This time it was Inoques. She pulled herself up to the stern rail.
“Don’t kill me,” she said. “It’s my ship.”
Chimeg let her weapon off half-cock, and Inoques climbed over the rail and jumped down, naked and glistening in the darkness.
“We have wine,” Chimeg called.
Inoques took the pitcher. Aranthur sat down against the mast and she came and fitted herself beside him. She smiled at him.
“I do not give up easily.”
He found that he was grinning. “I hoped.”
She shrugged. “You can do little wrong with a captain, by guarding her ship.”
She leant over and kissed him, her lips cool in the warm air.
Chimeg gave a muffled laugh.
“Get a room,” Kallotronis said.
“We had a room,” Aranthur said quietly, suddenly bold. “But someone had to guard the ship—”
The alarm went again.
“Damn it,” Aranthur spat. “Someone coming.”
He still had the carabin in his hands and he rolled over, eyes searching the darkness.
“Careful. Probably more of ours.”
“Everyone will end up out here…” Chimeg mocked.
The sound of muffled oars came plain across the water, and Chimeg’s playful comment died away.
“We could play cards,” Kallotronis said loudly.
“I wish I had my tamboura,” Aranthur said, playing along with Kallotronis and his deception. Then he moved.
“You can’t play it for shit anyway.” Kallotronis sounded much drunker than he was. “I can, though. Give it here.”
Somewhere amidships, Inoques said, “Shut up, you lout. I want to hear him play.”
There were three boats crammed full of people. More important, there was a glamour—a fairly subtle working on all three boats. Aranthur was confused, because the working was an Academy working.
The boats were close.
“More wine!” roared Kallotronis.
“It’s mine!” shrilled Inoques, sounding like a harridan.
Something familiar in the caster. A feeling that Aranthur knew very well.
A whisper under the bow, in Safiri.
On the count of three…
Aranthur stepped back, and Chimeg stepped aside.
He shook his head violently, and made the Nomadi hand sign for “capture.”
Chimeg nodded, a puffer in her left hand, a belaying pin in her right. She stooped behind the bowsprit fitting.
A man crawled over the bow with more strength than grace. He made plenty of noise, dropped to the deck, looked back, and Chimeg struck. Her belaying pin tapped him behind the head and he fell to the deck.
The second man appeared in seconds, jumped down with a rattle as his scabbard caught on the railing, and froze.
“Khan?” he said in a stage whisper.
Aranthur moved. The man turned, raising a puffer, and Chimeg hit him. Aranthur took the puffer as if the three of them had practised this dance many times. But the blow caught the man’s turban, and he was not out; he croaked a warning.
The third man had just his arms over the rail, but he was smaller and faster. He vaulted the rail even as Chimeg struck the wounded man again. Aranthur reversed the puffer…
It took too long.
The small man raised his own puffer.
“He” triggered a working with a word, Lucit.
An Academy word.
Everything happened at once. The puffer’s steel barrel centred on Aranthur’s forehead as his own puffer came up to the target. The flare of light outlined the downed man’s white turban, his Safian features, the second man’s scarred face.
The third “man” was a woman.
It…
was…
Kati.
Aranthur raised the barrel even as his finger tightened on the trigger, and he stepped back.
Kati flinched with the effort she made not to pull the trigger.
“Aranthur?” she asked. Her puffer was still steady on his forehead.
Another man jumped down behind her.
“Stop,” Kati ordered in Safiri.
And another man.
Chimeg stood up, a carabin on Kati and a puffer covering the second man.
“Drop your weapons,” she said.
Another figure dropped to the deck.
“I have five shots,” a voice said from the darkness above them. Kallotronis.
“And I have three,” Inoques said. “Drop your weapons.”
“Kati?” Aranthur said. “I knew it was you when I felt you cast.”
“Aranthur?” Kati’s barrel was steady. “What in ten thousand hells are you doing in Masr?”
Aranthur thought as quickly as he’d ever thought in his life, as all the pieces fell into place.
