by Holly Lisle
It did for me.
But Gnadable, who was not Tonk, but an islander, a Sera Amber who had insisted in staying with us because she wanted to record this history of our trip in her knot-books, said, “You’re Tonk. Your men were looking for you. I’m Nito Absi, and I’ve heard no word of any Absi men searching for their lost and stolen. Nor seen any Absi ships armed with marines out sailing the seas to fight the slavers.”
“The oceans are big, and we haven’t been over most of them,” I said, a bit amused. “It’s easy enough to believe that they could be looking in a thousand places for you, and still have not found you.”
“I don’t think that’s it,” Gnadable said. “I remember being Absi. I wasn’t taken by slavers, but by Absi men who took us away to pay off debts our fathers or brothers had incurred. We’d always been told that if they came for us, we were not to fight. They never needed to kill anyone to take us from our families. The day they took me and two of my sisters—they said for my father’s debt—they pulled the three of us off the streets in broad daylight, waved their swords around, and everyone shrank back. Not a single man stepped forward to fight them, not a single one. I never saw my family again after that day, and I don’t think even they cared.”
I sat trying to imagine that. My parents fought for my siblings and me. Died for us. Everyone in the encampment had. It was the clearest picture I’d had of them. How would it have been for me if all I could remember was them backing away and leaving me to my fate?
I would have hated my family, and my people. I would have hated them a thousand times over.
“The men nearly sold me with my sisters as whores. But then one of the seru showed up, and paid extra for me. Just me.” She sat there, silent, for a long time, and we three Tonks said nothing. “That’s why I’m studying with Tuua to become Tonk. I don’t want to think that some day I could stand back and let those vile beasts take my children off to horror simply to save my own life.”
“Being Tonk is better than being of the Order,” I said. “I remember almost nothing of my life before. But Tonk means something. The Order never stood for anything. Profit, I suppose, for services rendered. Some fine songs passed down to us from ages before. Hours kept, and liturgies said. But can any of you tell me the meaning of the Liturgy Axa Nidella? We said it every day, and I have yet to understand why.”
No one had an answer.
I glanced up through the deck, seeing movement where none should have been, and I discovered that strangers had stepped onto the Taag. Five big men wearing armor of metal rings hidden beneath animal-pelt coats, and knives tucked away against their bodies, out of sight. Our people looked soft and watery compared to the dense metals of these men. I did not like the way they walked. Nor the way they looked. And I watched one of ours slip away from the deck and hurry down the passenger companionway.
It was Tuua.
“Trouble,” he whispered. “Meggren has been overrun by Feegash mercenaries in the harbors, claiming the right to inspect all Tonk ships. The Feegash say the Tonks have been inciting the Sinali and pirating through waters protected by Feegash treaties. They’re looking for trouble.”
“They’re hiding knives and armor under their coats,” I said.
Tuua said, “I’m not surprised. They claim this is simply a routine inspection, but I think they mean to take us.”
I hurried into the time river. This was the danger I had seen, not clearly limned before. Feegash mercenaries. Those we sailed to destroy, here at the wrong place and the wrong time, not looking for us particularly, but for all Tonk.
And they did mean to take us. The currents were strongly split; in half, they did take us. In half, we got out of this mess and sailed way.
One variable would determine whether they merely made nuisances of themselves, or whether the lot of us would be dragged away to Feegash prisons to face trial for … what? What?
I fought to clear the murk in time’s waters, to understand what I was seeing. And then Eban, dressed in Feegash clothing, was prodded into court as a witness. Against us.
“Jostfar bless us, Tuua! Get Eban into the deepest hiding place on the ship and keep him there and quiet, or we’re all going to be executed for kidnapping the son of a Feegash first diplomat. Hurry, man! You have almost no time left, and the rivers are shifting against us.”
We needed a diversion. I ran to my room and over my simple garb tossed on the outer wrapping of grand Oracle robes. “Stay,” I told my companions. “Except for you, Redbird. Follow me. We’re going to be Ossalene Order all the way.”
