by Roland Green
Even the light kiss drew another screech from Nai. She stamped out into the street, sleeves rolled up and blouse showing even more than usual. "Mongo, if you don't stop chasing this lightskirt and sit down for a drink, you can—ummph!"
Nai's tirade broke off as Mongo kissed her in a way that made speech impossible, then scooped her up and carried her inside. The sailor did not stop in the taproom, but headed for the stairs to the chambers above.
Torgia couldn't help thinking that Nai K'del calling anyone else a lightskirt was one midden pit complaining about another's smell.
"Seldra, I apologize for what I seemed to be saying," Torgia said. "Just let me know if Mongo seems to make a habit of defending other women's virtues, besides Nai's."
"What virtue?" Seldra said, with a laugh that came out a snort. "And what business is it of yours?"
"Very simple," Torgia said, and now it was her turn for a voice like runoff from a glacier. "My soldiers stay away from Nai. If Mongo breaks a soldier's bones over another woman, I'll have to notice it. If I don't, others above me will. If they—"
"If they want to reach Aston Point before the bones heal, they'll need to ride on the wind," Seldra put in. "And speaking of healing, I think we ought to send up to the temple to heal this fellow. He won't die without it, but he'll need a bed longer
than anyone around here's likely to give him one."
The sergeant nodded and two of the men scurried off, back uphill toward the keep. Torgia made a gesture for good luck.
"I hope the monks can spare someone. Old Aston's not long among the living, so I've heard, and they're trying to help him. When he's awake, he goes on spouting the half-addled prophecies that already have us stumbling over travelers drawn by them. Even his followers are looking over their shoulders now."
Seldra's reply was lost in a chorus of screams. They started from the waterfront, but swiftly climbed up through the town, like pain creeping up a diseased limb. Just-sheathed swords rasped free again, Finlaysdotl nodded toward the end of the street, and the captain returned his signal.
Whatever else had come to Aston Point, this narrow street in front of the Grinning Gar, with no fighting room and not even a decent view of the sky, was the wrong place to meet it.
What Torgia expected to find when she reached the open, she could never say afterward. What she found was what seemed to be the whole population of Aston Point, all staring at the northeastern sky. Some pointed, others knelt, but the sky held their attention as a snake holds a bird's.
Torgia looked up, and both her hands instinctively shaped themselves into a childhood sign against bad luck. She understood the stares.
In the northeastern sky, a star drew a trail of fire across the sky. The fire trailed so far and spread so wide that one could barely see the star at the head of the tail. The star glinted silver, while the tail flamed orange and crimson, gold and eye-searing white, all the fire hues of a god's forge blazing in the sky.
Torgia watched the star as it rose steadily higher above the horizon, and she realized that the higher it rose, the more people would see it, until distant lands echoed with the tale of the fire-trailing star.
There was a name for those stars that fell down from the bowl of the heavens, trailing fire. Torgia remembered it. The old name for them was "comets."
The old books also said that comets were usually portents of doom, or at least mighty events. Hardly good news for a captain who had to keep the peace in a remote town with thirty soldiers, none of them immune to fear of the unnatural, with no promise of help except from the monks—
No, that was not quite right. Torgia Mel had for some time kept a secret list of those whose level heads and strong arms might help in a crisis. It was clearly time to call on a few of those people.
• • •
It was a while before Jazra could override her escape pod's computer and turn the pod onto a course parallel to Fworta's. The sight of the dying starship was simply too awesome, coming as it did on top of the long fight, and her hair-thin escape.
The dimensional rift within the gate was clawing at the prime material like a starving predator clawed its prey. Compressed hydrogen atoms spewed out of the rift, combining with plasma spewing from the damaged engines, and fuel from ruptured tanks.
Together, they made a trail of fire across the vacuum behind Fworta, a trail already as long as the diameter of a fair-sized planet. Looking at it with the unshielded eye was impossible, like looking at a blue star. Even shielded, Jazra felt her eyes watering, and the color shifts did not help.
