Isles of the Forsaken (37 page)

A lieutenant leaped to his feet on seeing Nathaway, and offered him a chair. “I will inform the admiral that you are here,” he said.

Nathaway sat, fidgeting, as the lieutenant carefully eased the door open and slipped inside. No one in the crowded room uttered a word. Nathaway caught two of the officers studying him curiously, but they averted their eyes when he looked at them. At last the door cracked open and the lieutenant gestured Nathaway quietly to enter.

Corbin was sitting behind a desk with two officers at attention before him. He broke off speaking when Nathaway entered. His eyes, cold behind their gold-rimmed glasses, pinned Nathaway to the wall. With a brittle formality, he gestured in the direction of a chair, then turned back to the two officers, giving directions in a clipped, rapid voice. The secretary taking notes at his side was sweating with effort.

It was not until this moment that Nathaway paused to reflect that he barely knew his brother. There were fourteen years and six siblings between them. By the time Nathaway had come along, his eldest brother had already been in the navy. They had seen each other only during brief holidays and leaves, surrounded by other family, and the relationship had never been affectionate. For all Nathaway knew, they had nothing in common but a name.

At last the admiral finished his instructions, handed the officers some sealed orders, and dismissed them. They saluted and left, the secretary behind them. Then Corbin turned to Nathaway.

“I am glad to see they have plucked you away from the savages,” he said. “It was beginning to be an embarrassment.”

The chilly tone of this welcome made Nathaway stiffen in his seat.

The admiral went on, “I gave orders for them to prepare suitable rooms for you. Did they do it?”

“Yes,” Nathaway said. “It’s all perfectly fine, except . . .”

“Yes?”

“Why am I still a prisoner?”

“Ah, yes. Well, you see, in the navy it is our custom to restrict the freedom of those whose loyalty we cannot be sure of.”

“Loyalty?” Nathaway repeated, bewildered. “Loyalty to whom?”

“To our nation.”

Corbin’s expression was so severe that Nathaway wilted inside, even though he knew himself to be perfectly innocent. “What are you talking about?” he said. “I’ve never—”

“Your short career as advocate for the enemy is over,” Corbin said. “You will find that your collaboration has made things a great deal worse for them, and for you.”

“Collaboration?” Nathaway protested. “I wasn’t collaborating. I was a prisoner!”

“A very busy prisoner,” Corbin said. There was a stack of newspapers on his desk. He now rose and brought them over to Nathaway. The first thing Nathaway saw, when the front page of the
Fluminos Intelligencer
fell open before him, was “Dear Rachel . . .” circled with a red pencil.

“Oh my god,” he said, transfixed to see his own words, his private words to his sister, emblazoned on the front page of the largest-circulation daily in the land. “She
published
my letters?”

“Either she, or some enemy of the Court.”

Nathaway scanned the paper in his hands to see if she had at least edited out the personal parts; but no, it was all there. A burning embarrassment was rising from his neck to his face. It took a moment for him to process what Corbin had said. Then he looked up, his thoughts racing. “There’s nothing in my letters against the Court.”

“No, just advocacy calculated to inflame public opinion in favour of the rebels.” Corbin was standing over him, clearly furious, though his voice stayed tightly controlled. “For god’s sake, did it never occur to you that Harg Ismol was manipulating you?”

“I . . . yes, of course it occurred to me. That’s why I took care only to write the truth.”

“Then you don’t even have the excuse of naïveté.”

It was very difficult to face the intensity of Corbin’s anger. It made Nathaway want to flee the room, or take cover. But he had long practice dealing with forceful personalities, and it gave him an unwise courage. He tried to keep his voice calm and reasonable.

“Look, I didn’t say anything but what I really believe, that we ought to negotiate with them. I was saying the same thing to Harg, that he needed to settle his differences through legal means.”

“It is not your government’s position that we should negotiate with insurrectionists,” Corbin said coldly. “It is your duty to support that.”

“I’m entitled to disagree with my government if I think they’re mistaken.”

“Not while we are at war. Not while our citizens are being killed and captured, our ships seized, our cities occupied. By god, if you weren’t politically connected I’d have you tried for treason here and now.”

