Michelle West - Sun Sword 04 - Sea of Sorrows Page 13

  "Logistics?"

  "He has never traveled with a large body of armed men before. He has not had to see to their needs; to see that they're fed; to see what price their passage demands of the countryside."

  "In this case, very little."

  Alina raised a dark brow. "In this case, perhaps. But he will, he is certain, command armies in his time—and he wishes to learn from the men who have bested us."

  "Let him learn, then, when learning will do him good; let him learn when they engage."

  "He could be convinced of that," she said at last, reluctantly. "If the Ospreys were to be detached from the body of the army and accompany him to the South."

  "And that is the only circumstance under which he will detach himself from the army?"

  "It is," Alina said softly. "And to my great surprise, ACormaris, the Kings have acceded to his wishes. Should he desire to travel at the head of the Northern army, he will so travel."

  Mirialyn was completely silent. Rigid. "That means the Kings have given him command of the armies."

  "Your pardon?"

  "Commander Allen, Commander Kalakar, Commander Berriliya. They have all but refused his request. If Valedan is to accompany the army in spite of this, it means that the Kings have ordered the Generals to report to Valedan if it comes to that, and not merely to… facilitate his capture of the Tor Leonne."

  "But that—"

  "It is not impossible," the Eagle said, his voice completely devoid of emotion. "Politically, the stated reason for our entry into the Southern war is the kai Leonne."

  "The kai Leonne is barely adult and has no experience with, and no training for war. The Kings cannot possibly—"

  His expression as constant as the rocks above and below them, Commander Bruce Allen produced a large, ornate silvered tube that bore at either end the sign of the crown, and was decorated on either side by the sword and the rod. Crossed swords, crossed rods, in opposition; crossed rod and sword, crossed rod and sword, between. An expert eye could make out the faint outline of wings; the curved talons of the Eagle; could perhaps see the noble line of a wolf's jaw. No doubt, when the tube had first been made, those faint lines had been stronger.

  The tube's presence silenced The Kalakar. She watched, as impassive now as her rival, Devran, as the tube was twisted, the lines of its pattern broken a moment, and the scroll within removed.

  Commander Allen had already perused the contents; he had done so precisely once. More was unnecessary. But he felt the hand of King Reymalyn in every word, although the signatures, scrawled in both splendor and at leisure, were signatures he recognized. At precisely the end of a such a document, several times in his career—once at the death of the man who had been both his mentor and, in privacy where honesty could be its most grim, his inferior— he had seen these orders, bearing these signatures; the memories were engraved in some place that time touched slowly, if at all. He knew their truth on a level that was much more visceral than simple intellect, even passionate intellect; they were not forged.

  Had he wished proof, it was simple enough to check for authenticity, ft would also be the act of an angry fool, and in the end, if he was one, he was not the other. He was not above letting The Kalakar speak, after she had read the document from top to bottom, her eyes slowing down over the sparsely—but precisely—chosen words it contained before they raced up to the top and began again.

  "Is this authentic?" She was hunched slightly over the table, as if, even seated, she found herself in the center of the circle.

  The Berriliya's momentary glance was heavy with contempt. It had the effect of silencing Commander Kalakar.

  "Why?" she asked at last.

  "I believe," the Eagle said, sitting back in his chair with the scroll, heavy enough in weight that it did not immediately roll into a tubelike curl, "that King Reymalyn's words carried weight in this matter."

  "But the boy—"

  "Ellora, I know. But admit it: the boy has become more than any of us first envisioned. He is not a fool; he is not, at least not at first, second, or even tenth glance, a pawn. He serves himself, and his complicated sense of rulership and responsibility has impressed the Kings—and possibly the Queens—enough that he has been given the final say in what occurs in the country he claims as his own."

  Devran's gaze was cutting as it swept up the slightly stiff line of the Eagle's jaw.

  "He has no experience on the battlefield."

  The Eagle rose. "No. But he has—in our brief experience—the propensity for taking advice from those he believes have the experience he lacks."

  "A fine thing to risk our armies on."

  "Ellora, enough."

  Silence.

  "The kai Leonne is no fool. He understands why it is imperative that he travel South ahead of the army. But he maintains—and with cause, if the reports of the Astari are to be believed—that the Ospreys constitute his best chance of survival against… the assassins our enemies have chosen to deploy against him. He has chosen to travel with the army because he believes it is only with the army that the Ospreys are guaranteed safety against the less supernatural exploits of their past in the Dominion."

  "He needs the Ospreys; the Ospreys need the army."

  Commander Allen nodded. "Yes. Is it true?"

  "Which part?"

  "Both."

  She was silent, turning the words over. Rejection and acceptance fought, like any of the other seasoned warriors under her command, in the private circle of unvoiced thoughts. Her expression, rather than a window into that conflict, was sort of like an arrow slit; a man could look, but only at the right angle.

  Devran's smile was a weapon; he used it briefly to inflict a cut, not a wound.

  "They did what had to be done," she said, without rancor, although the look she gave Devran promised there would be, later. "They fought a war the South could understand, and better than the Southerners could fight it. But the Annies—"

  "Commander, may I remind you who has command of the armies?"

