Marion Zimmer Bradley's Sword and Sorceress XXIII

by Waters, Elisabeth

  She halted under the eaves of a dilapidated tavern. Two patrons tumbled through the doors and into the darkness. In the street beyond, white-robed Hounds raced by.

  "Kill the accursed ones!" the Hounds chanted. "Kill them all!"

  Eliane half-closed her eyes, questing outward with her mind, knowing that in doing so, she took a terrible risk. The amulets of the Hounds rendered them sensitive to the use of magic. She prayed that in the confusion, they would not be able to track her.

  Matthias... Eliane sent her silent call into the night. There was no answer. Bharim magic was personal, limited in range. Of all of them, only Eliane could reach halfway across the city.

  She had separated from her foster father when the first of the riots began. The speed and viciousness of the attacks left them stunned. Friends had sent word of the impending arrival of Hound and Questioner, but time had run out before ships could be found, captains bribed, families taken by circuitous routes to the harbor. Matthias led the first group and Eliane another, all children. Eliane had expected to find Matthias at the ship before her and when he was not, had returned to the old city, now ablaze, to find him.

  In the little courtyard before the Bharim temple, bodies lashed to a row of upright stakes twisted and screamed as they blackened. At the far end, soldiers in the Duke's gold and red stood guard.

  Eliane pushed through the crowd. She did not recognize any of the burning bodies. She did not want to. Beside the splintered temple doors, a single soldier stood over a knot of children. Their heads and shoulders had been smeared with ashes, and their hands bound and linked together, but they appeared otherwise unharmed. There were four of them, two stripling boys, one of them naked, a girl, and a boy of six or seven. She knew all of them, had sung their intertwined lineages on many midnight gatherings.

  The children looked so frightened, they might not run when she called them. Then, as if the Mother of Blessings had heard her prayer, an explosion rocked the courtyard. Stones and slate shingles from surrounding buildings clattered to the pavement. Gouts of brilliance erupted above the roofline, from the direction of the Duke's armory. The soldiers abandoned the stakes and hurried toward the citadel. Only the one holding the tether of the children remained.

  Eliane wavered, but for only an instant. Calm settled over her. The crowd dispersed, opening a path.

  The soldier saw her coming. When he lunged, Eliane pivoted out of the direct path of his sword and glided past him. She moved without thinking, in that quicksilver flow of speed and wiry strength that marked her difference from the stolid, scholarly Bharim. All the care her foster family had lavished on her could not make her one of them.

  The soldier, overbalanced, tripped on an uneven stone. Catching himself, he whirled to stare at her. Firelight licked his eyes. Then he fled, leaving his sword behind.

  Eliane picked it up, though she had no training in how to use it. A lump of sea-silver had been set like a talisman into the hilt. When she touched the metal, it hummed against her skin.

  She hurried toward the children, but an old man and a woman in a charred dress were already slicing the ropes that bound them together. She called their names, but they ignored her. The woman spirited her charges away without a backward glance.

  The man hesitated. "Scatter and hide!"

  "The Hounds are on the loose!" she cried. "We must leave the city!"

  In response, he melted into the flame-churned night.

  One boy remained, gazing at her as if entranced. Eliane remembered him from the long afternoons he came to study the Book of Remembering with Matthias. His name was Doveth. She led him, too stunned to protest, down the alleys toward the sea.

  More shouting came from further up the street, toward north pier. Their brief respite was over. Eliane tightened her grip on Doveth's hand and broke from their meager cover. The boy tumbled along at her side. By some miracle, as if the Mother of Blessings truly held them in divine safety, they came unscathed to the harbor.

  A skirmish had broken out on the pier where Seawind, the ship they had hired at an evening's notice, lay moored. A single swordsman, his back to the waves, held off a handful of soldiers.

  Khalden, the mercenary Captain Horos had insisted on hiring, placed himself so that the Duke's men must come at him single file along the pier. When he spotted Eliane, his face lit, gleeful. He shouted, "Aha!" and redoubled the attack. The middle soldier toppled into the water. Another jumped over the side. The rest made a rush for land.

