by Sarah Ash
“So when do we set sail?” asked a sleepy voice from the bed. Astasia had woken up.
Eugene stopped pacing a moment. “ ‘Set sail’?” The question came out more irascibly than he had intended, and he saw her blink almost as if he had shouted at her.
“For Karila’s party.”
He had forgotten Karila’s birthday! He had been so preoccupied with the worsening situation in Smarna that it had slipped his mind. He saw that Astasia was looking at him, waiting for his reply, and he felt a stab of guilt.
I promised Kari we would come home to Swanholm. She was too ill to attend the coronation; how can I break my word now?
“She’s expecting us to be there.”
My only daughter is growing up, and I have not been there to share these precious weeks with her. A deeper-buried fear still nagged him. And if her health continues to give cause for concern, these weeks may become all the more precious. . . .
“Wind’s tricky this morning,” Kuzko said as they left the shelter of the harbor and ventured into open sea. “Weather’s on the turn.”
The waves were choppy, flecked with milky foam.
“Shall we wait for fair weather?” Andrei glanced uneasily up at the cloudy sky.
“Na,” said Kuzko. “I’ve handled my Swallow in worse.”
A strong gusting crosswind suddenly caught in the patched sail and tilted the little Swallow, lifting her prow right out of the water. A great Tielen warship was sailing toward them and they were being blown right into her path.
“Tikhon!” yelled Kuzko, leaping to tug on the ropes.
The tall warship’s ironclad prow cut a swirling furrow through the grey-green water, towering high above them, drenching them with cold spray. Andrei grabbed hold of the tiller and pulled with all his strength.
“Harder!” Kuzko roared through the din of the churning waters.
“The wind’s against us,” Andrei yelled back. All his efforts seemed in vain. They were being driven right beneath the warship’s prow; they would be smashed to matchwood.
“No use,” he cried. “I can’t control her! I can’t—”
A jagged flicker, lightning-blue, burst in his brain and went fizzing down into his arms, his hands. Suddenly he felt his muscles pulsing with strength. He tugged at the tiller.
The Swallow bucked and yawed wildly. The cresting wake caught her and spun her aside.
“Hold fast!” Kuzko’s voice carried faintly to him as a wave drenched the deck. Blinded by the water, Andrei gripped the tiller, leaning into it with the weight of his whole body until he could shake the wetness from his hair, his stinging eyes.
“I’ve got her!” he cried, voice raw with triumph. “We’ve made it! We’ve—”
Only then did he see the second shadow looming up to their left. Another warship in full sail, bearing down on them fast. To the lookouts on high, the little fishing boat beneath their bows would be invisible in this wind-whipped sea.
Kuzko stood, mouth agape, staring up at the mighty ship.
“Jump, old man!” Andrei let go the tiller and flung himself at Kuzko, trying to push him over the side into the sea.
The second warship smashed into the Swallow. Andrei was flung into the sea even as he grabbed at Kuzko. Splintered timbers flew up into the air. And then there came the hollow roar of the sea as Andrei went under. Freezing water squeezed the breath from his body. Blackness flooded his mind. He came up again, choking on the salt-bitter water, arms flailing, gasping for air.
“Kuzko! Kuzko!” Against the crash of the waves, his voice was as thin as a seagull’s cry. He trod water, trying to stay afloat as the wash from the great ships came billowing back toward him. Now he saw there was a third—and a fourth approaching close behind. A war fleet. If they weren’t drowned, they’d be crushed by the heavy vessels.
“An—drei . . .” The cry was so faint he scarcely heard it. Turning his head, he caught sight of Kuzko clinging to a plank, grey head just above the water.
“I’m coming!” He took in a lungful of salty air and struck out toward him. “Hang on!”
Skar tramped up the winding stair in the Iron Tower to check on the progress of his patient. Twenty-One’s condition had been giving him some cause for concern. He had developed a slow-burning fever since the operation, and had been alternately mumbling and shouting out incoherently. Often he pawed at the dressings on his head, picking at them, then tearing them off as if they were some kind of infected scab.
