by Tim Susman
“I wondered about that,” Jackson said. “If he’d tried to consume you as you did Hadlock, it wouldn’t have worked?”
Cott would never have done something like that. But Jackson didn’t care about that part. So Kip shook his head, spreading a paw over his chest. “I don’t think so. Nor if I’d tried it on him.”
“Not something you’ll have to worry about in the future, eh?” Jackson smiled.
The world felt vaster and lonelier than it had at the beginning of the day. There would be no more threats of fire, true; there would also be nowhere else to learn once the war was over, nobody else who understood what Kip’s power felt like. The only fire sorcerer left in Britain or America shook his head. “No, sir.”
The Master Colonel rubbed his hands together and turned to look back across the wake of the ship. “All in all, it has been a great success. I knew it would be.”
“A…” Kip’s ears splayed to the side. “A great success? We lost thirty Calatians.”
“Acceptable losses.” Jackson waved to the ocean. “We discovered that they have created a new kind of fireproof vessel, which is valuable, and you sank it, which is even more valuable. Hadlock is a middling sorcerer but a decent tactician—was, that is—and his loss will hurt them, as will the loss of their only fire sorcerer. Besides which, the destruction of the Road will unsettle them greatly.” He rubbed his hands together. “It all went about as well as I had planned.”
Kip stared. “Sir? I was on my own. I didn’t consult you about most of what I did. If Captain Lowell had been there—”
“If Captain Lowell had been there, all that would be different is that you would have someone else to blame your shortcomings on. Don’t downplay your accomplishments, Penfold. What Lowell might have done in the two places I feel you could have done better probably would not have made a great deal of difference. And depending on how you feel about the destruction of the Road, I could argue that the outcome without Lowell present tilted more in our favor.”
“Our…favor? Where could I have done better?”
Jackson ticked off on his fingers. “One, you should have killed that raven as soon as they let it come close to you. Two, you should have sunk the ironclad and killed Hadlock as soon as you saw them. Finding a fire source inside it to amplify was very clever; I wager you could have done permanent damage to the ship before Cott was able to pull back the fire.”
“Cott was protecting Hadlock until the end, when he was distracted. And they had the Calatians on board, or under their control. I’d have lost them.”
“Perhaps. As I said, one could argue either way. They underestimated you, as I thought they would if I did not send a senior officer along, but you won’t be able to count on that in the future. All in all it was quite well done. Now, why aren’t you coming back to Boston? General Hamilton will want to hear your story, and we expect a British attack in the coming week.”
Kip could think of nothing he wanted to do less right now than join another battle. He waved a dark brown paw at the ship. “These Calatians are my responsibility, sir, ah, until you assign them to someone else. The British could have other ships, sorcerers, ravens, and so on. I want to make sure they are safe and warded.” He seized the moment to ask the other question that had been on his mind. “Sir, where will they go? The Tower isn’t large enough for all of them.”
The question appeared to bore Jackson. “They have tents around it, aye? They can sleep there. We will see to them presently.”
“Presently? Sir, they’re being fed by the generosity of—”
“Penfold.” Jackson’s tone sharpened, and despite his passion, Kip quieted. “My job is to win this war for America. When we win, then we will have the luxury of settling three hundred Calatian refugees.”
“They won’t be treated as prisoners, then?”
“Of course not. They left of their own volition.”
That was the most he was going to get from Jackson, so he nodded and said, “Thank you, sir.”
“Meanwhile,” Jackson said, “I’ll task Captain Lowell with finding someone to take charge of the Calatians here.”
“Sir,” Kip said. “If you leave me Callahan and Broadwood, we can have them all in New Cambridge by the day after tomorrow.”
“Two of our translocators? Out of the question. You can send one at a time, can’t you? You may keep Broadwood, and be back in Boston the day after tomorrow, eight in the morning on the nose.”
“Yes, sir.” Kip sighed. “We will manage.”
