Liavek 1 (6 page)

As Noen reached the lower deck, the port basilisk went off with a crash. The foremast was lurching toward the beakhead, and Dinnile had his boarding party mustered forward of the mainmast. Looking at him, Noen realized the burly mate must be as frightened as he was, but like himself would rather die than show it. "Good luck, Beddil," he called. Then, "A place ashore!" It was something one said; the "place" was the grave, which could never be mentioned directly.

"A place ashore," Dinnile responded cheerfully.

The port corner of the quarterdeck exploded in a cloud of splinters. "Steersman!" Noen yelled. "Port a point. We're coming in the back door."

The steersman's "aye, aye," was strangely muted; when Noen reached the quarterdeck, he saw that a splinter had laid her cheek open, baring white molars in a misplaced grin. One of the starboard stern chaser crew was ripping up her shirt to staunch the bleeding.

The stern chasers would be no use in this fight. He sent the rest of their crews to join the boarding party.

The two sakers had already been shifted to the port rail. They would not be able to fire without damaging
Windsong
's rigging until they were very close, he thought, but they might get a chance then.

Oeuni's hail came faintly from the gun deck. "She's luffing!"

Noen nodded to himself.
Zhironni
would try to turn in order to present her broadside to her attacker. But imposing though they were, carracks were notoriously unhandy, and now the wind made every plank in her towering freeboard work against her.

Dead ahead, a leviathan rose from the sea, golden-scaled, with eyes like pale moons and teeth like the blades of cutlasses. Poltergeist fired with a roar that shook the ship, and the giant fell backward in a welter of blood. Noen braced himself for the shock when the ram struck its body, but there was none; it had sunk too quickly, or perhaps disappeared.

Somehow the culverin's roar had reminded him that he had not yet wound the wheellock of his pistol. He got out the key and did so. A pistol with a tight lock was always dangerous, and if the lock were wound too soon, the spring might break or lose its strength. But shapes like horned Kil were clawing at
Winding
's racing sides with crimson hands, and it seemed to him that the time to wind it had come.

"Magic," a crewman at one of the sakers wailed.

"Illusions," Noen told him, shouting against the whistling wind. "He hasn't had time for something new."

Poltergeist and the gun-deck basilisks went off together;
Zhironni
's rudder flew to bits, and ragged holes gaped in her transom. An unlucky roundshot cut through the boarding party, leaving a dozen hands writhing on the reeling deck. They were close now, so close Noen could see the dark faces of the gun crews through the sterncastle windows. He fired at one, not with much hope of hitting him, but because it was bad tactics to permit your enemy to fire without being fired upon.

Zhironni
's stern loomed above them. Noen felt they were hurtling toward a cliff, and it was no magical illusion, but the effect of the carrack's sheer size. The sakers banged like hammer blows, scouring
Zhironni
's sterncastle windows with harquebus balls and scrap metal. Noen shoved his pistol back into his belt and grabbed the quarterdeck railing.

The ram struck with a shock that nearly knocked him off his feet. Only weakly braced by its angled backstays, the foremast snapped, fell against the carrack's stern, slipped, miraculously caught on the gilded molding. As Dinnile's boarding party swarmed up the ratlines, a Zhir with a petronel appeared at the taffrail. Noen fired the remaining barrel of his pistol at him, shouted for the sakers' crews to follow, and leaped to the main deck.

The ratlines were slack and thus hard to climb, lying almost against
Zhironni
's stern gilding. Shattered window casements hung in shreds of iron, glass, and lead. A dead man slumped over the breech of one of the stern chasers. Noen hesitated, hardly daring to believe his eyes, put one foot on the gun muzzle, then the other. Half falling, he caught the window frame and swung into
Zhironni
's stern cabin.

Outside, it had seemed impossible; but it was there. A circular, inlaid table was bolted to the floor in the center of the cabin; on it a small jade rabbit slid restlessly with the rolling of the ship, confined by the table rim. Only when he reached for it did Noen see the delicate girl who sat in shadow beside the cabin door.

"It is mine," she said. "But it could be ours."

The rabbit felt as cool as any river-washed stone.

"There are many isles—" She had risen and was coming toward him; her fingers toyed with a white rose. "-even in this little Sea of Luck. And there is the ocean beyond. We might master an isle and rule there together." Her face had a delicate beauty that made Oeuni and every other woman Noen had ever seen seem like a man. No, a beast.

