Katerina’s stare was pure ice. “I understand perfectly what this mission entails, Major Sung. I have planned it in great detail, over several months. However, I do think we have just now resolved one of the minor points. Major Chan will accompany me as my second-in-command in the landing party. You, Major Sung, will remain with the ships.”
“You think that is a punishment?” said Sung. “Very well, I accept it, but I must tell you that this is a fool’s mission. Likely to be a complete disaster. It would be hard to accomplish even if the force were commanded by a seasoned Legionnaire officer. It cannot be done under the command of a girl with no military experience who wants to play at soldiers.”
“You begin to irritate me, Major Sung. And if you do not hold your tongue, I am likely to do something that I may regret later—and that you will regret immediately.”
Ari Yoritomo took a step forward, his hand still on his katana.
The eyes of the three Legion officers immediately flicked toward him. Their hands went to their own swords. They all knew the tales of the Niho knights and their ruthlessness.
There was an uncomfortable silence for about five heartbeats. Then Colonel Wang said, “My apologies, Highness, for my colleague’s inexcusable rudeness. Would you kindly continue the briefing. I can guarantee there will be no more interruptions.”
He shifted his shiny boot and trod down hard on Major Sung’s toes.
“Speed is crucial,” said Katerina. “We must capture the Red Fort before the Governor of Istana Kush or any of his Federation staff are aware of what is happening. If they were able to reinforce the Red Fort in any strength, then our assault would be little more than suicide. We have too few men for a prolonged fight and no artillery. But with surprise and speed, I believe it may be done. I have no military experience, that is true. But I have studied the textbooks—all of the great military authors. I have read numerous accounts of the terrain. And the Conclave of the Venerables was kind enough to give me their very latest intelligence on the region. It can be done, gentlemen. Have faith in me. But I will require maximum efficiency from the men and full cooperation from all members of my staff.”
The three officers looked at her but said nothing.
“The next part of the plan also needs to be done quickly,” she continued. “Once we have taken the Red Fort, we must immediately train its guns on the Green Fort on the other side of the Strait. The Green Fort is well within range of the Red Fort’s cannon and I believe that we can destroy it or drive off the defenders fairly briskly. We do not wish to allow them to fire upon us, so it is crucial that we dispatch or disperse them as soon as possible. Fortunately, they are not well motivated to die nobly at their posts. Their morale is poor, as I said. I believe that they will abandon their posts and run away into the safety of the jungle when attacked.” She looked again at the officers, to see if they grasped her point.
Again she was met with silence.
Katerina was speeding up her speech now; she knew it. Their silent opposition to her plan was causing her temper to fray and she wanted to be rid of these three idiots as soon as possible. The plan was achievable. It could be done; she knew that. But that smug prick Sung’s jibe about a mere girl in command of a dangerous mission was burning at her like a live coal in the belly.
“I will fire a red rocket to signal that the Red Fort has been taken. Although the sound of the cannon will no doubt alert you to the fact that the assault has begun. The rocket will be the signal for the ships to weigh anchor at Loku Beach and prepare to sail. A green rocket will signify that the Green Fort has been destroyed. At that moment, and under your orders, Colonel Wang, Yotun, Egil and Sar will proceed through the Gates of Stone, completely unmolested by either fort, and will commence bombardment of the harbor defenses of Istana Kush itself, as well as dealing with any enemy shipping. The cannon of the Red Fort will be redeployed to assist you. With enfilade fire from the fort, and your own powerful ship-based cannonade, Colonel, I believe we should be able to reduce the harbor defenses quickly and land our assault troops in the small boats with little, and possibly even no resistance.”
Katerina paused, took a breath. “The final part of the plan is an assault on the Governor’s Palace, the city’s last redoubt. I am certain that with the combined firepower of the ships and the redeployed cannon of the Red Fort, the walls can be swiftly breached. Then the Legion will assault and capture the palace and all Istana Kush will be in our hands.
