by Holly Lisle
“And a woman dressed in white, in the manner of the Tonk, with a sword at her hip and a staff in her hand, came to me. She has come to me before, but this time she came with a child—a little laughing girl. And she told me, ‘This child has been with Ethebet for a long time. Her body remained in the world of the flesh, but her spirit has been in Ethebet’s care. Set her flesh free, and mourn her passing only for a little while. Know that you who ride for Ethebet will see her again in Jostfar’s land.’”
Aaran stared at Hawkspar. He had heard tales of the woman in white. He had once heard the famed Tonk heroine Talyn, who had been sitting in the Star’s Rest in Beyltaak, telling a story to those around her of having been offered a choice between a banquet and the world, and water and a sword, by a woman in white. Talyn’s description of the woman and the place sounded just like Hawkspar’s.
The hair on Aaran’s arms stood up.
Aashka had been safe? He had felt her body suffering. But he had not felt her. He had never felt anything about her that had remembered him. He had felt only pure pain. And he thought about the fact that as soon as her body died, it decayed. Her body was, lying atop the pyre at that moment, little more than dust.
The wizard, then, had kept her flesh alive. But her spirit had gone on long before.
He breathed easier all of a sudden. A burden lifted from his shoulders. He signaled for the torch, and suddenly Hawkspar turned to him and said, “You have to take the medallion with you.”
“I have to … what?”
“The medallion your sister wore. The woman in white said that you have to take it with you. That you have to wear it.”
Aaran didn’t want it. He wanted nothing to do with that accursed piece of metal, for which his sister had been singled out and dragged to this horrible place to be taken by the first diplomat and premier of Ba’afeegash to be his personal toy.
But he climbed onto the pyre, and unwrapped her, and gently lifted the medallion over her head and dropped it over his own.
He climbed back down from the pyre, took the torch handed to him, and said, “I release you, Aashka, little sister, into the arms of our mother and father, into the care of Ethebet, into the fields of Jostfar. Run free, be joyous, and know that I love you. And I will miss you until the day I see you again.”
He fought back tears, and put the torch to the base of the pyre, and watched as the tinder caught, and then the oil and the flames licked up the wood. He stood, with the smoke boiling into the sky, and thought of all the years he had spent on ships in search of her, hoping for word, hoping for a sign. Of the oath he had taken, that he would not rest until he found her. Until he saved her.
He’d kept his oath as best he could. It hadn’t been enough, because from early on, she’d been beyond rescue. But he had sworn, too, to bring the men who had taken her to justice.
And he had made a start on that.
“Be well,” he whispered, and his hand wrapped around the medallion that she had worn. “Be well, and be happy.”
Hawkspar
I’d regained the time river. The waters that flowed around me when I stepped into it once again showed the currents of our possible futures.
I had hoped to see us triumphant. I had hoped to see the Feegash discredited once and for all. But none knew of the fall of Ba’afeegash save those within its walls. It was being kept secret.
The slaves, the flunkies, and those otherwise freed from oppression had taken over the gates and the treasuries, and were carrying on trading as they had before, pretending that their masters still ruled them. Supplies poured into Ba’afeegash as they always had, as did tribute from allies. Emissaries were turned away, with a story about temporary difficulties in the diplomatic headquarters; they were given official documents from the secretaries who had years of practice lying for their masters, and who now were telling one last grand lie to protect themselves.
The people of Ba’afeegash were carefully dividing up the gold and the goods of the city, and leaving in family groups. There was nothing in this foul, sterile place that they wanted—not the played-out land, not the poor grazing of the small fields, not the precarious location that without regular supplies from debtor nations would leave the population to starve quickly. And since we’d made it clear that we intended to topple the Feegash masters and destroy their regime, everyone understood that if we were successful, the supplies and tributes would stop coming.
And if we failed, the Feegash diplomats and mercenaries would return.
So, via two broad roads, in groups of ten and twenty and even thirty, families and friends who had found each other at last slipped out of the walled city, carrying their shares of hidden gold, good food, and such small trinkets as they wished to carry. They mingled with the traders leaving the city, bound for anywhere that ships might be paid to take them.
Some remained with us. We had another mission, one I had seen in the waters of time. If we succeeded, we would win the day, and our place in the world. If we failed, the Feegash elites would regroup and the Tonk would yet be overrun and our history would come to an end, and with it our people.
We kept with us some of the secretaries and the file clerks and the scribes. Those mercenaries who had turned against their ranks to save their own civilian families and had fought with us. The wives and concubines of the first diplomat and their children.
We were going to burn Ba’afeegash to the ground on our way out the door, lock the gates behind us, and hammer notices that Ba’afeegash was closed for business to celebrate a great triumph to the walls. And then we were going to hie ourselves with all possible speed to Sinali, which housed the Grand Hall of Nations, and in which the Feegash still held sway through their proxies. And there we were going to out-diplomat the diplomats.
The Feegash had left behind the complete details of their Five-Hundred-Year Plan for the total domination of the world. They were on year 324. They had been kind enough to write their plan down, make multiple copies, and have their servants file those copies.
