by Holly Lisle
They were through.
12
Hawkspar
For two days, I paced in my sleeping quarters, stepping along the wall with my fingertips dragging the stone. While the darkness was everywhere the same to me, I’d found my way around my quarters, which held nothing more than shelves of the previous Hawkspar’s knot-journals and a sleeping pad. There was little in there upon which I could hurt myself. I’d been into my private chapel, but there I cracked my shins on the hard benches.
I had a penitent who ran for me. She brought me food, or walked with me to the upstairs dining hall where the oracles sometimes took their evening meals together.
Once each day I would gather Obsidians around me and make the trek to the green glass tower. Each time I did, the prince would begin to scream at me.
This time he saw me and howled, “I’ll have your hide for this, you stone-eyed whore. I’ll throw you to my men and let them have their fun with you, and then skin you myself.”
“You are not yet contrite,” I told him, sounding insufferably pompous. It was my intent to anger him. To frighten him, to shame him. I did not want him to change his ways. He would be no use to me if he became a better man, and I would feel badly about the future I planned for him if he renounced his horrible past actions.
I did not imagine the prince would like the experience any better than I had, nor did I think it would humble him. He did not seem to me the sort of man who would allow himself to grovel once my foot was no longer on his throat.
I made sure slaves kept him clean, but this was more for my convenience than for his comfort. My sense of smell had grown sensitive with the loss of my eyes, and the stench of his filth offended me.
I did not permit him food; neither would I allow him anything to drink, save water.
I intended to let him go when I was done with him. I would send him back out there with his warships and his soldiers and his newborn hatred of the Citadel, the Ossalenes, oracles, and everything we did and stood for.
I was making an enemy.
When I was done with the chained prince, my penitent led me across the common and into Oracle House, up the stairs to the room where oracles took their meals. I was dressed in fine clothing, and from the rustling of silks and the clattering of beads and jewels, I knew the other oracles had come wearing their finery.
I could not see them, though, or see myself. They kept asking if I had found my sight yet—evidently visual sight always came later than time sight. This made no sense to me, but all of them claimed to have experienced the same thing. All of them who would speak to me, of course. Sunspar loathed me, and kept her distance.
The others told me the sight would be different. Useful, but different.
The slaves filled our plates, and some of the other oracles began to chat with each other. I sat silent among them, fumbling with food I could not see.
Sunspar said, “If you’re still blind, it would seem the Eyes haven’t much use for you at all.”
The others snarled at her and made excuses for me. Or said nothing. I simply struggled to get food from my plate to my mouth. It was such a simple thing, or seemed so until one no longer had the sight to do it easily. Then it became a monumental task.
Tigereye, seated to my left, cleared her throat.
All other conversations died.
“We are concerned,” she said, “about your plans for the prince. His navy, waiting on our doorstep, grows restless, his soldiers march in front of the gate, and the Obsidians report forays by small teams, all moving around the base of the Citadel looking for other ways in. If you do not give the prince what he came for, his men will, at very least, destroy the town below. We hold the high ground, but that does not mean that they won’t try to take that from us.”
“This will get ugly,” Sunspar said. She sounded accusing. “There will be bloodshed. Have you thought how you will deal with it?”
“Yes,” I said. “I know exactly how I’ll deal with it.”
From the Tower, we heard screaming. The green glass monstrosity was playing with its latest toy again. I did not want to know what it did. I remembered its glass faces moving around to watch me, its glass hands reaching out to touch me; the memories were more than I could stand to contemplate.
I reminded myself that the previous Hawkspar had laid out this last plan before she died. I was following it as perfectly as I could.
On the third day, I went to the Tower and sat in the throne that formed there for me.
I had the Obsidians wash my captive prince and bring him before me—naked, shaved, in chains.
“We are displeased,” I told him, pitching my voice as Hawkspar had taught me. “You have come to us before offering us gold and jewels, lands and slaves, and each time we have taken nothing of yours and turned you away from our gates because of your arrogance and your pride. This time, we gave you an opportunity to learn humility. To come before us with a meek spirit and a bowed head. Had you done so, we would have gladly offered you all that you desired.”
Sudden power surged through me, unbidden, and I heard the prince gasp. I did not know what he saw; I could not guess what I had done. But when I spoke, my voice became deep and loud and dangerous. Like thunder, or the sound of a waterfall when the river has flooded.
“Now,” I said in that terrible voice, “you will ask of me what you came to ask. And I will tell you what you must know. And then—and hear me well when I say this—you will leave this place, and you will not pause in doing so. You will not look back, you will not hesitate.” My voice growled even deeper. “And under no circumstances will you ever return.”
Abruptly I could see.
Not as people see who have eyes. But—I could see time, where before I had only felt it. I could see it flowing before me and behind me and all around me, dancing in rivers and pooling in eddies, tumbling down cliffs, flooding plains. If I had ever thought of time before, it was to see it as a line. Time is no line. It is a pageant, all of it happening at the same time. A wilderness of rivers, cliffs, marshes, eddies, and whirlpools, lit from within, radiant and wonderful and terrible. It is beautiful. Extraordinary. Compelling.
