Down to the Sea (26 page)

“If only we could trigger that.”

“I don’t know how,” Richard replied. “I wish I did.”

“There’s one final question for this morning,” Andrew said. “Assuming we face their fleet within the next four to six weeks before the storm season strikes. What do we do?”

“Based on what he said,” Webster replied, “surrender the ships or pull out.”

Andrew looked over at Webster with a flash of anger in his eyes. “We can’t withdraw, nor will we ever surrender.”

“We fight, and they get blown apart and thousands of good men die for a hollow gesture based on political considerations.”

Richard stepped back from the two as an argument ensued. Long ago, while still a slave, he had learned that when rulers fight, the lowly should be nowhere in sight.

As he moved to the edge of the group, his attention focused on the half-completed ship.

“I always feared these were not enough.”

Varinnia was by his side, Adam behind her. He nodded, sensing it was best to say nothing.

“Beautiful ships, but the problem with the sea is, so much rides on so little. A dozen ships can decide the fate of a nation. On land, with massed armies, you can fight a battle, lose it, perhaps even lose near on to an entire army as we did several times, but with the right backing industrially, by the time your opponent advances you can have a new army in place and quickly adapt your tactics to what you’ve learned from the last fight.

“At sea it comes down to a few thousand men, a few ships. Lose that fleet, and before you have time to build a new one they are standing off your harbors, destroying the crucial yards needed to rebuild. One battle at sea, maybe two, and the issue is basically decided. Maybe in a way that is better. I’ve always dreaded the mass slaughter created by the weaponry I helped to build.”

“Admiral Bullfinch calls it the power of a fleet in existence,” Richard replied. “Says that he used to talk about it with his roommate when he was at the old Naval Academy back on earth.”

“So these ships will die if they go to face the Kazan.”

“They’ll be sunk the moment they come into range of their guns.”

She looked at Keane and Webster, who were still arguing, then turned back to Richard. “Tell me, is there a way that they can fight without having to come within range?”

As she spoke, Richard could see Adam standing behind her, ready to burst with excitement. “I think Lieutenant Rosovich has the answer to that,” he replied.

“What is it, Sean?”

Ashamed that she had caught him thus, he slipped out of the bed and retreated to the small veranda attached to their bedroom in the palace of Hazin.

Slipping on a light robe, Karinia came out to join him. “What’s wrong?” she whispered, “I woke up, and it sounded like you were crying.”

He lowered his head, covering his eyes with his hands. “Nothing,” he whispered. “A bad dream, that’s all.”

“Tell me about it.” She sat down beside him, hands lightly touching his shoulders, rubbing them.

“My mother. I dreamed she was still alive, back in Roum. She asked me why I had done what I have.”

“Done what?”

“Stayed here,” and he uncovered his face.

Ever so gently she touched the tears on his cheeks as if they were some strange curiosity she had never experienced before. She touched a teardrop on her fingertip to her lips.

“And my father, yelling drunkenly. Funny, that’s one of the few memories I have of him from when I was a boy. Him drunk.”

“Did he hit your mother?”

“No. He was never like that. A good-natured mick, they called him. He’d laugh too loudly, always with some of his friends from the army when he came to Roum. He’d give me some present, then have the servants shoo me off to bed. In the morning he’d be gone and my mother would cry for days afterward. He was with her in the dream, asking me the same thing.”

“You regret staying?”

He looked over at her and forced a smile. “For you? No, of course not.”

He let his fingers lightly trace the line of her jaw. His hand cupped her cheek for a second, then fell away. He stood up, leaning over the railing. Below was the main courtyard of the temple. In this, the hour before dawn, initiates of the first order, Kazan and human, were dimly visible, lying on the flagstone pavement with arms spread wide. At dusk they had drunk of the holy waters, and even now they drifted in their visions. Occasionally one would moan softly.

Guards paced back and forth between the rows. Several of the bodies were completely still, blood splattered around them, their heads neatly laid to one side. Even as he watched, one of them, caught in a horrible vision, began to stand up, crying out. He was dead within seconds, body collapsing, spraying blood. He had failed, falling victim to the inner terror. He had not learned stillness in the face of fear.

