Ison of the Isles (37 page)

Suspicious of a ruse to get the gun and its precious ball away from him, Harg for an instant considered using it then and there. “I’m not giving it back,” he said.

“I’m not asking you to,” Talley answered. He held the cell gate open, and at last Harg followed him.

Outside the cell block was a guard’s room where two Torna soldiers sat playing cards. They both rose to attention as the Admiral entered. “One of you, come with us,” Talley said curtly. The guard, looking at Harg, moved to take a set of manacles down from the wall, but Talley said, “Leave those. We won’t need them.”

With the guard at Harg’s back, Talley led him up a flight of stairs and through a tall, unlit hall. Harg had his bearings now; they were making for the Gallowmarket gate. He thought he knew what this was all about.

The soldiers at the gate challenged them, but Talley’s curt order got them through. They emerged from the palace together, and Harg saw the site of next morning’s spectacle, lit by the rising moon. The wooden grandstands stood on one side, draped with bunting, and there was space for a huge audience on the other. On the execution platform below the palace walls, the stake was waiting, set horizontally on trestles. It gleamed in the moonlight, as if greased. Harg’s knees suddenly felt weak.

Talley paused, scanning the empty plaza. “We had to clear the square forcibly at sunset,” he said. “There were crowds camped out. Your countrymen are ghouls.”

“No, you’re wrong,” Harg said, his voice faint. “They know the power in what you’re about to do. Unwitnessed, it would have no sanctity or meaning.”

“Sanctity!” Talley exclaimed in disgust.

“For us, suffering consecrates and heals.”

He could feel the gun in his belt, pressing hard against his flesh. His escape. The way out that would leave things forever unresolved. There would be no catharsis, no cure, no significance to a banal death by his own hand. He needed to give the gun back. He needed to do it for the Isles, and for Inning. He tried to make his hand move to grasp the butt, and couldn’t do it. He was too much of a coward.

A wave of dizziness passed through him, and he swayed. Talley gripped his arm to keep him upright. “This way,” the Inning said. “Don’t make us carry you.”

A covered carriage drawn by two horses was parked under the shadow of the palace walls. Talley pushed Harg into it, then climbed in himself, sitting in the facing seat, and dismissed the guard. He rapped on the ceiling and the carriage lurched into motion. Harg no longer thought he knew what was going on.

They clattered through dark streets, weaving around corners, often climbing, till Harg was thoroughly lost. He tried to divine something from Talley’s manner, but the Admiral was like a mechanical man now, acting automatically. At last, from the sound of the wheels, Harg could tell they were on a dirt road. He leaned over to look out the window, and saw only fields and roadside bushes. “Where are we going?” he finally said.

“Croom,” Talley answered, his voice neutral. “There will be some friends of yours waiting there with a boat. The only promise you must give me is to leave the Forsakens by the shortest route. Otherwise you will be hunted down.”

Harg saw the gleam of Talley’s teeth as he gave a joyless smile. “You understand, this is not a bargain Inning will honour. This is strictly a private matter between you and me. My orders were to carry out your execution tomorrow, so that the High Court in Fluminos could act suitably shocked by my severity, and disavow responsibility. They weren’t sure of the repercussions, you see, and wanted to be able to pin the blame on someone else. It is always handy to have a monster to hold over people’s heads.”

His voice was unemotional. Harg stared at him, still disbelieving. “Are you acting against orders, then?” he asked.

Talley smiled thinly at him. “You could say that. I have just broken the law and helped a condemned fugitive to escape. Not even my family will be able to cover this up, not that they would try. I’ll be the one accused of treason now.” His smile was like a black glass knife.

“You deserve worse,” Harg said, thinking of all Talley had done.

Looking out the window, Talley said, “Justice is more elusive than our law implies. And mercy is nearly driven from the land.”

The racket of the wheels filled the silence between them. “What if I had used the gun and shot you back there?” Harg said.

“Then, obviously, I wouldn’t have been able to carry this plan out.”

It had been some sort of strange, twisted test. Another trial, this one of Talley’s own devising.

The carriage stopped at the head of the cliff, where the road plunged in steep switchbacks down to the sea. “You will have to walk from here,” Talley said. “The road is too dangerous for a vehicle at night. Go to a tavern called the Sunken City, on the main street. Your friends are waiting there.”

