Treason's Shore (39 page)

“My warning? I am not constrained at the moment to act as agent of invitation.” Ramis’ voice was unremarkable, his countenance not expressive, yet Fox suspected his choice of words was not idle. That he had been so ordered and had so acted.

Ramis whispered a word, traced an arc in the air that glowed. Ramis stepped through. Fox was drawn inexorably after him. He found himself standing on the deck of a ship he’d only glimpsed twice.

They were alone. Fox took in the gold leaf along the rails, the beautiful rigging and pure black canvas of the sails, as new as if the ship had launched yesterday. Fox had heard that magic transfer was a wrenching experience, but he’d felt only the briefest sense of unbalance, no more than a lee lurch in mild weather, and the strangeness of passing from the warm, spice-redolent air of the cliffside waterfall to this cooler, shadowed bay with the sun on the other side of the isle.

Ramis led him into the spacious captain’s cabin. The bulkheads under the ceiling were edged with fine-carved fretwork in complicated, overlapping circles composed of three curved arms. Those circles were interlocked in triangles, two low, one high, and then the pattern reversed. A marquetry tree wound and wound upward along bulkheads in twists from the inlaid deck, its many-wooded grains pleaching around the stern windows and ending in leaves of vein-embossed gold.

The Tree of Ydrasal appeared again in a gnarled candelabra with nine branches ending in candleholders. The candelabra was built into a shelf above a desk. Over the captain’s table hung a chandelier of intertwined branches into which twenty-seven candles would fit.

Fox had studied the Venn. He recognized in these silent signs that this craft had once belonged to a Venn king. He yanked open the door to the cabin and gazed down the length of the deck to the prow. Instead of coming to a vaguely shaped figurehead with mere slashes that resembled eye sockets, the prow rose to an elaborately carved dragon’s head, slanting eyes at either side, the long, scaled jaw parted. That dragon’s head had not been on the prow after the pirate battle.

Fox whirled around. “Dragons. Did they exist?”

Ramis looked amused. “I never saw any. They were here thousands of years before my time. But sources that were unfortunately burned while I was elsewhere indicated that they were present in this world, though they did not originate here. They came to an agreement and vanished again, taking the more innovative and creative people out of what later became the Land of the Chwahir.”

As he spoke, Ramis opened one of the many small, carved doors in the desk, and took out a book bound in fine blackweave edged with gold.

Dragons were forgotten. “That’s my book,” Fox exclaimed.

“Yes.” Ramis tossed it to Fox, who caught it and just barely concealed the impulse to clutch it protectively against him. “I read it last night. You write with vividness and precisian. The battle at the Narrows was particularly well done. Your memory agrees with my assessment of the end.”

Fox rubbed his forehead, then looked up. “You scragged me, then forced me here to tell me you approve of my writing?”

“I brought you here because this cabin is warded in space and time. The spell will not last a hundredth of the time it took to set it up. I am here to exhort you to carry on with that project. It seems worthwhile, unlike most of your other endeavors.”

Fox kept rubbing his head. Trying to think made his head ache more. “You’re serious.” His voice cracked on a laugh and his head ached. “You really want me to write down all my battles? For whom?”

“Your descendants.”

Fox was not ready for that topic. “Norsunder lies outside of time. I suppose that means you are far older than you appear, which would explain why no one was able to discover any of the details of your birth.”

“True. The guise was necessary and effective.”

“And no doubt fun,” Fox jibed. When Ramis did not deny it, “So do you know the future?”

Ramis flicked his fingers again, a negating gesture. “There are beings in this world who do not experience time and physical space the way we humans do. Magic can shorten distance, though it takes effort. To move ahead of the sun’s measure can be likened to swimming in amber, and one’s clarity of vision is roughly equivalent, probably because of the possibility of change.”

“Yet you say I’ll have descendants?”

Ramis opened his hand toward Fox’s book. “For whom have you written those accounts?”

“Myself.”

Ramis waited.

Fox turned away, gazing blankly out the stern windows. The quiet water was azure. Faint rays of sun struck glints off the water, veining the cabin with shifting light. “If I have a son,” he said slowly, “then I do so knowing I condemn him to the same meaningless existence my family is condemned to.”

“How has your life been meaningless, except as you deliberately chose meaningless actions?”

Fox turned away from the window.

Ramis had taken a seat at the table and crossed his arms, head at a skeptical cant. “You cannot possibly be implying that life is meaningless because you are not king of Iasca Leror.”

Fox flushed. Treachery by the Montrei-Vayirs, who called treason justice—his father’s slow suicide by pickling his brain—all those old reasons kited through his mind. “Meaning,” he said finally, the word twisting with derision. “My family is living proof that concepts such as
honor
and
justice
do not exist except as conveniences for self-justification.”

“You, like everyone else in existence, are living proof that human beings are capable of both justice and injustice. We are also proof that both have consequences that ripple outward through time, through space.” Ramis indicated the book. “While you brood on your captain’s deck over your notions of treason, your mother, sister, and betrothed are striving to provide justice over the land your family still retains.”

Fox grimaced. “Marend is still there?”

“Yes. Whom would she marry, with so many young men in your homeland dead?”

Fox paced the cabin’s perimeter, then stopped to examine more closely the carving of interlocked circles around each candleholder in the chandelier. “It was that bad? Inda wouldn’t say. Now he doesn’t write to me at all.”

“Inda,” Ramis said, “
talks
to you.”

Fox did not ask how he knew. “Not by letter.”

“You will not see one another again?”

Fox whirled around. “You don’t want me to write my battles. You want me to write Inda’s,” he accused.

“I don’t
want
you to do anything,” Ramis replied. “But you already began.” He indicated the book.

