Isles of the Forsaken (27 page)

“What the hell does that matter? We’re going to need the Tornas, too. Especially them.”

“Speak for yourself,” Dorn said. “I’ve never sucked up to Tornas, and I never will.”

“You’ll never get them on your side, either.”

“You think you’ve got them on your side? Well, check your back—there’s already a target painted on it. Those mongrels turn to treachery as naturally as they breathe. They have nothing to gain by supporting you. All their wealth, all their power, comes from the Innings. For sixty years they’ve played the obedient dogs so they could become the masters. And it’s paid off. Now they control the navy, the government, the commerce, the shipping. They’ll be running souvenir stands at your execution.”

Harg knew he was seeing the reverse side of the prejudice he had endured from Tornas for years. And Dorn wasn’t the only one who thought this way.

“This is why we could never beat the Innings,” Harg said. “Because we’re so glad to fight each other. If we’re going to win this, we need to pull together.”

Dorn ran a hand through his dishevelled white hair. “Win? You really are mad, aren’t you?” he said. “The gunpowder has frizzled your brains. This isn’t some little band of islanders you’ve stirred up. This is the Inning Empire. They can wipe the South Chain from the face of the earth without even breaking a sweat.”

“Don’t talk as if you’re not in this too, Dorn. Like it or not, you are. All of Thimish is. There’s no backing out now.”

“Rot you,” the pirate growled. “You think I don’t know that?” He began to pace. Despite his immense bulk he moved with an animal’s silence, and like an animal seemed ready to jump in any direction. “What chance do you think Thimish has of holding out against the Empire?”

“Thimish alone? None at all. But Thimish won’t
be
alone. There will be Romm and Spole, and Pont and Vill. It will be the entire South Chain against Inning.”

“You’re very sure all those islands will forget their grievances against the pirates of Thimish and join us.”

It was Barko who spoke up then. “You should have been down in the town square tonight, Dorn. If you’d seen what went on there, you wouldn’t be doubting now.”

There was a long silence. The fire crackled in the grate, and the sound of the guard changing filtered in faintly from outside. At last Dorn said, “I know men who have spent their lives waiting for an Ison to rise and unite us, lead us back to the greatness of olden days. I’ve always said they were daft. It won’t happen in our lives.”

“Well, at last we agree on something,” Harg said. “There isn’t any magic hero who’s going to appear and save us. It’s up to us. If plain folk like you and me won’t work to save the isles, it won’t get done. We have to do it our way—the straight, honest, Adaina way. No Inning riches, no Lashnura power. Just us.” He got up and went over to Dorn then, close enough that they could touch hands. “Dorn, we shouldn’t be enemies. We’re on the same damn side.”

Dorn regarded him with a mix of suspicion, fear, and memory. “Do you know what the Innings do to rebels? They won’t be so polite as to hang you, the way they did Ison Orin. He wasn’t an Inning subject; you are. Their punishment for treason is impaling. They’re going to ram a wooden stake up your ass and raise you up in the town square to die by inches, hanging there baking in the sun.”

For an instant Harg had a vivid premonition that Dorn’s words were prophetic. It lasted only a moment, but left him feeling drained, tired, and beaten. The tide of certainty on which he had been surfing all night receded, fast and fantastic as a swallow on the wind.

“I can’t argue any more,” Harg said, turning away.

When he and Barko had closed the commandant’s door behind them and were facing the dark parade ground of the fort, Harg felt as if he had walked into a wall. All at once the day caught up with him and he couldn’t think, he couldn’t move. All he could do was sink down on the steps in exhaustion.

Barko sat down beside him. “Don’t let Dorn make you doubt yourself, Harg,” he said.

“What if he’s right? What if we made a terrible mistake today?”

“You didn’t. Maybe you can’t see what’s going on, but the rest of us can, clear as day. There is a force bigger than any of us at work here. There is a pattern unfolding in the isles. I don’t know where it will lead. It’ll probably demand a lot from us, you especially. But this I do know: if we miss the chance that’s being offered us, if we waste our time with doubts, the pattern will sweep right on past. We’re riding a wild wind, Harg. There is no giving up, no going back.”