The cabin door flew open, kicked by a nomad with a knife in one hand and a cutlass in the other. Noen said, 'This woman is a prisoner, Myllikesh. Take her to our ship and put her in the wardroom. See that she's well treated."

The nomad pointed to the rabbit with his cutlass. "Sir, move away your hand."

Noen picked up the rabbit.

"Sir, I do not desire that I kill you. But you must give that to me."

"You knew what it was," Noen said. ''That was why so many of you signed on. You heard it had left Liavek by ship, and you knew our ships would be sent after it."

Myllikesh took a step nearer. "We told your stupid Guards of this ship, so your ships would be sent. Sir, I can kill you most easily before your sword is out. Put the rabbit down."

Noen did.

The girl said softly, "Do you know its secret, brave man of the wastes? Tell me."

Myllikesh turned to her, eyes flashing. "Yes, we know! Long ago our fathers were driven from S'Rian, but we remembered. Friends told us it was found, and we came!"

''Tell me. Now you will be a king." Her great eyes were fixed on Myllikesh; Noen was surprised at the pain that gave him.

"I am a king! Now I shall rule a rich land." The nomad laughed. "Rushing streams for us. Fruiting trees and fields of wheat! A great mage made this so S'Rians might have such a land, though the city was lost. But it was left behind, lost too. You must throw it down. That only! Then even rocks and sand will blossom."

The white rose flashed forward and vanished in the nomad's chest, then reappeared a red rose. He gasped and dropped his cutlass.

Noen hit the girl in the face with the twin barrels of his empty pistol. She staggered backward; when she struck the canting cabin wall, she was an old man who grasped a scarlet dagger.

Myllikesh was half out the cabin window, one hand pressed to his wound, the other clutching the rabbit. Noen caught him by the neck and wrist, and the rabbit fell from his hand, tumbled down
Zhironni
's towering stern, dropped between
Zhironni
and
Windsong
's bow, and splashed into the sea.

When it touched the water, it seemed to bounce—the upward bound of a hunted hare who tries to sight its pursuers. It struck the water again running, jumping and skipping from wave to wave, racing across the restless sea as if the sea were an upland meadow.

Behind it, seals lifted sleek heads and a thousand dolphins bowed. The sea itself grew dark with the tiny creatures on which the smallest fish graze, and the great whales; fish surged in silver shoals, swirling and leaping everywhere after the rabbit for as far as Noen's eyes could follow it, until the sound of their swimming entered
Zhironni
's timbers and filled the cabin like the humming of bees.

"Wasted," Myllikesh whispered.

Noen thought of Syb and Su, of the unpainted fishing cottages on Minnow Island and the wretched shacks on Eel Island. "No," he said. "Not wasted."

But the rattle of the last breath was in the nomad's throat.

•

From
Windsong
's taffrail,
Zhironni
seemed a seaworthy ship. Her mainsail, maintop, and mizzen were all drawing, and though she listed a bit and the twin streams of water spurting from the lee side showed where Dinnile had prisoners at work on the pumps, Noen decided
Zhironni
might well limp back to Liavek even if they met with squalls. A captain's share of prize money was a full quarter. That would not come to twenty thousand levars, he thought, but it might come close. Even damaged as she was, the big carrack should be worth sixty thousand at least.

"Rekkue!" he called to the midshipman of the watch. "Make signal: 'reducing sail for night.'"

"Aye, aye, sir."

"Tivlo! Reef the mainsail. We don't want to lose her in the dark."

"Aye, aye, sir!"

The big triangular mainsail dipped. It was a great advantage of the lateen rig, Noen reflected, that the crew did not have to go aloft to take in sail or let it out. Some of the hands Tivlo was directing had been Myllikesh's nomads; some were former slaves from
Zhironni
.

Rekkue told him, "
Zhironni
acknowledges, sir."

Noen nodded. "I'm going below to write my report. In my absence, you're officer of the watch. You're to call me if anything happens. Anything, understand? Call me at the end of the watch and I'll relieve you so you can get some sleep."

"Aye, aye, sir." Rekkue touched her forehead.

She would be an officer soon, Noen thought. She was fit for one already. As he went down the steps to the lower deck, he decided to announce her acting promotion to third mate in the morning, if everything went well that night. He ducked automatically as he entered his cabin, pulled out his chair and seated himself before his little writing desk.

Ler Oeuni said softly, "I hope you don't mind, sir."

