The Path of the Storm (11 page)

There was nothing Miro could do.

"Stop," Amber said.

All eyes were suddenly on her.

"I'm warning you," she said. "Let us go."

"You're warning us," Carver said. He snorted. "You're warning us? How about I give you a warning?"

The rat-faced first mate nodded at Ulrich. Without a word, the fat quartermaster drew his knife along Captain Meredith's throat, slicing it neatly from one ear to the other. Meredith's head fell back so that the gaping wound was displayed for all to see, and then with a gurgling sound blood gushed out.

"No!" Miro cried. He watched as the life left Meredith's eyes.

Ulrich released the captain, and let the man's body crumple to the floor.

"Looks like I'm the captain now," Carver said.

"Stop!" Amber screamed again.

Miro tried to smash his head backwards, but the big sailor behind him easily avoided the blow. Another blow to Miro's kidney made him gasp with pain, but he fought with all his strength to remain standing.

"Be still, woman," Carver said. He nodded past Miro's shoulder. "Kill him."

Amber raised a hand, and Miro saw a ring on her finger.

"Stop," Amber said, her eyes flicking to the ring. Even standing in her nightdress, with a dagger at her throat, there was strength in her voice to make her captors pause. "Don't make the slightest move. I have an explosive device in the hold, in one of the store boxes."

Miro's eyes widened and he wondered if she was bluffing, but he remembered how wary she'd been of the sailors. She had her tools with her, and some essence. It was possible.

"If I speak the activation sequence, the device will explode," Amber said, in a voice of steel. "Let us go, or I'll do it."

"I don't believe you," Carver said.

"You should," said Miro. "She's an Academy-trained enchantress."

"We need to be quiet," Beck said, "the men are going to hear."

"Let's get this over with," Carver said.

He nodded again to the huge sailor behind Miro. Miro sensed the cutlass come up at his side. He struggled desperately as he saw Carver's knife cut into Amber's throat.

Amber gasped an activation sequence. "
Lithia-tassine
."

The ring lit up in a flash of red. A great thudding boom sounded below their feet, and the ship trembled like a wounded animal.

For a long instant no one made a move. Suddenly the screams of men sounded outside. The other officers looked uncertainly at Carver, who gaped while his mind worked.

Then the companionway door crashed open, a sailor's head poking in. "Captain! Anyone! We're taking water!"

The sailor drew back in shock when he saw the bloody body of the captain.

Carver swore. He turned to Beck and Ulrich. "The plan's changed. Tie them and gag them while we figure out what to do. We need to save the ship."

"You," he said to the helmsman, "come with me."

Another sailor looked in and saw the captain's body, his face draining of colour.

Miro heard the cries of panicked men. He and Amber were thrown roughly to the floor and gags were put into their mouths. They were bound hand and foot.

If the ship sank, they couldn't even try to swim.

9

R
OGAN
Jarvish returned to a city of seething tensions.

The city had changed in his time as Lord Regent. Seranthia's great wall was no longer used as a quick and easy way to execute dissidents, leaving their corpses for the dogs. The rebuilding of the wealthy districts and squalid slums was well underway, and the market houses of the
raja
were again sacrosanct places where emissaries and trade delegations could engage with each other effectively. Yet there was little trade between the houses, for basic needs such as food and shelter surpassed requirements for Louan-made timepieces and Alturan-made armour. The streetclans still dominated the poorer districts, a problem unfortunately low on the list of issues to address.

The Lord Regent of the Empire rumbled along the Grand Boulevard in a drudge-pulled carriage, heading directly for the Imperial Palace. With him were his wife Amelia and adopted son Tapel. Lost in thought, Rogan's soldierly instincts suddenly made him look around.

At first he wasn't sure what had alerted him. Then, as soon as the carriage drew in sight of the Imperial Palace, he knew there was going to be trouble.

The Grand Boulevard was a broad avenue as straight as a rule, so wide a stone couldn't be thrown across it, and so long one end could not be seen from the other. Manicured parks with beds of scarlet flowers lined both sides of the street, and the statues of famous men and women from the past frowned down on the people below.

