The Larion Senators

by Rob Scott; Jay Gordon

  He slipped and fell, hitting his head on one of the columns. The marble was wet in places, and treacherous. He wouldn’t make that mistake again.

  Rolling over, he used the column to regain his feet, but something gripped his right ankle, a whorl of snarled root protruding through the muck. Mark tugged his lower leg, trying to extricate himself. It was hot here, and humid, hard to breathe. His clothes were soaked through with sweat and clung to his flesh like a peelable second skin. He was covered head to toe in marsh muck and shit … and he reached for the root, pulled hard and slipped his boot free.

  A coral snake – those are poisonous! – slipped from behind the root and up onto the back of his hand. Mark, covered almost entirely in goose pimples, screeched and jerked back reflexively. The rainbow-coloured serpent went on its way, slipping over the root, across the marble ledge and into the trough.

  Told you we had a few more.

  Fuck you.

  I’m not the one doing this to you, Mark. I was happy with you in the dark. I have what I need, and I’ll call you when I need you again.

  The lights began to dim. Before they faded all the way to black, Mark checked the length of the rectangular koi pond. It was marble, narrow, shallow, and lined as far as he could see with neo-classical columns. Where had he seen these columns before? The Capitol Building. Those were the ones that flared up in his memory, anyway.

  Wrong again. The voice was fading with the lights. That’s not the right place, Mark, it said, echoing its earlier admonition.

  Well, where then?

  The column was cold. Real marble had a way of staying cold, no matter where you put it. The marble columns of Hell would be nice and cool, a good place to rest while enjoying a cold drink, whatever they’re serving down there. He tried to memorise the lie of the land between himself and the bridge. If I can follow the columns, I’ll get there. I’ll cross in the dark. That’ll surprise him, the bastard. I’ll cross in the dark and the next time he turns on the lights, I’ll be there.

  There were eight or nine columns between Mark and the bridge. They were each about twenty feet apart. One hundred and sixty feet. I can make that. Just stay on the edge, I can make it.

  He remembered the coral snake. That one’ll bite you. The others wouldn’t, but that one will. That’s the one I have to watch. Mark used the dying light to check for the colourful serpent. It was there, keeping pace with him in the water. It would know if he moved. He hugged the column; it felt good against his face. He had to stay put. The snake would bite him – more than once, too. It’ll go on for a while – if he tried to reach the bridge in the darkness.

  Night closed in.

  Where had he seen these columns?

  The Capitol? New Orleans? Europe? They were all over Europe. The Gloriette. What the hell is a Gloriette?

  Now you’re thinking.

  It was dark again; the coral snake slithered onto the edge of the marble trough and waited between Mark’s boots.

  ‘Over the side! Over the side!’ Gilmour shouted, shoving Garec and Kellin towards the rail where the barge’s first mate had tethered their horses. ‘Just cut the reins, cut them!’ he yelled, checking to be sure the spell book and far portal were safely lashed to his saddle.

  ‘What is it?’ Steven followed the others. The magic was bubbling over, preparing for battle.

  Gilmour ignored him. ‘Lead the horses to that shore. We’ll go north, find cover and dry out. But be quick now, quick. You have to get as far into the shallows as possible. Don’t look; just head for shore.’ The riverbank was no more than sixty or seventy paces off, but to Gilmour the relative safety of dry land seemed a Moon’s travel away.

  ‘Gilmour!’ Steven shouted, ‘what is it? What’s he doing? What’s coming for us?’

  ‘I was too tired, too rutting tired from yesterday, from chatting too long with Milla,’ he lamented. ‘I didn’t feel it – I should have, when those waves rolled past.’

  ‘The waves?’

  Gilmour tried to untie his horse’s reins, then, frustrated, cast a noisy blast that blast through the starboard gunwale. ‘Just ride off the deck and into the water. But stay with your horse. They’ll be able to move through the shallows and up the riverbank faster than we will.’

  Garec held his own horse by the bridle, trying to keep it steady after Gilmour’s explosion. ‘They won’t step into the river, Gilmour. They know how cold it is.’

  ‘I’ll help them,’ he said, his hand already glowing red. ‘Now, go.’ Gilmour slapped Kellin’s horse, sending a bolt of Larion lightning into the animal’s hindquarter, and with a loud whinny, the horse, with Kellin in tow, plunged through the broken slats and into the frigid waters of the Medera River.