The fire ran through every hue of the spectrum in the time Jazra needed for a deep breath. It changed colors in the blink of an eye. At first she tried to name each color, then realized that she was seeing colors for which there were no names—at least not in any tongue spoken by natural beings.
There might have been colors like that in the days when it was said that wizards and witches worked spells. But magic was only a myth; although, for the moment, nature seemed to be doing well enough.
Nature. Gravity was a primal force of nature, and it would be operating freely on Fworta now that her engines no longer drove her. Jazra opened the distance to the ship still further, to avoid any interference with her computer's operation, and began her calculations.
The escape pod was a miniature, one-voyage spaceship that required generous computer capacity. It did not take long for Jazra to be certain that the ship was indeed on a course into the gravity well of the planet they had sighted just before the attack.
Unless the planet could fend off a plummeting starship—and the Rael had not detected the electronic signatures typical of such a level of technology—that meant, ultimately, a crash on the planet. Or perhaps Fworta would break up first. Even then, fragments the size of houses would spray half a hemisphere, like flechette rounds from a cosmic magnum cannon.
Jazra continued her calculations, using the best data available for the amount of thrust the outgassing was generating. Then she added the planet's rotation, the gravity of its larger satellite, atmospheric pressure, and averages for wind, precipitation, temperature, and so on.
For the first time since the Overseer's horde stormed aboard the ship, Jazra allowed herself a sigh of relief. She ran the calculations twice more, while looking at a map of the planet. The pod's own navigational telescope was not powerful enough to make out its features at this distance; the map was the creation of Fworta's huge instrument, computer-enhanced, then downloaded into the escape pod's memory.
Definitely a low-technology world. No artificial lights, no atmospheric pollution from urban areas or industry. The planet was listed in the computer's records, but all the data was from a single drone probe that had orbited the planet for three days just before the war with the Overseer began.
The planet had intelligent inhabitants, walking upright, and civilized enough to have primitive cities, roads, and wind-powered vessels. Doubtless they would have been visited long since, if the war had not intervened and made such marginal planets of little
interest to people fighting for their own survival.
Certainly the Overseer would face little resistance from the natives. Even if any Rael survived the crash and fled the ship, they might be taken for enemies: evil wizards, demons, angry gods, or the like. Before they and the natives could establish a basis for cooperation, the replicators would have reinforced the Overseer's strength enough to doom the planet.
But Jazra's calculations suggested that the ship would be coming down in barren mountains, to the west of an inland lake so large it could almost be called a freshwater sea—wind-driven vessels would take days to cross it. On low-technology planets, such areas were seldom heavily populated.
If the Rael and the Overseer were destined to continue their battle on the world ahead, at least they would not have to do so amid the rubble of burning cities, and the corpses of slaughtered innocents. If jazra could reach the planet before the ship crashed, she might even have a notion of h
ow to warn the inhabitants.
By ill chance the Rael had loosed the Overseer on the universe again. Honor as well as survival demanded that they try to undo the harm they had wrought.
One
Fedor Ohlt tossed and turned in his narrow bunk aboard Fairy Rose until well after midnight, when he decided that he would not get to sleep unless he somehow made himself tired.
With no room for that in a cabin he shared with five other folk on their way to Aston Point, he pulled on a tunic and trousers, but no shoes. It still felt slightly unnatural to go shod aboard a ship, although he had not sailed before the mast in fifteen years.
The ship was all but becalmed, with only faint puffs of wind making the sails on the two masts ripple. Toward the horizon, Ohlt saw the lights of several other ships in similar straits. He had not sailed on Paradise Lake before, but the waterfront gossip in Port Enkrimpe seemed to have the right of it: more folk than usual were bound for Aston Point, responding to Aston Tanak's prophecies.
Ohlt raised his eyes to the sky, where the cause for taking the old monk seriously blazed against the sky, making all but the brightest stars invisible. The Fire to Come stretched halfway from horizon to zenith. When Ohlt had retired it had been just above the horizon, and its tail had been a silvery-blue with exotic traces of purple.
