Dragons were forgotten. “That’s my book,” Fox exclaimed.
“Yes.” Ramis tossed it to Fox, who caught it and just barely concealed the impulse to clutch it protectively against him. “I read it last night. You write with vividness and precisian. The battle at the Narrows was particularly well done. Your memory agrees with my assessment of the end.”
Fox rubbed his forehead, then looked up. “You scragged me, then forced me here to tell me you approve of my writing?”
“I brought you here because this cabin is warded in space and time. The spell will not last a hundredth of the time it took to set it up. I am here to exhort you to carry on with that project. It seems worthwhile, unlike most of your other endeavors.”
Fox kept rubbing his head. Trying to think made his head ache more. “You’re serious.” His voice cracked on a laugh and his head ached. “You really want me to write down all my battles? For whom?”
“Your descendants.”
Fox was not ready for that topic. “Norsunder lies outside of time. I suppose that means you are far older than you appear, which would explain why no one was able to discover any of the details of your birth.”
“True. The guise was necessary and effective.”
“And no doubt fun,” Fox jibed. When Ramis did not deny it, “So do you know the future?”
Ramis flicked his fingers again, a negating gesture. “There are beings in this world who do not experience time and physical space the way we humans do. Magic can shorten distance, though it takes effort. To move ahead of the sun’s measure can be likened to swimming in amber, and one’s clarity of vision is roughly equivalent, probably because of the possibility of change.”
“Yet you say I’ll have descendants?”
Ramis opened his hand toward Fox’s book. “For whom have you written those accounts?”
“Myself.”
Ramis waited.
Fox turned away, gazing blankly out the stern windows. The quiet water was azure. Faint rays of sun struck glints off the water, veining the cabin with shifting light. “If I have a son,” he said slowly, “then I do so knowing I condemn him to the same meaningless existence my family is condemned to.”
“How has your life been meaningless, except as you deliberately chose meaningless actions?”
Fox turned away from the window.
Ramis had taken a seat at the table and crossed his arms, head at a skeptical cant. “You cannot possibly be implying that life is meaningless because you are not king of Iasca Leror.”
Fox flushed. Treachery by the Montrei-Vayirs, who called treason justice—his father’s slow suicide by pickling his brain—all those old reasons kited through his mind. “Meaning,” he said finally, the word twisting with derision. “My family is living proof that concepts such as honor and justice do not exist except as conveniences for self-justification.”
“You, like everyone else in existence, are living proof that human beings are capable of both justice and injustice. We are also proof that both have consequences that ripple outward through time, through space.” Ramis indicated the book. “While you brood on your captain’s deck over your notions of treason, your mother, sister, and betrothed are striving to provide justice over the land your family still retains.”
Fox grimaced. “Marend is still there?”
“Yes. Whom would she marry, with so many young men in your homeland dead?”
Fox paced the cabin’s perimeter, then stopped to examine more closely the carving of interlocked circles around each candleholder in the chandelier. “It was that bad? Inda wouldn’t say. Now he doesn’t write to me at all.”
“Inda,” Ramis said, “talks to you.”
Fox did not ask how he knew. “Not by letter.”
“You will not see one another again?”
Fox whirled around. “You don’t want me to write my battles. You want me to write Inda’s,” he accused.
“I don’t want you to do anything,” Ramis replied. “But you already began.” He indicated the book.
“Writing out Inda’s battles was a mental exercise.” Fox threw the book down on a table inlaid with stylized dragons winding in a circle, heads to tails. “Seeing if I could lay out in sequence how he perceives the chaos of battle, and how he organizes it. Listen. If anyone was to draw the attention of your Garden of Twelve, it would be Inda.”
“That was a possibility for a time.” Ramis’s eyes narrowed to an inward focus. “You know what Inda dreamed about last night? Rig’s death onboard Walic’s ship.”
“I don’t know who Rig is.”
“Do you remember the first one of Inda’s crew Walic had killed? He wouldn’t join because the pirates had murdered his brother in their initial attack.”
