The bow ground into the enemy boats that had survived his magic, and most of Nita Qwan’s warriors dove over the sides. Black Heron loosed an arrow so close to his target that the arrow went through the bogglin as he tried to come over the gunwale, all the way out through his wing cases and into the bogglin behind, and then Black Heron leapt for the next canoe like a leaping deer.
Aneas had never been so surprised in all his life; in three beats of his heart, he was almost alone in the great canoe. The bogglins turned from climbing the slab-sides of the round ship and came at him, leaping lightly into the rising bow of his canoe. Nita Qwan had not deserted him, and he threw a tomahawk into the first foe, dropped a second over the side with his paddle, and then Aneas was at the Outwaller captain’s shoulder, his short spear licking over the Outwaller’s shoulder to kill a third, and a fourth.
Nita Qwan turned and dove over the side, leaving Aneas alone except for Ta-se-ho in the rapidly sinking stern. Aneas had thigh-high boots of heavy goatskin and a long shirt of maille, and the bogglins held no fear for him, except that the canoe rocked like a trotting horse’s back, and Aneas knew that if he went over, he’d sink like a stone.
But other canoes were coming in to the right and left, wedging his against the cockles and the hull of the great Gallish round ship. His spear licked out and took another bogglin, and then he had to shorten the haft. His feet were wet; the boat was sinking.
He used the haft, used the head to slash, thrust viciously with the butt-spike, trying to reach another boat, but the bogglins were reckless, and then he was in the water and so were the bogglins; he took a blow in the back and almost lost his air. He sank.
Then there were rocks beneath his feet; shallow, but the water was full of bogglins and not all of them were dead. He missed the moment when the Sossag warriors, old hands at water-fighting, rose under the cockle-boats and boarded them from the other side, slaughtering the shocked bogglins; he missed the moment when the Galles, realizing that they had allies, began concentrating their crossbows on the flanks of the fight, isolating the bogglins and speeding their collapse. He was in the water with twenty of the vicious creatures and he’d lost his spear and had only his heavy dagger; immediately he had to loose a working he would rather have saved for a deadlier foe, blasting a pair of the creatures off his back and head and losing an ear in the process, ripped from his head by a four-hinged mouth. Blood poured down his face into the water, summoning other predators, but the bay was full of blood, and as the new sun rose in red splendour, Cranberry Bay was a brilliant red, the red of new blood under a vivid orange sky.
A wedge of canoes came out of the smoke from the shore.
Once again, a line of violet fire came from Looks-at-Clouds. Hir strike met a shield and dropped it with a concussion like the falling of an ancient tree; not a single clap, but a long, titanic ripping noise.
“Hastenoch,” Ta-se-ho said. The old man was in the water with Aneas; he had a short, curved sword in one hand and his pipe axe in the other and his feet on the shingle of sand beneath them. He had a slash wound on one side of his neck, and even as he spat the warning, Nita Qwan leaned out from a captured canoe’s gunwale and hauled the older man straight out of the water.
The massive, four-footed troll’s head caught Aneas in the midriff, driving him off his feet and into deeper water; luck and the warning were all that kept the blow from being his death, and even as it was, he felt the ribs go on his left side.
His fear gagged him in the bloody water; the huge thing was almost invisible under the surface, and he couldn’t find it, and he was sinking, the weight of the maille too much for him. The blow had knocked him off his sandbar into deeper water.
He opened his eyes under water, fighting panic; there were hundreds of bogglins, their corpses neutrally buoyant just below the surface; and there …
It ignored all the boats and came for him. A long trail of bright blood curled away from it in a spiral of almost aethereal beauty, rising into the orange sun over their heads. Archers were loosing into the thing from above and it was taking hits, making the water leap, but the thing came straight for Aneas.
He set his feet in the deep black mulch of the bottom, so different from the sand he’d just been on, and he raised his own pipe axe under water and loosed his last prepared ops and light flared, brighter than the sun, brighter than ten suns. It was the merest cantrip, a flash of light to blind an opponent, but in the murky water it dazzled the monster and it made fair to dazzle its caster, who only had one eye closed by virtue of the pain from his head where his ear had been ripped away.