Safian bandits, the Pure, the attack on the Black Pyramid, Kallotronis saying they were “Safian warriors…”
Between one breath and another, he guessed much, and he made a leap of faith.
“I’m putting my weapon on the deck. Kati, I beg you to talk to me. And I promise you that if you fight, most of you will die.”
“All of them!” called Kallotronis.
Aranthur ignored him and knelt, placing his loaded puffer on the deck. Since Kati held her shot, he put a hand on the downed man’s head and felt his pulse at the neck.
“He’s alive,” Aranthur said. “No one’s been killed. Kati, did you attack the pyramid?”
Very slowly, as if her arm was melting in the heat, Kati’s puffer descended. Aranthur could feel the line that the barrel traced along his body almost physically, and then the weapon was pointed only at the deck.
“I am not surrendering. But I will talk.” Kati shifted. “Are you really Aranthur Timos?”
“Penknife,” Aranthur said. Then he spoke up in Safiri. “No one will be harmed unless you act with violence, or move too quickly.” And in Byzas, “Hold your fire! Please let me talk. I know this woman well.”
He rose to his feet and no one pulled a trigger.
“Half-cock. Everyone. Come on. Let me hear the clicks.”
He looked at a scarred man beside Kati and pointed to his own weapon on the deck.
In Safiri, he said, “Make it safe.”
“Fuck your mother,” the man said.
Aranthur met his eyes. They weren’t crazy—merely feral.
“Mikal!” Kati said.
Mikal shrugged. “I’m tired of running and I won’t be a slave. I say, fight.”
Aranthur knew the man was about to shoot him. He could feel the dark energy building—not sihr, but human will.
“I will not fight.”
Aranthur deliberately turned his back on the man. His whole body shook with his fear of the action he was taking, but he couldn’t see another path.
Now he shoots me.
“Kati, no one will be a slave,” he said.
He was looking up into the mainmast rigging. Kati’s light working was so powerful that he could see Kallotronis on the platform of the mainmast, his body covered by the step of the mast.
“These people are my family and my family’s friends,” Kati said. “I have loyalties you cannot imagine, Aranthur.”
Dear gods, send me Sasan. Please, Lady, if ever you heard a prayer. Sasan. Come to me!
“Do you serve the Pure?” Aranthur asked.
“We did.” Her words carried a heavy freight of emotion. “Aranthur, you really can’t imagine—”
“Enough talk,” Mikal snapped.
“There is always time to talk,” Jalu’d said, in his beautiful, courtly Safiri. “You must not be in such a rush to die, my brother.”
He danced out from the main deck. He twirled—a neat pirouette—and from his hand trailed a hail of rosebuds. The scent of roses pervaded the deck.
Mikal’s mouth opened.
Jalu’d took his puffer from his hand with a graceful movement, and then bowed and returned it to the surprised man, butt
first.
“But you are one of us!” Mikal said.
“We are all us, my brother.”
“You have a Seeker among you?” Kati asked.
“We were just in Safi,” Aranthur said. “I’m going to guess that we crossed the desert just behind you—maybe four days behind.”
“Gods,” Kati said. “Aranthur Timos. The last person I expected to see on the deck of a ship in Masr, much less with a war band and a Safian Seeker.” She knelt by the downed man. “He is our leader, and our cousin.”
“He will recover,” Chimeg said, and Kati was startled by the Steppe woman’s proximity. “I know how to hit people.”
“Draivash?” Kati asked.
A tall, rail-thin man pushed out of the crowd in the bows.
He shrugged. “There are only seven people on this boat. But they are very well armed. I say, talk. The Khan would say the same. Especially,” the bandit chuckled, “as he will be the first to die.”
“No,” Aranthur said, turning slowly. “I’ll be the first to die.”
The one called Draivash had the same feral look as Mikal, but his smile was broader.
“True for you,” he said.
Aranthur managed a slight smile.
“What do you want?” he asked.
“We want to go home,” Kati said. But she didn’t sound sure at all.
