This had a good side—Katla had never had a friend so near her own age before, and it distracted her from the chronic alarm about our father—but I badly needed Jonno and Mallinna to be useful members of the crew in case anything happened to Kat or me. For obvious reasons I thought Jonno's training might proceed faster if his instructor was neither so keen to discuss the great verities of life nor so distractingly pretty as Kat was becoming, and so I elected myself to be Kat's replacement. The seamanship lessons I was giving Mallinna were also strictly businesslike, of course.
The Deppowe Strait, a deep-water channel more than fifty miles long but less than three miles wide at its broadest, lay between the coast of Fathan and the hazardous Kerriin Shoals that ran parallel to it on the south. I had planned to sail well outside the Shoals so as to enter the strait at its eastern mouth, thus avoiding the well-patrolled waters around Deppowe at the western end, at the cost of two or three extra sailing days. Two factors changed my plans.
First, if Jonno had read those signal flags correctly, the strait would be virtually empty of ships—Mashakel was a good way west around the coast. Second, I could feel time pressing at us again, a desperate urgency to reach Faddelin and take our people off before the emergency that had arisen at Deppowe had time to affect the outlying settlements; if, indeed, it was not already too late. The lengthy detour skirting the Kerriin Shoals was no longer an option.
And so, it was just at dawn of the next morning, the morning after the Image of Oballef sped past us, that we entered the western mouth of the strait with the reasonable expectation of mooring in Faddelin by nightfall. Kat was beside me, ready to begin her watch, but I was in no great hurry to give up the wheel. Kat's waking company was preferable to the fearsome versions of her that haunted my dreams; and anyway, the entrance to the Deppowe Strait at sunrise was like nothing I had ever seen before.
On my left hand, across a stretch of dawn-gilded water, was the legendary slag-land of Fathan: an astonishing tumble of broken peaks and unnatural flats, of smooth, glassy sweeps and tormented angularities, in more shades and textures of black than I knew existed—here absorbing the light like the deepest velvet ever woven in Glishor, there reflecting it with the sheen of the finest Omelian silk. On my right hand, the Kerriin Shoals dappled the sea with a hundred thousand silver sandbars, most of them smaller than the afterdeck of the Fifth, but a few of them stretching for hundreds of feet in both dimensions, like small sea-locked deserts. At high tide they would all vanish under a few inches or feet of salt water; at mid-tide, as it was then, they were a busy little world of rock pools, resting sea-pups, flapping fish and seabirds on the hunt, marked here and there by the skeletons of unlucky ships. Kat and I watched in wonder.
"Perhaps I should wake Tig up to see this," I murmured.
"Don't bother—he's up on the crosstrees already."
"Is he? I didn't see him come up."
"Neither did I," Kat whispered grimly, "but he's there now."
I glanced at her, winced and kept silent.
In due course, within the next half-hour, the rest of our crew drifted on deck, Mallinna helping Angel to his favourite spot in the bow, the invaluable Jonno arriving from the galley with a tray full of steaming mugs. There was little conversation and no laughter that morning, however; the appalling beauty of the Fathidiic barrens stunned our faculties and stifled our tongues. The stillness was a contagion spreading from the shore. We spoke in whispers when we spoke at all, and I even found myself tiptoeing when at last I yielded up the wheel to Kat and Jonno and joined the others in the bow.
Sitting down opposite Angel and Mallinna, I peered up at the foremast to check on my father. He looked normal, even a little better than normal, with a touch of colour in his newly shaven cheeks, and he was gazing at the shore of Fathan with an air of impersonal interest. Angel, I noticed, was spending as much time watching Tig as watching the Fathidiic landscape unscroll silently before us.
There was no question of going below deck to my pallet. I curled up in the bow and fell into a doze on the bare boards, and was immediately assaulted by dreams. Katla was in one of her younger manifestations that morning, a small child with a painted wooden fish in her hand, wearing a tunic Shree had sewn for her from one I had outgrown. She smiled at me most affectionately, but I could not bring myself to embrace her because she was on fire, her smooth babyish skin charring and sloughing off to reveal an identical face underneath, which then caught fire—
"Vero, wake up. You have to see this." Mallinna's voice; and it was probably her finger that was poking me in the ribs.