  Only a single soldier remained, holding a stubbornly defensive posture. Eliane caught a wash of the man's desperate courage. He was alone, his companions fled, with an armed lunatic before him and another enemy—herself—behind him. Eliane lifted her sword so that it might be even more visible. She hoped her own inexperience might not manifest in that small movement. The sea-silver flared hot and tingling in her hand.

  The soldier's nerve broke. He threw down his sword and raised his hands. Eliane stepped back, opening an escape. He sped past without a backward glance.

  "You make a grand entrance." Khalden's eyes glittered, the battle-fever fading. "This all?" He jerked his chin in the boy's direction.

  "So far. What of the others?" Eliane asked.

  "Best get onboard. The safest place for you now is out to sea."

  "We must wait—"

  "You don't ever understand, you people. You keep trying to save everyone, as if that mattered. There aren't going to be any others, and if you keep dawdling, there aren't going to be even the ones you've got."

  Eliane suppressed a surge of anger. The mercenary had been hired to protect Seawind, after all, and he had done just that. But it was Matthias's coin that had paid the captain's fee, and Matthias—

  Sweet Mother of Blessings. The armory! Dragon-powder, as well as ordinary weapons—swords, crossbows, spears and body armor—was stored there. It could be detonated by magic, but that required physical proximity—

  Hoof-beats clattered behind Eliane, pierced by shouting. She whirled to see torches blazing off armor and spear points. In the forefront, a rider in soldier's tunic pointed in their direction.

  "That's them!" he yelled. "Don't let them get away!"

  Khalden grabbed Eliane's sleeve. "Go!"

  Doveth sprinted for the looming bulk of the ship. Eliane ran after him. The weathered planking creaked beneath her feet.

  One of the sailors, a lanky hill-man, his bald head covered in blue tattoos, stood ready to throw off the mooring ropes. Ghostly sails caught the wind, straining. Captain Horos, his hair a gleam of golden silk against the dark water, had just helped Doveth over the gap. He held out one hand to Eliane.

  Eliane threw the sword into the water and jumped. As the ship shifted, she landed off-balance on the deck. Khalden raced down the pier with a line of horsemen on his heels. Torchlight gleamed on the crossbow in the hands of the leading rider.

  Khalden raced to the very edge, gathered his legs under him, and hurled himself over the water. His body thudded against the wooden side of the ship, then slipped from view. Horos dashed to the rail and leaned over.

  Something hissed through the air beside Eliane's face. She turned to see a stubby crossbow quarrel quivering in the mast.

  A sliver of darkness slipped from the lee of the next pier. Eliane made out an oarsman and a second man in the boat's prow. Thoughts brushed hers with the clear deep tone like polished bronze. She cried aloud in gladness. Somehow, against all chance, Matthias had made it alive out of the inferno. Clutching a bundle to his chest, he crouched in the tiny craft. A renewed battery of shouts arose from the horsemen.

  There was only one thing so precious that Matthias would risk the gauntlet of soldiers to preserve and bring safely to whatever sanctuary they might find beyond the sea—the Bharim-a, the Book of Remembering, the written lineage of the People.

  A howl burst from the foremost rider. In the moment of confusion on the pier, the rowboat drew alongside the ship.

  Horos cursed as he hauled Khalden
, dripping, on to the deck. "Go! Go!" he shouted to his crew.

  "No, wait!" Eliane screamed.

  Matthias rose to his knees in the tiny boat, lifting the wrapped book.

  Thwap! Thwap! The horsemen quickly rearmed their crossbows. Fire exploded in Eliane's mind, shredding vision, lacing her lungs with acid.

  "There he is!" Khalden's voice broke the lapping darkness.

  Horos threw a rope overboard. He drew it up, empty, and cast it again.

  "I can't see him—"

  Eliane couldn't hear Khalden's answer.

  More crossbow bolts peppered the ship. A man's voice shrieked from the rowboat.

  The wharf, the city, everything Eliane had known, slipped into the distance. Her mind reeled with emptiness. Matthias was gone. The Book was gone.

  Horos shouted commands at his crew. The wind strengthened, rounding the sails, and Seawind leapt into the night.

