by Holly Lisle
And began eating the peppered beans.
I heard whimpers masked by coughing, little choking noises, wheezing, strangled muttering. And over all, the steady clicking of dippers against the wooden bowls. And then the clatter as each man put his wooden bowl on the deck and resumed his position.
“Tell him his men are most brave and rugged warriors,” I said to Aaran. “And be quick about it.”
Aaran raised a glass and said, “I salute the brave and valiant warriors of the Iage, with bread and ale.”
While I translated, the cook and his assistant brought up the bread and ale, and began passing that around. And if the Iage ate the next course with unseemly quickness, or drank the ale in embarrassing quantities, none of our people made any sign of noticing.
The feast continued after that, with a roast swan taken by one of the sailors by bow and arrow as it flew overhead. And with steamed flounder. And an enormous smoked ham. And yams salted and sugared. Smoked conies by the brace. A thick dessert soup of chilled jellied cranberries and fresh peaches liberated from the Citadel stores.
By the end of it, the Iage were sitting around the deck, too full to move. Which had been the plan all along.
Our marines sat, too, but they had received much smaller portions than the Iage, so while they’d been instructed to act as the Iage acted, they were nowhere near as close to being incapacitated.
It was, all in all, a fine and effective feast. And since we had not been included on the groaning board, I had to consider the first part of our encounter a success.
The second part would be up to the captain and me.
The Iage chief leaned his elbows on the table and sighed hugely. “I and my men thank you for your hospitality, which was both grand and unanticipated.”
I passed this on to the captain.
“You are our welcome and honored guests,” the captain said, “with whom we would trade favor for favor.”
I translated that, too. The captain and crew were being careful to say only what the Iage could hear—it’s always risky dealing with those who trade widely, because they have a nasty habit of picking up languages you wouldn’t expect them to know. And of demonstrating their knowledge of a language only after something unforgivably insulting has been said in it.
The Iage were not as circumspect, however. One of the chief’s men sitting outside the circle said to another of them, “As well they fed us. This lot looks too tough and stringy and old to make good eating.”
I did pass that on to the captain. His face snapped toward me, and in Tonk, not Trade, he said, “They were going to eat us?”
“I thought I’d mentioned that,” I said.
“They’re cannibals? I thought the west islanders were cannibals.”
“Some of them are. And some of the south islanders are as well.”
The chief said, “He has questions about his guests?” Which told me that the chief had at least a rudimentary knowledge of Tonk.
“One of your men noted how unappetizing our ship’s crew would have been.”
“If your captain is offended by this, I will—myself—kill the man who spoke, and your ship’s very fine cook can prepare him.”
“I think, rather,” I said, “that the captain is pleased his men are too tough to make good meals. It is the way of Tonk warriors, and that is, to them, a compliment and not an insult.”
“Ah.” The chief smiled broadly, and I passed this exchange on to the captain, who laughed.
Yes, we were all fine friends around that table.
In most cases, the next order of business would be the challenges, to ensure that the Iage dealt with real men and not weaklings unworthy of their time. I waited, knowing the chief could require a challenge if he so chose. If he did choose, I’d told Aaran that he wanted to suggest an eating contest—the hot peppered beans. He had assured me, in fact, that the beans could be made even hotter than those that would be served at the banquet. I wondered what manner of men would seek out such food.
But apparently the chief had considered the beans served at table to be enough of a warning about the men he dealt with.
“So—what favor would you trade for, that you have treated us so kindly?” he asked, skipping the challenge phase entirely. I had been able to see that as one possible outcome, and I was pleased.
“Safe passage south,” the captain told him. “Escorted by your men.” We had discussed this beforehand, he and I, and I’d convinced him that this was the best solution, though he didn’t like it. Aaran wanted to travel through alone, because the Taag would sail so much faster unaccompanied by rowed longboats. However, the Iage already had their treaties and through-ways worked out with the competing powers in the area, and no matter how talented a tracker Aaran might have been, he could not track through lines of political infighting.
“Safe passage. And an escort. For that,” the Iage chief said in a thoughtful voice, “we shall need a powerful future from the Oracle Hawkspar, Eyes of War.”
I waited, pretending to consider the offer. First, the talents of the oracles were never priced lightly. A true view of the future is no small thing. Nor could I be seen as eager to accept this offer as if it favored our side. An escort through the southern islands was not the equivalent of a hundred slaves, and the Iage knew it, and so did I. Not being eaten by the Iage was worth considerably more than a hundred slaves, but I could not suggest that I considered that a factor, and the chief, having just been well fed by our crew, could not suggest it either.
It still was a factor, of course. Though treated well, the Iage were entirely capable of finding an unintentional infraction against their complicated religion or mores as a reason to attack and devour those on board the ship if it suited their goals; they’d made an art of finding excuses for breaking their treaties with their neighbors in the past. If they knew we had a shipload of young girls and women in the hold belowdecks, they would consider that a wondrous excuse. Iage men kept harems, and were not picky about how they got them. For this reason as much as for their dinner habits, their neighbors bore them no affection.