Skar unlocked the cell door and placed a lantern on the table.
“Bright. Too bright.” Twenty-One rolled away from the light, muttering and hiding his eyes.
“I’ve brought your medicine,” Skar said.
“No—more—medicine.” His speech was badly distorted.
“I’ve mixed it with honey to make it taste good,” Skar said patiently, as if humoring a child.
Twenty-One peered out at him suspiciously from behind his fingers. His skin glistened with a feverish sheen and his eyes burned overbright in their darkened sockets. With his shaven head, crisscrossed with half-healed scars, and sunken cheeks, he looked to Skar like one of the damned.
“Here. Drink it all down.”
Twenty-One’s hands shook so much that Skar took back the glass and held it to the man’s lips himself. He still seemed unable to drink properly, and some of the willow-bark infusion dribbled out down the side of his chin.
“Bitter,” he mumbled.
And then his head jerked up and his whole body went rigid. He seemed to be listening with great concentration.
“Help me!” he cried out. He lurched off the bed and half-fell, half-shambled, one leg dragging, head raised toward the barred window.
Skar watched, fascinated. He had heard nothing.
Twenty-One raised one shaking hand toward the bars.
“Can you—hear me?” His body, exhausted by the effort, gave way and he fell to the floor.
“It—is—close by,” he said as Skar tried to hoist him back onto the bed. “Why doesn’t it answer me? It is—so close.”
And then he started to weep: great gulping sobs. “I—cast it out. It—will never come back. Never. Never.”
Skar found himself embarassed by this uncontrolled display of emotion. He picked up the lantern and withdrew, leaving the damaged man wailing and cursing.
Andrei struggled against the pull of the current and the dragging undertow from the wake of the Tielen fleet. He did not ask where this extraordinary burst of strength came from; he just fought the waves. He had nearly drowned once before. He was not going to let the sea claim him again.
Kuzko’s head bobbed closer. Andrei made a grab for him. Kuzko’s face was pallid with cold and fear and his eyes rolled wildly in his head.
“Catch hold of me!” Andrei tried to roll onto his back so that he could begin to pull Kuzko along with him, his face tipped upward, out of the freezing water. But Kuzko clung grimly to his plank. “Let go.”
“My Swallow,” Kuzko gasped.
“Let her go.” A wave smacked into them and they went under. Andrei dragged Kuzko back up, coughing out a lungful of seawater. Glancing behind he saw a fifth warship sailing toward them, white sails filled with the wind, cutting through the bucking waves.
“Help me.” Andrei closed his eyes, not knowing to what power he was praying, only that he could see no way to swim clear of the clean, cruel might of the metal-clad prow, churning the waves to foam.
Deep within him, he felt something stir. His heart twisted then cracked open within his breast. Stars exploded across his vision. A wordless cry burst from his mouth as a dark whirlwind enveloped him.
The warship ploughed on toward them, carving its foaming furrow through the waves. Andrei gave one last desperate tug at Kuzko’s waterlogged body, trying to lift him from its path.
And suddenly they were rising, water cascading from their sodden clothes, rising from the sea as the great ship’s prow hit the plank.
Andrei found hi
mself hovering above the waves, clinging onto Kuzko’s dangling body.
“Make for land.”
Land. He cast around—and saw a flat grey shoreline beneath a rugged headline a mile or so away.
“I can’t; it’s too far—”
“Don’t fight me!”
The voice urged him onward.
Wingbeats echoed in his head, throbbed through his whole body. Dark wings bore him upward, onward across the sea. His dazed mind was dazzled with a sparkle of stars. Was he drowning—and dreaming with his last conscious thoughts before the sea took his life from him? Or had a dark angel swooped down to bear him and Kuzko to the Ways Beyond?
“So how is he?” Baltzar asked, sliding back the observation shutter in Twenty-One’s door and peering in.
“Worse,” Skar said bluntly.
Twenty-One lay unmoving on the bed.
“Since his last outburst, he’s lapsed into a stupor. Nothing seems to rouse him. It’s almost as if he’s given up the will to live.”