Harg couldn’t answer. There wasn’t a speck of energy left in his body, not even enough to open his mouth. He became vaguely aware that Barko had called out, “Hey Calpe! Is there an extra bed in this place? We’ve got to get this guy to sleep.”

Then Calpe was on one side of him, Barko on the other, and they were leading him somewhere. There was a bed, the most welcome sight on earth. Calpe was taking off his boots and jacket. Her eyes were full of fierce loyalty. Ah, Calpe—so fit, so lovely, so married. What energy she would have. How tired he was.

He fell asleep almost before his head touched the pillow. But it wasn’t Calpe he dreamed of. He dreamed he was standing in a shower of cool silver hair, washing in a lake of unquestioning Lashnura love.

*

After Harg had left her, Spaeth stood for a moment alone on the steps of the customs house, then turned to find a refuge inside the gutted building where no one could see her. Her whole body trembled with rejection. Never had she felt so inflamed with the desire; now it burned in her, unfulfilled. What a fool she had been, to think that her free sacrifice would be honoured, or her selflessness would be valued. She looked down at her hands. In the darkness it seemed as if the fingertips had grown blacker in just the last few minutes. She clenched them desperately.

The cure had seemed so close, so obvious. Watching Harg speak to the crowd in that charged moment of mora, she had felt a sharp urge to drink in his power, to let his will flow through and possess her. With his life-force animating her, she would have been full in a way she had never been before. Now, deprived of him against all her expectations, she felt hungry and vengeful.

The light from the bonfire outside cast odd shadows across the empty, ruined rooms of the building. Spaeth mounted a darkened staircase to the second floor and picked her way through smashed furniture to the front, where she could look out onto the square. The stone buildings that ringed the courtyard seemed to be frowning from under their dark lintels, and from time to time the firelight snagged on a glint of glass like a watching eye. The dancers below seemed unaware of it. A couple was sitting on the steps where she had stood, their bodies pressed so intimately close it made Spaeth ache to look. The woman was laughing. No thought for the sacrifices that knit the world together and kept them safe. The Lashnura and all their tragic love were of no consequence here.

Spaeth turned away and wandered through empty rooms till she found another staircase, this one narrow and steep, leading up to a trap door. When she pushed it open she found herself in the open cupola on top of the building, with a view on all sides. She leaned against the sill, feeling a deep bitterness in her blood. Was there a finite amount of happiness in the world, so that it could only be purchased by stealing it from someone else?

“Now you see,” a voice hissed in her ear, black as night.

“We are used, Ridwit,” Spaeth said. “The Adaina don’t care for us. They trap us into loving them so they don’t have to be responsible for their own folly.”

“Yes,” Ridwit said.

“They don’t deserve our dhota.”

“Especially not yours,” Ridwit purred, stirring the hair behind Spaeth’s ear.

“It’s unjust that we should be forced to give what they don’t value.”

“There may be another way,” Ridwit said, “if you have the courage to pursue it.”

A chill wind blew past. Spaeth felt poised on the threshold of a domain beyond responsibility, and it gave her a forbidden thrill. She looked down on all the puny little humans making much of themselves around the bonfire below. Harg’s name was on all their lips. The thought of him made her desire and rage flare up so bright she thought it would light the courtyard. She wanted to conquer him, to make him beg for her dhota.

A claw pierced her flesh. Her mouth opened in a soundless cry, half of pain, half of pleasure, as she felt it bury itself deeper and deeper into her body. It penetrated the place of her humiliation and transformed it into something red and steely. She gasped with the flood of power.

The night was no longer dark. She saw everything in sharp outline, as through the night vision of a cat. When she laughed, a feral snarl echoed back to her from the night wind.

The vaulted ballroom of the Sorrell mansion was all aglow with winking currents of finery and faction, coquetry and manoeuvre. Commodore Joffrey, distinguished in his dress uniform, scanned the room. An eddy of merchants’ sons and daughters swirled past him, inviting stares with their imported Inning fashions. It seemed that “savage chic” was all the rage this season. Feather headdresses bobbed above the ladies’ elaborately braided hair, and their dresses swished and clicked with shell beads. The most stylish young men wore elegantly fitted versions of the Adaina leather knee-boot, blousy shirts, and sealskin hats. Joffrey wondered what the Innings made of these islanders imitating the Innings imitating them.

