by Paul Kearney
“Looks like we’ll not have to row, after all,” he told Canker. The Thief-King did not answer, but stared intently southward to where the coastlines on either side of them came together. As they converged, there was a glow, a thickening of lights almost dead ahead, some miles off yet. Arbion.
The snow continued to fall soundlessly. Rol could feel it on his eyebrows. The interior of the cutter brightened as it began to lie on the thwarts, but it kept down the swell and spindrift so that they remained fairly dry.
There was an exclamation in the bow of the cutter. Elias Creed gave a shout of surprise.
“What is it?”
“We have a stowaway, hid under the tarp. For the love of the gods, boy, what in hell do you think you’re doing?”
“I’m coming with you.” The voice was Giffon’s, and he sounded remarkably composed.
“Gallico, take the tiller.” Rol clambered forward and leaned on Creed’s shoulder. Giffon’s moon-face looked up at him, stubborn and set. He had his bag with him, and it clinked as the boat pitched.
“Giffon—”
“You might need sewn back up, if you start fighting in Bionar’s wars. And they say a battlefield is the best place for a surgeon to learn his trade too. I will go where I please. I choose to come with you.”
“We may not choose to have you,” Rol said quietly.
It was as though some light in the boy’s face went out. He ducked his head. “That’s for you to decide. Throw me overboard, if you like; I’ll swim to shore.”
“You’ll freeze first,” Creed said grimly. The frost had turned his beard entirely white; he looked like some hoary prophet. “We’ll have to get him back to the ship.”
“I won’t go,” Giffon said, entirely calm.
“Gallico?” Rol called aft.
“We’d be all night beating back up against this wind. We’re stuck with the little bugger.”
“All right.” Rol was glad of the darkness; he hoped it would hide his grin from the boy. For some reason, Giffon’s presence heartened him. Something indefinable and absurd to do with his luck, perhaps. “One of these days, you’ll have to stop this stowing-away lark,” he said, as sternly as he could.
“I’ll be no burden. The day I am no longer of use is the day you can wave me good-bye.”
“I’d sooner kick you in the arse, you little idiot,” Creed said, but his tone was softer than his words. Rol went aft again and took a seat on the snow-covered thwart beside Canker. Gallico was as good a helmsman as himself, and could likewise see in the dark.
They sailed on. The lights of the city grew close, separating out into ten thousand separate shards of fire. Candles at windows, street-lanterns, braziers, watchfires, bonfires. So many nurtured points of flame, and a story behind every one. But between many of them were wide stretches of empty darkness which even Rol’s eyes could not penetrate.
“We’re in the channel,” Gallico said.
Two great flammifers of iron blazed high on towers either side of the cutter, and out from them the immense hulk of the harbor wall extended into the night, a faint flash of surf all about its foot. The sense of open water about them faded, and the current picked up as the tide surged through the sea gates. The walls passed, shadowed and flamelit and tossing back the echoes of the water chopping in their lee. They slid past the masts of a great ship, poking black and forlorn above the sea. The wind had dropped, but the tide still had them on its back, and it brought them into the docks at a slow walking pace, a silent craft full of snow, five bundled shapes within, silent as stone.
Arbion’s waterfront stretched almost two miles, a city within a city of wharves and jetties and warehouses. Even at this time of night it should have been crowded with vessels, busy with longshoremen and lighter-crews and dockworkers, but as they broke out the oars to scull the last few yards to the quays, there was barely a sound. A tang of burning hung in the air, and the charred hulks of ships lay beached like broken whales in the shallower water, a veritable graveyard.
The cutter’s prow thumped the stone of the wharf and Giffon clambered up to take a round turn about a stone bollard. They moored their craft fore and aft and then left her in puffing procession, their breaths clouding about their faces as they climbed up a sea-slimed ladder. They had moored by a dock built for bigger ships, because it was one of the few that did not have a jagged wreck moldering beside it. Forsaken though the dockland seemed, they had been ashore only a few minutes when a bent old man accosted them and declared himself the harbormaster. Six copper minims, it seemed, was the going rate for a day’s mooring in this desolation. They gave him silver, enough for many weeks, and Gallico at his most menacing impressed upon him how important it was to his welfare that the cutter rest unmolested. Canker stood by and said nothing, his face hidden in his cloak.
