A Secret Atlas (35 page)

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 displeasure 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