The War With The Mein (42 page)

If you free us we will fight for you, the Santoth eventually said, answering with a rapidity that betrayed emotions they had thus far tried to control. Make us true sorcerers again, Lord Prince, and we will wipe the world clean for you to remake as you wish.

Spratling awoke. His eyes were open. He was free of the dream. It was not real. He tried to quell the fear that had shoved him out of slumber so forcefully, but it was not easy. The illumination of the lamp hung by the ramshackle door to his cabin did nothing to dispel the menace he felt pulsing from the walls. There was threat latent in the three-legged stool with the vest draped over it and ominous import in the half-empty bottle of wine on the wall shelf. From outside came a rasp of ocean’s breath. He knew that there was nothing to fear in these mundane objects or sounds. In a way there had not even been anything to fear in the dream. Nothing like the dangers he willingly faced in his daily work. Knowing this, however, did not help him through the moments between the dreaming and the conscious world.

The nightmare he had fled was yet another variation on the visions that had plagued his sleep since Leeka Alain arrived in the Outer Isles, insisting on calling him by that half-forgotten name. Each dream began with an awareness of his smallness. He was a child, tiny, spindly legged, thin armed. He viewed the world from half height. He knew himself to be a target, hunted by a nameless, shapeless possibility. If this being found him, something terrible would happen. He did not know what, but he could not stay still to find out. He wandered through subterranean corridors, a dark and absurdly complex maze. The world existed only in front of him, and he existed only by moving forward through it. Behind him things vanished. He dashed through intersections, afraid of what they opened onto. Out of the stonework of the walls strange creatures stretched their talons, their beaks, and their horned heads, each of them trapped in expressions of rage. How easy it would be for any of them to rip him to pieces; how frightening that they all held so steadily to the pretense that they were only stone. They were not, of course. If he listened hard enough, he heard their hushed breathing.

Though the corridors varied and his path was never the same twice, he always arrived at the same destination. He stepped into a brightly lit room. It was full of people, loud with laughter and music, a sound of tinkling glass that was almost like cascading beads of water. A hundred faces turned toward him, smiling. They had gathered to honor him. It was his birthday. That was what he’d been searching for all along! His tenth birthday celebration. They crowded forward, calling him by the same name Leeka had. That name, actually, was the only word they said: spoken in myriad pitches, strung together in sentences, lilting like questions, forceful like accusations. They spoke a language made up entirely of a single word. His name.

One of them, the youngest girl, stretched a hand out toward him, her white palm upward, fingers crooked and beckoning. The gesture racked him with spasms of fear. She moved toward him, whispering, motioning that he need not be afraid. The more she indicated this, the more he believed it to be a lie. She had enormous brown eyes. They were too big for her face. He realized in a single, telescoped moment that she was not who he had thought her to be, even as he grasped that he had not even conceived an identity for her. This paradoxical realization was what hurtled him toward consciousness.

As always, the experience left him shaken. Who had he thought the girl was? Who had he realized she actually was? Sometimes he spent a greater part of the day plagued by her image, haunted by her eyes. He knew that her identity was within him. It was as if he had a hundred-sided die with the truth written upon one side. No matter how relentlessly he rolled the die, he never found the answer.

Wren stirred on the pallet beside him. She rolled from her back to one side, facing away from him. He felt as if he could hear her eyelids split open. They were not eyes at all like those of the girl in his dreams. Wren was from a coastal people north past Candovia. Her hair was brittle and straw silvered like a woman of the Mein, but her eyes were narrow, set flush with her face instead of recessed. They had about them a sleepy quality, although this belied her predatory sharpness of mind. “Dreams have no power beyond their realm,” she had told him before. “Only actions do.” Spratling felt sure that she was right but was not sure whether to read that statement as a comfort or as a challenge.

Later, when he joined the crowd of raiders taking their morning meal, he walked among them, smiling and joking, teasing in the easy manner he had with his men. They sat on benches ranked around a cook stove that had come from the mess hall at Palishdock. It was a massive, cast-iron thing. Spratling himself had led a small party back to the settlement to rescue it from the ashes and destruction the league warship had inflicted on the place. Its appearance here—on the southern isle that had become their third hideaway in as many months—had raised morale.