“You have a boat full of calyxes,” Jackson pointed out. “You can get this done.” He raised a hand. “Come, Lowell, we’re going back.”
Kip leaned back against the railing and closed his eyes. But his ears remained perked, so he heard Captain Lowell say, “Permission to remain on the ship to brief Penfold about the other operation, sir?”
Jackson said something indistinct, and Lowell replied, “I am assigned to their unit, sir.”
The reply sounded irritated, but it must have been in the affirmative, because Lowell said, “Thank you, sir,” and a moment later Kip smelled him nearby on the railing.
“One more thing, Penfold,” Jackson called sharply.
Kip opened his eyes to see the man’s ascetic features set in a thin-lipped smile. “When people say you destroyed the Road, don’t deny it too hard. Will scare the British even more if they think one of ours did it and is still alive.”
“Yes, sir,” Kip said, though his stomach churned. Jackson nodded and strode off to find Callahan, leaving Kip and Lowell alone.
They stood in silence while the ship cut through the water with a rhythmic rushing of waves, wood and rigging creaking above them. Finally Lowell spoke in a low voice. “Was it terrible?”
Kip nodded. “Aye. The Road was a marvel and then it was gone. For a moment it sucked magic out of the world and then magic came back. But not the Road.” He paused. “It killed Cott, destroying it.” His eyes traveled out to the ocean again, to the vast expanse of water that mocked any puny human or Calatian enterprise. Cott lay there somewhere in its depths while Kip sailed home on its surface.
Lowell nodded, absorbing that. “I heard you tell Master Colonel Jackson that you wished I was with you here. That means a great deal to me.”
“I meant it,” Kip said. “You’re experienced and you’ve always guided us true through our battles. And…” He hesitated. “I get the impression that you care more for we Calatians as a people than perhaps some of the other officers do.”
Lowell inclined his head, but said, “A free America is my first and truest pledge. But in that free America I do greatly hope that all people will be equally free.”
“As do I,” Kip said. “Now…what was this other operation?”
“Ah, yes, that.” Lowell looked down at his hands. “We had just acquired information that the Prince George’s College sorcerers were being held in Gibraltar. Thanks to you, in great part. We did some reconnaissance and determined that they were being held in the fortress. There were few other places to keep them, to be honest. So…”
Here he paused again, still not looking at Kip. The fox’s tail swished against the railing, and finally he said, “So?”
“They—Master Colonel Jackson and Major General Hamilton, I believe—conceived a plan to rescue them. The operation was to be undertaken at the same time as yours, and yours was to serve as a diversion for the British sorcerers.”
Kip heard the words but took a moment to fully understand them. “They told the British sorcerers about our mission?”
“No!” Now Lowell did look at him. “I don’t believe so. But they were convinced that you could not sneak hundreds of Calatians out of the Isle without the sorcerers noticing, and when they noticed they would focus all their attention on you. Besides which you would be depriving them of their calyxes for a critical day or two at least.”
“I see.” This one piece of information answered most of his questions about Jackson’s changes to his
mission. Of course Jackson had wanted him to draw out the mission over days; of course he’d wanted Kip to lead the British sorcerers out into the middle of the ocean, to keep them watching him while they stealthily extracted prisoners from Gibraltar. “Did they find the Peachtree Calatians?”
Lowell shook his head. “Our mission was to extract the sorcerers, and we accomplished that. Our secondary goal was to find the book of demon names, and we accomplished that as well.”
“You didn’t have time to find the Calatians?” Kip searched the captain’s face and saw the answer there. “It wasn’t one of your priorities. But that doesn’t make any sense. Why go to all this trouble to deprive the British of their calyxes if you were going to leave them the prisoners?”
“I don’t know the thinking behind it. The military sorcerers seem attached to their calyxes; in many cases they travel with the sorcerers and live with them for extended periods of time. So stealing the British calyxes may take a toll on the sorcerers.”