Time flowed into and through itself. It backtracked. It crashed and careened and scattered. It overflowed banks, got stalled. Lived.
Before, I had felt my way in darkness along its wild banks, and I had grasped only some small part of what time was. At that moment, I saw that at every point, it could be changed. It could flow from one strong stream into a hundred or a thousand rivulets, each going somewhere different, all going simultaneously.
And I could see not just the flow of time, but the little twigs and rocks, and the big boulders and cliffs, that made the steady streams diverge.
Before me again lay the future in which the pompous Prince Sheoua went to battle against the nation whose islands neighbored his, and won the battle and the war, and annihilated his enemies. Only this time I could see banners and battles, bodies stacked like cordwood, the march of dense armor. I saw him powerful, joined with villains who were themselves growing in power. Ruin for many lay in the path of Sheoua’s success.
I saw clearly the shape of the diversion I had created by delaying for three days his navy’s movement. His enemies had gained critical ports, moved powerful forces into strategic locations. I saw how those forces would, if he could be induced to attack in haste, ambush him and destroy most of his navy.
I saw what I had done with Hawkspar’s guidance. I saw how, in the future, I could do it on my own.
For the first time, I understood what power oracles could have. The moment was not a fleeting thing, not unchangeable, not fated. The river of our existence had currents where it was most likely to go, with events pulling before it and pushing behind, but a single well-placed twig could divert a part of it.
The prince stood before me, and for the first time, I could see him, too, after a fashion. He’d been present for me before as smells, mostly—whether unwashed or washed. I caught
heat as I walked up to him. Heard his raging, and the clank of chains.
But now I saw the shape of time as it flowed around him, and so saw the shape of him. His love of power drew in dark waters. The horrors he had committed in his past painted him in the blood of innocents; the horrors he intended for the future twisted him into a monster. His people he saw as an extension of himself, and his great desire was to spread them through the northern islands, to subjugate every people not his own. To murder the men, rape the women, enslave the children.
I knew his sort. He had never been a slave. He had, however, created whole armies of them. And I could break him, and free them from his hands.
I had reached into the stream of him and touched his hatred and distrust for me. For the Ossalenes. I had sharpened it, made it keen and fierce, twisted him back on himself so that all he could see was a reflection of what he was. He looked at me, but saw me as himself.
So I was going to tell him, at last, the truth he had waited so long to hear. I would set the truth to destroy him.
I said, “Ask your question, foolish prince.”
I could feel his rage brushing against me. Wrapping around me. Threatening me. He was in chains because at that moment he would rather kill me than have his answer—but since he could not touch me, he would ask his question.
“I seek war with the Chevaks, whose islands lie next to mine. I have my ships prepared. I am stronger than the Chevak potentate, better equipped, richer. I have more men. I want you to look at my war and tell what I must do to win it.”
His chance of winning the war he sought against the Chevaks had passed in the days I had held him and his ships in our harbor. He had lost them for the present. With his forces, he might yet have won a hundred other wars, and he might have come around from the other side of time with allies—in ten years or thirty—and overrun the Chevaks.
But those were not the questions he asked. Asking the right question, I saw, was more difficult than getting the right answer.
From my lips poured the truth. “You will win this war against the Chevaks by walking away from it. By turning tail and sailing home, O Prince, and putting your ships to sea as fishing boats, and setting your warriors to tilling the earth and caring for their wives and children. You will win this war by fleeing like little girls before a mighty storm, for if you seek this battle, your day as a mighty power will pass, and it will not come again.”
What prince desires to hear that the prize he seeks cannot be his? What prince listens when told to set his eyes on different trinkets?
Not that one.
“That’s your answer?” he screamed. “That I must go farm? That my men will fail? What treachery is this that you throw in my face, you who would not speak to me for ten years? This is the advice for which I have so long waited, you useless woman?” His voice dropped to threatening tones. “Hear me now, O Oracle of the Eyes of War, weak and pathetic liar, hater of men. I will go to war against the Chevaks, and crush them, and overrun them, and own them. And when I have done, I will come back and own you.”
“At your pleasure, then, O Prince. You know our words on the matter; but we would not keep you from your fancies.”
The Obsidians who had dragged him in now dragged him out. He would be tossed, naked and in chains, out our front gate, and we would give the signal for his men to come get him. I wished, knowing the sort of man that he was, that he could be given back to them as bones and tatters.
I could have fed him to the Tower, and he would have joined the silently screaming faces and reaching hands that lived within the glass. But much as that would have pleased me—and it would have pleased me a great deal—I had to set him free. I could not use him dead. Living, he would be a solution to a problem that had not yet presented itself, but that would shortly arrive.
It is fact, and fact known to all who know of us, that the Ossalene oracles speak truth. Only truth. We refuse many, for not all men deserve the truth. All who petition us and are admitted to the Tower, however, hear the truth, and most walk away. The Order of Ossalenes does not often send their supplicants out in pieces.
