When True Night Falls (16 page)

As he handed his coinage to the captain, he remarked, “I’m surprised you let yourself be put in charge of this.”

Rozca shrugged. “They’ve got to work off their tension somehow, right? Might as well let it be harmless.” As he tucked the bills in his pocket, he added, “I’ve seen worse than this, coming into an unknown shore. Much worse.”

Aye, Damien thought,
I’ll bet you have.

And then at last the lead ships turned east, heading toward land. Those whose wager marks adorned that portion of the map grinned and exulted as Rasya fought to make out some sign of land in the distance. At intervals she had a small pail let down to catch up a sample of water, which she tasted. Most of the time she spit her mouthful back into the sea with a frown that indicated she was searching for some clue in particular and not finding it. But then, on the fourth day of their escorted voyage, her ritual taste received a different response.

Damien and Captain Rozca were with her on the bridge; she handed the bucket to them and smiled. Damien did as the captain did, cupping his hand and scooping up a mouthful of water which he clumsily spilled into his mouth and tasted. Even as he spit it out the captain grinned and slapped Rasya on the back. “Damned good call,” he congratulated her. “Within ten miles, if I remember right. For my book you could smell out the currents in all ten hells and still have time for breakfast.”

Rasya turned to Damien, her blue eyes beaming. “Well?” she demanded.

The water was cool and slightly murky but not unpleasant to the taste. Damien rolled the moist remnants of it about on his tongue, trying to sift it of meaning. But to him it was water, plain and simple. He swallowed the last few drops in silence, noting that the last few stages of the swallowing process were no more informative than the first.

“Tastes like seawater,” he said at last.

“The hell it does,” the captain swore. “What, can’t you tell at all?”

“No sea sense,” Rasya informed him smugly.

“There’s no salt in it, man!” the captain informed him. “Or vulkin‘ little, at any rate. That means a river nearby, and a damned big one. Water like that won’t mix with the sea right out if the fresh current’s strong enough. Hell, you can taste the river Vivia nearly a hundred miles out from its mouth; that’s how they found it in the first place, you know.” His hands on his hips, he studied Damien, “When you go into strange waters, you’d better be prepared to do so without a guide and without good charts, and that means learning to read the sea like a book. Gods know, the signs are all there for the seeing—or the tasting,” he amended with a grin. “Rasya and I, we figure practice never hurts. Right?” When Damien said nothing he cocked his head, studying him. “What’s the matter, Reverend? Something’s on your mind, I can see that. Speak up.”

“I was only thinking,” he said slowly, “that maybe now I understand why my contacts in Faraday claimed you were the only two who could manage these waters.”

“The only two crazy enough,” Rasya agreed, and the captain grinned. “Damn right,” he declared, displaying a cracked tooth.
“Damn
right!”

Tarrant’ll like that,
he thought grimly. And he lifted the slender telescope the man had given him, to resume the search for land.

The great eastern river spilled its water into the sea with considerable vehemence, along with tons of mud that it had scoured from higher ground. The result was a vast delta of low-lying mud bars, some overgrown with reeds and marsh-brush, some nakedly transient. It was the kind of land that would slow down a tsunami, Damien noted, wearing the great wave down as it crossed mile after mile of shallows, until by the time it hit shore proper there would be little left to devastate man’s settlements.
Hell,
he thought cynically,
it’d be no more than thirty or forty feet high by then. A baby.
He preferred the tangible safety of a cliffside perch himself, preferably above the two-hundred-foot mark. That, or a hundred miles of dry land between him and the shore. Or more.

They could see tiny shadows in the distance, dark spots drifting between the mottled islets. Maybe boats, the captain had ventured, set out to harvest something from the marshland. He’d seen that once in the far west. And Damien watched as vast flocks of birds wheeled and dove and came up sputtering with fish in their beaks, while the captain described in vivid detail the hallucinogenic marsh-grass one could buy in Denastia City.

The breeze held steady. The guide-ships led them steadily northeast, skirting the freshwater current. Mile after mile of muddy green landscape passed by them on the port side, teeming with the life of the sea marshes. The smell of it was so thick on the breeze that it overwhelmed all their senses, so that even their hurried lunch of dried meat and grain cakes tasted of swamp grass and guano. Damien swallowed it quickly and moved to the bow, chewing on a bitter shoot he’d plucked from one of the garden boxes atop the wheelhouse. God willing there’d be real fruit soon, and greens that weren’t watered by sea spray; this stuff might have saved them all from Sailor’s Rot, but he’d welcome the day he never had to touch the stuff again.

Yet another joy of the sea,
he thought dryly. He leaned on the bow rail and squinted into the sun, searching for land. The Core was just starting to rise, which was no help at all; between it and the sun he could hardly see.

And then something flickered on the surface of the water, which was neither marsh-grass nor land. He blinked, trying to focus. A jagged shape silhouetted against the rising sun—no, two—long and low to the water, with peaks that shimmered gold and white in the morning light.

I’ll be damned,
he thought, as he realized what they were.
Other ships.

There were two of them, with more soon to follow: frigates and clippers and at least a dozen other types whose names he didn’t know, who swept by the
Glory
’s starboard side with no more than a brief flash of red flags in greeting. All bore the same standard, that of the interlinked circles-and-continents, but some flew a lesser pennant beneath it. He counted them as they passed by, awed by the sheer number of them. Granted, the complex tides might favor travel at this hour—he knew they affected shipping schedules, wasn’t quite sure of all the details—but to have such traffic in one place, all linked (he assumed) to one port ... it spoke of considerably more sea travel than he was accustomed to, and he had been around. Was it possible that these people had found a safe harbor—a
truly
safe harbor—and that there were enough similar ports throughout this land that real sea trade was possible? The concept staggered his imagination. He was accustomed to the sea being regarded as an enemy, unpredictable at best, so that even a simple journey was fraught with peril. But here? He gazed at the great ships in amazement, noting that more‘ than a few spewed the thick smoke of steam power from their central stacks. This was ... this was....

