(Shadowmarch #2) Shadowplay (59 page)

“Don’t be jealous, Pedder,” said Teodoros serenely. “I promise you my relationship with young Tim has been as chaste as it would have been with Zoria herself. But Tim, the crudeness of Master Makewell left to one side, what do you say? You could be a great help to us and earn yourself a player’s share, which can be rich indeed in Tessis, since the Syannese love plays the way the Hierosolines love religious processions.”

“I am flattered, I suppose,” Briony said carefully—she would be traveling with these people for days more, perhaps months, and didn’t want to offend them. “But the answer is no. Under no circumstances. It will not happen in this world or any other. You must think of something else.”

She only had a tennight to learn the lines. There were dozens upon dozens of them, in teetering rhyme-that-was-not-rhyme. Rehearsals came at night after whatever performance they made for their supper, so most of the work was done by candlelight in tavern courtyards and barns, while chill winds blew outside and snow and rain fell, but they could also speak lines and discuss blocking—a word she had learned meant where the actors went in and out or stood—as they made their way down the Great Kertish Road toward Syan.

I have fallen so far,
she thought.
From a princess in a castle to a false goddess with no home, with straws in my hair and fleas in my woolen hose.

Still, there was an unfamiliar freedom in such a collapse from grace. Briony was not happy, but she was not sad, either, and she had to admit that however lonely and uncomfortable it might be, and however much she missed her home and family, she was having something that could only be described as an adventure.

A
LREADY SMOKE LAY OVER the Kulloan Straits like thick fog, great curtains of gray and black torn ragged by the wind. The Xixian ships churned up and down before the walls of Hierosol, their long banks of oars stabbing at the water like the legs of insects, fire spouting from their cannons. The defenders fired back: white spouts leaped up to show where the Hierosoline cannons were finding their range, and many of the Xixian sails were tattered, the flaming eye insignia in flames, but none of the besiegers had been sunk yet. Still, it was a little solace to Pelaya to see that the cannonfire that reached Hierosol’s walls did almost no damage.

“Look, Babba,” she said, tugging on her father’s arm. “They bounce off like pebbles!”

He smiled, barely. “Our walls are strong and thick. But that does not mean I want you here watching. You have given me your mother’s message, and my midday meal.” He turned to the armed servant, a tall man with the long-suffering look of someone in minor but almost constant pain. “See her back, now, Eril. And tell my wife that she and the children are no longer to come to the palace, not unless I say they may.”

The servant bowed. “Yes,
Kurs
Perivos. And I will inform the
kura,
as you say.”

Pelaya rose onto the tips of her toes to throw her arms around her father’s neck, not caring one little bit about either Eril’s frown of disapproval or her father’s distracted, half-attentive squeeze in return.

“You should not act so,
Kuraion,
” the servant reproached her as they made their way out of the antechamber and onto the landing. He had called her “Little Mistress” since she was small enough to enjoy it—a time long past. “Not before strangers.”

“What strangers, Eril?” She was particularly nettled because she always did her best to uphold the honor of her house—and it was high honor, too: the Akuanai were of the blood of the Devonai, the dynasty that had ruled all Hierosol only a few short centuries before, and whose funeral masks lined the entrance hall of the family estate in Siris like an assembly of patient, placid ghosts. She might not be as timid as Teloni of speaking out in public, but neither did she run or giggle like a child: those who saw her, she had always felt sure, saw a young woman as grave and serious-minded as befitted her upbringing and her noble house.

“There were soldiers there,” he said. “Your father’s men.”

“Theo and Damian? And Spiridon? They have all been in our house,” she told him. “They are not strangers, they are like uncles.” She thought of Damian, who was really quite handsome. “Young uncles, perhaps. But they are not strange to me, and it is no shame to embrace my father in front…”

She did not finish her statement because something outside the antechamber boomed like thunder, making the statue of Perin sway in the wall shrine above the landing. Pelaya squeaked with fear despite herself, then ran to the window.

“What are you doing, child?” The servant almost grabbed her arm to pull her away, but then thought better of taking such a liberty. “Come away. A cannonball will kill you!”

“Don’t be foolish, Eril.” Whatever else she might be, Pelaya was her father’s daughter. “They cannot shoot their cannon this far, all the way to the citadel, not unless they are inside our walls already. But, oh, sweet mother Siveda, look!”

A thick plume of gray black smoke was rising beside the ancient walls—one of the buildings along the quay of the Harbor of Nektarios.

