by Dave Duncan
“No!”
He ignored that. “The first thing we must decide is where our rendezvous is to be. Orders must go out at once to all the allies, and we’ll need a good harbor to—”
“I said no.”
Meluak grew even louder and more abominably cheerful. “I did not and will not hear that word, 700. This is your chance to avenge your son, or rescue him if he’s been taken prisoner. If you don’t accept, then I will refuse the appointment. I’ll do all the work, I promise you, day and night, never sleep. But I need you to tell me what to do.”
Koriana had predicted that she would meet her son again. The woman was mad. So was Irona, even to think of this. Her only child … but if she did not even try, how could she ever bear the pain of wondering what might have happened if she had? A few words of advice on strategy wouldn’t commit her to anything more.
Veer read her face and said, “Irona, no!”
“Tombe,” she said.
“What?”
“They’re past Fueguino, heading south, right? You’ve got to put the army ahead of them to stop them, just as I had to do at Didicas. If you muster north of their front, you’ll be chasing them, and they will outrun you. Tombe has the longest beach I’ve ever seen. Podakan played on it when he was a toddler. It’s capable of holding every ship in the Empire, and I don’t know anywhere else that could.”
Meluak was aghast. “That far south? You think they’ll have reached Muhavura already?”
“You mustn’t gamble on stopping them at Lopevi. Karang is hopeless—only one decent harbor, and even that has no access to the interior. Even the Shapeless may not be able to cross Karang. By the time we get to Tombe there should be news of where they are.”
Meluak noticed the “we” that had just slipped out. Smiling, he rose and settled into a chair. “So where do we begin?”
“You begin tonight.” She paused to gather her thoughts.
Veer brought wine for the visitor, but Meluak waved it aside without taking his eyes off Irona.
“If we find ourselves fighting on three fronts, we cannot hope to win,” she said.
“Three?” Meluak and Veer said simultaneously, with horror.
“Three. Maleficence has broken out at Vult. I have always believed that the Gren were merely Shapeless who had found a back door through or around the Rampart Range into Grensdalur, so we may soon hear that Achelone is being attacked again. If that happens, we shall probably have to withdraw completely from the mainland.”
Meluak nodded, aghast. “And the third?”
“The island allies, of course. Will they be with us or against us? If many of them choose to throw off the yoke of empire and turn against us, we cannot possibly win. Even if they merely fail to support us, we cannot survive.”
Veer, moving with surprising quietness and without knocking over anything at all, brought some wax tablets and a stylus to the grand admiral, so that he could start taking notes.
Meluak took them. “Your orders, ma’am?”
Irona sighed and accepted that she had been trapped. Like it or not, she was going to war again. “Tonight … You said you must notify the allies of the rendezvous, and you are right. But dispatches will not be enough. We must send emissaries of the highest possible rank to convince them of the urgency of this situation and the need to support us.”
Stylus poised, Meluak said, “Name them, ma’am.”
“Well, Genodesa is the most vital. If it puts its back into this, then the others will likely follow. We need Vyada Kun, of course, and Lenoch, but Genodesa is the key. …”
Irona slept badly that night. Never had the Empire faced a worse challenge, and she could not rid herself of the certainty that Podakan was somehow behind it. Guilt ate at her like acid: Didicas, Podakan-Zaozerny, Muhavura, and now Vult—he had carved his initials all around the boundaries of the Empire and she had stayed loyal to a mirage of parenthood. Kill him now, Queenie, while you can. Why had she not heeded that warning from the dead?
Unable to bear the frustration any longer, she wakened Veer so he could strap on her brace and let her go to work. When her chair arrived at the Palace, she found it bustling with clerks and officials. Meluak was stirring things up already.
As the sun breached the eastern horizon to brighten the summer sky, she was in her office, seated before a table loaded with memos, notes, and reports. The door flew open and in stormed Ledacos 692. Unshaven, unkempt, and disheveled, he was waving a small tablet.
“What is the meaning of this?” he roared.