It was getting on for a year since Rol had set foot in any city except Ganesh Ka. To pay the harbormaster in money—real coins—seemed a novelty. In the Ka most things were exchanged through barter, or the understanding of simple fellowship. People in need were often given things freely by others, in the knowledge that this would, in the end, help everyone. It was a system Michal Psellos would have found amusing to the point of hilarity, depending as it did on some innate philanthropy. The rest of the world did not operate that way. The rest of the world believed only that men should better themselves by any means that came to hand.
None of them save Canker knew Arbion, and the Thief-King, eager to be off, walked away whilst Gallico was still handing over coin to the harbormaster. Thus it was that the four of them—Rol, Gallico, Creed, and Giffon—followed Canker’s sprightly progress through the streets like so many children trailing after an impatient parent. There was no time to stop and stare, but for all that, the scenes about them made them stretch their eyes.
All of them had seen violence firsthand. It was one of the constants in their lives. They had suffered it; they had dealt it out. But none of them had seen true warfare, waged with all the energy that a state, an entire people could muster. They saw some of its fruits now, as Canker brought them away from the margins of the sea.
Gallico, the reader, the hoarder of facts, had told them while still on board the Astraros that Arbion housed some third of a million people. It was shaped like a horseshoe, with the open end resting on the sea, and its walls were forty feet high and almost as thick, bastions of stone over three leagues long. There were public baths, theaters, racecourses, and three tall citadels built over each of the city’s gates. One watched the Phidon Road, one the Gallitras Road, and one the paved highway to Urbonetto.
But now, in the chill winter dark, Arbion stood in ruin around them. Outer walls of tall houses reared up like incomplete skeletons on all sides, within them mounds of rubble, blackened timbers, oddments of furnishings and possessions. The streets had been swept clear, but broken stone and brick was piled up on either hand to the height of Gallico’s head. Whole districts had been flattened in this manner, as though the Creator Himself had sauntered past with the hem of His robe trailing an apocalyptic wake.
“How did this happen?” Rol asked, extending his arms to the wilderness of broken stone that surrounded them.
Canker’s face was closed. “We lost a lot of people here,” he said tersely. “Bar Asfal ordered that it be held to the end. We had to blast them from every house, street by street.”
The shattered city was not deserted. On every corner were clots of ragamuffin children with filthy faces and predatory eyes. Gangs of men and women, muffled against the cold, pushed endless convoys of handcarts up and down. Some were laden with stiffened corpses, others with whatever they could pick out of the ruins. Here and there a body of soldiers marched past in column of fours with firearms slung from their shoulders and short-bladed swords slapping at their thighs. If they wore a uniform, it was hidden by an eclectic assortment of furs and scarves and woolen cloaks. Their eyes glittered under their hoods and they wrapped their hands under their armpits, boots slapping th
e cobbles. Tramping inland, uphill in the ruin-scored night, Rol felt that he had put behind him one part of his life and was being presented with another, one that opened out before him in the desolation of Arbion like some dark and noisome flower.
Eight
THE ROAD SOUTH
THE GALLITRAS CITADEL TOWERED OVER ARBION’S RUINS like a grave-marker; two hundred feet of quarried granite, its summit marked with a line of blazing cressets. In the dark, it looked relatively undamaged, but Rol’s eyes could pick out the pockmarks of artillery fire, the broken merlons and gapes in the curtain-wall. Down in its guts two stout barbicans guarded the entrance and egress of all traffic. Even at this hour of the night, these torchlit tunnels were crammed with convoys of vehicles and footsloggers. Heavily laden ox-wagons trundled south, and in their midst plodded half-starved-looking men and women with handcarts and barrows. A sullen traffic, clotted with wailing children and traversed by lean dogs, noses to the ground. Off to one side a group of soldiers warmed their hands at a glowing brazier and watched the procession with expressions of profound boredom. Occasionally some of them would break off to cuff and curse the lines into less sluggish progress. The wagon-wheels thumped and cracked on the pitted surface of the cobbles, and gangs of sweating, pop-eyed men fought to keep the vehicles out of the deeper shell-holes.
