by Anthony Ryan
“Swam the harbour from the northern mole and climbed the anchor chain when you were saying your goodbyes.” She shrugged. “It wasn’t difficult.”
So much like Reva, he thought. But not entirely. “Your mother would have killed at least two before I got here,” he told her.
Her stare turned into something more guarded. “I’m stiff from crouching behind barrels for three days.”
No, he decided, studying her face carefully. You knew I’d stop you. “Did Lord Nortah partake of any rum?”
She shook her head. “He was about to, sure enough. Tried tapping a spile into one of the small barrels and knocked it onto my foot. That lot heard us arguing.” She hesitated. “Are you going to hang them?”
“Do you want me to?”
She was calmer now, the anger leeched away into a nervous uncertainty. “They were a bit free with their hands, but I doubt they were really going to do anything. If that matters.”
“They outraged the person of my niece, who also happens to be the heir to the Fiefdom of Cumbrael. It can’t go unanswered. But neither can your disobedience.”
She gave a derisive snort. “Going to flog me, are you, Uncle?”
He stared at her wordlessly until the grin slipped from her lips and she began to fidget as he let the silence stretch. “I’ve been indulging you, up until now,” he told her, hoping she heard the soft sincerity in his voice. “Because of the love I bear for your mother. I have tried to be gentler in your education than my masters were in mine. I used to see their harshness as cruelty, an unnecessary adjunct to the wisdom they imparted. Now, I see I was mistaken. You have learned nothing from me, because I have not taught you properly.”
He stepped closer to her, keeping her eyes trapped in his. “So I will give you a choice. Submit to my training or don’t. If you don’t, you will be confined on this ship and returned to the Reaches once I have disembarked in the Far West. You will return to your mother, explaining my failure to teach you. Or”—he stepped closer still, lowering his voice to an intent whisper—“agree and I will allow you to journey with me. I offer nothing but hardship, judgement and pain from here on in and you may well hate me by the time we’re done. But at least you might have a chance at surviving this world, for I suspect it has many dangers in store for you.”
He watched her throat bulge and resentment steal over her features. He knew she was fighting the impulse to strike at him, hurl yet more abuse and declare her scornful rejection. But, if he had any real chance of teaching her, she would have to master her impulses.
After a few seconds of staring at him with bunched jaws and reddening skin, she gave a jerky nod of acceptance.
“I need your word,” Vaelin said. “State your agreement, Lady Ellese.”
“I . . .” She faltered and cleared her throat. “I agree to submit to your training, Lord Vaelin.”
He glanced over her shoulder at the shadowy confines of the rum store. “These quarters aren’t suitable. From now on you’ll sleep on the upper deck, regardless of the weather.”
* * *
◆ ◆ ◆
Captain Veiser of the Sea Wasp was a tall, taciturn Renfaelin with a face that resembled a mask of weathered stone but for the occasional twitch. From the cowed demeanour of the transgressing sailors arrayed before him, Vaelin was struck by the realisation that they were more afraid of their captain than their Tower Lord. Veiser listened in silence to Vaelin’s account, which included a fulsome apology for the actions of his niece, before turning a cold eye on the sailors.
“Your punishment, my lord?” he enquired.
“It’s your ship, sir,” Vaelin said. “And they’re your men.” He glanced at Ellese, who stood nearby trying vainly to conceal her apprehension. It was clear to him she had no desire to witness another hanging. “Lady Ellese has indicated a desire for clemency,” he added. “However, I leave any punishment in your hands.”
“Lady Ellese is to be commended for her compassion,” Captain Veiser replied, his eyes never wavering from the sailors. They were arrayed in a line parallel to the beam of the ship, flanked on either side by the bosun and the third mate, both large men bearing cudgels. “However,” the captain went on, “in addition to the insult they dealt her, these men have also transgressed the ship’s rules as set down by the Honoured Trading House of Al Verin. All stowaways are to be brought immediately to the captain.”