  ‘You do have a way with women,’ Garec said with a wry grin.

  ‘No time to chat,’ Gilmour replied, and slapped Garec’s horse with a similar charge.

  Still confused, Steven said, ‘It’s too cold. Why are we doing this? Let’s stand and fight here, where it’s dry.’

  Gilmour took him by both shoulders and shoved him towards his horse. ‘Mount up. Stay in the saddle, just hang on. She’ll get to shore; you just hang on.’

  ‘Gilmour, what—?’

  The old Larion Senator pointed downriver.

  Steven gaped at the wall of water coming towards them. ‘Oh my dear Christ.’ It was massive, nearly eighty feet high, an unstoppable nightmare dragging all manner of debris: broken bits of lumber, cracked spars trailing torn sails, wooden doors, fence-posts, and scores of uprooted trees. What remained of a ship, wrenched in two, rode the crest of the rogue flood. There were carcasses, too: cows, a horse, most of a pig, and too many people. Steven set his jaw and looked away. Reaching shore was pointless; they would need to be at least a hundred feet higher to avoid being swept all the way back to Wellham Ridge. He knew they wouldn’t make it; the barge would be reduced to splinters.

  Somewhere near the bow he heard a scream and then a splash. It was followed a moment later by two others. The crew was abandoning ship.

  ‘Go, go!’ Gilmour shouted, smacking Steven’s horse into the river behind Kellin and Garec. ‘Stay with her, hold on as long as you can.’ He checked a final time for the spell book and far portal, then spurred his own horse as, with a deafening roar, the floodtide ploughed its way towards Wellham Ridge.

  The barge was lifted up and tumbled head over heels before it finally shattered in a prolonged ripping crack, like so many brittle bones snapping beneath the weight of a hundred thousand tons of water.

  ‘Alen?’ Milla touched him gently on the shoulder. ‘Alen? Are you awake?’

  Cramped and stiff as a corpse, Alen Jasper opened one eye, swallowed dryly and groaned, ‘I am now, Pepperweed. What’s wrong? You need the pot? There’s a clean one under the—’

  ‘Something’s happening,’ the little girl cut him off.

  Alen propped himself up and rubbed his eyes. Yawning, he asked, ‘What’s the matter?’

  ‘The people are in trouble. Should I try to help them?’

  ‘What are you—?’ Alen sat up, found a goblet beside the bed and drained whatever had been inside.

  ‘The people, they’re far away, but they’re in trouble from the water.’

  Now Alen felt it begin, quietly at first, like the low hum of a familiar tune. He shrugged off his irritability and focused his attention inward. ‘What is it, Pepperweed? Can you tell where it’s coming from?’

  ‘Far away, back where Gilmour fell when I let him go,’ she whispered.

  Alen tried to hone in on the monstrously powerful magic, but it was distant, half a world away. ‘You’re right, Milla,’ he said finally. ‘It’s coming right from where Fantu— um, Gilmour said he was going.’

  ‘Should I try to help them?’ she asked again.

  ‘Do you think you can?’ He let the distant drone fade, knowing the shockwaves would reach him in a moment, like huge ripples churning a mill pond.

  ‘I can try.’

  O
rindale Harbour was the busiest port in Eldarn, even during the coldest winter Twinmoon. Moorings were rented by the Moon when necessary, but most captains paid for a few days’ anchorage at a time. Cargoes were loaded, offloaded, speculated on, bought and sold, day and night, in all weathers and at all tides. The northern wharf was tucked into a crooked semi-circle of a cove, a natural jetty of topsoil and rocks rolled or dragged across southern Falkan by the river over the ages. The southern wharf was larger, if more sparsely populated, and it dominated the lower part of the waterfront, a sprawling testament to the city’s industrial growth.

  On the day that Mark Jenkins sailed into the harbour, thinly disguised as Major Nell Tavon of Malagon Whitward’s occupation army, absent without leave and in command of a missing platoon, there were thirty-two merchant and naval vessels docked, moored or making their way into the harbour on the inbound tide. Hundreds more small barges, skiffs, ketches and transport vessels worked the harbour as well, but Mark was interested only in the fat ones, the fancy sailing ships rigged for the gusty headwinds that blew along the Ravenian Sea. A scattering of naval vessels monitored the passage of merchant ships to and from the wharf; Mark didn’t give these a second glance.

