This Forsaken Earth (9 page)

“Yes.”

“And to think we’ve pissed in the same pot!” Rol glanced up at the grinning halftroll, and in that moment he loved him. Creed’s eyes said the same thing.
What of it? We are shipmates.

Rol spoke to Canker. “You’ve loosed your little broadside. Now, what’s the upshot of it all?”

“Your sister needs you, Rol.”

“Sincerity sits ill on your face, Canker. Why not be honest? You might find the change refreshing.”

“You must go to her. This war approaches a climax, and she would have her brother by her side to share in the final victory.”

Her brother.
“I’ll write her a letter.
Dear sister, have fun running the world.
Will that suffice?”

Canker’s face darkened. “You damn fool; do you know what it has cost me to get here?”

“What’s wrong, Canker, the war effort tripping up a little? What need has Rowen of me when she can command armies?”

“She needs leaders, men she can trust. Do you think a woman like her—”

“Like what, Canker?” Rol advanced on the Thief-King, and as he left the hearth the light in his eyes quickened. His voice grew loud, ugly. “A woman who has prostituted herself to all and sundry—who fucks and murders her way through the world, whose carcass has been pimped out a thousand times. A woman like that? I can do without her favors—or her goodwill.”

Canker looked up at him calmly. “You love her,” he said.

Rol backed away as if he had been struck. Fleam leaped out of her scabbard and was in his fist like a flash of sea-lightning. The scimitar swept through the stool on which Canker had been sitting, cutting it in two and striking sparks from the stone floor below. The Thief-King had thrown himself aside almost as quickly as Rol’s arm had moved. He rolled across the floor like a ball. Gallico and Creed stepped over him. “Rol, no!”

It was there—he was on the cusp of it, so easy now. Gods in heaven, how good it would feel to let go of it.

The others in the room watched, horrified, as a vile brightness spilled out of Rol’s eyes. He seemed to rise up off the floor, and a clutch of luminous spears grew at his back, like the unfurling of great wings. The scimitar in his hand grew into a bar of unbearable bright light.

Gallico’s fist punched back Rol’s head, bursting open the lips on his maniac leer. The halftroll launched himself bodily at Rol and bore him against the far wall, crushing the air out of him.

For a moment Rol struggled. Fleam shrieked in his head, a woman’s voice that clawed across his brain. Gallico’s weight lay upon him like a hill, but the strength was in him to toss it aside, to rise up like…like…

And some form of sanity whispered in his ear, like the drunk’s sodden realization of what lies in wait for the morning. He threw the scimitar away, and the blade scored a long, smoking furrow in the solid basalt of the floor.

“Hold him down!” Artimion was yelling, and Miriam was clicking back the hammer on her musket. Creed clapped his hand across the lock and wrenched free the flint, scattered the powder in the pan. The two of them fought over the weapon like children with a favorite toy.

Gallico’s eyes, inhuman and yet compassionate, staring at him from six inches away. Rol fought for breath. The tears were trickling helplessly down the sides of his face, liquid fire. Within him, the white flame guttered, struggling against his will. For a moment, he thought he could see clear to the heart of it, and the room about him vanished, to be replaced by a fearsome landscape from another world. But it died before he could make sense of it.

His ribs creaked under Gallico’s bulk. “Get off me, you big green bastard.”

“That’s better.” The halftroll’s weight lifted fractionally.

“It’s all right, Gallico. I’m all right.”

Gallico stared at him a few seconds more, studying his eyes, then he nodded and got to his feet. Rol clutched his bruised ribs, blood pouring down his chin. It was Canker, of all people, who finally helped him up.

“You are full of surprises, Master Cortishane,” Artimion said.

“You have no idea,” Rol gasped, spattering blood. He saw Fleam lying on the floor and bent to retrieve her, but Elias Creed set a hand on his arm.

“Maybe it’s as better not,” he murmured.

“It’s a sword, Elias.”

“No. There’s more to it than that.”

Rol bent regardless, and set Fleam back in her scabbard. The steel was dead and cold.

“This has happened before,” Artimion said, looking at Gallico. The halftroll hesitated a second, then nodded.

Rol wiped blood from his chin and smiled bleakly. “My secret is out, it seems.”

“Remind me not to goad you again, Cortishane,” said Canker. Strangely, he seemed unfazed. In fact, he seemed more like a man satisfied with his work.

“You had some idea about this,” Rol accused him.

The Thief-King seemed about to deny it, then shrugged.

“What plots are you and Rowen hatching, Canker? I want no part of them, but if you persist, I’ll make it my business to put an end to them.”

Miriam spoke to Artimion as though they were alone in the room. “Whatever this thing is, we should not have it in the Ka. It is dangerous.”

“The thing has ears, Miriam,” Rol said wearily. He felt like a bear in the ring, beset and bewildered.

“There has been enough talk for one night,” Artimion said. “Cortishane, your friends will see you back to your chambers. Do me a courtesy and remain there until morning. Miriam, you will see Canker looked after. A room in one of the Towers, and two of your men at the door.” He smiled at the Thief-King. “Merely to see that you come to no harm.” Canker bowed.

“Nothing that has been said or seen in this room is to go beyond it.”

“Who’d believe it anyway?” Elias Creed asked wryly. He hoisted one of his captain’s arms over his shoulder, for Rol’s knees were buckling, and he and Gallico half carried, half dragged him from the room.

It was not a darkness like that of sleep, but rather some womb of starless night, black as the end of the world. He fought through it like a man struggling through deep water, but without direction or sense of progress.

