The Calm before the Storm

They waited a full day and night for Ringil Eskiath to show.

Everyone was briefed, everyone knew their place.  The locals hid in their homes, the League privateers held ambush positions down at the harbour and all along the edges of the bay.  Lookouts took the high ground at either end, and the watchtower at Dako’s Point.  Certain among the imperial marine prisoners were held in a beer cellar not far from the docks, ready to be hauled out and used for bargaining or simply as shields.  Klithren sat at a table in the Inn on League street, played dice against himself and waited for word.

Ornley held its breath.

The privateers were sanguine – they knew how to sit tight.  It was part of their trade to wait, sifting the haze at the horizon for signs of enemy shipping or a change in the weather, sometimes for days on end, and nothing to break the monotony but the soft rocking of the vessel on the swell.  You learnt patience out there, you had to.  No percentage in getting all riled up ahead of time.  The fight, the storm – these things would be upon you soon enough.  Take the empty hours and breathe them in like pipe-house smoke, they’d be yours for a meagre enough span in the end.

The townspeople were less sanguine.  Maybe if you were a soldier boy you could sit scratching your arse like this all day long, but gouging a living out of the Hironish isles took work.  You were up with the dawn or before, out to sea and casting your nets, or into the surrounding hills to tend your livestock.  There were dry-stone walls to be maintained, crops to be checked for blight, crows and gulls to be kept at bay, eventually the harvest; thatches to be renewed or repaired after storms, peat to be dug and cut and stacked for drying.  Nets to be mended, hulls to be ripped of barnacles, scrubbed and pitched; there was gutting and cleaning, salting, packing, the smokehouse to tend.  Did these bloody blade artists ever stop to think how food ends up on their plates and fire in the grate to keep out the chill?  Thank the Dark Queen we never got that garrison they promised us after the war, if this is all they’re good for……

The hours limped by like aging mules, overladen with expectation, one slow step at a time.  Late into the afternoon, some representation was made to Klithren, that they could not sit like this indefinitely and when did he expect to be done with this Outlaw-Enemy-of-the-League-brought-to-Justice shit?  Because the goats out on Whaler’s Rise wouldn’t milk themselves, you know, and there were-

At which point, Klithren looked up at the little knot of spokesmen, and gave them a thin smile that dried the words in their throats.

He waited a couple of beats and then, when no more complaints looked to be forthcoming, he nodded.  Two privateers stepped in from the corners of the room, and the spokesmen were ushered away, to recriminate bitterly with each other out in the street.

Klithren, for his part, stared after them until the tavern door slammed, then he went back to his dice.  Cup and roll, out onto the scarred wooden table-top with a bony rattle.  Scrutinise the faces the worn cubes offered up.

Scoop and cup, and roll again.

“He’ll come, Venj,” some later claimed they heard him murmur.  “You’ve not long to wait now, mate.”

But whoever he was talking to seemed destined to disappointment.  Afternoon turned into evening, and what miserable grey light there’d been all day went down into dark without any sign of the outlaw or his ship.  The customary lamps were lit along the harbour wall and the wharf-front, the waiting privateers stretched cramped limbs, and cursed, and settled in to wait some more.

“Going to be a long fucking night,” someone grumbled out on the harbour wall and the men down the line all laughed.

“Figure it’ll be worth your while,” someone else called back.  “I was at Rajal beach in the war, I saw Ringil Eskiath fight.  Never seen anything like that, before or since.  We take him down tonight, you’re going to have a tale to get you laid the rest of your natural life.”

More laughter, punctuated this time with lewd commentary.

“Yeah, or you’ll be dog meat,” sneered a grizzled and corpulent privateer sprawled spread-legged with his back to the wall a couple of yards down from the original speaker.  “And your soul sent screaming to hell.”

And he prodded morosely with the tip of his killing knife at the crack between two of the harbour wall flagstones he sat on.  Around him, the laughter damped down a bit.  Stares fell on him, a few of the men shifted out from the wall so they could see him more clearly.

