by Holly Lisle
He slid down the rigging and landed lightly on the deck, quickly straightened his own dress clothes, and took up his position on the officers’ deck, between the longboats and just in front of the steersman’s castle.
His people were ready.
Two Sinali warships came racing out, and out of the corner of his eye, Aaran could see others raising their flags to follow. The Feegash undersecretary who would be the lead delegate for the Feegash cause took the ship’s calling cone in hand, and in Feegash, told the Sinali captains that the fleet had come with Feegash negotiators to bargain a Tonk settlement in the Court of the Grand Hall of Nations, and that the Sinali should put down arms and raise truce and treat flags.
The effect on the Sinali was immediate. Both ships heeled around, their truce flags waving as they did, and came alongside either side of the Tonk fleet.
On the docks in the Ei Angon Yeh harbor, men had stopped preparing the warships. They watched from decks and masts and watchtowers as the whole Tonk fleet sailed in, claimed dock space, and weighed anchor.
The Sinali troops that guarded the city were waiting as the Feegash marched off first—many of them walking for the first time in years, thanks to the care of Moonstones and Tonk healers. Behind the Feegash went the marines, excepting those few who would stand watch over the ship. Behind the marines went the Ossalene seru and the oracle, behind the seru, the keepers and their assistants, and behind the them, the captain.
All the sailors stayed aboard with the remaining marines. It would not do to march too great a force into the city. The thousand-strong marines made an impressive escort, but adding more than twice that many sailors would have been seen as a threat.
Aaran and his contingent were first off the docks, but as they moved forward, more and more Tonk poured onto the docks and marched forward. The centerline of Tonk marines carried boxes of documents. The Ossalenes carried staffs, and perhaps some of their hidden weapons. They did not wear the swords at their hips, though. Everyone else was armed, but with arms away and weapon hands raised across chests as they marched.
The Tonk were not, for the most part, marching men. They were by preference and long practice riders, guerrilla fighters, runners. But they could march at need, and they had drilled onboard to get precision marching down, because the armies of their enemies marched and stood in close formation, and regarded such armies as civilized.
So the Tonk were arriving in the guise of civilized men, presented and accompanied by Feegash negotiators, an Oracle Hawkspar Eyes of War, and an entire contingent of Ossalenes—most of those Obsidians.
This fight had to be won with words instead of swords, and Aaran and the other captains had played out this battle endlessly, both with each other and in their own minds.
This, finally, was the one that would count.
Hawkspar
I could hear the murmuring of the men around me as we marched off the dock and headed for the Grand Hall of Nations.
I could tell it must have been beautiful. It was amazing even from what I could discern. It towered over us as we made our way up steep switchback roads of stairs, between lines of archers atop walls and behind them. We lived for that moment at the mercy of the Sinali, under a flag of truce that they had never seen fit to honor before. I’d heard all the stories from the men, of Sinali warships coming in with their truce flags raised only to cut them loose and raise weapons when they were within range, of them cutting down unarmed men carrying flags of truce. I knew that the presence of Feegash dressed as diplomats, and to a lesser extent the members of my Order, which the Sinalis respected, were the reason the archers did not shoot the Tonks down to the last man.
I did not forget, either, that we were marching into the city safely enough, but if we failed to convince the members of the court of the merits of our case, we would be unlikely to survive our march back out.
I wished, briefly, that I had let myself indulge in time spent with Aaran during our trip. I knew we had less than even odds of surviving this visit into the halls of our enemies. But unlike the battle of Ba’afeegash—where we could have lost everything, but could not have won everything no matter what we did—this time the other half of those odds indicated that we could remove the cloud from the Tonk people if we performed well here.
The waters of time ran in every imaginable direction.
As we drew closer to the Grand Hall, I could make out the deep designs carved into the stones from which it was built. They were in relief, and they made sense to my eyes—but not a pleasant sort of sense. I saw friezes of men in chains being marched at spear point, men being beheaded, men being run through in battle. In their stone murals, the Sinali were always the heroes, of course. They paraded with the heads of their enemies on pikes, and ripped the entrails from men chained to stretching racks.
These were not a gentle people led astray by the whispering of the Feegash. These were people who had been brutal and violent on their own, without help from anyone else.
They had fit in with the Feegash plans.
We started up the main steps of the Grand Hall. It dwarfed us; it was on a scale so inconceivably massive that I realized our entire contingent would be able to gather comfortably under the pillars at the front. We were not much more than gnats in this place.
I didn’t find that feeling pleasant.
When we reached the landing, a man hurried to me, and bowed deeply, and in Sinali said, “I am Do-es Ei-enyan, empress orator first to Ei Angon Yeh for the empire of the Sinali. Please forgive that I do not recognize you by your robe ranks, but unless I am mistaken, you are an Oracle of the Eyes, are you not?”
I turned to him. “I am. I am the Living Goddess Oracle Hawkspar Eyes of War.”