“There is one final thing, gentlemen. There is a small harbor on the eastern side of Istana which I mean to leave unmolested until the rest of the city is in our hands. That will allow the Governor and his staff, and perhaps some of the Federation troops to flee. We want them to be pushed out, gentlemen. I don’t want any death or glory, no heroic last stands. We leave them an exit, and hope with all our hearts that they use it. Likewise any shipping that tries to escape—let it go. So, there it is. This is the plan. This is what we will do. And by the end of the third day after the advance force’s landing at Kara Bay, or fourth at the very latest, I expect Istana Kush, gateway to the Laut Besar, to be mine.”
Was it her imagination? Katerina thought she could detect a slight smile of admiration on the Colonel’s face. Or was he just quietly laughing at her?
“Are there any questions?” she asked.
“I think you have done a superb job in planning this operation, Highness,” said Wang smoothly. “Really very competent. I do not think any man in the Legion High Command or on the hallowed benches of the Conclave Hall could have done it better. However, I do have one small question—what happens if the dawn assault on the Red Fort fails?”
“You have put your finger on the crux of it, Colonel. I commend you.”
“Thank you, Highness. And what is your answer?”
“If the assault on the Red Fort fails—and I must stress that I do not think this likely—then I will not send up a red rocket on the morning of the third day and you, Colonel Wang, and you, Major Sung, will oblige me by immediately taking my three ships home to Ostraka, then marching the Legion back to the Celestial Republic, where you will offer my thanks, along with my eternal regrets, to the Conclave of Venerables.”
“What are you saying, Highness?” Colonel Wang’s smile had now disappeared.
“I am saying that if I do not manage to surprise and quickly take the Red Fort, then I, my bodyguards and the two hundred Legionnaires with me will undoubtedly be wiped out by the vastly superior force ranged against us. Everything, this whole campaign, hinges on the capture of Red Fort. If we do not take it swiftly, we shall all be dead.”
CHAPTER 25
The sorcerer looked down at the Eye of the Dragon as it nestled in a bed of wood shavings in a timber box in the dim hull of the Sea Serpent. The ship was three days out from Sukatan, on a northwesterly bearing, heeling over at a slight angle with a stiff easterly breeze across her starboard bow. He could clearly hear the hissing wash of the sea along her wooden flank as she surged through the waves.
Mangku put out his bandaged left hand, slowly, and touched the smooth, cool surface of the huge green-and-white gemstone with his fingertips. It was the first time he had laid his flesh on it—and he felt a small jolt of magical power surge up his arm at the contact.
That was a vast relief. His information about the Keys came mostly from ancient palm-leaf manuscripts that were often incomplete and some of which were so decayed that they were almost crumbled to dust. There was plenty of room for error. Indeed, there was one Key that he had very little information about at all. He had only just begun his preliminary studies into the myth of the Seven Keys when he had been expelled from the Mother Temple. For decades he did not believe they truly existed, or if they did, that they genuinely had the kind of power that the old stories promised. In fact, it had taken him ten years even to come up with a list of six of the Seven that he had enough confidence in to act upon. But there had
been no error here. The Eye was, without a doubt, one of the Keys of Power—and it was finally in his possession.
Even with Raja Widojo’s mind and body under his control, it had been a difficult and bloody task to extract the huge, gold-encased gemstone from Sukatan. Indeed, it had been much harder than he had expected. The common people had rioted in the arena at Widojo’s announcement and the violence and unrest had spread throughout the city like a contagion.
He and the Raja had been forced to take shelter in the palace for the rest of that day, surrounded by hundreds of armed guards, while the citizens of Sukatan had raved and roared outside the walls, and demanded that the Eye remain in their city and the necromancer who had poisoned their Raja’s mind be handed over to them for summary justice. The only consolation for a wasted day had been the chance to send the ridiculous Wukarta princeling and his girl-servant to the mines. That would teach the arrogant puppy to try to extract vengeance from Hiero Mangku. It had been a pleasure to punish him.