He spun around. She was in his bunk, her face, her bandaged arm, and one bare shoulder visible above the blanket.

"It was lonesome in the wardroom with Dinnile gone," she whispered, "and I wanted to tell somebody how brave I was."

When he had kissed her, she added, ''I'll bet you were brave too, Noen."

"Birth Luck" by Nancy Kress

ONE OF THE three had left the window open. Noises drifted into the attic room—late-night noises, muffled noises, floating up from the late-night and muffled activities in Fish Alley below. Footfalls, murmurs, a woman's too-shrill chuckle. Then a sudden ring of crystal, piercingly sweet, followed by the yowl of a cat.

"The bell hawker," Reykja whispered. "She must have finally thrown a glass bell at that orange cat!"

The other girl, the white one, nodded. Her eyes met Reykja's and Reykja giggled, a high nervous giggle unexpectedly sweet, like the thrown bell. Sallow and intense, with black brows like angry wings, Reykja did not look like a girl who giggled. The boy sitting cross-legged in the middle of the floor glanced at her in annoyed surprise.

"Sorry, Kalum, I didn't mean to laugh," Reykja said, all in a rush, and laughed again.

"You're just nervous, dear heart," the white girl said in her quiet voice. "She's just nervous, Kalum."

"We're all nervous," Kalum said, not angrily. His gaze sought Reykja's. She reached across the boundary of the chalked circle in which he sat, a circle splintered by the rough attic floor, and grasped his hand. Brother and sister exchanged a long look from eyes of the same black, excitement rising in each like tide against dark glass.

"Nearly time?" Kalum said huskily. "When should I start?" Although of course he knew, had known for years, could not have even begun the chalked circle in this tense attic room without knowing.

"Six minutes after midnight," Reykja whispered. She let go Kalum's hand, sat back on her haunches, and pushed the thick dark hair, sweaty at the hairline, back from her face. "Her birth labor started at six minutes past midnight."

"And only three hours of it," Kalum said. "So little time—I wish I had taken twice as long arriving in the world!"

"Perhaps your mother did not," the white girl said dryly. She was truly white: hair, skin, fingernails, eyes, a smooth slim whiteness traced with blue veins so delicate they might have been shadows, as unlike Reykja and Kalum as moonlight is unlike the rough bark of trees it touches with mystery. Yet Kalum loved her and Reykja trusted her. All three had come to Liavek as bond servants, all three were barely grown, all three wore the patched rags of a mean household meanly run. But still Reykja felt the wordless differences that lay among them in Ondur's whiteness, and in her unnatural silences. The differences did not chill Reykja because they were not her nor Kalum; instead they excited her, because they were not Liavek. Ondur was the white strangeness in a gray life, the grasped-at largeness in a small one. Sometimes in the dusk Reykja watched her friend's profile, and regretted fiercely that it was not quite regular enough to be beautiful.

"Two minutes more," Reykja whispered. "Again today I made certain of the sandglass against the clock at the Fountain of the Three Temples, and once more at sunset against the sandglass at the inn, and—oh, Kalum!"

"It will be fine," Kalum said. "All will be fine. We just breathe deeply and leap."

"You leap, dear heart. The risk is all yours, the gain all of ours."

"Camel dung," Kalum said. He spoke with difficulty; his dark eyes gazed fixedly at the garish cheap colors of the sandglass in his sister's hand. "Is it time yet?"

"Not quite. Can you feel the birth luck stirring?"

"No. Not before the time. Reykja—remember not to cross the circle until the three hours are done. You too, Ondur. No matter how the investiture fares—no matter
how
. Stay out of the circle."

"I'll remember," Reykja said. "Ondur?"

"You can still turn back," Ondur said.

Shocked out of their excitement, brother and sister swung their heads to stare at her, Kalum wrenching his gaze from the sandglass and Reykja from Kalum.

"Turn back!" Reykja cried aloud.

"Hush!" Kalum hissed. "They will hear downstairs! Oh, gods!"

The three held their breath; no one of family or servants in the huge shabby house heard. A night breeze blew in the window, smelling of flowers and garbage, ruffling the candle flame in its holder on the floor. The sandglass trickled without noise.

Kalum said evenly, "I will not turn back," at the same moment that Reykja hissed, "Why would you even say such a thing, Ondur!"

"I have said it before. Investiture is dangerous."

