Silver Road (The Shifting Tides Book 2)

by James Maxwell

  The wind was sudden and out of control. The sorcerers unleashed chaos.

  Nothing could have prepared me for it. With no time to coordinate their magic the sorcerers each chose a different direction for the wind. The only commonality was that the wind’s summoners wanted to be taken away from the sinking island and away from Marrix. Uncontrollable wind and waves did just that, thrusting the fleet out to sea.

  I heard a mighty crack. Turning, I saw the archmagus’s ship heel as a gust struck from the side and the mast snapped, crippling the vessel. Then the towering waves hid the ship from sight, and I never saw the golden ark again.

  The storm the magi created sent the fleet away from danger, but it also swept us far from the lands we knew. Out in the open ocean, the magical winds merged and collided with other winds, and a hurricane struck the fleet, driving it north.

  Later, much later, when the weather finally calmed, we were surrounded by ice floes. We tried to navigate through, but the wind continued to push us onwards. At some point our navigators ceased to know where we were. We were so far north that every other direction was south. Then a ship became stuck, and when we tried to free it the ice trapped another. The floes crowded closer together. The fleet became lodged.

  But one day, despite Aleuthea being gone forever, one day, we will return to reclaim our dominion. One day we will return to the Realm of the Three Seas.

  The account of the fall of Aleuthea finished there.

  Palemon lifted his gaze, thinking about the events that had befallen the Aleutheans since that fatal night. Of the forty ships that made it to this land of cold, most had been destroyed when they were trapped by the ice, with only a handful still serviceable. The exiles salvaged everything they could; all wood and metal would henceforth be prized.

  The greatest problem was that they were lost. Over the years the exiles sent the surviving ships out one by one. They never returned. With no guide, no working compass, and no sun that rose in the east and set in the west, they could never find their way home.

  Now this galleon, the Solaris, was their last ship. And with the herds of musk ox and reindeer being thinned too quickly to sustain themselves, in a year, perhaps two, Palemon’s people would be starving. The nusu natives who had lived in these lands far longer than the Aleutheans had taught them to hunt whales and fish, but the taller, stronger Aleutheans had become victims of their own success. The numbers of nusu had declined as the Aleutheans took over the natives’ traditional hunting grounds. Now even the once-plentiful ocean life was scarce. It had been several weeks since a whale had been butchered. Soon it wouldn’t be just the savages who were starving.

  Palemon frowned as he clasped his palms and rested his elbows on the desk. Before long they were going to have to send this last ship out, perhaps even this summer, while the ice had retreated. The Solaris would sail again. But likely, as with the other vessels, it would never return.

  He started as a crack of wood against wood broke his reverie. The sound sent a shock through him. He was alone, on a ship, in the middle of a snowy plain. He shot to his feet.

  2

  The two nusu boys hurriedly climbed out of the hatch in the center of the main deck and sped for the ladder. The boy in front was slightly older, with wild hair and ruddy skin, while the other, jabbering and moaning as he urged his companion on, still had the round cheeks of a child.

  Palemon’s long strides took him over to the boys in a heartbeat. The youngest saw him approaching and quailed with fear. Wide-eyed and terrified, he fell to the ground and raised an arm over his head.

  Ignoring him, Palemon drew his broadsword in one swift movement and pressed the point to the older boy’s throat, halting his rush for the ladder. The two boys’ faces were similar, and Palemon decided they were brothers. He might have seen them before; they might even know him well. He rarely paid attention to the savages.

  Swallowing, the older boy froze, suddenly as still as a corpse left out overnight. Showing the whites of his eyes, he ran his gaze from the shining steel to the gloved hand of the man holding the hilt, until he met Palemon’s cold stare.

  Even Palemon was surprised at the rage that bubbled to the surface. The curiosity of the young had no place here. This ship was the only thing that remained as an example of his people’s former glory. It was their last link to the world they’d left behind. With it they had hope. Without it they would all share the same graves as the nusu savages they held in such contempt.