Kip had made that same argument, but now he doubted whether it would really make much difference. He focused on the fact that he’d rescued over two hundred Calatians. “It may,” he allowed.
Captain Lowell put a hand on Kip’s arm. “You’ve proven yourself a valuable asset to the American army, the more so because you’re the only fire sorcerer left on either side. Besides that, this mission will be trumpeted as a great success, and you’ll always know the part you played in it.”
“They’re going to make me out to be the destroyer of the Road,” Kip said. “I don’t want—” He sighed and stopped. “Tell me about the raid.”
So Captain Lowell told him in some detail about the raid on Gibraltar. They’d sent several scouts ahead to find out where the boundary of the wards was, but they also had to be careful because the border of Gibraltar was heavily guarded by both British and Spanish soldiers. Lowell led a small unit, three sorcerers and one calyx, who followed the scouts in past the fortifications. But it wasn’t as easy as getting into the Isle of Dogs had been; inside the outer wards were many inner spaces that were also warded, so the sorcerers had had to summon demons several times to explore the spaces. They had only brought one calyx with them, but, Captain Lowell said, that one (a fox) had borne the calyx ritual stoically every time.
Kip gritted his teeth during that part, and Lowell moved on quickly from it to talk about the hour they’d spent creeping through the fortress, the times they’d run into guard demons and their own demons had had to do quick battle with them. “Fortunately,” he said, “our demons were second order, and the guard ones are all first order out of necessity, else they couldn’t be bound for long periods of time.”
“Of course.” Kip thought about Valkuni, how he’d fought the binding, and again about Nikolon.
“We were lucky, I think, in that they did not seem to expect us coming. Gibraltar is an odd place for a prison, being so close to Spain; if we had to guess, we would have thought them kept in the Tower of London, but Gibraltar is nearly as secure. Master Colonel Jackson said it hasn’t been used as a prison before, and perhaps that’s why they chose it, so those of us who’d fought in the British Army wouldn’t suspect.”
Kip nodded, and Lowell went on to describe the many obstacles they’d faced and how the sorcerers had overcome them. As the story went on, Kip began to understand how much Lowell’s leadership must have meant to it; Jackson had given them little in the way of orders beyond “rescue the sorcerers and remain as quiet about it as possible,” and Lowell had ordered the use of demons when needed, had guided their magic (in one case, he laughed at Master Johnston, who’d wanted to translocate himself into a warded area with no idea of what lay on the other side), and had kept them on track when they had to wait for half an hour for a guard to leave his post rather than attack him and risk his absence or body being discovered.
While he remained angry that the Calatians hadn’t been rescued, Kip had to express his admiration. “Jackson—sorry, Master Colonel Jackson didn’t seem to think that you would have made a difference in our mission here, but I believe if you’d been with me, we would have rescued all the Calatians.”
Lowell smiled and lowered his head. “It’s kind of you to say so.”
“It’s the truth.” Kip lowered his voice as much as he thought he could and still have Lowell be able to hear him over the water. The crew of the ship were mostly going about their business at a distance. “You should get a promotion for this. I don’t know how promotions work, but you deserve one.”
“At my level, most often they are purchased, but we shall see. It would be nice to imagine that the Army is of the same mind.”
Kip shook his head. “How long have you been a captain?”
Lowell’s smile came humorless and crooked. “Eight years.”
“Eight years? Is that a normal amount of time?”
“What’s normal for one person may not be so for another.” He pushed himself away from the railing. “And now,” he said, “I believe you were going to convince poor Broadwood to send two hundred Calatians to New Cambridge.”
Kip sighed and followed Lowell away from the railing. “Yes,” he said. “And I must likely convince him to do the calyx ritual, and then convince some poor calyx to give him the power. How many times must we do that ritual? And how are we to keep it secret? Abel told me that most of the London Calatians know what the ritual is, but if one doesn’t, it will be quite shocking to discover. Not to mention the ship’s crew.”
“I have some ideas on that score,” Lowell said.
