Darkening Skies (The Hadrumal Crisis) (31 page)

The Esterlin Residence, Relshaz

21st of For-Autumn

M
ELLITHA OPENED HER
letter with an ivory-handled knife and scanned the contents. She clicked her tongue in exasperation. ‘Kerrit Osier’s had no more luck discovering hints of ensorcelled items hidden in the Magistracy’s archives, or in their strong boxes come to that.’

‘That was a long shot at best.’ Jilseth put the scrying bowl down on the table and went to fetch the tray of perfume vials. The crumbled bitumen looked incongruous in its white crackle glazed dish. She frowned to see how their supply had diminished. ‘Is there more of this to be had?’

She wondered if some eminent mage would ever discover why searching wizardries could be worked only once using whatever was focusing the particular spell. At least they could still focus their scrying on the anchorage, thanks to one galley and one trireme which the fleeing corsairs had been forced to abandon as damaged beyond hope of repair.

‘I’ll see what can be done.’ Mellitha made a note on the wax tablet beside her on the cushioned day bed. ‘Until then, we may have to limit ourselves to fewer viewings.’

Now it was Jilseth who tsked with frustration. ‘But they have stopped killing themselves. Surely he will make some move to bring them together.’

As relieved as she was not to be scrying out dead bodies, every passing day made her more apprehensive that the Mandarkin would do something unexpected. She was cudgelling her wits to think what any wizard might do with this rag-tag of untrained and distraught mageborn. What might they do while she and Mellitha were not watching?

‘What will we learn from him simply bringing them together?’ Mellitha’s irritation sharpened her tone.

Jilseth didn’t take offence. She knew it wasn’t directed at her.

‘We must work a clairaudience into the scrying,’ the older magewoman said firmly. ‘Unless we can hear what he has to say, we’re wasting our time and that pitch.’ She gestured at the crackle glazed dish.

Jilseth was sorely tempted to agree. ‘We must put that to Planir,’ she said by way of compromise.

Mellitha nodded as she read her next letter. ‘We—’

Velindre’s appearance in the salon startled them both. The tall blonde magewoman didn’t give either of them a chance to speak.

‘There’s word of two galleys in sore distress coming into harbour.’

‘Those corsairs who escaped Anskal?’ Mellitha threw her correspondence aside.

Velindre nodded. ‘The wharf rats say that they’re raiders’ ships fleeing whatever disaster befell them in the Archipelago.’

‘Courier doves will be carrying that news all over the northern reaches.’ Mellitha pursed her lips. ‘Let’s go and see what’s to be seen.’

She held out a hand to Jilseth, who took it expecting to help the older magewoman up. Instead cool white mist enveloped her with the familiar sensations of translocation. As she felt firm ground beneath her feet, the mist cleared to show her the seaward face of the great white temple. All three of them stood in a sheltered nook between two massive buttresses. Barely five paces of marble paving separated them from the dark waters.

‘There’s never anyone here,’ Mellitha said comfortably.

‘This way.’ Velindre strode on ahead.

The Aldabreshin quays proved to be no great distance away, built outwards into these deeper waters unsullied by the river mud carried down to the delta’s shores. Lofty stone breakwaters embraced a calm expanse where Archipelagan cargo galleys were moored. These mighty ships were far bigger than any of those raiding vessels Jilseth had seen while scrying on the corsairs. Lean and predatory triremes were anchored between these great galleys, their stern platforms all manned by dangerous looking swordsmen.

More dark-skinned warriors leaned against the buildings lining the quayside. Each one seemed to have three times as many blades as he had hands to use them and they all wore the fine steel chainmail of the islands. The links were so small that the gleaming armour draped and flowed like cloth. Even their feet were encased in mail leggings, riveted to hobnailed leather soles.

It was very different to the riverside wharves which Jilseth had visited on her search for Minelas. The other side of the city offered rough-hewn warehouses and seedy taverns favoured by the Caladhrian and Lescari bargemen who plied their trade on the river Rel. Here substantial storehouses were built of smoothly sawn and darkly oiled wood with broad balconies on their upper storeys.