  "The Annagarians, then. The Southerners. They expected us to play by Northern rules while they played by none." She shrugged.

  "So instead, you chose a group of your personal men and told them to play outside of the rules as well. And we paid the price for their lack of discipline."

  Old arguments had a consistency and a strength that came out of surviving the harshest of emotional climes intact. All of the arguments that so visibly divided Commander Kalakar and Commander Berriliya were old ones; even the new ones that occurred from time to time relied heavily on the foundation of their history in old wars and skirmishes. She did not—because Commander Allen was present—allow the discussion to slide into the minutiae of the discipline problems that had plagued the Kings' armies during their sojourn in the South. But those deaths were there between them.

  Although if she were honest, if it weren't those deaths, it would have been something else. Everything about their approach to command was different, and in a way guaranteed to cause conflict.

  The Ospreys were not the only example of that conflict, but they were the most glaring. And yet.

  And yet, out of the broken, the half-mad, the men—and women—who would have otherwise made their way to the gallows or the sword, Duarte AKalakar had fashioned a unit that, playing by its own rules, had far exceeded her expectations. Possibly even his; hard to say. The early days had been difficult, and he had been forced to his own brand of justice, while they looked the other way. She had wondered what it would be like, to take the Ospreys into battle, rather than to forge them out of its fires.

  But she was no longer certain that that curiosity would ever be satisfied. She rose.

  "Very well," she said coolly.

  Commander Allen rose as well.

  He could have thanked her. He spared her that. Instead, he remained standing until she left the Hall of Wise Counsel.

  CHAPTER THREE

  20th of Scaral, 427 AA

  Averalaan Aramarel
as, Kalakar Manse

  Sunrise behind cloud.

  Warm, although the darkness was also warm, even here, at season's ebb. The harbor city that was the heart of the Empire rarely understood the cold. It flirted with such understanding in the drizzle of rain, when the clouds were thick and heavy and the sunlight momentarily denied its people, but it was a passing fancy; the city knew the warmth would return and merely found cover while the shadows passed. Boats sat like great, fat fowl, sails, like wings, tucked in, at the edge the city exposed to the sea.

  You could only see those boats from a particular angle when your home was Averalaan Aramarelas. The Kalakar Manse was not particularly tall, but it did boast towers of a sort—wide, squat squares set firmly one on top of another until they ended in parapets. The man who had designed that tower had been pragmatic to the core, something The Kalakar admired, and very few others did. Her Council had, during the decades—as had the Council of her predecessor—attempted to have them removed as an eyesore; to have them remade or replaced with structures that better suited their position on the isle. It pleased Ellora—and said much about her—to leave the tower as it was, not so much to save the enormous sums of money that would go into destroying it and putting something else in its place, although it would undoubtedly do that, but as a gesture of stubborn solidarity with the past. If you understood that about her, you understood something fundamental about her character.

  Duarte understood that. Admired it, in some small fashion. And as an officer—even an officer whose strict duties took him out of the Kalakar fold—he had access to the heights.

  He rarely took advantage of that access. But today, this morning, he had felt the restless urge that drove him up to where he might gaze out on the bay. As if he were an Osprey in fact, not name, and now perched on the highest peak in his small dominion.

  The sea breeze was strong. He tasted salt in the air, and wondered at it; salt was a part of his daily life, and he rarely noticed it as keenly as he did this morning. It reminded him of the fact that he had not spent his entire life in Averalaan; that at some point in the distant past, the taste of salt had been an unpleasant reminder of things left behind.

  A reminder that all things end.

  Endings.

  He had been summoned to House Kalakar specifically for this interview. That in itself was unusual; he was accustomed to offering The Kalakar a report on the activities of the Ospreys—rand their charge—four times a week. Any procedural irregularity that came up was dealt with during those frequent meetings, as were all bureaucratic details. Most of those details usually involved complaints laid against one or another of the Ospreys—usually Auralis, although his drunken binges and the resultant claims of damage had lessened dramatically of late. Enough so that he had become the butt of betting that, by Kalakar rules, was strictly forbidden to all soldiers, and overlooked in the Ospreys.

  But this particular meeting was signaled not by routine but rather, the presence of a Kalakar Verrus. Any request that came from a Verrus had the weight of emergency behind it. Worse still, Verrus Vernon Loris—the man known as The Kalakar's harbinger of bad news—was not the set of quartered circles that crossed the threshold of the Arannan Halls. The man who had arrived bearing the sealed scroll was Verrus Korama. Duarte had long suspected that of all the men who served Ellora, it was Korama that she would save if she could only save one. He had often wondered if they were lovers.

  He could not imagine the pragmatic Commander and the quiet Verrus together, and shook his head to clear it of the image.

  "What is it?" Alexis had said, coming from behind as always, her slender form catching the corner of his eye and demanding his attention. Time had changed the line of her hair; had sharpened the point of her chin, dulled the glint of eyes that had once, round or no, had the sharpest edge he had ever seen on anything not flat and steel.

  "A… summons."

  "What for?"

  "I don't know." He had handed her the scroll, his eyes never leaving the place it had resided; the palm of his hands retained the memory of paper's weight, his mind, the words.

