“That was you?”
The swordsman smiled. “It was. Ciras was the silent, suffering priest.”
Tyressa turned to look at Ciras, then back to Moraven. “If you were in disguise on the boat, why drop it in Asath?”
Ciras answered. “My Master charged me with the duty of listening to all but himself. There were two men on the Catfish from Asath, and they watched Keles Anturasi very closely. We were not certain why, but then when the ship docked, an official delegation met Keles and took him off to Lord-Mayor Yiritar’s house to stay. We suppose that the actor did something there to let the mayor penetrate the deception.”
“It wasn’t what he did, but what he didn’t do.”
Keles hoped the darkness hid his blush. “When I was here before, I lost a bet with the Lord-Mayor. He cheated, and we both knew it, so I promised him a dozen bottles of the best brandy Moriande had to offer. I told him I would deliver it myself, and we both knew I was lying since I would never return. I’d never mentioned the incident, and had quite forgotten it. My double would not have known and likely did not respond correctly.”
Tyressa shook her head. “But why send people out looking for us?”
Moraven shifted in the saddle. “The Lord-Mayor, knowing he was deceived, looked for everyone from the Catfish. He wanted to determine if the Prince had sent spies upriver. He may have even supposed, when he learned the actor was not you, that you were the spy.”
Keles nodded. “Who better to determine that he’s been taking the Prince’s money and doing none of the work required? Of course, if he did, the river would be clear and his town would cease to exist.”
The elder swordsman nodded. “That makes perfect sense. Thank you for solving that riddle.”
“My pleasure. If you would not mind, you could solve one for me.”
“Yes?”
“Can you tell me what is in the sealed orders Tyressa is carrying?”
“I do not know. I know what I believe they say, but it is speculation.”
Keles smiled. “Go ahead, speculate.”
Moraven shook his head slowly. “No, I think not. There may be many dangers between here and Gria. To speculate would distract us. What the Prince means us to know will be revealed when we reach Gria.”
“What if we don’t get that far?”
“Then whatever he would have tasked us with is immaterial, isn’t it, Master Anturasi?” Moraven laughed quickly. “Let us get to Gria and prove ourselves worthy of the Prince’s command.”
Chapter Thirty
27th day, Month of the Dog, Year of the Dog
9th Year of Imperial Prince Cyron’s Court
162nd Year of the Komyr Dynasty
736th year since the Cataclysm
Thyrenkun, Felarati
Deseirion
Prince Pyrust pulled his black cloak more tightly around himself and snarled. A glance in a looking glass reminded him that he now appeared very much like the model for the toy soldier of himself the Naleni had created. While his spymaster had told him he was not being played, and that it was good for Prince Cyron to underestimate him, being seen as a child’s amusement rankled.
It was not this alone that consumed him or made his thoughts as dark as his capital city. Upon his return he had called his chief ministers to him and demanded a full and forthright accounting of the harvest. They were hesitant—so much so he had to explain that while the sons and daughters of Deseirion would continue to enter the bureaucracy, their sons and daughters might not be among them. He did not elaborate, letting each man’s fears spur him on to action.
The full report had been even more dire than Prince Cyron had suggested. While Pyrust was forced to assume that the harvest had been underreported, even a generous estimate of supplies would have his people eating rice they needed to be sprouting and planting next spring. There was no way all of his people would survive without Naleni rice.
The ministers had even estimated a die-off of five to ten percent of the population. They did allow as how it would mostly be the old and the very young, but they cast that in the form of a tragedy. Even Cyron had seen it that way when he noted that Pyrust would not starve, but his people would.
The Desei Prince chuckled, for neither his neighbor to his south nor even the Desei bureaucrats understood the true joy of power and how it could be employed. If he deemed it necessary, he could keep the children alive, and even the ancient ones. He would simply order that food be given to them preferentially, and that if a child or elder died of malnutrition, their families would be slain, their goods divided and their ancestors’ bones scattered. He need not even carry out such a threat, but just spread the story of one or two places where it happened, and gossips would carry it far and wide. Overnight the reports would universally be attributed to a village or town a valley or two away, and everyone would toe the line lest their village be hit next.
