Shadow Over Kiriath

  He heard the clanging of the alarm bells that would call out the bucket brigades and pump wagons, men already beginning to converge upon the flaming Hall. The Hall itself was clearly past saving, but the sparks and flaming debris shooting out of it could easily ignite a secondary blaze among the surrounding sea of wooden roofs. He knew a plan for fighting fires was in place with chain of command already appointed, but he sent Trap down to help nonetheless, even as Simon ran off to direct the shoreline defenses.

  Abramm himself joined Admiral Hamilton in his command-post bunker built up against the cliffs east of the city. Leyton Donavan went with him, each of them equipped with a telescope so they could keep an eye on the fire, the shoreline defense preparations, and the battle itself.

  The same armada of civilian vessels that had turned out to stop Katahn soon pushed off from their moorings, many of them forming a blockade at the river’s broad mouth as others ferried soldiers out to engage the enemy. As with the firefighters, both Simon and Hamilton were carrying out plans Abramm had already set in place—which gave him little to do but watch, a role he found profoundly discomfiting.

  Behind the forward line of twelve enemy galleys, two following vessels spewed smoke, obviously the source of the mist. They would be the ones the Kiriathans must attack most vigorously and sink, if possible. The Chesedhan frigates ceased firing now as Katahn’s galleys shot by them to ram the enemy ships. As the boats lurched and clung to each other, Katahn’s crewmen leaped over the locked gunwales to engage the Esurhites hand to hand. After that, the conflict was slow, virtually soundless, and obscured by shifting veils of shadow and smoke. Often Abramm glimpsed men struggling on the vessels’ decks, saw the flash of swords, sometimes a flare of white light or purple. . . .But then another vessel would drift into his line of sight and he’d see no more. At least two of the Esurhite ships were sunk by the ramming maneuver, and finally one galley broke through to attack the smoke ships. A furious firework of white and purple flared in the thickening mists, leaving one smoke-ship adrift and the other sinking. After that the invaders retreated until they had withdrawn from the bay.

  By then the column of smoke from the Hall of Kings had been replaced by a pall of gray, and thankfully no more of the city had burned. Abramm was beginning to relax when Hamilton noted that the fog not only remained just at the mouth of the bay but had also reclaimed the two headland fortresses.

  “They could be waiting for nightfall to attack,” he said worriedly. A concern that made so much sense Abramm took it to heart immediately, certain they were staging another attempt to take Graymeer’s.

  Perhaps they believed their surprise attack on the Hall of Kings had been successful and Abramm was dead, leaving no one to ruin another corridor, or drive off the mist, or . . . use the guardstar. Suddenly he wondered if the whole conflict in the bay had been nothing more than a distraction from the real target: Graymeer’s itself. I have to drive off that mist. Now.

  He turned to Leyton Donavan. “Didn’t you say there are tales claiming my scepter can conjure a wind?”

  Leyton frowned at him. His eyes flicked to the burned-out hall at Abramm’s back, then returned to meet his gaze. “You think there’s any way the regalia survived that fire?”

  “If they are what you think they are,” said Abramm. “Would you like to come with me and see?”

  His carriage brought them around to the bottom of the hill upon which the Hall of Kings had been built, the ride giving them a thorough view of the damage. The Hall, still hot and smoldering, had been gutted. Nearby buildings had also suffered various amounts of damage, most of them saved from complete destruction because they were built with stone. The Jewel House was one of the latter.

  Abramm leaped out of the carriage as soon as it pulled to a stop beside it. The house’s wooden roof sagged inward, still smoldering despite having been soaked by the bucket brigades. The structure’s windows had melted into slag, and even some of the stones in the walls were cracked.

  Ducking beneath the charred, half-fallen lintel, Abramm picked his way through the rubble, avoiding the biggest and hottest beam and wondering how he was going to find anything beneath the wet jumble of ash, charred wood, and stone that layered the floor. Part of one wall had tumbled in, and all the furniture and cabinets had been reduced to charred sticks.