Baltzar frowned at the prisoner.
“And the infection?”
“The wounds are healing cleanly on the outside. But I fear the infection has gone deep and invaded his brain.”
Baltzar snapped the shutter closed.
“And what will we tell his imperial highness if he dies on us?”
“Would his imperial highness care?” said Skar with a shrug. “Plenty of prisoners die before their sentences are up. Prison air is not so wholesome. Diseases spread too rapidly for us to control.”
Baltzar had been biting his lip. He knew this prisoner was different from the rest, life sentence or no. He knew the Emperor was still interested in his progress. Had his medical experiments gone too far this time?
“He could have caught typhus,” Skar said.
“Yes,” Baltzar said, nodding. “An outbreak of typhus. Tell the other warders to avoid this part of the tower and tell them why. We can’t have a major outbreak on our hands. We’ll keep this one in quarantine. Then if the inevitable happens—”
“A lime burial to avoid the infection spreading.”
“A hygienic necessity.”
Two passengers on the deck of the Francian ship following close in the wake of the Tielen war fleet saw the little fishing boat crushed by the man-o’-war. As the captain dispatched a rescue party and the Francian sailors lowered a rowboat, the passengers watched from the rail of the upper deck.
“Jagu.” The woman clutched at her companion’s arm, pointing. “Look. What in God’s name is that?”
Jagu raised the eyeglass he had been using to observe the Tielen fleet and focused it on the wreck of the fishing boat.
“Whatever it is, it’s not of this world.” He passed her the glass.
“There were two men in the water. Now I see only one—and that abomination.”
The sailors were gaining on the wreckage now.
“The angelstone,” urged the woman. “Use the angelstone.”
Jagu pulled out a crystal pendant from inside his shirt and held it up high. The clear crystal muddied and turned black as ink.
“A warrior-daemon,” the woman whispered, “from the Realm of Shadows. This could be the one. If only Abbot Yephimy had not been so stubborn, we could have had Sergius’s Staff . . .”
“Turn back!” yelled Jagu to the rowers, but they were too far away to hear his voice.
“Twenty-One. Can you hear me?” Skar bent over the prisoner. There was no response. He lifted the man’s wrist, feeling for a pulse. When he found it, it was so faint and irregular it was hardly there. He looked so gaunt, his skin grey and pallid, his eyes sunken in their bruised sockets. Days of fever had exhausted him; his weakened body had no resources left to fight the infection in his brain.
Skar stood up and gazed at his patient. That rattling, wheezing sound in the throat did not bode well at all.
Twenty-One was dying. He must alert Director Baltzar.
And then he thought he heard the prisoner whisper something through cracked, dry lips. At first it sounded like nothing more than a guttural sigh. But then he thought he heard a name, though it was no name he recognized. Probably nothing more than the last jumbled utterances of a fractured mind.
“Drakhaoul . . . help me . . .”
The black-winged daemon halted in midair as though listening. It shuddered.
Suddenly it let out a wailing cry, inhuman and desolate. Then it began to plummet toward the waves, losing its hold on its human burden.
“Does it sense us?” Jagu said. “Does it know we are near?”
For a moment daemon and man disappeared below the surface. Then a whirlpool began to churn the waves. The sailors shouted out and cursed, gripping the sides of the rowboat as it was thrown sideways, almost capsizing. And out of the spinning water, Jagu and Celestine saw a shadow rise, dark as smoke, and speed away, low across the waves.
Andrei hit the water. The force of the impact knocked the breath from his body.
Blackness.
And then he was being lifted by many hands, strong hands, and let down onto the wooden boards of a ship.
He dragged himself to his knees, retching up a lungful of briny water. He was freezing, drenched to the skin, shivering till his teeth clacked together—but somehow still alive.
His rescuers returned, carrying someone else. They laid their burden down beside him. Pushing his wet hair out of his eyes, he saw Kuzko lying next to him, inert, limp, unbreathing.
