The Other Lands (72 page)

It was true that the league had been struck a blow when Calrach rebuffed them. Sire Neen—Dariel could not help but chuckle thinking about him. The memory seemed more manageable now that he was free in the world. Tunnel and several others clinging to the rocking deck nearby looked quizzically at the prince as he laughed. That just made him guffaw all the more. “Rather changed your view of the world didn’t it?” he shouted. “Getting your head lopped off, I mean.” The others just stared.

The fresh air and the motion of waves beneath him and a ship’s wheel in his hands did a great deal for his humor. He felt a vibrant energy at his center that he had not really felt since his days as a brigand captain.

He let the energy feed him from the inside, and he let the urgency pressed on him by the outside world drive him forward. Knowing the league as he did, Dariel knew they would not spend much time mourning Sire Neen. Nor would they be deterred from whatever it was they intended in Ushen Brae. The activity on the west side of Lithram Len proved as much. It could only be a matter of days before they began exploring the other side of the island, where Skylene told him the soul catcher was. She was the only one of the party to have information about it, and that came only from the things Mór had told her. Even this information came largely from a child’s memories, but Dariel knew such things could have surprising accuracy.

A little way into their northern turn, Skylene called for him to slow the boat. They would have to study the coastline carefully not to miss entrance to the soul catcher. It was hidden in plain sight, Skylene said.

Trees of a type that Dariel had never seen crowded the shore. Slender trunked, they were as tall as any pine in the high forest of Calfa Ven. The trees exploded near the crown with branches that shot out in every direction. They looked top-heavy, but the branches entwined with their neighbors and those joined the many into a single, linked partnership.

Rocky outcroppings interrupted the trees now and then. It was for a particular one of these that they searched, riding the waves now, nosing along more slowly. Dariel made sure to scan the sea horizon often for any other vessel, but he also watched for submerged rocks and could not help but stare for long moments at the shore.

“On the mainland there are vast forests filled with creatures.” Skylene had come up beside him. The breeze off the water stirred the tufts of feathers at her hairline. “They say there are creatures on Ushen Brae—squirrels and flying rats and howling monkeys—that live their entire lives in the tree canopy. Imagine that: having no need of the ground beneath you. The world is odd, isn’t it?”

“That’s what keeps it interesting,” Dariel said.

“Well, yes. And this island is interesting, too. As lush as those trees are, as thick, no animals live here. Listen, you’ll hear no calls. Not even birds. They say it has always been that way on Lithram Len.”

Indeed, now that she mentioned it, the place did have an eerie stillness. It was hard to imagine the island not crawling with animal life, but he saw no motion save the leaves stirred by the wind. Staring at the trees they did seem almost as if they glared back, like their entwined embrace was not so much an act of mutual support as it was preparation for aggression.

Just after midday, Birké, with his Wrathic hunter’s eyes, was the first to see something. His arm shot out, pointing. At first Dariel saw nothing but another bulge of rock that pushed through the trees and overhung the water. He moved the vessel closer, willing it to ride calm on the swells, angling so that he could see into the water more clearly. There were rocks there, rippling and near, under the glassy green tint of the water. It was not until he swung the boat all the way around and backed into the shelter of a natural quay that he realized he had navigated a route that brought him to rest at a pier, a carefully hidden structure just beneath the rock outcropping.

The others had the boat secured in a few moments, and Dariel leaped onto the dock even as Birké started to ascend a stone staircase cut into the buttress. The steps were invisible from the sea but obvious from this angle, a curving ascent that kept to the natural contours of the wall. Dariel followed.

It was a quick climb, and soon he stepped through a darkened opening, as if into the mouth of a cave, breathing heavily from the exertion. The others crowded the room and he had to slide between them. As his eyes adjusted, he realized the chamber was not truly cavelike. It was sculpted, oblong and sleek. The stone had a light within it, a faint illumination that seemed to grow the longer they stood there. No one talked, but they walked slowly around the chamber.

Tunnel said, “This is truly it?”

Skylene nodded, her sky-blue face grave and beautiful in the soft light. “It’s as Mór described. Exactly.” She pointed to the bedlike stone platforms. “Ravi—I mean, the child to be sacrificed lies on one of those. Whoever is to receive his soul takes the other. Covers come down from above.” She looked upward. Indeed, rectangular structures hung there. “And whatever happens is hidden from view. The Lothan Aklun do things. That’s all she could say.”

“Who were these people?” Dariel asked.

“Some believe that the Lothan Aklun came from your land. Sorcerers who fled persecution”—she ran her hand gently over one of the panels, not actually touching it but as close as she could come to doing so—”and became persecutors in this one.”

From my lands, Dariel thought. How could they have come from Acacia? “I’ve heard no tales of that.”

“Not all tales get told,” someone said.

“These sorcerers, they put their magic into things,” Skylene continued. “Like they put souls in the boat. Like this chamber. This is the place. It’s all as Mór described. It may be incomprehensible to us, but the league might not find it so. They are so near, they may find it any day. They may have texts to show them its use. I don’t know—”

“If the league has any idea what this can do, they’ll search for it,” Dariel said. “They’ll find it. They’ll use it. I know that much about them.”

“Destroy it,” Birké said. “Let’s not wait a minute more.”

Another man, Tam, answered this with motion. He unclipped the mace that hung at his belt, gripped it, and tested its weight as he decided where to strike. Dariel understood him to have escaped from the Fru Nithexek, though the only marks of the sky bear on him were dark, circular tattoos around his eyes. He picked his target, a slanting compartment in the wall with hand-shaped, raised impressions on it. Those near him stepped back.