He had spotted the boy across the arena, picked him out from the crowds when he sensed that someone was agitating against him. He was the only one who did not grub about on the ground for the copper coins dispensed by Raja Widojo’s servants. It made him stand out like a goat dropping in a rice bowl. Pride. Always the downfall of these Wukarta usurpers. He was too proud to gather up the largesse offered by his richer cousin.
After the guards had seized him, he had considered ordering his immediate execution—through Widojo’s mouth, of course—but it had seemed more amusing to condemn the boy to a slow death. His own Ebu people were daily sent to the mines in scores—it was fitting that a prince of the Usurpers, a living symbol of the race that had enslaved his people, should suffer as they did. The boy would be beaten and raped until he was no more than walking meat, then he would be worked like a mule in the darkness until his spirit gave out and his wasted flesh was flung into a pit, or whatever they did with used-up bodies there.
One day, Mangku told himself, when he had assembled all the Keys, when he came into his full power, he would close the Konda Pali mine for good—and liberate all the poor damned Ebu souls imprisoned there. But that would be far too late for the Wukarta whelp.
On the morning of the second day in Sukatan, the riot appeared to have burned itself out. So Mangku had summoned fifty men from the Sea Serpent as an escort to take the Dragon’s Eye back to the ship. Widojo was spent by then; he had retired to his apartments whimpering about a headache. Mangku knew the Wukarta Raja did not have long in this world. The beetle would spread rot throughout his brain after a day or two, as these magical creations always did. It was no matter. Good riddance to another member of that dynasty.
When he finally took his leave of the palace and began to head down to the harbor, the Dragon’s Eye safely boxed in a bed of wood shavings and surrounded by his fifty men, he saw the devastation that the riot had caused in the town: fire-blackened buildings, looted emporiums, men and women still drunk on obat or rice wine wandering about in confused states. But it was not long before he realized he had made a mistake—and a bad one.
The riot was not quite extinguished and some of the Sukatan folk he passed recognized him from his appearance in the arena, sitting next to Raja Widojo.
“That’s the fellow Mangku, the one they say poisoned the Raja’s mind,” one fat little old man shouted as he passed them, his gray sarong pulled over his head against the sun, pointing at the sorcerer in the center of his phalanx of sailors.
“He’s the one told Widojo to give away our Eye!” shouted a workingman.
A stone or two had been thrown. Someone standing on a rooftop had dropped a slate into the crowd of Sea Serpent men, smashing the eye socket of one of the pirates and dropping him to the ground. And a ragged musket volley from Mangku’s sailors in return had killed the slate-dropper, as well as an old woman standing a few paces away, who was merely looking out curiously over the rail at the noisy street entertainment below.
It was a spark. And there was tinder aplenty. It seemed to Mangku that, at the death of that one insignificant crone, the whole city erupted again in an explosion of noise and fury. The light shower of stones thrown by mildly angry Sukatan citizens suddenly became a raging storm. Bricks and boulders lashed down on them from the buildings on either side. The fifty men of the Sea Serpent were battered, gashed, some hauled bodily out of their formation and ripped into pieces by many snatching hands in the surrounding crowds.
Someone with a pistol fired into the mass of Sea Serpent men. The bullet smashed the skull of a big hatchet-man standing protectively next to Mangku, showering the sorcerer with hot brains and blood . . .
They had only been saved from being quite literally torn apart by a bold sally from the ship once they reached the harbor road. A squad of musket men had leaped from the Sea Serpent, formed up, and, with a reckless disregard for their own safety, they had advanced on their surviving comrades, now huddled around their master and his prize, shooting volleys into the crowds and stabbing almost at random with their spike bayonets at any man, woman or child within reach. Mangku had grasped his staff, sliced his poor palm again and used his own blood magic to blast cones of green ichor-fire into the mob, incinerating dozens, and creating a lane down which he and his men could withdraw. The crowds had pulled back at this supernatural onslaught, bloody, singed and still furious—but now wary. At last, Mangku and the box containing the Eye had been taken on board—and they had cut their cables, abandoning their anchors, hauled up a sail and got the Sea Serpent under way in short order. It had been close, Mangku knew, and if things had gone a different way, he and all his crew might be dead.