“It must be the powder magazine, hit by some stray shot. Oh, look at it burn!” Had her forward-thinking father not moved much of the powder stored for convenience in the immense harbor magazine, parceling it out to at least a dozen different storage places all over the city, half of the city’s black powder would be gone now, not to mention the harbor itself, which would have almost certainly been destroyed. Instead, it looked as though only one building, the magazine itself, had been ruined, and if the fire could be put out quickly the loss would be bearable.

“I must tell my father,” she said, leaving Eril to catch up as best he could as she scuttled back up the stairs.

“What are you
doing?
” her father shouted as she came in. He looked angry, truly angry, and for the first time she realized that the city might fall—that they all might die. She was so overwhelmed by this sudden, terrifying understanding that for a moment she could not speak.

“The magazine…” she said at last. “The one in the Harbor of Nektarios. It was hit by…it’s exploded.”

His expression softened a little. “I know. There is a window in the next room, do not forget. Go, and hurry to your mother as I told you. She will be frightened—I’m sure she could hear that crash in Landsman’s Market.”

He is defending the whole city,
she thought, staring at him. Her father had already turned back to the table and was examining his charts again, his big hands splayed across the curling parchments like the roots of tall trees. For a moment she found it hard to breathe.

Pinimmon Vash, Paramount Minister to the Golden One Sulepis, Autarch of Xis, did not like traveling on ships. The sea air that had so delighted his ancestors when they came out of the deserts of Xand and settled on the northern shore of the continent smelled to him of putrefaction. The rolling motion of the waves made him feel again as he had in his childhood, when he had caught the bilious fever and lain for days near death, unable to keep anything in his stomach, shivering and sweating. In fact, his survival of that fever had been so unexpected that his father had dedicated the sacrifice of an entire ram to the goddess Sawamat (something that Vash would never have mentioned to the autarch, who barely acknowledged that any other gods beside Nushash existed).

Now, as he teetered down the ramp, he was so grateful to be on dry land again that he offered a silent prayer of thanks to her and to Efiyal, lord of the sea.

The long bight of land known as the Finger, which jutted out into the Kulloan Strait parallel to the western shore of Hierosol, was almost invisible from where he stood at its southernmost tip. Billows of gray and stinking yellow smoke hung close to the ground, so that in the few places where the walled fortifications could be seen at all they seemed to float atop clouds like the palaces of the gods. The fighting, which had begun at midnight with an invasion of the autarch’s marines from both the landward edge of the Finger and the place where Vash’s ship had just landed, was almost over. The Hierosoline garrisons, undermanned because Drakava had (against the recommendations of his leading advisers) withdrawn so many soldiers in preparation for the siege, had put up a brave resistance, but the small fortresses had proved vulnerable to the missiles of burning sulfur and straw the autarch’s catapults had flung over the walls by the hundreds before the morning sun had climbed above the horizon. The defenders, choking, blinded, many of them dying from the poisonous smoke, had been unable to repel the autarch’s marines, who, protected by masks of wet Sanian cotton, were able to hoist their siege ladders and clamber over the walls almost unopposed once the worst of the smoke had blown away. The defenders had offered resistance, but weakened, breathless, and blinded, they had fallen before the marines like brave children fighting grown men.

If we could use that tactic on Hierosol itself,
Vash thought,
the war would be over in a few days.
But there was not enough sulfur for that in all of Xand, nor enough catapults to throw it, even in the autarch’s huge army. Still, he could not help admiring how well Ikelis Johar and the other polemarchs had planned for the siege. The cannons jutting from the walls of the fortresses along the Finger might not be able to reach the walls of Hierosol, but they were an invaluable aid to its defense, able to rake the near side of any ships in the strait, or drive them in under the bigger guns of the city walls.

The autarch’s pavilion had already been mounted on the slope beside the gangplank of his flagship, the
Flame of Nushash,
a towering four-masted warship painted (in defiance of any secrecy about its semi-divine passenger) in blindingly bright shades of red and gold and purple, with the great, flaming god’s eye on either side of the bow and the autarch’s royal falcon spread-winged in gold across the red sails. The recently erected pavilion was no more restrained, a striped cone almost fifty paces across flying two dozen falcon banners. Vash limped toward it, angrily waving away the offers of help from his guards. Sulepis, the Golden One, had already made it clear he suspected his paramount minister’s loyalty: the last thing Vash needed was for the youthful autarch to see him staggering in on the arms of soldiers. He might as well announce himself old and useless and be done with it.

The autarch, dressed in his fanciful battle-array of golden armor and the flame-scalloped Battle Crown, was sitting on his war throne atop a raised platform at the center of the tent, talking to the Overseer of the Armies. Dozens of slaves and priests surrounded him, of course, along with a full troop of his Leopard guards in armor, muskets in hand, their eyes as brightly remorseless as those of their namesakes.

