The Shadow of Tyr

by Glenda Larke

  He radiated a mixture of alarm and anxiety.

  ‘I don’t know,’ he admitted. ‘Rathrox may have just said it because he was put in such a humiliating position that day. Perhaps he felt that if we thought a god did that to him, through the medium of the Oracle, then he would lose authority. We wouldn’t want to take orders from the Brotherhood, if the Brotherhood was despised of the gods.’ He paused, then dared to look her directly in the eye. ‘Who are you, Domina?’

  ‘I don’t think it matters, Mescades. Goddess, Oracle, numen? What counts now is what I want, and what I can achieve, not who I am.’

  He considered that thoughtfully. ‘And what do you want, Domina?’

  She found herself liking him, admiring his control of his fear. A rational, thinking man, this seamaster. ‘I want a better world for people of the Exaltarchy. Unfortunately there will be those who will think the world I would create will be worse than the one that went before. The present Exaltarch, for example. Or Rathrox Ligatan. Mescades, you have long served an emperor who craves power, no matter what the cost. His war with Kardiastan brought Tyranian legions to their knees. So now I tell you this: I demand your service. I demand that you support a new Exaltarch.’

  The seamaster blanched but did not speak.

  She continued, ‘Order every single naval ship in the port to sea today. Sail with them yourself and blockade the entrance to the estuary, well out to sea. Ignore any orders to return for three days, then go to the palace and prostrate yourself before your new Exaltarch.’

  She probed his emotions, and felt almost sorry for him. He was appalled, knowing that any naval ship leaving port was supposed to do so only on orders from the Exaltarch. If he ordered the ships out, and Bator Korbus was still occupying the imperial seat when he returned, then he was a dead man, crucified for treason, his estate confiscated, his family destitute.

  ‘And if I don’t?’ he croaked.

  ‘I could threaten you. But let me offer incentive instead: do this, and you will be more than just the city’s seamaster—you will be seamaster of the Tyranian fleet, and you will have the ear of the Exaltarch and a seat on the Senate.’

  ‘Senate? When there hasn’t been a Senate for, what, fifty years?’

  She felt the first stirring of expectations within him, and knew she had touched strings that hummed with hope. His grandfather had been a senator until the Senate had been banished by the first Exaltarch.

  She pointed her sword at the copper on the table and, with careful precision, began to melt it. ‘I have power, and it is time this land had an Exaltarch who is not a despot.’

  Mescades stared at the melting metal, mesmerised. Beads of sweat had formed along his brow.

  She added, ‘You have a choice, seamaster. I could kill you now, if you’d think that a simpler solution. Or you could go to Rathrox—or Bator Korbus—and tell him I was here, and why. Then I would have to kill you later, and that would be a shame. A senator’s robes would sit well on your shoulders. Or you could do nothing, in which case the new Exaltarch will remove you from your post as soon as Bator Korbus falls.’ At least he didn’t doubt that—she could feel his belief laced through with the tendrils of stark anxiety.

  ‘What kind of man am I if I abandon my city when it is threatened?’ he asked in a whisper. ‘Do not ask this of me, Domina.’

  ‘What kind of man are you if you do not save your men from needless death serving a tyrant? Tell me, Mescades, how many ships and men did Tyrans lose fighting Kardiastan? How many never made it to Kardiastan?’

  The line of his jaw tightened. She had hit a nerve. ‘Too many,’ he admitted.

  ‘And yet he continued to send more and more men to their deaths.’ There was a long silence while he thought that over, then she added, ‘If Tyrans had a Senate still, would they have allowed him to commit such folly?’

  ‘How can ships leave without the Exaltarch’s order?’ he asked. ‘The forts at the booms—’

  ‘Let me worry about them,’ she said. ‘Begin now. I wish to see the ships on their way out of port on the next tide.’ Which, she knew, gave him about five hours. She added more kindly, ‘Don’t think of this as treachery, Mescades, but loyalty to your city and the land it governs. Tyrans needs rescuing from the greed of a few men who no longer concern themselves with the greater good. Oh, and if it is any consolation, I suspect the Exaltarch will order you to send your ships out into the estuary entrance anyway, to be ready for an attack coming in that direction.

