His eye was drawn to the ruined city and the gap-faced temple, lit now by a mass of torches, and he snorted, recalling all he’d been through of late.
Yes, my Lord. I am an idiot. And I will simply look forward with great anticipation to seeing how you pull all this off, since it is obvious that you can.
The barge swept out into the river and the current caught it, hurrying it along beside a leaf-crowned tree floating downstream. He stood at the stern beside several of the soldiers, who stared at the torchlit temple, murmuring to one another. At first he struggled to pick out the words, for he’d not heard the Tahg for years, and these men had an accent he was unaccustomed to. But after a few moments their words grew clearer, especially when he discerned the subject matter.
“They say it was the White Pretender who came through and destroyed the temple.”
“That’s impossible! The Pretender is dead. And he was never that strong anyway.”
“What if he has come back from the dead?” The voice was full of awe.
“Come back from the dead?”
“He served the Dying God. Surely of all the gods, Eidon would know how to restore the dead. It is said he brought back his own son. . . .”
“Gods do not die.”
“Well, something came through that corridor. Something that looked like a man, all blazing with white, at first. He was tall and blond, they say, with a gold shield on his chest and a red dragon on his arm.”
“Tall, blond Terstans with red dragons are everywhere.”
“Tall, blond Terstans are everywhere. The red dragon is increasingly rare.”
That stopped the conversation for a moment. Then the first man said, “He destroyed the corridor. They’re worried the damage might even have extended out from Aggos through the corridors to the temples at Oropos and Xorofin.”
They spoke on, but Abramm pulled away, pleased his conclusions about his location were correct, and even more pleased that his trip through the corridor might have affected the other temples. That would surely cause the Esurhites a major hindrance in their efforts to take Chesedh. Assuming Chesedh still stood, which it must or they wouldn’t have been planning to funnel all those soldiers through the corridor.
In any case, now he was heading downriver on the Okaido toward the Sea of Sharss and most likely the Esurhite naval base at Tortusa, which meant he must get himself and the slaves ashore before they arrived. To find the best place for that, he needed to look at a map.
In the wheelhouse, the captain was irritatingly solicitous. Abramm attempted to squelch him with a brusque manner and monosyllabic answers, refusing offers of tea or more light—surely the blaze in the captain’s wheelhouse was bright enough!—and finally convincing the man to leave him alone. Perusing the map, he committed to memory the towns, the distances, the streams that fed into the river, and the lay of the land on either side. Eventually they would need to cross the mountains he had seen earlier, but for now, he just had to get his countrymen off this barge and out of Esurhite hands, in the right place, at the right time.
The captain informed him they would arrive at the river town Abramm had selected as a likely point of debarkation around dawn, which gave him the night to prepare. He found a place to settle on a pile of rope foreward of the deckhouse and sat down, watching the poleman at the bow as he considered how he might gain access to the hold full of slaves. But he’d not sat there long before the silence, the fresh air on the river, and the boat’s gentle rocking opened the door for his exhaustion—barely dented by his earlier nap—and he dozed off.
Sometime later he jerked awake with the sense of the boat having struck something hard, and found things gravely amiss. It was still night, but four men now stood at the bow, shadowy figures heaving on their long poles as they sought to force the barge out of the current. The north bank loomed as a dark mass not far off the starboard railing. From their shouts, he guessed that more men poled at the vessel’s stern, blocked from his view by the boathouse. The moment he stood up, he felt the deck’s ominous cant to starboard and realized the vessel was shipping water. And the only place it could be going was into the hold with the slaves.
Would anyone think to free them? He rounded the deckhouse to find the hatch standing open and the Esurhite officer’s assistant perched on the hold ladder with a big iron key in his hand. The barge captain and the officer stood beside him arguing, the officer wanting to unchain the slaves lest they drown, the captain refusing to concede the possibility his vessel might actually sink, and unwilling to complicate the efforts of his sailors in bringing her to shore by having a mass of slaves wandering about on deck.
Finally, the officer swore at him in exasperation and ordered his assistant to unlock the chains that bound the slaves to the boat. The captain belayed that instruction, even as something banged deep in the hold, and the screams grew more desperate. Both men turned to look into the hold as the deck shuddered and canted even more sharply, and Abramm seized the moment. Plowing between the two leaders, he sent them sprawling across the deck as he collided with the assistant on the ladder and brought the man with him, banging and slithering down the ladder’s rungs into the hold’s dank depths.
Abramm’s night sight showed him the clear outline of men’s bodies, the gleam of their eyes, and the glints of the chains. The setup was painfully familiar: Men lay chained in a line along both hulls, two huge locks at the middle of each line. Snatching the key from the still-addled assistant, Abramm sprang to the starboard line, found the lock that secured the sternward half, jammed in the key, and wrenched the hasp open. The rest he left to the captive as he turned to the man’s neighbor, and released the lock on the foreward half.
After unlocking the second man, he repeated the process with the portside line. By then the first of the slaves from the starboard side were struggling up the ladder. Fearful the hatch would be closed upon them at any moment, Abramm shoved his way past them to the deck just in time to stop the two boatmen who were lifting the hatch cover. The captain erupted in outrage, lunging ominously toward him and receiving for it the full force of Abramm’s backhand, which knocked him backward over the gunwale.