“Writing out Inda’s battles was a mental exercise.” Fox threw the book down on a table inlaid with stylized dragons winding in a circle, heads to tails. “Seeing if I could lay out in sequence how he perceives the chaos of battle, and how he organizes it. Listen. If anyone was to draw the attention of your Garden of Twelve, it would be Inda.”

“That was a possibility for a time.” Ramis’s eyes narrowed to an inward focus. “You know what Inda dreamed about last night? Rig’s death onboard Walic’s ship.”

“I don’t know who Rig is.”

“Do you remember the first one of Inda’s crew Walic had killed? He wouldn’t join because the pirates had murdered his brother in their initial attack.”

“All I remember is making sure Inda didn’t betray himself, and us.”

Ramis closed his eyes. “Inda’s nightmares,” he said in a musing voice, “fall into three categories. The boyhood ones, the pirates ones, and a new category has added itself after the recent battle. In most of the pirate nightmares, he sees accusation—condemnation—in Rig’s face because he was helpless to save any of the crew.” Ramis opened his eyes. “If you hadn’t stupefied him with that blow to the head he might possibly have saved them. He would most likely have touched off the mutiny he organized half a year later.”

“I know that.” Fox turned around. “Are you blaming me for cracking his skull to shut him up?”

“I’m telling you why he lost the interest of Norsunder. If he’d led a mutiny that day, taking Walic’s flagship and thence his fleet—” A lifted hand. “He was stupid with pain, but he just looked stupid to Norsunder’s witness onboard that ship. The witness lost interest and left, as she considered Walic and his mates to be too petty for use. Even the Brotherhood of Blood didn’t want Walic. Inda’s subsequent wins appeared from a distance to be accidents, largely because he did not follow up on them in the traditional manner, by building a pirate empire.”

Fox pressed both hands to his head. The conversation had turned from unbelievable to absurd to . . . what? To a blurring double view of what had been real, and what someone had apparently worked hard to make appear real to Norsunder’s “idle eyes.” “You want me to tell the truth? How can I? All I know is my own experience.”

“I just told you something that Inda has never told anyone,” Ramis said. “If you find the need, you will have access to what I saw. And heard.”

Memory by memory, wit by wit. The sound, and finally the sense: this man was a mind-reader. He won the fight because he really did perceive every move before it was made.

A mind reader. So, that meant . . . “You’re a soul-eater?” Fox barely got the words out. He did not even try to hide his sick fear. The fellow could read it as easily as he’d read the book.

“No.” Ramis made the negating gesture again. “Only one of the Host is. Some do try to match that, ah, dimension of cruelty, but enough about them. What do you intend to do about the treasure?”

“What’s the use in asking? You’re obviously going to tell me what to do, and even I can see that there is little I can do to stop you.”

“When I exert my will, you will know it,” Ramis observed. “You can do anything you want. You can kill those four in the scout craft out in the bay right now—”

“Four?”

“—or you could force them to leave the treasure and take your fleet down the strait to Ymar, where the Ymarans and the Everoneth are gathering with the rest of the Fleet Guild alliance to determine who is going to control the strait once they throw the last of the Venn out. The Chwahir are on the way.”

Fox did not know what question to ask first.

“The protective ward is fading. We must finish. It is time to see the end of that treasure. Far too many have died because of it. Therefore, if you choose to fall in with Barend Montrei-Vayir and Wisthia Shagal’s plans, there will be a reward. Not for you. But for your descendants, someday. Every coin or artifact you bring out of that cavern to be carried back to Wisthia Shagal will cause another gold coin or artifact to be brought beyond time to a place I will one day tell you.”

“That’s impossible,” Fox exclaimed. “How can you promise all these things? How can you
know
these things? How can you prove any of what you’ve told me is actually true?”

Ramis smiled. “The young man the Marlovans called Noddy Toraca made Indevan Algara-Vayir promise something just before he died. Inda could not hear it. What Toraca said was ‘no more war.’ Tell Inda that.”

“But—”

“Just remember what I said.” Ramis struck his knuckles on the table holding the royal candelabra of an ancient Venn king. “This vessel will await you. If the Venn return, I suggest you take it into battle. You will discover it has unexpected virtues.”

“Battle?” Fox repeated.

Ramis laughed soundlessly. “What was old Savarend’s first rule of bad government? A rule his assassin was careful to destroy.”

Fox repeated automatically, “When you cannot control your own people, you send them out to fight someone else.” He said on an outgoing breath, “The Venn. They’re coming back.”

“The situation right now is very fluid, but the one who took seeds from the Garden knows the cost if they do not bear fruit.”

Fox remembered Inda and Signi explaining about the Venn dag Abyarn Erkric, then dismissed him. The important thing was that the enormous army necessary for such an invasion—a second invasion—could not be marshaled, supplied, and launched from Venn. It was too far away. They had to be closer to make the jump to Halia. Then coordinate the attack, which would have to be from every harbor at once, as a concentrated strike in the north had not worked. So that meant—

He looked up, ignoring how much that hurt. “The Venn only hold Jaro Harbor in Ymar. Are they coming to retake the strait?”

“Right now it’s just reinforcement on the way,” Ramis said. “They expect an easy win for this small force. They count on it.”

The dark scintillance began to coalesce around Fox. He snatched up his book, then he found himself at the waterfall, but this time he was alone.

Jeje had scolded and nagged the other three into making a plan for dealing with Fox. When the fog dissipated before a sudden, driving wind, they sailed toward Ghost Island, putting the finishing touches on their plan.

All of which vanished like the fog when in the slanting light of sunset they found Fox waiting on the shore for them, blood crusted on the side of his chin, a spectacular black eye forming. He leaned against a rock with a semblance of his usual negligence, but the four were far too experienced not to see how much effort it took him to stay upright.