'What are you doing here?' Fost asked his friend in puzzlement. Nevrym had seceded from the Empire during the Barbarian Interregnum and had kept its king and sovereignty when the rightful native dynasty was restored. There was little love between High Medurim and the Tree. Lifestyles and modes of government were too different.
Grimpeace's brown eyes had slipped from Fost's, and the courier knew the answer before the man spoke it.
'I've come to make submission to the Emperor and beg his help,' the exile said softly.
Fost's first impulse was to shout, 'You can't!' but he schooled himself against it. Grimpeace bore a heavy burden of responsibility, weightier than Fost could readily imagine. Also, Fost himself had bent his knee to Teom just a few days past with no good result. He pointed that out to Grimpeace.
'Teom can barely cling to the Sapphire Throne with both hands and all his toes,' he said. 'If you must sell the free birthright of the forest, can't you at least get a better deal?'
Grimpeace shook his great head, bone-weary and bitter at all that had happened. 'Where else can I go?'
'Back to the forest. Fight a guerrilla war against the intruders. Make a treaty with the trees and unicorns. They can't desire Hisser masters.' Still the king shook his head.
'Too many of my people chose to go in with Fairspeaker. The Hissers control too much.' 'They can't be everywhere,' pointed out Moriana.
'No, Princess, not everywhere. Not yet. You have stymied them at the Marchant – for now. And the Watchers of Omizantrim have all but closed the skystone mines.'
'See!' cried Fost, eagerness seizing him. 'It can be done. You can do it, too! Go back and fight them on your own ground, where all the advantages are yours.'
'The advantages are those of Fairspeaker and the other traitors,' Grimpeace said bitterly. He sat heavily in a creaking chair. 'Besides, the heart's not in me for such a war. I must face reality. Mayhap all I'll find here is my own death fighting to defend these stinking crowded streets from the Fallen Ones. But better that than to skulk like a thief through Nevrym-wood, my wood, while the monsters at Thendrun sit like kings within the Tree.'
There'd been little more to say. Grimpeace parted from Fost with a few uncomfortable words, bowed courteously to Moriana, and was gone. The encounter had left Fost deep in black depression. It wasn't just the misfortune of his friend that possessed him or the triumph of the evil Fairspeaker. The tradition of almost fifty centuries, the tradition of Nevrymin freedom, lay in ruins at the clawed feet of the Vridzish. Kara-Est was a raw wound in the soil at the head of the Gulf of Veluz; Wirix had not been heard from, even via magical means, for weeks. The Empire was tearing itself apart from within, while the Hissers squatted in their fortifications across the Marchant and watched with chalcedony eyes, waiting until the stone thunder-head of the Sky City darkened the sky above the homeland of their enemies.
He had the awful sense that the People were victorious everywhere, that such pinpricks as the defeat in the Black March and the interruption of the Omizantrim mining operations were sad, silly, futile against the might and cleverness of the lizard folk and their patrons. Istu had scarcely shown his strength and yet the dominion of humanity fractured like rotten stone.
Fost was impotent with Moriana that night. Not even Erimenes found voice to complain. And Moriana hardly seemed to notice, her thoughts distant and her body tense. They clung to each other, unsleeping, unspeaking, needing the reassurance of closeness rather than the release of desire.
Oared galleys had warped Endeavor out of the harbor the next day, accompanied by her escort. No cheering crowds lined the waterfront to see them go. Teom's advisors had insisted on keeping the time and manner of the departure secret. Teom and Temalla took leave of them at the Palace with tears and presents and lingering kisses, but did not go with them to the dock. Only painted Zunhilix, his normal ebullience subdued, and a detachment of Guards had accompanied them to the docks.
They did not leave unnoticed, however. The tugs pulled Endeavor within a hundred yards of Onsulomulo's ship the Wyvern, already riding low in the scummy water with her hold swollen with the goods of refugee patricians. And there was Ortil Onsulomulo clad only in Jorean kilt and dawn light, golden on the rail of his vessel, dancing and playing a mournful hornpipe. He was a strange one, this half-breed, but he had in his way been a friend and they were sad to see the last of him. Somehow, though, Fost couldn't find it in him to worry about Onsulomulo. The half-breed claimed the gods and goddesses watched over him, and the evidence bore this out.