He stepped closer to the sailors, voice hardening as he walked along the line. Vaelin noted how his face twitched with increasing energy as he spoke. “The Sea Wasp is a respectable vessel. She is not some flagless tub crewed by scum. Once my crew were all fine men. Once we sailed across half the world and did great service at the Battles of the Beacon and the Cut. But many were lost to the fires of war, and these days I am increasingly obliged to take on wretches such as this.”
This last was punctuated by a hard openhanded blow to the last man in line. From the way the man whimpered in response, Vaelin was forced to ponder the manner of Veiser’s command.
“The last man to breach house rules received ten strokes of the Crimson Duchess, as you may recall,” he said, stepping back, a contemplative frown on his brow as he turned to Vaelin. “Are you familiar with the Duchess, my lord?”
“I’ve heard of it. A many-thonged whip fashioned from the hide of the red shark, I believe.”
“Quite so. Cuts the skin of man like a dozen razors at once. The sight is really quite affecting. And not always fatal. Still.” He thought for a moment longer. “Since the good lady has made a plea for clemency we’ll leave it at a caning.” He turned to the bosun. “Ten strokes each. And no rum for the rest of the voyage. Any further transgressions and it’ll be a dozen strokes of the Duchess.”
The punishment took an hour to administer, each man taking his turn at being tied to the main mast to receive ten strokes of an ash cane. The bosun did his work without obvious relish, but also with a diligent efficiency that left each man on their knees with blood seeping from the welts on their back, weeping and gasping in pain. As the fifth transgressor was led to the mast, Ellese turned away and started towards the stern.
“Stay,” Vaelin ordered, his glare sufficient to freeze her in place. “Watch.” She stood, flinching with every stroke as the bosun set to work on the next sailor. “Consider this your first true lesson,” Vaelin told her. “All actions have consequences.”
CHAPTER EIGHT
So, the Emerald Empire existed for a thousand years before the rise of the Merchant Kings?” Vaelin asked.
“Closer to nine hundred, give or take a few decades,” Erlin said. “I must say, in all my travels I never heard tell of a single dynasty that lasted so long. But everything fades with time. What was strength becomes weakness. So it was with the Emerald Empire.”
Vaelin glanced over at Ellese as she came to a halt a few feet from their perch close to the ship’s prow. The sun was high in a cloudless sky and sweat shone on her brow and the bare skin of her arms as she laboured to drag air into her lungs. Sehmon, who had opted to take an equal part in her training, stumbled to her side an instant later, his breathing even more ragged.
“Was that six laps?” Vaelin asked Erlin, who shrugged.
“Wasn’t counting.”
“In that case we’d better make it another two, just to be sure.” He met Ellese’s gaze and jerked his head in dismissal. She swallowed a sigh before filling her lungs and setting off on another full-pelt lap around the deck, Sehmon following a few paces behind.
“Strength became weakness?” Vaelin prompted, turning back to Erlin.
“Quite so. Before the empire the Far West was just a clutch of competing kingdoms in a near-perpetual state of war, rather like the Realm before King Janus came along, but on a much grander scale. Mah-Shin, the First Emperor, wiped out the old monarchies, killing every member down to the fourth generation, and declared it his int
ention to craft a dynasty that would achieve the perfect harmony between Earth, Heaven and man. This so-called harmonic principle was an old idea even before Mah-Shin’s birth, the goal of the many ambitious conquerors that preceded him. However, only he ever came close to putting it into practice, founding the Emerald Empire on the twin pillars of an extensive bureaucracy and a canon of written law.”
A brief drum of footfalls and Ellese stumbled to a halt once more, back bent and chest heaving. Sehmon took another second to arrive, sinking immediately to his knees, groaning with every breath.
“One cup of water each,” Vaelin told them. “Then climb the mainmast.”
“How . . . many . . . times?” Ellese enquired between breaths.
“Until I tell you to stop.”
She nodded and started towards the water barrel, pausing when Vaelin spoke her name. “Would you leave your brother lying there?” he asked, pointing to Sehmon.