The troll lost its air in shock; bubbles exploded all around it.
He struck with the pipe axe, a feeble blow to its brow ridge, but it was turning, turning, its sense of direction lost, and Aneas grappled it, wrapping the haft of his pipe axe over its antlered head and round its neck and locking it there with both hands as the now-panicked monster shook itself like a terrier and then leapt for the surface.
They burst into the noise and chaos of the battle and Aneas hauled in a breath and cranked the pipe axe haft against what he hoped was the troll’s windpipe.
An arbalest bolt, lucky or aimed with great skill, sank right to the fletchings in the thing’s side as it rolled, a hand’s breadth from Aneas’s hips where he straddled it. It spasmed, its strength godlike, and broke his grip and flung him out of the water, maille and all. He fell back; his head hit something hard …
… he was choking, his lungs full. It was all very slow; he was alone in a great field, running to his mother with a handful of flowers, and then he was sitting on Gabriel’s chest while Gavin held him down, rubbing pig shit in his hair; he was kissing Anthony, the stable boy, and then Anthony was dead, killed by his father, who loomed over him, a sword in his hand, and his mother …
… his mother …
A spike of pain, and he was choking, choking, vomiting and choking, and he was upside down and all the day’s disorientation came together and he was …
… gone.
The Gallish officer looked at Nita Qwan. “He’s breathing,” the man said. He wore an odd smile, and his Low Archaic had a scholarly quality.
Nita Qwan looked at Aneas Muriens, who hung like a gutted deer, upside down, the wound to his head bleeding freely onto the deck of the great round ship. The ship’s physician had ordered the drowned captain seized by the heels and hung that way, and had both kissed him and punched him in the stomach, causing Irene to attack him. But Looks-at-Clouds, in precise High Archaic, restrained Irene and explained her, at the same time, and the Galle had smiled his odd, twisted smile again.
Gas-a-ho watched the operation with a clinical detachment. He was smoking Ta-se-ho’s pipe axe, and now he grabbed the swaying head of the upside-down captain, pulled him close, and fastened his mouth over Aneas’s mouth and breathed out, filling his lungs with tobacco smoke.
Aneas coughed; hacked again, and gurgled.
“Oh, stop it!” Irene said.
Aneas vomited. It was ugly, and watery, and went on too long; the man coughed and coughed.
The Gallish doctor caught his head and shoulders and two sailors cut him down, and they laid him gently on the deck, well clear of his vomit.
“He’s breathing,” the doctor said again triumphantly; this time in High Archaic, rare among Galles albeit common enough among Outwallers.
Aneas’s eyes flickered open.
An hour later he sat, naked but for a white wool blanket, in the stern cabin of the round ship, as a pair of Gallish sailors unshipped the heavy deadlights that had protected the stern windows in battle, loop-holed like a fortress wall. Beyond the windows, the banks of the Great River slipped by, and astern, almost a dozen long canoes bobbed and skipped like captive dolphins. At his side sat Nita Qwan and Black Heron and John de Monts, the forester, and Irene, all ranged along a beautiful stern bench with a velvet cushion. A magnificent scene of the annunciation of the Virgin was painted on a panel and hung on the starboar
d wall, and on the port side, a rich tapestry depicting the hunt of a wild boar.
“You were waiting for us?” Aneas asked. He still felt terrible; he felt as if he were someone else and not himself; death, or near-death, had added to his disorientation; worst of all, he had lost his contact with the aethereal. There was nothing there, and like the torn ear, whose bleeding stump he could not stop handling, the lack of contact with the aethereal was something he kept probing; stepping into his memory forest, wincing at the alien darkness where his clear pool had been, and drifting back to the real. He felt sick, sick to his very core. He felt as if he were another person. The feeling frightened him, and so did the near worship with which he was greeted on deck when he came to; Gas-a-ho claimed he had killed a troll in the water with only his pipe axe. Aneas had no immediate memory beyond choking; it was as if his former life had been stripped away. He remembered Looks-at-Clouds; he remembered the attack of Ash and the night movement on the Cranberry, but of the fight there he had only flashes.
