Ships from the West (31 page)

There was Dweomer in this man.

No, that was not correct. It was something else. An adamantine strength greater than the craft of mages, an
anti
-Dweomer perhaps. He could not fully explain it, even to himself, but he realised that here was a man whose will would never be tamed, whom no spell would ever subdue. And this also: Odelia’s dying instincts had been correct. In victory, this man might well revel in an enormous bloodletting. His wife’s fate had kindled an unassuageable pain in him which sought outlet in violence. And Golophin, in ignorance, had just stoked the fires of his torment higher.

Three more days the army laboured painfully and slowly up the Gelkarak glacier. They were struck by a series of brief, vicious snowstorms which cost them dearly in horses and mules, and they lost another artillery piece to a crevasse, as well as the two dozen men who were roped to it. There was a crack like a gunshot, and it sank through the crust of snow and ice and dragged them screaming to their deaths like a series of fish snared on a many-hooked line. The troops were warier after that, and their speed decreased as they realised that it was to some extent a matter of luck whether a man put his foot in the wrong place or not. Pack mules were unladen and harnessed to the guns in the place of men, but this meant that the army marched more heavily burdened than ever. They were making at best two and a half leagues a day, and often much less, and Corfe estimated that no more than half their journey was behind them.

The air grew thin and piercing, and even the fittest of the men gasped for breath as he marched. Mercifully though, the weather cleared again, and though the raging, intense cold was a torture in the star-bright nights, the days remained fine and sunlit. Many of the animals became lame as the surface crust of the snow gashed their legs, and the cavalry quickly learned to bind wrappings about the hocks of their mounts. But the cold was wearing down both animals and men. Soon there were many cases of frostbite and snow blindness, mostly among the Torunnans, and after a meeting of the senior officers it was decided that those so afflicted would be left behind with a small guard to make their way back eastwards as soon as they were able. With them stayed scores of worn-out animals that might yet bear the weight of men, and a good store of rations.

But they were over the highest point of their passage, and had left the glacier road behind. There was a narrow pass leading off to the west-south-west and this they took, following the ancient trail described in Corfe’s text. It was a harder road than the glacier, being much littered and broken with boulders and shattered stones, but it was less treacherous, and the men’s spirits rose.

And at last there came the evening, twenty-four days out of Torunn, when the army paused on the opening of a great glen between two buttresses of rock, and looked down to see the vast expanse of the Torian Plains darkling below under the sunset, and closer by, almost at their feet it seemed, there glittered red as blood the Sea of Tor.

The army was fewer by over a thousand men and several hundred mules and horses, but it had accomplished the crossing of the Cimbrics and there were now only thirty leagues of easy marching between it and Charibon.

Nineteen

Aurungabar had seen a sultan and his queen buried, and a new sultan and his queen wed and crowned, all in the same month. The city was still unsettled and volatile, but the presence within its walls of a host of soldiery entirely loyal to Sultan Nasir had a considerable soothing effect. The harem had been purged of all those who had fomented intrigue in the brief interregnum and Ostrabar’s absolute ruler had proved his mettle, acting swiftly and without mercy. A youth he might be, but he had an able vizier in the shape of Shahr Baraz the Younger, and it was rumoured that his new Ramusian wife was a great aid to him in the consolidation of his position. A sorceress of power she was reputed to be, even mightier than her witch of a mother. Unruly Aurungabar had been swiftly cowed therefore, and it was rumoured throughout the city that the Sultan already felt sure enough of his position to wish to set out immediately for the wars of the west.

He was closeted with his new vizier in one of the smaller suites off the Royal Bedchamber. He sat at a desk leafing through a pile of papers whilst Shahr Baraz stood looking over his shoulder, pointing something out now and again, and the spring rain lashed at the windows and the firelight sprang up yellow in the hearth to one side. A set of Merduk half-armour stood on a wooden stand by the door, and a scab-barded tulwar had been set on the mantelpiece. At last Nasir rubbed his eyes and straightened back from the desk with a mighty yawn. He was slim and dark, with olive skin and grey eyes, and he was dressed in a robe of black silk which shimmered in the firelight.