No, the tail had been the exact shade of the scarf Wylina had bought the day she and Marfa went out to shop in the West Wall Market and never came home. The watch had found the scarf in Wylina's purse when they lifted the overturned cart of ale barrels off her and Marfa. They had brought it home to Fedor Ohlt along with the bodies of his wife and daughter. He would never forget that color, even though he had had the scarf buried with his wife.
Ohlt swallowed hard. The memories remained; so did his self-command. The new color of the fire-tail was the raw orange of a harpoon shaft heating in a forge, almost ready for the hammer and tempering oils.
It was also longer than it had been when it rose. This was not uncommon with such "long-tailed stars," as Ohlt knew from having seen them in skies far from Paradise Lake. When stars fell down from the bowl of the sky, the sky gods' essence peeled away from them like the shell from an egg, burning as it departed. In time they came too close to the world to resist the influence of the earth-essence, and were no more.
Or so men who had studied such matters said. Ohlt would believe them, as long as they believed him about patching leaky boats, or picking an adze.
The Fire to Come was indeed so bright that it lit up the deck of Fairy Rose, enough to let Ohlt see that he was not alone. Besides the steersman and the lookout, the sterncastle held a bulky figure whom Ohlt recognized as Captain Figul.
Forward, the deck was bare save for the usual litter of ropes, shavings, and half-empty kegs. Two of the hands were curled up on the ropes. Ohlt did not think much of Figul's shipkeeping, but envied the hands their ability to sleep. Youth and a long day
doubtless helped, as much as freedom from nightmares.
A third figure stood just by the break of the forecastle, staring upward intently. Ohlt assumed that Hellandros was, as usual, studying the Fire to Come. Why, he did not venture to
guess.
Hellandros looked to be a traveler of some kind, perhaps one who had been studying to be a cleric, but had failed some test or forgotten some important spell. He had to be past thirty, old to be on his first journey. No seasoned adventurer would have carried only a staff and eating dagger. He moved stiffly, sometimes slowly, as if his joints were not quite as nature made them. He spoke seldom, but when he did he was always polite, and his accented common tongue spoke of an educated man's High Fer-endorian.
All of which persuaded Fedor Ohlt that Hellandros was not what he seemed, but would not welcome undue curiosity. Ohlt, to all intents and purposes fleeing the city that he could no longer call home, had no quarrel with the traveler.
A heavy tread sounded from aft, as Captain Figul descended i wo ladders and lumbered toward Ohlt.
"Fair night, eh?"
"Aye, Captain." Ohlt was not written up in Rose's crew book, but his carpentry had paid his passage.
"Fine as the lake gives a sailor, if it wasn't for that." No need to follow Figul's outthrust hand to know what he meant.
The captain shook his head. "I've never seen one of those fall so far from the sky before. Might could be, this one will fall all the way to earth, and that's a sign."
"Certainly for anybody who's underneath it."
Figul's look said that he had not been deceived by Ohlt's light manner, and did not approve of it, either. "It's driven Aston Tanak mad, and no good can come of that."
Ohlt had heard as much. He had also heard (again, in the waterfront gossip of Port Enkrimpe) that the years had been taking a toll on Aston Tanak's wits long before the Fire to Come appeared in the sky. But Figul considered himself sympathetic to the old mystic, even though the captain seemed to practice neither the hard work, nor the plain living, Tanak so vehemently preached.
Figul seemed to take Ohlt's silence for agreement, and nodded complacently. "Well, I've done my best. I sent ashore all the hands I didn't trust. I had three different priests bless the voyage, had a seer-wife sprinkle oil over the prow, and I've no wizards aboard, though it cost me dear."
Ohlt doubted the truth of those last words. All twelve passenger bunks were filled on this voyage, and a half-score more, hardier or poorer, were taking their chances in the hold. That hold bulged with sacks of grain and beans, barrels of salt meat and fish, wine and ale, cart wheels, cloth, tools, and what had to be at least three chests of armor and weapons for the garrison, bearing the Grand Duke's badge and so heavily iron-strapped that an ogre would sweat to pry them open.