“Say what?”

The grizzled privateer glanced up, saw he had an audience.

“Yeah, that’s right,” he said.  “I don’t know nothing about Rajal beach, but before I got this gig, I worked muscle for Slab Findrich back in Trelayne-”

“That slaver piece of shit?”  A younger privateer hawked and spat.

“Too fucking right, that slaver piece of shit.  Findrich pays double the going rate for good men in Etterkal.”

“What’d he pay you, then?”

Jeers.  Further down the line, a sergeant bellowed for quiet.

“Yeah, laugh it up.”  The corpulent privateer glowered and dug harder with his dagger.  The blade tip made a tiny scraping that put your teeth on edge.  “I was in Etterkal when Ringil Eskiath came calling last year, when Findrich put the bounty out him.  I saw what was left of the Sileta brothers when they finally found them.”

The jeers dried up with the mention of the name.  Everyone knew that story, some version or other.  Tavern tale spinners in Trelayne had been drinking off it ever since the news broke.  Mothers down in harbour end used it these days to quieten their unruly infant sons – behave, or Ringil Eskiath’ll come for you in the night and do you like the Sileta brothers.  

The privateer looked round with a thin smile, nodding.

“Slab Findrich threw up when he saw what was done,” he said.  “I was there at his side.  And I’ll tell you this much for free.  Nothing human could have done that.”

“Ah, come off it,”  somebody scoffed.  “What is this Eskiath, a fucking demon now?  You think there aren’t half a hundred whores and losers in harbour end who’d have cut the Siletas up the exact same way if they got the chance.”

“But they weren’t cut up.”  Scrape, scrape went the knife point, along the crack and the listeners’ nerves.  “It wasn’t a blade that did it, it wasn’t that kind of damage.”

Silence.  Lamplight dappled out in thin lines across the black harbour waters.  Out to sea, a barely heard sound that might have been gathering thunder.

Someone cleared their throat.  “Look-”

“He’s just a man,” snapped the privateer who claimed to have been at Rajal beach.  “Fast with a blade and not afraid to die is all.  Seen it before plenty of times.”

The corpulent storyteller scowled.  “That’s what you think.  Maybe he was still a man back at Rajal, but no man could have-”

“You!”  The sergeant, grown tired of the raised voices, had stirred himself and come stalking down the line.  “Yeah, you – fatty.  Shut the fuck up, before I kick your larded arse down in the cellar with the prisoners.”

The rest of the privateers broke up – ripples of snorting laughter along the harbour wall.  The sergeant rounded on them.

“That goes for anyone else around here who thinks this is all a big fucking joke.  You stow that shit, right now.  Call yourselves men of war?  You’re on watch, all of you – not down the tavern with your pox-ridden sisters on your arm.”

The laughter died abruptly.  The sergeant glared up and down the line, spaced his words for impact.

“When this outlaw faggot piece of shit comes creeping into harbour tonight, I want men on this wall, not a gaggle of fucking fishwives.  Do I make myself clear?”

It seemed, from the ensuing quiet, that he did.

Still, he stood a while longer, daring anyone to catch his eye.  When no-one looked like taking up the challenge, he evidently judged his point made and headed back to his post.  Muttering snaked in his wake, but it was muted, and there was no more conversation along the harbour wall for quite a while.

The privateers settled once more to waiting.

But the only thing that came creeping into harbour as the night wore on was a thick, low-lying sea fog that blanketed vision, muffled sound and chilled them all to the bone.

 

*

 

“I know you can’t see to steer in it,” said Ringil patiently.  “You don’t need to steer in it.  The ship will steer itself.”

Not really accurate, but about as close to the truth as he wanted to get.  If he’d told captain and crew what was really going to steer Dragon’s Demise through the fog, Gil suspected he’d have an all-out mutiny on his hands.

This swordsman-sorcerer gig was turning out harder to balance than you’d expect.