The Innings were scattered around the room in clumps, conspicuously taller than the rest of the crowd, many of them splendid in bullion and braid. Most of the newly arrived officers were surrounded by soberly dressed merchants, Tornabay’s commercial elite, who were attracted to power like ants to sugar. Joffrey could tell instantly where the guest of honour, Admiral Talley, was standing—and not just because the largest swarm of merchants was around him. All of the navy officers were instinctively oriented so they could see the admiral, monitor his mood, and check where his attention was directed. They all looked tense and wary. None of them had spoken to Joffrey since he had entered the room—nor would they, so long as the admiral could see them.

As a group of merchants’ wives swept past, Joffrey forced himself to concentrate on smiling. He was not in a mood to party. For one thing, he had already noticed several disturbing security lapses for which he was ultimately responsible. For another, he had just survived one of the most unpleasant days of his life.

That afternoon, he had had to brief his icy commander and the senior staff on the debacle in the South Chain. The news had only arrived the day before, hard on the heels of Admiral Talley’s arrival, and new details were still filtering in. There was no way to paint it over pleasantly. The Fourth Fleet, the Navy, the whole Inning nation had been humiliated by a pack of savages. The admiral was furious, and someone was going to be held accountable. From the vacant space around him, Joffrey knew who everyone thought it was going to be.

The only one who appeared unaffected by the general tension was Corbin Talley himself. Joffrey watched him across the room, standing erect and elegant in his uniform. He had the charm turned on tonight. He was gracious, attentive, even witty. Though he was never exactly warm, tonight it gave him a tantalizing air of detachment. He made people feel honoured to have been noticed. Worden Sorrell, the host of this long-anticipated banquet, was standing next to the admiral, basking in his presence. What none of them knew was how abruptly Talley’s charm could turn off.

“Looking for Livvie?”

Joffrey snapped out of his reverie to find that Tiarch had had the courage to approach him. He simulated a smile. “Yes, I haven’t seen her yet tonight.”

“I think she is waiting to make an entrance.”

Joffrey’s rather public courtship of Livvie Sorrell, openly encouraged by her parents, had been keeping the Tornabay rumour mills alive. The Innings, despite their power, were not seen as good matrimonial prospects, since they were apt to court, then leave. Joffrey, being an islander, had been a better prospect to stay and wield influence for years to come. From the bevy of young women who had been paraded before him, he had picked not so much Livvie as her father, rumoured to be the richest man in Tornabay. Of Livvie herself, he cared only that she was not repulsive. But he made a gallant effort to pretend he was smitten.

Despite her conversation opener, Tiarch knew perfectly well where Joffrey’s attention had been directed, and now her gaze turned the same way. “They ought to back off and let him enjoy the scenery,” she said.

“The women, you mean? He wouldn’t notice them,” Joffrey said.

“Really? What
does
our admiral enjoy?”

“Winning wars,” Joffrey said.

“Nothing besides? Wine? Gambling?”

She wanted to know his vices. Joffrey had no encouragement for her. “He’s an ascetic.”

“I expect he has to be careful to avoid scandal. There must be suspicions that he achieved his position by nepotism.”

“At one time there were. At first, it may have been true. No one says it any longer.”

“You’re very loyal,” Tiarch observed.

With a thin smile, Joffrey said, “He has been very good to me.”

Of all people in the room, Tiarch ought to know best what he meant. Neither of them had been born to prominent families; they had both used the Innings to claw their way upward, into the kind of exalted company they inhabited tonight.

Tiarch had been at the meeting that day. She had played the scene like an expert: grave and concerned, never breathing a word of criticism, but fairly radiating a message of “that will teach you to put anyone but me in charge.” Joffrey couldn’t afford to let himself resent it; in her place, he would have done the same. Besides, Tiarch was one he understood. She was a wily survivor who would play along with any faction, or all of them at once, till it became clear who was likely to win. Then she would strike, or betray.

Yes, he could work with Tiarch.

“Commodore?” A young ensign was at his side. “Captain Dorris is here, and would like to speak to you.”