A Mighty Fortress (30 page)

Despite which, he could hardly wait to get off the ship. It would have been tiresome enough to spend an entire month in such confined quarters under any circumstances. Under the conditions associated with a winter passage of the Gulf, “tiresome” had quickly given way to something much closer to “intolerable.”

Of course, there
is
the little fact that every foot closer to Fairstock brings me that much closer to Zion and the Temple, as well,
he reminded himself.
On the other hand, as the Archangel Bédard said, “Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof.” If I get off this damned ship alive, I’ll be perfectly prepared to let future problems take care of themselves!

“I make it about another three hours to our anchorage, My Lord,” Yuthain said, reemerging from his contemplation of the chart. “If the visibility were better, we’d probably already have a pi lot boat coming alongside. As it is, I won’t be so very surprised if we have to feel our way all the way in on our own. Either way, though, I think we’ll have you ashore in time for supper.”

“I appreciate that, Captain. I doubt anyone could have taken better care of me on the passage than you have, but I trust I won’t offend you if I admit I’d really like to sleep in a bed that isn’t moving to night.” He grimaced. “I doubt I’ll get more than one night—maybe two, if I’m really lucky—but I intend to enjoy it to the fullest!”

“Well, I can’t say as I blame you,” Yuthain said. “Mind you, I’ve never really understood why anyone prefers sleeping ashore when he’s the option. Although, to be honest, back before I had my own cabin, and my own cot, I felt rather differently about it, I believe. Fortunately for my sea-dog image,” he grinned at his passenger again, “that’s been long enough ago now that my memory’s none too clear!”

“I’m sure that for a seasoned sailor like yourself the ship’s motion is just like a mother rocking a cradle,” Coris responded. “Still, though, I think it’s an acquired taste. And if it’s all the same to you, it’s one I’d just as soon not acquire.”

“To each his own, My Lord,” Yuthain agreed equably.

As it happened, Yuthain’s prediction was accurate. They had to make their own way until they saw the blurred, indistinct shapes of other vessels, riding at anchor, and dropped their own anchor. In fact, they’d passed close enough aboard one of the other ships to draw an irate shout of warning from its anchor watch.

“Oh, hold your noise!” Yuthain had bellowed back through his speaking trumpet. “This is an Emperor’s ship on Church business! Besides, if I’d wanted to sink your sorry arse, you silly bastard, I’d’ve hit you square amidships, not passed across your misbegotten bow!”

The noise from the other vessel had ended abruptly, and Yuthain had winked at Coris.

“Truth to tell, My Lord,” he’d admitted in a much lower voice, “I never even saw ’em until the last moment. I think I’m as surprised as they are that I didn’t cut their cable! Not that I’d ever admit it to them, even under torture!”

“Your secret’s safe with me, Captain,” Coris had assured him, then gone below to be certain Seablanket had everything packed up to go ashore.

“I’ve checked and double- checked, My Lord,” the habitually gloomy-faced valet had said then. “Still and all, I don’t doubt I’ve forgotten something. Or misplaced it. Or that one of Captain Yuthain’s sticky- fingered sailors has relieved us of it when I wasn’t looking.”

“I promise I won’t hold you responsible for someone else’s pilferage, Rhobair,” Coris had assured him. If the promise had done anything to lighten Seablanket’s gloom, Coris hadn’t noticed it. On the other hand, his valet knew their itinerary as well as he did, and he rather doubted Seablanket was any more eager than he was for the final stage of the journey.

Now, as the earl sat on the midships thwart of the ten- oared launch which had (eventually) turned up to ferry him ashore, he found his own thoughts dwelling on the prospect of the journey in question. He was, by nature, a less gloomy fellow than Seablanket, but at the moment he’d discovered his mood was very much in tune with the valet’s. The one good thing about the weather was that there was very little wind, yet that didn’t keep an open boat from feeling like Shan- wei’s own ice house, and he felt confident the bitter cold he was feeling at the moment was only a mild foreshadowing of what it was going to be like when they reached Lake Pei.

Or, for that matter, how cold it’s going to be
between
here and Lake Pei,
he told himself sourly.
Langhorne, I hope I really
do
get at least two nights in a row under a roof in a warm bed that isn’t simultaneously pitching and rolling under me!

“Easy all!” the launch’s coxswain called. “In oars . . . and bear off forward there, Ahndee!”

Coris looked up to see a long stone quay looming up close at hand. The tide had turned long enough ago to leave the high- water garland of weed and shellfish a good foot and a half clear of the harbor, and the launch slid alongside a set of stone steps, leading down into the sea. The two or three lowest of the exposed steps looked decidedly treacherous, covered with a slushy mix of residual seawater and falling snow (where they weren’t still regularly sloshed over by the weary- looking swell), but the upper steps didn’t look a lot better. There’d been enough traffic to pack the snow into ice, and it didn’t look as if anyone had spread fresh sand across them in the last several hours.

“Mind the footing, My Lord,” the coxswain warned, and Coris nodded in acknowledgment. He also reached into his purse to add an extra quarter- mark to the boat crew’s tip. That was probably exactly what the coxswain had hoped would happen, and the earl knew it, but that didn’t change his gratitude for the reminder.

“And you mind
your
footing, too, Rhobair,” he tossed over his shoulder as he stood and stepped cautiously onto solid stone for the first time in a month.

The solid stone in question seemed to be curtsying and dipping underfoot, and he grimaced at the sensation.
That
wasn’t going to help him get up these damned stairs undrenched, undrowned, and unfractured, he reflected glumly.

“I don’t want to be fishing you—or the baggage—out of the damned harbor,” he added as one of the launch’s oarsmen helped the valet move Coris’ carefully balanced trunk.