We hurried up to the deck via the crew companionway, since that was the way the Feegash were heading. To inspect the ship, they were saying; they would find us, instead.
I reached the top of the companionway just as they were getting ready to descend, and heard all five of them gasp.
“Who are you? Explain yourself immediately,” I said to them. But not in Tonk. In Sinali.
Fierce stone-eyed women wearing elaborate robes and speaking in the tongue of the Great Empire do give men pause. And thank Jostfar for that.
“Pardon me,” the man in the lead said. I heard him swallow hard. “Who, exactly, are you? You … aren’t Tonk, that’s for certain.” His Sinali was passable, but nowhere near as good as mine.
I kept my hands tucked into my deep sleeves, and reminded myself that under no circumstances could I let any of them see the palm of my left hand. “I am the Oracle Hawkspar Eyes of War, Goddess Incarnate of the Ossalene Rite of the Cistavrian Order of Marosites, from the Citadel of the Ossalenes.”
“The … who?”
Behind him I heard one of the men whisper, “Gods’ balls, Sergeant, I’ve heard of the Ossalenes, and if you knew more of the world than where to find booze and whores in Sinali, so would you have. They’re absolute terrors, they are. The Sinali empress goes herself to visit the Oracles; they don’t go to her. That’s how big they are. If we create an incident, the first diplomat himself will … well … you know.”
I was not meant to have heard that, and so I pretended that I hadn’t. Instead, I said, “You ask many questions, little man, and yet I have refrained from demanding to know who you are.”
The silence that followed was either awkward or frightened; both suited my purposes. “We’re Feegash mercs, posted to harbor duty,” the sergeant said.
“As for who I am, emperors and kings and regents seek me out when they need to see a true future.” I made certain to put the weight of the Order and my deep scorn equally into those words. “I am known by name to the High Red Empress of the Sinali Empire, and King Rostgavir of Bheki has come personally to my chambers thrice in his lifetime, bearing slaves and gold and treasure of immeasurable worth. So, little men, why do you block my way? I demand to speak to that pissing irritant of a captain, and you impede my progress?”
“You’re a seer,” the not-terribly-clever sergeant said.
“If you tell me what I am, I shall tell you what you are, little man, and what you are is doomed.”
“Are you threatening me?”
“None such. I merely report the past, the present, and the future as I see them. I have urgent business with this ship’s captain, who has been well paid to get me promptly and without incident to my destination, and now he pleads low supplies, and to my way of thinking, you people look like an incident. I am most displeased.”
“Beg your pardon for asking, Oracle,” the sergeant said, “but what would your mission be?”
I was scrabbling through the waters of time, digging for the right answer. The one that would get him and his men off our ship. An ally of the Feegash, one of their puppets.
“The city of Rajarmalad, in Cartajarma. You know it?”
“Rajarmalad has been a Feegash friend for centuries,” he said. “Why did your captain not tell us you were bound there, or that he carried envoys of another Feegash friend?”
“Perhaps for the same reason he failed to tell us he had only stocked half our request
ed supplies of fine Regallan soap. Or that his ship would not have sufficient fresh water for us to bathe in comfort daily. Perhaps because the man is a blundering jackass.”
“He’s here to resupply with water and … soap?”
“He finds that embarrassing. Would you find that embarrassing?”
I heard his men suppressing snickers. “No, Oracle,” he said, but there was a hint of a chuckle in his voice, as well.
“We travel to Rajarmalad,” I added, “to set up an outpost for the Order there.”
“The Order of the Eyes inhabiting a Fee—I mean, ah, that’s tremendous news. Seers on their way to … to tell the future in convenient locations.”
“With a ship full of nice soap,” the funny man in the back said, and again I heard the sounds of barely suppressed laughter squeaking out of them.