The thing of it was, however, Pyrust saw no difficulty in carrying out his order. He could simply select a perfectly innocent family or two, accuse them of having a child die of malnutrition, and destroy them. Aside from being a superior means of eliminating local political troublemakers, a single true act was better than a hundred manufactured stories.
Still, the loss of five or even ten percent of his population, provided it was from the unproductive margins of society, seemed more of a blessing than a tragedy. His people were a herd that had overgrazed their range. A die-off was inevitable, and it would be the weak who died. Those who survived would be stronger, and would not be bothered with needing to care for the weak. The whole ordeal would make his nation stronger.
While he was fully prepared to accept this purge of his people, he resisted it for one simple reason—he loathed situations that were forced upon him, by man or the gods. If he could find a way to defy either, it pleased him. Immediately upon his return to Felarati, he had put into place several plans that did begin to make a difference, both for the short term and longer.
Delasonsa’s suggestion about making one military unit into two, and using the other to train villagers into militia units had begun in earnest. Pyrust had ordered villages to provide warriors for service in a local militia. He would feed those who joined, as well as provide extra quor of rice for the villages from whence they came. Those shipments would, of course, be delayed so the villages, which now had fewer mouths to feed, would eat off supplies that should have been made available to the Crown. The soldiers would be fed from the Naleni grain. Not only was there irony to that, but the golden rice from the south provided more nutrition than that grown locally.
He would allow the militias a month’s training, then put them to work in the second part of his plan. In response to hard times and tight markets, a system of smuggling and tax avoidance always sprang up. He would move the militia into the bigger cities and use them to hunt down and destroy the criminal element. They would liberate great stores of hoarded grain, some of which they would be allowed to convey back home, giving the militias combat experience as well as the joy of entering their villages as heroes. They would be lauded as having performed a service for the Crown, which would make them see themselves as part of the state. Once they began to identify with him and the nation, they would be his to use.
Reports from the training fields suggested that perhaps as many as one in five of the recruits might be talented enough to be trained as a warrior. This hardly surprised him, both because levies were regularly called up and those who survived battle with little or no training must have had some minor talent to begin with. As well, the tools used in cutting and threshing were, in essence, swords and flails. A farmer’s normal activities honed skills that were translatable into something Pyrust would find more useful. If the recruits accepted the call to further training, he paid a bonus to their families, the village and the village’s headman, which helped all of them to convince young men and women to accept the honor of further training.
Most recently, his ministers reported Naleni displeas
ure with his troops’ continuing attacks within Helosunde. The protests had come through the lowest diplomatic levels because the Mountain Hawks’ attacks had all been in response to Helosundian raids. Because those raids had been easy enough to provoke, and his response to them had been fierce, neither Cyron nor his people were fooled. Still, he felt fairly certain that as much as he was being admonished to stop all operations, so were the Helosundians, and that served his purposes as well.
Pyrust closed his half hand over his goatee and tugged on it unconsciously. There had been threats that rice shipments would be delayed or stopped, as Delasonsa had predicted, but Pyrust knew he could not withdraw all pressure from Helosunde. Cyron himself had said that he would willingly toss food to a wolf to keep him away from the door. If I do not show him fang, he will forget I am a wolf.
The Desei Prince crossed the creaking cedar floor, slid open the door to his tower’s southern balcony, and passed out into the dusk. Already, Fryl—the large, white owl-moon—had begun to rise from the sea. Its light revealed jagged silhouettes of the city’s rooftops.