  With the spell table opened, his first target was a Malakasian schooner, which started breaking apart audibly. When the mainmast snapped, it was loud enough that Captain Blackford covered his ears and he was still holding his head when the thick post crashed through the foredeck, bringing down the main and topsails in a tangle of canvas and rigging. The hull opened and the sea poured in, but by that time Blackford had been distracted by the devastation in other quarters and when he briefly looked back to the schooner, it was already gone, the few crew members who had escaped rowing towards shore in an overfilled launch boat Mark had overlooked – but before they reached the wharf, he’d spotted it and set the small boat aflame. A couple of sailors managed to swim the last few paces to shore, but that was all.

  A Pragan galleon, crammed to bursting with textiles, tanned leather, mortar sand and quarried stone was also on fire. Her crew had been watching the schooner snap in two when their own vessel started to burn. Their screams filled the air as they tried to reach the sides and jump over. The flames, oddly resistant, quickly engulfed the galleon, and once the rigging went up and the fore, main and mizzen masts were burning, the firelight lit the whole harbour. Heat radiated across the water and the sailors working Major Tavon’s barge felt it warm their faces. The fire was a beacon, and could be seen from anywhere in the city, a harbinger of grim events yet to come.

  As the news spread, the city of Orindale turned out in force to watch as frigates, barges, two more galleons, a massive carrack and a handful of sleek schooners were all sent to the bottom, ripped in half, punctured, blown to splintered bits or simply set ablaze and burned to the waterline. One sloop, a single-masted vessel from Strandson, was lifted from the water and those watching from the relative safety of the wharf talked for Twinmoons about seeing its keel clear the surface as it rolled lazily to port then back to starboard before wrenching itself in two, snapping like a handful of kindling and disappearing beneath the waves. Two barges were swept clean of their cargo by rogue waves and then broken into flotsam. The bits that remained afloat caught fire, looking like a string of macabre lanterns floating upstream.

  A Falkan carrack, one of the largest ships currently making its stately way into the harbour, came about hastily, despite the tide, and endeavoured to tack into the open sea. Onlookers cheered – it was a local ship, after all – and when the captain ordered the top and main sails set, the waterfront erupted with an ovation Blackford could hear halfway across the harbour.

  ‘Stop cheering!’ he shouted, ‘don’t you understand? You’ll make it worse! Stop cheering!’

  The cheering did stop when the carrack exploded. It was almost to the horizon, almost into the currents – almost free – when the proud giant simply blew apart. The concussion was massive, throwing Blackford and his men to the deck as the shockwaves passed by. He had never seen such a disaster, had never heard such an explosion – nothing in Eldarn exploded like that! This was the work of a god.

  All manner of vessels set out on a mercy mission in hopes of rescuing the hundreds of sailors, soldiers and merchant seamen now drifting amongst the floating debris, though many had already drowned; either they couldn’t swim or they had succumbed to the cold.

  Fathers and mothers, fat merchants, aged grandparents and children barely old enough to grasp an oar all rowed, hauled lines, gripped tillers and tied great loops into heavy rescue lines, a flotilla of venerable, chipped, rotting and battered family boats, making their way into the harbour to save what lives they could. Even the soldiers, the Malakasian brutes who periodically beat them, or hanged them for no reason on the common near the imperial palace, even they did not deserve to die like this.

  Mark attacked them all, using five-foot waves to wipe the sea clean of the determined but irritating little boats. The more seaworthy craft, those that rode the five-foot swells, he set on fire or snapped into splinters. There was howling from everywhere as people burned to death, drowned or succumbed to hypothermia: everyone cried for mercy in the same miserable language.

  When it was over, the galleon burned brightest, a signal fire warning all craft away from this place. With the chill snaking into their bones, many of the spectators, their lust for carnage sated, realised with a catch in their throats that perhaps the gods weren’t done with them yet; perhaps the devastation they had witnessed was just the beginning; perhaps the city itself was next. There was a moment of stunned silence, broken only by the crackle and snap of the flames and the piercing cries of the injured and dying, then panic blew through the crowd like a fogbank and, pushing, pulling, shoving, punching and kicking, the people of Orindale turned and fled as one.