I put a hand on the sergeant’s chest and let his time flow around me. There truly was not much of it left. “You mock me? And yet, if I choose, I can tell you how to live past tonight. If you follow your present course, the woman with whom you are … ah … keeping company, will betray you. You dare not touch her again, out of either passion or vengeance, for she is not who you think she is. She pretends to be a commoner, but she is, in fact, a daughter of the vice chair of trade, with whom your diplomat treats. Having found out most of what she wanted to know about your mission from you, she has invited you to a dinner and bedding tonight.”
He gasped. “You knew of … of her? And my plans?”
“Emperors do not pay a kingdom’s riches to those who cannot deliver what they promise. I deliver,” I said. My tone was haughty. Aristocratic.
Oh, sometimes being an Oracle is a fine thing. I think the bastard Feegash damn near pissed his pants right there.
“Then I should not go?” he asked.
“The instant you step through her doors, you are a dead man walking, for whom there will be no retreat. Would you live?”
“I … would,” he said. “I have no wish to die at a woman’s word.”
“Take your friends quickly away from this place, for she has marked all of them for death as well. Put as much distance as you can between you and Meggren, and as quickly as you can, because when you fail to appear at her dinner, she will send assassins after you. If you leave immediately, you and your friends have two out of three chances of living to fight in great wars. For every moment you tarry, your chances narrow horribly. If you’re still in Meggren by the next bell, you’ll die before the morrow, no matter where you might hide.”
The man before me and his four fellow guards turned to each other, and in a flurry of debate I heard only snatches of their muttered conversation.
“ … pass this one through?”
“ … soap … you want to die for soap?”
“ … should stop with the captain, or we’ll be in trouble …”
“ … I’m not going to die for that bitch …”
And the sergeant whose future I’d read, and to whom I had lied so handily, turned to me and dropped to one knee and kissed my hand. “I would give you gold or jewels if I had them, Oracle. I’m told by my men that is the way of it, but I’m a poor soldier.”
“Your people and my Order share powerful friends,” I said quietly, tucking my hand back into my sleeve and hiding it away before he decided he wanted to kiss my palm as well. “Live a long and courageous life, and consider that my repayment.”
He rose and whispered, “Thank you,” again, and then fled with his cronies, slowing only enough to snap at Aaran, “The next time you’re hauling allies or restocking soap, you fool, say so and spare us all a lot of bother, won’t you?”
“I … will?” Aaran said, though he didn’t sound certain about it at all.
While the one mercenary berated him, one of the others took a board from his hand, appeared to mark it, and said, “You’re cleared, and your cargo. Get your soap and go.”
And then the mercs hurried off the decks as if pursued by wolves and wizards and the walking dead.
I stood, unmoving. Waiting. Tracking them through increasing crowds, plotting their course. They were heading for another wharf, and the wharf would take them to a ship which would take them away from both their duties and their captain.
And they would die this night anyway. In a fight against their fellow mercenaries.
I fought the pain of the lie. The necessary lie that saved our lives. I despise liars, yet found myself a liar whose lie carried weight because it has always been known that the Oracles of the Eyes speak the truth.
I had become a new sort of Oracle. A liar.
Was this also what it meant to be Tonk? To deceive enemies, standing on the power and prestige of my position, in order to save my own people? My family?
I wanted to slink back into the passenger quarters and hide myself on my bunk and soak myself in my shame. I’d felt no other way to save us but I’d betrayed the sole core of being an Ossalene oracle to do it.
But Aaran was hurrying across the deck at a fast clip, and I waited to hear what he had to say.
“What happened?” he asked me. “I heard your nasty remarks about me, but I’d thought we were going to keep you and your people well hidden, and glide through here without making waves.”
“We won’t make waves,” I told him. “All of those men will be dead before sunset. I … sent them to their deaths with a lie.”
“You’re damned dangerous,” he said.
“Be grateful they did not see what we hid belowdecks. We would have all been hauled into their stockade and held there until they could send the lot of us off to Ba’afeegash to be executed.”