“Ghastly in its power,” Sean whispered.

“The first thing you learn,” Karinia replied. “Weakness is the destroyer.”

He stepped back from the spectacle below, looking over at her. “My tears were weakness.”

She smiled. “No. Just love.” She moved into his arms. “I vaguely remember my mother,” she whispered. “My father, any of our fathers, none of us know. He is simply selected, then is gone.”

“Were you selected for me?” Sean asked.

She slipped from his embrace, returning to the bed, beckoning for him to follow, which he did.

As he lay down beside her, she lightly traced a fingertip across his chest. “Yes, I was selected.”

He pulled back slightly and sat up.

“Don’t be angry. Consider it an honor, my love. It was Hazin who told me to go to you. I obeyed, but after I met you the obedience became pleasure.”

He shook his head. “It makes it seem false.”

“Why? Because that is not how it is done in your old world?”

He nodded.

“Hazin wanted you for the Order. There is nothing wrong in that. If not for that, you would be dead now.”

“That’s not what I mean.”

“What, then?”

“Arranged like that.”

“Don’t they do that where you come from? The Chin still arrange marriages, don’t they?”

“How do you know that?”

She smiled. “I just know. Consider it an honor conferred by Hazin. You are not of us, yet he wishes your blood to be joined with us. I should have been destined for someone pure, of ten generations or more, but he chose you. That indicates his regard.”

Sean looked over at her, not sure how to react. She seemed a dream of perfection, yet beneath the softness of her light olive skin, she had a strength that at times, in moments of passion, seemed capable of overwhelming him.

She was not the first woman he had been with. There had been Svetlana, one of the girls at the Roaring Mouse, and even Lavinia back in Roum, who, at age eighteen, he had at times thought of in terms far more than passion. He had made her vague promises about finishing the academy and his first tour of duty, at which point the military freed him and would allow him to marry. He wondered where Lavinia was now, if she mourned him, if she still cared or had already forgotten him with someone else.

The way I’ve forgotten her, he thought. He looked over at Karinia. She was different, and he wondered if in some way she was not even quite human.

Yet that was indeed what had convinced him to stay. It was not the visions given to him by Hazin, the cunning and oh so persuasive arguments of the inevitability of history on this world, or even the quest to find a Portal and thereby reach the power of the stars. No, it was the raw, primal power of this race the Kazan were breeding. They were the inevitable culmination of man, and once unleashed, nothing, and especially the Republic, with all its turmoil and teeming, foolish voices, could stand against them.

“My mother, in the dream, she said something.”

“What?”

“That I was a traitor.”

Karinia laughed softly. “To whom? Yourself, your country?”

He nodded.

“Rather, it is your Republic that would betray you. We understand a thousand centuries of history, Sean. This world is the old world of the Kazan, of their barbarian cousins who once rode the northern continent. From here they leapt to the stars, subjugated a hundred worlds, and then came the Great Falling, the casting down and twenty thousand years of darkness.

“The Portals are the key to everything. All were dead here, annihilated, and then the Portals somehow opened, the gate between worlds. A few came from one world, and then another. Their descendants multiplied, but understood nothing of before.

“Our race. Our race somehow was on more than one world as well.”

He looked at her in surprise.

“Didn’t he tell you that?”

He shook his head.

“The-world your father came from, the world that those who lived under the northern hordes came from, it is the same place. Perhaps the ancients of the Kazan made a gate there, perhaps several, and took ancestors of yours from long ago. There was another Portal here, in the realm of the Kazan, that is where my blood comes from. It was this order, then, who decided to make the blood pure, to recreate us.”

“I understand how,” Sean said softly, almost fearfully, as if someone was listening. “I do not understand why.”

“You will, when Hazin decides it. Sufficient to know that what he offers is the only alternative. Both races united, both races pure. Your Republic could never achieve that, and you know it. We are the future of this world, not the Republic.”