These people were now all heading in one direction. They were shouting and waving their arms.

Rogan could see a huge crowd assembling in Imperial Square, where the palace looked down haughtily on the common people below. Nothing in Seranthia was done at a small scale, and the Imperial Palace was no exception. A monumental edifice of crenulated walls and towers, with peaked white roofs poking from behind the battlements, the hundreds of windows only hinted at the size of the interior. Highest of all, rising from the palace above Imperial Square stood a tower with a railed balcony, from which the Emperors of the past had addressed the people of Seranthia.

Before he could open his mouth to alert the driver, the crowd grew thick around the carriage and Rogan knew it would be impossible to turn around. He leaned out the window, heedless of the people shouting in the street.

"Forward!" he growled at the driver. "Get closer to the palace!"

The drudge picked up speed, and space opened up in front of the carriage so that they were able to properly enter Imperial Square.

"Scratch it!" Rogan cursed. They were so close! He hoped the soldiers would see his carriage and send out some men.

He turned to Amelia and Tapel, both looking frightened. When they'd docked after their long voyage from Castlemere he'd been so concerned about the state of affairs he hadn't bothered waiting for an escort to arrive. His poor judgement may have jeopardised the lives of his family.

"Don't worry," Rogan muttered. "I'll sort this out."

The drudge could go no further and the carriage drew to a halt. Seeing this display of wealth at a time when farmers had no drudges to plough the soil caused a wave of resentment to surge through the densely-packed crowd. Stones bounced off the doors of the carriage and the angry people began to rock it, causing Amelia to shriek.

Someone up ahead was raising the mob, making speeches from a wagon cart, with the crowd responding to each remark with a roar. Rogan began to get seriously worried for Amelia and Tapel. He didn't have his armoursilk with him; it was too expensive to maintain, and the same applied to his zenblade. He wondered if he should have left his family back in Sarostar, but he knew Amelia would never have listened. Or would she have? When it came to her son's safety, she was all ears. He should have at least left Tapel in Altura.

Through a gap in the crowd Rogan saw the speaker. Of course it was Bastian; he'd never had any doubt. Rogan had tried to open serious talks with the former mason, but the man always refused.

If Bastian turned the mob against them, they would die.

~

B
ASTIAN
was pleased. He'd never managed to gather as many followers in one place before. And now some lord or lady was here, with Bastian holding his or her life in the palm of his hand. It gave him a heady sense of power.

"The Evermen haven't deserted us!" Bastian cried. "It's we who have deserted them!"

The crowd replied with a roar.

"There are those who say they weren't gods; that the Evermen never looked over us. Of course they were! Think about the wonders of Stonewater, the great machines and the golden light of the Pinnacle, now destroyed by the Alturans! What about the Sentinel, now off-limits and under guard? Who knows what our western occupiers plan to do with the statue that has guarded our harbour for an eternity?"

The crowd surged and ebbed. A hundred paces away, the carriage of whatever fool noble was trying to get into the palace rocked from side to side.

"It's a plot to control the people, yet it's a plot that cannot work, for the evidence is there for all to see! I follow the Evermen, and no one can take that away from me!"

People shouted their approval. Bastian decided it was time to change tone.

"My name is Bastian, and I am a mason. My father before me was a mason, and back when Xenovere was the Emperor my father led a team of a hundred men in his workshop. Xenovere made sure the Toraks didn't get all the building work. Who needs Torakon's lore when you're building a man's simple house? Yet now they have the Toraks building a wall around the Sentinel and none of the work has gone to a single man from Tingara or Aynar!"

"That's not fair!" a man in the crowd cried.

"What does that mean? Essence is twenty times the price it was before the war. So for the cost of that wall around the Sentinel, we could rebuild more of the city and we'd all have jobs!"

"They destroyed our city so they should fix it!" a woman shrieked.