Standing in the sand before it, inhaling the bacon scent sizzling atop it, bent forward and preparing to pluck a strip up with his fingers, he did not take note of the general’s arrival until he spoke. Leeka stood some distance away, on the other side of the stove. He spoke for everyone to hear.

“Why haven’t you told everyone about the key?” he demanded. “Why haven’t you told them what the prisoner has said?”

Spratling’s appetite, his pleasant mood, his transitory sense of equilibrium all vanished in an instant. He had known this moment was coming, of course. It was eight days since his attack on the warship. He had sworn to silence the few who had heard just what the key was for, but secrets among raiders do not last, especially not with a league pilot held prisoner among them. Spratling cursed himself for bringing the prisoner with them. He should have killed him on the night, but he could not resist taking so valuable a prisoner, could not help but want to know what the man could tell him. He had made sure only those who had been with him in the pilot’s room took food and water to the man, and only Spratling and Dovian interrogated him. But his presence had been on everybody’s mind since their return.

“I make the decisions here, not you. If I do a thing, there’s a reason for it.”

“I thought Dovian led this group,” Leeka said. “You’re only one of his raiders, right? You said so yourself. Spratling, the raider. Just one of many…”

Turning to face him through the rippling heat thrown up by the stove, Spratling said, “Either way, you don’t make decisions for us.” He cast his voice tight and dangerous. He had not meant to respond with such obvious anger, but his passions tended to flare each time this man prodded. He had not kept the key secret out of any timidity, damn it! He just needed to think its significance through, to research what he could do with it. Leeka had no business calling him on it.

“Dovian agrees with me,” the soldier said.

As if on cue, the old raider rose from where he had been sitting at the edge of the group. He hobbled forward, his bulk like that of a wounded bear. Whatever pain the movement caused him he kept clamped between his teeth. He might have been getting better these last few weeks. He was certainly on his feet more often, but Spratling was not sure just how much of his illness he was hiding.

Leeka went on. “You have a weapon that could cripple the league. You should let it be known, and together we should plan how to use it.”

Spratling shifted his gaze from the Acacian to the Candovian, expressing his annoyance through his eyes. Dovian simply stared back at him, his face sad, apologetic, rimmed beneath the eyes with disappointment. “We will talk about this later—”

“No,” Leeka said, “we will talk about it now. Don’t you all wish to talk about it now? Your young captain wears a key about his neck that you should all know about. You want to hear of it, don’t you?”

Nobody answered. They did not have to. Their silence had a quality to it that anyone could read. Of course they wanted to know. And, Spratling knew, they deserved to know. He tossed his food down, no longer having a taste for it.

That afternoon they had the open meeting that Leeka wished for. They sat on the sand near the ocean, under the ribboned shade of coconut palms, the sky above them cloudless, a light blue dome undisturbed by anything save the progress of the sun’s blazing whiteness. Spratling did not attempt to run the meeting. Wren and Clytus, Geena and all of the others who had been involved in the attack on the league warship were glad to break their enforced silence and sing in chorus.

“Think back a few months ago,” Geena said, “to when they took the brig with Spratling’s nail. We came away with a fair bit of treasure, yes? There was one piece, however, more valuable than the rest.”

“See that pendant about Spratling’s neck?” Wren asked. “That’s what we speak of. You’ve all seen it, but we didn’t know its value until the pilot of the warship explained it. It’s one of a handful of keys that unlock the outer rim platforms.”

“There are only twenty of them in existence,” Nineas said. “Only twenty. And we have one.”

“And we brought the pilot with us,” Clytus said. “Spratling’s been learning all sorts of things from him, I wager. So you have to ask yourself if there’s a use we could put this key and our new source of intelligence to.”