I had done eight watches out of twelve in the previous three days and I was in no mood to have my ribs abused, even by the most beautiful woman in the known world, after whom I hopelessly lusted.
"Go rot, Mallinna. Leave me alone, let me sleep."
"Vero, no, wake up. I tell you, you have to see this."
Groaning, I sat up and blinked around me. I had been asleep longer than I thought, at least an hour judging by how far the sun had moved up in the heavens. Katla had struck some sail but raised the demi-lateens, and we were scudding along at a very decent pace with hopeful seabirds circling over our mast-tops. Tigrallef was still in the rigging, now wearing an expression of faint boredom; but it was over the bowrail that Mallinna was pointing, and she looked anything but bored.
The channel had narrowed, and Kat was keeping well to the centre. We were less than half a mile from the black shore of Fathan, close enough to see the fused sand and heaped black boulders of what might have been a long stretch of beach a thousand years ago. Radiating from it were networks of grey lines, pale and distinct against the dark slag, branching and branching again like a child's drawing of a row of trees until I lost them far inland in the confusion of broken black hills.
"What are those grey tracks? Dry river beds? Old roads?"
"No, they're just the Mosslines, the cracks in the surface where the moss grows; except I don't understand why they're grey, they should be a nasty kind of pale green. But that's not why I woke you—look further east, over that way. Do you see it?"
"I see it." Dark smoke: three separate columns of it, close together and still some way ahead.
Angel said flatly, "Deppowe is burning."
Mallinna added, also flatly, "That's not all. We've seen two bodies in the water already, and look—here comes the third."
We passed the ruins of Deppowe just over an hour later. Long before then, the seabirds deserted our mast-tops for reasons that were not too hard to understand. I suppose it was a grand and memorable time if one happened to be a carrion-eater. We gave up keeping track of the corpses in the strait when the count reached forty; after that, as we neared the last small headland before Deppowe, the bodies were too thick in the water for us to keep a reliable tally. Many were naked. We estimated, however, that about a quarter of those still clothed wore shreds of the dun-coloured uniforms of ordinary troopers, about half were in the rags and tatters of civilian garb, and a very few were in remains of the smart black tunics of the Flamens' Corps. The remainder were unclassifiable.
They've been in the water for a few days," Mallinna said sombrely. "See how bloated they are."
I could not bring myself to comment. The implications were too disturbing. If catastrophe had hit Deppowe as long as several days ago, there was plenty of time for it to have spread out along the Mosslines. What, then, could we expect to find at Faddelin?
Deppowe itself was even worse than we feared. As we rounded the last headland, the scene that met our eyes was devastation piled on devastation: a town recently shattered and still smouldering, at the edge of a great slag-field from a destruction more than a millennium old. It was an extensive and well-planned town, the Primate's Deppowe, purpose-built for efficiency and good order; I had seen a map of its layout in the Mosslines reports, a neat grid centred around the guardtroops' barracks and the governor's residence, and fortified on three sides with a solid masonry barricade at least ten fee
t tall. This had been designed as much to keep the Mosslines slaves in at night as to keep attackers out, but it would have failed signally on both scores in its present condition, having been breached in so many places. The town plans also showed a gate midway along the wall's northern stretch; now there was not much left of either the gate or the north fortification, as if some terrible wavefront of destruction had swept down from the hills, razing everything in its path.
Inside the line of the wall, not a building remained standing. The columns of smoke we'd seen from far away were rising from three enormous ruins, the largest of them close to the waterfront, the second in the centre, the third filling most of the northwest quadrant of the shattered townsite. Respectively, these were the great warehouse, the barracks and the main lockup for the Mosslines slaves, all three of them large and ambitious enough to have smouldered on for days. The rest of the enclosure was a trackless litter of charred wreckage, as black as the slag that lay under it, with here and there on the ground a dark, log-shaped bundle that I strongly doubted was a log. Among the stumps of the ruined quays, the blackened hulks of two great windcatchers and uncountable smaller ships were rocking gently in the tide. Nothing else moved, neither ashore nor on the water.