Nathaway was suddenly very afraid of what he had done, and very afraid of this implacable man who was his brother. There was a long silence while Corbin stared at him like a searchlight, and he stared anywhere but at Corbin’s face.

“Good,” the admiral said at last, his tone businesslike again. “You will be leaving for Fluminos tomorrow, on the next available boat. What they do with you is up to the Court.”

“No!” Nathaway looked up, dismayed. “Please don’t send me back, Corbin. Really, I could be useful to you here.”

“Useful.” Corbin said the word in disbelief.

“Yes, I learned a lot about the Adaina while I was among them. You’ve got to know how they think, why they’re acting as they are. They’re not like us. You have to set aside our standards—”

“Have you no idea how immeasurably difficult you have already made my job here?” Corbin’s irritation was not just aimed at him now; it was broader. “If this were just a military problem, the solution would be simple: they are going to lose. My problem is getting to a spot where I can even use a military solution. This sort of thing—” he gestured at the newspapers “—makes that even more difficult.”

“But that’s just what I mean,” Nathaway pleaded. “I can help you avoid a military confrontation. This whole dispute can be pursued in the courts—”

“The time for that has passed,” Corbin cut him off, and turned back to his desk as if to terminate the conversation.

“No, it hasn’t,” Nathaway argued. “We could still persuade them to sue instead of shoot.”

“I said, that avenue is no longer open. The courts have been suspended. The Forsakens are now under martial law.”

Nathaway was shocked into speechlessness. The courts were the ultimate arbiters of civil society. To close them was like revoking civilization itself. “You can’t do that,” he stammered.

Corbin had seated himself behind the desk again, and now he smiled arctically across it, his hands folded. “Fluminos has made it known to me that they want this situation resolved quickly, by whatever means. The civilian authority was becoming an obstacle, so I suspended it.”

“But . . . you don’t have the power! No one does. The courts are where all power originates.”

“All the lawsuits in the world don’t add up to one bullet,” Corbin replied.

Nathaway was chilled to the bone by this answer.

There was a knock on the door and the lieutenant looked in. Corbin’s attention was instantly fixed on him. “Yes?” he said sharply.

“Sir, it seems we have a problem.”

“What is it?”

“Tiarch’s militia, sir. They’re refusing their orders.”

Corbin rose. “Send in Tennial.” He gestured at Nathaway. “And take this man away. Confine him to his quarters.”

The lieutenant held the door open for Nathaway. This time, he met Nathaway’s eyes with a look of grim commiseration.

As the two Torna guards stepped forward to conduct Nathaway back to his room, the sound of a distant explosion rumbled through the thick walls of the palace, and the ground slipped treacherously sideways underfoot. Furniture tottered and swayed, the foundations of the great edifice groaned. One of the soldiers reached out to steady Nathaway on his feet. “Don’t worry, sir,” he said. “It’s just the crack, opening a little wider.”

“The crack?”

“The crack under the mountain that will someday swallow us all.”

It was half an hour before sunset, and Harg still sat in the taproom of a coarse back-alley tavern, drinking more than he should. Tway was beside him, and Gill sat at the bar. Calpe stood near the door. She had a tense, bodyguard posture, her eyes everywhere. Though there was no sign of the pistol she carried, she looked armed.

The bartender looked in Harg’s direction, hoping to sell another pint. Tway motioned him away. She had a vigilant air, just like Calpe; but where Calpe was looking for external enemies, Tway seemed determined to protect Harg from himself. She was right, he admitted to himself; he needed to be able to think. And yet thinking was precisely what he didn’t want to do.

The road branched before him, but as he tried to travel each way in his mind, the footing became rutted and treacherous. Down each route he met different versions of himself, all people he might become. None of them seemed like him.

The most alluring false self was the one he had seen in Calpe’s eyes the instant he had told his friends about the meeting with Tiarch. Calpe was in the grip of a kind of hypnosis, a conviction that they were being guided by mythic destinies. In her mind, Ison Harg already existed. Whenever her eyes were on him, Harg felt ennobled; and when she looked away he felt deeply fraudulent.