But they were not dead—and he now had the Eye.
Still, he had badly miscalculated. As the Sea Serpent drew clear of the harbor and headed out into open water, Mangku had pondered his mistake.
The extreme fury of the people of Sukatan might seem to be a natural response to the loss of an object as magnificent as the Eye, but the sorcerer knew that it was not; it was not a natural response at all. He had detected a presence there in the arena, and afterward in the violent city streets, a disruption in the flow of the world, a sensation similar to a bad smell, but purely of the mind, which indicated the activities of a practitioner of the ancient arts. Someone had stirred up the people to attack him and his crew. It was not another sorcerer, Mangku was certain of that: the motions of another of his own kind would have been a blaring disruption to all his senses, like a psychic firework, an explosion of mental sound and color. And there were few sorcerers left in the world, anyway, and none now in Yawa. Besides, this was much more subtle. Someone was working against him and using one of the old techniques of the Vharkashta priests to sway the temper of the crowd. And Mangku knew then who it must be: it must be Semar.
Was that ridiculous old goat still following him around the world? He had thought himself rid of his pestilential presence after Dhilika the year before.
Mangku had been on the hunt for the Key of Wood, a venerable wooden staff carved from a tree that legend said the God Vharkash himself had sat under and prayed for rain, and which his researches had indicated was to be found in a back room of the Dhilika Museum of Antiquities, probably dusty, cobwebbed and long forgotten. However, his quest for the staff had proved fruitless—he had searched the museum and interrogated the curator and all his people—but the antique wooden staff was not there. Then he had discovered the presence of Semar in the same city, watching him, skulking in dark corners, talking to the very same people he was talking to.
He had informed a contact in the local security service that Semar was a spy for the Lord of the Islands; he had even told this agent where Semar could be found. It should have been enough to have the sanctimonious old worm carried off to the Amrit Shakti cells never to be seen again, but evidently Semar had escaped the cells or evaded the attentions of this usually efficient organization. For here he was again, in
Sukatan, sniffing around, interfering in Mangku’s business, stirring up the people against him. He would make properly sure of the meddlesome old buffoon next time he encountered him: a good blast of green ichor-fire and he would make no more trouble in this world.
He closed the top of the wooden box, shutting out the Eye of the Dragon from the meager light. He tapped it down tight with a pry bar and moved over to a similar box, farther along, where despite generating a flash of pain from his gashed hand he managed to lever open the lid. Inside, once more cradled in wood shavings, out of its sheath, freshly oiled and glinting dimly, lay the ancestral blade of the Wukarta.
Mangku took a grip of the worn wooden handle and lifted the kris out of its bed. The blade was thin and worn with use and pitted with age now, but the lines were still classically elegant. He passed the blade through a beam of sunlight, slicing it through the air. This was undoubtedly the greatest of all the Keys—and he felt a joy in its possession that outweighed any of his concerns about Semar. The ancient weapon seemed to shimmer with its own potential and Mangku was reminded of the ancient legend that the spirit of a woman who came from beyond the heavens had been trapped inside. Perhaps it was even true. He sliced the blade one-handed through the air, once, twice, then gently, reluctantly placed it back in its nesting of soft shavings, replaced the lid of the box and tapped it shut.
Two Keys he had, two of the Seven that he needed. One Key for each of the seven elements: metal, earth, air, water, fire, wood—and Ji or life force, the most precious element of them all. Ji was the element that animated all living things. Some of the ancients had called it ether; some called it the soul. And Mangku was not entirely sure, if he was honest, what form the Key of Ji would take. His research was still incomplete. But he would discover it in time; of that he was entirely certain. One Key of Power existed for each of the Seven Hells. He possessed the Key of Metal, the Kris of Wukarta Khodam; now, too, he possessed the Key of Earth, the Eye of the Dragon. What had once seemed no more than a grand dream was becoming reality. Five more Keys to find—only five. He could feel the spirits of his Ebu ancestors smiling upon him. The Master, the wise friend who had set him on this path all those years ago, would be proud of him.
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