For the first time in days a glimmer of defiance flickered across her face. “He’s not . . . my brother.”
“He is now.”
He held her gaze until she set her jaw and moved to Sehmon, taking hold of his arm and dragging him to his feet. “Get up, you lazy sod.” She prodded him towards the water barrel. “And don’t even think about calling me ‘sister.’”
“Heaven,” Vaelin said to Erlin. “The home of the Far Western gods, I assume?”
“They don’t really have gods, not as we would understand them. Rather, Heaven is the source of all fortune, good or bad, and also the wellspring of what we term the Dark.”
“The Music of Heaven,” Vaelin murmured, recalling Ahm Lin’s tale of how he had been conscripted to serve one of the Merchant Kings once his blood-song had been revealed.
“A rare gift,” Erlin said. “One of many, as we well know. Those that possess them are said to enjoy the blessing of Heaven and are thereby elevated above the rest of humanity, for when they die their souls will take their place in Heaven. The spirits of the non-blessed will remain earthbound, contained within tombs and placated with offerings from their descendants, lest they become restless and disturb the balance.”
“And did the First Emperor achieve his goal? This perfect harmony.”
“Many a Far Western historian will insist he did. It was under Mah-Shin that military and civil appointments were made on merit rather than privilege. He established laws that banned arbitrary imprisonment and guaranteed rights for all from the lowliest peasant to the wealthiest landowner. He also began construction of the great web of canals that even today links all corners of the Far West. Prosperity and justice were his legacies, at least that’s what the official record would have us believe.”
“And the truth?”
“He was a tyrant who ruled as much through fear as wisdom. It’s said he went mad in his later years, believing himself to be a living vessel of divine grace and therefore infallible. On his deathbed he decreed that no word of the laws he had set down were ever to be altered. And so, as lesser sons sought vainly to match the glory of their forebear in ever-changing times, they found themselves increasingly constrained by the laws that had once seemed so vital to the empire’s well-being.”
“And yet it lasted for a thousand years.”
“Yes, with many wars, famines and bloody dynastic feuds along the way. Theories differ as to why the Emerald Empire eventually fell apart, but I tend to subscribe to the notion that the imperial bloodline had become so corrupted by inbreeding and luxury it simply lacked the ability to produce an heir capable of effective rule. The last emperor was widely rumoured to have never actually walked on his own two feet or been taught to read. However, it was a series of floods, droughts and subsequent famines that brought the ultimate crisis. Above all else, the favour of Heaven is said to reside in the weather. Faced with so many submerged cities and ruined crops, who could doubt that the emperor had lost its blessing?”
“And so the empire split into the realms of the Merchant Kings.”
“After two decades of chaos. The provinces of the empire were each governed on a tripartite basis consisting of a civil governor, a military commander and a financial minister. When the empire collapsed, power coalesced around the financial ministers since they held not only the keys to the provincial treasury, but the knowledge of how to administer the tax system. In time, these masters of coin became masters of all, and the realms of the Merchant Kings were born. There was another decade or so of warfare as small regions were gobbled up by the larger neighbours so that today there are three Merchant realms: the Venerable Kingdom in the north, the Enlightened Kingdom in the south-east, and the Transcendent Kingdom to the south-west. Technically, the Free Cantons that comprise the major islands of the Golden Sea could also be termed a kingdom, but they govern themselves according to old imperial law rather than Merchant statutes.”
Hearing a shout from above, Vaelin glanced up in time to follow Sehmon’s untidy fall from the mainmast. The youth’s descent was partly arrested by some rigging before he collided with a crossbeam and tumbled into the sea off the port side. Vaelin went to the rail to see the outlaw thrashing in the ship’s wake. The winds were strong today, swelling the Sea Wasp’s sails, and he was soon swept towards the stern. Vaelin looked up at Ellese standing in the crow’s nest and gestured expectantly at Sehmon’s struggling form.