Lal Nyanar, for instance.  There he stood on the helm deck, fine aristo features pinched up in a frown, shaking his head.  Torches bracketed at the rail gave a flickering yellow light, enough to make out the salients.  Below them on the main deck, the mist roiled and crept like something alive. Above and ahead of them it wrapped tendril fingers through the rigging and around the masts.

“This….”  Nyanar gestured weakly.  “This is no natural fog.”

Ringil held onto his temper.  “Of course it’s not natural – you saw me summon it, didn’t you? Now can we please get underway while it lasts.”

“You put all our souls in danger with this northern witchery, Eskiath.”

“Oh, please.”

“I think,” said Senger Hald dryly, “That my lord Ringil is most concerned at the moment with our temporal well-being.  To which I must concur.  There will be time enough to worry about the salvation of our immortal souls once we’ve saved our mortal skins.”

Ringil masked his surprise.  “Thank you, commander.  I do believe you’ve stated the case admirably there.  Captain?”

Nyanar looked betrayed.  Hald was probably the closest thing to a soul-mate he had on the expedition.  Both men had washed up in the company through sheer chance.  Both had been witness to the arrival of the Helmsman Anasharal whilst they were about entirely routine duties, and so in the interests of keeping the secrets of the quest between as few as possible, both had been promptly seconded to the command.

But more than that, they were both of a kind.  Both were Yhelteth born and bred, both came of noble stock – Hald might lack the staggering wealth of the Nyanar clan in his own family backdrop, but like most home-grown military commanders in the Empire, his lineage would be impeccable – and both had contented themselves with moderate careers in soldiering that kept them close to home.  Neither man had seen more than superficial deployment during the war.  Neither man had previously been outside the Empire’s borders.

Now here they were, up on the mist-ridden outer rim of the world, the sun-baked certainties of Yhelteth three thousand miles astern, and suddenly Hald was breaking ranks.  Buying into this infidel sorcery and the dark northern powers it called on.  Casting off the sober tenets of the Revelation and trusting to an unholy alien faith.  Worse still, they had no Citadel-assigned invigilator along to weigh in – Jhiral moved swiftly enough to crush that custom as soon as events at Afa-marag gave him the upper hand.  The palace, he declared, could not possibly trouble the Mastery for valued officers of the faith when they must surely be needed here at home to help with the purges; the northern expedition must perforce rely on the individual piety and moral strength of its members without recourse to clerical support; as, in fact, must all naval and military commands, for the time being at least, until this deeply shocking crisis has passed.  No, really, such an outpouring of pastoral concern is touching, but his Imperial Radiance insists.

No invigilators, no clear moral compass, no working chain of command, and the only viable father figure around wears a scar on his face and has demons at his back.

You had to feel sorry for Nyanar, caught up in it all through no fault of his own.

No, you have to kick his arse and get him moving.

“Captain?  Are we agreed?”

Nyanar looked from Ringil to Hald and back, mouth pursed tight as if he’d just been served a platter of peasant gruel.  He turned his back and stared out into the fog.

“Very well,” he snapped.  “Sanat, raise anchor, make sail.  Inshore rig.”

“Aye sir.”  Sanat sent a practised first mate’s call rolling down the length of the ship.  “Raise anchor!  Make sail!”

The call picked up, was echoed across the decks.  Men moved in the rigging, vaguely seen, and canvas came tumbling down.  Inshore rig, taken as read.  Grunted cadences from the prow and the repeated graunch of wet rope on wood as the anchor came up.

  Dragon’s Demise shifted and slid on the swell.  Began to move with purpose.

Ringil felt himself relax a little with the motion.  He thought it had been touch and go for a while back there.  Not for the first time, he wondered if the powers he was acquiring under Hjel’s tutelage were really worth the trouble spent getting them.

What point, after all, in racking yourself to produce a handy sorcerous mist, if the men you led wouldn’t follow you into it?