“Calpe’s going to be disappointed when she finds out what I’m really like,” Harg mused in an undertone to Tway.

“Then she’s a damn fool,” Tway said.

He didn’t pursue the subject. It was just masochism, trying to imagine what would happen when Calpe found out Ison Harg didn’t exist and never would.

If he went to the palace tonight, he would be going under false pretences, because he knew he would never carry through with Tiarch’s plan for him, not as long as it required dhota-nur. For better or worse, he was built of old wounds. It would all be for nothing if he let Goth take it away.

Then the other phantom selves rose before him. The prospect of alliance with Tiarch completely transformed the situation. If she were in earnest, they would no longer be engaged in a hopeless, lawless rebellion, but in a movement with stature and backing. The far-fetched notion of bringing the Innings to the table became suddenly plausible. And for himself, there was the prospect of an apprenticeship in real power. Tiarch could be his pilot on a voyage of exploration like no Adaina had ever made, into the secret provinces of imperial authority.

And yet, the avid attraction he felt for leapfrogging over his people’s heads into Tiarch’s world was like his desire for another drink—something that made him mistrust his own motives. It was too easy to imagine himself, solid with a buttery middle age, an expert at manoeuvre, colluding in the profitable enslavement of his people, all the while pretending to speak for them.

But not to enlist Tiarch might be even worse. Looking down that road, he was stopped by a phantasm of carnage. Through the smoke of burning villages he glimpsed the hills lined with a bristling picket of stakes. And all of it was due to him.

“There aren’t any good choices,” he said to Tway. “Just bad ones and worse ones.”

Tway said nothing. She was the only one whose opinion he really wanted, and she had not offered it.

“Maybe I should just walk away, back to the South Chain.”

She studied him. “And leave Goth here?”

Another bad choice. He felt like a prisoner of his own success. Now that he had come so close, it seemed like treachery not to go on. He longed and dreaded to see Goth. The Grey Man was part of a purer, simpler world—not this cobweb tangle of Inning cruelty and Torna treachery. Goth had been born to be protected, a treasured victim, and the Innings would use that against him, against them all.

“Damn him!” Harg said under his breath.

The one self he couldn’t picture clearly was the one Goth would see, now that they both knew the truth that had been hidden for so many years. It was still an effort not to feel a sting of resentment at the fact that Goth had not trusted him to know.

Tway said, “Harg, you’re not really angry enough at him to walk away?”

For a moment he wanted to shock her, to show her how unworthy he was; but that wasn’t like him, either. “No,” he said.

Across the room, Calpe had tired of waiting, and now came over to join them. “It’s time,” she said. “We need to go.”

Harg went to the bar to pay their bill. As he was putting down his money there was a boom, like distant artillery, that shook the cracked window panes. “What’s that?” he asked tensely.

The tavern keeper gave an oily grin. “Calm down, outlander. It’s just the crack under the mountain.”

When the four companions reached the street outside, they saw a black cloud rising into the sky from the mountain’s peak above the city. Calpe eyed it darkly. “I wish we were well out of here.”

As they headed toward the palace, the cloud rolled swiftly down the mountain slope, and soon the air was filthy with falling ash. Shopkeepers rushed to close their doors as an unnatural evening settled on the city.

Near the Gallowmarket the four friends split up, so they could come into the square from different routes. Soon Harg and Tway stood together at the easternmost entrance, where an ancient stone bastion arched over the street, remnant of some outgrown fortification. The ash was falling like a heavy snow; they paused to tie kerchiefs over their faces. The few lit streetlamps had eerie haloes around them.

Harg had wanted Tway to walk to the Gallowgate with him so they would look more like innocent pedestrians; but the market was deserted now. The ash had begun to mask the sharp edges of building and curb. He could barely make out the motionless shapes on the execution stand. As they set out across the empty pavement, their feet raised little clouds of dust at every step. Tway’s brown hair was prematurely grey with ash.

The iron-studded gate was closed, but a light glowed in a guardhouse window. It went against instinct to boldly attract the attention of a palace guard, so Harg paused outside the guardhouse. A small window swung open and a Torna soldier peered out. “Yes?”