Lowell suggested that they secure the calyx blood in a private place and then bring it to Broadwood in a flask. Out here in the ocean air, the smell of blood from the flask dissipated quickly.
Convincing Broadwood took a good twenty minutes of arguing from Kip, and finally he told the other sorcerer that he himself had done the calyx ritual, and that if Broadwood chose not to do it, it would take him five times as long. With ill grace, the young man accepted his task.
The second problem, more surmountable, was that he needed to take a swallow before every spell. Abel rounded up all the calyxes he could, and Kip and Alice volunteered as well, but still it felt as though more blood was spilt than had been lost in the battle. Now Kip understood viscerally how the London sorcerers could literally bleed a calyx dry. In America, calyxes were mostly used for demon summoning and there was not much call to summon a number of demons in a row. But to extend one’s range of perception, to try several different things while engaged in a military operation—that might require ten or twelve swallows of blood. And if a calyx were summoned several times within the week, they might well lose consciousness and even die.
Here, Abel managed the calyxes to ensure that nothing like that would happen; he forbad Callo Cotton from helping even though the rabbit insisted he was in perfect health and his sorcerer had only taken one goblet a few days ago. Broadwood, meanwhile, didn’t feel well after his fifth swallow of blood and translocation spell. He had to take a long drink of wine to clear his mouth and his head.
“The first time it was worse than I thought it would be,” he told Kip as the fox sat with him. “But the fifth was not nearly as bad. I hate the idea that I’m getting used to it.”
“I know the feeling.”
“The power is great. Ten people at a time! Once you’ve tried it, you wonder why you wouldn’t use it all the time. Especially when you’re bringing it to me in a flask and I don’t have to know where it comes from. That worries me.”
“London has that habit and has stopped her questions,” Kip said. “Which is why we’re rescuing them.”
“Aye.” He nodded and cleared his throat. “Imagine if the world knew we sorcerers were blood-drinkers. Myself too, now it comes to that. I thought the sorcerers who drank Calatian blood were disgusting, and I was a fellow of theirs.”
“That is why we guard the secret,” Kip said. “The Calatians could tell the world, but then they would lose the protection of the so
rcerers.”
“Of course.” Broadwood’s eyes widened. “You said you’ve done it, too, though? Does it work with—er, if you take from yourself?”
“That is how I prefer to do it now.”
“It must have been worse for you.” Broadwood stared out at the ocean. “If you don’t think about it, though, don’t you go the way of King’s College, as you said it?”
“You don’t think about it in the moment,” Kip clarified. “Any other time, it’s hard not to.”
“Ah, I take your point.”
They sat in silence staring out over the ocean. Kip could very easily believe that they were making no progress, just sailing the same endless water over and over again. “It’s peaceful out here. I understand how some people can fall in love with the sea.”
“It’s boring. The clouds change but everything else looks the same. Plus I can’t walk two paces without holding on to something.”
“You’d get used to it.” Kip sighed. “But that might be bad as well. Maybe the joy of the sea is the new places you get to at the end of the journey, even if the journey seems it will never end.”
Broadwood didn’t reply to that, so Kip changed his tack. “I very much appreciate all that you’ve done on this mission.”
“You’ve done more than I. I missed all the interesting parts.”
Kip glanced at the young man. “It sounds like you would have wanted to be there, in the range of an enemy physical sorcerer and a desperate fire one.”
“I suppose not when you put it like that. But I was here when the Road was destroyed, and all my mates will ask me what it was like and what’ll I say to that? ‘I was on a large ship helping some Calatians get on board and then there was like a thunderclap and magic felt strange, and then a huge wave came along, and then Master Penfold came back to tell us the Road was gone.’?”
“I’m not ‘Master Penfold.’”
“I don’t know about that. If anyone’s earned the title, you have, the work you’ve done.”
“Thank you. I don’t know what I’d get from the title.”
“Well, a raven, for one.”