Nobody said anything about stopping. The Fifth pushed on through the mat of corpses until we reached clearer water, and then Kat shouted to me to run up some more sail. Not one of us, except perhaps Tigrallef, had the stomach to look back.
We were halfway to Faddelin before the wind stopped bringing the stench of the Deppowe shambles to our nostrils. To our right, the Kerriin Shoals gradually vanished beneath the sea as the tide rose; to our left, the smoked-glass landscape of Fathan rolled on and on, devoid of sound, colour, movement; devoid of everything except an unpleasant atmosphere of menace. What had seemed so beautiful to us only hours before—a shining faceted jewel of jet one-third the size of a continent—had become hateful, hideous, and above all strangely boring. Even the branched grey scars that occasionally cut across the glaring plains did little to relieve the sameness.
Tigrallef had not moved from the rigging all day, nor had he eaten. The mug of gruel Jonno brought for his breakfast (with an air of making an offering at an altar—habits of worship die hard) was still sitting on the deck at the foot of the mast, along with the bread and cheese I had less ceremoniously tried to give him at midday. He had not seemed overly disturbed by the horrific sights at Deppowe, nor was he peering ahead towards Faddelin with any sign of anticipation, anxiety or even mild interest. And all the while the rest of us were straining our eyes to the east, long before there was any point in doing so, peering through the hot haze of our own sweat and the blinding glare off the slag, searching for the first glimpse of Faddelin—or the first far-off columns of smoke that would mark the well-roasted ruins of Faddelin and anyone with the bad timing to have been there.
He took notice of us only once. Kat had left Jonno at the wheel and come up to the bow; she took pains to keep her eyes well below the level of the rigging where our father was perched. "What could have happened back there?" she asked. "Who could have destroyed a town so completely, and killed all those people? I don't understand."
Obviously, that question had been bothering me too. "Miishel?" I suggested. "Or Grisot? Or one of the client states that doesn't appreciate the privilege of being part of the Gillish empire? Or even," I glanced at Mallinna, "I was wondering if the Opposition might be involved?"
Mallinna flushed, rather becomingly. "Ten days ago, Vero, I would have said no. Ten days ago, I'd have said the Opposition would happily slaughter troopers and guardsmen as legitimate enemies, but they would free the prisoners on the Mosslines. Now I'm not so sure. Whoever crushed Deppowe killed everybody—everybody . . ." Distressed, she paused.
"And you think your former hero, the Truant Malso, would be capable of ordering such an atrocity if he thought the Opposition would benefit. A terrible thought, Mallinna, but I would have to agree."
Angel spoke up, in a return to his normal cryptic style. "The moss," he said, lifting his eyes significantly to Mallinna's.
She nodded. "He means, whether it's the Opposition or a rebel state in the empire, the moss itself would be a powerful motive. The Flamens maintain an insanely lucrative monopoly—if it were knocked out from under them, they'd have to impose a heavier burden of taxes and tributes to keep up the Order's income—"
"—which would mean more disaffection among the people and a stronger common cause against the Primate; yes, yes, that makes good sense." I was actually getting excited, partly with rage, partly with a twisted sense of hope and relief. "If that's anywhere close to the truth, then Deppowe and all those poor sods in the water should be enough of a demonstration—the point's been made, they wouldn't need to destroy Faddelin, in fact they'd want to preserve Faddelin and Mashakel against the time that they control the Mosslines and the moss trade, and—"
"Stop, Vero," Katla said quietly. "This all sounds pretty thin to me. You're working yourself into a lather over a mere supposition. And you're one of the people who taught me about reserving judgement until the evidence is in."
Rapid snapping of fingers from above us, from high up in the rigging; Tig was applauding. "Nicely put, Katla, poppet. You'll be teaching your brother before long."
