Responsibility of the Crown

by G Scott Huggins

  “No, Father would be enraged if he knew what I was doing,” said Avnai. “But he would do it himself without hesitation because it would be his duty, even as it is mine, and, I am sorry to have to say, yours as well.”

  “Avnai, I’m…” her mouth worked. “I’m sorry. I’m frightened.”

  “Me, too,” he said. He reached out, drew her to her feet, and held her in an embrace. “Will you come with us?”

  She nodded.

  “Good. Senaatha wants to see you.”

  “She’s awake?”

  “For a little longer, yes.”

  The wounds in Senaatha’s side were still ugly, but they had closed and showed signs of healing. Senaatha’s Union with the Theurge was strong.

  “Azriyqam,” she sighed, her great eye opening wider. “You have come.” She looked at Avnai. “Leave us.”

  Avnai flipped her a salute. “It’s time to go hunting anyway.”

  “Young Avnai has told me about the enemy’s plans that you found and your part in finding them.”

  “But you gave me permission,” Azriyqam protested.

  “And I was wise to do so. Cease playing the petulant child and attend to my words rather than to yourself. I do not speak of what you should or should not have done, but what you have proven yourself capable of doing.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  Senaatha sighed. “When he rescued you, Avnai told you the story of your mother, did he not? Why she abandoned you on that century ship?”

  “Yes.”

  “Shaaliym was strong in Foreseeing. I warned her that Foreseeing was a good guard but a poor guide.”

  Azriyqam felt her heart skip a beat. “My mother foresaw that my brother and I would meet at sea.”

  “Yes. Her vision haunted her. Much like the vision of drowning and a burning ship has haunted you.”

  “Avnai said that Foresight was learned. That I had never learned how to do it.”

  “Avnai is human,” Senaatha snorted. “He Commands the Theurge rarely and has little understanding of it.”

  “Then why did my visions only start now?”

  “I do not know. It may be that Union with the Theurge was needed. You did not even know of it during your exile. Nevertheless, it is clear, you have Foreseen the destruction of Ekkaia, though you did not recognize it.”

  “Then…” Azriyqam swallowed through a throat gone suddenly dry. “Then Ekkaia will be destroyed? No matter what we do?”

  “Perhaps. Perhaps not. That is what you must understand. What your mother failed to understand. The Foreseeing means what it shows you. Nothing more. You cannot command it. It is a guard, not a guide. Its visions may sometimes be averted and sometimes not. Listen to it when it comes. But never trust it.”

  “Then what’s the point of it?”

  “You did not know of this danger. None of us did. Now we do. That is why you set guards. They may be able to fight off the enemy, or they may buy time for you to escape, but either way, your mother has given you a gift if you choose to accept it. It is a gift that all parents give their children, as hard as they try to avoid doing so.”

  “What do you mean?” asked Azriyqam.

  “The gift of her error,” said Senaatha. “Your mother has showed you how not to use the Foresight. She feared it too much and allowed it to tell her what to do. You can do better.”

  “How would I do that?”

  “By doing what is right, as you did before, though it is dangerous. Now, I must rest.” The great eye closed.

  “Good, she’s healing well.” Elazar’s voice behind her was calm.

  “How long will it take?”

  “I don’t know. The stronger she gets, the faster she may be able to heal herself. I don’t like the way her bones are bent. That may take longer than anything else, but at least we can leave her some charts. She should be able to find her way home, assuming there’s a home to return to.”

  “Elazar…” She didn’t know how to ask it. Finally, she decided on bluntness. “Is all this truly going to happen? The Consortium destroying the kingdom? Just because they’d rather make friends with the Century Fleet?”

  “Yes. It will.”

  “Why do they hate us so?”

  “For a number of reasons. In the last war, we hurt them badly enough to force concessions they did not want to give. We not only accept but honor the mating of human and dragon, and we Command the Theurge in ways they want to see forgotten. They know we resent their control. It isn’t hatred, kyria, it’s sound political reasoning, devoid of any drop of compassion, mercy, or ethics. They have the chance to trade a resentful ally for an enthusiastic and grateful subject.”

