This Forsaken Earth (39 page)

Rol struggled to his side through the mob. “Load the boats!” he yelled. There were bodies at his feet, but he did not look down. “Get as many as you can aboard without swamping them.”

The ex-convict nodded. “Rol, I only found a couple of dozen. The rest—” He gestured helplessly at the faces of the crowd.

“I know, Elias. We did our best. Get them aboard now.”

They filed the Bionese refugees aboard the boats through a gauntlet of the ship’s company, hardened mariners not afraid to use their weapons. Some had wives in the Ka, children lost somewhere beyond that howling mob, but they stood to their posts and held back the desperate throng at sword- and pistol-point. People spat in their faces, threw stones, cursed them, and vowed revenge.

Rol was the last to leave the quay. He clambered aboard the heavy cutter and pushed her off from the stone with his boot. Someone tried to leap past him and Fleam flicked up without his will to slash the unfortunate open from crotch to breastbone. The corpse splashed into the water. A cry went up. A stone swooped past his head. In his fist, Fleam quivered in pleasure, and he sheathed the scimitar with revulsion.

The cutter was low in the water, the crew barely able to ship their oars for the mass of people cowering within. The sailors used them like giant paddles instead, and slowly drew away from the wharves. Musket-shots, echoing off the cavern walls. People wailed and shouted and fell tumbling from the wharves and fought one another in the water. Some threw torches at the departing boats.

The cutter was paddled out of the ship-cavern, into the harbor with its mighty encircling arms of stone. Rol looked up to see the stars overhead, a sliver of moon. The tide was still just on the ebb, and it took their keel, slid them quietly along with the plash of the oars. The water around them was thick with small-craft of all sizes and rigs, and ahead the yards of the three ships stood stark against the paler stone. The noise died away. No one spoke in the boat.

Twenty-one

THE MARK OF RAN

A RAT-TAG FLOTILLA, THEY ANCHORED TOGETHER
around the
Revenant
and transferred their wretched cargoes to the larger vessels. Rol came aboard to find Gallico standing on the starboard gangway, his face a desolation.

“Is this all?” he asked. “You must go back for more.”

The Revenants rigged tackles to the yardarms and began hauling the weaker occupants of the boats aboard like sacks of grain. “There’s no going back,” Rol said. “We barely made it away afloat.”

“I’ll go back. Let me take the cutters in again, Rol. We have space for more.”

“No. Gallico, that place is not Ganesh Ka anymore. It belongs to a maddened mob. You take the boats back in and they’ll sink them under you.”

“Now, listen—”

“That’s an order, Gallico. As soon as the boats are back on the booms we weigh anchor. It’s over.”

Gallico glared at him with something like hatred in his shining eyes.

“Where’s Miriam, Artimion?”

“I don’t know. The Bionese have landed up the coast. They’re on the march as we speak, whole regiments. We have to get away.”

Gallico’s great fist came up and grasped the front of Rol’s tunic. Gaunt though he was, the strength in the halftroll’s arm was startling.

“He’s right, Gallico.” This was Elias Creed, climbing aboard with his mouth still bloody. “We can do no more. We’ve saved all we can.”

Gallico released Rol. “The wind has backed to east-nor’east,” he said formally. “The tide will be on the flood in two turns of the glass.”

“Then we must put out to sea as soon as we can, and claw off this coast.”

“What course shall I set?” Gallico asked.

“Due south, reefed courses and jib.”

“You’re the captain,” Gallico snapped. And he walked away.

“Let him go,” Elias said, as Rol tried to follow. “It’s not you. He knows. He just has to get over it.”

The small boats surrounding them were already sculling down the coast in an ungainly gaggle, their oars striking up white water from the darkened surface of the sea. The
Astraros,
the
Skua,
and the
Osprey
were making sail. Rol hailed the nearest: Thef Gaudo on the xebec.

“Due south, Thef—pass it on to the brigs!”

“Due south, aye aye—glad you made it, skipper.”

“Elias, throw lines to the smaller boats. We’ll tow them if they can’t keep up.”

Aveh and Esmer had joined them at the gangway, looking landward. “I see lights,” the carpenter said.

They were springing up all over the shoreline, disembodied in the dark, some larger than others.

“They’re burning the place,” Esmer said, astonished. “Is it the Bionese? Have they arrived already?”

They watched, transfixed, as the fires spread. Not in one single wave, but in dozens of discrete glows, licking out of the stone windows that peppered the seaward sides of the towers and the cliffs. It looked almost as though the Hidden City were finally coming to life, lighting up for some unknown celebration, unafraid of watching eyes at last.

“We’re burning it,” Rol answered him. “We’re doing it to ourselves, room by room.”

The looming towers were outlines above a saffron blaze now, a bloom of fire. As they watched, there was an incredible mushrooming ball of flame that rose up hundreds of feet, and a second later the air shook with the deep thunder of the explosion. They all ducked instinctively. The ship’s company, the refugees on board, all paused to stare, aghast.

“That was the powder-arsenal,” Rol said.

“Artimion has lost control,” said Creed.

Between them, Aveh the carpenter looked at the vast fireball now rising up to blot out the stars, and merely nodded to himself, as though it confirmed some knowledge he already possessed. Then he hid his eyes with one hand and bowed his head until it rested on the good wood of the ship’s side.

Rol and Creed went to the quarterdeck. Gallico was fixed there like a standing stone, and the tears on his face gleamed bright in the light from his eyes.

“There was no going back,” Rol said quietly, looking up at the halftroll, this monster he loved as a brother.

“I know,” Gallico said.

Rol raised his voice. “Weigh anchor. Morcam, course due south. Lookouts to fore and main. Elias, get those people below.”

The crew of the
Revenant
went about their business, and in the white-tipped sea around them the other ships and boats and desperate souls of their little fleet watched the Black Ship unfurl her sails and take wing for the south. On her quarterdeck a tall, gaunt man stood among his friends, and stared at the palm of his hand.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

PAUL KEARNEY
was born and grew up in Northern Ireland. He studied English at Oxford University and lived for several years in both Denmark and the United States. He now lives by the sea in County Down with his wife and two dogs. His other books include the acclaimed
Monarchies of God
sequence.

ALSO BY PAUL KEARNEY

The Mark of Ran

The Way to Babylon

A Different Kingdom

Riding the Unicorn

Hawkwood’s Voyage

The Heretic Kings

The Iron Wars

The Second Empire

Ships from the West

T
HIS
F
ORSAKEN
E
ARTH

A Bantam Spectra Book / December 2006

Originally published 2006 by Bantam Press,
a division of Transworld Publishers (UK)

Published by Bantam Dell
A Division of Random House, Inc.
New York, New York

All rights reserved
Copyright © 2006 by Paul Kearney
Map by Neil Gower

Bantam Books, the rooster colophon, Spectra, and the portrayal of a boxed “s” are trademarks of Random House, Inc.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Kearney, Paul.

This forsaken earth / Paul Kearney.

p. cm.

eISBN-13: 978-0-553-90315-7

eISBN-10: 0-553-90315-2

I. Title.

PR6061.E2156 T48 2006      2006047733

823/.914 22

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