  Captain Hershaw offered a hand to Captain Blackford, still lying on the barge’s deck. They were both in shock, mute in disbelief.

  ‘Why?’ Blackford finally managed.

  Hershaw gestured towards the southern wharf. Three ships remained intact, tied to a deepwater pier and facing north, as if they knew somehow that they would survive the morning. These were frigates, giants, capable of carrying massive cargoes to anywhere in Eldarn.

  Hershaw said, ‘I don’t think she wants to be followed.’

  ‘So we’re going home in those?’

  ‘Not just us.’

  Blackford tried for a moment to figure out who might be joining them when he heard a change in the low humming coming from Major Tavon’s quarters. It was slight but unmistakable as the pitch ratcheted up a tone or two, resonating with an extra pinch of mystical intensity.

  He looked at Hershaw. ‘Rutters! She’s not yet done!’

  As if hearing him, the harbour itself rose up. Swelling first in the middle, a hummock of smooth water bubbling up from below, it grew into a rounded hill, higher than the tallest buildings along the waterfront. Burning ships tumbled off its slopes and were extinguished in the waves. Bits of jetsam and floating debris slipped down its sides and scuttled across the surface. Still the hill grew until it was a tremendous liquid dome, dwarfing the waterfront like an alpine range.

  ‘Great rutting whores,’ Blackford said, ‘she’s going to destroy the city!’

  ‘Let’s go,’ Hershaw said, drawing his sword.

  ‘She’ll kill us both,’ Blackford argued, ‘we can’t—’

  ‘We have to.’

  Trembling, Blackford followed, hoping he would get the chance to run Tavon through, especially if she was distracted, even for an instant, by the stone table. Or by killing Hershaw.

  But before they had reached her, she struck, and the blast ripped the door from its leather hinges and sent much of it ripping through Captain Hershaw’s body in jagged splinters. He was dead before he stopped tumbling, somewhere amidships.

  ‘Blackford!’ Tavon screamed.

  He approached warily. His face and arms were bleeding, and he
feared he would spend the next aven picking splinters out of his skin, but he was still here, still alive. ‘Yes, ma’am,’ he said politely.

  ‘I want you to watch this, Blackford.’ Tavon was elbow-deep in what looked like a waist-high circular pool. Blackford knew better, though. It was the stone table, transformed somehow by magic into a fluid, unending cauldron of energy and power. He watched the colours change, flickering from hue to hue as the major’s wiry arms pulled and pressed spells and charms about inside. There was an animal, something that looked like a tadpole, and then a snake, and a hideous-looking fellow with a grim countenance, if that was possible. There was a creature Blackford guessed was an almor and then a blurry and indistinct image of a man, a South Coaster hiding in a stone temple with a rainbow-coloured serpent coiled at his feet.

  ‘Why are you doing this?’ he whispered. ‘Please, Major, enough.’

  ‘Oh, shut up, Blackford, your breath stinks. It’d stop my watch if I hadn’t given it to that Ronan slut.’ The pool changed again; this time, Blackford could see the outline of the Orindale waterfront. The northern and southern wharfs were on either side of the inlet. He saw the Medera and the stone bridge arching above it, connecting everything in the Falkan capital. The bridge looked different, though: cleaner, whiter, as if it had been carved from pristine marble. When the centre of the table rose up in an aquamarine hummock, Blackford understood what he was about to witness.

  ‘Please, Major,’ he repeated, shaking.

  ‘Watch this, Captain.’ She released her hold on the hill of magical energy she had called up beneath the waters of Orindale Harbour and, as the tiny hillock of blue careened through the imagined inlet and across the waterfront Blackford could see lining the circular edge of the stone table, he heard the deafening roar of the actual harbour rushing east to swallow the wharf and flood the Medera from Orindale to Wellham Ridge. Inside the spell table, Blackford saw the waters crash over the stone bridge, collapsing it like a bit of folded paper. Without looking towards the city, he knew that the bridge spanning the Medera had fallen as well. There had been hundreds of people on that bridge. They’d be dead now; there was no way they could have survived. Hearing the fading thunder as the great floodtide rolled east into Falkan, Blackford tasted something tangy and metallic in his throat. The dead would number in the thousands.