“The Gallitras Road,” Canker said. He still kept his cloak about his face like the villain in a stage-play, though his breath had frosted it white. “I must seek news of the war. Stay here.”
“We’ll tag along, if it’s all the same to you,” Rol said. He felt he was adrift here, and whatever arrangements Canker chose to make, he wanted to witness them firsthand.
The Thief-King shrugged, and the five of them picked their way through the dismal concourse on the roadway to the band of soldiers warming themselves. Gallico brought traffic to a standstill, and there were exclamations, pointing fingers, the nervous shrieks of women. He clenched and unclenched his great fists as he walked, ignoring them all.
The soldiers stared, and some fumbled for weapons that were buried under layers of warm clothing. Canker dropped his cloak from his face, and Rol saw their officer stiffen, like a beaten dog that glimpses the stick.
“You know me, Lieutenant?”
“Yes, lord. I saw you at the Embrun River. I was in Bayard’s Regiment.”
“Excellent. Does Governor Hass still maintain his quarters here?”
“Yes, my lord. The eighth level. I will see that—”
“I know where it is. Carry on, Lieutenant.” Canker walked on, leaving the soldiers standing awkwardly at attention. Rol and his companions followed, somewhat bemused.
The people in the roadway drew back from them as though they carried a disease. At first Rol thought it was alarm at Gallico’s towering bulk, but as he studied the gaunt, fearful faces, he realized that they were staring at Canker. He summoned up some dregs of his training and sorted out their whispers from the clatter within the barbicans, read the stiff lips as they mumbled a name.
Through a postern in the gate-tunnel, and then a series of cramped rooms that had Gallico crouching and swearing and scraping his knuckles on the floor. Startled soldiers who leaped to their feet and stood at a loss until the more knowledgeable among them nudged their fellows and they snapped to attention with crisp salutes. The dreary squalor of a military barracks where spit and polish had gone to the wall under pressure of war. The atmosphere reminded Rol of certain taverns in Ascari, where the cheapness of the liquor and the women were all that mattered, and the customers cared nothing for the filth in which they drank and fornicated. He felt a pang of dismay. So this was Rowen’s great crusade.
A cramped circular staircase. Gallico’s profanity became worn down through sheer repetitive weariness. It seemed a long time since any of them had had their fill of sleep. Shipboard muscles ached at the endless steps. They passed level after level of dank stone, their eyes smarting with the smoke from guttering torches and rushlights, the thin reek of overused privies, stale food, damp plaster. Once there was a sudden, startling panorama of the broken city below them, as they passed a yawning hole in the exterior wall.
And at last they stood in a spacious hallway with wide doors, archaic arrow-slits through which a fearsome wind whistled, and two sentries who bore arquebuses with smoking match on the wheels. These were leveled squarely at Gallico, who growled ominously, his usual good humor abandoned several stories below.
“Names and purpose,” one said, whilst the other whispered through a square hole in the wall. Seconds later, the heavy door swung open and six more men joined them, likewise armed.
“I wish to speak with the governor,” Canker said calmly.
“He’s asleep. Who are you? Names and purpose, if you please.”
The Thief-King fumbled under his cloak and produced a heavy ring with a scarlet gem glinting upon it. The sentry leader studied it with something approaching horror dawning on his face. He lowered his weapon, and bowed. “My apologies, lord. You may enter, of course. But the governor is still in his bed.”
“Wake him up,” Canker snapped. “And bring us some wine, for pity’s sake.”
They resurrected a half-dead fire from its ashes and piled on faggots of wood until it blazed up in the stone hearth and softened the worst of the chill.
“The stone holds the cold,” Elias Creed said. “Ye gods, but this is a miserable place.”
The room was impressive nonetheless, if one were interested in architecture. A cantilevered ceiling of beautifully finished sandstone blocks. More arrow-slits, like wedges sculpted out of walls some three feet thick—though these were disfigured by the rags and furs that had been jammed into the slits themselves to keep out the wind. A checked floor of black and white marble slabs worn smooth by centuries of use, and the huge fireplace with a black iron spit on a pivot. They could have roasted a sheep upon it.