“Executed? We have nothing they consider contraband. Not yet, anyway, though when our holds are loaded with Greton fire, we’ll be in trouble if ever we’re boarded.”
I took his hand in mine. “That’s not precisely true. We hold the nephew of the Feegash first diplomat aboard. He has by now been reported kidnapped, and if anyone among the Feegash finds him in the company of Tonks, you can be sure they’ll have all our heads.”
34
Aaran
The Great Pack stood off the South Current Convergence Point, and all save one of the ships that had joined the pack had arrived safely.
The only ship not to report in, however, was the Ker Nagile, and she was a day past the latest date she should have arrived.
Aaran and the other captains met aboard the Taag, down in the common attable. They had two choices: assume that The Ker was fine and simply running behind, or assume that it had been taken and that Haakvar and all his people were captive and would be tortured for whatever information they could give.
They could, of course, give a lot.
Aaran sat at the head of the council of war, with Hawkspar at his side.
“If we go on, we could find ourselves running into a trap,” av Messyn of the Muus Zir Ip said. He stood, leaning over the table before him with his hands planted on it as if he could no longer bear his own weight, glaring down the table’s length at the rest of them. “Without Haakvar, I don’t see how we can keep going.”
Belkraag of the Dark Fire, an independent ship like Aaran’s, said, “We keep going because if we don’t the Tonk will be wiped from the face of the world like a stain.”
“I second going on,” Dyur av Derstaag said. “The Vinik Han is Haakvar’s, just like the Muus, but if Haakvar’s dead, are we to give up the fight because of it? Better we should fight in his memory, I say.”
They’d been at each other for some time, and no one had faced what Aaran saw as the real issue. “I don’t think we should go on, and I don’t think we should go home,” he said at last.
“You want to sit here until every hostile ship in the region figures out this is where we’re sitting and comes to destroy us?”
“No,” Aaran said. “I think we need to go to Greton. Not all of us. Just one ship, secretly, though with as many marines as we can squeeze aboard. I say we go back to Gerstaggen, get the Ker Nagile
and her crew at dead of night, and kill anyone who is holding them.”
“A raid? You want to raid Gerstaggen?” Dyur, who had been staunchly supporting what he saw as the true Tonk way, turned to stare at Aaran as if he’d lost his mind. “Gerstaggen Harbor. The largest and most heavily guarded of the harbors of Greton, wherein, I’ll note, port authority is already well armed with catapults loaded with Greton fire and massive winching crossbows bolted with Greton fire, and soldiers with swords and spears and archers with an unlimited supply of … Greton fire. You don’t raid Greton. It’s nearly as much a law of nature as that things tossed up do come back down.”
“Laws of nature are made to be broken.”
“Tell me that after you’ve flown around the room, lad.”
Aaran looked over at Hawkspar, who sat quietly. He still felt the urge to drag her back into his bed and have his way with her every time they were in the same room together, as well as a lot of times when they weren’t.
It was, however, an impulse tempered by visions of a future in which he was forever without her. That vision, paired with endless longing and painful desire, made for uncomfortable moments whenever they were so close.
He said, “I’ll go in, and take the Oracle and her fighters with me. They can … move without being seen. Or at least Hawkspar can. If we can sail into harbor, she can get our people, kill their captors, and I’ll have marines and the Obsidians in place as backup if things go bad. We’ll send a clear message if we run into trouble we can’t handle, and anything you do after that will be up to you.”
“Move without being seen, eh? I don’t believe that for an instant,” av Messyn said.
“Since it’s my life and my crew’s lives I’ll be risking on this plan, why don’t you just not worry about how reasonable what I’d be doing sounds?”
He wanted to hit a whole herd of captains, most of them Haakvar’s. He wanted to trample the smug bastards whose dubious expressions couldn’t have been more clear. They didn’t know Hawkspar. They hadn’t watched a sea-walking wizard crumble to pieces before their eyes the way he had. They didn’t know.