Doom's Break (10 page)

She stared at the distant land. All the questions, all the hopes she had, were tangled in her mind like noodles in soup, and she knew she couldn't sort them out just yet. It was enough to feel her insides churn with a desperate yearning, to think that she would soon breathe that air and feel that ground beneath her feet.

Soon she would have the pleasure of being among her own people once again and hearing her native tongue and not the harsh sounds of Shashti. To have someone other than the Emperor to whom she could speak in her own language. He tried his best, but his accent was always going to be strange, and he still scrambled the order of words.

As if on cue, she heard a shout from below. She looked down and saw him standing on the forecastle, the Emperor of Shasht, Aeswiren the Third, himself.

"Come up!" she called with the easy familiarity that had grown up between them.

So he did, hauling his heavy frame up the rigging, then through the lubber's hole until he could join her on the crosstrees above the foresail. The sailors around her moved away to give him room.

"There!" she said dramatically and pointed to the east.

He squinted at the horizon. "So," he said quite calmly, "there it is, the fabled Land you have told me so much about."

She glanced at him for a moment and then looked away again. Many things would change now, she realized. When she set foot on the Land, she would be in her own world, not in the world of men.

Soon after that she hoped she would have an answer to the most burning question of them all: Was Thru alive?

The last she had heard of him, two years before, he and his brigade had left Glaine, heading for Farnem.

After the battle there was little news from the army. The word of the disaster had passed over Sulmo like a foul wind from an opened grave, and on its heels came the army of man. Nuza had endured the siege of Sulmo and was captured in the fall of the outer city.

When that had happened, she'd still had no word about the fate of Thru Gillo, who was lost and presumed dead.

Now she hoped to know for certain, either find him alive or extinguish the spark of hope that had lingered, despite everything, throughout these years of exile.

Aeswiren was looking at her. She could not ignore him.

"Almost there," he said and leaned closer. "I know this will change things, dearest Nuza. We will not be as intimate as we have been. But you must know that my feelings toward you will not change."

"And I to you, Lord," she said automatically.

That led to another question. How was she going to handle her strange relationship with this great man? He had brought on his own downfall in part because he would not hand her over to be killed. He had shown himself, time and time again, to be a firm friend.

She knew that the feelings of friendship went further on his side of the abyss that lay between them, man and mor. She could not return those feelings, but she did feel love of a sort for him, not in a sexual sense but in the way she loved her father, or Toshak, her former lover.

She found it all very confusing.

Finally, there was the colder understanding that Aeswiren the Third was the only hope for ending the war without more bloodshed. For he was the true Emperor, and the man the soldiers of Shasht would always follow.

In Shasht itself, his son, Aurook, had taken the purple mantle and the title of Norgeeben the Second. But the common soldiers would turn to Aeswiren, if given the chance.

"We have much work to do, you and I," he said.

"Yes, Lord," she said, using the honorific constantly employed by the men aboard the ship. He was the Emperor, after all, even if he did not insist on ceremony. Aeswiren was a man with great dignity, but also one who was comfortable in his own skin. His men loved him for it.

Nuza wondered how it would go when Aeswiren finally met Toshak. Two giants brought together like that could raise sparks, even a conflagration. Yet they shared a common need, to end the war. Plus, Nuza knew both of them and how their minds worked. She could defuse any conflicts.

A wide swath of land was rising into view. Captain Moorsh was up in the mainmast topstory taking observations. Soon he would try to match what he was seeing with what the charts depicted. These charts had been drawn up by the invasion fleet and sent back to Shasht in the first year of the war. They offered considerable detail concerning shoals, rocks, and headlands. The interior was simply labeled "unknown."

Aeswiren climbed down to the deck and began pacing. Nuza had to smile. His impatience was so clear. He was itching to get back on land.

But sometimes even Emperors have to wait. So he paced back and forth while Captain Moorsh completed his observations and scrambled down with a chart tucked inside his coat.

Nuza watched them go, the Emperor beside the captain. Aeswiren intended to move very quickly once he reached the expedition forces. They were known to be harbored on an island south of the main mass of the Land. From the description of this island—nearly circular, dominated by craggy peaks, with a harsh, hot climate—Nuza knew it had to be Mauste. The mots there were mostly fisherfolk and shepherds, since the rivers were too steep and rocky for the farming of polder land. From what she had heard from Aeswiren, the Mauste villagers had either fled to the neighboring peninsula of Fauste or were dead, slain by the men of the expeditionary force.

Nuza prayed that Aeswiren could end the war and take the expeditionary force away. He said he would take it back to Shasht to be the core of the army he would build to take back the throne.

Nuza and the four men who were going to row her ashore were lowered down the side of the
Duster
in the ship's small boat. As the boat was lowered, Nuza felt his gaze upon her. She looked up, and their eyes met. Aeswiren, as Emperor, could not wave, but Nuza could.

"I will come back," she had told him. She thought he believed her, but perhaps not entirely. The trust between them had never been tested like this. She had always been the one forced to trust him, and, of course, her trust had been rewarded. Once she was free on her home soil, though, there would be nothing to stop her from remaining there.

She looked across the water to the town. Her heart skipped a beat once again. With its steep gray roofs, the buildings packed tightly into a narrow space beneath a great brown bluff, it was undoubtedly a town built by mots. She would be among her own people again, for the first time in two years. By the breath of the sweet Spirit, it would be wonderful just to see a crowd of mots and brilbies in the street.

Nuza had insisted that she be the first person to contact the townsfolk. Aeswiren and the others had accepted this. The ship had put in at a couple of villages so far, only to find the folk had fled inland at the first glimpse of their sails.

"What else would you expect?" she'd said to them when their boat came back with the news that no one had stayed to greet them. "Mots are not fools. We learned that your ships come seeking meat, not friendship."

