Path of Revenge

by Russell Kirkpatrick

  The fisherman ran through the list of impossibilities. Attack the third group, two against ten, with one minute to overwhelm them before their reinforcements arrived. Attack the second group, two against six, rescue his sworn men, then attack the third group, four against ten. Or assault the first group, two against thirty. Even if he could guarantee there were no real swordsmen among them—which he could not—the beach offered no tactical advantages. It was not a narrow lane, where one man could dominate a space. No matter which group he and Gawl assailed, within moments they would be taking on practically the entire invading force.

  When confronted by overwhelmingly superior numbers, Cyclamere said in that dispassionate voice of his, disengage. If you must continue the battle, withdraw and wait for the strategic moment. Look to surprise or deceive your opponent. If nothing presents itself, and no reinforcements are due, flee.

  Withdraw and wait. They could not remain in such an exposed position. Nor could they hide inside one of the houses, as they might well become trapped. Up, then. Like all dwellings on the Fisher Coast these beachfront homes had flat roofs, with parapets to shelter behind. A few words with Gawl, followed by a leg boost, saw Noetos on the roof. He pulled the miner up after him, grunting at the pain in his arms and shoulders.

  The withdrawal component completed successfully, Noetos settled down to wait. As he stretched his legs to find a comfortable position, Gawl tapped him on the shoulder and pointed—not down at the beach, but along the row of roofs to their left. There, perhaps a dozen houses away, another figure hauled himself onto a roof, then hobbled forward and ducked down behind a parapet.

  ‘Don’t any of you people know how to obey orders?’ Noetos growled, secretly pleased at the boy’s courage.

  ‘Nuh. We go by us instincts in the mine, ‘wise the smothergas or the creepin’ water gets us,’ Gawl muttered. ‘What’s that lameborn fool up to?’

  The boy limped back the way he had come, then disappeared. A minute or so he re-emerged, this time on a roof further away.

  ‘Ah. Something is happening with the captive village leaders,’ Noetos observed. They were being herded towards the houses—towards the house upon which roof Dagla lay hidden. ‘The boy must have anticipated this.’

  Two of the Neherians detached themselves from those guarding the village leaders and strode purposefully between the houses. A number of dwellings behind them were still ablaze; they approached one and, with care, each selected a burning timber from the wreckage.

  ‘We are out of time,’ Noetos breathed.

  Shouts of rage and fear erupted from their right, jerking their attention in that direction. Something was happening near the longboats, three of which had already been loaded with human cargo. People were spilling out of the vessels, falling into the water. One of the longboats had been holed; one end beached, the other submerged in three feet of water.

  The worst scenario for a commander, murmured Cyclamere, is when unplanned engagement occurs on multiple fronts. As he tried to divide his attention between the three groups, Noetos wished the remembered voice would shut up.

  From his elevated vantage point the fisherman watched, amazed, as two black shapes—seals?—moved slowly through the water beyond the longboats, popped their heads above the surface for a moment—people, not seals—resubmerged and headed for the second longboat. The two heads emerged again, hidden from the Neherians by the bulk of the longboat, and one began to attack the boat with something sharp. A shocked Noetos realised he recognised the face of his village Hegeoman.

  Lacking the view Noetos enjoyed, it took the Neherian commander, wherever he was, some time to work out what was happening. In the noise and confusion caused by sixty or more villagers crying out in fear as boats sank beneath them, his orders were obviously lost. Noetos had been trying to identify the commanding officer since he had taken position on the roof, and had narrowed his choice down to perhaps four men, but none of them seemed to be effective in sorting out the mess.

  Unplanned engagements do, however, provide an opportunity for a decisive commander to take the initiative.

  ‘Come on,’ Noetos whispered to Gawl. ‘Time to go by our instincts.’

  The man replied with a gap-toothed grin.

  They were forced to wait for an unnervingly long time—although probably no longer than sixty heartbeats—while the soldiers searching houses or otherwise engaged in the village rushed back to the beach. When the cobbled street had cleared, Gawl and Noetos scrambled down from the roof and ran swiftly towards the house on whose roof Dagla hid; the house, if Noetos understood the situation, in which the Makyra village elders would be burned alive.