Irona looked up with annoyance. “Shut the door.”
“Tell me what—”
“Shut the door!”
Grumpily he shut the door and returned to the table to glare down at her.
“What part don’t you understand?” she asked mildly. She was torn between fury that he would interrupt her when she was engaged in work so vital, and a despicable satisfaction that the infinitely slippery Ledacos had been cornered at last.
“Genodesa! That’s what I don’t understand. Send me off as your courier if you must—if that’s what your spite requires. Treat me as a slave, but send me to anywhere but Genodesa. You know perfectly well that I was one of the judges who sentenced the present king’s father to the sea death!”
“You will, of course, mention that in your representations to His Majesty,” she said, and this time she was hard-pressed not to smile at his expression of outrage.
“Bitch! Conniving slut! Genodesa has its own version of the sea death, and if the king is inclined to play traitor, the first thing he will do is send me to it!”
“The grand admiral and I decided that this should maximize your motivation to succeed in your mission. Genodesa is well aware of our politics and your status. By sending you, we display our complete confidence in our ultimate victory and drop an unsubtle hint that he had better not misbehave like his father did.”
The normally impassive Ledacos was shaking with fury now. “This disaster is all your fault, cow. You went off to Vult and came back with a monster, an uncontrollable, Maleficence-spawned—”
“Silence!” Had Irona been capable of the move, she would have leaped to her feet at that point. That was much too close to her own fears to pass unchallenged. “On the contrary, it was all your fault, ’92.”
“Mine? Are you crazy?”
“Not at all. Maleficence preys on our weaknesses, and yours is ruthless ambition. You thought that solving the Vult problem would get you elected to the Seven, but the idea of volunteering to go there in person never entered your head. You needed a puppet, and you chose me. On the day Jamarko was executed, you tried to persuade me. I refused. So then you turned your wiles on Vlyplatin Lavice, right there at Execution Bridge.
“You had done the boy a great kindness when his father died, and you called in the debt. You, a Chosen! A Chosen can bully a mere citizen into anything. But personal favors are not the same as political favors, Ledacos! Political favors can be called in, personal ones can’t. They may be returned, but they are not extorted on demand. You never did understand the difference. You warped Vly’s gratitude and turned it into guilt. You made him betray his lover by asking me for children. Vly wanted nothing in the world that I did not want, but you twisted him around.”
“This is madness, blaming—”
“I expect you told him that Vult was a rural fortress where nothing ever happened, a restful country retreat? So he and I went to Vult, and when he saw how he had been deceived, the truth drove him mad. Your fault, Ledacos. I’ve never told anyone this before, but in his madness that first night, he forced himself on me. Podakan is a child of rape, and the horror of what he had done sent Vlyplatin reeling out into the darkness, where he fell to his death. My child was a spawn of evil from the moment he was conceived. If now he belongs to Maleficence, the blame is yours.”
“Madn
ess, utter madness.”
“Sadness, utter sadness. Your failing is ambition; Vly’s was gratitude.”
Ledacos was portraying extreme disbelief. “This is absurd. Do you also have a weakness, 700?”
“I thought of mine as love, but it was denial. I refused to admit my child’s faults; I kept hoping he would change as he grew up. He did, of course—he just got worse. Now go and pack a bag, Ambassador, because if you aren’t ready when your ship is, I’ll have you marched aboard in chains.”
“Trollop! Well, if the Genodesans kill me, my dying breath will cry your name to Bane.”
“And I will name you with mine. It is agreed, then—first to die curses the other. Get out of here.”
She knew she might be sending him to his death. She was going to send thousands of others to theirs before this was done.
The Year 739
Nothing mattered in Benign then except the war. People never just walked anywhere. They ran, they shouted, they certainly never questioned. The eye of the storm was Irona’s office in the First’s Palace, where she spent days quietly dictating to pairs of secretaries. As soon as one pair left, another would enter. Her orders flowed out from there, with a copy to Meluak. Many instructions were verbal, with only the highlights hastily recorded. She arrived before dawn and left after dark, often so tired that she went to sleep in the litter as she was carried home.