  Soon first one boy, then another, made a cry of pain as Palemon threw them off the precious vessel, sending them tumbling to the frozen ground beside the galleon. He jumped down a moment later, landing easily on booted feet, sword still in hand. He then made the boys kneel side by side as he considered, resting on his sword, point pressed into the ice.

  Palemon judged their ages. The youngest was perhaps ten and his older brother two years his senior. They were old enough to know right from wrong.

  ‘Your people are forbidden to come near this ship,’ Palemon stated, his intonation low. ‘You know the rules, yet you broke them willingly. You know what we are. We are cold bloods. We have no warmth in our hearts. We are as strong as iron, as hard as ice.’

  He looked from child to child. Both knelt with heads tilted back, staring up at him. The younger boy’s expression showed utter terror, but there was defiance in the older one’s face.

  ‘As king, I pronounce your punishment thusly. One of you must die. The other will watch, in order to bear witness and warning to the rest. I now must decide. Which of you dies?’

  He pondered, shifting his gaze from face to face. The nusu were kept in line by fear. Nothing was more powerful than fear: not greed, not lust, and not envy. He made his decision.

  ‘I choose you for life.’ Palemon pointed his sword at the younger boy. His terror would be contagious. His story would prevent the necessity of doing this again. ‘And you’—he leveled his weapon at the defiant youth—‘I choose for death.’

  Palemon moved to stand beside the older boy and lifted his sword above his head. ‘Watch,’ he instructed the boy he’d spared, who now had tears streaking down his cheeks. ‘This ship is more important than your people know. But how could you know? You are our slaves. All you have to do is stay away.’

  Arms held high, he tensed as he prepared the blow that would end the boy’s life, promising himself he would make it clean. But then a voice called out, making him lower the sword and frown.

  Palemon turned and saw a man in furs stumping toward him, walking with a strangely stooped gait. The newcomer’s back was bent at a sharp angle, just below his neck, and his arms were outsized, so thick and muscled that they should have belonged to a much larger man. He had deep-set eyes and thick black eyebrows.

  ‘Sire,’ the hunchback called again as he approached.

  ‘Kyphos,’ Palemon said, ignoring the two boys as he once again rested on the point of his sword. ‘What brings you here?’

  ‘The witch, Zara, requests your presence.’

  Palemon shook his head. ‘I hope you don’t call her witch to her face. She is a sorceress, and a powerful one. Why not come herself?’

  ‘She didn’t say, but she was anxious that you come immediately.’

  ‘Bah,’ Palemon growled. Only Zara had the nerve to send for her king as if he were a common house slave. He glanced at the pair of nusu. ‘Sort out these boys. Kill this one.’ He pointed to the older of the two. ‘And send the other one home.’

  King Palemon knew that Kyphos would carry out his orders; he would take no pleasure in it, for unlike some others in the city of the dead he didn’t have a cruel streak, but he was utterly loyal.

  ‘Of course,’ Kyphos said. He rested a hand on the axe hanging from his belt. ‘What did they do?’

  Palemon didn’t hear him; he was already striding away, wondering what Zara thought was so urgent.

  Two mighty ridges of black and white rock traveled at angles to each other until they met and became one.
The settlement nestled in the apex of the fork they formed, sheltered from the cruel winds, huddled in the lee like a cub nuzzling closer to its mother’s body.

  It was more a large village than a town, a collection of crude conical huts covered in furs, erected on frames with streams of smoke trickling from the tops. The settlement’s inhabitants burned human and animal dung for warmth, and the vast majority of their furnishings, clothing, and diet came from beasts. Whales gave them bone for the ribs of the huts and oil for their few lamps. Furs made their clothing. Water was stored in reindeer stomachs. Fish bones were crushed and eaten along with the flesh. Bear and wolf were both predator and prey.

  As he walked, Palemon passed one of the few houses in the settlement constructed from wood, and reflected on the fact that, like his people, he had never seen a tree. With planks of dark timber and strangely warped curves, these larger dwellings were built from the ships of the fleet that originally fled the fall of Aleuthea, those that were too crushed by the ice to ever sail again.

  The hunters were away and the women and children were all indoors, and so Palemon strode along the avenue that ran from one end of the settlement to the other alone.