  ‘I just want you to stay there—all the fleet—no matter what. My intention is to keep your ships intact and your men safe. I want to save them from the fate of those who set sail for Kardiastan and never returned.’

  The faintest of cynical smiles flitted across his face. ‘The new Exaltarch wishes to govern a strong Tyrans with a strong, intact navy,’ he said. He looked back at the misshapen copper and poked it with a tentative finger, flinching when it scorched his skin. She felt his capitulation like the ebbing of a tide within him. A decision not to push against something that was inevitable. ‘Very well. If I get the order from the Exaltarch, I will take it one step further and do as you ask. And I’ll pray that you are Melete,’ he added with dry humour, ‘so I can one day tell my grandchildren that I served a goddess.’

  ‘You’re a very brave man, Mescades. You will make a fine senator.’ She changed the breeze to a small whirlwind, which she sent spinning in his direction. He leaped to his feet to get out of the way. As the wind whipped around him, she left the room. He hadn’t quite believed her to be a deity, but she had sensed no intention to betray. Good.

  The naval officer she had sent out of the room had taken it upon himself to guard the door. He saluted as she came out and, through the haze of golden light, she smiled at him and gestured him inside once more. The moment the door was closed, she grabbed up her shawl, swaddled herself in its anonymity, and made her way back to the main entrance.

  There, the fire was finally out and two badly burned ceremonial cloaks in a large puddle of water were smouldering testimony to how tenacious it had been. A number of sailors with empty wooden pails were standing about arguing over how such a fire could ever have started. No one took any notice of her as she slipped out into the street.

  ‘What the sweet hells—?’

  The man on watch duty in the tower near the floating booms stared hard at the ferryman’s dhow coming downriver. It wasn’t the boat that had his jaw dropping; ferry vessels were common enough on the lower River Tyr where there were no bridges. What had the sentry gaping was that the dhow was skimming along as fast as it was possible for such a boat to move, and yet the tide was still on the flow upstream. To make the progress of the boat even more extraordinary, it was the middle of the day when the air was as hot and as still as a baker’s oven. So how in all Acheron’s seven hells was the Vortexdamned thing moving?

  He leaned out of the tower. ‘Hey, Petrus—call the centurion, will you? There’s the unholiest thing coming downriver!’

  The centurion, directed up into the tower, was more horrified than amazed. One look was enough to have him reaching for the alarm bell, scowling and shouting at the watchman. ‘Don’t you remember that Altani vessel that sailed when there was no wind? The Magister wanted to have our hides because we let it pass!’ The sound of the tolling bell rang out over the water, sending sailors and rowers scurrying for the galleys, others running to man the catapults.

  The dhow, however, did not try to escape through the booms. At the last minute it halted midstream, the wind in its sail and the tide under its keel in sudden perfect balance. Light flashed at the end of each of the booms, and the anchoring buoys sparkled with gold. And disintegrated, shedding pieces into the air like feathers from a flock of startled pigeons. The chains rattled away into the water. The centurion screamed at the men handling the catapults to aim at the dhow.

  Liberated of their shackles and caught by the current, the string of logs of each boom floated free. For a moment they t
hreatened the dhow, but the sail soon billowed and the tiny boat began to scud upstream on the tide. Boulders from the two catapults landed harmlessly in its wake.

  The logs bunched up, bumping one another, then sorted themselves out to drift with the flow, only to be brought to a halt at the limit of their connecting chains. As the end of each string of logs was still attached to the shore on either side, each boom swung in, slowly but inevitably, towards the bank. The river was no longer partially barricaded, but wide open to any vessel that cared to enter or leave.

  ‘That’s impossible,’ the duty guard muttered as he watched the small boat speed away upstream, powered by a wind that bulged the sail yet never raised a ripple on the water. ‘No boat can do that.’

  The men gave up on the catapult and gathered at the battlements, staring as the dhow disappeared into the dock area, long before the galley even drew level with what was left of the boom buoys.