All penitents were taught the story of the Iage. And the Kee, and the D’gadigi, and the Mfar, and every other culture the Order had dealt with since men first found their way to the women with the Eyes, in search of a clear path to their future.
I knew only too well with whom I dealt.
I knew, too, that the Iage chieftain had to believe he got the better of the deal. If for a moment he thought that we had come out ahead, we would discover that we had committed some taboo, and would be overrun by thousands of Iage.
So I made the most of my reluctance to part with such a powerful thing as the reading of the time rivers.
“Have you slaves to add into this bargain?” I asked him. “Gold or jewels? Silks or laces? I would not think to ask for a hundred slaves or their equal, of course, for your escort though these dangerous waters is no small thing. Yet and all, charting your path through the troubled river of time is no small thing, either.”
He bowed to me. This was familiar territory for him, if not for me, and he was much more familiar than I with the many ins and outs of negotiation. “I had thought,” he told me, “an escort of five hundred men for the days it will take you to traverse these waters to the Great Deep would be an equal to the exchange of goods for your path.”
Which it would. I did not like the sound of this, though. Five hundred men in escort was far too many. It was a war party. If we traveled with a war party, one of two things would happen. One, we would find ourselves in the midst of a war with some local tribe the Iage wanted to overrun—in which we would be forced to engage ourselves on the side of the Iage—and we did not wish to do that. Or two, the Iage would, citing some breach of taboo, use their massive superiority in numbers to overrun us in the middle of the night watch, and that would not end well.
I sat there for a moment, formulating my words carefully as I prepared to pass this pending disaster on to the captain. “
They have offered us an escort of five hundred men,” I said at last. “A great honor.”
Aaran considered that for only the briefest of instants. “Tell them I am honored beyond all honor by their proposal, but we could not hope to repay such a debt. I grieve at our poverty, and ask for a simple guide of a dozen men, asking that the chief forgive our lack of success on this voyage, and understand, too, that I cannot allow a woman to pay my debt for me.”
He was clever, was Aaran. I would never have considered the mere-woman angle.
I passed this on to the chief, and he sat there for a moment in nonplussed silence.
“The Oracle is not your master?” he asked at last.
“I am a passenger only, traveling via this ship to a war of immense size, where I will offer my guidance. I … paid a fare to travel thus.”
“In truth? It must be some magnificent war you seek. I have never known the Eyes to leave their Citadel.”
“It is a war that could consume the world,” I said. And that was truth, if I’d understood my predecessor.
Again I passed on our conversation to Aaran, and he said, “Such deals as you make with him will be only for your safe passage. We will pay as we can for his small escort.”
The chief was surprisingly understanding. “Very well, then. For your safe passage, O Oracle, a short look into the waters you alone can see, and the answer to this question. How do we conquer the Ekadites in three days? And for the captain … I do not understand what he has to offer of value equal to our guides.”
“Tell him you’ll lay out the future for him, and I’ll draw him a map of the paths he must take to arrive there safely.”
And the chief found this idea intriguing, and after a quick demonstration of Aaran’s power, conceded that this was a deal worth a dozen men and one boat for a handful of days. And my safe passage, of course.
I slipped into the twisting churning waters of time. We were in a bad place—in the waters of a physical river, I would have called it a rapids. I should have been watching all along, for not only could I see a dozen different ways in which the chief would attempt to betray us, but I also saw that someone onboard the ship—one of our own people—had betrayed us already.
I tried to see how. I fought for it, looking for the link between a treachery that sought us at that moment and the betrayer who had sold us, and I struggled to lay out the chief’s planned betrayals in such a way that he would be shamed … but not too shamed … and would honor both the word and the spirit of our agreement.
The hideous thing about being in a rapids is that if you lose your footing, you find yourself swept into the water and banged against rocks along the way. It works the same when fighting the waters of time.
The pain grew hideous; I was reading too many things at once, digging deeper than I had a capacity for, seeing too much, feeling too much. Blood and death and lies and corruption, old plots and new plots and a thin pale thread of faith and honor that hung above me like a rope, if I could just grab it before I drowned.
I reached. Clung. Became aware that I was whimpering and clutching my head and my eyes.
I pointed at the chief. Pointing is a grave insult to the Iage, unless of course you’re an oracle. “You plan to have your five hundred men follow us. Use us to make your war against the Ekadites. You plan to claim that we have eaten of the cow and the caribou in your presence, so that you can claim bounty on this ship. You plan to plunder whatever treasure we might have aboard, and sell the ship to your allies. And you were alerted to the possibility of our coming by your allies, some of whom are hidden away on this ship, under the guise of sailors. You never intended to honor your agreement.”
The Iage chief stood and shouted, “Now!” and over the sides of the ship swarmed men who had crept up on us while the Iage sat in their feast-bloated stupor, and we sat thinking we had gotten the better of them.
Our marines were quick, and my Obsidians even quicker. They had not eaten at all, and, hungry, were sharp and hard. It all became a blur. I grabbed a knife. My head throbbed, and I wanted to do the trick again where I stopped my place in the waters of time, then moved through it. But I could not. I could barely stand.
