Authors: Rachel Aaron
“I’m sure,” Sara said, flipping through Slorn’s book. “I got back from the desert this morning, but Alber’s weapon isn’t ready yet, and at this rate I don’t know when it will be. I need more wizards, and fast. Myron’s already drawn up plans for more spirit defense points than I can man, even with Blint’s deserters. That militaristic idiot doesn’t seem to understand that wizards are not interchangeable. There’s a huge power difference between a man like Blint and our Miranda. I’d hoped that by making Banage a traitor we could squeeze the Court enough to get what we needed, but it looks like all the true talent has stayed loyal so far.” She blew an angry line of smoke. “They’re worse than burned sugar, the way they stick together.”
“If you’re holding out for Miranda to turn, it’ll be a long wait,” Sparrow said. “Banage could say the sky was green and she would still back him.”
“It’s her loyalty I’m counting on,” Sara said with a sad sigh. “Blint was right, you know. Banage will never back down now that Whitefall’s forced him to make his stand. He won’t budge an inch
from that tower until I roll over. We’ve been playing this game for twenty years now, he and I, but not for much longer. I didn’t want it to be like this, but the Empress is the trump that forces all hands, even mine.”
“Well, that’s the problem with games,” Sparrow said. “Sooner or later, someone has to lose.”
Sara sighed again and tapped out her pipe. Sparrow just smiled and held the door for her as they started down the dark stairs toward her office in the Relay chamber.
Outside, at the edges of Zarin, another hundred soldiers arrived at the gates.
J
osef stomped after Duke Finley’s servant as they wound down through the ancient warren of Osera’s royal offices. But rather than stopping at one of the venerable old doors, the servant led Josef out past the stables to the little paved yard at the rear of the palace. A black carriage was waiting there for them, and the servant hurried forward to open the door.
Josef paused. This was all getting a little too suspicious—the sudden invitation, the backdoor exit, the unmarked carriage. Though, Josef reminded himself, suspicious as it was, he wasn’t exactly a soft target. If Finley wanted to try something, let him. At least it would be a straightforward fight. Grinning at the thought, Josef climbed into the carriage. It rocked under his weight as he pulled himself inside. The servant followed, shutting the door behind them. The moment the door closed, the carriage shot forward, clattering through the yard and out the iron gate.
The back gate of the palace faced east, toward the Unseen Sea. Here, on the side of the island farthest from the Council and the wealth it brought, the scars of the war with the Empress were still evident. The houses were still built in the old way, stone shacks
never more than a single story tall, most without windows, only a chimney and a door covered with oil cloth to keep the weather out. The houses clustered together, leaning on each other for comfort, but between the clusters, breaking up the flow of buildings like rocks in a stream, were the craters.
Josef wasn’t born when the Empress’s fleet first attacked, but he knew those craters same as any Oseran. They were the legacy of the Empress’s war spirits, great monsters of stone and fire that came from the sky, striking the ground in enormous eruptions of burning rock. Even now, decades later, the ground was still black at the crater’s base, the bedrock itself scorched and broken where the Empress’s wizards had struck.
As they drove down the island’s eastern slope, the houses grew smaller and the craters more numerous. The road they followed was narrow and winding, changing from smoothly paved stone to gravel and finally to rutted, sandy dirt as it snaked down the mountain. Ahead of them, Josef could see the glitter of the Unseen Sea. He knew where they were headed now. Osera, steep and rocky as it was, was not without beaches. This road led to the only sheltered bay on the island’s eastern side, a protected curve of sand called the Rebuke, for it was here that the Council forces, led by his mother, had finally turned the Empress away.
The carriage bounced down the rutted road and came at last to a halt. Josef was out before the wheels stopped moving. Finley’s servant hurried after him only to find Josef standing at the bottom step of the carriage, staring at the water with a strange look on his face.