  ‘All right, you men,’ the centurion snapped. ‘If someone wants to break the boom, it’s so others can gain easy entry to the river. We can expect to be under attack, and soon, from the sea. I want everyone on watch duty. Delonius—mount up and take the news of what just happened to Legate Valorian and to Seamaster Mescades. We need reinforcements here, and we need them fast. Xasus—get every engineer you can find: we have to mend the booms and get them back in place. Although Hades knows just how we can do that in a hurry.’ He remembered the appalling trouble they’d had once before when a boom chain had broken. A boom was a cantankerous thing to manage in mid-river, and the few minutes between the ebb and the flood of a tide was the only time when it could be tamed long enough to fix its anchorage.

  Three hours later, half of Tyr’s legionnaires were lining the riverbanks downriver of the city, looking seaward. Less than four hours later, the Tyr fleet rowed out through what was left of the boom and disappeared into the wide stretch of the estuary.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  Arrant’s fingers were blue. His feet probably were too, but he couldn’t see them properly yet. They certainly felt cold enough to be the colour of day-old bruises.

  After spending the last day inside the aqueduct with their feet freezing in water and their heads baking inside their sun-heated helmets, they had walked overnight the last few miles to their destination. Now it was just a matter of waiting for the dawn, and Ligea’s signal to attack. ‘You’ll see it over the city,’ she’d said.

  They rested within the confines of the water channel, trying desperately to snatch a little sleep, but how was that possible when you had your feet ankle-deep in water, and no dry place to sit except on your helmet? How was that possible when you knew you might die in the morning? And was it sensible anyway, to spend what could be your last moments on earth asleep?

  The emotions around Arrant were so potent, even he could not fail to feel them. They twisted with dark excitement, with hope and desire and fear, with tendrils of poignant memory. He felt the emotional lifetimes of adults replayed in the heads of the men who wondered if this was their last night alive. He struggled to maintain his composure in the midst of such murk, but to these men, the future was a tragedy louring, ready to consume, and the past was filled with the savagery of dislocation, slavery and inhumanity.

  Arrant, don’t.

  He pulled his mind free of the morass to answer his brother. Tarran, I can’t help it. They think such dark things…

  I know. I feel them too. But you must be strong. I cannot stay and help.

  What’s wrong?

  They need my strength.

  Who does?

  Tarran didn’t reply; he was already gone. A silly question anyway, of course. The Mirage Makers needed him. That’s why he was one of them.

  Arrant thought, I have to be strong. We both have to be strong. Oh, Vortexhells, I am only nine!

  Foran, grim-faced, came to find him as night dissolved into the chill grey light of the pre-dawn. ‘Here—have this,’ he said. He handed over a stale piece of bread and some very hard cheese. ‘At least there is plenty of water to soak it in.’

  ‘What—what happens next?’ Arrant asked, shivering with cold and trying to nibble a corner of the bread. He didn’t relish dipping it in the water that had already run over the feet of hundreds of soldiers before getting to him, and he’d already finished all the water in his waterskin.

  ‘We wait for Ligea’s signal. We will find ourselves a safe place a nice distance from the walls and watch. This is not our fight. I’m too old and you’re too young.’

  That’s not true, Arrant thought. No one is too old to fight using Magor magic. Foran could easily help Ligea.

  He knew Ligea’s instructions to Foran were to keep him safe at all cost. Yet the power of another Magor, even one who was only an Illuser, could have meant the difference between success and failure. Guilt churned his stomach. If he were a proper Magoroth he would have been able to look after himself. He could have helped. Instead, the unreliability of his powers meant that he and Foran had to hide themselves away while real soldiers fought a battle. I shouldn’t have come. I should have stayed in Getria; then Foran could have helped Ligea.

  Why had she allowed him to come, then? Did she think she would win, no matter what? He couldn’t believe that. No, it was because she knew he had to see this. He would one day rule a nation. He had to see what it meant to go to war. He had to know the enemy next door.

  He dropped his eyes, wishing he’d had a last chance to talk to Ligea. He wanted, at the very least, to wish her luck, or say goodbye, or something, but she had gone without seeking him again. He knew his bitter disappointment was silly. It was unrealistic of him to expect her to do so. She had a whole army to command and he didn’t need her anyway—Foran was there to look after him.