Done too often, that would be bad for business. Done for clear reasons, it evidently has the opposite effect, for our business has been steady for as long as people have yearned for the future and Ossalenes have had the Eyes to see it.
I sent the prince away, and stepped out of time’s river.
I could still feel the new power within me, though. The change that had overcome me as I read the future for him, as I saw him standing within the cold blue fire, was not undone.
I sat in the throne within the Tower, and gradually my surroundings came into focus. Everything was darkness still—I had no beautiful rays of sunlight, no glorious colors, no patterns or textures. My world remained blackness, utter and bleak. But I could see the weight of things, and the density. Objects near to me came into very sharp focus; farther away, they seemed to blur. I could see what lay beyond my walls in all directions. I watched the other oracles going about their business, and the slaves, and the penitents, and the seru. I could see the prince, dragged down to the gate and pushed through, being dressed in fine robes by his slaves, and attended by his warriors.
I could see the shape of the island, and all the many passages that honeycombed it. I could see inside myself—could watch my heart beating and my lungs expanding and contracting.
I could not see the radiance of the sun. But I could see more.
13
Aaran
Silence lay in the Taag av Sookyn’s wake.
On the deck, silence, too, as the men sorted the dead from the dying, and enemies from friends. The bodies of enemies went over the side without ceremony. The injured among the enemy men were killed quickly, and tossed, too. The Taag had no room to carry prisoners if Aaran hoped to rescue slaves, and tossing living but injured men into the shark-swarming sea would be no kindness.
Alwyn, the kor feer, had desperate rounds, attempting to save men horribly wounded in the fight. Most lived; Alwyn did not have the power of the five Tonk master healers. He could not rebuild what was gone, but he could repair what was broken. Still, five sailors were dead, as was Majim Likely-Done, the kor jaagyn, or shipwright. Which meant that damage to the ship would become a greater risk to all who survived.
Three more men, including Drum, the Eastil who’d caught Eban stealing food, were missing.
Aaran stood on the officers’ deck, built above the officer quarters, and worried about the fates of the three missing men. They might have fallen into the sea during the fighting. They might have been carried away by the hordes of men in longboats, to face whatever fate those men had planned for the crew of the Taag.
It tore at Aaran that he couldn’t go back for them; that he had no other ships to help him, that he hadn’t the manpower or the weaponry to take the battle to those bastards and destroy them. When they hit the narrowest part of the strait, his men should have launched Greton fire into the trees to either side of the Taag. The cannibals could have burned.
But by the time they were working their way through that narrow, fighting had already moved to the deck, and no one could chance letting Greton fire fall into enemy hands. It had been hurried off the deck by that point and hidden away in the guarded armory.
“You’re quiet,” Tuua said, joining him on the deck.
“I worry that the three missing men might face horrors, and I ache that we cannot save them from whatever they face.” His mouth tightened. “We should have had the whole of the pack at our backs, Tuua. We shouldn’t have been sailing these waters alone. In all the years I sailed with him, I never thought Haakvar a coward. But I think him one now. Four wolves could have sailed through there without losing a man. We could have cleared that passageway to make it safe for the next ships. We could have opened a way through the Fallen Suns for the Tonk, and claimed it.”
Tuua put a hand on his shoulder. “You know what Ethebet says.”
“No,” Aaran growle
d. “I don’t. But I suspect I’m about to find out.”
Tuua said, “‘There is no good that does not birth an evil, and no evil that does not birth a good.’”
“Easy for her to say. She’s been dead a long damned time.”
“We could have had a whole pack with us. But we did not, and perhaps, though it was not for the good last night, it will be for the good in the days yet to come. I sometimes wonder at the way events seem to work for ill, yet work in the end for good. Had we come through with four ships, perhaps we would have been marked as enemies and engaged by the navy of that tall black city we slipped so carefully past. Perhaps we would have fallen afoul of Sinali hunters before we even got out of the Path of Stars. We cannot know what evils we avoided by being only one ship. We can only know what evils we did not.”
Aaran studied his cousin with a steady gaze. “I’d like to see some of the good in our hardship. I’d like to see where this has worked for us.”
“Trust that it has. You’ll find out how when you least expect it.”
That was a worry, then, but not a worry he could do anything about. Jostfar had the working of serendipity as his burden. Aaran had cannibals and captive slave girls and markings on Makkor’s chart that suggested Aaran had begun sailing the Dragon Sea, which he’d assumed to be a mythical place where dragons and sea serpents and ship-devouring octopuses lived, where giant birds dropped out of the sky to lift full-grown men to their nests to feed their young. But which, if Makkor’s chart was correct, might not be a mythical place at all, and might include not-so-mythical monsters.
It just looked like sea to Aaran. Islands behind, water ahead.
They would have to do burials at sea for the crew. It would not be long until evening. The men would be sent off with the evening prayer. It was for that hour that both Aaran and Tuua waited.
“So … how is your young helper?” Aaran asked.