“Kuzko!” Andrei prized the old man’s mouth open and tried to blow his own warm breath into him. After a while, exhausted with the effort, he sat back on his heels and pressed on Kuzko’s still rib cage in the hope of forcing it into some semblance of movement. The old sailor’s head lolled back, mouth gaping.
“Come on, Kuzko!” Andrei laid his head against the damp chest, listening for a heartbeat. “Don’t desert me now, old man!”
It was no use. Somewhere between the sea and the ship, Kuzko’s spirit had fled its body. All his frantic efforts had been in vain.
Andrei laid Kuzko’s body down on the deck and with clumsy, numbed fingers, closed his eyes.
One of the sailors came up and wrapped a blanket around Andrei’s shoulders. Andrei’s heart felt as though drenched with a cold and bleak despair. Kuzko had saved him from the sea. Why had he not been able to save him in return? And how could he break the news to Irina? First the sea had taken her son, and now her husband.
He crouched down beside Kuzko’s still body and wept.
Shadow-wings, fast beating outside the Iron Tower . . .
“Who’s . . . there?”
Eyes glimmered in Gavril’s cell, blue as starlight. And something blacker than darkness itself reared up, towering above his bed.
“You called to me, Gavril Nagarian.”
“Dra—khaoul?” So many times he had dreamed this, and now he was so weak he could hardly whisper the words he wanted to say. He tried to lift one hand to welcome his banished daemon, but the effort was too great and his hand flopped back uselessly onto the bed.
“What have they done to you?”
“I—don’t know. So weak. So wrong—”
“You could not live with me—and now you cannot live without me.”
“Take me. Take me away from this terrible place.”
The Drakhaoul enfolded him—close, closer—until he was drowning in an ecstasy of shadows.
“Now you are mine again, Gavril. Now we act, we think, as one.”
His sight blurred, then cleared. He could see again.
“Where shall we go?”
“Home . . .” Gavril’s heart burned with a sudden longing. “My home.”
“To Azhkendir?”
“No . . . to Smarna.”
Skar was crossing the inner courtyard on his way to check on his dying patient when he saw the skies darken. Stormclouds were blowing toward them across the Iron Sea. A sudden cold wind whined about the asylum walls. Then blue lightning shivered across the
sky and struck the Iron Tower.
Skar felt the shock as if it had pierced his body. He dropped to one knee, gasping.
Director Baltzar ran out into the courtyard. He gripped Skar by the shoulders, pulling him to his feet. “What in God’s name—” he shouted above the whine of the wind, pointing to the tower.
Skar looked up. Stormclouds, black and electric-blue, swirled about the top of the tower. Little crackles of energy lit the darkness. “A lightning ball?” he shouted back.
A sudden explosion rocked the tower. The iron bars burst asunder and stones rained down into the courtyard. Skar pushed the astonished Baltzar out of the way just as a huge block of masonry crashed down where they had been standing. Other warders hurried out into the yard, roused by the commotion.
Skar raised his eyes to gaze at the broken tower. For a moment he saw—or thought he saw—a great winged creature, darker than the rolling stormclouds, launch itself from the jagged top of the tower and go skimming off across the dark sea.
He blinked, rubbing his lightning-dazzled eyes.
The clouds were dispersing, blowing away as swiftly as they had come.
“The p-prisoner,” stammered Director Baltzar. “Twenty-One. No one could have survived a direct lightning strike.”
The tower stair was strewn with rubble. Twenty-One’s door had been blown off its hinges. Through the doorway they could see daylight and feel the fresh breeze off the sea.
Skar gingerly entered the room and found himself staring at the open sky through a great gaping hole blasted in the tower wall. All the roof tiles had gone and only a few broken beams remained overhead. Scorch marks blackened the stones. Wind whistled through the gap.
“Where is he, Skar?” asked Director Baltzar, gripping hold of the doorframe. His face was pale as gruel. “Where is our prisoner?”
The imperial barque lay at anchor on the River Gate quay; Eugene could see the New Rossiyan standard fluttering from her topmast. All was ready for the voyage to Tielen. And yet he still lingered here in his study, reluctant to leave for no good reason that he could explain to himself.
