The Fox (54 page)

“Look again,” Ramis said from just behind him.

Inda blinked. The coruscation was not the rock but lay over it; when he gazed into that sun-bright shimmer, the sparkles resolved into many figures, faint outlines as if formed of smoke and sun refraction.

Ghosts?

He could almost make out individuals: men and women, children at times, some dressed in outlandish fashion, walking, drifting slowly as a dream, forming in shafts of dazzling light, then vanishing in blue shadow.

Wonder bloomed, withering into chill. This was no life, only a distortion of life. “I don’t understand.”

“There are places all over the world where the temporal bindings, shall we say, are very thin. This is one.”

“I can’t count them. Why are they there? What do they do?”

“I suspect they find themselves there, the ones who are not bound to a place by their own passions or will, however fragmented. I was reliably told that the single trait they share is violent death. I was also told that those who do not find a reason—however that can be defined to a ghost—to cleave to a specific place any longer will eventually wander here, gathering, drawn to others of their kind. Human beings are by nature social when they are not busy murdering one another. Their numbers increase until those who first lived in this world before we came notice them. And send them out beyond the temporal bindings.”

Inda drew in a deep breath, now searching those glimmering forms for fallen shipmates. Was that Yan, there, on the shore, watching? Sunlight dappling the water dazzled his vision and the form, familiar or merely seeming so, was gone. Inda lowered the glass, and blinked away the blue afterimages leaping across his vision.

For a moment he felt a presence at his side, as if Dun the Carpenter—killed by Fox when Walic’s pirates attacked their ship—stood at his shoulder, sword in hand, as he had just before his death.

Inda turned his head and saw only the rope-and-metal shrouds webbing down to the rail, supporting the towering mainmast, and beyond the rail, the calm blue sea.

A flush of foolishness burned his ears as he faced Ramis. “Why did you bring me here?”

“What do you want?” the man returned.

Inda fingered his jaw, looking out to sea again. Easier than meeting that steady gray-green-brown gaze. “The satisfaction of a good fight. Why not? It’s what I’m good at. Most of my crew believes there is no real meaning past that . . .” The words, almost convincing to Inda when contemplated during the nights since his conversation with Fox, seemed absurd now, when he considered that strange shoreline nearby.

“What do you want?” Ramis repeated.

Inda’s mind began sifting words, images, and he faced Ramis once again, this time with a narrowed, considering gaze. “What do
you
want?”

“Freedom,” the man said, smiling a little.

Inda thought over their conversation and put together the clues. He said, “You mean Norsunder . . . runs you in some way?”

Ramis said, “I made a very bad bargain once. They will let me live as long as my actions provide entertainment, after which they will exert themselves to destroy me.”

Destroy? Soul-eating. Not just the unthinking invective of anger, the real thing—that which comprised damnation, another word used so freely, with no thought to what it meant. But Inda had read enough to comprehend a little: to be violated not physically, but in mind and memory. Each secret routed out and devoured, each memory. First your will and then your identity stripped deliberately away by those who savored terror and resistance, consumed by those Ramis had referred to as “idle eyes” until you diminished to . . . what? Nothing? Or did some essence remain, terribly, in the heart of the enemy, for all time?

Ramis said, “This will be our only meeting. Ramis of the
Knife
will vanish within the year. My value as entertainment has waned, and my harvest has garnered them enough for their present wants. So I ask again, what do you want?”

Inda’s awareness shifted to that rapid flow of images, possibilities, connections, the running stream that pushed into the future and became a path: a plan. That, once acted on, became real. Ramis, whoever he was, whatever his past, had in reaping souls for Norsunder’s mysterious rulers managed to do the world some good.

Inda said, “You could have beaten Marshig. Taken over, run the Brotherhood yourself. Attacked Iasca Leror yourself. Even taken over as king.”

“Yes.”

“And Norsunder, wouldn’t they like that?”

“If whatever I did was sufficiently entertaining, of course.”

No moral truth lay there, yet Inda sensed its presence underlying the man’s words, like a lake beneath parched land.

