“Kor will destroy Renda Bay and come back in time for the war. We are still building our ships.”
“Renda Bay!” Sounding like a crow, Chalk shook his scarred head and scuttled backward without speaking further. The skin of his shoulders, his arms, his back was pockmarked from the bites of hungry razorfish.
The Norukai king heeded Chalk’s visions, but the shaman was also eccentric, damaged. Patchy hair grew in bristly clumps around his head, wherever the follicles could poke through the scar tissue. Chalk swiped his knuckles across drool that leaked from his damaged lip. He stood in the sunlight and turned his face to the sky, bathing his bare skin in the warmth.
Even though the terrifying past ordeal had given Chalk his ability to see visions, Grieve still resented his father for allowing it. Grieve had been too young then to defy King Stern, and he had barely known Chalk, certainly not well enough to give his life to save the strange creature. After pulling the albino from the pool filled with razorfish, young Grieve had wrapped the torn and mutilated boy in sailcloth and tended him.
The other Norukai had assumed the freak was dead, but young Grieve rowed him across the inlet to a small neighboring island, little more than a hummock of rocks and grasses that poked like a stump above the waves. That was where the blind old fish woman kept her cottage, a woman whom many Norukai used as a healer, especially when their slashed mouths grew infected after the ritual cutting. The old woman was an expert in scars.
Grieve took Chalk to her and, using all the power of command he had learned from his father, told the old woman to save the boy. Without arguing, she coated Chalk’s torn skin with greasy, foul-smelling ointments made from guano and fish liver, and she wrapped the albino with strips of cloth, encasing the entire body like a cocoon.
Grieve couldn’t let King Stern or any other Norukai know that he tried to save the misfit they had meant to sacrifice. He secretly rowed over to the fish woman’s island every day and watched Chalk recover. Finally, when the scarred pale boy was conscious enough to speak, he gazed at Grieve with his oddly shifted eyes. “Don’t kill your father yet,” Chalk said, out of context, speaking from nowhere. “Let me tell you when it’s time. I will know.”
Grieve responded with only silence, staring at the blind fish woman, who pretended not to have heard. Until then, Grieve had never even considered killing his father. The idea of ruling the Norukai islands had felt so far in the future, but Chalk seemed absolutely certain. Grieve had felt gooseflesh crawl up his back and arms. He believed that Chalk would know and would tell him.
And he had.
Over the years he had visited the hundred main islands that formed the Norukai archipelago, as well as the coastline that the raiders pillaged and stripped of its resources. They forced slaves to cut down the forests, leaving the hillsides bare after seizing the wood, and they used slaves to mine in the mountains for iron, gold, and silver. But Grieve had always wanted more. Now, he intended to get it.
He agreed with the shaman’s prediction and Captain Kor’s assessment of Ildakar. If they took over the legendary city, that would plunge a knife through the heart of the Old World. From there, the Norukai could spread in all directions, up and down the Killraven River, blockade the estuary, swarm up the coast all the way to Tanimura and beyond.
Thousands of years ago, the Norukai tribes had been wild and fierce. They fought in countless tribal wars, leaving wreckage and sorrow in their wake. But while they ravaged the land, the Norukai were not organized enough to be invincible. When Sulachan’s powerful empire rose, the tribes were hunted down because they proved to be uncontrollable. When they refused to swear loyalty to Sulachan, the emperor ordered the extinction of the entire people. His armies drove the Norukai to the sea, and they retreated to countless defensible islands. The death toll on both sides was immense.
In the millennia since, the Norukai grew powerful again and took their slow revenge. But it was too slow.
Such impatience was one of the reasons that convinced Grieve to overthrow King Stern. And now his father’s skull, picked clean by the fishes, rested as a centerpiece in Chalk’s glass-walled tank in the throne room where he kept his favorite specimens.
Grieve and Chalk had become friends, and the albino shaman was devoted to his savior. Grieve had slain nine rude Norukai warriors who made the mistake of laughing at the strange young man, and after that, the other Norukai left Chalk alone, showing a grudging respect for Grieve, if not the odd shaman.