The records she consulted might have been written by Byakal 633 himself, or even Eboga 500, but were often her own notes from the Achelone campaign. Meluak saw that her orders were carried out. As he had promised, he seemed never to sleep. His eyes became caves, his face sprouted coppery stubble, but he kept his good humor. The docks, shipyards, and chandlers ran day and night. Even he could not be everywhere, though. At Irona’s suggestion he appointed two rear admirals, Kerinci 735 and Caprara 736, without whom everything would have piled up on top of everything else. They got a lot of exercise, but even a twenty-year-old could cow a gang of mutinous dockworkers if he wore a jade collar.
Caprice chose a pregnant girl at the festival and nobody noticed.
Soon the first contingents would be arriving at Tombe, and someone must be there to receive them. Since Irona had now organized the organization, and Meluak was still overseeing the performance, she was the logical one to lead the advance party. They agreed on the forces she would take with her. She issued the orders and went home to pack.
That morning she had ordered her travel bags brought up from the cellar, and she found them sitting in the bedroom, already fat. Veer Machin was busily stuffing tunics in a sack. It had never occurred to her that he might be planning to accompany her. She half sat, half leaned on the edge of the bed and watched with mingled fear and affection.
“You can’t come this time, love,” she said. “I’ll be well defended.”
He flashed her a mocking look and went back to what he was doing. “That’s what I’m afraid of.”
“I don’t think one in a hundred thousand men could ever get horny enough to menace an old relic like me.”
“The other ninety-nine thousand, nine hundred, ninety-nine could. Of course I’m coming. You think I’d trust you around all those brawny young hunks?”
“I’ll take a couple of slave girls with me to help with my brace.”
“No need, I’ll be there. What’s this?”
He held up a multicolored cord, about five feet long. Irona’s heart twisted in guilt. In the frenzy of war preparations, she had barely spared a thought for Koriana and the children. Had they gone? Were they even still alive?
“Where did you find that?” She needed a moment to think how she would explain that curiosity.
“In your oddments box. I was looking for that little whetting stone I brought back from Kell. Can’t find it. But this? It’s very curious braiding.”
It was typical of his falcon eyesight to notice the braiding.
“It was a keepsake from Koriana.” Irona watched his guard go up at mention of the king of kings’s daughter. “She let each of the children choose one of the threads.”
“Keepsake? Or a fix?”
“She said it would bring me luck.”
“I am relieved to hear that you’re certain it is not a curse.” He carefully wrapped the cord around three fingers until he could tie it in a neat hank. He walked over to Irona and handed it to her. “You’ll be taking it with you?”
“I suppose I will.”
“Sometimes I think you’re crazy.”
She sighed. “Most times I know I am.” She tried again to talk him out of coming with her, but when Veer made up his mind, nothing would ever change it.
Next morning they shipped out on Eboga 500, which Irona suspected had been renamed for the occasion. Her commodore was Marapi Kembar, commanding a fleet of twenty galleys, half a dozen barques, and two of a new class of sailboats called frigates, very fast and designed to carry messages. As the cavalcade passed between the headlands, she saw that they were thick with spectators. Never in a century had Benign sent such a force to war, and more would soon follow.
It was past time for some of the nearer allies to respond to the Empire’s call. So, since the sea was calm, she ordered the fleet into line abreast, in the hope of intercepting some messages heading south. Her hunch paid off less than an hour after Benign itself sank over the skyline, when the western end of the line encountered a royal Genodesan galley and sent word to her flagship. Irona could have dallied to read the dispatches it carried, but she was unwilling to waste good sailing weather. She could believe the report that Genodesa was mustering a major force but was inclined to take the claim of fifty galleys with a keg or two of salt, and she could only pray that they would be supporting the right side.
