The Merchant Emperor (39 page)

When those lands, like the rest of the continent, had fallen easily to Cymrian tyrannical dominion, the Church immediately sought to replace the primitive animist religious beliefs with their ridiculous doctrines of channeled prayer, where the individual no longer communicated directly with his Creator, but was now required to pray through a local cleric, who passed the combined adoration and supplication up what was known as the Chain of Prayer. The actions of the Cymrians, and the indigenous peoples’ reactions to them, had produced many orphans and widows, so the supposedly altruistic Church set up places where those unfortunates could receive services and live simple, safe lives away from the streets where many poor women and children were routinely victimized.

And so the Abbey of Nikkid’sar was designed and built atop the most advantageous spot on those tall, rocky cliffs. The terrain was not jagged and peaked, like most of the spit-topped cliffs, but had a wide, flat top, a rocky field of sorts, surrounded by a heavy barricade of jagged outcroppings which hid both the view of the field and the sea beyond it. The rocks from the field were gathered and used in the construction of the main buildings, a gathering place where meals were served and lessons were taught, a small hospital and a dormitory for orphans, as well as individual stone houses for mothers with young children to live as families.

And in the very center of it all, where an unusual depression in the flat rock field had been discovered filled with rainwater, a deeper cistern was dug, expanding the natural formation into a useful source of fresh water atop a massive stone cliff which otherwise would have none. Round and deep, with filters and pipes that had been invented by the Cymrian lord known as Gwylliam the Visionary, it was deep and large enough to reflect the whole of a gibbous moon when it was lighting the sky.

The Well of the Moon.

The abbey was under the supervision of a mother abbess, generally a cleric of substantial level out of Sepulvarta, the newly built holy city at the time, and was kept running with the aid of more than a dozen female acolytes of second-year or higher training. Its construction and stocking of necessary tools, sundries, and foodstuffs was completed and the moving in of the occupants accomplished just in time before a massive earthquake struck the coast of Windswere.

While many of the uninhabited sandspit cliffs were damaged in the quake, the only thing to happen to the cliffs of the Abbey of Nikkid’sar was the landslide that crumbled the heavy barricade of rocky outcroppings that had been known as the Moraine. Prior to the earthquake, a narrow natural path had been widened to allow for access to the rock field at the top of the cliff. Now that path and, in fact, all connection to the land behind it was severed, making the cliff that once had been part of a mountain range extending out into the sea into a freestanding structure that looked almost as if it had dropped from the sky at the edge of the water.

The other significant effect of the quake was that the abbey’s widened passageway was swallowed, all but cutting off access to the outside world. This did not prove to be a problem for the current residents, because the open field at the top of the cliff had been topped with cultivatable soil; it had water and open sun, and the weather modulation of the sea. The only problem that arose from the landslide was the closing of the doorway to any future refugees.

Except at the time of the full moon, when the ocean’s effects on the tides meant a small alternative passage could be found, too narrow to accommodate a man in armor, or even a non-armored man of any great heft.

But it was just wide enough to allow entrance to a child and most women.

When the moon is full, when the tide is high, when all other paths are exhausted, when all the sandbars are covered, when all other roads are blocked.

But only if you are a child.

Talquist had all but forgotten about the legend until he saw the fresco on the basilica wall.

A woman, the Guardian of the Well, undoubtedly the mother abbess, pictured in the center of a circle of smiling children and the mothers of babes in arms.

Holding what looked to be a scale very much like the one he had found on the Skeleton Coast.

Talquist spun the stem of his wineglass between his thumb and forefinger, lost in thought.

It made sense to him that one of the scales of the deck had been given into the care of a cloistered place between land and sea, where no male adult would find it, Undoubtedly the yellow scale, known in the ancient texts as Heat Saver/Heat Spiller or Light Bringer/Light Queller, would be used to warm and light a lonely stone outpost full of child refugees at the edge of the cold sea. Dearly as he would have loved to have been the one to rediscover and take the scale from the clifftop abbey himself, his position now prevented him from attending to such things in person.
A pity
, he mused as he raised the glass to his lips and drank. The consequences of power was that he now had to accomplish his desires at the hands of others.

Much as he had when he was powerless, but in a completely different way.

He looked over at the acolyte he had been defiling for the better part of the last day. She was curled up in the corner of the room under a blanket with the royal crest of the Empire of the Sun embroidered on it, shivering violently and hiccoughing from time to time. Talquist smiled broadly as a pleasant, almost altruistic thought occurred to him.

Perhaps she can gain a position in the Abbey of Nikkid’sar,
he thought, pleased with himself. In addition to being a female acolyte, she now might also qualify as the type of woman that abbey specialized in serving.

Now that the pristine and celibate manse of Sepulvarta would no longer have a use for her.

He finished his wine and pulled up the polished linen sheets and thick quilt around his neck, settling down to the sleep of someone eager to be on the road home in the morning.

35

AVONDERRE HARBOR, WESTERN SEACOAST

The brigantine
Flying Sails
was not a sleek vessel, nor was she particularly large. She lay low in the water, encrusted with salt and barnacles all the way up to the portholes. When not rigged, as unrigged she stood on that fateful morning, she could easily be mistaken for a scow.

Especially from the air.

It was her age and weather-beaten look that saved her, the captain would note later. Moored alongside one of the oldest docks far to the north in Avonderre Harbor, she was lying in shadow, her sun-bleached decks causing her to blend in with the wood of the quay, when the assault on the naval forces began.

A delay due to bad weather meant that the crew of the
Flying Sails
had arrived in port in the earliest hours of the new day, and therefore had not returned to muster. All sailors save the captain, the boatswain, and the sleeping shift were still haunting the taverns in the northern villages of Avonderre, harassing the serving women with demands for service of many kinds. As the kitchen fire was cold and the women exhausted, the only requests fulfilled were those for ale, leaving the crew disgruntled, tired, hungry, and drunk.