“Will you leave your brother drowning?” he called to her.
He watched her head tilt back in a brief spasm of annoyance before she bent to retrieve a coil of rope from the base of the crow’s nest. She quickly tied one end around her waist and fixed the other to the mast before clambering down to the crosstrees below and sprinting forward to propel herself into the air, arms sweeping out and down to form a spear-point. She left a small splash as she completed her dive, surfacing quickly and striking out for Sehmon. Reaching him after a few strokes, Ellese wrapped her arms around his waist, sputtering out some colourful language to quell his struggles.
“Make ready to haul ’em in, lads!” the bosun called, taking hold of the taut rope.
“Leave that a while, if you please,” Vaelin told the man as a trio of sailors ran to join him.
“You want us to leave them in the water, my lord?” the bosun asked, his heavy features bunching.
“I do.”
“For how long?”
Vaelin glanced at the sky, judging the sun at an hour past noon. “Until it gets dark,” he said. “Or it looks like they might drown. Whichever is soonest.”
* * *
◆ ◆ ◆
Ellese’s hand shook as she spooned stew into her mouth, chewing and swallowing with a somewhat mechanical determination. Since being hauled from the sea she had kept her gaze firmly averted from Vaelin’s, he assumed in order to avoid any temptation towards unwise words. She had lasted over an hour before finally losing her grip on Sehmon, whereupon the bosun had ordered her hauled in and another line thrown to the outlaw. Vaelin was struck by the lad’s lack of animosity, his pallid and chilled features betraying a strange impression of acceptance, as if nearly perishing at the whim of the Tower Lord were some form of honour.
“Your lessons are hard,” Alum observed to Vaelin as they ate together at the far end of the table.
“Yes,” he agreed. “And yet still kinder than those I was taught at a far younger age.”
“You were one of the blue-cloaked beasts, were you not? Tell me”—he leaned closer, voice dropping a little—“is it true they kill in order to sate the shades of the dead with blood?”
Vaelin started to laugh, then saw the seriousness on the Moreska’s face. “Is that what you were told?”
“The Empress’s agents tell many stories these days. And often they concern the Hopekiller and his vile brethren.”
Vaelin recalled his last encounter with the woman who had since been named Empress Emeren, the Trust of the Alpiran People. Your
apology is as empty as your heart, Northman. And my hatred is undimmed. He remembered the hard gleam of utter sincerity in her eyes as she faced him on the quayside in the Meldenean capital. In that moment the blood-song had made it clear her lust for vengeance was far from over, but its tune failed to reveal that she would one day hold sway over an entire empire.
“No,” he told Alum. “The Sixth Order does not kill to sate the shades of the dead. They fight in service to the Faith and the Realm and, on occasion, have done good in so doing.”
“But you no longer serve them,” Alum said. “Why?”
Vaelin reached for a tankard and sipped some watered-down wine as he pondered his answer. “It’s often said that doubt is the enemy of faith. But I have found the real enemy of faith is truth. I left the Order because I had heard and seen too many truths to stay.”
“So you have no gods? No . . . faith?”
“I’ve yet to be convinced that any god is more than a fable. As for faith, I still have it. In myself, in those I’m privileged to call friends.” He glanced over at Nortah, who sat at the opposite end of the table, head bowed and face blank as he ate. “And in my family, what remains of it.”
Alum’s brow creased in puzzlement, as if the notion of navigating life without recourse to gods was an imponderable notion. He began to voice another question but the words died as the urgent tolling of a bell sounded through the deck boards above.
“Stand to arms!” came the muffled cry of the first mate. “Pirate vessel approaching!”
“Fetch your weapons,” Vaelin told Ellese and Sehmon, rising and hefting his sword.
He found Captain Veiser at the stern, spyglass trained on the northern horizon. The seas were heavy today, painted slate grey by an overcast sky, the waves whipped high by a stiff easterly wind. Vaelin could make out the dim shape of a sail in the swirling haze, but not much more.
