Isles of the Forsaken (21 page)

His estimation of Spaeth had done a complete turnaround. On that night, in her own sphere, she had not seemed like the innocent, childlike being he had taken her for. As Nathaway had shrunk into helpless insignificance, she had grown into a majestic figure, terrifying and wise. She had turned his world inside out, and now he needed her to explain.

Her cottage was deserted. Frustrated, he returned to the path, unsure whether to look for her in the village or in the hills. A woman was standing where the path branched off to a nearby house, watching him with arms crossed. He recognized Agath, who had hosted the barbarous healing ceremony that had precipitated everything, and he turned uphill to avoid her. But she called out something to him, so he dutifully turned back and said, “I beg your pardon?”

“I asked if you were satisfied now,” she said.

Approaching her cautiously, Nathaway saw that she looked half crazed with anger and grief. He tried to speak calmly. “I don’t know what you mean.”

“You’ve driven her away,” Agath said, tilting her head at Spaeth’s house. “Just like Goth before her. You’ve brought death back to Yora. Are you happy now?”

“She’s gone?” Nathaway said. “Where?”

“I thought you Innings knew everything,” Agath said contemptuously. “But maybe all you know is how to maim and kill.”

“Look, I’m very sorry about your son. But he—” He was about to launch into an explanation of medical procedures when something told him to leave it be. “He fought bravely to uphold justice,” he finished, acutely aware of how clichéd it sounded.

Her face crumpled. “That is so much slop,” she said. “He fought for nothing. If you think it’s so noble what he did, then why weren’t you fighting with him?”

Nathaway had no answer to this question. He mumbled “I’m sorry” again and set off down the path, his shoulders hunched defensively.

The encounter had unsettled him. He walked blindly toward the harbour, the cool wind grating against his skin. A thousand questions were crowding his head—what was he doing here, how had it all gone so wrong, what could he have done any differently—but above all, where was she?

When he reached the shipwright’s house, Strobe was in his workroom, rhythmically planing a board. The older man looked up and frowned when Nathaway entered. “I’m looking for Harg,” Nathaway said.

Strobe set his plane aside and brushed off the board. “He’s not here.”

“Where is he?”

“He left Yora.”

It felt like everything was falling apart. “Why?” Nathaway said blankly.

“Your goons came and beat him up,” Strobe said. “It was pretty clear they weren’t going to leave him alone.”

The Tornas had never breathed a word of this. “I never authorized that!” Nathaway exclaimed, outraged. Strobe only shrugged fatalistically and began to rummage on a shelf for some varnish.

“Where has he gone?” Nathaway demanded.

Strobe didn’t answer.

An inspiration struck Nathaway. “He took Spaeth, didn’t he?”

Strobe gave him a suspicious glance, then shrugged again. “I don’t know.”

This only made Nathaway more certain he was right. It made sense. They shared the bond of their common parentage. Surely they would stick together.

“Can you take me to Thimish?” he blurted out. It was the obvious place for them to have gone. Leaving Yora was against his instructions, but at that moment it seemed like a course of action that might drag him out of his morass.

Strobe found some imaginary flaw in the board and started smoothing it with a pumice stone. Frustrated, Nathaway turned to leave, but then turned back. “Is he in trouble?”

“No. But he thinks he is.”

“Look, I know I’m not the person Harg wants most to see—”

“Actually, you might be wrong about that.” The shipwright brushed off the board, then said, “I can take you there. As long as you don’t tell Tiarch’s men it was me.”

“I won’t say a word if you don’t,” Nathaway said. “Wait here. I have to fetch some things from the boat. I’ll be back shortly.”

As he hurried down the beach, Nathaway felt not exactly optimism, but a sense of purpose.

*

“Impregnable, my ass!” Harg said to Barko. “You can’t have been serious.”

“I wasn’t looking at it from this angle,” Barko said in his own defence.

Just like a pirate, Harg thought, to think if a fort couldn’t be attacked by sea, it couldn’t be attacked at all.