"Stealing to pay for a magician's lessons is also dangerous," Kalum said, "and I will have you two doing it no more. Look what happened to you last month, Ondur, when that corporal at the Pickerel caught you picking his pocket and the bastard—I've had enough lessons. I'm ready. Tonight I invest my birth luck in a vessel, and tomorrow all three of us leave this dung heap of a city. Not one day longer—not one, Ondur. I will be a wizard, and a wizard cannot be held by bond."

Ondur said quietly, "Our bondship will end of itself, in time."

"
Now
," Reykja said.

Kalum closed his eyes. A sudden swallow worked the flesh on his throat, and for a second he looked as young as he was, as young as he would have been without the hard gleam on his dark face. From his sash he drew a seal ring and laid it before him on the rough floor. The ring, the sort favored by unskilled artisans or farmers, was large and light, fashioned of gilded copper pretending to be gold. The seal was bent in on the left side, and part of the finger guard had turned green.

"Into this unity whole. Into my grandfather's ring," Kalum chanted, his face flushed with effort. "Into my grandfather's ring—Reykja—"

"You have three hours," Reykja said. "Go slowly, Kalum, you have all the time you need!"

"Into this unity whole, into my grandfather's ring…"

In the alley below, the cat yowled.

•

The night flew. Reykja, bloodless of face, stared at the sandglass, shook it, hurled it, finally, against the wall. It shattered, a few shards of glass bouncing into the chalked circle. As soon as they crossed the chalk the shards glittered brilliantly and viciously, like knife points, and vanished.

"No, ah no, time does not pass that fast, it does not, Ondur stop it
stop
it—"

"Into this unity whole! Into my grandfather's ring!" Kalum chanted desperately. "Into my grandfather's ring—gods, Reykja, I can feel the birth luck here in my hands. I can feel it, but it won't leave, it won't
invest
—"

He could not sit upright. One arm trailed along the floor, fingers limp, dangerously close to the chalked circle. Kalum's face, ravaged with the effort of hours that should not have passed so fast—could not have passed so fast, gods no—had gone nearly as white as Ondur's. His glance scuttled from Reykja to Ondur, Ondur to Reykja, pleading for help they could not give. The attic room reeked with the smell of sweat gone wrong, acrid and unnatural.

"
Into my grandfather's ring
—help me, Ondur!"

Ondur gave a soft, anguished whimper. Reykja threw back her head and, beyond all thought of those downstairs or those anywhere but this desperate place she had not foreseen, howled like a dog in pain. Ondur threw herself across the other girl and clapped both hands over Reykja's mouth.

"Hush, Reykja—you'll bring the master! Kalum has a few minutes still—a few—"

"Into this unity whole. Into my grandfather's ring...
into my grandfather's ring
—"

The three-hour labor of Kalum's mother, fifteen years dead, ended.

For a single shining moment, the last moment, it seemed the investiture had succeeded after all. The cheap ring began to glow with a tentative, flickering light. The chalked circle smoked and quivered on the floor. Kalum's face somehow expanded, as if his exhausted skin were floating off his face, or if something behind the skin were floating away from it in hard and bloodless sheets. But the moment collapsed; the ring dulled; the circle merely twitched, imprisoned still on the splintered wood. Kalum howled the same howl as his sister had, grabbed at his forehead with both hands, and toppled sideways.

Reykja screamed. Clawing at Ondur, she tried to scramble from the white girl's grasp and hurl herself on Kalum. Ondur held her fast with more strength than that slight body could have contained.

"Reykja, no—not yet—it is dangerous still, no, the magic is not finished with him yet—"

Footsteps pounded up the stairs. The attic door flew open and the room was full of people—people, shouting, the brightness of torches, curses and gasps. Someone knocked against the window shutter and it banged closed; Reykja, tearing herself free from Ondur—or perhaps released—threw herself across Kalum. The master of the house burst through the door. Huge and bearded, red-faced with outrage, he bellowed something no one heard and tried to seize Reykja by the hair to pull her off the still form of his other bond servant.

He had thrust one hand over the circle, had actually felt the brush of coarse dark hair against his palm, when his hand jerked to a halt. It was held immobile by the pressure of slim white fingers, and through the chaotic gloom Ondur gazed at him from eyes white and cool as moonlight on untouched snow.

"No," Ondur said. "Not yet." The master felt his hand pushed slowly backwards. He stared at her in fear and outrage, both too sudden to permit words, although his red face grew even redder.