“Vash, welcome!” The autarch spread his fingers like claws, then scratched himself under the chin with the figured tip of his golden gauntlet. “You should have stayed on the ship a little longer, resting yourself, since we are going back to the landing spot soon anyway.”

“I’m sorry, Golden One, I don’t understand.”

The autarch smiled and looked to Ikelis Johar, who nodded but maintained his customary stony expression. “The Royal Crocodiles are coming ashore.”

For a moment Vash was completely confused, wondering what bizarre new plan his impulsive master had conceived. Was he going to put some of the massive reptiles from Xis’ canals into the strait, or even introduce them somehow to the waterways behind the Hierosoline walls? The great beasts were certainly fearsome enough, even the younger adults longer than a fishing boat and armored like a siege engine, but who could make them do anything useful?

It was a mark of how strange and impulsive the autarch was, and how unpredictable life was in his service, that Vash was still trying to understand how crocodiles could be used in warfare even as he and Ikelis Johar and a crowd of servants and soldiers followed the autarch’s litter back toward the ships. Only as he saw the monstrous thing being swung up from the hold of one of the six biggest cargo ships did Pinimmon Vash remember.

“Ah, Golden One, of course! The guns!”

“The largest, most beautiful in the history of mankind,” said the autarch happily. “Each crafted like exquisite jewelry. What a roar they will make, my crocodiles! What a fiendish, terrifying roar!”

The immense bronze tube was six or seven times the length of a man, and even without its undercarriage, its weight was clearly staggering—several pentecounts of seamen were pulling on the ropes, trying to steady it as they swung the cannon barrel out over the side of the boat, the massive winding-wheels and pulleys creaking with the strain. The weapon had indeed been cast to resemble some monstrous river reptile, with inset topaz eyes and fanged jaws stretched wide to make the cannon’s mouth, and the creature’s rounded back ridged with scaly plates. This one and its brothers would fire huge stone balls, each missile ten times the weight of a man, and if the autarch’s engineers were correct (they had been informed they would die painfully if they were wrong) they would easily be able to reach the far side of the strait from the forts along the Finger.

“Come,” said the autarch after they had watched the sweating sailors lower the gun onto a giant wheeled wagon. “How fortunate for us that the old emperors of Hierosol made this fine, paved road for their supply wagons, otherwise we would have to drag the guns through the sand and the waiting would be even more tedious. I will have my morning meal, and then perhaps about midday we will be able to hear our first lovely crocodile speak. Come, Vash. We will attend to all other business as I eat.”

The autarch had rather conspicuously not said anything about his paramount minister being fed. An hour on dry land had settled Vash’s stomach and he was feeling extremely hungry, but he effortlessly stifled a sigh: all of the autarch’s servitors either mastered the art of hiding their feelings and stifling their needs, or else their cooling bodies were picked clean on the vulture shrines.

Vash bowed. “Of course, Golden One. As you say.”

“I ask your pardon for disturbing you, King Olin,” said Count Perivos.

The bearded man smiled. “I am afraid I cannot entertain you in the way I could have in my old home, but you are welcome, sir. Please, come in.” He waved to the page, who was watching with trepidation: Olin was only a foreign king, but everyone knew his visitor was of an important and ancient Hierosoline family. “Be so good as to pour us some wine, boy,” Olin said. “Perhaps some of the Torvian.”

Perivos Akuanis looked around the king’s cell, which was furnished in moderate comfort, though not exactly overlarge. “I am sorry you must live this way, Your Highness. It would not have been my choice.”

“But Ludis wished it so. He must have some hidden qualities, the lord protector, that he has a man as famous as you in his employ.”

Perivos began to say something, then looked over to the guards standing on either side of the door. “You may wait outside, you two. I am in no danger.”

They eyed him for a moment before going out. Count Perivos cleared his throat.

“I will be honest with you, Olin Eddon, because I believe you are an honorable man. It is not so much loyalty to Ludis that keeps me here, although the man did pull the country back into stability after a long civil war, but loyalty to my city and nation. I am a Hierosol man, through and through.”

“But you are of high blood yourself. Why is it that you yourself did not try to take the throne, or support someone more to your liking?”

“Because I knew with things being as they are I could do more good this way. I am not a king or even a king’s counselor. I am a soldier, and of a particular kind at that. My science is siege war, which I learned from Petris Kopayis, the best of this age. I knew I had no choice but to use that knowledge to try to save my city and its people from the bloody-handed autarchs of Xis. Thus, I could not afford to take sides in the last throes of the civil war.”