They were standing in the high meadows behind Harbourdown, looking down at the Redoubt. From this perspective they could see the whole town sprouting like a growth of kaleidoscopic lichen between the harbour and the hill. It was a mongrel town, half rude fishing village and half emporium of a far-flung pirate network. “Everything is for sale in Harbourdown,” so the saying went. As Harg and Barko had passed along the streets that morning, bangled women and keen-eyed artisans had beckoned to them from street-side displays of bright carpets, glassware, brass, and ivory. Now and then shuttered windows showed where a shop had dealt in weapons or fortune-telling or dreamweed before Inning regulations had come to Thimish. Not that the Inning presence had truly halted Harbourdown’s age-old traffic. By mutual agreement, every shop that dealt in black market goods had hung out a wind chime, and the streets were now musical with outlawed solicitation.

When Harg had looked up at the Redoubt from the town, it had made his heart sink, for its dark, seamless walls rose atop a ninety-foot sandstone cliff with only a narrow switchback road for access. But as they had circled round behind it, climbing the bluff behind the town, the fort had dwindled. Now they stood looking down into the small, pentacle-shaped courtyard. The Redoubt was all grand façade, and nothing behind.

“I’ll wager it was never even intended as a fort,” Harg said. “If it was, the Altans didn’t fear attack by land. They put all their strength toward the harbour and left their backs exposed. Get an army on top of this hill, and with a couple of ten-pounders you could blast them into the sea.”

“But we don’t have any ten-pounders,” Barko pointed out.

To this, Harg said nothing. Lying down in the long grass, out of sight of any sentinels, he raised the Inning spyglass he had borrowed from Torr. There were only two gates. The main one on the southern, seaward side stood open for the almost continuous arrival of donkey carts, wagons, and visitors who had business with the military. The small north postern closer to them was shut at the moment, but was clearly used for access to a level, grassy parade ground behind the fort.

“What do they use that field for?” Harg asked.

“It looks like they’ve been grazing their mules out there.”

“How many mules?”

“Two teams. They used them to get the big guns up the hill.”

Harg located the placement of the guns. They were all aimed toward the harbour, and still mounted on the carriages that had brought them up here. He swung the spyglass around to study the frigate they were protecting, anchored below. A small vendor’s boat was pulled alongside it, the proprietor dickering with some sailors for his wares.

He collapsed the spy-glass with a click. “No, we don’t have any ten-pounders,” he said. “We’ll have to think of something else.”

“Harg, the fort may be weak, but we can’t attack it with pitchforks and fillet knives.”

“I wasn’t thinking of pitchforks,” Harg said. “I was thinking of catball rackets.”

He got to his feet and started off across the hills toward the west, leaving Barko scrambling to catch up. Harg felt totally focused; he loved the sheer intellectual challenge of the problem before him. Coming up here, he had only intended to see if any portion of the puzzle were soluble, but now the pattern was falling into place in a chain reaction, and the whole thing was lying open before him. As they walked, he peppered Barko with questions: How far to Rockmeet Straits by boat? By land? Was there a road? How many people could Barko recruit? What skills did they have? Any boats?

After walking over grass hills for ten minutes, they plunged into a pine forest. Around them, scaly trunks towered to the sky, ancient presences whose majestic silence made them lower their voices. Underfoot, a carpet of needles cushioned their steps, and the wind whished eerily in the treetops far overhead. There was little undergrowth; it was like a hall of pillars. They walked for forty minutes and only had to cross a single ravine before they heard the sea ahead and came out atop a high stone cliff. Across the narrow strait lay the sand flats of Ekra.

“How deep are the shoals over there?” Harg asked.

“Oh, it varies a lot. They’re like rolling sand hills under water. Pilots try to stay as close to the east side of the channel as possible.”

So the warships would be hugging the cliffs as they came through. Not perfect, but manageable. Scouting along the cliff, Harg chose a spot and started piling some loose rocks in a cairn.

“What are you doing?” Barko asked.

“Marking gun emplacements,” Harg said.

“For what guns?”

“Don’t worry, we’ll have guns. Sharpshooters as well.”

“Harg, would you mind explaining?”

So Harg laid it out, in all its crazy inspiration. By the end Barko was shaking his head. “I don’t know,” he said.

“What don’t you know?”

“Whether we can pull it off. If we do . . .”

“If we do, we’ll give the Northern Squadron a taste of real South Chain hospitality,” said Harg with a grim smile.