“All I remember is making sure Inda didn’t betray himself, and us.”
Ramis closed his eyes. “Inda’s nightmares,” he said in a musing voice, “fall into three categories. The boyhood ones, the pirates ones, and a new category has added itself after the recent battle. In most of the pirate nightmares, he sees accusation—condemnation—in Rig’s face because he was helpless to save any of the crew.” Ramis opened his eyes. “If you hadn’t stupefied him with that blow to the head he might possibly have saved them. He would most likely have touched off the mutiny he organized half a year later.”
“I know that.” Fox turned around. “Are you blaming me for cracking his skull to shut him up?”
“I’m telling you why he lost the interest of Norsunder. If he’d led a mutiny that day, taking Walic’s flagship and thence his fleet—” A lifted hand. “He was stupid with pain, but he just looked stupid to Norsunder’s witness onboard that ship. The witness lost interest and left, as she considered Walic and his mates to be too petty for use. Even the Brotherhood of Blood didn’t want Walic. Inda’s subsequent wins appeared from a distance to be accidents, largely because he did not follow up on them in the traditional manner, by building a pirate empire.”
Fox pressed both hands to his head. The conversation had turned from unbelievable to absurd to . . . what? To a blurring double view of what had been real, and what someone had apparently worked hard to make appear real to Norsunder’s “idle eyes.” “You want me to tell the truth? How can I? All I know is my own experience.”
“I just told you something that Inda has never told anyone,” Ramis said. “If you find the need, you will have access to what I saw. And heard.”
Memory by memory, wit by wit. The sound, and finally the sense: this man was a mind-reader. He won the fight because he really did perceive every move before it was made.
A mind reader. So, that meant . . . “You’re a soul-eater?” Fox barely got the words out. He did not even try to hide his sick fear. The fellow could read it as easily as he’d read the book.
“No.” Ramis made the negating gesture again. “Only one of the Host is. Some do try to match that, ah, dimension of cruelty, but enough about them. What do you intend to do about the treasure?”
“What’s the use in asking? You’re obviously going to tell me what to do, and even I can see that there is little I can do to stop you.”
“When I exert my will, you will know it,” Ramis observed. “You can do anything you want. You can kill those four in the scout craft out in the bay right now—”
“Four?”
“—or you could force them to leave the treasure and take your fleet down the strait to Ymar, where the Ymarans and the Everoneth are gathering with the rest of the Fleet Guild alliance to determine who is going to control the strait once they throw the last of the Venn out. The Chwahir are on the way.”
Fox did not know what question to ask first.
“The protective ward is fading. We must finish. It is time to see the end of that treasure. Far too many have died because of it. Therefore, if you choose to fall in with Barend Montrei-Vayir and Wisthia Shagal’s plans, there will be a reward. Not for you. But for your descendants, someday. Every coin or artifact you bring out of tha
t cavern to be carried back to Wisthia Shagal will cause another gold coin or artifact to be brought beyond time to a place I will one day tell you.”
“That’s impossible,” Fox exclaimed. “How can you promise all these things? How can you know these things? How can you prove any of what you’ve told me is actually true?”
Ramis smiled. “The young man the Marlovans called Noddy Toraca made Indevan Algara-Vayir promise something just before he died. Inda could not hear it. What Toraca said was ‘no more war.’ Tell Inda that.”
“But—”
“Just remember what I said.” Ramis struck his knuckles on the table holding the royal candelabra of an ancient Venn king. “This vessel will await you. If the Venn return, I suggest you take it into battle. You will discover it has unexpected virtues.”
“Battle?” Fox repeated.
Ramis laughed soundlessly. “What was old Savarend’s first rule of bad government? A rule his assassin was careful to destroy.”
Fox repeated automatically, “When you cannot control your own people, you send them out to fight someone else.” He said on an outgoing breath, “The Venn. They’re coming back.”