The wind came from the port quarter, fair for passage west to the turning of the land, fairer still for Tolviroth. They made good time to the place where the outflow of the Lo stained green seawater brown. Their escort made a slow turn, dipped flag in salute and began to pull back for High Medurim, a proud and lonely remnant of lost Imperial might and grandeur.
Despite Fost's apprehensions, there was not real trouble. A flotilla of galleys with drab sails set had come out of North Cape Harbor when the Endeavor passed in sight of the Northernmost Peak to try to claim this rich prize for the Dwarves' revolutionary government and its new allies, the Zr'gsz. Big as she was, Endeavor was a smart sailor with a good Tolvirot hull, and she put them easily in her frothy wake.
Down came the sails, out went the oars, and the Dwarven ships began a waterstrider crawl in pursuit. Endeavor's master, a native Tolvirot only a few years Fost's senior, medium built with the broad shoulders and dancing tread of a fencing master, casually ordered an onager unwrapped from its oiled cloth coverings. The Endeavor had been laid for deepwater and open sea storms. She was much more strongly built than any oared war craft, and could carry heavy engines, true shipkillers, whose workings would damage the lighter hull of a war ship. Captain Arindin stood with one hand in the voluminous pocket of the embroidered green coat he was never without, calmly munching a fruit held in the other, while his crew unshipped the onager and set it bucking, hurling great rocks against the pursuing galleys. The fourth shot sent a hundredweight stone smashing through the bottom of the leading vessel, breaking her back and foundering her in the rollers heaving in from the line of squalls hanging far to the north. Abruptly less avid for the chase, her companion ships crowded around to assist in rescue operations. One was so intent on breaking off the chase and aiding the damaged ship that the would-be rescuer rammed another just aft of the bow and holed her. The last sight the Endeavor had before twilight drew a dark curtain over the scene was a confusion of uncontrolled ships and angry heads bobbing in the swells.
'If the wind'd died we might have had hot work,' was Captain Arindin's only comment.
An eeriness, a foreboding, attended the rest of the voyage, or so it seemed to Fost. Dark clouds hung like a line of distant cliffs in an unbroken wall across the northern horizon, sometimes sending down dark mutterings of thunder, flaring by night with maroon lightnings like no other Fost had seen. Sometimes it seemed that huge shapes stalked among the clouds, and sometimes there were splashings and tumults in the sea, too far for Endeavor's lanterns to reach even with their cunning lenses of Tolvirot manufacture. The loudness became all the more unsettling for that. Alarum was cried shortly after midnight and Fost and Moriana came tumbling onto deck, she in a cloak, he naked except for his woebegotten mail vest. No attacker threatened.
A huge wheel of light, eight-spoked and hundreds of feet across, rose from the depths to make the surface bubble and glow a yellow-green a thousand yards ahead of the Endeavor. As the astonished passengers and crew watched, the monstrous colored wheel sank a score of feet, then, still clearly visible, moved toward them, spinning faster and faster as it came. It cleared the keel of Endeavor and passed beneath them without sound or heat, though the heavy ship rocked at its passage. It crawled along under the long wake of the ship and was soon gone from sight. Arindin ordered wine broken out and, fortified with drink, the vessel's folk went back to duty or bed.
Erimenes and Ziore chattered brightly about what the apparition might have been and where it might have come from. The Tolvirot mariners, hardheaded as they were, seemed disconcerted and exchanged muttered speculations of their own as they clambered into the rigging to dress the furled sails. Fost and Moriana said nothing about it between themselves. Privately Fost thought the wheel was a sign, a proof, that the reality he had grown up to accept was unraveling all around him. The Powers intruded more and more into his daily life.
No further disturbance occurred until Endeavor rounded the coast, headed south for the Karhon Channel and Tolviroth. Fost was on deck drinking wine, enjoying the double moons, the stars, the velvet sky, the warm rich smells of the land breeze and the comfortable speculation as to what awaited him when he joined Moriana in their cabin in a few minutes. His reverie was broken by a footfall behind him. He turned to see Moriana, her face strained and pale. At first he thought the cunning light playing down on them from the twin moons caused the effect. Then he knew it was no illusion. Tears glowed brightly in the corners of her eyes. 'Come,' she said urgently, gripping his sleeve.