Ramis said, “I ask for the last time: what do you want?”

“I want to go home,” Inda whispered.

Ramis did not reply to that, just returned his gaze steadily as the rising salt breeze fingered their hair and clothing.

Inda looked past him to the ghost-ridden island, where no living soul willingly walked. He thought past his answer, his true answer.

Even if I can’t make meaning, I can make nets
. As always, when he thought of the net-making of civilization, there was Tdor’s child face, steady and true. The Venn intended harm to his homeland as much as the pirates had, so wasn’t it net-making to get rid of them if he could?

“The Venn,” he said. “They are looking for me, aren’t they?”

“Yes. I believe there is a considerable force on its way here right now.”

They have a spy here?
Inda almost asked, but the answer was obvious. As well as the answer to
How do you know?
A Norsundrian would have access to information as well as magic.

So Inda said, “What can you tell me about the Venn? Why us? Why now, and not thirty years ago, a hundred years ago?”

“There are fierce political divisions in the land of the Venn,” Ramis said. “Due partly to the need for better land to feed a breaking empire and partly to ambition. But these problems lead to the fact that the Venn system of kingship is at stake.”

Inda’s mind streamed with images, questions, possibilities. “The Venn created the piracy problems here in the south,” he said. “I mean, besides their using the Brotherhood as their front-line chargers to weaken coastlines, Iasca Leror especially,” he said, and when Ramis inclined his head, his manner implying conditional agreement, Inda said, “Their stranglehold on trade—forcing the southern kings to comply with their tolls and rules—brought on piracy. No one can raise a fleet big enough to get order on the seaways. The Venn smash them first.”

Ramis said, “All true.”

Inda stared sightlessly at the island, then faced Ramis, who had waited patiently, his one-eyed gaze uncomfortably acute. Inda said, “Who is my chief enemy? Their Prince Rajnir?”

Ramis said, “Among the Venn you have three. Prince Rajnir needs a war triumph to win back their king’s regard; he has problems not just in the Land of the Venn, but much closer to home. Your second is Hyarl Fulla Durasnir.”

“Hyarl,” Inda said. “Sounds like our ‘Jarl.’ ”

“The titles, similar in meaning, share the same root. He commands the southern fleet of the Oneli, the sea lords. The Oneli is the oldest and most prestigious of their forces. He would actually like to see an end to further invasions, but he does not make those decisions; he is oath-sworn to carry them out once made.”

Inda was briefly distracted by a word that sounded so unfamiliar. His mother’s lessons about the history of language made him wonder if the word “Oneli” had vanished from the Marlovan version of Venn when the latter turned inland after their exile and adapted to the plains.

“The Hilda—the army—has been traditionally seen as support, which causes its own tensions. Durasnir is the most able commander they have had in generations, which is why the king sent him south to accompany Rajnir.”

“That’s who I—we—a fleet, I mean—would face in battle. Assuming I can raise a fleet,” Inda said, and on Ramis’ gesture of agreement he laughed at himself inwardly. He had to be dreaming, talking so easily about raising fleets and personal enemies in the world’s most dreaded empire. Digging his thumbnail into his palm, he said, “That’s two. You mentioned three.”

Ramis lifted a hand northward, a gesture Inda could not interpret because he was distracted by memory of Ramis making a similar gesture to rip a hole between sky and sea.

“Your third,” he said, “is a mage. The Venn call them dags. Erkric seeks to become the Dag, the supreme magicwielder at the side of the future king. It was he who negotiated with Ganan Marshig to loose the Brotherhood against the south. He is aware of you now, and would do anything to destroy you.”

Inda realized he’d drawn blood and wiped his hand down his old, scruffy deck trousers. The other palm was equally damp, he discovered: sweat.

“There is no one else trying to gather against them?” Inda asked.

“The answer is complicated,” Ramis said.

Inda retorted impatiently, “What forces are trying to fight the Venn? I don’t see any complication in that.”