The king insisted on leaving Chalk behind when he went out on raids, even though he valued the shaman’s visions. Chalk was not a fighter, and Grieve knew that sometimes the walking meat could become violent. Whenever Grieve came home scarred with battle wounds, his friend was overjoyed to see him safe.
Once, before a typical raid, the shaman was inexplicably terrified. Grieve intended to accompany four ships south to raid a mining village they had not preyed upon for fifteen years. The children they’d left alive would be grown up now, the population fat and lazy. It should have been a simple raid, but Chalk begged Grieve to stay home. He wouldn’t explain why, but he grew more frantic, his jagged voice shrill. “Don’t go, don’t go!”
Grieve would never admit he was afraid, but Chalk’s insistence chilled him. The other Norukai were puzzled as to why he would back out of the raid, but he owed them no explanation. When one brutish female warrior, Atta, laughed too loud and pressed too hard, Grieve broke her nose and shattered her cheekbone, injuring her so severely that she had to stay home from the raid as well.
Grieve learned later of a tremendous storm that had swamped the raiding expedition. Three of the ships were sunk outright, and the last one attempted to limp home, only to be set upon by vicious selka. The undersea creatures tore the vessel apart, and only three survivors were found in the wreckage. If Grieve had gone along on the raid, he would have died.
From that point on, he always listened to Chalk, even if he didn’t understand his mysterious predictions.
Now, in the harbor below, iron bells rang out, the clangor ricocheting along the cliffs louder than the roar of the ocean and the whistle of the wind. The six serpent ships set their dark sails and engaged their weather spells to catch the wind. Muscular Norukai manned the oars to drive the vessels like knives out of the narrow, protected harbor. The iron bells continued to ring.
“Renda Bay, Renda Bay!” Chalk scuttled up to him again. “Plan for Ildakar, and the whole world, my Grieve, King Grieve! They’ll all grieve.”
“I’m building my fleet,” he said. “We won’t invade until our fighters are ready. Our navy will be like a school of sharks.”
As Kor’s raiding vessels sailed away from the main island, Grieve shaded his eyes and gazed across the water to the misty hummocks of other islands dotting the sea, with barely navigable passageways through the reefs. On the leeward side of the islands, long docks had been built where more ships were being constructed, in addition to all the serpent ships that already existed. Grieve had ordered the nearest mainland stripped of lumber, the tallest trees seized for masts, with other logs to be sawn into hull planks. Ribs curved along the keels, growing into fearsome serpent ships, dozens and dozens of them.
Each island had its own master wood carver, and skilled artisans used knives and chisels to fashion a distinctive figurehead, a unique representation of the serpent god for the bow of each ship, one great vessel for every main island. Thirty new warships had already been completed in the past two weeks, with fifty more under construction and dozens more planned. From the top of the Bastion, Grieve heard the distant hum of activity as Norukai shipbuilders took advantage of the good weather to make swift progress.
King Stern had taken far too long to launch his war against the mainland, and young Grieve had lost patience. When Chalk told him it was time, Grieve hadn’t hesitated. He had challenged and killed his father. Stern hadn’t led the Norukai to the glory they deserved, but Grieve would.
Now, as he surveyed his extensive, growin
g navy across the water, he knew it was only a matter of time.
“They’ll all grieve,” he muttered to himself, and Chalk grinned.
CHAPTER 15
Inside his headquarters structure, General Utros brooded in darkness, wrestling with disbelief and dread certainty. The sun fell behind the western hills in the direction of Kol Adair, but even before darkness gathered, Utros pulled the shutters closed. Inside the dim, stuffy building, Ava and Ruva built up the hot coals in the braziers, filling the shadows with orange fire, and then acrid herbs. The smoke that swirled around the enclosed room had a bitter smell, but not as bitter as what Utros had learned.