A quicksilver light grew about him, and at last there was up and down, left and right. There was weight and air and all the things that made existence a rational thing. He stood with his feet planted firmly in black soil, and a wind was in his hair. There was water in the wind, a rushing moistness, a smell of rich, writhing, striving life so intense he felt it had entered his lungs and punched them wider in his chest, shocked the slow beat of his heart into something faster, stronger. He stood on a gray nightscape, drenched in starlight. A rolling plain dotted with drumlin-hills, rising up to vast mountains, and then the starfields blazing and wheeling above.

A woman stood beside him, nude and pale with a magnificent mane of black hair which fell down over the lush curves of her breasts. She turned to him and smiled, and he saw that her eyeteeth were fangs of bright silver.

“Fleam,” he said.

“That is what you have called me.” And she linked one arm in his, her satin-soft skin producing a jolt of fierce pleasure as it met his own.

“What is this place?”

“Give it a name. Any one you like.”

Rol looked at the walls of mountains about the horizon, the rolling grassland monochrome under the stars.

“It looks like—like the Goliad.”

“Then that is what it is.”

His bare toes dug into the moist black earth beneath him. “This is no desert.”

“This is the Old World, Orr-Diseyn. This is the shadow cast by the world men have made.”

“The world men have made.” He smiled, but there was no mirth in it. “Do men make things like this, outside of dreams?”

He began walking, mostly to feel the soft earth beneath his feet, the mud balling up between his toes. The woman he had called Fleam followed, her feet barely imprinting the ground. He felt heavy and leaden in comparison; but all the same, there was that exhilarating sense of well-being, of strength. It was as though something in the air and in the ground was nourishing him, making him grow like a light-starved plant brought into the sun. He marveled at it, and brought a hand up in front of his face to stare at his own palm as though he had never seen it before. It was his scarred palm, the mark set there by what might have been a god. More than ever, he felt that the wormed lines in its paleness were some form of ideograph, a message he must decipher; but that did not seem important now.

“This
is
a dream,” he said. It made things more understandable to say it.

“No, no, this is all real,” Fleam contradicted him. Her smile was both alluring and vicious. “It is time you stopped thinking like a mere man, a mortal thing, Orr-Diseyn.”

“I am a man.”

“You are nothing like. That carcass you haul around is a vessel, nothing more, as inessential as is a ship to its company.”

“Men at sea are wont to drown without their ship.”

“They do not feel pain when the ship’s hull is pierced. If it sinks, they will swim. They have a life beyond its wooden walls. Do you understand me? The body you inhabit will be cast off someday. You must prepare for that day.”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

She stopped before him, caressed his face. “You will, in time.” She pressed herself against him, and he moaned as her mouth reached up for his. He could feel the fangs against his lips, felt her tongue come questing into his mouth. It was cold and dry, like that of a reptile, but the rest of her was a glory of soft flesh and smooth skin. He dug his fingers into her buttocks and pulled her closer.

But then she wrenched herself out of his grasp as though she had been burned. She screamed, high and shrill.

“That’s enough,” a quiet voice said. “Leave him.”

And Fleam was gone. Rol fell to his knees, light-headed. Strong hands took his arms and lifted him to his feet again.

When the dizziness had passed, he found himself looking down into the face of an old man, dark-eyed and bearded, with broad peasant shoulders.

“You should be more careful of the company you keep,” the man said lightly.

The mud was cold now under Rol’s feet, the air chill. He looked up and saw that clouds had come across the stars and were building steadily over the mountains. The old man touched him lightly on his shoulder. On his other side, a small hand slipped into his and gripped it tightly. It belonged to a boy, not ten years old. There were tears coursing down his face.

“Why is he crying?” Rol asked the old man.

“He knows what is coming.”

Five

A MATTER OF SHIPS

THE SEA-BREEZE, THE RUSH OF THE PATIENT WAVES—THESE
things calmed his spirit now as always. He stood on the lip of the sea-cliffs and watched the long swell of the waters roll in from the east, like the heralds of a different tomorrow. The sun rising fast behind them.

“Quite a little show you put on last night.”

Rol did not turn round. “I thought Miriam had her lads guarding you.”

Canker joined him on the edge of the cliff. Two hundred feet below them the Inner Reach beat upon the stone in a long belt of foam. The climbing sun was bright, but there was a coolness in the air, borne off the white heights of the Myconians in the west.

“I was not once a Thief-King for nothing.”

They stood side by side and watched the sea, almost companionably. There were three fishing yawls out close to the horizon, performing the dual functions of gathering in their catch for the Ka and keeping a lookout for Bionari cruisers.

“There may indeed be a freedom in the sea—for such as you, that is. On a morning like this I can almost fathom it.”

“It’s clean,” Rol said. “It has no memory.”

Canker seemed about to speak, then held his tongue. He smiled instead, the first genuine smile Rol had seen him make.

“What does she want with me, Canker?”

The smile left his companion’s face. “I can rely on your discretion?”

“About as much as I can rely on yours.”

“Rumor will out in the end, I suppose. We’re losing, Rol.”

Cortishane stared at him. “The war?”

“What else? Phidon had fallen to the loyalists before I left Myconn, and Myconn was on the point of falling back into their hands. We rebels are being driven back into the mountains.”

“You’ve been on the road three months, you say. This is old news.”

“Yes. Many things, both good and bad, may have happened since. Rowen was trying to regain diplomatic contact with Perilar and Oronthir—last summer they were on the point of granting her official recognition as Bionar’s Queen.”

“And now?”

“Now they hold their hand, waiting to see how the tide will turn. They may even invade on their own account, seeing opportunity in Bionar’s chaos.”

“How did she do it, Canker? One woman alone—how did she start such a storm?”

“She is extraordinary, Rol. You of all people should know that.”

Rol stepped back from the cliff-edge, glimpsing as he did an odd look in Canker’s black eyes. “So what is her plan, and why is she so keen for me to figure in it, after all this time?”