  “That’s worse than if they hated us.”

  Elazar smiled without happiness. “Yes, and no.”

  Azriyqam’s brows drew down. “What do you mean?”

  “What do you mean?” he parried. “How is it worse and what difference does it make why they do what they do? It’s the same for us, isn’t it?”

  When Azriyqam spoke, her voice was low and thick with the dregs of memory. “Haraad hated me on board Ekkaia. He never missed a chance to have me beaten if he found me outside my cage without permission, but at least he was honest about it. His father, the high captain, just had me beaten because he was afraid of what might happen to him if he didn’t do what everyone wanted. He was a coward.”

  “So, the high captain was a worse person. But tell me, would the high captain, given a choice, have handed you back to your mother had she returned? Or would he have had you killed?”

  Azriyqam had never thought about that. “Handed me back, I suppose.”

  “Haraad, given the same choice, would not. If he could have gotten away with it, he would have killed you, yes?”

  Azriyqam nodded.

  “A man who is acting out of his own interests can be bargained with. The Consortium is acting opportunistically. If we can take away the opportunity, we may be able to save the kingdom as easily as the Consortium could take this chance to destroy it. They are not determined upon our destruction, it is merely the easiest and most profitable thing they can do. The advantage of dealing with the cowardly opportunist is that he can be manipulated and bought off. At least until you are stronger than he.” Elazar’s eyes glowed.

  “Then that’s why Father is so determined to stay on good terms with the Consortium? It’s a trick?”

  “A trick of desperation, yes, and one that will take several generations to accomplish, but a trick nonetheless,” Elazar said. “You understand. Good. But first we must survive our present weakness, so that we may be strong enough to bargain.”

  “But, Elazar, Haraad is not that sort of coward, and he does hate. He’s high captain in all but name. He may be high captain in name as well, now. His father was sick when I escaped. If I’m there, we’ll never be able to bargain with him.”

  Elazar nodded. “There is still much planning to do, but it will have to wait until we are underway. We must move fast if we are to save Ekkaia and the kingdom.”

  “It’s a fool’s errand. Doesn’t he know it?”

  Elazar shrugged. “The fools’ errand we have all been engaged in since you were lost to us is keeping the kingdom alive in the face of its conqueror. It’s an errand we’ve dedicated our lives to. Tomorrow, we leave in a ship that sails the air on a bag of flammable gas. My dear princess, have you not discovered the truth yet? Fools’ errands are all there are in this world.”

  She laughed in spite of herself.

  “Come, let us get ready,” he said, and she followed.

  * * * * *

  Chapter 14

  “Azriyqam. We’ve found her.”

  Zhad’s voice woke Azriyqam from a sleep so deep she could hardly remember it. The throbbing of the Fool Errant’s airscrews was like a subsonic lullaby she found oddly reassuring. She and Elazar had named their captured skyship, and Avnai hadn’t objected.

  She shrugged off the blankets and walked forward to where
the shadows of the corridor gave way to the light pouring through the great front windows of the gondola. Below and far ahead of them, the only break in the grayish-blue ocean, the Ekkaia sailed on.

  Azriyqam’s breath caught in her throat on seeing the great vessel that had been her world for so long reduced to the size of a toy that a child might sail in an afterdeck bathhouse.

  “Keep us at this distance, Mr. Zavat,” said Avnai. “I don’t want to make our approach until full daylight. Let them see our colors as plainly as they can.”

  The captured pilot muttered an acknowledgment and adjusted his throttles.

  “They’ll already be able to see us, of course,” Azriyqam said.

  “That can’t be helped. I admit I did like it better in the old days, when we could see them before they could see us.”

  Elazar chuckled. “When would you have raided a Century Ship, son?”

  “All right, I liked it better in Father’s stories when we could always see them before they could see us and when we had a dragon or two in the air to force the issue.”

  We’ll be very fortunate if they don’t just think that our story is a ruse to fool them.

