Authors: Dave Duncan
“Then we'll do it this way. Zajic and his men will be expecting Redkev, coming to take over as usual in their continuing dance. So you and I go in on
Sea Dragon
, leaving the other galleys out of sight. We will be taken at once to the governor, and I will read myself in. At that point you serve your warrants, legally and probably peacefully. They ought to be too surprised to object.”
He tried to bluster. “Absolutely not! Your safety is my primary directive.”
“It comes third in your list of priorities. Are we to have this same argument every day for two years, Commander, or is it understood that I can give you orders?”
He took some time to answer, perhaps trying to find words that he could later weasel out of, but in the end he just muttered, “Yes, ma'am.”
“Good. Then we are agreed, and I hope that together we can give Vult two years of fair and honest government, while cutting off the flow of fixes into the Empire. Now if you would be so kind as to ask Sazen Hostin to come in, he can brief us on the geography of Vult and Eldritch.” Irona already knew it by heart, but she suspected that Bericha did not, and the questions he subsequently threw at Sazen confirmed that.
The next night, the last night before Vult, the flotilla anchored at Fueguino, a small town with a good harbor. Irona dined with the mayor, a local appointed by the Treaty Commission. He was a rough frontier man, the son of a former marine who had retired to the north after his service ended, probably to farm or fish. So the mayor was an imperial citizen, even if he spoke Benesh with an accent so impenetrable that she wished she had Zard 699 there to translate. He seemed honest enough, but she reserved judgment. There were many such people in the town, some of them former marines who had served in the Vult garrison.
One question she had was answered there, in Fueguino. She had wondered how much faith to put in the general belief that Eldritch's only access to the Empire was by sea. Her first glimpse of the icy Rampart Range to the north settled her doubts. Nothing, human or not, was going to cross that. She had never dreamed that such mountains existed.
Fueguino was Vult's market. Its fishing fleet and farmland kept the garrison fed, and it was the only town with which Vult had legitimate trade. If Eldritch's export of fixes came through Vult, it likely continued by way of Fueguino. Irona's writ ran there, also. In a pinch, she could hang the mayor by his chain of office.
The mayor's guest room was tiny and homely, but comfortable enough for a woman who had been raised in a shed. And the down mattress was soft as a summer cloud, stuffed with local feathers, no doubt.
“This is your last chance,” Irona said as she slid naked into bed, “to father those triplets you promised in reasonably civilized surroundings. You can have three tries.”
Vly blew out the candle. The mattress billowed as he joined her. “I can't. Not tonight.”
“Rubbish. I've known you to score four.” Not recently, of course, but he still managed three if sufficiently provoked during a long winter night.
“Good night, Irona.”
“Not yet it isn't.” She cuddled closer and groped for that infallible apparatus he sportedâexcept that what she found was small and limp and pathetic. Erectile dysfunction had never been Vly's problem before. At times in their association she would have welcomed it.
He removed her hand. “Good night, Irona.”
“What's wrong?” she whispered. “Tell me.” He had been surprised that she had not become pregnant right away, and she had explained that this was nothing to be alarmed about. Perhaps he was suffering from delusions of inadequacy.
“You just found out what's wrong. Keep your hands to yourself, woman!”
“Forget about babies then. Just fuck me.”
No answer.
“I need it. Please, Vly?”
“Go to sleep,” he said.
The Vunuwer River flowed southward out of the Dread Lands into a wide delta of marsh and brush, infested with snakes and poisonous reptiles. Nothing remotely human lived there, so far as was known. Every squall of rain that came marching over the desolate landscape was welcome, because it brought some relief from the fog of gnats and the overpowering stench of rotting swamp. Blustery winds made even the nimble galleys hard to control, and sailing boats would have been hard put to traverse the twisting channel at all.
Admiral Bericha had abandoned his oarsman masquerade. Clad in a jangling armored apron, he had joined the civilians, coxswain, and steersman under the aft canopy, but his monosyllabic conversation did little to lift the prevailing gloom. Everyone aboard was facing at least one year's miserable exile in this bleak and blighted land.