“We need to get across the river,” Draivash said. “There are more of us. So far, we’ve only managed to steal three little boats, and one of them is sinking right now.” He shrugged. “So I’m willing to talk.”
Aranthur nodded. “What if I said we’d take you across the Delta?”
There was a muffled squawk from the foremast above him. He assumed it was Inoques.
“What if we told you that you were on the wrong side?” Jalu’d said. “What if I sang to you of the harm the Pure are doing to our people?”
At Aranthur’s feet, the prone figure stirred.
Kati knelt by him and started to croon. It wasn’t a working Aranthur knew, but it followed precepts he knew. A healing volteia. Something simple.
The man sat up, groaned, and held his head.
“He’s been hit on the head before,” Draivash said.
“Speak to us, Khan,” Mikal said.
“Gods,” Val al-Dun said. “Hells.” He spat. His voice was thick, but his words were clear. “You don’t have to fucking tell me the Pure are poison.”
Mikal stepped back, so that he was against the bulwark of the bow. Draivash relaxed. Other men and women finally released the catches on their puffers and jezzails, or pointed them over the side.
It was as if the world exhaled.
“Boats coming off the shore,” a Safian voice called.
“That will be the rest of our soldiers,” Aranthur said.
Tension returned to every figure; tense muscles, tense jaws. At least one click as a half-cocked weapon was pulled back to the firing position.
“May I go to the rail and talk to them?” Aranthur asked.
The man holding his head raised it.
“Who are you?”
“He’s Aranthur Timos,” Kati said. “I went to school with him in the Empire. Please, I trust him, Val al-Dun.”
“He didn’t kill you,” Draivash said. “Seriously, Khan. He didn’t.”
The injured man looked up, his face almost white in the burning light of Kati’s casting. He managed an ironic smile.
“Well, thanks. Sure, talk.”
Aranthur stepped to the rail, deliberately passing next to Mikal.
“Sasan!” he roared out.
All around him, men looked at him.
Kati folded her arms.
“Sasan!” Aranthur roared.
“Here!” Sasan called.
“I need you, and only you. The others, stand off! We have a… a…” He looked around. “A negotiation.”
“Understand!” Sasan called.
“Who is this Sasan?” Kati asked. “He is one of us!”
“We are all called Sasan,” Mikal said.
Aranthur knew that, as soon as the man spoke to him, something was better.
He could feel Sasan climbing the side; even a fifty pace long hull moves when a big man climbs aboard. Sasan jumped down into the midships and then walked forward.
“Aranthur?”
“Here. Sasan, I believe we’ve found the Safian bandits.” He indicated Kati. “And this young woman is—”
“Sasan!” Kati said.
“My mother’s cousin,” Sasan said, his hand on his heart. He bowed.
Kati bowed.
The injured man stumbled to his feet.
“You are the Sasan?”
Sasan shrugged. “That died with my father.”
Kati was in such shock that her magelight sputtered and died.
Aranthur stood in the darkness, watching the Safian men and women bow to Sasan, and wondering if the gods did, indeed, play a role in human affairs.
Later, when most of the Safians had been returned to their shore, and an arrangement patched up to embark them the next day; later, when calm had returned; when Sasan had admitted that yes, his name implied a noble rank, and Aranthur had been confounded because he had known that at some point; later still, when Aranthur had drunk quaveh with Kati and Val al-Dun, asked them questions and answered theirs as honestly as he could; even later, after he’d hugged Kati and handed her down the side to Sasan and Dahlia to row ashore, Aranthur stood, exhausted, and watched the very first fingers of dawn touch the darkness.
He dropped his borrowed kilt and slipped into the water, hoping it would clear his head. He swam down the length of the ship. He was just turning under the stern when Inoques leant out over the captain’s rail.
“Syr Timos,” she said. “Come up my ladder.”
He found himself in her tiny stern cabin under the command deck.
“I make it a rule never to make love here,” she said. “But this night has been so very full of events that I think I must make an exception.”
Aranthur was so tired, so at the end of various tethers, that the words formed to decline her, even as her lips touched his.