Kat glanced up at him very briefly and then dropped her eyes to the deck, a sudden pallor making her few freckles stand out. I took a longer look at Tig, wondering what my sister had seen: wolf, snake, dragon, some other horror entirely? All I could see was an unwontedly well-groomed young man without a care in the world, sitting comfortably on the crosstrees like a paving customer on a tour—a customer, moreover, who considered the tour to be not quite worth his while. That was based on the sulky little smile I thought I saw on his lips.
I was, of course, very tired. Twenty years tired.
"You're among us again, are you?" I shouted up at him. "You've chosen to honour us with your attention, have you? Then perhaps you'd honour us with your opinion as well. Maybe you can illuminate this disaster at Deppowe for us. Or maybe you can tell us if we'll have to sort through a crowd of bloated corpses in the waters at Faddelin—"
"Stop it, Vero, stop it." Katla pulled at my arm.
"—or if we'll need to sift through the ashes to find their bones—"
"Stop it, Vero!" This time Katla punched me, a thoroughly competent blow that called on all the training Shree and I had ever given her. Taken off guard, I only just caught myself from lashing back.
Without a word, Tig stood up and stepped off the cross-trees; only Angel managed to let out a cry. The fall was about fifteen feet, but Tigrallef landed as lightly as if he had stepped off the bottom stair of a short staircase. The rest of us stood frozen where we were, dumbly looking at Tig's face and then down at his feet. I cleared my throat with difficulty.
"Anything broken, Tig? Sprained ankle, sore knee . . . ?"
"What does it matter? The old sow would only fix it again."
"I know, but—"
"Never mind that now, Verolef. Katlefiya, I know you can't bear to look at me, but you must listen. It is very important that you keep calm. Do you understand? When you're excited, it's harder for me to keep hold, and that ends up as dangerous for everybody. I can't tell you why, flower, but it's so. That's all."
She nodded without raising her eyes, and turned back towards Jonno and the wheel. I put out my hand to delay her, but Tigrallef shook his head. "Let her go." He waited until she was out of earshot then turned to me again, gave Mallinna and Angel an apologetic smile, and pulled me a short distance away from them.
"Vero," he said quietly, "there's something I have to tell you, for your ears only, something you must be prepared for."
Although there was nothing very tragic or portentous in his tone, I felt my body go cold with a terrible premonition. He was going to say that he had seen Faddelin with the Harashil's eyes; that he had seen the charred and bloody corpses of Chasco, Shree, Calla and a hundr
ed others scattered carelessly among the ruins; that he had seen them floating in the water, naked and swollen, ripped by sharp predatory beaks, impaled on the blackened spars of a smouldering hulk, contorted among the ashes with hands curled in black talons on their bony black chests . . .
"By Raksh, Vero, you've got a grisly imagination." Tigrallef viewed me with apparent horror.
I closed my eyes and took a few deep breaths. "All right, Father, just get it over with."
He looked around carefully to check that the others could not hear, and leant forward to whisper into my ear: "None of this is important; none of this matters." With a quick shushing gesture, a finger tapped against his lips, he turned away and began walking back to the foremast.
I stood stupidly on the spot for a moment and then, furious, leapt after him to seize the shoulder of his immaculate tunic. He did not resist as I swung him around. "Is that all you have to say?"
He made no attempt to shake my hand off. "That is all we need to say. We just want to help you prepare for what lies ahead." Tig had picked up a bit of an echo in the last few seconds, as well as the plural pronoun, but he was still trying to keep his voice down. "Here—we will explain, listen carefully because we do not like repeating ourself: the Primate, the Opposition, the Empire, all those trivialities you were speculating about—they do not matter. They are not important. Just remember that."
He made another move to go, and sighed when I tightened my death-grip on his shoulder. I said nothing, because I was too choked with rage.
"Vero, what is this about? Was there something else you wanted to know?"
Through gritted teeth, I forced the words out. "Are they dead?"
Gil Trilogy 3: Lady Pain Page 24