The only man aboard who might have welcomed the prospect was Vly, for he would have Irona all to himself for the next two years. But Vly had turned a lurid green color and hung on the rail like a dying man, barely speaking even in monosyllables.
Around midmorning, Vult itself came into sight, an isolated monolith of black rock shaped like some great sea lion asleep across the river's path.
Sea Demon
and
Sea Dog
pulled in to the edge of the channel and dropped anchor. At noon they would follow, with their actions on arrival to be dictated by the reception
Sea Dragon
had encountered.
“I had not expected it to be so big,” Irona muttered as the great rock loomed ever larger.
“Well, it does not compare with the Mountain, of course.” Sazen had never been to Vult, but he always enjoyed being the expert. Knowing everything was his job, and he welcomed any chance to show it. “About a third as high. The habitable portions are at the top. I expect there will be transportation for you, ma'am; the rest of us will be glad of our Benesh leg muscles. The lower portions are still being, um, excavated, and are not safe. One day the worms will eat it all away and it will collapse into dust.”
“You chatter too much,” Bericha growled.
The spy ignored him. “I believe I can hear the falls already. The weir was built by Eboga 500, when he was governor here. That was long before he became First, of course.”
“They don't banish senior Chosen here, you mean?” Irona asked sweetly.
“Usually not until they're at least forty,” Sazen countered, slickly turning a perceived insult into a compliment. “Eboga was thirty. It is said that there was a chain of reefs and islets extending right across the delta, east and west from Vult Rock itself. He had the higher islets quarried for building stone, so he could dam up the channels and raise a weir across the width of the delta. The Two League Waterfall, he called it, and it bars access to the interior. No oceangoing vessels can navigate the Vunuwer above Vult.”
“Which means that we can't just bring in the army and sack Eldritch to stop their crap,” Bericha said.
No one commented on that. Eldritch had originally been Eldborg, named after its founder. It had fallen to the Shapeless in 490. At least three times the Empire had tried to retake Eldritch, meeting worse disaster every time.
Suddenly Irona's arm was gripped in steel claws.
“Irona! Don't!”
She turned to find Vly staring at her, eyes wide with horror, lips curled back, traces of foam on his teeth.
“Let me go!” she snapped. “What are you doing?” He had never behaved like this before.
“Don't go there, Irona! Can't you feel the evil? You mustn't go on! Don't you see what this is doing to me already?”
“To you? You're breaking my arm, you idiot.”
Bericha stepped forward, broke Vly's grip without effort, and threw him aside. He fell flat on the deck.
“Sorry about that, ma'am,” the commodore said happily. “Civilians, you know.” He meant
weaklings
.
Vly had rolled over and appeared to be sobbing. If guilt was his problem, there was nothing Irona could do to change it now.
“And there it is!” Sazen announced triumphantly.
He might mean the great rock itself, now fully revealed to their left, but more likely the Eboga Weir on the right. The channel the galley had been following opened up into a muddy lake, which extended from the base of the Vult rock far off to the east, winding along the base of the man-made wall. If not a thousand waterfalls, at least several dozen fed the lake, dropping about half a man's height, far enough to dig out the mud and excavate a shallow basin.
“You see?” Sazen continued. “The galley can go no farther, and the tribes inland cannot enter the delta to trade.”
Irona did not believe the second statement. “Surely any reasonably agile man with a bag of fixes on his shoulder could jump over that wall? There are dry places where he could scramble back up again.” She could do it herself.
“There are good and toothy reasons not to swim in this water, ma'amâI believe they call it the moat. The garrison is supposed to patrol it in small boats.”
Irona looked quizzically at the commander-elect. “So if the garrison turns a blind eye, oceangoing ships can come up the river and meet dealers from inland right here?”
“And if that is how it's done,” Bericha said, “then every man-jack of them must know it. I still think you should bring up all your forces, ma'am.”