"Meanwhile, what are all these foreign soldiers doing here? We're ploughing the land by hand, and our farms can only feed so many. Why should our farms feed foreign pillagers when the people of Tingara are starving?"

As Bastian's words took effect, the rocking of the carriage increased. The wrought-iron gates of the Imperial Palace opened and a squad of soldiers came forward, but they were far from the carriage and struggled to push through to come to the occupant's rescue.

The carriage door opened and a man stepped out. Someone raised their arm to strike him but was thrown back ten paces themselves, before falling to the ground, dazed. People surged towards the man but were either tossed back or fell away to let someone else take their place. He was like a rock poking its head above the ocean, yet a rock that steadily moved. As he walked through the crowd none could touch him, and now that the occupant of the carriage had exited, the mob left the vehicle alone.

The tall grey-haired man neither rushed nor faltered as he moved towards Bastian's makeshift podium atop the bed of a wagon. The mob fell back from the man's stare, but followed in his wake. As he drew close, Bastian realised with a smile it was the head of the beast, the subject of many of his speeches.

Bastian had under his power the Lord Regent, Rogan Jarvish.

With a warrior's agility the Alturan leapt atop the wagon. Disconcerted, Bastian couldn't help but draw back.

"Lord Regent." Bastian smiled, his voice loud so the mob could hear. "So pleased you could come to answer for what you've done."

"I haven't come to answer for anything," the tall man said. He looked out over the crowd and continued. "I've come to explain some hard truths. Truths you won't like but must face up to."

Bastian was taken aback. He'd learned to project his voice by helping his father on the masonry floor, shouting commands in an environment where a misinterpreted word could mean instant death from the heavy blocks of stone. The Lord Regent's parade-ground voice could easily be heard across Imperial Square and the crowd was stilled.

"The truth is things are tough for you here, I know," Rogan said. "But they are little better in Petrya or Halaran, Vezna or Torakon."

"What about Altura?" a man in the crowd yelled.

Rogan's face was sober. "In Altura the High Lord is near death, with the Lord Marshal's son also poisoned, in an attempt to shatter this fragile new order."

Some in the crowd looked down. Even Bastian was taken aback; this was the first they'd heard of it.

"We've had enough of bloodshed, haven't we? We're working hard to give work to your men and put food on your tables. I choose to bring my wife and son here because I have faith in this city, that it's a safe place where things are getting better day by day. At the moment we're having to make do without essence, which is difficult, but we're making progress. The harvest will come in soon, and it will be the largest harvest yet made without drudges to till the soil. The new aqueduct is bringing fresh water into the city without the use of any lore. I have faith that Seranthia won't just be the city she was before, she will be something even greater. I have faith in all of you. Don't do anything to make me lose that faith."

"When will the essence return?" someone shouted.

Bastian realised he'd lost control of the crowd. They now looked to the Lord Regent, where before they'd turned to him for answers.

"As we speak the machines are being rebuilt. Lignite is being stored, ready to process. It will be soon, I can promise you."

"Why is it you use a carriage when we starve?" a woman cried.

"I use a carriage because when I returned only hours ago from Castlemere, I saw this opportunity to address you all and wanted to get here as quickly as possible."

Bastian sneered; he knew it was a lie.

"But," Rogan held up his hand, "this day I will take the drudge to the fields and give it to a farmer who needs it."

Bastian snorted, but was forced to admit to himself that for a soldier, Rogan knew the right things to say.

The Lord Regent turned to Bastian and gave a small bow in the Tingaran manner. He then turned back to the mob.

"Thank you for the opportunity to address you all. My wife and son have had a long journey by sea and I have a great deal of work to do. Working together, we can make this city great."

As the Lord Marshal descended there wasn't exactly a cheer, but people made way for the commanding figure and one or two even shook his hand.

There would be another opportunity, Bastian knew.

The coming harvest would never feed them all. Parents were less easy to reason with when it came to the fates of their starving children.

~

R
OGAN
re-entered the carriage and as he took a seat his shoulders slumped with weariness. The crowd opened up and the drudge got underway.