  Cries of pain and anger greeted their arrival. Signalling Gawl to remain at street level, Noetos climbed an external ladder to the roof. Dagla started when Noetos appeared at his side, then offered him an enthusiastic grin.

  ‘Well, m’ lord,’ he said, ‘I’m makin’ my death mean somethin’ as you told us.’ So saying, he took up a stone from a pile at his feet and hurled it over the parapet. A thunk, not unlike the sound a fish made when it hit the deck, and a cry of pain. ‘I’m a good shot,’ he added unnecessarily. ‘Lotsa stones at Eisarn Pit, lotsa time to practise.’

  Eyes wide, Noetos peered over the parapet. Five men already down, including both the Neherians carrying the burning timbers, which smouldered on the sand. One of the men was a villager, blood pouring from a wound to his back. From sword, not stone. Two pairs of figures struggled; the other village elders sat docilely on the ground, too old or afraid to fight or flee, though no one guarded them.

  ‘Noetos!’ Gawl cried, appearing at the top of the ladder. ‘’Ware!’

  He was followed onto the roof by three, no four, Neherians armed with swords. One of them Noetos recognised from the battle in the lane; from the look on the man’s face it was clear the recognition was mutual.

  Noetos smiled. ‘Keep throwing those stones, son,’ he said, patting Dagla on the shoulder. ‘We’ll keep the Neherians off your back.’

  The boy laughed, a joyful sound.

  He didn’t need Cyclamere’s comment, though it was given anyway. Should your enemy, by some foolishness on their part, offer you the tactical advantage, take it immediately.

  ‘Come, Gawl,’ he said in a voice intended to carry, ‘you are the better swordsman. I yield the floor to you.’

  The fools should have set fire to the house as soon as Dagla started throwing his stones. Too late for them now.

  Gawl smiled his wicked smile, and drew his sword in his ham-fisted grip.

  The Neherian from the lane blanched. ‘We need reinforcements,’ he said, and ran for the ladder, just as Noetos had gambled he would. As one, the three other Neherians turned to see the man disappear from sight. ‘Hey—’ one of them began.

  ‘Now,’ Noetos said. The three guards flinched at the sound of his voice.

  The fight was brief, and ended when Gawl muscled the only real swordsman of the three off the roof. The unfortunate man caught his foot in the ladder as he fell, snapping his leg like a dry stick and leaving him hanging upside down, whimpering in pain.

  By the time Noetos and Gawl reached the village elders—stopping only to assist the Neherian swordsman to complete his fall to the street—the beach was in chaos. His two sworn men were still under guard, but only by a single swordsman, whose cries for assistance went unanswered until Noetos ended them.

  The situation at the longboats was beyond comprehension. A number of bodies floated in the water, a few more lay sprawled on the beach. The Neherians were divided into two groups. One fought the villagers, cutting them down ruthlessly, sticks and poles proving no match for swords. The second group fled in a longboat—by order or through cowardice, Noetos could not tell. He could see no sign of the two ‘seals’.

  ‘Come on, men,’ he said when Dagla rejoined them. ‘Time to risk everything.’

  ‘Again?’ one of them said, and they all laughed.

  Noetos sat on the sand am
ongst his sworn men, chewing on a hunk of bread. All around him the villagers of Makyra Bay worked to erase the devastation wrought by the Neherians. Fourteen villagers slain, the village Hegeoma had told him, and a number of wounded to care for. Two would not survive the day. Twice that many Neherians to bury. A third of the houses burned to the ground. Boats sunk, livelihoods lost. Celebrations and grief mixed together in a bittersweet potion.

  The remnant of the Neherian soldiers, fought to a standstill by Noetos’s men and the courageous villagers, had taken the only seaworthy longboat and rowed for their lives. ‘You have ensured your own deaths,’ their commander had snarled at the villagers as he made his retreat. ‘We will return, and none of you will be left alive.’

  Noetos had wanted to wade out into the bay to cross swords with the man, so consumed was he with battle-lust, but Bregor had placed a wet hand on his shoulder, restraining him. ‘He’ll not be back,’ the man said, satisfaction in his voice. ‘Just watch.’