Harg sat staring at him for a second.

“Go on! Get out of here!” Talley said.

On a sudden impulse, Harg reached across and grasped Talley’s hand. For an instant, it was as if he touched the Inning’s mind; it was all laid bare, as in dhota. Harg felt a compassion that terrified him. “Let her cure you,” he said, then dived out the carriage door.

He ran the first hundred yards or so, partly out of sheer exuberance in his freedom, partly out of fear that it was all a trick, and soldiers would come out of the shadows to arrest him. On the second switchback he slowed to a walk, panting, able to see by moonlight before and behind, and no one was waiting in ambush. It was a clear, chilly night. Below, he could see the lights of Croom, and the moon cast a shiny trail on the sea, as if someone had newly buffed the waves.

The Sunken City showed signs of having been a popular place earlier in the evening. Now the crowds were gone and the staff was clearing up. He stood at the door, looking around, feeling conspicuous. Two people were still drinking at a table in the shadows; they saw him and started up. He almost dodged out the door before he recognized Katri and Tway.

They each hugged him wordlessly; no names were uttered. Katri tugged him by the arm into a shadowy alcove, whispering, “Horns, am I glad to see you whole.”

“There’s going to be some disappointed people when they have to cancel the show tomorrow,” he said. He was still trembling with the thought that he’d escaped it.

“I’ve got two boats,” Katri said. “Talley gave me my freedom on condition I get you safely to Rothur, so they’ll think you’re with me. But you won’t be. My boat will be the decoy, and the other’s yours. She’s all stocked so you won’t have to lay in to port till you reach Rothur. Want to see her?”

“Yes!”

They left the inn and headed for the dock. The boat was a sloop fitted for single-handed sailing. Harg jumped on board and began checking out the sails and lines. Katri’s boat was moored alongside. She said, “I’ll make straight south, as if to Rothur; you go west, as if to Lashnish. If anyone gives chase, they’ll follow me.” She leaped aboard her boat and disappeared below.

Tway was standing on the dock, watching. “Want a crew?” she said.

He couldn’t imagine she meant it. “I’m leaving the Isles, Tway. Only the Ashwin know if I’ll ever be back.”

“Do you think I’m as dumb as that knot you’re tying?” she said impatiently. Then, conversationally, “You’re doing it backwards.”

He looked down, found she was right, and unravelled it. He said, “You don’t know what you’re asking. The Rothurs are beasts. They make their wives live in separate houses.”

“You think I want to marry one?” Tway said.

He tried to picture Tway in Rothur—Tway, with her tart tongue and her practical grasp of what mattered. He almost laughed. It would serve the Rothurs right.

“Is that a yes or a no?” she demanded.

“You got any skills?” he said, to tease her.

She said, “I can tie knots in places you’ve never even imagined.”

“You’re hired,” he said.

She jumped aboard and quickly set about loosing the mainsail.

She was everything he came from, familiar as his own past. A part of his past he could still salvage, that he hadn’t destroyed beyond recall.

“Tway,” he said seriously, resting his arms on the transom of the cockpit, “you can find someone better than me.”

She paused to look at him over the boom. “Oh, I think you’ll do for now,” she said.

There was a good east wind, and they set course down the channel north of Rusk with the sails splayed wide. Sitting with his feet braced against the edge of the cockpit, with Tway sitting warm beside him, Harg looked up at the stars and nearly shouted in joy at his freedom.

*

Tornabay was finally getting back to normal. The mongers were back haggling in their stalls, the insurance offices were doing a brisk business, and Torna developers were looking with interest at all the real estate fortuitously cleared by the fires. Even the Adainas camping in the ruins had a new look of solidarity, as if each of them personally had outwitted Inning justice. Though the entire year of conflict had netted them precisely nothing, when they met on the street they looked like they were exchanging secret handshakes with their eyes.

“Don’t they know they’ve lost?” Nathaway said to Spaeth. “They’re so complacent to be victims.”

They stood on the balcony outside his hotel room, which looked out on the Rivermarket. She was wrapped in a woollen man’s coat that nearly reached her ankles, for the east wind was chilly. Her hair was braided and coiled on her head again, the way she liked it.