  * * * *

  Blackness washed the deck as the last of the city lights faded. Once they passed beyond the smoke, stars glinted overhead.

  Eliane went below, where the children waited. Blindly she touched the hands of the children she had brought from the city. A dozen remained, no more, out of all those Matthias had planned to save. So few, so few. They rushed into her arms. She rocked them to sleep.

  * * * *

  In the darkness of the hold, Eliane flexed stiff arms and legs, and wished it were not so very difficult to pray. The words would have come more easily to Matthias, who had taught them to her. Pain rose up behind her heart like a tide and then subsided.

  Noises reached her from above. The world shifted and rolled in a way that was strangely comforting, and yet she had no recollection of ever setting foot on a seagoing vessel.

  As she climbed the ladder, the breeze shivered against her flesh. Voices reached her, shredded in the splash and surge of the ocean.

  Eliane emerged into the brightness of the deck. She recognized the tattooed crewman and the rawboned man in a gray turban. Khalden.

  This was the first time Eliane had seen Captain Horos in broad daylight, for their passage had been arranged, quickly and in darkness, by Matthias. She had glimpsed the captain only as a shadow among shadows, a gleam of shoulder-length golden hair.

  "I see you're with us," the captain said. "A bit late and a bit green around the gills, but you'll do."

  "Do?" Her throat felt parched, rusty with unshed tears.

  "You are now crew. We're well away for the moment, with an easy wind, but that could change." He squinted up at the sky. "We'll need every able hand for the journey. We don't have supplies to reach the eastern shores, but we can resupply at Pirion."

  The haunted isles, where only madmen and pirates put in.

  "The way I see it," Horos continued, "you have two choices: work or swim. Look, less than half my people made it onboard. The rest are stranded back there, along with the second half of the gold for your passage."

  "Matthias was bringing it in the boat," Eliane said numbly.

  "There's no way we can go back," Horos continued. "We'd all be hanged, every one of us, the moment we set foot in the damned city."

  "And the children—what of them?"

  "They stay below, as cargo, where they can't get into any trouble."

  "Let them work as well," Khalden spoke up suddenly. "Sun and exercise will be far better for them than the hold. They will be needed, not just useless puking baggage."

  Images burst across Eliane's mind like flashes of fire. Waking in the dark—alone—the alarum of flight, the smell of ashes and terror, the shudders down to the very marrow of her bones—shouting, a blow to her temple, staggering in the rubble, the ground shifting—her body curled hard on itself like a shell—screams that went on and on until her throat turned raw and her heart burst, unable to hold the pain—

  I will not let that happen to these children.

  She turned to Horos. "We will all work. No one gets left behind in the darkness."

  * * * *

  The children took on their tasks, and the ship settled into a routine. During the first difficult days, Khalden proved an unexpected ally, offering his own rough comfort.

  "I had three younger brothers," the swordsman explained. "If the work doesn't wear them out, I'll put them to whacking one another with wooden swords."

  Days stretched into weeks of a sweet running wind. As Khalden predicted, the journey took on the aspect of an adventure. The children emerged from their shock and grew brown under clear skies. True to his word, Khalden invented games for them, contests from which they emerged sweating and laughing. Even Captain Horos chuckled at their antics.

  When it was her time to sleep, Eliane lay with open eyes in her hammock, wondering why she could not mourn. Matthias had been the only family she could remember. Why could she not grieve for him? She whispered aloud the prayer for the dead, and felt nothing. Only when she chanted the ancient lineage did she feel some stirring of emotion and that was oddly muted, as if it were happening to someone far away.

  * * * *

  The moon passed through its changes and the small stores of food and water dwindled. The tattooed crewman cast his nets, but brought them up empty. No rain fell to replenish their supplies. Horos ordered rationing.

  "If the winds hold," Khalden told Eliane as they rested together, staring out across the ship's prow at the expanse of shifting water, "we will reach Pirion in two days."

  "I have heard it's a perilous harbor," Eliane said.

  Khalden nodded. "Pirion sits upon the slopes of a fire-mountain, a volcano. Five years ago, it belched forth enough hot ash to set half the ships in port afire."