The chief leapt across the table and grabbed me, but Aaran moved faster than I could trust my senses to believe, and I felt the gout of the Iage’s hot blood on my skin.
The bell on the ship rang like doom itself, and the deck flooded with every able-bodied sailor, and with the Onyxes and the fight-trained acolytes as well. Blades clanged, men screamed, and I stood in the center of it all, in the way, unable to do anything of value, furious at myself for being so weak that I had not been able to follow the river of time to this moment before we found ourselves in it.
I was useless. Worthless. I had done nothing but set us up for the betrayal the Iage had planned all along. The captain would have done better without all my knowledge and advice. And I thought I was going to prove of some use to the Tonk? That I had any place among them?
I was a fool.
And the next thing I knew, I was a fool grabbed by a couple of the captain’s marines and dragged toward Aaran’s cabin through the thick of the fighting. “Captain’s orders,” one told me. The second jumped into the captain’s cabin with his blade swinging, and got two of the Iage hiding there in one arcing slash. They checked the many hiding places, determined that the quarters were safe, and bade me lock myself in, while they would stand guard outside.
I could hear the fighting, muffled but still horrible. I could feel time pushing at the backs of my Eyes. Unbidden, images spilled over me of my people taken back into slavery, of the men who had risked their lives to save us dead—horribly murdered—of myself a captive and concubine of the Iage.
I fought the pain. It was pushing me to my knees, but away from the fighting I could slow down everything that was pouring into me and washing over me. I began to understand why oracles would only meet with one man, and would do it away from everyone else in a stone-walled room. Distance mattered. Silence mattered. Being able to feel water from one river, instead of something that felt like an onrushing sea tipped out of its bed, mattered most of all.
The pain did not recede. But I did find an eddy in the waters of time where I could stand still. And where I thought I might be able to stop the waters. I did not know how long I would be able to hold them, but I knew that if I did not do something, the main channel of the future I read would hold, and we would lose everything that mattered to us.
My sacrifice. My choice.
I made time slow. Slower, slower, and then the waters stopped, and the cold descended around me again, and the air grew so thick it seemed unbreathable, and I waded through it to the door, unlocked it, moved with certainty to the few Iage I could identify as key warriors. Men without whom the Iage would be leaderless. I remembered my lessons of my first fight in time held still, and did not waste all my energy on one man. I slashed through the neck of the first with his own sword which I had ripped from his hand, and ripped open the belly of the second, and rammed the blade into the belly of the third. Two remained, but I could not reach them. I fell to my knees, and the weight of the waters washed over me and the pain of the rocks upon which I was battered smashed the world into silence.
22
Aaran
Aaran found Hawkspar lying with the dead and near dead, nowhere near his quarters, and with a bloody sword in her hand. The marines he’d set to guard her swore that they’d seen her safely locked into his quarters and that she had not come out.
But she had a way of ending up where she was not supposed to be, a fact he found both frustrating and unnerving.
She was hurt. She’d been stepped on more than once, and he could see that one of her arms was broken, and could hear a grinding in her ribs when he picked her up. She was covered in blood, too, and some of it was her own. He carried her into his quarters and called two of her terrifying white-eyed healers in, demanding that they attend to her before they saw to anyone else.
He assured himself that this was simply so that he could be sure that the Tonk would have their seer.
But it wasn’t that, nor was he fool enough to try to deceive himself for long.
He wanted more from her than the visions of her stone eyes.
He wouldn’t take it. He couldn’t have it. But he at last was willing to admit that she was what he wanted, what he hungered for. He did not know why. He could not begin to guess what it was about her that so deeply touched his soul. He did not look forward to discovering how he would sail away from Hyre without her, in search of his missing sister, and spend the rest of his life with an unrequited love that he had to that point managed to avoid.
He was a fool.
“She’s badly injured,” one of the Moonstones, who mostly struggled to speak Tonk, told him. “There are tears in her … I don’t know what you call. Inside. She bleed inside.”
He spoke slowly. “Save her. Do whatever you have to do. I’ll give you whatever you need. But you can’t let her die.”
“The gods and goddesses decide that,” another of the Moonstones said. “We no make promises about what we can’t keep.”
The Obsidian Redbird stood at the head of her bed, unmoving. She did not acknowledge his presence. She simply stood there, hands on the pommels of her blades, and he had the feeling that she watched everything, both inside and outside his cabin.
He left Hawkspar with the Moonstones and Redbird, and set marines at the door again. Two of them, with strict instructions that none save those in the room with her at that moment be permitted to enter.
Cleanup was a little slice of hell. He and his sailors and marines and officers tossed the Iage corpses over the side without a second thought. But his own people—and Hawkspar’s—those bodies could not be dealt with in such a cavalier fashion.
And there were a lot of them.
He’d started the voyage with nearly a full complement. He’d lost a third of his officers—including Ino Tortaaknavyn, his second daan—near half his sailors, a third of his marines, and both cooks and all four assistants. The Iage had gotten into the galley and slaughtered them all.