“The situation right now is very fluid, but the one who took seeds from the Garden knows the cost if they do not bear fruit.”
Fox remembered Inda and Signi explaining about the Venn dag Abyarn Erkric, then dismissed him. The important thing was that the enormous army necessary for such an invasion—a second invasion—could not be marshaled, supplied, and launched from Venn. It was too far away. They had to be closer to make the jump to Halia. Then coordinate the attack, which would have to be from every harbor at once, as a concentrated strike in the north had not worked. So that meant—
He looked up, ignoring how much that hurt. “The Venn only hold Jaro Harbor in Ymar. Are they coming to retake the strait?”
“Right now it’s just reinforcement on the way,” Ramis said. “They expect an easy win for this small force. They count on it.”
The dark scintillance began to coalesce around Fox. He snatched up his book, then he found himself at the waterfall, but this time he was alone.
Jeje had scolded and nagged the other three into making a plan for dealing with Fox. When the fog dissipated before a sudden, driving wind, they sailed toward Ghost Island, putting the finishing touches on their plan.
All of which vanished like the fog when in the slanting light of sunset they found Fox waiting on the shore for them, blood crusted on the side of his chin, a spectacular black eye forming. He leaned against a rock with a semblance of his usual negligence, but the four were far too experienced not to see how much effort it took him to stay upright.
“Who got to him first?” Jeje asked the air.
“And how?” Gillor rubbed her knuckles.
Fox moved stiffly down to the water line as they brought the rowboat in. “I just came from the cavern. Everything is there, untouched. My suggestion is this. We send Fangras and his fleet down to Ymar, where Chim and his allies are forming to jump on the last Venn outpost.”
“What?” Jeje demanded. “How’d you know that?”
Gillor shrugged. “Makes sense. If the Venn are gone, the strait will be up for grabs.”
“The Venn aren’t going to be gone for long,” Fox said, gently feeling his swelling face and wincing.
This time, they all exclaimed, “What?”
“I don’t know anymore than that. We’ll pick up information when we reach Bren. Chim will know where we can find the alliance. Right now, we’ll keep our five capital ships here. Load up, buy coffee for trade. Extra barrels to hide the gold in. Load our capital ships and some of the smaller ones with hand-picked crew. And we’ll follow on after the fleet, with a side trip to deliver the gold to Wisthia Shagal.”
“Empty it?” Jeje said, and whistled.
“I suspect you’ll be thoroughly sick of the amount by the time you’re done carrying it.” He laughed silently, then winced. “Speaking of sick, orders will go out to the entire fleet: collect fish oil as they sail.”
The four exchanged glances, and Gillor gave her expressive Fal shrug. If he’d gone mad, at least it was a madness a Fal could appreciate.
Jeje scowled. “You gonna tell us what happened?”
“No,” Fox said.
Barend opened his hands. “Then let’s get busy.”
Chapter Twenty-five
“THE Council of Elders is reconvening the Frasadeng tomorrow at noon, and all in service rank are required to attend,” the young messenger wearing the white of Anborc said to Brun Durasnir the next morning—or what passed for morning when the windows still showed dark. “The accused traitor has been found.”
Is this accident, coming the very day after the return of the fleet? Brun Durasnir thought. Instinct was sure: nothing was accident. There had been no announcement the night before at the council gathering celebrating the triumphant return of Prince Rajnir and his commanders.
A full day before the convening? Why? The messenger was not the one to ask. She dismissed him and returned to her tasks.
The low winter sun, gaining strength every day, had just emerged from the southern horizon when one of the Cormorant’s ensigns appeared at the command quarters in Saeborc to leave Fulla Durasnir’s formal summer uniforms and take his freshly aired winter gear back to the ship. He said nothing, but there was something in his gaze, and the careful way he laid the heavy linens and silk in her arms, that caused her to speed to their room as soon as he was gone and to sort through the clothing.
And there, rolled up in a shirt, was a single strip of the archivist’s paper that she used to mark scrolls, with a single rune drawn on it.