  Fire at sea must be terrifying, Eliane thought. Sailors often had a superstitious dread of drowning. Yet to remain onboard, with the flames licking ever closer...

  She remembered the plaza in Yvarath, and the greasy, foul-smelling smoke. To drown—to plunge into the cool refuge of the waves, to sink into their secret depths—no, she did not fear that fate.

  Late one morning, the sea grew calm. Brightness seeped across the sky until not a tinge of blue remained. Huge slow swells rose and fell. Eliane finished her shift and stood against the rails, cradling her half-cup of water.

  She thought of unnamed beasts in the lightless waters, mute and vast, inhaling darkness and breathing it out. The last few nights, she had dreamed of those depths, passing through them with a sense of inexplicable joy. Waking, she ran her fingertips over the palm of her hand where it had pressed against the sea-silver in the hilt of the soldier's sword.

  Now, in the flat bright day, sweat trickled down Eliane's face and neck. She downed the last of the water, despite the brackish taste, and found Horos standing at the prow. He held a seeing glass.

  "Nothing yet," the captain said. "Not that you could see through this muck."

  Squinting into the glare, Eliane could barely make out the line between water and air. They should have already glimpsed the coastline, had the day been clear.

  Eliane glanced up at the mast, where one of the middle children clung to the topmost rigging, peering outward. By the boy's posture, he could see nothing more from his vantage.

  She opened her mind to the invisible horizon. Behind her eyes, she saw steam rising in billows, bubbles appearing on the surface of the water. Heat rose up before her. She reeled with it. The air seethed, glowing. She envisioned ashes crisping, a storm of tiny cinders. Brightness parted—

  She hovered on the edge of an inferno. Red-orange flames erupted skyward, filling the horizon. Her vision faltered.

  "Eliane!"

  Khalden's voice jerked her back to her own body. Pain ran in jagged bands up her forearms from clenching the topmost railing. Her vision cleared. A puff of humid air brushed her face.

  Ahead, white mist rose from the water.

  "This is no natural fog," Horos told Eliane. "I've never seen its like. Can you not magick a way through it?"

  Eliane frowned. "Whatever you have heard of the Bha
rim, we have no power over the weather."

  They were out of food, almost out of water. They had to reach land within the next day or two.

  "Look! Look there!" Khalden cried.

  The glare off the water blinded Eliane for an instant. Then the mist lifted from sea. With every passing heartbeat, more was revealed, flecks and bubbles of foam, the broken surface of the water. A line of darkness appeared on the horizon.

  Horos lowered the seeing glass, his face waxen.

  Eliane took the glass and scanned the island, beginning at the line of white foam that marked the beach and then upwards. From one end to the other, from the sawtooth mountain to the empty shoreline, stretched ash and rock, blackness veined in glowing red. Once or twice, she caught a spray of pin-point embers erupting upwards. Not a trace of human habitation, or of life of any kind, showed anywhere.

  Eliane directed the seeing glass toward the center of the island, where a cone of cinder-gray rock rose above the shattered slopes. Red light glimmered at the top. Even as she watched, the slopes trembled.

  A moment later sound reached her, a rumbling at the very edge of hearing. On the mountain, the glow intensified, brighter with every passing minute. It shifted from ruby to gold and then white. Through the glass, Eliane saw chunks of rock, some of them immense, plunge down the sides of the cone. Fissures opened, spewing forth more embers.

  A deafening crack rolled out from the island. Dense gray clouds billowed from the mountaintop and blotted the horizon. The rumbling built in waves.

  "This—this can't be Pirion. We must have gotten off course," Eliane stammered.

  "Not unless the stars themselves have deceived us," Horos answered in a hollow voice. He began shouting orders to bring the ship about.

  Around the ship, the waters crashed and rose. The deck heaved under Eliane's feet. She caught the rail for balance.

  Eliane raced to her place, hauling on the ropes. Across the towering blackness of the island, she glimpsed rivers of yellow-white. Molten rock, she thought, from the very heart of the mountain. When it reached the shore—