust a dead rat in her face like he thought she might have skipped lunch. Another shrieked something unintelligible until an elbow from a Revenant gave him cause to shriek in earnest. As he fell back, one of his fingers hooked around the edge of Romany’s mask, nearly tearing it loose. She grabbed it and held it in place. Spider’s blessing. That would not have been a good time to have her face exposed, with Mazana Creed and Senar Sol in close attendance. The chaos almost made the priestess want to turn and get back on the ship.

  Or maybe not.

  “Weapons out!” Twist bellowed, and with a hiss of steel the Revenants unsheathed their swords. The rabble came to its senses at last, retreating to a safe distance before starting up their caterwauling once more. Beyond the crowd, Romany glimpsed a man she thought she recognized—a man she had last seen fighting the Fangalar in the Forest of Sighs. But no, it could not be him.

  He passed from sight behind the throng, and when Romany searched for him again, he was gone.

  A hundred hard-fought paces along a road lined with wooden buildings brought the company to a fortified wall with a gate in it. Looking left and right, Romany saw that the wall extended the length of the waterfront. Had it been built to hold back an invader, perhaps? Or to keep undesirables from straying where they weren’t wanted? That certainly seemed to be the message of the body parts hanging from the battlements. No mistaking the warning in those.

  The gate was manned by soldiers who stepped with understandable reluctance into the path of the executioner—now walking at the head of the company alongside Mazana Creed. A few words, a flash of the emira’s smile, and the guards parted again, though the majority of the Gray Cloaks were sent back to the ship to leave the company a mere twenty strong as it continued on.

  Of all the cities in the Sabian League, Gilgamar—with its dearth of culture and its abundance of snakes—was among the last Romany had ever thought she’d like to visit. Within a quarter-bell of leaving the harbor, though, she found herself reappraising her view. The warehouses beyond the wall gave way to elegant buildings that put her in mind of her temple in Mercerie. But what struck her even more was the tranquility of the place. The port was a fading murmur behind, some
marketplace a swelling buzz to her right, but the streets were free of the beggars and urchins that contested her every stride in Olaire. Instead there were powdered women in sedan chairs, or serious men in double-breasted jackets, or uniformed servants with the good grace to keep their gazes on the road. Aside from those servants, the only commoners Romany saw were accompanied by soldiers as they went about their business. This was how a city should be run, she decided: the great unwashed partitioned off from their betters, so they could do no damage to anyone but themselves.

  On every street corner was a cage containing a mouse. It was only when Romany saw a blacktooth snake also trapped inside one that she deduced the cages’ purpose. A sensible precaution to stop the serpents spreading too far from the canal, the priestess supposed. Indeed, the only surprising thing was that the authorities were using mice, and not condemned prisoners, to bait their traps. But perhaps that was just because they’d found a more grisly punishment for the reprobates. As the company passed a courthouse, Romany saw a line of stocks housing a miserable collection of ill-dressed, fly-ridden souls missing either a hand or a foot or an ear, and groaning like a chorus of the damned. Above the smell of corrupted flesh she caught a sticky-sweet odor. She wrinkled her nose.

  “It’s the tollen,” a woman’s voice said from beside her, and Romany looked across to see Mazana keeping pace, one arm around the shoulders of her half brother, Uriel. After last night, the priestess wasn’t comfortable having the emira a mere knife’s thrust away. But she couldn’t let the woman know that.

  “Tollen?” she said.

  “A drug that numbs the mind to pain and grief.” Mazana glanced toward the amputees. “Though having seen the lot of the underclass in this city, I can’t imagine what they need to escape from.”

  Mazana Creed, champion of the poor and oppressed.

  The company reached an intersection and turned onto a street leading up to the Alcazar—a huge building with a triangular frontage and turrets that became progressively smaller toward the margins. The road got steeper. After the walk up from the harbor, the old Romany would have been wheezing by now. The new Romany, though, was breathing no harder than when they had started out.

  “Impressive, isn’t it?” Mazana said.

  “Most buildings are, compared to your palace.”

  “Ah, but my palace is on the coast. When you put a building on a hill, it has to make a statement. It was built by some tyrant who overthrew the Ruling Council at the turn of the last century. Alas, he didn’t survive to see the last stones set in place. The Gilgamarians were never going to put up long with a despot, such is their love of democracy and equality.”

  Romany sniffed. “We are fortunate the winds of liberty never blew as far the Storm Isles.”

  “You think so? That is not the message preached by your high priest.”

  Not yesterday, perhaps. Romany thought back to the riots gripping the Shallows each night. “No, much better to allow the people the free rein they are enjoying in Olaire just now.”

  Mazana chuckled.

  A hundred different flags hung limply over the Alcazar. The fact that Erin Elal’s wasn’t prominent among them suggested the emperor’s delegation had yet to arrive, and indeed Romany hadn’t seen a ship flying his colors in the harbor.

  “See that flag at the center?” Mazana said, pointing. “The one with the swooping firedrifter? That’s the crest of the city’s former first speaker, Rethell Webb. And since it is flying at full mast, I’m guessing word has not yet reached Gilgamar of his sad demise on Dragon Day. That’s hardly surprising, though. How is news supposed to cross dragon-infested waters when ships cannot?”

  The Alcazar was now just a few hundred paces away, and from its central gate emerged an enormously fat man wearing a chain of office about his neck. A member of the Ruling Council, presumably. He strode down the slope toward the company at a pace that had a group of hangers-on trotting to keep up.

  “My, my, someone’s keen to meet me,” Mazana said.