She twitched it into a twist, tossed it into the stove vent under the sleeping platform, then carried on with her tasks.
A short-glass before midnight, she checked to see that her son Halvir was peacefully asleep in his bedchamber. Then she went into the wardrobe room against the cold west wall, and took from her oldest trunk the long scratch-wool gray cloak of a thrall. Her skin crept as she shrugged it over her own cloak, though it was clean and had never been worn by any thrall. Her own mother had used it to punish her when she was young. She had kept it as a disguise and as a reminder.
Symbols make seeming real, she reflected as she yanked the hood over her face, and then pulled heavy gloves over her house gloves: life inside the tower, expected of the commanders, meant endless cold drafts from nowhere during winter that the house dag never seemed to be able to ward.
It was good to walk where the silent ones had to walk, she thought as she slipped down the thralls’ narrow stairs, where pairs of thick wooden clogs waited. She thrust her fine shoes into a pair of the clogs. There had to be thralls—she understood the order of things—for who would do their work if there were none? The lowest branches of the Tree gave support to the higher reaches, everyone knew that, and to walk for a time where thralls walked reminded her not to be brusque with those who could not answer back.
She eased through Saeborc’s Trallagat, the thralls’ entrance to the abandoned Hilda annex. Icy air found the chinks in her clothing as she ran up the steps to the side door that gave onto the narrow causeway beside the King’s Road gutters, where thralls must walk so their feet would not defile the tablet-patterned stone of the road.
Even wearing three layers, she gasped when the wind struck her full force, trying to flense her flesh from her bones as she bent into the wind.
She had confidently expected to be alone, and so she was surprised to discover shrouded figures here and there, some carrying burdens, all bent into the wind. So I will just be one more of them, she thought, and toiled grimly toward the bridge.
On rare good days, the distance from the Saeborc to the bridge over the river, midpoint along the King’s Road, was but a few steps. In the fierce, numbing wind of winter, it seemed longer, but terrible as it was, this plod into the wind was preferable to the thralls’ long staircase, covered with moss, that led to
the frigid, dank old tunnel under the river, and then the long climb upward again. From the number of those abroad, most clothed in gray, others thought so, too, causing her to wonder if they were all thralls. I must not see conspiracy, just because we have lived in an atmosphere of it. We have regained order . . .
The King’s Road was customarily only used for ceremony, or to be strolled on during the rare pleasant summer evenings, when people would light the ramparts with candles and walk about talking and sipping the sharp, heady triple-distilled bristic. The exception was the Blood Crowd, when a condemned traitor was taken in full view of the city, who could vent their anger for their betrayal before the application of the knife on the top of Sinnaborc and the slow expiration under the waiting eyes of the death birds.
Her heart lurched. A Blood Crowd? Were the burdens some bore baskets of stone and ordure? She lengthened her steps, while keeping her head low.
Thin, ragged clouds obscured patches of brilliant stars as she peered northward along the road, shifting her eyes away from the lone pale tower of Sinnaborc at the terminus. If you ignored the Sinnaborc, the north towers looked like fingers reaching toward the sky: the massive Saeborc at her shoulder the thumb, the pairs of towers on either side of the road forming a cupped hand reaching upward.
This was the shortest way to the abandoned tunnels that once had belonged to the Hilda, before a king in the previous century had tried to shift power away from the Oneli by giving the Hilda autonomy and their own annexes off Leofaborc.
She bent farther into the wind, stumping in the awkward peg-heeled clogs over the icy stone of the bridge toward the southern curve of the King’s Road. Far below the covered bridge corridor, the river plunged in a roar over the stones to empty into the sea.
She turned her head sideways to peer past Skalts’ Tower toward Leofaborc, and beyond that, Anborc in the distance. The three smaller House towers were obscured from her view, which meant no one who might be braving their western ramparts could see her, either. And if they did, they would see only a humble thrall, head down.
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