We had the copies. We had the servants. We had the medallion of the first diplomat, and the undersecretary who had signed documents for him for years, and who had once had a wife and children he loved.
And we were on our way to our next battle.
Our communicators were sending like wild men, keeping everything in code but letting our people back home know what we had discovered.
The Tonk, meanwhile, were having a terrible time everywhere. In Hyre, the Cartajarmans and the Pindans had attacked from the north, the Sinali were bringing in fleets from the south, the Reform Mindans were sabotaging Tonk efforts from the inside—although they were not doing as good a job as they might have hoped, for most of them had already been banished from Tonk lands. Only those few that had managed to stay well hidden remained.
On the seas, in Tandinapalis, in Velobrina, in Franica, our people were beset by enemies. War raged everywhere.
And our people could not say anything about the fall of Ba’afeegash, because if they did, the Feegash throughout the rest of Korre would reorganize. As it was, they’d stopped receiving any communications from their own people when we killed off their communicators. Their code books were in place and several of our communicators were Feegash-fluent, so we brought the Feegash communication stations back to life and we spun out a nice little tale of the defeat of a major Tonk territory down in the nearby lowlands, and of the celebratory month-long orgy that would be ensuing. National Feegash holiday, we’d declared, and said Ba’afeegash communications would be via courier for anything but emergencies for all that time.
We ordered the farflung Feegash embassies to close their doors and celebrate with us. We’d left our communicators to deal with the emergencies in such fashion as amused them; they feigned being irritated at being disturbed from their drunken revelries, they passed on commands from the first diplomat and premier himself that had to be driving the field diplomats and the mercenary commanders to distraction. We had, for several w
eeks, shut down almost all Feegash activity. We couldn’t touch their allies, though, so our people were still dying.
I wished I could have seen the smoke of the burning city as we set the last of it to the torch.
At last all the people save ours were gone—all of them comfortably well off from their masters’ gold, all of them heading for new lives and new futures. I hoped they would find them.
I wished them well.
With a small contingent of amused ex-slaves dressed in the armor of the Feegash mercs parading along the tops of the walls to give the illusion that the city was still guarded, we shut and locked the Ba’afeegash’s grand gates behind us on our way out the doors. The fake mercs had suggested that they wait one month, then file out the Shepherds’ Gate in the dead of night. By then, we would either have won or we would have lost, and it wouldn’t matter if the true fate of the fallen city were known.
Making our way down the mountainside, we told the oncoming traders and others who were bearing tribute up the mountain, “Big party. They don’t want to be bothered for a while, and they’re sending everyone away. Wait if you want, though. They have to open the gates again eventually.”
So great was the fear of the wrath of the Feegash that not a single trader or tribute-bearer turned and started back down the mountain.
We raced down the road, taking half of it for ourselves and pushing those who went down ahead of us out of the way.
We had little time. The Feegash and the Tonk were the only two people who had Hagedwar Communicators, but the news of the fall of Ba’afeegash would not stay hidden for long. We had to get to our ships and sail to Sinali with our proofs of the Feegash betrayal of all their allies before the Feegash in the Grand Hall of Nations could stir the full wrath of those same allies against the Tonk and crush us with the might of the world’s armies.
With good winds we might make decent time, though we would be sailing against the southern Trade Current.
We swept into Danaskataak and onto our restocked ships and launched ourselves out of Askag Bay with our windmen on steady shifts boosting already favorable winds. The seas parted for us as if Jostfar himself had smoothed them for our passage.
Tuua and Eban worked on some of the Feegash records in the ship’s temple.
The rest of the records were scattered across all the other ships and their keepers. Our people were finding the best examples of Feegash treachery against those we hoped to win to our side, marking books with plots that had been used against the Feegash allies, and the results of the actions taken.
The marines and Obsidians trained on the deck for close-order fighting. The sailors practiced their fighting when they weren’t sailing us toward our destination.
I even drilled, doing the exercises I had mostly neglected during our months aboard the ship.
I kept myself from Aaran’s side, except when I could not refuse to meet with him. The time was coming when I would make the last sacrifice of myself. We were on the way, time and my predecessor had both been clear that this was my future, and I could not bear to be with him when I knew how quickly the magic of the Eyes would devour me.
He didn’t seem to notice. He worked constantly. He and the other captains were working with the people they had rescued from the Ba’afeegash, honing the testimony they would present to the court of the Grand Hall of Nations.
I spent a little time watching the oracles and the Ossalenes who had remained behind in the Citadel. They were almost as profitable as ever, even without the Eyes of War. They’d put a girl in my place who wore false Eyes of hawkspar stone, but without the magic. She sat in audience and offered advice whispered to her from advisers who read the old Hawkspar knot-books from their hiding places behind her throne.
They still dealt with potentates, they still entertained warlords, they still made great sums of money.
I could see that in the near future, Ossal would present himself to the monastery again, though I could see neither the how nor the why of that. But the future beyond his arrival was all whitewater, and I grew weary of trying to penetrate it, so I ceased to try.