‘Do we have an excuse for our presence?’ she asked Mellitha in an undertone as one storehouse’s guardian narrowed his dark eyes at them all.

‘Trade.’ Mellitha smiled serenely at the suspicious swordsman.

‘The warlords who trade most regularly with the Relshazri like to build themselves a little piece of home.’ Velindre gestured at the next building along the quayside. ‘Their most trusted galley masters winter here, turn and turn about, and accommodate their visiting lords in the summer sailing season.’

‘With their wives and children?’ A high-pitched giggle drew Jilseth’s eyes up to a balustrade where three small children leaned over to watch the scene below. A woman in vivid red silk scolded them away as the sunlight struck fire from the rubies in her high-piled long black hair and around her cinnamon-hued wrists.

‘Concubines, more commonly than wives,’ Velindre corrected her, ‘but don’t think that they’re merely doxies looking no further than their bedroom ceilings. Every Aldabreshi woman will know all the ins and outs of the markets, looking to secure maximum advantage and profit through the trading season.’

‘How much longer will this year’s season last?’ Jilseth contemplated the procession in and out of the nearest storehouse’s wide doors.

Bales and chests and baskets, some open and others tightly corded, were carried to and fro alongside bolts of cloth sewn into sailcloth shrouds. Some were small enough to be managed one-handed; others needed two strong men to shoulder them.

Two strong slaves, Jilseth corrected herself, either Aldabreshin born or Relshazri ne’er-do-wells fallen into debt or paying for some crime against the Magistracy. So Relshazri slave merchants insisted, invariably and unconvincingly appalled when some hapless Lescari captured by mercenaries was discovered among their stock, or an unfortunate from yet further afield.

‘We always see this last flurry of ships as the Archipelagan rains slacken off in the northern reaches in the latter half of For-Autumn,’ Mellitha explained. ‘But the gales from the western sea will strengthen as the equinox approaches.’

‘The ships will stop sailing well before then this year,’ Velindre said ominously. ‘The Emerald moves into the arc of Death in eighteen days time.’

Before Jilseth could ask her to explain that baffling statement, a distant shout echoed across the water. More hallooing followed from the westerly breakwater. Velindre took a long stride forward, shading her eyes with one hand.

Two galleys appeared between the watch towers guarding the harbour entrance. One rode so low in the water that Jilseth marvelled to see it staying afloat without magical aid. The other looked more seaworthy but its oars flailed like some mortally wounded insect’s legs.

The ships in the harbour cleared a path. The triremes’ triple banks of oars hit the water with a disciplined splash. The massive galleys were slower to move but once their rowers were marshalled, a single stroke sufficed to haul the closest vessels out of the toiling arrivals’ way. Coloured pennants flew up the masts of triremes and galleys alike.

Jilseth couldn’t see any answering signals from the battered corsairs. She wondered how Velindre or Mellitha proposed to learn whatever those aboard and escaping the Mandarkin wizard could usefully tell Hadrumal’s mages.

‘How soon—’

Velindre silenced Jilseth with a vehement oath in what must surely be the Aldabreshin tongue. Her words turned heads on all sides around them.

The hostility on the Archipelagans’ faces sent a shiver down Jilseth’s spine. She felt a warm glow of unexpected magic in the palm of her hand. Closing her fingers lest any magelight escape her grasp, she nevertheless kept hold of that instinctive surge of wizardry. ‘Mellitha?’

The older magewoman laid a calm hand on her arm. ‘They’re not interested in us.’

Velindre contemplated the harbour scene guardedly. ‘Let’s be ready in case that changes.’

Sharp noises aloft sent seabirds perched on the roofs wheeling into the sky, squawking. Jilseth looked up to see all the balconies deserted; louvered doors and shutters being slammed.

A trio of armoured men rushed out of the closest storehouse’s entrance. More Aldabreshin warriors emerged from the other buildings, right along the broad sweep of the quay. They were all heading for the only mooring left open to the labouring galleys.