A few more such prosperous voyages in the days when he held shares in cargoes, and Fedor Ohlt would not have come ashore to build ships rather than remain at sea to sail them. And how much else would that have changed in his life ... ?
He needed to swallow again, and preferred to turn his back on Figul to do so. Hellandros, he saw, was now looking out at the water rather than up at the sky.
Hellandros, Son of the Grove, lowered his eyes from the sky, mostly to avoid further arousing Fedor Ohlt's suspicions. Ohlt was one of the two people aboard most likely to have penetrated his disguise. The other was M'lenda, a half-elven woman, and she seemed more likely hold her tongue.
Looking at the water, he thought he saw something in the middle distance move. The fire in the sky was brighter than any moonlight; a waterstrider would have been visible on such a calm night.
It might also be his eyes jesting, though they, and his ears, were both fighting the assaults of time better than his joints. Would that his school had been able to provide him with at least that much real youth, instead of merely a youthful appearance.
A faint kloop of broken water floated past on the breeze. That was no trick of his senses, but it might have many causes.
Hellandros considered a small spell of inquiry, one for which he had the material permanently bound into his staff. But even a small spell could draw attention—and if it drew Figul's, Hellandros would no longer be safe aboard Fairy Rose.
Furthermore, the less others knew of his purpose in going to Aston Point, the better. He and his school cared little for portents, although as a new sort of (probably) natural object, the fire had certainly aroused his curiosity. His purpose was to inquire about Drenin Longstaff, druid and werebear, said to have made his grove in the wooded hills behind Aston Point.
Few spoke against Drenin, save by those who feared all ly-canthropes alike, but even druids could feel thus, and Hellan-dros's school wished to know if this danger threatened Drenin. So did the grove of druids from which Drenin had wandered many years ago. It was the same grove near which Hellandros had been raised, a foundling adopted by a forester and his wife, loved by them, and taught much by the druids, even after he knew he would not be one of their number—
The kloop this time was louder. It se
emed to come from no farther than a spear's cast to port. Hellandros turned slowly, and saw a pinnacle of rock breaking the surface. He listened, but heard no further sound. Had he heard only ripples swirling around a rock?
This time he heard not a soft sound of uncertain origin, but a distinct splash. Two splashes: one to port, and one to starboard.
Then a figure leaped onto the pinnacle, and flung a spear that sank quivering into the mainmast. From the water on the starboard side, another spear flew. Lines led over the side from the butt end of each spear, and now two figures hauled themselves hand over hand up the lines to the deck. They clambered over the railings, and stood proud and tall, the light of the Fire to Come making the drops trickling down their bare skins glow like living jewels.
They were sirines, sea-dwelling women with potent spell-songs, except that these dwelt in fresh water, not unknown, but rare to the last degree.
They did not look overly friendly.
Hellandros allowed himself one eyeblink's worth of regret over not at least preventing their surprising Rose. Then he took the first measure that any sufficiently powerful wizard took against unknown sirines—a spell of selective deafness that would guard his wits against their songs.
The next move in this unexpectedly-begun game was the visitors'.
• • «
Fedor Ohlt sidled toward the door to the sterncastle, hoping by slowness not to draw the sirines' attention. Their songs could enspell anyone aboard Fairy Rose once they started singing, and they could see in the dark like cats, but so far they had made no further move since coming aboard.
They simply stood side by side, staring about them as if the sight of a human ship was a wonder. Maybe it was. Freshwater sirines were even rarer than their saltwater kin, and survived only by staying as far from human settlements as possible.
They were a splendid sight, even if the glow of the Fire to Come gave a curious hue to their normally green skins. Sirines had the form of tall women with splendid figures, and tonight neither of the visitors wore anything save belts of fish skin supporting bronze daggers, and necklaces of oddly assorted human coins.