  It must have been the crown, for he walked straight across the chamber as if he knew where he was going, the heat from the stones and beams searing his face and making the scars burn as if they were newly made. He stopped without knowing why—maybe it seemed like the place he recalled the regalia to have been kept—and bent to pull aside a soot-covered rock, glad he was wearing gloves. Even through them the heat was intense. His men entered behind him now, muttering among themselves.

  He kicked away a wooden plank, unmindful of the soot that stained his woolen stockings and the ash that now coated his fine shoes. Before he could remove another, Channon and Will Ames were pulling it away for him—and there at his feet, gleaming white amidst all the black, lay the scepter. The rod showed no sign of char or soot or even tarnish, the great orb at its head flickering with a pale white light.

  A slight shifting of the direction of his gaze revealed to him the Orb of Tersius, enfolded in a paper-thin shroud of ash—probably the remains of the velvet drapes that had hung in this room. He stepped toward it, bent, and pulled away the shroud. Behind him came the hissing of Leyton’s breath and a murmured exclamation of astonishment. Like the scepter, the orb had weathered the inferno untouched by the heat itself or by the ash and soot in which it lay.

  He stepped back and bent to pick up the scepter, Channon’s instinctive warning smothered almost as soon as it began. Like the captain of his guard, Abramm expected it to be as hot as the other things he’d touched here and was surprised to find it was no warmer than on the day of his coronation.

  “May I bring the orb?” asked Leyton, standing over the object in question.

  Abramm gave the man a nod and then, as the latter squatted to pick it up, he pointed out the ring, lying under a fallen stone. “And I think that may be the robe there, under the pile of ash just beyond it.”

  A creaking from above and a sudden shower of sparks urged him to take Channon’s advice to leave, and having found what he’d come for, he did. Commiting the orb and other articles into Fortesque’s care, he took the scepter and rode back to the palace to change his clothes and get Warbanner.

  An hour later he rode into Graymeer’s at the head of a twenty-five-man squadron. Lieutenant Brookes immediately escorted him to the ramparts where Commander Weston was directing the firing of the catapults, which had been placed up there for this very eventuality. The mist was so thick Abramm could not see the top of the seaward observation tower, nor even to the far side of the fortress. Moreover, it was a pale and dry mist, more like smoke than fog, but without the odor.

  Weston confirmed Abramm’s fear that Esurhites had tried to come up from below. He’d assigned a force to guard the grotto at the bottom, but they’d been pushed upward from their position about an hour earlier. However, they were still holding the newly installed gate at the halfway point. “Though, since the southlanders now have access to all the warrens below us,” he said grimly, “they might come up anywhere.”

  Abramm looked down at the scepter in his gloved hands, thinking he was a fool to have brought it up here with no more idea of what he intended than simply to bring it. Perhaps it was the strange way in which he’d been led to it that had made him think that was all the planning he needed, but clearly it was not enough.

  I need a wind, he thought at it. And felt immediately foolish when absolutely nothing happened. He tried releasing a tiny spark of Light into the rod. Which it accepted readily, the orb at its head flickering slightly in acknowledgment.

  Did it need more, then?

  He tried again, channeling a larger force. The orb flared brightly so long as he kept it up, but faded the moment he stopped. And there was no wind. br />
  He turned to Leyton, who had come up behind him and was watching him closely. For a moment Abramm hesitated, reluctant to appear completely incompetent. His next thought was the wry observation that he was, in fact, exactly that. And this was no time to let pride get in his way. “What am I supposed to do?” he asked the Chesedhan.

  Leyton frowned. “The account I read said you must know it.”

  “Know it. What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “I have no idea. I got the impression it would be automatic. Perhaps it is a function of one’s growth in the Light.” He paused. “Would you like me to give it a try?”

  NO! Abramm thought. But again that was pride speaking, not sense. And anyway, if the regalia truly were his and only his, Leyton would have little more success than he had. He thrust the implement into the man’s hands and told him to go ahead.