“The Eyes of War? Never have we of the empire known an oracle to travel beyond the walls of your Citadel. We are most honored by your presence, Living Goddess Oracle Hawkspar Eyes of War. Most honored. You will be our guest while you are here. You will have the best of everything. The empress was notified of the presence of an oracle when you were still walking on the Path of Truth and Justice, and she commands me invite you to partake of her bounty, and treat you in her chambers as a beloved sister.”
“I thank the empress,” I said. “And when I have concluded my business here, I would be delighted to visit with her. I have gifts, unworthy though they maybe, for her august glory.”
He bowed.
I bowed. Dealing with the emissaries of empresses is a touchy business, especially when one is not in one’s Citadel surrounded by a good wall, long leagues of ocean, and hundreds of Obsidian-Eyed warriors who would make rat hash out of anyone who became dangerous.
He said, “Your business here … You are speaking on the surrender of the Tonks?”
“I am speaking on a number of issues, and bringing what I know of the future of our world before the peoples represented in the court of the Grand Hall of Nations as a gift.”
“A …” he faltered. “A gift? From the Ossalenes?”
We oracles were well known for being right. And for being touchy, and difficult, and sometimes dangerous. We were not, however, known for our generosity of spirit where the powers of our Eyes were concerned; rather, we had a well-earned reputation for skinning our visitors for all they might be worth, and more, if we could manage it.
“A gift,” I said firmly, “though it will not be a happy one.”
“Ah,” he said. Oracles giving away bad news wasn’t any more common than oracles giving away good news, but at least the former fit in with the Sinali philosophy that nothing good came free.
Cynical people, the Sinali. From the empire-building perspective, though, I could understand where they could make a case for the success of their philosophy.
“When you have presented your … news … the empress will make you welcome.” He bowed.
I bowed.
He said, “I have a simple question from the empress. Not a future. Simply … a question.”
I caught the stress
es in his voice, and realized that someone in this city knew a Hawkspar claimant still inhabited the Citadel of the Ossalenes. She would have preferred credibility, because she was where Eyes of War belonged, and I was not.
So I was being asked to prove that I was not a fraud. The question would be laden with tricks and traps.
I said, “Ask her question.”
“The empress was treated just yesterday for a health condition that had left her most ill for some days. Was she treated correctly?”
I was surrounded by a throng of people, all of whose life currents collided with mine. The empress was nowhere near. The emissary radiated a nervous energy that gave me a headache.
I bowed. “You will hold out your hand, and I will touch it to read this bit of the empress’s current.”
He bowed lower, and held his hand out. As my hand touched his silk glove, I read backward as quickly as I could, and uncovered a veritable viper’s nest of lies and treachery and betrayal in the high court.
The empress had recently conceived a child by the man before me. Her own husband, the empress consort, had been away in battle, in which the empress had made arrangements for him to die. But the man with whom she had made arrangements had been killed instead, and she did not know if that death had been accidental or intentional, or if someone knew of her attempt to rid herself of the empress consort.
Her husband, meanwhile, had come home the admired hero of a battle that he had not been expected to carry, and favor in the high Sinali court had shifted from the empress to him. Talk of seeing him made emperor had reached her ears. If he were made emperor, the empress knew, her own power would vanish. He could put her away from himself, have her killed, marry a dozen other wives. Her own children with him would be hunted down and slaughtered, and the power of her family, and the dynasty that had ruled for hundreds of years, would end.
So the empress had called in her trusted medic, and had him create a powder that could be added to her husband’s food. The powder would take three days to sicken him and kill him. The small dose his taster would ingest would have almost no affect, and even the effect it did have would be days in coming.
But had anyone seen or heard what she was doing? That, of course, she could not know. But I knew.
I said, “These things you must repeat to the empress, exactly as I tell them to you. Her smallest sickness, though it saddened her, is done with, and she will recover fully. For the larger problem, it is badly contagious, and yet it has not spread so far as it might seem. Her trusted medic is a worthy man, and his cures are good. If he can but give a second dose like the first, he will rid her of this disease and set her free. Her beloved and trusted minister of the spirits, who has grown close to her adored husband, should be … consulted … on this matter.”
The empress orator first had grown still as I told him the necessary cure for the empress’s “health”; his face was turned toward mine with fixed intensity, and he seemed not to breathe. When he heard the last of my words, though, he said, “Ah. Your Eyes see clearly, blessed Oracle, to see all of that.”
He then bowed so low his head touched his knees.
“Give the empress my blessings, and tell her she is and will always be a dear friend of the Ossalenes.” And I bowed. Just a little.
He turned and hurried away, a lean man dressed in layer upon layer of expensive silk.
Others in our party had been approached, of course. The Feegash, naturally, had found themselves facing diplomats of their own people. We’d known this would happen. All they would say was that they had been sent away from the celebration of the Feegash at the orgy in Ba’afeegash with documents of surrender and treaty, and that they had been instructed by the first diplomat and premier to present these documents directly and without delay to all the representatives seated within the Grand Hall of Nations.