  Halfway between the beach and the anchored fleet, the longboat stopped dead in the water and shouts of terror drifted back towards the village. The boat went down slowly, giving the Neherians enough time to save their lives, had they known how to swim.

  ‘Fancy sending non-swimmers on a ship-borne raid,’ Noetos said reflectively. ‘Do I have to ask how you knew?’

  Bregor smiled. ‘You would think a man who cannot swim would take the time to check the seaworthiness of his vessel, would you not? Though I do not remember them having the opportunity. Someone’s private army was pressing them hard, as I recall.’

  ‘As for swimmers, I did not know Bregor the Hegeoman possessed the ability. Frankly, I’m astonished. The Hegeoman I knew from Fossa wanted nothing to do with the sea.’

  ‘You know little of my life, fisherman,’ Bregor said, an edge in his voice not accounted for by the damage to his throat. ‘I was thirty years old when you sought admittance to Fossa. What could you know of how those years were spent?’

  ‘That’s why I was surprised,’ Noetos replied equably. ‘What other talents does Bregor the Seal possess?’

  The Hegeoman of Fossa looked Noetos the fisherman in the eye. ‘I have no doubt we will find out in the days to come,’ he said, ‘as we attempt to rescue your family.’

  Noetos nodded, content, and relaxed for the first time in days. Should the Neherians decide to invest the village he would have plenty of warning. There would be little the salties—he liked the word, it described them well—could do if the Makyrans were prepared to abandon the remaining houses and take the unassailable cliff-top. He asked someone if they could arrange a bath and a change of clothes, then allowed a harried village doctor to tend his wounds before closing his eyes.

  COSMOGRAPHER

  CHAPTER 12

  EMPEROR OF THE DESERT

  LENARES SPENT MOST OF each day gazing out of the opening in the palanquin, curtain pulled back, no matter how much Mahudia grumbled about sand in the silks, sun in her eyes or damage to her skin. The pure, uncluttered beauty of the desert eased the young cosmographer’s heart anew every time she looked upon it. Fine gravel, red-grey on brown, crunched beneath their bearers’ feet, part of a random yet orderly landscape stretching to the horizon. The others found it tedious. They used words like sterile and boring and inhospitable. For Lenares, the subtle shades of stone and sand acted as an anodyne to the gaudy colours and party-like atmosphere of the expedition, while the gentle whispering of the desert breeze helped mask the brazen shouting and braying of man and beast, and the never-changing horizon of the stone plain they crawled across stood in restful contrast to the constant motion of her sterile, boring, inhospitable fellow travellers.

  So sick of their constant complaining did she become that, after the first day out of Talamaq, Lenares ordered the bearers to walk at the daughterward edge of the expedition’s wide column. This gave her the best views of the desert. She could look out at the play of light and shadow in the morning, with the low sun casting every stone into sharp relief, perfectly suited to her clear morning mind; while in the afternoon the westering sun blended the gravel carpet into a soothing pattern, easing her towards a blissful state of half-wakefulness. During the latter hours she nodded near the borders of sleep, letting her constant calculations slow and simplify until they almost stopped. Like this afternoon. So peaceful, so perfect.

  But no matter how restful the days became, she ensured she continued to count the steps her bearers took, an almost unconscious record of the distance from Talamaq. She had been fearful of this journey, but her counting and the peacefulness left her feeling centred and relaxed. It was almost enough to make her forget the hole that threatened the world. Almost.

  ‘Draw the curtain, girl, and come out of the sun. Look at what it’s doing to your skin! You’ll be complaining if you get burned again.’

  Lenares thought the pink tinge to her pale skin looked nice, but she knew ma dama was right, so she pulled the curtain across a little.

  ‘Ah, girl,’ Mahudia said, exasperation in her voice, ‘you will dry up like a raisin in the sun.’

  Lenares laughed at the image: a shrivelled little wide-eyed girl with its wrinkled hand in Mahudia’s.