Maybe not, but Ramis seemed to consider the question further before saying, “Forces. Those in the north are disorganized, and not well led,” said Ramis. “Here in the south all that stands against Venn sea power is the Guild Fleet struggling to form out of Bren, but now that the Brotherhood has been materially defeated, their purpose, to fight the red sails, is—according to the Venn—nullified. The Venn have made it clear there is no more reason for the Guild Fleet to exist. The guilds themselves are split over this question. The only thing they agree on is this: if the Venn ever deem them a threat, they will smash them.”

Inda said, “How can they not know that the Venn are the biggest threat to trade, bigger even than pirates?”

“They do know. But doing something about it is another question entirely.” Ramis turned his palm up. “The guilds involved are not stupid people. Their ships are not well led as a force. And they know it. The Guild Fleet expeditions have been mostly confined to watching Venn Battlegroup maneuvers on the pretext of pirate-watches and noting down various outrages in hopes some king will back them.”

But the Guild Fleet still existed. Inda needed a big fleet to even consider going against the Venn. The Guild Fleet needed leadership.

Ramis turned his gaze westward, and Inda sensed that this extraordinary conversation would soon be ended. “Tell me how the Venn navigate in deep waters.”

“It is a system run by magic, connecting each ship to certain established sites in a webwork over the world. Their ship-mages—the sea dags—tend to the navigation, showing each captain where he is on the water in relation to land and to other ships.”

“They can spot us by magic, then?”

“No, they need sight just as you do. But because of that network their sea dags can reveal their position to the others, as well as the positions of ships they sight to others of their fleet.”

“So what we need to do to master that navigation is capture not their captain or mates, but these mages—dags?”

“Yes. But be aware of this: the dags transfer away if it looks like the ship they are assigned to might be taken. It’s an imperial order they always obey. And if a dag is incapacitated, it is the captain’s job to kill him or her. And the dags agree to a spell that kills them if they are given white kinthus—all measures to protect the secret of their navigation. A last fact: Venn captains, like your Marlovan warriors, are always men, but the dags can be either sex.”

Inda rubbed his jaw again as he tried to figure out which question to ask next—or if he dared ask a personal one.

“The tide is on the make,” Ramis said. “I must be on my way.”

Inda looked around. The sailors were busy preparing to set sail, as if they’d received some sort of invisible signal. “I suppose the Guild Fleet will not kill us as pirates out of hand if I contact them.”

“The Venn would probably wish them to do that, but those whose voices currently prevail will welcome with open arms, and open pockets, the one who defeated the Brotherhood.”

Open pockets. Inda recalled what Ramis had said about the writers of the Brotherhood of Blood book—he’d read it. That meant he, too, knew about that vast treasure supposedly buried on Ghost Island.

“The treasure is real, then?”

Ramis looked across the glittering water. “It is real. The few who knew the extent of it no longer live. The world expects the Brotherhood to have treasure, but the whereabouts and the amount have remained a matter of hot debate. There are kings who suspect the size of it and thus would willingly kill anyone to discover its whereabouts.”

Inda drew in a slow breath. He’d at first disbelieved in the existence of treasure; from his limited experience pirates spent loot as fast as they took it. But the Brotherhood was old, older than he’d thought, however violently it had changed its captaincy, and there had been those in its twisted, extremely violent past with an eye to empire building.

So if the kings find out I have it, then they can join the Venn in hunting me,
he thought, grimacing.

He dismissed that for later consideration, and turned his mind to his immediate situation.

“And then what, if I do join with the Guild Fleet? Am I being set up for your ‘bad bargain’?”

“It’s a necessary question,” Ramis replied. “But no. You would have to do a lot more than you’ve done to come to the notice of those who tarry in the Garden.”

“Are we being watched now?”

Ramis’s mouth was grim. “Their gaze is elsewhere, or we would not talk with this much liberty.”

A man who could predict his own death with such calm certainty had to be listened to.

“As for my own motivations,” Ramis said, “consider how many of our kings and heroes appear to define honor by the worthiness of their enemies. Things will change only when honor is defined by our works.”