‘All this can wait, Baraz. It’s frivolous stuff, this granting of offices and remission of taxes.’

‘It is not, Nasir,’ the older man said forcefully. ‘Through such little boons you buy men’s loyalty.’

‘If it must be bought it is not worth having.’

Shahr Baraz gave a twisted smile. ‘That sounds like your mother speaking.’

Nasir bowed his head, and his clear eyes darkened. ‘Yes. I never thought I would get it this way, Baraz. Not this way.’

The vizier laid a hand on his shoulder. ‘I know, my Sultan. But it rests on your shoulders now. You will grow into it in time. And you have made a fair beginning.’

Nasir’s face lit up again, and he turned round. ‘Only fair?’ They both laughed.

The door was knocked, and without further ceremony the Queen entered, also clad in midnight silk. Her golden hair was down and her marmoset clung to her shoulder cluttering gently, its eyes bright as jewels.

‘Nasir, are you ever coming to bed? It’s hours past the middle of the—’ She saw Shahr Baraz and folded her arms.

Nasir rose and went to her. The vizier watched them as they looked upon each other, half shy still, but an eagerness in their eyes. That, at least, had turned out well, he thought. One must be thankful for small mercies. And those not so small.

‘I’m being drowned in dusty details,’ Nasir told his wife, ‘when all I want is to get on the road with the army.’

‘Are you sure that is all you want, my lord?’ They grinned at one another like two mischievous children, and indeed they were neither of them yet eighteen years of age.

‘The army marches in the morning, my Queen,’ Shahr Baraz said, his deep old voice bringing them up short.

‘I knew that,’ Mirren said with the laughter gone from her face. ‘Golophin spoke to me. He has been in and out of here for days. If Nasir is to be up before the dawn he must have some rest at least.’

‘I quite agree,’ Shahr Baraz said. ‘Now the Sultan and I have some last business to attend to, lady, and the night is passing.’

Mirren’s eyes narrowed, and the marmoset hissed at Shahr Baraz. The rebellion in her face faded however, seeing the vizier’s implacable eyes. She kissed Nasir on the mouth and left. When the Sultan turned around with a sigh he found the old man shaking his head and smiling.

‘You make a handsome pair, the dark and the gold. Your children will be fair indeed, Nasir. You have found yourself a fine queen, but she is as strong-willed and stubborn as an army mule.’ When Nasir’s mouth opened in outrage Shahr Baraz laughed, and bowed. ‘So says Golophin. For he has spoken to me also, the old meddler. She is her father’s daughter in more ways than one. And in truth she reminds me somewhat of—’ And then he stopped, though they both knew what he had been about to say.

The Merduk army marched out before sunrise, when the streets were as quiet as they ever became in the capital. They formed up in Glory of God Square where once the statue of Myrnius Kuln had frowned, and then led off in long files by prearranged streets to the West Gate. It was a cold, clear night with the sun not yet begun to glimmer over the Jafrar in the east, and King Corfe of Torunna, who had once fled through this very gate as Aekir burned about him, was not yet in the high foothills of the Cimbrics. Nasir was leading fifteen thousand heavily armoured cavalry westwards to the aid of the kingdom which had once been his people’s bitterest foe. But he was young, and dwelt seldom on such ironies. Besides, half of his own blood belonged to that people. As did his new wife, whom he already knew he loved.

That same dawn found two ships coursing swift as cantering horses across the eastern Levangore. Their masts were rigid with almost every sail they possessed and their decks were black with men. All through the previous evening and the night they had been hurtling north-north-east with the freshening wind on their larboard quarters, and now to port loomed the purple shapes of the southern Cimbric Mountains as they marched down to the sea east of the Candelan river. Torunna, last free Kingdom of the West, rising up in the dawn light with the snow on the summits of the mountains catching the sun first, so that they tinted scarlet and pink and seemed to be disembodied shapes floating over the darker hills below.

Murad stared at that sunrise briefly and then focused once more on the ship ahead. The xebec had tried to lose them in the night, but the moonlight had been too bright and the eyes of the pursuers too keen. She was little more than four cables ahead now, almost within gunshot, and the
Revenant
was closing the gap.