It was two days since she had told him she was pregnant. The news had staggered him. The first words out of his mouth had been, “Whose is it?”

“What do you mean? It’s mine,” she said.

“I mean, who’s the father?”

“You can be, if you want.”

He had still tried to probe, to suit his Inning notion of paternity, but it was useless. She didn’t know and didn’t care.

He was getting used to the idea now. Though it still made him jumpy, and he sometimes looked at her like a man doomed in court to a life sentence, she could tell he was already falling in love with the child, sight unseen.

Pregnancy was a lovely consolation, but there was still a hungry, empty space inside her—and would be, as long as Harg and Corbin were alive, and Corbin uncured. Her two complicated bandhotai, carrying all the cares of two incompatible worlds. She leaned against Nathaway, enjoying the simplicity of her feelings for him. He was in his usual state of unfocused dissatisfaction with the world. Nothing ever quite lived up to his expectations.

“They’re just going to fall back into that Adaina stoicism,” he said. “The Governor’s already reneging on his promises about the land, and no one will fight him.”

Spaeth squeezed his hand. “Fighting doesn’t work. What we need is dhota.”

“There’s not enough Grey People alive to do the curing the Isles need,” he said.

That was why the Emerald Tablet had passed on, she thought. She looked at Nathaway, and thought with a quirk of inner laughter that dhota had worked on him, and no dhotamar had ever touched blood to him. It had been the dhota of the ordinary Adaina that had captured him. He had absorbed the memory of them into his pores, and nothing could ever get it out of him. Perhaps the Inning empire would be the same. “They should have a care who they conquer,” she said. “They say the victor always becomes the victim.”

“Is that another of your Lashnura proverbs?”

“Yes.”

She put her arms around him, and he held her close. She said, “You think the war is over. It’s not. We’re going to beat the Innings yet, but not their way. We’ll have to do it our way, with mora. The more they make us sacrifice, the more power we will have.”

“That’s outrageous!” Nathaway said. “It’s totally unjust.”

There was a minor commotion behind them, back in the room; Bartelso had arrived. He joined them on the balcony, breathless from climbing the stairs. “My dear boy,” he said, seizing Nathaway’s hand, “I just heard the good news, that your lovely wife is adding another Talley to the world.” He turned to Spaeth, beaming. “Well done, my dear. Now I’ll get congratulated for having had the foresight to marry the two of you in time.”

Spaeth had no idea what he was talking about, but it seemed well intentioned, so she smiled. Nathaway was looking awkward. Bartelso clapped him on the back. “I dare say your mother never suspected you would be the first one to present her with a grandchild, but she will be very pleased.”

“You think so?” Nathaway said anxiously.

“I know it.” His face changed, and grew more serious. “It will soften the bad news.” He took a newspaper from his pocket and handed it to Nathaway. “They’re not going to let the Navy handle Corbin’s case. They’re going to try him before the court in Fluminos,” he said. “It’s going to become a political lynching.”

Spaeth felt a cold dread at the news. She looked up at Nathaway. They both knew what it meant. She had to follow her bandhota.

“Then we’ll go,” Nathaway said, squeezing her hand.

“You’ll love it, my dear!” Bartelso said. “It’s the most exciting city in the world. You know, if you spit from a rooftop anywhere between the Knob and Holton Street, you’re sure to hit a lawyer.”

“We’ll make an effort to try,” Nathaway said.

Bartelso looked at the two of them, sizing them up. “You’ll definitely liven the place up. Yes, indeed.”

After he had bustled off, Spaeth stood trying to convince herself that he was right, and she could be happy outside the Isles.

Nathaway put his hands on her shoulders. “You
will
like it, Spaeth,” he said. “I promise. Some night I’ll take you up onto the hills overlooking the city, and you’ll see the whole valley sparkling like a thousand stars. You’ll say there is magic in us, too.”

“I have walked other circles,” she said. “I suppose I can walk Holton Street.”

Seriously, he said, “Isn’t there any way to free you from my brother?”

She shook her head. “No way at all. I must cure him some day. When that happens, he will love me, and I will love him more than anything in the world. But it won’t change the way I love you.” She could see that it troubled him, but there was nothing she could do about it. Her ancestors had seen to that.