The Rebuke was a curving oval bay ringed in by steep cliffs to form a narrow mouth leading out to sea. This much at least was still as Josef remembered it, but everything else had changed. When he’d come here as a boy to swim, the Rebuke had been little more than a grassy hill leading down to a narrow strip of rocky sand wedged between a cleft in the sea cliffs. Now that scrubby hill was
gone, replaced by a smoothly paved walkway wide enough to march ten men abreast circling the inside of the bay all the way to the cliffs. Squinting against the salty wind, Josef ignored the servant’s insistent tugging and walked out onto the stone. The paved area wasn’t just a flattening of the old hill; it wasn’t even just a walkway. It was a rampart, the flat top of a great wall that ran all the way along the bay’s inner curve, forming a third, manmade cliff to join the natural barriers on the bay’s north and south. Below the flat walkway he stood on was a steep, unclimbable slope of enormous, sharp, piled stone held together with sandy cement.
Josef looked over his shoulder. “When did they build this?”
The servant, not at all pleased by this delay, answered in a clipped voice. “Construction on the storm wall was finished five years ago, sir. It is the duke’s greatest project.”
Josef looked down at the solid stone beneath his feet. Not bad. Considering the gentle hill that had been here before, the wall of sharp rock and the wide rampart running along its top were certainly defensive improvements. Leaning into the wind, he looked over the wall’s edge. Down below, the narrow beach had been widened as well, the sand combed and relayed to create a wide space between the surf and the wall. A tiny stair, steep as a ladder and barely wide enough for one man, cut down between the sharp rocks at the wall’s midway mark, the only access Josef could see to the wide wooden docks that crowded the new beach. The docks themselves were large and freshly built, the tar still gleaming on the jutting joints that pushed out into the bay’s blue water, but they were nothing compared to the ships.
Oseran runners filled the blue bay in long, precise lines, the fresh-cut wood of their narrow, high-running hulls gleaming white in the afternoon sun. Josef whistled appreciatively. Runners were the pride of Oseran shipbuilding and notoriously hard to make. It was no easy task getting hardwood long and straight enough to
bear the carving needed to make a runner’s long, curving keel, but that difficult shape was what let a runner weave through shallows and move faster on open water than any other ship on the sea. Back when Oserans had been pirates, the runners had been the reason they were feared. There had to be near a hundred of them bobbing in the water below, more than Josef had ever seen in one place, and every one of them new.
“Finley had this built?” he said, trying not to sound as impressed as he felt.
“Yes, your majesty,” the servant said with barely disguised disgust. “
Some
members of the royal family cherish their position and strive to serve Osera’s interests.”
“I bet,” Josef said. “All right, take me to him.”
The servant bowed and turned toward the large tower that dominated the storm wall’s northern half. Josef followed him, squinting up against the bright sunlight. The tower was square and solid, four stories tall with foot-thick walls and made of imported granite twice as strong as Osera’s native stone. The door was solid iron, as were the stairs that wound up the tower’s core. They passed an armory filled with racks of crossbows and crates of bolts, a small but well-equipped mess and sleeping barracks, and a nicely appointed officer’s lounge. There were soldiers everywhere, navy officers mostly in their distinctive tight coats, but there were palace guards as well, standing watch in their chain and quilted surcoats with their short swords ready on their hips.
The top floor of the tower was separated from the others by a heavy door. Finley’s servant stopped and knocked, a rapid double tap. The response was instant.
“Enter!” The heavy door did little to muffle Duke Finely’s booming voice.
The servant opened the door and stepped aside with a sweep of his arm. Josef looked back down the winding stair, checking for
emergency exits, just in case. There was only one, the way they’d come, but he was certain he could overpower the soldiers if it came to that, so he set his face in a scowl and marched into the room.
The top of the tower was unlike the other floors. Instead of smaller partitions, it was one open room, a great loft with a high ceiling going all the way up to the tower’s pointed peak. There were tables here, including a large desk at the tower’s center, all done in the same style as the rest of the tower’s furnishings. But where the other floors were dark and sheltered by the tower’s thick walls, this room was bright with sunlight streaming in through enormous, panoramic windows that ringed the room on all sides. The windows were set with thick glass, high-quality stuff, showing the view without so much as a single distorting wobble. And what a view it was. Josef could see the entire sweep of the bay below, the wide ocean spread out in front of him, the tops of the high cliffs to his right and left, and the eastern slums behind him running almost all the way to the weathered walls of the palace at the peak of the mountain.