 

*

 

They’d watched him raise hands to the sky and contort his face, like some barking mad market square prophet of doom.  A knot of sailors not otherwise occupied gathered on the main deck below to stare.  They’d heard the muttering sounds he made deep in his throat, seen the splay-fingered traceries he cast across the air.  He supposed they must have done some muttering themselves, some more clutching at their precious talismans, but he’d been too lost in it by then to notice.  Too busy pouring his entire focus into the glyphs he made, because in the end that was the only way it would work.

You must write upon the air like a scribe, Hjel tells him on a cold stony beach somewhere at the margins of the Grey Places.  The air itself is parchment, read continually by powers waiting for command.  But such powers can only read what is written clearly, can only answer commands clearly expressed.  Cast poorly and you are no better than a clumsy scribe, blotching or scrawling your script.  Cast poorly or in error, and there will be no answer.

  Now try again. 

  It takes days.

It takes morning after bleak early morning, going down to the shore again and again from the cold, coarse-grassed dunes where Hjel’s gypsy band are camped; it takes day after day of standing there facing the ocean like an enemy, clawing at the air, grating the learnt strings of polysyllables until his throat is raw.  It takes days, and not even Hjel’s caresses under canvas at night can take away the impatient frustration it stirs in him.

But finally, one morning, he goes down to the shore in an odd, empty mood, alone – Hjel turns over under the blankets when he rises, mumbles something, does not open his eyes – and he stands there, and he casts, and this time he does it right.

The mist rolls in from the sea, blots out everything around him.

Wraps him in its damp embrace.

Now, aboard Dragon’s Demise, it came as second nature.  His throat had long since accustomed itself to the harsh sounds he needed to make, his fingers had grown supple with practice.  And whatever elemental powers lurked in the coves and straits of the Hironish, now they leapt to do his bidding.  He sensed them – rising off the darkened ocean’s surface like cold steam, pouring down out of gullies and caves in the ancient cliffs along this coast, circling the anchored vessel in fitful band-light like curious wolves, darting in now and then to stalk the decks unseen by human eyes, to ruffle the flames of a torch, or brush past crew members with wild, unhuman hilarity, leaving the brief touch of chilly tendril fingers and shivers on the spine.

He felt them gather on the helm deck at his back.

He felt them breathing down his neck.

He gathered their cold breath to him like a cloak, he breathed it in.  He smiled as the ikinri ‘ska came on like some icy battlefield drug.

He heard, as if in a dream, the lookout overhead, calling out the fog as it rolled in and wrapped them.

The ikinri ‘ska syllables died away in his throat, scuttling back down under cover, their work done.  The muscles in his cheeks and jaw eased out of their cramping grimace and his arms sagged to his sides.  His aching fingers hung loose, his eyes – he wasn’t aware he’d closed them – snapped suddenly open, and he found himself staring into Senger Hald’s face.

The marine commander shuddered visibly in the torchlight.

Turned away.

 

*

 

  Dragon’s Demise made curiously good time down the coast, as if the same elemental forces that had brought the fog now clung to the masts and filled the cautiously-rigged canvas with their breath.  As if they were anxious to see the ship arrive.  Once or twice, the helmsman remarked that it felt as if something was dragging on the hull.  But they were a prudent distance out from the shore in five fathoms or more of water, and when Nyanar glanced askance at Ringil, the Trelayne knight just shrugged.

Now and then, off the port bow, they heard the rumbling prowl of a storm.  But it was faint and distant to the east, and showed no signs of coming for them.

These are not trivial sorceries, Hjel warns him, when he has the magic down.  The elementals are capricious, and their range is wide.  Unleash them, and their mischief will be general.  Try not to worry about it too much, it’s a price you have no choice but to pay.  That they do your will in your vicinity is the trick.  What havoc they wreak elsewhere need not be your concern. 

Ringil shrugs.  Sounds no worse than most men I’ve commanded. 

He stood alert throughout the night, though, listening intently to the storm and ready to pull down the ikinri ‘ska on the elementals’ heads if they showed signs of getting cute.

The fog held.  The storm stayed away.

They made Ornley harbour with the dawn.