  Overkeen, Romany would have said. A man that round, if he tripped and fell, might roll all the way down to the harbor.

  The emira looked across at her. “If I didn’t know better, I might think I had something he wanted.”

  Romany nodded. Like the power to clear the dragons from the Sabian Sea, for example. Gilgamar’s infrastructure was sustained on the fees received from ships using its canal. With trade having ground to a halt, the Ruling Council would be feeling the loss of that income acutely.

  “Before Dragon Day,” Mazana said, “the Council was vociferous in its objection to Imerle’s latest increase in the Levy. Is that still its position now, do you suppose?”

  * * *

  Galantas looked down from the first-story window of the temple of the Lord of Hidden Faces. It was over a bell since Faloman Gorst had entered the Speaker’s hovel. Galantas knew the Speaker by reputation—a witch used by fishermen to dispel the ill fortune that would otherwise follow from finding in their nets such items as those that hung from the eaves of her house: a decayed fetus, a bloodstained susha robe, a mutilated doll of the White Lady. Of course Faloman was no fisherman, meaning he was here to avail himself of the Speaker’s second talent: that of reading a man’s future in a limewing’s entrails. Waiting outside to ambush him, Galantas could only hope the Speaker’s abilities were truly the sham he took them for.

  He blinked sweat from his eyes. The roof of the temple had long since collapsed, and the sun beat down with a force that set the dusty air shimmering. Beside him Barnick was winding a finger through his hair. Galantas shared the mage’s restlessness. Things were not going as planned. Talet had disappeared. The stone-skins still hadn’t responded to Galantas’s proposal. And after two and a half bells, Karsten’s absence would surely have been noticed by now. His men would be searching for him, just as Dresk would be hunting for Galantas. And while the temple was as good a place as any for him to lie low, what happened when his father thought to seize the Eternal and force Galantas into the open?

  He looked toward the harbor along the street known as the Gully.

  And froze.

  The Augeran vessel was moving toward the quays!

  Galantas allowed himself a smile. It seemed the stone-skins had finally come to their senses, though they hadn’t yet raised a second flag in the agreed signal. No matter. Galantas needed to get down to the dock to meet them. A pity this chance to take down Faloman would have to go begging, but there’d be time later to deal with Dresk’s krels.

  Then Galantas noticed that the decks of the Augeran vessel were heaving with red- and black-cloaked figures.

  A wave of water-magic swelled in the harbor, not under the ship but in front of it. It gained height as it rolled toward the wharf. Galantas lost sight of it behind the rooftops of the buildings along the waterfront, but he heard it strike home with a concussion that sent spray fountaining into the air. Screams sounded. The roof of one of the taverns collapsed. White-flecked water came fizzing along the Gully, carrying on it a boy wearing an eyepatch. The wave rolled past the doorway to the Speaker’s hovel and lost speed as it climbed the slope toward the temple. It deposited the spluttering boy on the ramp beneath Galantas’s vantage point.

  It was a moment before Galantas’s mind clicked into gear again. The stone-skins were attacking? Did the fools think they could take the whole city with one ship? He shook his head. Such a petulant move. Such a missed opportunity …

  Then movement to the east caught his eye. Another ship was approaching Bezzle on a wave of water-magic—a second Augeran vessel, judging by its patterned sails.

  The bells of the Meridian Watchtower started ringing.

  * * *

  Returning from her spirit-walk to the alley where Noon waited, Amerel lay for a time with her eyes closed. Her clothes were damp with sweat, and her fingertips were coated with dust from the cracked flagstones. From below came a murmur of water from Bezzle’s underground aqueduct, while far off she could hear tem
locks lowing. Otherwise all was silent. A breeze off the sea carried on it the smell of salt and rotting fireweed.

  She had arrived in Talet’s neighborhood well in advance of their meeting. She’d wanted to assess the lay of the land before calling on him, but she needn’t have bothered. Talet’s house was empty but for the spy himself. No crossbowmen on the roof. No swordsmen behind the curtains waiting to jump out and shout “boo!” The houses nearby were empty too, unless you counted the grayhairs and the odd woman cooing to a baby. And if they were the ones going to spring a trap, Amerel fancied her chances of fighting free. There was something about this idyllic picture that didn’t fit, though. Something missing? Or something present that shouldn’t be? She couldn’t say, but there was no denying a certain feeling.…

  A feeling. Yes, that would look good in her report to the emperor.

  A stone was digging into her back, and she propped herself up on one elbow and opened her eyes. Noon was looking at her. “Well, Princess?”

  “All seems quiet.”

  “You checked the other houses as well?”

  “I thought you were doing that.”

  Noon squinted at her, then muttered something.

  Amerel stood and dusted herself down. “Come on,” she said, setting off down the alley in the direction of Talet’s house.

  The front door was unlocked. Nothing suspicious in that, though—he was expecting company, right? Over a hearth in the reception room were two crossed spears—the symbol of Dresk’s clan—while through an archway was a graveled courtyard. The door to Talet’s study was on the far wall. At the center of the yard was a pool in which floated a dead stoneback scorpion. To Amerel’s left, through a partly open door, she saw a fish-scaling knife on the floor amid a scattering of child’s drawings. She considered checking to see if anyone was hiding behind that door, but how many times did she have to search this place before she was satisfied it was deserted?

  Sometimes nothing really did mean nothing.

  She edged forward, stones crunching beneath her sandals.

  Then in the distance she heard frantic shouts, the clanging of bells from the city’s watchtower. She exchanged a look with Noon. Those bells, the signal to warn of an attack?