  "Duarte—"

  "I don't know," he said, with less force, the space between each word precise and measured in the quiet.

  She shut up. He thanked Kalliaris for that, the gift of her silence. There had been others in the room. The only man he was aware of, when he had at last looked up from the lined surface of sun-worn palms was, oddly enough, Valedan kai di'Leonne.

  Their eyes met, brown and brown. Whose gaze held whose, he couldn't say, but at last, it ended; unanchored he turned to Verrus Korama AKalakar.

  "Thank you," he said quietly. "I will accompany you shortly."

  The Iron Hand, as Vernon Loris was known, was the grim face of The Kalakar; the face that exacted no sympathy and delivered no mercy. He was the law, such as it was, when The Kalakar herself was not present. When Korama was sent, it was… worse. Vernon Loris was sent to deliver complaints filed against the Ospreys for their unfortunately frequent drunken bouts in the old city; Korama was sent to tell them that one of their own had unexpectedly died, and that The Kalakar wished their help or advice in locating family, if they existed. Not that many of the Ospreys had ever had family they were willing to claim as their own.

  Since the Ospreys had become Valedan's personal guard, they had managed—after they had lost two members to the first demon they encountered before any warning could be sounded—to keep out of the tawdry brawls that always attracted the magisterial guards. And as far as he knew, no one else had died.

  Perhaps someone was going to.

  Sea breeze.

  Squawk of gulls on thermals.

  Verrus Korama, like shadow—or shroud—appeared at his side on the battlements. Duarte wondered, briefly, how the Verrus had known exactly where to find him; he almost never came to the parapets. But he didn't ask, and the Verrus, subdued and oddly respectful, didn't volunteer the information.

  "The Kalakar," he said softly, as softly as he walked, "will see you now."

  She had her back to the door when he walked through it. Bad sign.

  Her first words were, "Verrus Korama, that will be all."

  Verrus Korama nodded, the movement as precise as the salute that protocol forbid between people of their rank. He bowed, slightly, to Duarte AKalakar, gaze glancing off his face.

  Duarte heard the door shut behind him and wondered what a corpse would hear when a coffin lid was dropped. Her words, he thought, as they came, were the patter of dirt.

  She did not immediately turn to face him. Sunlight made a shadow of her back; a shadow with slightly stooped shoulders, and a head that was bowed toward the ground beyond his vision.

  "Captain Duarte," she said. The shadows darkened her pale hair; they were not as strong as shadows cast by full sunlight, but they were there, if one knew how to look. Duarte had spend his life looking into the shadows. "You've never been given the easy duties."

  He said nothing, but his body fell into rigid lines; feet firmly planted against the grain of old wood, hands behind his back, chin up, face forward.

  "And when you perform the duties that are required of you, you perform them in shadow; you perform them as if you were a step above criminal. I have always thought that a crime." She turned, now, her expression so many things, its chaos was unreadable. Her pale hair had been pulled back from her face in a severe knot; he saw the lines around her eyes, the lines etched in her forehead; time's gift and judgment. They seemed deeper.

  He knew.

  He knew then. But he waited.

  "You have always done the impossible. You—you personally—made the Ospreys, culling them from the gallows in ones and twos. You took the risk and the responsibility of… correcting your errors in judgment. You gave the South something to remember, and gave the North the clean hands and breathing space we needed.

  "That has never been acknowledged by anyone who is not Kalakar. Not even the Kings themselves have been moved to commend you
in a fashion that you—and your own—deserve."

  He was profoundly weary. But discipline held him.

  "Nor, to my profound shame, can I." She started to turn, and then her feet became as rigidly planted as his own; no coward, Ellora. Only a leader, and at that, a leader to follow and die for.

  "Why did you summon me?"

  Her expression shifted slightly. The silence was pointed, but she did not extend it.

  "You will not understand this," she replied, in a tone of voice that might be mistaken as conversational by a casual listener—if there could be such a thing, in a room like this, in these circumstances. "You will not understand it, and I'm old enough, and powerful enough, not to beg you to make the attempt. You are not a stupid man, Duarte. If you were, you would never have been accepted by the Order of Knowledge; if you were, you would never have retired from its vast and useless walls. You don't have the look of a killer about you, but if you hadn't the heart of one, you would never have survived the Ospreys, and the Ospreys would never have survived the war."

  "They almost didn't."

  "No," she said, the single word displaying a ferocity that he realized she had kept from the conversation so far by force of a will that was legendary. It eased him, somehow, to know that she hurt.

  His own pain was building.

  "Yes," she said evenly, forcing that quiet into her voice again, "they almost didn't."

  "They wouldn't have, Commander, had you not personally interceded."

  She winced. She had the grace to wince. "You are a dangerous man," she said, when she at last chose to speak. "To remind me of that, here."

  "It was not said as a political gesture," he replied, staring now at the surface of an uncluttered desk, an uncluttered room. "But as fact. We know what it cost you. We know that Commander Allen all but forbid it. But you chose your men from among the House Guard, and you led them personally into the trap that killed two thirds of our number. They were willing—even eager—to lose us. But not you, not Ellora AKalakar."