Downright Earthlike
, he thought. Awed by the thought. Jealous of the land that had prompted it.

A tiny shadow had appeared on the horizon that was neither ship nor swampland. The lookout, whose viewpoint bettered Damien’s by some thirty vertical feet, was the first to recognize it. “Land ahead!” the man announced, and he cried down specifics in the sea-code of the west. Damien watched through his glass as the shadow spread, lengthened, covered more than half the horizon with its craggy terrain. Coastline? Island? He wished that Rasya were with him so that he could ask her. But she was much too busy now to be bothered with a mere passenger’s queries. And so he watched uninformed as the land drew nearer and nearer, and tried to read meaning into its form with his oh-so-limited skills.

A ragged, mountainous skyline spoke of a far more solid foundation than the mud islands they had passed, and a much older history. As they drew closer he could see that though its form was lost in the distance to the north its southern tip was clearly discernible, and the foreign ships that headed toward them seemed to be coming from around that point. And they were heading toward it. He watched as signal flags flashed from one ship to the other, bright splashes of red and white and black against the morning sky, and watched the distant shoreline shift to the port side of the ship as the Glory and its escorts made their way through the crowded seaway. Damien tried to guess how far away the land mass was or how tall those peaks might be, but he lacked any kind of reference scale; not for the first time, he wished the sea had mile markers.

A hand tapped his shoulder, interupting his reverie. It was Anshala Praveri, purveyor of ... (he tried to remember) ... spices?

“Pilot said to give you this,” she said, and she handed him a roll of paper.

Uncurling it, he discovered the map that had been pinned on the wall of the cabin section. Nothing had been marked on it since last he had seen it, and for a moment he was lost as to why it had been sent to him. Then his eyes traveled down to Rasya’s mark, and the strange position it occupied. South of the river’s mouth by several miles, her initials were entirely circled by a thin ring of land that jutted out from the coast. A few narrow channels gave access to enough water that the surveyors had labeled it a bay, but it hardly had the kind of access one would require for a major port. Unless time and tides—and earthquakes with their smashers—had resculpted that narrow arching tongue, opening wide one entrance to the sea....

And the seas have risen,
he reminded himself. He felt the paper fall from his hands, heard the rustling of Anshala’s clothing as she bent to retrieve it.

“What is it?” she asked him.

For a moment he couldn’t respond. “A safe port,” he said at last. His voice was hardly more than a whisper. “A truly sheltered harbor.” How many were there in the human lands? He could remember only three, and each had become—for obvious reasons—a center of human commerce. If Lopescu and Nyquist had discovered one here, then their journey was truly blessed.

And then the
Glory
came around the southern point of the jagged land mass, and he saw.

Ships. They were scattered across the bay like so many thousands of birds just come to land, bright wings fluttering in the noontime breeze. Open-sea ships with rank after rank of weathered sails, coast-land yachts with slender masts and peaked canvases, private boats that whipped about their more massive brethren with playful alacrity, some so tiny that a human weight against the tiller was enough to shift their course. White upon white upon white upon white, all glistening in the dual skylight: silver from overhead, gold from the east, creating dual shadows that played upon the waters like nuporps, sporting in the multiple wakes. There was smoke as well, mostly from the numerous tugs that wove in and out of the traffic, guiding the larger ships to their safest route. But for most the crisp northeasterly wind was clearly enough, and sails bellowed full as ship after ship wended its way through the harbor’s narrow mouth with no more power than Nature had provided.

If these are to be our allies,
Damien thought in awe,
then we may yet triumph. But if they turn out to be our enemies
...
then we’re in deep shit.
He did notice that few of the larger ships had any kind of visible armament, which was marginally reassuring. And certainly it was hard to imagine the creatures they had fought in the rakhlands—vicious and sun-sensitive, shadowbound and animalistic—having anything to do with this glorious display, or with the society that founded it.

But the Evil that we came here to fight is subtle, and its tools may vary. Don’t give in to assumptions,
he begged himself. Even as he felt optimism flood his body like fine wine, making his senses swim. Even as he tried to ignore the fact that a part of his spirit was souring like the wind itself, that a voice inside him rang with the force of a thousand chimes:
These are my people, oh, God. Thy people. And see what wonders they have wrought, all in Thy Name!

The coastline to the east of them rose quickly to meet a line of mountains which made it possible to see the city even from this distance. Immense and sprawling, Mercia carpeted the lower slopes in a tapestry of terra cotta tile, gleaming numarble, whitewashed brick. In the center of the city several buildings soared among the others, and sunlight glinted on their heights. One looked like a cathedral. The others could have been ... anything. Damien raised his eyes above, saw a mountainside terraced for farmland, with the maize and sienna velvet of thriving crops already rippling along its heights.

The sound of winches tightening drew his attention back to the middeck—and up to the rigging, where sailors were scurrying to gather up the sails. Evidently Rozca had received some sign that they were to remain here, for the great anchors were released to fall into the sea even as the last of the sails were furled. Then, as if in response to the
Glory
’s actions, a small rowboat was lowered from the rear of Toshida’s ship, to make its way across the waves to them.