  She had brought up that point more than once over the last five days. Each time, Avnai had quite reasonably asked her if she could come up with a better plan. “We’re only asking them to alter their course for home. We’re even asking them to alter course away from the kingdom’s waters. We don’t want anything from them. Remember, we’re just the lawful agents of the Consortium showing our good faith by using our amazing powers to warn them about an attack. If we can pull it off, we may even get the High Command to look at our kingdom as more of an asset and less of a threat.”

  “But they have altered their course,” Azriyqam had pointed out yesterday, as they were reviewing the plan again in the skyship’s navigation cabin. The chart of Ekkaia’s movement was not a straight line toward the Grove, but a series of jagged back-and-forth motions, plotted out minutely by the crew of the skyship over the past few weeks. Ekkaia was inching homeward, not sailing straight for it.

  “Well, they’re sailing toward the Grove, which is darkward from here. So, they’re tacking against the wind from darkward,” Avnai had said, as though it was obvious.

  “They’re doing what?”

  “Tacking. You grew up on the largest sailing ship ever devised, how could you not know what tacking is?” Avnai had explained about the necessity for a sailing ship to use a zigzag course across the line of the wind to make headway against it.

  “Is that how you do it in your fleets?” Zhad had asked. “Century Ships don’t. They have winddrivers, remember? Like the one we used to escape?”

  Avnai’s mouth had opened once or twice, and then he said, “Oh.”

  “Even with winddrivers, it’s tough to sail directly against the wind, but Ekkaia isn’t directly darkward of the Grove, and the wind isn’t always exactly from darkward. They should be able to make a straight line. They were when we all escaped, and everyone wants to get through pirate waters and home to the Grove where they’ll all be rich.”

  The celebration when a Century Ship returned with its holds laden with cargo was literally a once-in-a-lifetime—very rarely a twice-in-a-lifetime—event for a Century Ship’s crew.

  “There’s no reason for them to tack. Something is wrong,” he continued.

  Something is wrong. The feeling remained with her, but the Ekkaia, sailing below them, small as a toy, looked unharmed.

  “Begin our descent, Mr. Zavat. Slowly,” Avnai ordered.

  “Yes, sir,” the helmsman muttered. The man had been, understandably, taciturn and unhelpful, but he realized that his life, and any hope he might have of returning home, depended upon his cooperation. “On approach. What kind of mooring system does this ship use, sir?”

  Avnai looked at Azriyqam. “I’ve no idea. The last time the Grove sent an airship to talk to us, I was ten. It was a huge event, but I wasn’t paying attention to the technical details. They moor at the center jiggermast.”

  “Great,” Zavat muttered. “Well, we’d better have somebody at the nose platform just in case they have to help. I might be able to figure it out when I see the jiggermast. We never got even this close, before. Besides, are these guys even going to want to let us dock with them?”

  “We don’t propose to give them a choice, Pilot Officer,” said Avnai.

  “What if they shoot at us, sir? This gasbag is full of hydrogen.”

  “First of all, I don’t think the captain of this vessel will want to risk war with the Consortium over a simple docking request. Secondly, Century Ships don’t carry a great complement of firearms. The few such weapons they do have are bulky and single shot. They would have to be very fortunate indeed to set us afire.”

  Ekkaia swelled. Now they could pick out individual masts. They marched forward in three lines from fore to aft, like great trees, though each was, in fact, hewn from the trunk of the same Grove tree that had birthed Ekkaia’s hull. Seven great masts stood on the centerline, with five more on either side, two-thirds their height.

  Against her will, Azriyqam felt her eyes dragged to the top of the mainmast.

  It was still there. A small hut. Still too far away to see the slits for windows, but she knew they were there. No one had taken it down since her escape. Her breath came faster. She looked forward, all the way to the foremast. Clinging to its top, she saw the far smaller iron cage that awaited its next victim. She looked sideways at Avnai, but he seemed unaware of it.

  How can he be so calm?

  “What’s wrong with that ship?” Avnai asked.

  Azriyqam started as the sound of his voice shattered her obsessive reverie. What was he talking about? Then her breath caught.