  Miserably, he forced himself to eat some of the cheese. It was as tasteless and as hard as ox-hide.

  ‘Signal!’ An exclamation from somewhere ahead. He looked up. A plume of golden light rose into the sky above the city. In the aqueduct, men scrambled to their feet, an army rising up to greet a day of battle, but it was relief Arrant felt from them, not fear. They were glad the time had come. Within minutes they were gone, vanished down the access stairs and ladders, disappearing into the gloom still gathered like a skirt around the city walls. And the first men had already died: the city guards along the aqueduct. He felt their terror as swords slid home.

  Arrant turned to Foran. They were the only two left standing in the water channel. Foran, who normally kept his feelings subdued and guarded tight within him, was now surging with passionate frustration. He in turn caught Arrant’s astonishment and they exchanged a stare. ‘I’m sorry,’ Arrant whispered. ‘It’s my fault you are here. Not there, helping.’

  Foran abruptly closed off his emotions. Or perhaps it was Arrant’s sensing that failed him; he couldn’t tell, but the memory of Foran’s rage at his need to stay with Arrant—that memory remained, to swamp him with guilt. To remind him that he was a nuisance. A burden.

  ‘Look,’ Foran said, changing the subject, reverting to tutor and slotting him back into the role of pupil. ‘That’s not the light of sword power she is shooting into the sky as a signal. That’s water. She is trying to conserve power and it’s more economical to colour water and send it skywards than it is to send light direct from her sword.’

  Arrant tried to sound interested, but all he could think of to say was, ‘Oh.’

  The waiting was hard. For a long time nothing happened at all. It was too dark to see the progress of the soldiers as they made for the North Gate. All they could do was stare into the grey shadows of the predawn until eventually they could distinguish the gate, off to the right of the aqueduct. Foran enhanced his sight. Arrant tried desperately to do the same thing. The scene wavered in and out of focus, as irritating as watching fish through ripples on the water.

  In the brief moments that he did manage to steady the picture, he could see the army from the aqueduct assembling. The city guards, who had open
ed the gates at first light to allow the entry of the farm carts stacked with produce for the city’s markets, were now struggling to close them. The farmers appeared to have fled, leaving their carts and mules and oxen behind. Produce was spilled across the paveway. Men were fighting in front of the walls. Above, in the sky, Ligea’s signal plume dwindled and vanished.

  ‘Can’t we go closer?’ he asked, as frustrated as Foran. ‘I can’t see properly from here. What’s happening?’ A sudden clawing of pain ripped along his mind: a random burst of a soldier’s agony against his senses. It was gone before he could scream, leaving nothing behind but the stark shadow of the memory.

  ‘You can ward me there,’ he said. His bottom lip trembled. He didn’t want to feel that stab of agony again. He didn’t want to see. Yet the fight drew him. The emotions churning in the distance, just out of reach, sucked at him. These were men he knew. Mole, who told him stories of his homeland in the Western Reaches. Batricus, who loved to play dice and had made him a hand catapult so that he could shoot stones at the Stronghold ravens when they came to steal the grain. Remolis, one of Jorbrus’s sons, who carried his pet ferret with him, even into the battle. ‘You can ward me there, while you help those who are wounded. I promise I’ll stay within your warding. Nothing can happen to me.’

  Foran pinched up his mouth, considering. ‘All right, all right. As long as you swear you’ll stay warded even if the warding weakens. I have to be able to trust you.’

  ‘I promise.’

  ‘We’ll get closer. I may not be a Magori, but I am a skilful healer, for all that. Perhaps I can help. Ah, Arrant, I hate to feel their suffering…’

  Arrant stared at him. With those words, Foran became not just a teacher, not just one more person always telling him what to do. He was a man, made suddenly real—and just as vulnerable and lost and bewildered as Arrant himself.

  It wasn’t a comforting thought.

  ‘Look at that, you scrawny insect of a helot’s son! Suppose you tell me what is going on, Magister Rathrox?’