The Gallish captain was called Charles: Charles de la Marche. He remembered that; the man had been introduced a moment before.
The man was older even than Ta-se-ho—in his late fifties. He had a grey beard and dark hair and he hadn’t shaved in a week, but his eyes sparkled. “I had a message from one of your black-and-white birds, ordering me to wait in the mouth of the Seneschal River, or perhaps the Chaudiere or this Wgotche .…”
Looks-at-Clouds nodded from across the table. S/he had a pipe, a clay pipe from Galle or Alba, and s/he was blowing smoke rings, but s/he leaned forward sharply. “The Huran name for Cranberry,” s/he said.
“I looked into each,” De La Marche said. “I didn’t linger; the south bank is crawling with the Wild.”
Aneas managed to muster enough of his usual humour to crack a smile. “We’re crawling with the Wild ourselves,” he said.
The Galle leaned back in his broad-footed captain’s chair. “My men are not so pleased to have these horrid goblins aboard.” He waved at the door to the main deck, where Krek and a dozen bogglins sat in the sunlight digesting an excellent meal of their enemies. “And irks!” he said.
Aneas tugged at his beard.
Irene was also wearing only a white wool blanket. She leaned forward clutching the blanket close. “You just happened to be in the river?” she drawled. “We spent the spring and summer fighting Galles.”
The Gallish captain’s face froze. “My brother was Oliver de la Marche. Does that mean anything to you?” he asked.
Irene was distracted by Aneas, who was smiling at her. She felt herself blush.
Aneas grinned. “You fell in?” he asked.
Monts laughed. “She jumped in to fetch you, sir,” he said.
Aneas flushed. And looked at the Galle. “Your brother was Hartmut’s captain,” he said.
“Hartmut killed my brother,” De la Marche said.
Irene sat back. “I see,” she said quietly.
“Do you?” De la Marche said, his voice flat, devoid of emotion. “I’m still not sure I understand it all. But I have two hundred sailors and forty men-at-arms of my own, and I collected all the men I found at Kebec. I have a commission signed by the Sieur Du Corse.”
“What men at Kebec?” Aneas demanded.
Looks-at-Clouds shook hir head. “The Galles,” s/he shrugged. “When Ticondonaga surrendered, your brother sent them north.”
Aneas frowned. For a moment he’d been himself, and now he felt as if there were a spear through his head. The pain was staggering.
“War makes for strange bedfellows,” Irene muttered.
“And who exactly are you, mam’selle?” asked De la Marche.
“I am Princess Irene of Liviapolis, Porphyrogenetrix, Heir of the Empire,” she snapped. And at her voice, no man would have questioned her, despite the pale, round shoulders or the white wool blanket or the sodden, mouse-dun hair.
De la Marche rose and bowed. “It is like having legends spring to life,” he said.
Irene favoured him with a regal smile. “I find these adventures wearing,” she admitted. “And yet … thrones are not won in throne rooms, nor do faint hearts ever win fair gentlemen.” She nodded. “We have been fighting Kevin Orley and his master all summer. Even now, the Army of the Alliance is in the west.” She pointed out the foredeck windows, where, behind De la Marche, smoke rose into the heavens; trees were on fire, and birch bark burned. And ahead, out the main hatch toward the deck, Aneas could see the sky—pink and red and deep grey—perpetually lowering like a storm front ready to break, at least for the last few days.
Aneas blinked several times, trying to clear his head. There was too much in it. “How fares Ta-se-ho?” he asked.
Nita Qwan shook his head. “The old hunter is dead,” he said. “He bled out. We lost him and Red Squirrel and you lost …”
Irene looked up. “Ashford,” she said.
“Damn,” Aneas said. But he sat up. “Is Ashford and Ta-se-ho a fair exchange for singeing Orley’s beard and burning Orley’s boats?” He felt the darkness settle on him. “What are we doing?” he asked. He sounded lost.
Irene spoke out, her voice assured. “We are moving upriver, headed west into the Milles Isles.”
Looks-at-Clouds nodded. “We must go west. We must snatch Thorn’s island before Orley can reach it.”