Dariel began, “Somehow I don’t think—”

Tam swung the mace. The iron head of it bounced back from the panel so forcefully the young man’s arm was flung over his head. He lost his grip on the mace and several had to duck out of the way to avoid being hit. Tam cried out, and for a cold second Dariel thought he might drop dead, cursed or something. But, no, it was just the pain in his shoulder and hand that caused him to cry. He stood, rubbing his shoulder, looking hurt and embarrassed at the same time.

Dariel took a moment, and then finished the sentence he had begun. “That we can just bash the place to pieces.”

“Tam,” Skylene said in a voice that made the statement the commendation she intended, “thank you for demonstrating what won’t work. We have to find another way.”

Dariel listened as the group talked, but he had his own idea and it held most of his attention. He circled it, unsure he wanted to offer it. It might fail for so many different reasons. There were risks. Perhaps as much as anything, it meant pushing through a wall of memories he did not relish facing. Or should he? Didn’t he have to? Those memories were tied up with the same children who were brought here. They included the same people he was now working against. He had unfinished business with the league. This could be a part of that.

“I think I know a way,” Dariel finally said. The others stopped talking and turned toward him. “I did something like this before. We blow it to bits—explosions, flame, and smoke.”

Tunnel nodded gravely. “Good idea.” A moment later, he added, “How will we do this thing?”

“We’ll need an explosive, of course,” Dariel said. “I think I know where to find one.”

T
hey used the cover of darkness to hide them, sailing back around to the west side of Lithram Len. The moon was just a sliver, but the stars were bright and Dariel seemed to have no trouble feeling the contours of the shore and sensing the dangers beneath the black and silvered water. The others were quiet. Dariel could sense their fear rise to a trembling pitch when the glow of the league vessel-crowded harbor illumed the night sky. They were close enough to the shoreline that they saw it first as a hazy smoldering above the dark silhouette of the trees.

As they got nearer, the sky took on a reddish aspect, seeming lower and choked with smoke. Dariel inched the boat around the last headland. The bustling harbor, with its maze of dock works, and the city behind it came into view. It hummed with life just as when they had first seen it.

The moment they were in view, Dariel knew how much they stood out, bright white vessel that they were. Fortunately, the league had already commandeered many Lothan Aklun ships. He saw several moving in the harbor now, even more at dock. Coming around into the light, they were now on display for any eyes that chose to see them. Instead of retreating, the prince willed the boat forward, toward the burning torches and hundreds of workers, each of them an enemy.

“Best to hide in plain sight, right?” Dariel offered. “We still agree on that, don’t we?”

No one answered. No one objected either. This was as they had planned, debated, and argued about all afternoon. From what they had observed the first time, there was no way they could get near the harbor without being seen. The night they had passed it during what should have been the dead hours, it was lit too well, was thronging with laborers and Ishtat guards and leaguemen busy making the island theirs, so clearly the time of the day or night would not aid them. In the end they all agreed. They would do just what they were doing now: sail in as if they belonged, as if they knew what they were about and were as intent on their work as any of the others.

It was no perfect plan. It might work. It might not. They could easily be discovered. If they were, they would likely die. But they could not sail away from it without trying. Dariel half wondered why he himself felt such resolution, but only half. He knew how much this was an opportunity to relieve some small portion of the guilt owned by his family. How could he do anything but try to make that happen? Beyond that, it just felt good. Captain of a ship again. With a crew who jumped at his orders, even if he had to explain his needs each time. And they trusted him. They would not let him pilot them into the enemy’s mouth otherwise. Skylene had even given him a dagger, a small, straight blade that he had shoved through his belt. Yes, he was one of them for the time being.

Working the ship closer to the docks, he darted his eyes about, searching at the same time he checked for danger. He knew the barrels would be here somewhere. The league never went far without their flaming weapon. It would be stored off the ships if possible, somewhere removed from the center of activity.

There! Yes, there on the far side of the harbor, at the end of a long arm of pier, sat stacks of drums. He knew them by their color: bright red. Hundreds of them. There was activity at the pier next to it, but the area around the barrels was deserted. Calmly, trying to think slower than the pulse beating in his throat, Dariel steered across the harbor, turned and angled in, coming to the docks on the far side, so that they would be sheltered somewhat from view.

Once docked and tied secure, Dariel turned to the waiting crew. “This is it. The pitch in these barrels makes an unholy fire. It’ll blast that soul catcher to pieces and leave a fire that’ll burn for days there. The more barrels we can get, the better. Let’s go, quickly but calmly.”

They could not be sure that the league used the people as laborers yet. Since slaves kept by the Lothan Aklun weren’t necessarily adorned in the same ways, those with the most noticeable signs of “belonging” stayed hidden. Skylene, Tunnel, the two others of the Kern clan, and Birké crouched on the far side of the deck. Under Dariel’s direction, the others began the work of shifting the barrels from the pier to the boat.

The next pier over seemed to be closer each time Dariel glanced at it. Fortunately, the boat moored there was on the far side, and the attention was thus directed away from them. A group of Ishtat Inspectorate guards stepped off the vessel and stood for a time talking beside it. Dariel kept up the motions of loading and securing, but he watched them every chance he got. He just caught the scent of the mist pipe one of them was smoking. Enjoy it, he thought. Just relax and enjoy the pipe and don’t turn around.

The barrels were heavy enough that they had to be tilted and rolled along on their rims, and then carefully leaned from the dock into the hands on board the ship waiting for them. This last move in particular needed to be done slowly, as demonstrated when Tam let a drum loose too soon. It crashed down on the edge of the deck and teetered a moment. Then it fell back against the pier and splashed into the harbor’s gray waters.