  The area was completely deserted. Necropolis, city of the dead, was a fitting name.

  Yet the settlement’s founders hadn’t chosen the name because of the eerie emptiness or the ghostly mists. It was called Necropolis because the ancient Aleutheans wanted to impress upon anyone who lived here that this was a temporary home only. The city was dead from the moment of its establishment. Their true home was far away. Despite the fact that the island of Aleuthea was sunk beneath the waves, gone forever, the entire Realm of the Three Seas had always been their dominion, and would provide a home again.

  A wind came up, blowing tiny crystals of ice from above, and Palemon scowled as he brushed flecks from his eyebrows, lips, and beard. He looked up at the sky and saw that the blue overhead was dissolving into white. The snowflakes were descending in flurries by the time he came to the house of the sorceress.

  Zara’s single-storied wooden hut was half buried in snow, the entrance dug out a good three feet lower than the surrounds. The door was plain, its panels pockmarked by exposure to the sea. Palemon raised a hand to knock and then hesitated.

  His lips thinned and instead of knocking he pulled the door open, struggling with its bulk as it scraped over the icy ground.

  The comparative warmth within caressed his face. Golden light revealed an interior furnished with low stools and animal-skin rugs. Shelves had been fashioned from precious timber and then filled with priceless books. A pile of dung cakes glowed in a hearth at one end, the smoke funneled upwards into a chimney. Besides this main room, there were two other chambers at the back. It was a small house, but only Palemon’s was bigger.

  ‘Close the door,’ a soft, feminine voice hissed. ‘Now!’

  Palemon stepped inside and hauled the door closed behind him, stamping his feet and feeling the strange sensation of chill that always came when one was well and truly out of the cold. Facing the center of the room, he regarded the owner of the voice.

  Zara wore a long-sleeved navy dress of thick dark wool, somehow managing to make the garment appear supple and rich as it clung to her lithe frame. The sorceress was beautiful but ice cold, her face carved like marble, with high cheekbones and parted lips that were chill blue rather than ruby red. Her hair was long and straight, as black as night, and she had brilliant blue eyes that glittered, eyes that were focused on something else entirely than the man who had just entered.

  Palemon cleared his throat, but she still didn’t even look at him.

  The sorceress had her sun staff in her hand. She stood in the middle of the room, every element of her posture and facial expression indicating complete concentration. Her legs were apart and she clutched the wrist-thick staff with her right hand, close to the hoop of solid gold at the top. Her left hand circled slowly around the hoop, which was the size of a man’s hand and etched with arcane symbols.

  Zara was obviously exercising her power, but Palemon couldn’t even hazard a guess as to what she was doing.

  It was clearly related to the sun staff, he could see that much. The interior of the house was bright not because of the meager fire in the hearth but because the gold circle was glowing fiercely, so radiant that it almost hurt to look upon it.

  The sorceress grunted and a darting flame suddenly flickered into existence inside the hoop. She shot out a breath, making a sound similar to the cry of a warrior striking an enemy with a sword, and the flame lengthened and grew brighter. Like an extending finger it left the circle and wavered before seeming to pick a direction as the flame prodded the empty air.

  Zara gasped and the flame vanished. She shuddered and her shoulders slumped. The fierce light shining from the gold hoop at the summit of the staff began to fade, and then went dark altogether.

  Now there was only the faint red light cast by the fire to see by. Zara turned to Palemon and he tilted his head in puzzlement. She looked exhausted, which didn’t surprise him after the display of power she’d just given, but she also appeared strangely triumphant.

  ‘I am sorry, sire, to have spoken to you in that way when you entered, but the wind interferes. Wind is silver, and I am working with gold.’

  Palemon frowned. ‘You sent Kyphos for me. I was busy.’

  She smiled softly. ‘Busy examining the ship for the thousandth time, sire?’

  ‘It is our last chance, our only chance,’ he growled. ‘And I found some nusu hiding aboard.’ She raised her eyebrows. ‘It’s fine.’ He waved a hand. ‘I left Kyphos to deal with them. They’ll remember their place. So, magus, why am I here?’