He nodded. That he knew was true. Man against man there was no question. The Kazan, all the Hordes, were bigger and far more powerful physically, but in battle that size had its drawbacks. They moved slower, and the northern hordes lacked the technical skills. The Kazan had those skills, but when it came to lightning speed and sustained physical endurance, humans had the edge. The Shiv combined a physical presence and power that was terrifying. A power that could unite the two races to one purpose was indeed unstoppable.

“And if you could control it,” she replied, again her fingertips tracing his arm and then his shoulders, “would you turn it against Hazin?”

He looked at her, wide-eyed.

“The truth.”

“I am nothing to the Shiv. In battle,” he paused, still shocked by what she had told him only the evening before, “in the arena that you told me about, any one of them could crush me.”

“That’s not what Hazin wants of you. He has a hundred thousand who can crush. They, almost all of us, are trained to nothing else. To think like your opponent, to understand them, that is what he wants from you. You can be the face that those of the Republic will see, will rally to.

“There is nothing but power. All else is meaningless. And when life ends, it ends. Thus morality is a charade to dupe the foolish.”

“The god of the Shiv?” he asked.

She laughed. “A legend for the initiates, for those who need such things. Those of the inner circles know that nothing exists beyond this life. Therefore it is power, my lover, power and nothing else that matters and that drives the game of our lives.” She smiled. “And that power then gives us the pleasures we desire.”

He wanted to pull back from her, but even as she spoke, the look in her eyes drew him in, her touch feeling like fire. “Do you know why your father was as he was?”

“No, I wondered that often as a child. My mother was beautiful, educated, and she loved him. He threw all that away.”

“It’s because he was drunk not with liquor, but with the memory of power. He commanded armies. He crushed his enemies and saw them driven before him. He knew triumph like few have ever known. And then it ended and he had nothing but memories.

“Could such a man ever settle down, sit in the corner of a room and watch the days drift into a blur, to lie with but one woman until they grew old and died? Believe me, Sean, once the elixir of power has been drunk, it will haunt you.

Forever after your life is divided between all that happened when you held it, and then all that came afterward, when each day is spent remembering rather than gazing toward what still lies ahead.

“That is what Hazin offers you. What I offer you.”

“And if I turned away, would you turn away from me?” She smiled softly. “Why do you ask?”

“Because I love you,” he whispered. “And fear you. Fear that you would leave me.”

“Ah, so I would haunt you forever afterward. Sean O’Donald, you know how to compliment.”

“And my power, what of it? Would it haunt you?”

“What you could be if you but allowed it. Hazin saw that in you and in your foolish friend.”

“You are not answering the question I asked.”

“Nor will I, lover. I must keep at least one secret from you.” She smiled. “It is, after all, part of the game that all lovers play with each other.”

He slowly nodded.

“Today you will see the Shiv in a new way. When you watch them, consider what it would mean to lead them in battle. Your father’s successes will pale to insignificance when compared to what you could do.”

She gently pulled him back down by her side and drew him close.

“Do you love me?” Sean asked, and he was ashamed that his voice betrayed his fears.

She kissed him gently.

“Here, at this moment when it is just the two of us alone. Yes, I do,” she whispered.

The blaring of the trumpets was an annoyance Hazin was forced to accept. He just wished that they didn’t have to stand directly behind the imperial box.

The fanfare echoed around the great amphitheater, the brazen call of the nargas, the war trumpets joining in. A hundred thousand came to their feet, clenched fists raised to the emperor as he came out of the shadows of the entry corridor and stepped into the light.

A thunderous cheer erupted and redoubled as he raised his hand in salute.

Hazin stood at the back of the imperial box, just behind those of the inner blood, the eunuch chamberlains, the royal attendants of the chamber, and the chosen concubines of the moment. He preferred this spot. It allowed him to watch without being watched.

While the emperor stood, accepting the adulation of the mob, his guards stood warily to either side. One of them examined the royal chair, expert hands running across the cushions to check one last time for a hidden needle or pressure detonator. He stepped back, gave a subtle nod of approval, and the emperor sat down.