Fog had risen to nibble at the wharves in Swellside. A thick tentacle stole its way up the sluggish Black River, while other small feelers filled streets and alleys. Yellow lights burned in windows and atop streetlamps, but the mist soon muted them. Only the gyanri lights on the largest trio of bridges over the river held the fog at bay. They glowed like sapphires, and the pattern in which they had been arranged revealed to him the constellation Shiri—the hawk.
Pyrust’s hands emerged from beneath his cloak as he leaned on the stone balustrade. Black stone had been used to shape the tower, for it hid the dirt and grime of the city. Likewise it contrasted sharply with the white towers of Moriande, mocking them. Felarati defied and challenged Moriande, as it had for ages, though seldom had the south felt any real threat.
Deseirion had always been a frontier province in the Empire. Its only worth, initially, had been as a place to stage troops to slow down barbarians. The early Emperors had created a string of fortresses to garrison troops, and slowly towns had grown up around them. Felarati had been the largest of these and the most vital, since supplies passed through it, up the Black River and its tributaries to the other fortresses.
A plague among the Turasynd killed enough of them to minimize their power for several centuries before the Time of Black Ice. Imperial interest in Deseirion waned as peace and prosperity waxed. Imperial support withered, but instead of retreat, the bold souls who had come to make Deseirion their home decided to stay. Prospectors found deposits of iron, copper, tin, and coal. The mineral wealth gave rise to foundries, with iron, bronze, and steel flowing south in return for gold and rice. Existence in Deseirion was not soft as it was in the south, but the Desei reveled in it.
The Emperors and other nobles also used Deseirion as a dumping place for obstreperous offspring and rebel generals. The Desei took these outcasts to their hearts, training them and molding them to survive in the unforgiving north. The people of the frontier knew they needed to be more united than the decadent provinces to the south. If they were not the strongest and purest of the Imperial people, the barbarians would come through and destroy the Empire.
When the Empress left to fight the Turasynd, leading them into Ixyll, she drew her last troops from the Desei. She gave control of the province to a small but clever man who kept Desei from Helosundian conquest by constant reports of pitched battles in which his people were the only thing that stopped hordes from pouring over the Black River. Though these battles were as mythical as the Mountains of Ice, his Helosundian counterpart—a cousin who was a grand warrior but stupid enough that he had trouble discerning day from night—prepared his nation for invasion and never furthered his ambition.
And when the Cataclysm came, it wiped out ambition along with much of the population. Since that time, Deseirion had changed dynasties every ninety to hundred and twenty years. As always, the perception in the outlying areas was that city life had softened the Prince into a southerner. Pyrust’s father knew that this fate would destroy his dynasty, so he launched the attack on Helosunde. Not only did the successful invasion make pride burn hotter and deeper in the hearts of his countrymen, but being constantly caught between Turasynd and Helosundian threats meant they had little time to think about weakness in Felarati.
Pyrust chuckled and looked at his maimed hand, corpse-white against the cold, black stone. Those missing fingers had proven how hard he could be. While the hawk remained the symbol of Deseirion, his personal flags had two feathers clipped from the hawk’s left wing. Four of his best units claimed to have his finger bones in their headquarters, where they were revered and worshiped much as the bones of great warriors were.
Felarati, the Dark City, spread out before him. Factories and forges belched black clouds full of red sparks into the air. Their foul stink permeated everything, muting even the finest of scents from the south. It poisoned the air, tainted the food, and soured the wine. It tainted the snow that fell, and made the Black River even darker as it entered the sea.
Pyrust saw no virtue in this state of his city, but neither did he see a way to get away from it. Out there in the factories, gyanridin worked on their inventions. Perhaps one of a hundred gyanrigot devices would actually work, and one of a hundred of those might be useful. He had reviewed plans for everything from riverboats that would row themselves to giant tripod figures that could carry troops, batter down city walls, and resist every attack. Neither of those plans had come to fruition yet, but they would.
If I can afford to continue financing them. Deseirion had spirit the way Nalenyr had gold, but it did not spend as easily or go as far. He had plenty of people traveling to the west to bring back thaumston to power the devices, but the west was not kind, and the supplies returning to the capital were both scant and costly.