Their bad timing was their salvation.

Jacinth Specter, who had been serving on the
Flying Sails
even longer than the captain, was on deck taking note of damage to the yardarm that had occurred in the storm the night before. That storm had blown them roughly into port; Jacinth’s eyes were bleary from salt spray and lack of sleep, so when the first wave of iacxsis appeared on the southern horizon, he mistook them for the shadow of a passing cloud. Instead, he heard the buzz first, a scratching at his eardrums that caused him to shake his head as if to dislodge a gnat that had been caught inside.

By the time he looked up again into the southern sky, it was darkening as if with black rain clouds racing by on a screaming wind.

A wind moving out to sea.

It took Jacinth more than a moment to force his voice from his throat. His brain berated him to speak, but he could not comply. Rather he stood frozen, his hand on the yardarm, as the northernmost edge of the winged serpentine force flew past within a few hundred feet. When he finally found his voice, it emerged hoarse and dry, hollow, as if from the depths of his belly.

“Cap’n?”

Captain Syrus Turley looked up impatiently from his log. The sight caused his hand to tremble, sending his quill over the side and into the green water of the harbor below.

Soaring above his head was the stuff of nightmares, an immense shadow of a creature that seemed to be riding the screaming wind, high enough to have missed noticing the
Flying Sails
, only because its sights were set farther out in the harbor.

A moment later the sky darkened with similar shadows.

From all sides of the city many more great beasts appeared in the air above the houses and shops, sailing on wide, batlike wings. They were serpentine in their movements, with long barbed tails that thrashed as they flew; their legs and jaws, however, were insectoid, sharply jointed, like the plague locusts that had been one of their progenitors.

Atop each of them was a rider with a burning bundle of whey-grass stalks soaked in pitch or oil.

Turley’s body was frozen in place, as if rooted to the ship’s deck, but he was able to turn his head ever-so-slightly to the west, out to the harbor of Avonderre, the terminus of one of the biggest seafaring shipping lanes in the Known World. The harbor was coming to light with the rising sun, alive with the motion and muted noise of hundreds of ships already being offloaded by hundreds more longshoremen, sweating and swearing into the early-morning wind as they reached into the cargo holds of those ships like machines, dragging forth the goods that had been transported from across the world to the shores of the Middle Continent and loading them into wagons standing on the piers, ready to continue their journeys to their eventual owners. Even more longshoremen were engaged in the loading of such goods into empty vessels, standing ready to sail forth on the outgoing tide.

At the harbor’s western side, nearest the inlet, the warships of the Alliance’s naval fleet were moored, guarding the harbor against incoming hostile vessels and giving them proximity to the sea.

And beyond the harbor’s horseshoe-shaped inlet, flanked on either side by massive twin light towers at the edges of the seawall, the wind off the sea was bringing in a thousand ships, more, perhaps, of all types, unaware of what lay beyond the inlet’s gateway.

As Time seemed to slow around him, Turley struggled to move; his legs and arms felt wooden as the horror that had washed over him settled into numbing shock. He shook it off, and turned back to Jacinth Specter.

“Ring the bell!” he shouted. “Specter—wake the sleeping shift!
Ring the bell!
”

The sailor’s brain of the boatswain, long trained to respond without thought to such orders, engaged like lightning, and he jumped to obey. Specter ran aft to the enormous bell of the
Flying Sails
, seized the striker, and began pounding furiously. The ship’s fortuitous placement at the high north end of the harbor gave it a surprising acoustical advantage; the resounding tone caught the morning wind that was heading out to sea and carried the alarm with it across most of Avonderre Harbor.

The great sonorous ringing of the ship’s bell cut through the heavy buzzing noise for just a moment and echoed across the waterfront. It caught the attention of the longshoremen as well as the ships’ crews, just in time to alert them to the waves of death that were about to rain down on them from the air.

With brutal efficiency, the squadron of winged beasts and their riders peeled off from the flying formation, the front wave heading west while the rear systematically divided and attacked, strafing the individual ships in dock or plying the harbor.

First, almost indistinguishable casks of clear liquid were fired or heaved into the mainsails of the ships, followed immediately by the whey-grass torches dropped by the riders. The sails and even some of the decks ignited where the liquid trailed, ripping into flame that crackled menacingly, burning with an unnatural insistence as the startled crews tried unsuccessfully to beat it out with their jackets and wet cloths.

As the town’s bells and the voices of those in the city’s streets picked up the alarm, the flying squadron divided again. The larger part of the forward wave sailed over the military fleet, heaving the same combustible liquid and torches into their sails; the warships fired their ballistae in return as the remainder of the aerial squadron flew onward past the guardian light towers and out over the sea, heading for the approaching ships that had no real view of the inner harbor.

Specter and Turley stood amidships on the
Flying Sails
, watching in horror as Avonderre Harbor caught fire. The sailors of the sleeping shift were coming topside now, and the first among them clogged the hatch as they came to the top of the ladder, then stopped, slack-kneed in terror.

The back end of the wave of iacxsis, which had set to destroying the merchant fleet moored within the harbor, turned in the air and dove, each creature at a different vessel. What missiles the merchant ships were able to fire bounced harmlessly off the stonelike bodies of the flying beasts, though here and there riders could be seen falling into the harbor or onto the decks of the ships when the heavy crossbows or ballistae found their marks. The beasts struck with insectlike efficiency, snatching sailors from the decks in their mandibles and dragging them back into the air, amid the sound of screaming and horrific crunching audible over the maddening buzzing.