At those words, every man had had the grace to drop his gaze.

So they'd had to accept that she was their only real chance of opening communication with the folk of the Land.

The boat splashed gently on the water. The men unhooked the chains and settled over their oars. Soon they were moving steadily away from the
Duster
.

It was a cloudy day, overcast but without rain. Nuza kept her gaze on the town. From the charts, Captain Moorsh was certain they had made landfall in the Northern part of the Land. Certainly the vegetation on the hills was of a Northern variety, pines and firs almost exclusively. Nuza did not know the region. She had never really traveled farther north than Dronned, which had to lie some distance to the south.

The inner harbor ahead was crowded with shipping: single-masted cogs, the predominant style of ship among the mots. The presence of so much shipping had made Captain Moorsh nervous. The
Duster
had not even put down an anchor, since he feared fireships such as those that had caused havoc in the first summer of the war.

The town was a sizable place, she could see, but smaller than Dronned or Tamf. The black roofs were made of slate, and they were steeply angled to shed the snow that would come in winter. She couldn't see anyone on the jetty or in the streets, but she had the feeling that many eyes were watching the boat as it entered the harbor.

Those eyes would have noticed by then that though men rowed the boat, a mor sat in the front of it.

A few minutes later, they approached the stone jetty. This was a dangerous moment. Arrows or spears might greet them. But the boat ground against the jetty without any sign of life in the town. A seaman named Kunkus, a gentle giant who reminded her in some ways of dear old Hob, the brilby that had been a part of her acrobatic act for many years, formed a step with his massive hands and she vaulted lightly to the top of the jetty. She stood there for a moment, struggling with powerful emotions.

"Thank you," she said to Kunkus and the others in Shashti.

"We will wait here, if we can," said Kunkus.

"I think they will leave you alone. I will tell them that you mean them no harm."

She took a step and almost tripped over her own feet, unused to stable land after so many months at sea. Recovering, she steadied herself on a bollard and then, taking careful steps, walked into the town.

The streets were deserted, though a flock of gulls wheeled above with their harsh cries echoing off the building fronts. While there was not a soul to be seen, she could feel concealed eyes following her movements. This was not a small village. There would be a militia ready to resist a landing from the ship.

She sniffed at the strong smell of fish. There could be no doubt of the town's primary occupation.

"Hello?" she called.

Her voice echoed back to her. She'd never been this far north. She hoped she could understand the Northern accent. Down in Tamf, they'd often joked about the clipped Northern way of speaking.

She wandered up the widest street leading off the harbor. Sunlight broke through the cloud cover for a few minutes. She noticed the glass windows all along the street, indicating that these were shops rather than homes. This town was clearly a commercial center.

The street was clean, with whitewashed curbs. A small pile of rubbish, bushpod husks mostly, had been swept up on one corner awaiting removal.

Someone had just moved into one of these houses, she realized, and grinned. It was common all over the Land to use bushpod husks to wrap around one's valuables when you packed them for a move.

She wondered where the sweepers were, running for the hills or crouched inside one of these buildings with a bow in their hands and an arrow trained on her.

"Hello?" she called again, but the silence continued. The sun slowly faded behind the clouds again.

She came to the corner. A side street cut across here on both sides, narrow and dark. She turned right. "Hello?"

Down this street there was no glass. The windows were all firmly shuttered with wood. Painted designs on each shutter spoke of candle makers, cobblers, and a hat maker. The designs were exactly the same ones used in Tamf.

Suddenly doors opened on either side. A half dozen mots and brilbies came out and surrounded her.

"Who are you?" said a tall mot with streaks of white in his cheek fur. He did not seem friendly.

"I am Nuza of Tamf."

"You came from a man ship. Why did they not kill you?"

"I was captured by the men at Sulmo. They took me to their own land. That ship brought me back."

The mot gave her an inquiring look. "To say the least, this is unusual treatment. We of Eskalon have only known the men as killers, not as hosts."

"I understand. Before I was made captive, I had seen the work of men. My own family lost everything when Tamf was burned. When I was taken captive, I expected death at their hands. They put me on one of their ships and we sailed to Shasht, which is what they call their land. I was very fortunate. Perhaps the Spirit took pity on me, I don't know, but the Great King of Shasht himself protected me. He befriended me. When I told him what his army was doing to our people, he understood. He had already decided to stop the war. He has now come to Shasht to put an end to it."

There was a long silence from her ring of listeners.

"You're saying that the Great King of the men is on that ship?"

"Yes. He is not like the other men. He is a good man."

"I have never heard a man described that way before."

"I was as surprised as you are now when I was first told I was not going to die. I had been separated from the others as soon as we landed in the city of men."

The mot had noticed Nuza's beauty and lithe presence. "They took you because you are beautiful."

"Perhaps. I have a gift at acrobatics. That's what I used to do, in the old days. It pleases him to watch me. When I learned that the Great King wanted to meet me, I had little to say in the matter, so we met. He told me many things, explained much about the world that I did not know. He had decided to stop the war."

"Then why has it not stopped?"

"There are other forces involved. The Great King rules on sufferance of another authority, an ancient being called 'the Old One.'"

The mot drew back with a hiss. "That sounds like sorcery."

"It is. And the Old One moved against the King."

"So the Great King fell from power, and now he comes to us seeking forgiveness?"

"The Great King fell, but he comes here to take command of the army of men. He will reorganize them and then take them back to Shasht."

"And win back his throne with it?"

"Yes."

Her listeners drew back. Three of them huddled together to exchange views. Finally the first one turned back to her.

"Your tale is fantastic and would be dismissed as nonsense except that we have seen you come from a man ship."

She shrugged. "Whether you believe me or not, what is important is that you take this message." She handed over a sealed envelope.