By then freed slaves crawled out of the hatch like roaches, fear and the sudden promise of freedom providing them new strength and speed. Abramm stood at the hatch hauling them up and over its lip, and soon a big, bare-chested, shaggy-bearded Terstan stopped to help him.
They kept at it until the ship’s cant grew sharp enough he could hardly keep his position and still help the men out. He turned to the big man beside him, a hulking shadow in the night. “You’ve got to go,” he said in Kiriathan.
“There’s still men below,” the man growled.
“I know.” Abramm shrugged off his heavy cloak and wadded it into a ball to tuck under his arm. “But this thing is going down, and the backwash will take you with it if you’re on the deck when it does.” He pulled off his helmet and stuffed the cloak into it. “You’ve got to jump free. Now.”
Stubbornly the big man bent to pull yet another slave out of the hatch, and when he was done, Abramm shoved him off the hatch lip. “Jump free, now! You can do no more here, and those ashore will need you.”
He’d already thrown the man too much off balance to recover, though he windmilled his big arms wildly in the attempt. Finally, though, he leaped free, clearing the slowly rising rail and disappearing into the water. Abramm leaped after him, wondering only then if the poor fellow could swim. Well, too late to worry about that now.
They weren’t far from shore, which was a good thing, because it was hard to swim wearing a longsword at one’s side while clutching a helmet and cloak. At least he didn’t have to do it wearing leg irons. In any case he was greatly relieved when his boots touched the mucky river bottom, and shortly he was slogging through a stand of flotsam-clogged cattails and up the soggy shore to solid ground.
Others collapsed on the grassy shore around him, leg irons clinking as a new day began to dawn. After shoving h
is helmet, cloak, and breastplate under a bush at the base of the undercut bank some ways up from the shore, he hurried back to the water’s edge to pull some of the weaker survivors to safety. When there were no more of them, he walked downstream to search for others. The day had fully dawned by the time he returned to their original landing site. Many of the slaves had found a way to remove their leg irons, and a group of them sat on the bank above the river, looking as if they didn’t know what to do next. Abramm went to retrieve his armor and cloak, and was just starting up the slope to join them when a lean, dark-haired man with a hideous slash where his left eye should have been stepped out of the underbrush to block his path. Abramm stopped in surprise, for the man wore the rags of a slave, yet brandished a stout plank from out of the flotsam that had washed up on the riverbank.
“We don’t need your kind around here,” he growled in Kiriathan, his voice laced with a strong Chesedhan lilt. “Traitor to their own blood.”
Abramm stared at him, wondering what he was talking about. The sudden sense of an attacker coming at him from the left provoked an instant response, his sword grating from his scabbard as he whirled and stepped backward. An ax head whooshed past his face, and he drove forward reflexively in the safety of the follow-through, his sword tip penetrating his attacker’s eye with a practiced accuracy he’d thought he should have lost after so much disuse.
No time to consider that, though, for a host of figures were emerging from the mist around him, armed with daggers, planks, and even stout tree limbs. As his first assailant went down, Abramm turned to a second, using the edge of his cloak to block the latter’s sword thrust as his own sword came around automatically, part of a coordinated sequence in the forms he had practiced for years, its tip slashing the side of the man’s throat in a fountaining of bright blood. The second man died as swiftly as the first, sagging lifelessly to the ground as Abramm turned to the one-eyed Chesedhan now attacking with his plank. Seeing he no longer had the advantage of surprise, the Chesedhan dropped his weapon and backed off, the others following suit.
By now those on the bank had stood and were shouting back to others who had settled out of his sight.
The one-eyed man gazed at his fallen comrades, lying glassy eyed in a gelatinous pool of blood. “You killed them,” he said in disbelief.
“If you come at a man with a bared blade, you should expect you might meet one yourself,” Abramm said testily, eyeing his victims, as well. It had been a long time since he’d killed a man. It made him vaguely ill to look at his handiwork. Considering how rusty he was, he was shocked by his reaction—swift, deadly, and without hesitation.
He looked again at the dark-haired man. “Why do you attack me?”
The man’s face hardened as his good eye came up to meet Abramm’s. “You are a traitor.”
“A traitor to whom? I set you free.”
“You serve Khrell.”
Abramm snorted. “I serve Eidon.” And to prove it, he tore open the front of his borrowed tunic, buttons spattering wildly, to reveal the shield on his chest.
The man’s eye flicked to the shield and back to his face, his hard expression not wavering.
“Shields can be faked. Or renounced and forsaken.”
“Well, mine is none of that.”
“Why are you dressed like a temple guard?”
“It was the only way to get out of Aggosim.”
“I don’t believe you. You are one of the Darian.” Darian—northlanders torn from their homeland as children and raised in their enemies’ lands. They might be Kiriathan or Chesedhan on the outside, but they were Esurhites in their hearts.
“I set you all free,” Abramm repeated.
“He speaks truly, Borlain!” came a deep voice from up the hill. One that sounded unexpectedly familiar. “He’s the one who helped me pull the rest of ye out.”