  The canvas on the sails was taut beneath the pressure from the winddrivers, but the great vessel was barely making headway. Then she recognized what she was seeing: forward of the mainmast, half the sails were reefed and what sails there were hung flaccid. The foremost sails, however, strained backward at their mountings, as if to haul the ship back from its course, even as the winddrivers filled the sails on the rest of the ship near to bursting.

  “That’s wrong,” she muttered, knowing it was redundant.

  “I see the mooring point,” said Zavat. “Somebody had better be ready to go to work.”

  Soon they were close enough to pick out details. The great aftercastle of the ship sprouted faces at every window of its three stories. Azriyqam saw people swarming on deck, staring up at them. She could imagine the ripples of rumor as it spread through the crowds as they neared. It had been ten years since they’d seen an airship. They must have wondered at first whether they were from the Grove, but now they would be looking up at the sword-and-ring of the Consortium and wondering what it could possibly mean. Even as she watched, men climbed the mizzen to the mooring point.

  Avnai said, “Elazar, you go up and get us secured. Merav, keep watch over him.”

  Azriyqam gulped. It was a risk, sending them, but Zhad couldn’t see to help moor the craft, and Azriyqam and Avnai would surely be recognized. Hopefully, the sailors would be concentrating more on securing the lines than they would on who was lowering them.

  They hung over the huge ship and the sails of the jiggermast moonrakers fluttered down. The sailing crew swarmed over the enormous beams like ants.

  Airman Zavat’s face was a mask of concentration as he tried to keep the big ship steady in the sky. Azriyqam imagined Elazar and Merav lowering lines to the crew at the tops.

  A sudden sluggish tugging told her the lines had caught. The engines slid down the scale to idle under Airman Zavat’s quick-moving hands and the airship fishtailed as the Ekkaia dragged it through the air, right in line with her course.

  “We’re moored,” he said.

  “All right. Go get the gangway down.” Avnai took her by the fingers. “Let’s go show your former captors that the Consortium has arrived. Just as I warned them.”

/>   “Avnai,” Azriyqam said. “The Consortium hasn’t arrived. Only us.”

  “Well,” he replied, with that same twinkle in his eye he’d given her when he was staring through the bars of a starving cage at her, “We’ll just have to show them what isn’t really there. Do I look convincing?”

  He certainly looked better than he had six months ago when the Ekkaia had picked him up. He was no longer sunburned and clad in a salt- and sweat-stained duty uniform. Now he wore the Consortium’s dress uniform: a blue and gold jacket with brass insignia and a half-cape of midnight blue over a cream shirt, matching trousers, and mirror-bright shoes. The omnisword of a fighting officer rode at his shoulder and a service revolver at his belt.

  She nodded, not trusting her voice.

  “Then let’s go meet our new allies.” His eyes narrowed at her expression. “No fear, sister. Act like all the kingdom is behind you. Look like Senaatha when she comes to teach you and Merav lessons.”

  Suppressing a shudder, Azriyqam drew herself up and fixed what she hoped was a haughty expression on her face.

  “Better.” He turned away, and Azriyqam’s fingers gripped the hilts of her airswords for reassurance. At least she was not about to go back onto the deck of a Century Ship unarmed, no matter what the need.

  She followed her brother up the ladder. The embarkation deck of the airship was little more than an antechamber. Airman Zavat lowered the gangway from its nesting place underneath the airship’s skin. On the other side of it, Azriyqam could see two common sailors reaching up to secure the ropes in place at the great circular platform that surrounded the mizzen. Beyond them, a half-dozen of Ekkaia’s Council of Captains stood, each in the uniform of his specialty, their faces every shade from white to rich brown. In their midst was a large figure wearing a jacket rich with braid, a fine spidersilk scarf, and the unmistakable tricornered hat and gold feather of Ekkaia’s high captain.

  It was Haraad.

  Azriyqam stopped breathing. Her fingers dug into Avnai’s shoulder. He looked sharply at her and then at the object of her gaze.