  And as he’d guessed, although Leyton could also light the orb at the top of the rod, in the end he produced no more than Abramm had. Well, so much for that, Abramm thought. Maybe I can figure out how to light the guardstar with it.

  He took the scepter back and hurried around the wallwalk to the observation tower. Descending its winding stairway he emerged into the Officers’ Yard, where the black-striped orb still rested atop its iron struts on the excavated mound. Then he stood there. As Leyton and the others caught up with him, he looked down at the scepter again.

  Know it. Well, I certainly don’t know it. Not what it’s supposed to do, not how it was made, not how it’s been used, its history . . . Hadn’t Maddie said something about a reference to the regalia in theWords? He’d never followed up on that, too distracted by all the other things. . . .

  He thought about the last corridor he’d destroyed here and that odd shifting of his perception that had occurred just before.Was that a form of “knowing”? It had seemed more like knowing his fortress than anything else, though. He didn’t recall doing anything specific beyond wanting the corridor gone. Eidon had done the rest. Just as Eidon had been the one to deliver him from the morwhol. He’d had only to trust.

  Is that the key here, as well? To simply stand by and trust? But what would he need implements for if he need only stand by and wait?

  Lord, what do you want me to do? I see now I’ve been remiss, occupied with other things when I should have been digging into your Words to find what you have to say about this. Or at the least I should have asked Kesrin. . . .

  At that moment a helmeted man in a dark breastplate burst out of the doorway in the observation tower. His dark eyes fell at once upon Abramm and widened in the surprise of recognition, only to narrow with renewed purpose. Shouting a battle cry, he ran at the Kiriathan king as if no one else stood in the yard but the two of them. Leyton and Channon moved simultaneously to cut him off, and he died three yards from his target, Leyton’s long sword piercing his throat, Channon’s sliding in under his armpit.

  His body had not even slid off the two swords when his fellows came pouring into the Officers’ Yard on a veil of mist, shouting at the top of their lungs, each of them focused on Abramm alone. Surrounded and severely outnumbered, Abramm found himself swinging the scepter like a club, unwilling to drop it in favor of pulling out his sword for fear of losing it. The Light flowed out of him, flashing and flaring in the orb as it arced through the air, knocking aside heads and blades alike, seeming suddenly much heavier than it had before. It trailed little sparkles of light, and he could feel the wind generated by its passing. . . .

  At length he found himself standing shoulder to shoulder with his defenders in a yard littered with bodies, some living, many not. The orb at the scepter’s end blazed like a living star, sparks still trailing from it in the wind. The wind. He felt it now tugging at his hair and cloak as it whipped around the yard, kicking up dust, flapping the garments of the fallen and driving the invading mist back over the top of the wall as it funneled upward. The moment it did, he heard Weston’s bellow to clean the guns and reload them, the echoed shouts of those orders repeated and elaborated, then the trundle of the gun trucks, the hiss and ring of the plungers.

  And up above, patches of blue appeared in the rapidly shredding mist.

  Abramm’s gaze returned to the scepter, already feeling lighter than it had. The flare in its head faded, the fountain of sparks slowed to a few glowing motes, spit forth erratically. He saw Leyton staring at it with eyes so wide the whites showed all around. Slowly now, as if he realized he was staring, he lifted his gaze to meet Abramm’s own.

  And then, before either of them could speak, one of the armsmen cried, “It lit! The big ball up there, sir. I just saw it flicker. I swear it.”

  All eyes turned toward the orb on its stanchions and immediately Abramm saw that part of its streaked covering had come loose, a strip of it flapping in the wind.

  Handing the scepter to Leyton, he climbed atop the guardstar’s platform, then shimmied up one of the struts until he could reach the sphere. The curling, flapping strip peeled away from the orb like the fleshy skin of an orange. He continued to pull off strips until what was left finally came away in one large piece.