Irona shook her head. The garrison was changed every year, so they couldn't all be guilty, or the racket would be common knowledge throughout the Empire and men would clamor to be posted to Vult. On the contrary, it was almost a penal station; a tour at Vult on a man's record counted against him. The corruption must be limited to those at the top and perhaps a few lower down. The rank and file might suspect, but no more than that. She would have to investigate all this in due course; that was the task that had brought her here.
And “here” was rapidly becoming a steep gray beach that fringed the rock. Two galleys were pulled up on it, both of them smaller than
Sea Dragon
. The present garrison, Sazen had told her, comprised those two ships and their crews, totaling about six score men. Even without the two support vessels lurking downstream, Quebrada Bericha should have no trouble taking control if push came to thrust.
The rock itself, she now saw, was visible only in its upper two-thirds or so, the lower part being mantled in long slopes of the same gray gravel that made up the beach.
On the beach were shacks, catwalks, a line of rowboats, and what seemed to be ramparts built of rough boulders. Behind all those, a wooden staircase rose about twenty or thirty feet up the rock before disappearing around a spur. Men were hurrying down to meet the new arrivals, but not in large enough numbers to oppose a landing.
It had started raining again.
“Take her in,” Bericha ordered.
The coxswain beat a signal on his drum, oars were shipped, and a moment later
Sea Dragon
shuddered to a halt, her keel grating on shingle. In a frenzy of well-disciplined movement, the crew vaulted over the sides to drag the galley higher up the beach, but this beach was unusually steep, and they did not, or could not, raise her very far.
The rain shower was becoming a downpour. Irona huddled her robe around her and set off along the ship's catwalk, leaning into the wind. Her tour of duty was about to begin. It would make or break her career as a Chosen.
“Irona, don't go there!” Vly called after her. “Please, please!”
She pretended not to hear.
The only concession the navy made to a Chosen's dignity was a ladder for embarking and disembarking. She clambered down until her feet reached a very odd beach. Shingle should consist of rounded pebbles, but these were angular chips, hard to walk on, sharp through her sandals.
“Worm poop, ma'am,” Sazen explained, right behind her.
Not wanting another lecture just yet, she crunched over to where Quebrada Bericha stood at the start of a boardwalk. He was glowering like an adolescent thunderstorm.
“What's wrong?” she asked.
“Everything in sight. Look at those galleys' hulls! When were they last careened? Look at the cables! Half the strakes in those rowboats are rotten. The boardwalks are falling apart. Moss everywhere. See those hairy apes? Beards down to their waists!”
The men in question wore bronze helmets and carried spears, but they did look more anthropoid than marines should. They were lining up at the foot of the staircase as a farcical honor guard.
Then Quebrada Bericha released a thunderclap of profanity such as Irona had not heard since she was sentencing pirates at Udice. Clearly his normal reticence was not caused by a shortage of vocabulary. The subject of his abuse was a procession that had come into view descending the staircase: four men carrying a fifth in a sedan chair. The passenger wore an ornate brass helmet that marked him as Commander Gabulla. Even at a distance, he could be seen to be enormously fat. Irona felt a touch of dread. A very nasty pattern was emerging.
Converting from mariners to warriors, the crew of
Sea Dragon
had donned armor and were lining up behind their leader. Irona pulled forward the hood on her cloak and clasped her hands behind her, so that her arms would not give her away too soon. Gabulla would be expecting Redkev 676 and she wanted the general closer before he discovered his error.
But then she was distracted by the sight of his companions. The guards who had annoyed Quebrada Bericha were merely slovenly, while Gabulla's bearers were not even human. They might have been assembled from a random collection of body parts, but not by any well-intentioned deity, and some parts were more animal-like than human. They were asymmetric and misshapen; the jaws below their piggy snouts hung open, slobbering and displaying flat teeth like millstones; their eyes were as dead as eyes painted on masks. One man had gigantic arms and tiny, twisted legs. Another was a muscular hulk, and yet a hunchback. All four sprouted seemingly random patches of mangy fur, and none of them wore more than two squares of cloth hung on a string around their hips.