De la Marche nodded at the changeling and then at Aneas. “Oui, monsieur. This is what your officers said you would want.”
Aneas winced slightly at the mention of officers and remembered Ta-se-ho telling him that he gave too many orders. It struck him that the man was dead; and that he had been a remarkable man, and without him, they would have had no boats. Something else was flitting around the edge of his mind, but Aneas wasn’t anxious to delve too deep in the soup of his head just then.
Then it struck him, what was wrong inside his head.
He had no access to ops. He could see his palace; it was dark, and looked as if it was haunted, but there was no connection.
He was dead to the aethereal.
He wanted to speak; to say something dramatic. But time passed, and he was still sitting, saying nothing. He looked, first at Looks-at-Clouds, and then at Irene.
Looks-at-Clouds smiled at him and nodded. “We must do this,” s/he said.
Irene gave him a queer look; the Gallish captain was more sanguine. “You have a chart for this Inner Sea?” he asked.
Monts laughed hollowly. “Never even been there,” he said.
“Ta-se-ho knew the waters well,” Nita Qwan said. “I do not. Gas-a-ho perhaps.”
“Deadlock,” Monts said. “He’s been up here. But he’s wounded.” The forester shrugged and got up carefully to avoid slamming his head into the low beams. “I’ll go speak to him.”
“You have no pilot?” the Galle asked. “Sweet Holy Trinity. Ventre Saint Gris. Par Dieu. You want me to take my ships into uncharted waters? These are not canoes; my ships have draughts. Rocks will sink us.”
Aneas blinked. He looked at Irene, and caught her eye. He was having trouble forming words.
Her pupils widened slightly.
“Yes,” Aneas said.
Looks-at-Clouds cut in. “If you can’t help us, we’ll go on by canoes, as we would have gone if we hadn’t … found you.”
The Gallish captain rose, bowing his head and swinging gracefully to avoid the silver hanging lamp. “I make no promise. Let us see what we see.”
The San Colombo Pass—Ser Alison
The great fortified camp was almost empty, and all the infantry had marched north, headed for the San Colombo pass.
Sauce was having too good a time to let it all go. She wanted the captain to see how good she was, and she had been reading all of Blanche’s messages. She had an idea; she had a strong rear guard of light horse; she had the company, or at least the whites and the greens. She had a steady flow of scouting reports.
In the first light of dawn, she mounted with the Duchess of Venike and
two thousand horse, and the moment there was enough light to see her hand in front of her face, they were moving. Not north, to the safety of the pass and the plains of Arles on the other side of the mountains, but south, to Firensi.
Arles—The Red Knight
The falconet barked, and the heady smell of sulphur billowed over the watchers. A hundred paces away, the four-pound stone ball struck an old oak tree and the tree’s base exploded, splinters flying fifty paces.
The second falconet fired, and its ball struck the same target, and the old oak tree, almost severed, fell with a crash.
Pavalo Payam peered through the smoke. “Remarkable,” he said. He twitched his emerald silk khaftan as if trying to keep it out of the smoke.
Bad Tom spat. “Aye, they’re monsters and nae mistake.”
Gabriel was watching his guests. Du Corse had his fingers deep in his beard. He looked at the emperor, his eyes full of speculation.
“You can crack a castle with ten rounds,” Du Corse said quietly. “Nothing can stand against you.”
Gabriel nodded. His smile almost split his face. “You should ask Edmund Chevins what they did to the Umroth,” he said.
“They’re too fewkin’ strong; they’ll take all the fun oot o’ war,” Tom said. “An’ the smell is like all the de’ils in hell ha’e dusted their breeks.”
Payam crossed his arms. “My sultan will require these to be shared,” he said. “This cannot be something that you alone have.”
Du Corse walked over to the crews and looked down the barrel of the nearest gonne, and watched carefully while the sponger ran his sheepskin-headed stave into a bucket of dirty water and then thrust it down the throat of the smoking piece. When he took it out, it was black, and a shred of glowing ember was stuck to the wet sheepskin, and the sponger plunged it in the bucket and sponged again.