The thing which had once been the Lord of Galiapeno glanced aft to see a man in the black of an Inceptine habit standing before the mainmast, solid and unyielding as a stone gargoyle despite the pitch and roll of the barquentine. From him there seemed to hum a silent vibration which could be felt underfoot in the wood of the decks. A soundless mrumming which, Murad knew, was responsible for the present speed, or part of it.

For Richard Hawkwood was too canny a sailor to be caught by conventional seamanship. He had survived the storm sent to sink him and they had almost lost him in the vast sea wastes of the Levangore, until one of Murad’s homunculi had glimpsed him by chance as it flew high and far beyond its master in search of news. There would be no second storm -such tactics were obviously inadequate. No, to Murad’s great joy Aruan had given him leave to capture the
Seahare
intact if he chose, and dispose of her crew in any way he wished -provided Hebrion’s Queen met her end in the process. What a pleasure it would be to meet his old shipmate and comrade again, and to preside over his unhurried death.

Murad knew much of death. On the night of the fleet’s destruction he had become lost in the fog on his way back from the flagship, and thus had watched from his longboat as that great armada was reduced to matchwood all about him. He remembered prising the fingers of desperate drowning survivors from the gunwales of his little craft lest they swamp it in their panic. He had bade his men row them out, far out into the fog, and there they had leant on their oars and watched the ships burning through the mist, listening to the screams. They had escaped that slaughter, or so he had thought.

Then the mage had come in a furious storm of black flame which incinerated Murad’s companions in a flashing second and seemed like to do the same to himself. But a curious thing had happened.

‘ know you,
a voice had said. Murad had lain in the smoking bottom of the longboat with the swells washing around his charred body, and the thing had hovered over him like a great bat. He felt he were being turned this way and that for inspection, though he had not been touched.

Kill him,
another voice said, a familiar voice. But the first laughed.

‘ think not. He may well prove useful.

Kill him!

No. Put aside your past hates and prejudices. You and he are more similar than you think. He is mine.

And thus had Murad of Galiapeno been taken into the service of the Second Empire.

And he had been willing to serve. All his life he had hated mages and witches and the workings of the Dweomer, but more than that Murad had chafed at his subordination to men he deemed less able than himself, even Hebrion’s last King. Now he took orders from one he acknowledged to be his superior, and there was a strange comfort in it. He was at last glad to merely do as he was told, and if the orders he received chimed with his own inclinations, so much the better. As for the Dweomer, well he had become reconciled to it, for was it not now a part of him?

And what was more, he would be ruler of Hebrion once this woman he pursued was dead. It had been promised, and Aruan always kept his promises.

‘Run out the bow-chasers,’ he said, and his crew jumped to do his bidding. A few of them were ordinary mercenaries, sailors of many navies, but most were tall, gleaming black men of the Zanru. They had cast aside their horn carapaces and now teams of them hauled sweating on the cables which trundled out the forward-aimed guns of the ship until they came to bear on the stern of their prey.

‘Usunei!’ ‘Yes, lord.’

‘Let us see if we cannot scratch his paintwork. Fire when ready.’

The grunting gun crews levered the two culverins round with handspikes while the gun captains sighted along the bronze barrels with smoking slow-match grasped in their fists. At last they were content and held up their free hands. As the bow of the ship rose they whipped the match across the touch-holes, springing aside with the grace of panthers as the culverins went off as one and leapt inboard, squealing on their trucks. A cloud of smoke went up and was quickly winnowed into nothing by the wind and the speed of the ship’s passage. Watching intently, Murad saw two splashes just short of the
Seahare’s
stern.

‘Good practice! More elevation there, and we shall have her.’

The next shots could be followed by those with quick eyes: two dark blurs which punched holes in the xebec’s mizzen course and then sent splinters flying from something in her waist. Murad laughed and clapped his hands, and the gun crew’s faces split in wide, fanged grins.

A minute later the xebec’s wounded mizzen course split from top to bottom and flapped madly from the yard. Spray struck Murad in the mouth and he licked the salt tang of it away, his eyes shining. The
Seahare
lost speed. The next pair of shots went home in the mizzen rigging and he saw a small, wriggling figure blown off the yard and flung into the sea.