  The guardstar sat above him on its struts, a smooth, slick orb that looked to be made of highly polished milk glass. But there was no flicker now, nothing beyond the normal reflection of light off any slick surface. And though he struck it with a filament of Light, and felt the Light received, it changed nothing.

  He kept trying, even going so far as to lay his bare palm against its surface and let the Light flow out of him, but that had no effect, either. Finally, his arm and legs cramping with the effort of holding himself to the strut, he slid down to rejoin his men on the ground. By then the small wind he’d generated earlier had driven off the remainder of the mist, leaving the fortress clear.

  Weston’s voice carried down from the ramparts, ordering the reloaded cannon to fire, and moments later the roar of their response rattled Abramm’s teeth and shook his innards. As the reload command rang out, he flew up the ramp toward the wallwalk to see how the battle was progressing. Then Weston cried out again: “They’re turning away, boys! They’re turning tail! Let’s give ’em something to remember us by.”

  Abramm joined him in time for the last salvo, the long guns bucking as they belched white clouds of smoke and six black balls arced over an ocean turned blue again in the wake of the rapidly retreating mist wall. The balls fell close enough to splash the decks of the five exposed galleys now frantically heeling around to catch up with their departing cover. Abramm leaned against the parapet as the wind rushed around him, flapping his cloak and ruffling his hair. He watched the galleys catch up with the mist, others of their kind doing the same below Kildar, which had also been uncovered. Meanwhile the cloud moved rapidly southeastward and out to sea until he could see it no longer.

  “Well,” he said finally, pushing back from the stone. “I guess that’s over.”

  “And I guess I was right after all,” said Leyton beside him.

  “More or less,” Abramm agreed. But he still had no real idea what he had done. As with all the other things, it seemed he had done nothing at all.

  CHAPTER

  29

  They hanged Arik Foxton at dawn the next day. Abramm made Briellen watch, and she stood under guard in the box across the square from him, waxen faced and unmoving. After the proceedings she was put immediately into a coach and driven away to the city’s edge, where all her retinue awaited her. Abramm did not accompany her; instead, the moment Foxton was declared dead, he turned his back on it all and returned to the palace, sickened and depressed.

  He couldn’t help thinking of the inequity in it—that Briellen, who by her own admission had started it, got off with nothing more than deportation, while Foxton was executed for a crime that would have gone unremarked and unpunished had he committed it with anyone other than the king’s betrothed.

  Abramm would have been tempted to spend the afternoon brooding about it all had he not so many other things to
occupy his thoughts. Changing out of his execution finery, he donned leather tunic, woolen breeches, and boots and went down to the docks with Count Blackwell and Admiral Hamilton to assess the damage his vessels had sustained in yesterday’s action. In the afternoon, he attended a meeting of the ship owners who’d hired on in an adjunct military capacity and commended them for their efforts in yesterday’s battle. Stressing the vital support their contribution had provided, he warned them that evil days were not yet over. Their services would be required again, possibly soon.

  After that speech, many more volunteered their own vessels, thanks in large part to the belief that Abramm had conjured the winds that had driven away the mist yesterday—and could do it again if necessary. Their fears of being becalmed and at the mercy of hostile, oar-driven vessels allayed, they displayed a confidence approaching blind bravado that any conflict with the “vastly inferior” galleys would be swiftly and decisively won.

  Needing their support and not even certain they were wrong about what he could do, Abramm said nothing to dissuade them. He was glad, all the same, to leave them for his second meeting of the afternoon, this one back at the Ministry of the Navy. After a comprehensive review of yesterday’s action and its results, they turned finally to Abramm’s greatest concern: the need to secure the Gull Islands. A few of the officers at the table had already conceded privately the strong possibility the islands had been the staging ground for yesterday’s attack, and the fact there’d been no reported galley sighting in the twenty-four hours since they’d fled only made his case stronger.

  “I want those islands under our control,” Abramm told them. “Whether we must wrest them from the enemy or establish a post on them ourselves, I want it done as soon as possible.”