  But she was a little girl no more, she reminded herself. She was now a cosmographer, one who didn’t have to do everything she was told, who could stick her head out of the opening if she wanted to. One who knew things, important things. Things no one else knew. One who was special.

  Her numbers told her many things. For example, she was certainly the only one who noticed that the gravel they crunched their way across day after day was slowly growing larger. It was a trick, of course, she knew that; the stones weren’t actually growing, but the further fatherwards they went, the larger the stones became. They had been thumbnail-sized on the first day of their journey. Now, a week later, they were the size of her fist. It was as though some giant had stood in a random spot in the desert and scattered millions of stones in every direction, the smaller ones going further. Another image to make her laugh; she chuckled about the giant and the rocks all through the afternoon, until Mahudia told her to be quiet.

  So, the numbers whispered to her, you draw closer to larger things. To where the giant stands with his pile of rocks. The idea made her a little nervous, so she put it out of her mind.

  She tried not to think of the hole in the world either. Whenever the numbers steered her thoughts in that direction she would resort to counting the stones. Knowing something of her mind, Mahudia had warned her not to count the stones. She’d said Lenares might go mad trying to count them all. But Mahudia didn’t know as much as she thought. Counting the stones was restful. So much of her time in Talamaq was consumed by measuring the relationships between unique things: people, buildings, streets, behaviours; all different, a multi-hued palette that taxed her to her limits. Out here in the stony desert things remained where they were put, and the relationships between the stones were not important. Her simple stone-counting allowed her to slip into a soothing one-dimensionality.

  Despite the gnawing worry at the back of her mind, Lenares had never been happier.

  Torve was deeply unhappy. He found himself in an invidious position. The Emperor had packed him off on this expedition as his eyes and ears, yet his august lord had surely known how little authority or even freedom he would have. When he hesitantly reminded Captain Duon and the other senior staff of the Emperor’s commands, he was laughed at. Laughed at, then ordered to serve the captain, and anyone else who bid him, in the same fashion he had served the Emperor.

  Not in exactly the same fashion, of course. Captain Duon did not experiment on the living bodies of his subjects, nor did he engage in philosophical discussions with Omerans. When he did notice Torve it was to correct something he had done, such correction given in a bored voice. As though Torve did not matter. After the intimacy the Emperor had offered him, he found this behaviour demeaning, but knew it was what every other Omeran in the empire experienced.
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br />   Worse, much worse, was to follow. Some of the lords and scions of various Alliances, having witnessed the Emperor’s favour to this Omeran at court, sought to flatter and indulge him at every opportunity. Still more of them sought to bring him low. Jeering, physical contact such as pushes and elbows to the stomach, contradictory or impossible orders and suchlike became his lot. Not a moment to himself from sunrise to sunset. He began to realise he had never known what it meant to be Omeran.

  And they, the Omerans themselves, were the worst. They knew of him too, and struck out at him repeatedly for no real reason he could discern. The behaviour of the Amaqi lords and ladies he could understand: he was being used by people to position themselves relative to each other and to the throne. But what motivated his fellow Omerans to spit on him, strike him and shower him with scorn? It distressed him deeply, but he could get no answer from them.

  Given all this, which surely his master must have anticipated, why had Torve been sent on this journey? Nothing his lord ever did was ill-conceived, therefore there must be a plan; if so, what was it? His commission was clear: to recover the Bhrudwan, or at least a sample of his blood. But the Emperor had deliberately withheld the power to carry through with it. Was he simply not powerful enough to protect his servant from this distance? Had he miscalculated? Or—and this riddled Torve with worry—had he ceased being useful, and was this a sophisticated way of divesting the Emperor of an increasingly embarrassing companion?

  He found his only moments of freedom before dawn and after sunset. Free from the demands of the dust-ridden procession, Torve would take himself off into the darkness, looking to lose himself in the solitude, to create a quiet place some distance away from the tents and the fires and animals and palanquins where he would try to reason out the Emperor’s plan. He was usually able to exercise at least part of his Defiance amidst the gravel. He imagined others of the Omerans finding places to practise the ancient discipline, though he had not seen evidence of this at any stage along their journey.