For the next few hours the raiders enthusiastically considered that question. They threw about schemes and notions, filled with a lust for revenge and with the possibility of an unheard-of bounty. Leaguemen were enormously wealthy and their tastes extravagant. What might those platforms house? Slaves by the thousands? Warehouses stacked high with mist? They might find concubines of amazing beauty. Gold and silver by the bargeload. Floating palaces hung with vines and flowers, paved in marble. They could drape themselves in silken clothes and drink wine from chalices of carved turquoise and eat and eat and eat as they had never eaten before. They could spend the rest of their lives in the pursuit of pleasure. They could drown in excess, as all raiders dream. They could even take over the mist trade themselves! They would have Hanish Mein by the balls then, and their fortune would know no bounds.

With Dovian’s consent, they brought out the prisoner. His hands bound and clothing shredded, he stood timid and begrimed at the center of this whirlwind, a trickle of congealed blood on his upper lip. He sometimes needed to be prodded or cuffed, threatened or kicked, but he answered the questions put to him. What he said only fired the group’s enthusiasm.

Spratling let them talk, amazed at how easily they lost their grip on reality. There were some monumental obstacles before them, but in their frenzy nobody mentioned any of them. Leeka offered little. Even Dovian seemed to believe their scheming served a purpose. Only when the banter slowed did Dovian clear his throat and speak.

“It’s fine to imagine, isn’t it?” He pushed himself upright and walked a slow circle in front of the group. Despite his age and ill health, the man still commanded attention, even when he was just drawing a circle in the sand with his massive feet. “I know it’s fine to imagine. And you all know that I’ve a history with the platforms. I saw them once when I was young. Just sailed by them, we did, taunting like. Had an entire fleet chase us from the place and hunt us so far north we saw chunks of ice floating in the sea. Almost killed us, that little stunt. But I saw them. They’re like you imagine and even more unbelievable than that.”

He stopped walking. He looked about a moment, inadvertently seeking the walking stick he had tossed away recently. Noticing himself, he straightened and looked about, his eyes moving from one face to another. “We cannot have their treasure, though. That’s not what we’re about here. An entire army could not besiege the place, and we don’t have an army anyway. And their riches…Truth be told, I don’t want them. Slaves, you talk about? Concubines? Come on, now. I’ve never minded a bit of plunder. Never minded taking what I wanted. Raiding is honest work, right? We do it with our hands, with our guts. What the league traffics in is a whole different level of misery altogether. You don’t want that, friends. You might, however, want to wipe them from the face of the world. You want rewards? How about the love of all the children who won’t be sold across the ocean? How about the thanks their parents would heap on you? How about just knowing that you’ve changed the world for the better?”

Dovian paused a moment, searching faces for the answer. His eyes passed over Spratling’s, but he did not show him scrutiny any different from the others. “What I’m saying is that there’s only one thing we can do with this key, and it’s the thing we should do with it.”

None of the raiders, who had moments before been keen on plunder, raised a complaint. Such was Dovian’s influence among them. The planning took no time at all really, as the venture was one more of pure nerveless courage than anything else. The mission, as Dovian explained it, was fundamentally simple. They had only three hurdles to overcome: getting to the platforms undetected and using the pilot’s knowledge to find the right gate, inserting the key and hoping that the locks had not been changed, and finding a particular warehouse. He believed that each of these challenges was achievable.

For example, as they made their approach they had mainly to avoid drawing attention to themselves. Stable and massive as the platforms were, the league was unlikely to expect any sort of an attack. They had gone unchallenged for several hundred years and certainly would not fear a single small vessel. “They might notice a small ship, true. But then again they might not. They won’t be looking for it, that’s for sure. There’s no navy in the world to threaten them, and they wouldn’t dream we’d try what we’re going to.” Still, of course, they had to be careful. There was an atoll less than a day’s sail from the platforms. If they launched themselves from it, timed correctly, with the right sailing conditions, they would be able to reach their target under the cover of night.

The question of the key still being useful was another matter. “What if they’ve changed the locks?” several asked in a quick chorus. “Or placed guards on the entry points?”

Dovian did not think a few months was enough time, even if they had wanted to change the locks. The workmanship of the key was such that it could not be easily replaced or altered. Moreover, only a handful of leaguemen carried a key like this. They swore to guard them with their lives.