I turned to watching my own future. I couldn’t see the places where I might suddenly veer, or dig my own channel, of course. But I could see my trend. I was consumed by the magic of the Eyes. Soon. Very soon. I fell into the madness and the brooding that spelled the eventual end of most oracles, and died badly. Always, no matter which way I turned, no matter what I did, shortly after the trial we were approaching, my channel went black.
But there was never a current that led me toward happiness. After all the tragedy Aaran had already been through, how could I let him love me and be subjected to watching me go mad and die? Was that any way to return his love?
I kept to myself, I prepared my own testimony for the court with everything I could gather about the futures of the people who were currently allied with the Feegash if they did not turn away from them.
I put together a knot-book like those I had read after the death of Hawkspar, treating on the Feegash and their iniquities.
And I waited.
The trip was as fast as the windmen could make it, as uneventful as any sea trip could be. We had one storm that scattered some of the fleet, but we regrouped quickly enough. We crossed paths with one Sinali slaver, and took as much time as we had rescuing our people and sinking the ship. But we took prisoners. Once we had done what we intended to do—if we succeeded—we would set them free. If we failed, we would offer them in a hostage exchange.
In such lonely fashion, with Aaran in his quarters and me in mine, we reached the southern tip of Sinali, the Magon Peninsula, and the province of Hai Ei, where, in the ancient city of Ei Angon Yeh, the Grand Hall of Nations sat atop a high hill like the crown on the head of a king.
48
Aaran
The city of Ei Angon Yeh, the Place of Courageous Men, rose from the rocky cliffs like a gilt mirage. Aaran was up the foremast on the snaparm, watching the shoreline off to starboard. When the Taag came upon it, first he caught a flash of gold. And then a shimmer of white, backed by green.
And then over the horizon arose the most astonishing city he had ever seen. It was almost like watching an enormous sun come up, it gleamed so in the sunlight. The white stone towers and buildings were topped with gold domes, gold pinnacle roofs, gold arches. Flags and banners snapped in the breeze from every high point, on top the azure spear of the Sinali empire, and below that flags from every Sinali province, and below those, flags of individual Sinali houses.
As they drew closer, Aaran could see the famed Trees of Life, rumored to be older than even Tonk civilization. They rose in the backdrop behind the walls of the city. Each of them was sacred, each had a name. The trees were called the guiding spirits of the empire, and some tales said they were haunted, and others, that they actually spoke with voices like those of men.
Aaran tried to equate the people who had built that glorious city with the men who had killed his parents and sold his sister to the Feegash. With the sailors who went from clan to clan, raping and murdering and looting and burning. He would have to remember that the men he would face within the court of the Grand Hall of Nations had set those other men against him and his. That the urbane gentlemen in the fine robes were pirates no less than the filthy ones in breechclouts.
He would be dealing with the wicked, the criminal, the vile, and the corrupt. And he had to win with honesty. It was the only card he could play—the only one he was willing to bet had never been played in that white-and-gold city before the gathered nations.
He would be the lead speaker for the group that would demand a hearing. He was not the oldest, but he was the one who had dared the Islands of the Fallen Sun to get Hawkspar and her people out, and to discover the truth that he intended to share with the members of those nations who were fighting and dying in a hundred little wars for the profit of the Feegash. He had taken the risks. He had earned the right.
As the Taag sailed closer, he c
ould see men on Sinali warships in the harbors scrambling to put out to sea to meet the Tonk fleet.
“Truce and treat flags up masts now,” Aaran bellowed. And on the foremast, the aftermast, and the castlepole, white flags with the single black circle in the center—the international sign of truce and treaty—snapped upward to billow in the wind. They rose an instant later on every ship behind the Taag.
“Marines on deck and arms rest!” Aaran shouted, and heard the order relayed via the bells. In a moment, the marines, in dress uniforms but fully armed, thundered onto the deck and formed up.
“Sailors on deck and arms rest!” Aaran called down, and as the bells rang a second time, those sailors not on duty charged onto the deck, well dressed but armed, and took their places. Tuua and Eban, the cooks and medic, the communicators, and other ship personnel came on deck with them.
“Passengers on deck and arms rest!” Aaran shouted one final time, and the bells ran the third signals.
The oracle and the Ossalenes did not run onto the deck. They walked in stately fashion, dressed in the full robes and hoods of their order. It was the first time he had seen them so dressed since not long after the Taag carried them away from the Citadel. All of them gathered together in a square on the raised afterdeck, each carrying a staff, all of them standing chins up and faces forward. The wind blew them, but they seemed unmoved, still as statues.
The Ba’afeegash on the Taag and the other ships of the fleet made their own small formations, too. While the Ba’afeegash women kept out of sight, the male Ba’afeegash put on Feegash black, the finely cut silk and velvet and linen and spun-wool clothes of the Feegash elite diplomat class. None of them were Feegash diplomats, of course. Those were dead if they had been posted in the Ba’afeegash city-state. Or, if they were lucky enough to be sent abroad, they were still on post at their various assignments around the world, or sitting in session in the Grand Hall of Nations. But that Tonk ships appeared to carry Feegash diplomats in great numbers, would, the captains of the fleet hoped, get them a hearing in the Hall without having to resort to violence.