*

Spaeth sat on the threadbare carpet of Anit the Bonecrafter’s home, staring at her nails. They looked black and bruised, as if hit by a hammer. The tips of her fingers were beginning to darken; when she pressed them she could feel nothing.

It was the morning after her first restless night there. Around midnight she had roused with a sense that the darkened room was full of the eyes of small, scurrying things. The fire had settled into a bed of ashes that gave some heat but little light. She had lain awake listening to tiny scrabblings and footfalls, and now and then the flutter of a wing. It had been a long time before she could fall asleep again.

The lump of blankets that was Tway stirred on the floor beside her. No longer fearing to disturb her, Spaeth rose and went over to make a new fire in the grate.

A soft footfall made her look over her shoulder. Anit was standing in the doorway, leaning on his gnarled stick.

“Did you sleep well?” he said.

Spaeth glanced at Tway. She looked as tousled and sleepless as Spaeth felt. Tway pushed her hair back out of her face, then got up and went to the back door, which opened onto the yard where the pump and outhouse stood.

Anit came over to his chair. He looked hesitant and fragile. Spaeth was about to sit down in one of the chairs facing his when Anit warned, “Take care you don’t sit on Tassie.” Spaeth looked down to see the ivory cat curled on the cushion, looking content and well-fed. She picked it up and placed it on the windowsill, distinctly remembering that Anit had done the same the night before.

“Your carvings—” she said.

“Ah yes,” Anit chuckled. “They aren’t really mine, you know. I just find them and set them free.” He reached out to pick up an ivory mouse from the side table. His hand shook slightly. “They are imprisoned in the ivory, you see. My creatures are much like people that way: when you first look at them, they seem to be only a block of raw stuff; but that is because so much dross surrounds their true nature. Once the excess is removed, what beautiful shapes we find! But sometimes a single piece is not complete in itself; it needs another to reveal its true shape.” To demonstrate, he picked up two shapeless sticks of driftwood from the kindling bin, held them together, and suddenly there was a sandpiper in his hands, hesitating before it sprang forward across the beach. “That’s like people, too,” he said.

“How did you do that?” Spaeth said, astonished.

The bonecrafter regarded her with a look of wan mischief. “Matter mimics matter, as your namorai say. Lightning is the shape of a tree root, a seashell is like the whirlpool, waves are found in grass as well as water. Sea, tree, and bird are all the same underneath. It would be amazing if there were no similarities.”

“You must be a namora yourself,” Spaeth said.

Anit waved a hand dismissively. “Oh, no. My uncle tried to make a namora out of me, once. It was useless. I have no sense of balance. Why, your true namora can take the
essences
of two pieces of driftwood, put them together, and create the essence of a bird—one that can fly away before your eyes. My uncle said all it took was to see things right. Once you could see the shapes, putting them together was simple. I still couldn’t do it.”

Lorin came into the room, tying a freshly washed kerchief over her hair. She set to work heating the kettle and mixing up a batch of biscuits for breakfast. Tway came back in and helped her build a fire under the brick oven.

Over the morning meal, the visitors learned that Lorin had come to live with Anit only a few months before, when her baby’s father had been drowned in a fishing accident in the Pont Sea. When Anit mentioned the fact, Lorin looked away and would not speak for a while. Spaeth could feel grief radiating from her, and had to edge away.

“It will soon be time for me to follow him,” Anit mused. “An old man must think of seeking out his soulstone and preparing to leave the islands.” Lorin looked at him darkly. He smiled patiently, as if they had argued over the point before.

“I dreamed of my soulstone last night,” he continued, to Spaeth. “Would you like to see it?”

He rose and went into the other room, where they could hear him rummaging inside a chest. When he came back he carried a small leather pouch. He placed it in Spaeth’s hands and sat down again.

The leather was old and very soft. Long ago, someone had embroidered geometric designs in dyed deer hair on the cured hide. She drew back the laces and shook out a stone, grey and smooth-polished by waves, shaped like a still drop of water.

“It is very like you,” Spaeth said. It was a conventional thing to say, but she meant it.

“I only found it last week. I have been a very lazy old man not to have sought one before.”