They settled for gathering about the fire, the only light in the room, and sipping at clay mugs of army wine. Mule’s Blood, soldiers called it, but there was heat in the vinegary liquid.
A door swung open, and two comely young women in hastily belted robes brought in candles and wooden platters heaped with food. They left without a word.
“I’ve been in cheerier prisons,” Gallico said. He stumped over to the massive oak table and sniffed the fare on offer. “Horse-meat, and two-day-old bread. I hope the rest of your war is a more organized affair, Canker.”
The door opened once more and a limping man entered. He was tall, thin, and bald but for a few sprigs of gray about his ears. He had a wide forehead, strong jaw, and nostrils as flared as those of a winded horse, but age had softened all these features somewhat. Only his eyes were notable: pale gray gimlets deep-set under hoary brows. He wore a long black robe of dyed wool trimmed with leather and he had stuffed his untied laces into the tongue of his boots.
“My lord, you honor us,” he said. He bowed, rather awkwardly, and his eyes passed over Canker’s companions in some surmise, resting on Gallico a second longer.
“Take a seat, Hass, and spare me the pleasantries,” Canker said. “I’ve been away, as I am sure you know, and I need to be brought up-to-date.”
Hass lowered himself into a chair, one leg remaining stiff and straight as he did so. “I heard you’d left Myconn, but that was months ago.”
“Fifteen weeks, give or take.” Canker leaned forward in his chair. “What’s been happening?”
“We’re a long way from the front here, lord. Things have been exceedingly…fluid.” Hass rubbed his poker-straight leg absently. “We do know that the loyalists have assaulted Myconn three times in the last six weeks.”
“We still hold the capital!”
“Yes—for what it’s worth. But enemy reinforcements are being shipped in from Phidon, and are attacking Gallitras. That city will soon be beleaguered, and if it is, the southern supply line, or what remains of it, will be cut. My lord, the Imperial City is now under siege, and the Quee
n has refused to leave it. She sent many regiments north to keep the Gallitras Road open—too many, some think. She and Gideon Mirkady have fewer than eight thousand men to defend the capital, and Bar Asfal himself has taken to the field there, to be in at the kill.”
Canker straightened, and took a sip of his wine. His black eyes glinted. “What of Moerus? Is he just sitting on his hands?”
“He has over three hundred miles of supply line to keep open, as well as the defense of his own city. My lord, we simply do not have the men, not since the losses at the Embrun River last summer. I hope I do not speak out of turn when I say that the general consensus is that Myconn must be abandoned. The Queen must pull back to a more defensible line, or our front is liable to collapse.”
“We lose Myconn, and we lose all pretense of legitimacy, and are back where we started three years ago,” Canker said somberly. “The Queen knows this; it is why she is hanging on.”
Hass raised his hands, veins blue at the back of them. “The city can be retaken at a more propitious time.”
“There will be no more propitious times, Hass. We are near the end of our little venture. This next campaign must be decisive, one way or the other. You must raise more men.”
“There are no more to be had, my lord. The barrel is scraped clean.”
Oddly, Canker turned here to look Rol in the eye. “Perhaps. Perhaps not.” He stood up, and stretched. “In any case, we will go south in the morning, but we’d appreciate some rest first.”
“Of course. I shall see to it.”
“Bring pallets. We’ll sleep here, in the warmth. I’ve seen the guest chambers in this damn place.”
“I was at your side when you took it,” Hass said, smiling a little.
“Yes, you were. I can be plain with you, Hass, I know that. It is why I am here.”
Hass nodded, but once more his gaze traveled over Canker’s silent companions. The questions burned in his eyes.
There were still two or three hours until dawn. Weary to the depth of his bones, Rol was awake nonetheless. Canker joined him at the fire whilst Gallico, Creed, and Giffon lay on straw pallets three yards away. Gallico lay on his back, and his snores were loud enough to drown out cockcrow.