  ‘You saw it, didn’t you?’ Her gaze flickered to the golden circle. ‘Tell me you didn’t miss it.’

  ‘I saw light and flame.’

  ‘Look,’ Zara said. ‘Come closer. Watch.’

  Palemon came to stand beside her as she closed her eyes. Her breathing slowed as her chest rose and fell. Finally the sorceress’s breath stilled altogether and, despite himself, Palemon held his breath along with her. Time stretched out, and he wondered when she would resume breathing.

  She opened her eyes, clutched the top of the staff in a white-knuckled grip, and let out an explosive cry.

  The gold flared up brightly. With eyes narrowed in concentration, Zara began to pant, lines creasing in her forehead as she drew the magic into herself and channeled it into the pure metal at the top of her staff. She grunted once more and again Palemon saw the flame appear inside the circle.

  As the sorceress harnessed strange forces, the flame lengthened, and then it darted out of the hoop and projected itself in a direction outwards and to the side. It was angled, like a string was trying to tug on the golden light, pulling it, drawing it somewhere specific.

  The sorceress finally sighed, releasing the magic’s grip on her senses. Palemon frowned but he didn’t speak, giving her time to regain her composure. Instead he stared at the fading gold circle and imagined all his people could accomplish if they also had quantities of silver, copper, and iron.

  But gold was the only materia left. The other metals had tarnished long ago, used in too many emergencies. As the magic of the materia was utilized, the metal corroded and eventually became unresponsive, even to a magus with Zara’s skill.

  Only gold never tarnished.

  Finally Zara turned her weary but excited eyes on him. ‘Please,’ she said. ‘Don’t make me show you again.’

  ‘I saw it,’ he said. ‘But what does it mean?’

  ‘It has taken me time to learn to control it to this extent,’ she said. ‘And I had to be sure before I told you, but the light is seeking a kindred spirit. It is being called to something.’

  ‘I don’t understand.’

  ‘I think I do.’ She smiled. ‘I believe I know what it is. A magical source of gold has been drawing energy. Something built by our people. Something we left behind.’
>
  Palemon gasped. ‘The ark?’

  Zara nodded. ‘It has to be.’

  ‘What are you saying? The horn has been uncovered? After all this time?’

  ‘Sire, all I can say is that I believe the ark was opened. A burst of the magic containing the horn was released. The horn may be in the hands of our old enemy, the eldren, or a curious barbarian may have opened the golden chest to see what is inside. Speculation aside, there is only one way to discover what has transpired in the Realm of the Three Seas since the fall of Aleuthea. And that is to go there.’

  Palemon, the thirteenth king to carry the name, swallowed. ‘You . . . You’re saying?’

  ‘The sun here does not rise in the east and set in the west. A compass travels only in circles. Every direction is south. But yes, King Palemon. I believe I can use the magic of the ark to find our way home.’

  Hope surged through him. This was the only world he had ever known, but every night stories were told of the Realm of the Three Seas. It was warm. The sun shone brightly, even in winter. Food was plentiful. People lived in grand buildings.

  And there was metal. Zara and her magi would be able to harness the power of gold, silver, copper, and iron. They would be able to find a new home, perhaps a place already established, a place they could nominate to be a new Aleuthea.

  New Aleuthea. King Palemon nodded to himself.

  He would push his people. The magic of the ark would guide them. The magic of gold, and light, and power.

  The Solaris was ready. Palemon would gather a select group of his strongest warriors; he’d already decided to lead them himself. It was summer and the ice was clear.

  Three hundred years had passed. But the last ship to survive the fall of Aleuthea would soon depart.

  3

  Chloe and her father Aristocles, first consul of Phalesia, climbed the winding series of steps cut into the cliff. The midday sun beat down from high in the sky as a fresh sea breeze blew her dark hair around her face and made her yellow chiton cling to her slender frame. She felt her heart race, and not only from the giddy height and the exertion of the ascent. Leaning against the rock wall for support, she couldn’t help relive when she’d last come this way.