All of this was, of course, true. Not true in the manner that the seated Feegash diplomats or any of the representatives of Nations would expect it to be. But the surprise was, to my mind, the best part of this expedition.
At last all our people had gathered atop the landing that led into the Grand Hall, and I wish I could say we made an impressive spectacle. I could only see us as a mass of individuals, and one that took up less than half the space on the landing. We waited while Feegash diplomats and others consulted on the landing with our Feegash, who were to a one posing as diplomats who had served previously in secondary diplomatic posts or as newly raised underlings. While the seated diplomats were uncomfortable with the arrival of so many underlings and seconds, and no familiar old faces, they could not deny that the last news they’d had from the home post had been of the fall of one contingent of Tonk, followed by a tremendous worldwide holiday for all Feegash.
And here were appropriately dressed Feegash who knew the diplomatic procedures and codes, who came with a whole fleet of tame Tonk running under flags of peace and, from their point of view, submission. And with them, the Oracle Hawkspar Eyes of War, who had never before in the very long history of the oracles stepped off her island.
It certainly looked like big news and a cause for more celebration by the Feegash. Like their long-held and long-hidden plans might be moving a few steps closer to fruition in one big leap.
We waited, men argued, I drifted a bit into the waters of time and felt all the countless dangers to us in the flow.
And saw the moment had come. I was called the Living Goddess, but I had never embraced the powers of a goddess.
They lay within me, and I could reach out and pull them to me—lines of light that had stretched long in the time since I left the Citadel. They went from our island to the Ossalenes around me, across a vast ocean to the Ossalenes departed from us. They were the strings that bound us all to Ossal’s spirit, those lines, and I had done my best not to even think about them.
But I could not walk into the next arena of my life anything less than a goddess. This was my last, and greatest sacrifice, the one the woman in white had told me would come. I could pretend that I did not recognize the moment, and it would pass. Or I could burn myself to nothing taking those powers. My part, like the parts my comrades would play, was essential to the success of our mission, and if I did hide from my responsibility, we would fail.
I shook myself out of reverie and focused on where I was and what I faced. No one died well, after all. Dead was dead. At least I could do something valuable before I was consumed. I could save my people from onrushing destruction.
At last we were ushered through massive doors of solid brass, into a vaulted space so huge it dwarfed the lot of us. Voices echoed within like shouts in a cavern. I felt like an ant crawling across the vast plain of the Citadel’s Great Chapel floor. From the balconies ringed above us into that celestial dome, I could imagine that I looked like that ant, too—if I was even that significant.
“Follow, please,” a Sinali man said, bowing, and we followed, across the long, open space, to a wall of doors that seemed at first so tiny that we would have to crawl through them single file, and that when we at last reached them, were so immense we could have doubled the width of our columns from six men to twelve and still marched through with space to spare on either side.
I tried to imagine the men who had built this colossal building. I wondered at their imagination, at their vision, at their goals. They wanted to intimidate, clearly. And to awe. They wanted to shape the people who walked through this monument that they had built with hands and minds and muscles; to make them less than they had been. To humble them. I had no doubt that they had succeeded.
I was humbled.
It was just stone and concrete. Stones piled on top of stones, one after the other, concrete poured a certain way, shaped a certain way, arranged to a plan. It was a roof and walls. And yet I walked through the high vaulted corridor behind the Sinali guide, knowing that dozens of other corridors just like this one had led off from identical doorways, feeling small to the point of insignificance. Feeling unworthy of wal
king in these corridors.
I would have benefited from a few years experience in being the Eyes of War in the Citadel, I realized. No oracle who had spent several years being treated like a goddess would have permitted walking through a mere artful pile of stones to reduce her to inconsequence. She would have been a goddess still, and the stones would have been stones.
I breathed in deeply, knowing the time had come. I straightened my spine, and drew to myself the lines of light that connected me to the other oracles and to every Ossalene everywhere. In part, I drew in the tradition of hauteur and unapologetic power that had come down to me from countless generations of women who dealt with kings. I could not be small here. I could not be human. What was needed here was not the human me, but the creature who had become part of the Eyes.
I could be that creature.
I bound myself around with the raw magic that had formed the Eyes. It filled me. It embraced me.
It became me.
49
Aaran
Aaran marched into a half-bowl chamber bigger than any Faaverhend he had ever seen. Tiers of seats and long, curving tables rose like cliffs around him, and all of those seats were filled with men who stared down at the group filing into the chamber like executioners awaiting the word of the judge.
He was not ready for this. He doubted if anyone in the room was.
But they had their audience. He could identify some of the representatives by the cut of their clothes, but that wasn’t necessary. The flag or banner or shield of each nation represented in the chamber hung from the dome above the men representing it. He knew that he and the people with him had what they wanted—an audience comprised of the eyes and ears of the power brokers of the world.