With so many small kingdoms and principalities in turmoil after his armies smashed them, news would have taken a long time to travel across the Old World. Could it be that Utros had conquered the continent, crossed over the mountain passes and placed Ildakar under siege, in the name of an empire that had already crumbled? How could history be so cruel? How could time have abandoned him after so many unparalleled triumphs?
And yet, in his heart, he believed what Nathan and Nicci had told him. He could not deny the evidence.
For now, with the door and windows closed, with guards stationed outside so that no subcommander would enter with a report, Utros kept only the sorceresses with him, but even their powerful magic could not drive away his doubts.
Iron Fang was truly gone, his empire crumbled into dust by the march of time. Empress Majel, beautiful Majel, was also dead in the most horrible way imaginable. Utros would have mourned his beloved in any case, but to know that her own husband had flayed the skin from her creamy shoulders, her rounded breasts, her flat stomach, her smooth thighs …
Utros squeezed his eyes shut, picturing Majel’s classically beautiful face, and those shimmering dark eyes that had gazed on him with so much love and forbidden passion. When they were together, she had felt such joy to be held in the arms of someone who wanted to love her, rather than possess her.
And then she’d been killed by the man she married, killed by the man to whom Utros had sworn his loyalty.
He was also the man Utros and Majel had both betrayed.
“Can it be true?” he asked aloud, looking at Ava and Ruva. He seemed to be pleading with the sorceresses to tell him otherwise.
The sisters had freshly painted faces, their cheeks swirled with scarlet and yellow, their necks adorned with a smear of indigo, outlined in crimson. “How can it be false?” Ava said. “You feel it, beloved Utros. You know you do.”
Ruva added, “I could not cast a spell to verify the truth when the emissaries were here, but I saw no doubt or deceit in their eyes.”
Ava took a step closer. “Emperor Kurgan is certainly gone, but our loyalty is not. You are, and have always been, our leader. Those hundreds of thousands of soldiers follow your commands, no matter who is emperor.”
“As I follow my emperor’s commands,” Utros said, struggling with his own loyalty. “When we departed from Orogang, I swore to complete my mission, and I did not need to receive any further instructions from Iron Fang. Even with this damnable stone spell, how is anything changed, just because more time has passed? I still have to conquer Ildakar.”
“The city must fall, if that is what you need,” Ava added. “Your soldiers will do what they swore to do. For you.”
Ruva’s voice picked up so swiftly that the twins seemed to speak the same thoughts. “And after Ildakar falls, you can set yourself up as its military leader, a new ruler for a modern empire.”
Utros was troubled by the thought. “No, that would make me feel an even greater traitor.” The image of Majel flashed before his eyes, and he set it gently aside in a different part of his mind. “I am a military man, not a power-hungry despot. I don’t do this for me.”
“But your army needs a leader,” Ruva said. “Command them. Do what you know you must.”
“Perhaps you’re right.” He wrestled with his fists, knotted his fingers, twisted his arms, trying to limber up his stiffened skin. “I am a hunter, and I have my eyes on the game I intend to kill. Before I worry about how I’ll preserve the meat for winter and distribute it among the storehouses, first I must kill the prey.”
“Ildakar,” said the women in unison.
Utros closed his eyes, blocking them out, setting aside all distractions. Ava and Ruva likely thought he was making military plans in his well-ordered mind, mentally positioning groups of soldiers, dispatching huge companies in different directions to overwhelm the surrounding lands. His forces could bottle up Ildakar and press upon the walls, which would perpetuate the terror inside the city, even if Ildakar’s magic-enhanced barriers held against the attack.
But Utros couldn’t stop thinking about Majel. His stony expression masked his disgust at how she had died, so much blood and pain. He should have been there with her. He should have saved her, but he couldn’t imagine how their love had been exposed. What had he and Majel done wrong? They had been so careful! What was their mistake?
Though he longed to write his thoughts every day, he had sent Majel only a very few letters, which he asked her to burn as soon as she read them. Even if she did keep them, who would dare rummage through the private possessions of an empress? And no courier would break the seal to read the letters.