They turned toward the big man now pressing through the crowd on the bank, head and shoulders above the rest of them. His blond hair was long and his face bushy with beard, but there was no mistaking the set of those broad shoulders, nor the twinkle of his blue eyes.
Abramm gaped. “Rollie? That was you helping?”
His words stopped the big man cold at the bank’s edge. His broad face drew into a frown as he stared at Abramm intently. “How d’ ye know my name?”
“He serves Khrell, that’s how,” said Borlain. “The evil ones have told him.”
Abramm stepped around him to face his friend. “I had a beard when last you saw me, Rolland Kemp. In the Great Sand Sea some leagues away.”
He saw the light of recognition dawn in the blacksmith’s eyes. “Alaric?”
A moment later Rolland was skidding down the bank to embrace him, and they pounded each other’s backs, though Abramm still gripped his sword unsheathed in his hand. When they parted, Rolland’s eyes shone with unshed tears. “Eidon’s mercy, Alaric. We thought ye were dead. Lost in the desert . . .” He stepped back farther, looking him up and down. “Ye look awful.”
“Well, thank you very much. You don’t look so great yourself.”
“Ye look like ye’ve been through torments.”
“Well, I was lost in the desert.” He glanced around, uneasy with pursuing that subject. “Are any of the others here? Cedric? Galen?”
“Aye, Alaric, we’re here,” Cedric said, stepping out from the crowd to stand at Rolland’s side. Galen stood on his other side. Even Oakes Trinley was with them.
Abramm stared at them in astonishment, the chill of portents so strong he all but reeled. How can they be here?
And yet, he knew. Eidon had told him how—and why—months ago.
They will have need of you. And you will have need of them.
He frowned. But, Lord . . . surely you don’t mean these to be my army?
CHAPTER
28
Carissa sat at her husband’s bedside in the palace at Peregris, embroidering a length of coiling vine onto a table runner, the design taking shape one leaf at a time. It had been nine days since she’d ridden into Peregris, beside herself with fear for him, about to faint with the prospect of seeing him again, and praying her foolish insecurities had not destroyed his feelings for her beyond resuscitation. She prayed for the courage to say what she needed to say, and that she wouldn’t suddenly fall into that pit of sudden terror where the words dammed up in her throat and refused to be uttered.
But it all turned out to be useless worry, for the reality was far worse. He wasn’t even conscious when she’d arrived, and at first sight of him she’d wanted to howl with dismay for the way he looked—so pale and gray and weak—and for the way his breath rattled in his chest as he struggled to breathe, the little tube sticking out between his ribs, dripping blood into a bowl.
They’d performed surgery on him to sew up the bleeding, the attendant had informed her, and kept the tube in place in case their efforts were unsuccessful, though he assured her they had been. After that there had been the fever and the horrible gurgling in his lungs as she had prayed for all she was worth. On the fifth night after she’d gotten there, everyone thought it was the end, and she’d knelt with her head resting on the side of his bed, clutching his hands as she prayed and wept all night long.
And in the morning, thank Eidon, he was still breathing.
A few hours later, he had opened his eyes for the first time since she’d arrived, but he’d been groggy from the laudanum they’d been giving him, and she wasn’t sure he even knew she was there. He’d fallen back asleep shortly thereafter and had been in and out ever since.
Her thread too short to work anymore, she tied it off and reached into her basket for a new piece, glancing up at her husband as she did. Trap lay swathed in silk sheets, arms resting atop them alongside his body. Ravaged by his two-week struggle to survive, his freckled face was pale and gaunt beneath the red beard. For the first time since she’d arrived, though, his brown eyes were not only open but alert. And watching her.
“Oh,” she sa
id, straightening self-consciously. “You’re awake.”
He flashed a tentative smile. “You look at me . . . speak to me. I hear the rustle of your clothing—it must be that you really are here . . . not a dream, after all.”
“Not a dream, my husband,” she said, putting aside her work and rising to pour water from the pitcher. “Would you like a drink?”
He accepted the cup, drained it, and handed it back. But he refused her offer of more, focusing upon her once again as she sat on the bed beside him. “How long?” he asked.
“It’s been about two weeks since you were injured.”
“I meant how long have you been here.”
She smiled again. “Almost that long.”
“But . . . were you in Deveren Dol? It would take you a week at least . . .”
She felt her cheeks heat but did not look away. “I turned back from Deveren Dol the very morning I set out for it.”
The crease deepened between his brows. “You turned back? How can I protect you . . . if you won’t do as I tell you? If the Esurhites’ plot had worked—” He broke off, frowning in his attempt to recall. “What did happen with that, anyway?”
She smiled, happy to get past the matter of Deveren Dol—happy, too, that he still cared enough to worry about protecting her—and told him what she knew: how Maddie had been turned over to Belthre’gar himself, but the wave had swamped his ship and brought her back. How at least a third of the Esurhite fleet waiting south of the island to attack had been destroyed by the same wave. Which had also drowned Ronesca and left Maddie queen in her place—a turn of events all the army and navy saw as Eidon’s doing.
“Queen!” he exclaimed when she had finished. “Well, that is happy news. Who is advising her?”