"No," Ondur repeated, and now she stared at the two figures on the floor, her voice white with emptiness.

•

Later the master, recovered from the queer moment of paralysis and all the angrier for it, flogged them both. Reykja screamed and howled, thrashing so hard from side to side under the whip that her wrists, chafing against their bonds, ended as bloody as her back. Ondur held both her hands over her face and shuddered, noiseless, and even the master averted his eyes from the red welling on the white skin. Kalum was not beaten. He sickened rapidly, as do all who fail at the investiture of birth luck into a vessel of magic. On the second day he died.

•

"But he was
ready
," Reykja said, for perhaps the hundredth time. "He
was
."

The two girls huddled in a hidden cranny on the roof of the master's house, sheltered between twin squat chimneys. Below them Liavek shimmered like a bright mosaic in the brilliant afternoon sunshine. It was the month of Wind; Kalum had been buried for a month, and Reykja sat facing the distant graveyard, unseen beyond the Cat River, where he lay. Before them to the north the roofs of Old Town glittered in whorls and swirls around the green copper of the Levar's palace; from behind them came the salty smell of the sea. The city below teemed with color, with movement, with life. Ondur's white hair blew free above the roof, without ribbon or veil. She never sunburned.

"Kalum was ready for the magic, Ondur. He was!"

"No," Ondur said patiently.

"By all gods, don't keep
saying
that! I told you—I told you the little magics he could do each year in his birth hours. More each year. Just last year, remember—no, it was a few months before you came, you didn't come until after my birthday—what was I saying? Kalum! He made that mirror reflect the cottage where we were born—I
told
you. He was ready."

"No, dear heart."

"And the ring, the vessel—it was a unity whole, it was strong enough to bear the investiture, it would have held the luck for a year until it was freed on his next birthday. He talked about investing it in something else next year, something richer, we might have been able to buy something rich next year—he was ready!"

Ondur put her arms around Reykja.

"It was the magic," Reykja cried passionately. "Kalum was ready for investiture, I know he was! It was the magic that betrayed him!"

"Oh, Reykja—"

"Don't talk to me like that!" Savagely, not knowing what she did, she pushed away Ondur, whom she had been holding fast, and turned upon her because there were no tears left and she must turn on something or feel she was going mad. "'Oh, Reykja'—little mincing protests, as if I were a baby who had lost a sugarfruit! I was his sister, his
sister
damn you, and you were only the latest girl he bedded—Ondur, I didn't mean that! I didn't!"

Ondur had begun to weep. Reykja seized her friend and held on tight. She suddenly felt that the whole world was whirling around her, the terrible bright sky had fallen below her and the roofs of Liavek twirled giddily above; her soul was falling right through the hole torn in the whirling world by Kalum's death. Terrified, furious, hating herself for having hurt Ondur out of her own hurt, Reykja grabbed wildly for something to hang on to in the whirling. Something, anything...if she did not grab hold of something she would be sucked into the sky below, smashed against the roofs and alleys above—something, anything! Anything to make sense of the senseless, to invest the whirling anger, because if she did not the tears were surely going to drown her and the choking and raging anger would tear her apart bodily, limb from limb, something, anything...

She found it.

"But it
was
the magic, Ondur! Hear me—it was. That's what killed Kalum, that's what brought him and me here—I've told you the story, the magician uncle of ours who sold us into bond after my aunt died—don't you see? All this," she waved one hand over the city below, "what does it do but serve all the evils of magic? It's the magic that causes the suffering. It's the magic that is the enemy!"

Ondur grew very still in her arms. Reykja, plunging on, did not notice. Her voice was feverish now, frenzied, the voice of someone grasping at the door out of pain.

"The magic is the enemy, Ondur. Liavek is rotten with it. Even the Levar herself, the stories of the way her first regent died—and the houses on Wizard's Row that appear and disappear, what are they hiding? Where do they go? Nowhere clean, nowhere alive—ah, Ondur..."

Ondur shuddered in Reykja's arms, her face hidden against the coarse blackness of unbound hair. But Reykja sat up straighter and her eyes gleamed as if with fever. "It's true, Ondur, you know it is. Liavck is built on blood and magic, both! The S'Rians who were here first and enslaved. and the horrible magicians of the Church of Truth squatting all over the city trying to lure victims inside, victims like Kalum—gods! It is magic that is the enemy, lying in wait to suck in Kalum, unnatural,
unclean
."