Finley was standing beside the window that looked due east, talking into his palm while an older man in somber civilian clothes stood beside him, watching intently. He glanced at Josef as the prince entered, and then turned away, continuing his low speech into his palm where Josef couldn’t see him. Josef glowered at that, but before he could say anything, Finley finished speaking and held out his hand to the man beside him. The older man moved forward, taking what looked like a small, blue marble from Finley and placing it carefully into a padded box.
The man bowed slightly to the duke and, holding the box in both hands, walked to the door. He did not bow to Josef, just slid by him and started down the stairs. Josef ignored the insult, focusing instead on his cousin and, so far as Josef could tell, greatest enemy in Osera.
“Ah,” Finley said, turning at last to Josef. “The prince graces me with his presence.”
Josef hooked his thumbs into his sword belt. “What do you want?”
Finley blithely ignored him. “I was just reporting our latest bit of bad luck to the Whitefall running the Council’s forces, Lord Myron.” He crossed the room as he spoke, stopping in front of a small wooden cabinet set between the windows. He unlocked the door with a key from his pocket. Inside was a cut-glass bottle filled with amber liquid. Finley took it out with loving hands, smiling at Josef over the glass stopper. “Would you like a drink?”
“No,” Josef said. “What are you doing out here with the Relay point? It’s supposed to be kept in the palace for the queen’s use only.”
“The first one is,” Finley said, reaching back into the cabinet for a crystal tumbler. “That was our second point, provided for this watchtower.”
“Osera has two Relay points?” Josef scoffed. “Since when? I thought they were incredibly rare.”
“They are,” Finley said, filling his glass halfway. “But considering how this tower will be the first to spot the Empress’s fleet, I convinced the Council to give us another.”
Josef narrowed his eyes. “So what were you relaying just now?”
“That,” the duke said, tipping his glass toward the southern window.
Josef turned skeptically. He couldn’t see much because of the cliffs, but he could see what looked like a plume of black smoke billowing up from somewhere down the coast.
Josef glanced back at the duke. “What’s that?”
“Our clingfire depot,” the duke said. “Or, rather, it
was
.”
Josef swallowed. Clingfire was an old Oseran secret, a blend of pitch and sticky oil that clung to wood and burned even when wet.
It had been invented so that Oseran pirates on their fast, narrow ships could take down larger freighters. It was also the only way the Oseran navy had been able to fight the Empress’s palace ships.
“What happened?”
“We’re not sure,” Finley said, his voice grave. “The whole depot went up sometime early this morning. It’s been burning for nearly twelve hours already, and since we had almost five tons of clingfire ready for the Empress’s assault, it will likely burn another twelve.”
“Five tons?” Josef took a step back. He’d never heard of so much clingfire in one place.
“At least,” Finley said. “Osera’s not the little fishing village you left, Thereson. My factories have been producing clingfire day and night on the queen’s order since word came that the Empress was on the move. I’d ordered it stored on one of the uninhabited southern islands for safety purposes, and good thing too. If we’d kept it in the city, the whole island would be burning by now.”
Josef glanced again at the column of smoke. “You think it was arson?”
“Arson or carelessness,” the duke said, sipping his drink. “Your wife’s investigating as we speak, so I suppose we’ll know soon enough. I may not like Adela, but even I can admit she’s good at what she does.” He left the words hanging, watching Josef over the rim of his glass.
Josef got the point well enough. “Better than me,” he finished.
“Well,” the duke said. “You ran away, so I guess we’ll never know what could have been.”
Josef barely stopped himself from rolling his eyes. “I’ve got better things to do today than listen to you gripe, Finley,” he said. “If you’ve got something to say, say it. Otherwise, I’ll be on my way.”
“You haven’t changed a bit, have you, Josef Liechten?” Finley said, setting his drink down on the window ledge with a clink. “Still unable to even play at manners.”
“I don’t play at anything,” Josef said. “Get on with it.”