But then he had no sense of himself. His passage from careworn leader to lover was virtually instant, and then there was no world for him but her lips, her hair, her hard brown body and the lines of tattooed script that ran…
Into all sorts of interesting places.
But even as they rose into union, he could feel the heat of her—not just lust, or love, but some fire in the Aulos that filled him with awe and a little fear.
They ended with her lying atop him, her legs astride, and she lay breathing calmly.
“So,” she said. She was smiling.
He smiled back at her.
“You are a person who carries more power than you reveal.”
“This is your Byzas idea of love-talk?” she asked, and licked his lips.
Aranthur was tempted to summon his magesight, but he let it lie.
She ran a hand down his chest, and then paused.
“My body is entirely human. Other parts of me are not so human. Can we leave it there?”
Aranthur grinned as her hand continued its searching.
“And we’re married,” he said.
“Oath-bound,” she said in an odd voice.
4
Antioke
They made odd sea fellows, the low black hull of the Masran trabaccolo and the Megaran great galley. Even odder was the empty sea around them. In the busiest sea lanes in the known world, the horizon was clear from the long, low coast of Masr falling away to the east, all the way around. No sails nicked the horizon, white or black or Megaran red. Only, low over the marshes of the northern Delta, above the wheeling birds, stood the Dark Forge, like a dark vein in otherwise white marble.
Captain Inoques was relaxed in a folding chair placed under the stern awning that carried Myr Hangelika Comnas’ magnificent arms and the lion, eagle and triangle of Megara. The
great galley was the largest ship Aranthur had ever been aboard. The deck seemed as large as the hippodrome, and the whole galley was decked over. Although there were row ports piercing the sides, the ship mostly moved under sail; the oars were only for moving in and out of port. Just beyond Inoques’ tattooed legs stood a pair of helmspeople at a large wheel connected to the enormous curving rudder by a complex series of pulleys. The great galley represented the very highest level of Megaran technology, complete with the slim young man who stood by the helm, a weather Magos, a graduate of the Studion named Ectore Comnos. By him stood Dahlia, now in the red doublet of a Noble Marine. Behind them stood Haras, the Masran priest, who looked deeply uneasy.
“It’s larger,” Myr Comnas said. She was pointing at the Dark Forge.
Dahlia looked at the helm.
“I don’t know…” she said, tentatively.
She wasn’t sure yet of her role; aboard the red great galley, they were back in Megara, and Dahlia was caught in the web of power and class that dominated the lives of the aristocracy.
But Myr Comnas wasn’t power mad. She nodded at Dahlia, as if approving her question.
“I do, Dahlia. I have instruments—I’m both an astronomer and an astrologer. It is wider—worse, the crack in the sky has lengthened. In fact, with precise instruments, you can see that it is wider every day.”
Ettore, the weather Magos, nodded. “I can confirm that.”
Katia ai Faryd also had a folding canvas chair. Val al-Dun stood behind it. Kati was looking away, out at the western horizon.
“It’s all our fault,” she said softly.
Aranthur shook his head. “No. First causes. It’s the Master’s fault, and his Disciples.” He paused, because he felt too young to even be a part of this council; he was younger than Kati, younger than Dahlia. But the words came to him, and he spoke them. “And regardless, blame is useless now.”
Sasan nodded. He was at the rail; he was watching the coastline intently, as if it held some answers.
“Agreed,” he said. “Forget how it happened. Now we have to fix it. The people on this deck know more about what’s going on than perhaps any other group in the world.”
“Wine,” Myr Comnas said to one of her sailors. She sat forward and looked at Sasan. “Gods, Sasan, that’s the most terrifying thing I’ve ever heard. Do you have any idea how great a responsibility it is to take this monster through the water? I have the economic fate of twenty houses in my holds—marriages and alliances can break and fail if I fail. It pins me to my deck—the worry, the constant calculations of wind and sun, of power and the sea. And you want me to take on the hole in the sky and the threat to Masr—”
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