The Relshazri were all departing, dragging their handcarts in panic. When several donkey-drawn wagons all tried to leave by the same alley between two storehouses, one muleteer abandoned his charges entirely. Ignoring cries of outrage, he vaulted an empty cart bed and fled.

As every face turned towards that uproar, the air around Jilseth shimmered although the day was nowhere near hot enough for the sun to strike haze from the stones. Magic wrought of elemental air rasped against her wizardly senses. Velindre’s magic, concealing them all.

Jilseth would have preferred to be consulted but she couldn’t deny her relief at being hidden. She looked in all directions, alert for anyone approaching. They might be invisible now, to anyone without both magebirth and wizardly education, but they were hardly intangible. The last thing they needed was some hurrying Aldabreshi barrelling into them all unawares. They could doubtless escape by means of a further translocation but that would cost them any chance of seeing what transpired here.

Invisible also didn’t mean inaudible and despite this swelling clamour a disembodied voice might snag someone’s ear. Jilseth looked to Velindre for some silent signal.

To her wizard sight, the tall magewoman looked like a charcoal sketch except that each feathered line and grainy shadow was wrought of vivid sapphire and the buildings behind her were clearly visible through her translucent form. Beside her Mellitha was similarly outlined in elemental air of a more muted hue. It wasn’t her spell after all.

With both women now looking at her, Jilseth tapped her own ear and shaped a sphere with her cobalt hands, her brows raised in a question. Should she wrap a magical silence around them all so they could converse? She wanted to know what Velindre had read in those signal pennants.

Velindre shook her head in emphatic refusal. Mellitha was less adamant but clearly agreed with the tall magewoman. She cupped one gold-ringed hand hand to her own ear, like some festival masquerader showing the audience she was alert.

Jilseth nodded her understanding. They couldn’t afford to risk not hearing some vital warning, cut off from the crowd by their own magecraft.

The ravaged galleys were approaching the quayside. Aldabreshi swordsmen raced along the open thoroughfare between the bollards and stone steps of the harbour and the storehouses. Gangs of slaves were now busy bolting and barring their ground floor doors.

The first vessel wallowed perilously, struggling to turn its stern ladders to the quay. Jilseth could barely hear the stuttering clash of oars being shipped above the harsh shouts from all those ashore. If the corsairs tried to answer, she had no way of knowing what they said or of asking Velindre.

The first of those aboard ship appeared. Ropes uncoiled through the air, tossed by gaunt men with haunted faces. Hands ashore caught the cables and hauled. With a shocking crash of splintering wood, the ship was irrevocably secured to the shore.

The crowd of armoured men on the dock rippled like a swarm of bees as the second galley struggled to make landfall. Those vessels already moored on either side of the new arrivals were now bristling with warriors. Every man was armed with the long curved swords or the simple short bow of the islands, arrows nocked and ready.

Jilseth’s skin crawled with unease. Either that or the swathing elemental air was grating against her innate affinity.

Something by the waterside tripped the hovering hostility into open aggression. Swordsmen stormed up each galley’s stern ladders to overwhelm those on the raised decks. As they headed into the belly of each ship, loud alarm flew up from the rowers’ benches.

Those first swordsmen reappeared with shocking speed to throw writhing bodies in ragged clothing down onto the quayside. The shifting mob ashore broke apart only to close on their victims in frenzied slaughter.

Heart-rending screams ripped through the roars of hatred. A few frantic corsairs struggled to their knees, momentarily visible before armoured men closed ranks around them. Blades gleamed in the sunlight, slicing downwards. Swords lifted dulled with blood to fling scarlet drops through the air. Lethal steel bit deep again and again.

Some of the murderous Archipelagans jostled so close together that they hindered each others’ butchery. Jilseth saw one desperate corsair crawling between stamping feet as the men who sought to kill him threatened to turn their blades on each other.

He had no hope of escape. Two different Aldabreshi hacked him limb from limb. Jilseth’s only consolation was that he must surely have been already mortally wounded, given the copious blood smeared behind him. One killer kicked the dismembered man’s head, sending it bowling along the thoroughfare.