A few days later she reached Yupil, on the coast of Muhavura, and received a welcome both worried and sincere. That prosperous, complacent city was unhappy that nearby Tombe had been chosen as the rallying point. That brought the war uncomfortably close. Yupil itself was arming, as were the nearer hill tribes. So was Vyada Kun, but they had no news from the northern mainland. The fate of Lascar 730’s party remained unknown, yet there Irona found a lack of information comforting. If the Shapeless were rampaging through the Empire, a flood of refugees should be heading south by land and sea. In her happiest dreams she imagined young Lascar stopping Maleficence in its tracks and making the great mobilization unnecessary.
From Yupil, Irona sent five ships north to reconnoiter, while the rest carried on to Tombe. She clearly remembered the great beach that could hold many hundred ships, the dunes behind it where a great army could camp, and the Tombe River racing down from the hills to provide ample fresh water; the labor of filling casks would keep the men busy while they waited.
She had hoped to find scores of ships from nearby allies already in place, but there were only half a dozen, all locals. At least this allowed the Benesh to claim the best location, nearest the fresh water supply and the town with its hope of evening entertainment.
She expected that her job for the next couple of weeks would be mostly adjudicating petty disputes between the natives and the visitors. That, and trying to make sense of intelligence reports, would be quite enough to keep her busy. Administrative military matters she could safely leave to General Marapi Kembar. When Grand Marshal Meluak arrived, his army should be ready to move.
By sunset, Irona’s camp was set up among the dunes, which sheltered her from the wind but restricted her view. Army had provided her with a splendid pavilion in Chosen green, with fine furniture and silk curtains to separate spacious living quarters from an impressive working area. There she would receive the elders of the city and the leader of each new contingent as it checked in. Veer grumbled that the drapes did not match the carpets, but she knew he was happy not to be sleeping under the stars. Irona herself would not be straying far, because the sand and tough grass of the dunes we
re impassable for her. From the entrance she had a glimpse of the beach, where the ships lay, and across the inlet to the barren, dusty hills of Karang. The Rampart Range stood somewhere to the northeast, too far off to be visible even from the shore.
The next day news began arriving, a flood of it, beginning badly and growing worse. On his way south from Vult, Kembar had warned the authorities in Brandur and Vyada Kun of the disaster at Vult. Both allies had promptly sent out scouts, but only now did their reports come by various routes to Tombe. Tokachi had suffered the same fate as Fueguino, being found burned and deserted. All the little fishing villages must be assumed to have fallen also. Crews returning to port in Lopevi had found their town ablaze and veered off. Some claimed to have seen a galley burning on the shore, which suggested that Lascar 730 might have tried to make a stand there and been overrun.
Worst of all were eyewitness accounts from the town of Sanbe. Half a dozen men and a couple of women had managed to escape in a fishing boat, and the tales they told repeated the horrors in the historical records almost word for word. Things in the night had attacked without warning: dead things, nightmares, monsters that seemed different to each onlooker and might change form before their eyes. Men had been attacked by half-eaten and obviously dead neighbors, women by their own children. Attackers had swarmed through the town, hundreds of them, which confirmed what the Seventy had feared most—that the victims were being conscripted by their killers. That had happened at Eldritch in the days of Eldborg 300. The horde would grow larger as it proceeded south.
Irona had advised Meluak to muster his army at Tombe in the belief that she was being extremely conservative. She had expected him to carry the war north from there. Now she worried that Maleficence might bring it to her before the imperial forces and the allies were properly mustered.
As the days dragged by, it became obvious that the allies were holding back. Two galleys arrived from Genodesa, four from Vyada Kun, one from Biarni. Their commanders insisted that many more would be arriving very soon, offering imaginative excuses for delay: freak storms, outbreaks of belly fever, civic holidays, shortage of funds. Representatives of other towns and cities followed, but in token numbers. No ally was going to be completely absent, for no one had forgotten the vengeance Mother Benign had taken on those who failed her during the Achelone campaign, but most were going to make sure they played on the winning team.