The Prince caught the scrape of boot on stone and knew it well. He also knew he’d not have heard it, save that Delasonsa wished to announce her presence. He did not turn to face her but shifted to lean on his elbows. “What do you have for me, Mother of Shadows?”
The crone remained in her hooded cloak and back in the dim recesses of the doorway. “Many things, my Prince. Our whispering campaign among the Helosundians is working. They believe you will be forced to draw your troops back, and they are massing to punish you. They wish to celebrate the New Year’s Festival in Meleswin. They will attack and slaughter anyone we leave behind, then sack the city.”
“This is very good to know. This gives us two months to train more soldiers and organize its reconquest. I will lead the counterattack. I want you to determine who will be leading the Helosundians into Meleswin. On the eve of our attack, I will want the more popular of the leaders murdered, with blame falling to one of the others. I want them at each other’s throats. You’ll also make certain that the stores of wyrlu and rice beer are quite potent, so their troops will not be.”
“Of course, my lord.” She paused, drawing in a wheezing breath. “I could arrange a plague as well, or a fungus in grain to drive them mad.”
“No, it must be their own folly and factional disarray that allows us to smash them. It will weaken their alliances. And it needs to be a military victory, else Cyron will forget we are wolves.”
“Yes, Highness. I have also had word of Keles Anturasi. He reached Asath and is bound for Gria. His party is quite visible and moving slowly.”
“A deception.”
“Unquestionably. At the same time he arrived, the local authorities lost a dozen or so men in a midnight battle. Four passengers did not continue to travel with the others from their riverboat. Two pairs. Keles and a Keru traveling as Helosundians, or Keles and a xidantzu traveling as a priest and his dowager aunt. We have lost track of them, but should find them again in Gria.”
Pyrust nodded. “If Keles slipped away from his decoy, then he has no way to communicate with Moriande, save through his grandfather.”
“And transmission of informa
tion that way is limited, and there is no telling how much Qiro will pass to the Prince. Were Keles to pass messages through agents on the river, we would know, Highness. He has not done this so far.”
“Good. This means Cyron does not know precisely what his circumstance is, so cannot send support. That he is placing so valuable a person in jeopardy is curious, which means the gain he perceives is worth the risk.”
The Desei Prince turned. “Dispatch a group of your finest operatives. I want Keles Anturasi alive and here in Felarati within the year.”
“This is not what you wished for before.”
“I know, but I need to have him more than just beholden to me. I wish him in my grasp. If the Stormwolf is successful in its mission and Keles can be ransomed for those charts, it will mean more to us than his willing cooperation. Moreover, the longer he spends with us, the more he will come to like us. He may never wish to leave.”
“As you wish, my lord.” Her voice lightened slightly. “Do you wish me to conduct a survey of the comeliest daughters of your nobility and find a half dozen to tend him and steal his heart?”
“That will do nicely, but only as a fallback plan.” Pyrust smiled slowly. “Once I have him here I will show him that he can do more for us than his grandfather can do for Nalenyr. His grandfather is great, but I shall make him greater. Flattery, greed, and lust are the three weapons we shall use, and he will be won to our cause. That, or there will be one less Anturasi to plague me.”
Chapter Thirty-one
36th day, Month of the Dog, Year of the Dog
9th Year of Imperial Prince Cyron’s Court
162nd Year of the Komyr Dynasty
736th year since the Cataclysm
Stormwolf, Archurko
Ethgi
Jorim Anturasi watched as sailors in one of the Stormwolf’s boats pulled hard for the ship. As seen from the ship, the landing party and villagers met peacefully. However, the urgency with which the sailors returned suggested something unusual. The same breeze coming in from the ocean had prevented him from hearing anything said on the island, and would likewise have stolen the sailors’ words, so they just rowed strongly.