“If it’s all the same to you, My Lord, I’d just as soon you didn’t have to, either,” Seablanket replied, and Coris snorted, took a firm (and grateful) grip on the hand rope rigged through eyebolts set into the side of the quay to serve as a railing, and made his way carefully up the slippery steps.

He inhaled in relief as he finally reached the quay’s broad, flat surface intact. Everything still seemed to be moving under his feet, and he wondered how long it was going to take him to regain his land legs this time. Given how extended (and lively) the passage across the Gulf had been, he wouldn’t be surprised if it took considerably longer than usual.

He stepped away from the head of the stair, trying not to move too gingerly across the apparently swaying quay, then turned to watch Seablanket and one of the launch’s oarsmen carrying the baggage cautiously up. The valet’s expression was even more lugubrious than usual, and his long nose—red with cold—seemed to quiver, as if he could actually smell some sort of accident or dropped trunk stealing surreptitiously closer under cover of the veiling snow.

Despite any trepidation Seablanket might have felt, however, Coris’ trunks and valises made the hazardous journey up onto the quay unambushed by disaster. Seablanket had just clambered back down the slippery steps after his own more modest traveling bag when someone cleared his throat behind the earl.

He found himself facing a man wearing the blue- trimmed brown cassock of an under- priest of the Order of Chihiro under a thick, obviously warm coat. The priest seemed on the young side for his clerical rank, and although he was actually only very slightly above average in height, he also seemed somehow just a bit larger than life. The badge of Chihiro’s quill on the left shoulder of his coat was crossed with a sheathed sword, further identifying him as a member of the Order of the Sword. Chihiro’s order was unique in being divided into two sub- orders: the Order of the Sword, which produced a high percentage of the Temple Guard’s officers, and the Order of the Quill, which produced an almost equally high percentage of the Church’s clerks and bureaucrats. Coris rather doubted, given this fellow’s obviously muscular physique and the calluses on the fingers of his sword hand, that anyone really needed the shoulder badge to know which aspect of Chihiro’s order
he
served.

“Earl Coris?” the under- priest inquired in a courteous voice.

“Yes, Father?” Coris replied.

He bowed in polite acknowledgment, hoping his face didn’t show his dismay. Having someone pop up clear down here at quayside, in the middle of a snowfall, on a freezing- cold day, when no one could possibly have known
Snow Lizard
would choose today for her arrival, did not strike him as a good sign. Or not, at least, where his hope of spending a day or two in a snug, warm room was concerned.

“I’m Father Hahlys Tannyr, My Lord,” the under- priest told him. “I’ve been waiting for you for several days now.”

“I’m afraid the weather was less than cooperative,” Coris began, “and—”

“Please, My Lord!” Tannyr smiled quickly. “That wasn’t a complaint, I assure you! In fact, I know Captain Yuthain quite well, and I’m confident he got you here as swiftly as humanly possible. In fact, given what I expect the weather was like, he made rather better time than I expected, even from him. No, no.” He shook his head. “I wasn’t complaining about any tardiness on your part, My Lord. Simply introducing myself as the fellow responsible for seeing you through the next, undoubtedly unpleasant leg of your journey.”

“I see.”

Coris considered the under- priest for a moment. Tannyr couldn’t be more than thirty- five, he decided, and probably not quite that old. He was dark-haired and brown- eyed, with a swarthy complexion and the lean, lively features of a man who would never find it difficult to attract female companionship. There was what looked suspiciously like humor dancing in the depths of those eyes, and even simply standing motionless in the snow, he seemed to radiate an abundance of energy. And competence, the earl decided.

“Well, Father Hahlys,” he said after a handful of seconds, “since you’ve been so forthright, I won’t pretend I’m looking forward to the . . . rigors of our trip, shall we say?”

“Nor should you be,” Tannyr told him cheerfully. “The bad news is that it’s the better part of thirteen hundred miles as the wyvern flies from here to Lakeview, and we’re not wyverns. It’s a bit better than seventeen hundred by road, and what with snow, ice, and the Wishbone Mountains squarely in the way, it’s going to take us very nearly a month just to get there. At least the high road follows the Rayworth Valley, so we won’t have to spend all our time climbing up and down. And I’ve arranged for relays of snow lizards to be waiting at the Church post houses all along our route, so we’ll make fair time, I imagine, as long as we’re not actively weatherbound. But even the Valley’s a good seven or eight hundred feet higher than Fairstock, so I think we can safely assume the weather’s going to be miserable enough to keep us off the roads for at least the equivalent of a five- day or so, anyway.”

“You make it sound delightful, Father,” Coris said dryly, and Tannyr laughed.

“The
Writ
says truth is always better than lies, My Lord, and trying to convince ourselves it’ll be better than we know it will isn’t going to make us any happier when we’re stuck in some miserable little village inn in the Wishbones waiting for a blizzard to pass, now is it?”

“No, I don’t imagine it is,” Coris agreed. And, after all, it wasn’t as if Tannyr were telling him anything he hadn’t already realized.

“The
good
news, such as it is,” Tannyr said, “is that I think you’ll be in for a bit of a treat once we finally do get to Lakeside.”

“Indeed?” Coris cocked his head, and Tannyr nodded.

“It’s been a hard winter, My Lord, and according to the semaphore, the Lake’s already frozen pretty hard. By the time
we
get there, we won’t have to worry about hitting any open water on our way across. Well,” he corrected himself with a judicious air which was only slightly undermined by the twinkle in his eyes, “we
probably
won’t have to worry about it. You can never be entirely certain when a lead’s going to open up unexpectedly.”

“So we definitely will be taking an iceboat from Lakeview to Zion?” Coris shook his head just a bit doubtfully. “I’ve been to sea often enough, but I’ve never gone ice- sailing.”