But what if Iron Fang had questioned why a military courier would bear a secret sealed message from his general to his wife? Had Kurgan intercepted and read one of his letters? The courier was sworn to deliver it only to its intended recipient, but would a courier defy a direct order from his emperor? No.
Utros knew his ruler all too well. Kurgan was the man who sat upon the throne in Orogang, but he was capricious and reckless. What Nicci and Nathan had said about how history viewed Iron Fang was correct. Emperor Kurgan had achieved greatness only because of the victories and wise leadership of his greatest military leader. Utros had conquered the Old World, and Iron Fang had been left to rule it, despite his inability to administer such a vast realm.
Perhaps Kurgan had understood that himself. Maybe he’d felt inadequate, jealous of his talented general. He would have realized in his heart that the victories belonged to Utros, and his army and his citizens knew that also. When the volatile ruler discovered he was an inadequate lover as well as leader, Kurgan would not have been able to endure it. It was another victory General Utros had won over him. Iron Fang would have exacted his revenge on someone weaker than he, a person whom Utros loved. Majel.
Yes, he could very well believe Kurgan had skinned his own wife alive, then fed her still-living body to flesh beetles.
Utros winced, struggling to bear the vivid portrait his fears painted for him. Had Majel cried out his name, holding on to her love for him even as her body was torn apart? Or had she begged her vile husband for forgiveness, denouncing her betrayal and swearing her loyalty to him again? It would have done her no good.
Utros knew the clash of honor and need in her soul. He himself could barely stand the constant tug of war between his loyalties. He had made a sacred vow to serve Emperor Kurgan, and that was the core of his being, and yet his heart had gone over to Majel. How could he reconcile that? Loyalty or love? So long as Kurgan hadn’t learned of their passion for each other, Utros was able to compartmentalize his duty to Iron Fang as separate from his love for Majel.
But now, if his beloved was murdered and their affair revealed, and if the very empire had fallen, how could Utros balance anything? What was his reason to exist? What about his orders, his mission to bring down Ildakar?
He squeezed his eyes closed and felt the tears burn there. He remained deep in thought until he purged the emotions, turned them into stone so that they crumbled into dust within his heart.
Finally, he opened his eyes to find Ava and Ruva waiting intensely, their eyes locked on his face. He couldn’t even hear them breathe.
Utros said, “We still have to bring down Ildakar. I must complete my orders.” He thought about how he had challenged the legendary
city fifteen centuries ago. “The wizards of Ildakar were very powerful once, but if the stone spell has faded, then we know their magic is weaker than it was before.” He narrowed his eyes at them. “And yours is still strong, I hope.”
Ava and Ruva nodded. “We have the gift as before, and now we are enhanced with the strength of stone, as well as flesh and blood. That makes us more powerful.”
Ruva added, “We know secrets that others don’t.” Outside the headquarters, twilight thickened, but the brazier light remained a dull, throbbing orange. “Nicci and Nathan may have inadvertently left something behind, something we can use against them,” Ava said.
Her twin smiled. “Yes, they were not careful. They don’t suspect the power that resides in every scrap of themselves. But we do.”
Before the two representatives had arrived for the parley, the sorceresses had tended to each other, using a knife to scrape their eyebrows, scalps, arms and legs, every patch of skin, removing the tiniest bit of hair, which they burned in the braziers. Then they clipped their nails, also feeding each bit to the fire. They had made sure that not the slightest speck of their bodies could be found by an enemy.
But Nicci and Nathan were careless.
Ava and Ruva intensely scoured every place where the sorceress and the wizard had stood. The women crawled about, scanning the rugs on the floor, the edge of the door, any place the two visitors had touched. Utros didn’t ask why. They were searching for something.
Ava combed her fingers over the rough wood of the doorframe, squinting in the light of the braziers. Then, with a cry of triumph, she produced a single golden hair caught on a splinter in the wood and snapped off. Their faces filled with delight and anticipation, the two sorceresses inspected the fine yellow strand, which obviously belonged to Nicci.
“Now we have what we need.” Ruva’s eyes shone.
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