CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Melio held his mouthful of water so long that at some point he lost the world. Probably only for a moment, for when his eyes opened again, his mouth was still filled with water. Geena’s body still touched his. Wet ribbons of her short auburn hair striped her round face. “That was fun,” she said. She planted a quick, salty kiss on his lips. “Great to be alive, isn’t it? Thanks for the grab.”
Melio realized his cheeks were ballooned out, his mouth still full of seawater. He spat, which unleashed a fit of coughing and retching. He crawled out of the compartment. The fish that had crowded the hull were all gone, as was anything that had not been secured. The boat pitched about at the mercy of the chop.
Geena was already checking the sail for damage. “All well?” she asked, looking unaccountably chipper. “Everyone have all their fingers and toes and wiggly bits?”
Clytus held the broken mast for support. His shirt had been stripped off, and he stood, sending a string of curses after the league ship. Kartholome did not waste his breath on them. He sat panting near the bow, his beard canted off to the side. One of his bone earrings was missing. Judging by the dribble of blood down his neck and the stain on his thin white shirt, it had been yanked free.
“They do that on purpose,” Clytus said. “They have a betting pool. The captain that runs over the most fishing vessels each moon cycle wins it.”
The galley lumbered away, looking slow and dull now, hardly the mischievous creature that had nearly sunk them. “The league,” Kartholome muttered. “Nothing else like them in the world. Wait until you see, Melio. Wait until you see what I have to show you.”
Since the mainmast had snapped, they took up oars and bent their backs to pull on them. They headed west, sailing lightless under a sliver of moon. They kept the islands north of them, bulky shadows that they ran alongside of, until sunrise. They pulled into a small cove, managed to hide the boat in the overgrown foliage, and slept under the dappled light, to the ever-present sound of crabs creeping across the fallen leaves.
The next night they turned in to the Thousands. They inched forward slowly, sharing the post of lookout on the bow, at the tiller, or on the oars. The place took its name from the numberless islands that jutted up everywhere. Some just reefs barely parting the surface of the ocean, others large outcroppings bursting with vegetation, loud with birdlife, and crowded with small monkeys that Kartholome claimed swam between the islands regularly, hunting snakes.
“Snakes?”
“Yeah, there are a lot of them on the small islands. On the bigger ones the league has mostly killed them off.”
They reached one of those large islands that afternoon. They pulled the boat aground on a small beach, hemmed on one side by a sheer rock face and on the other by a tangle of vegetation. The beach dropped quickly so that only a few feet out the water fell away into deep blue. This was why Kartholome knew the place. Midsized frigates and transports could pull up to the beach. Leaving Geena to watch the boat, Kartholome led the other two up a fissure in the stone that became a steep path. The beach was lost from view almost immediately.
The climb was short, and soon they walked through a forest of palm trees. The fallen fronds crunched under their feet. A few minutes later, Kartholome brought them to the edge of a slope above a large valley. He indicated with a wave that this was the view he had brought Melio to see.
Melio stepped beside him, wrapped a hand around a palm trunk, and looked out over a compound of buildings and clearings, water tanks and training fields. Military units marched through maneuvers in one area. In another, soldiers sparred with wooden swords. In still another archers shot at distant targets. Men and women filed in and out of the buildings. A line of wagons pulled in and people began to unload them, passing the crates into the gaping mouth of an enormous storehouse. For the second time in recent days, the sigil of the league blazed out at him, this time burned into the slanting roof of the warehouse. The leaguemen, it seemed, wanted even the heavens to see their prosperity.
“What is all this?”
“This is what the league gets up to in private. This is where they train their army.”
“The Ishtat?”
“No, no. That’s on Lavren. This is Sire El’s little project.” Kartholome propped his foot up on a root and leaned on his thigh, continuing to survey the scene below them. “The league started a breeding program years ago. The idea was that they could make quota slaves themselves instead of having to collect them from around the empire. The Fanged Rose let them take over the Outer Isles to do whatever they wanted. Sort of compensation for Dariel blowing the platforms to bits. The last eight years they’ve been hard at it, but they were breeding even before that. Ever wondered why the Ishtat are so loyal to a bunch of cone-headed freaks? The Ishtat are loyal because they’re part of the family. Each and every one of them, Melio Sharratt, was fathered by a leagueman and a concubine herself bred for the purpose.”
Melio’s gaze snapped over to him.
“You heard me,” Kartholome said. He ran his fingers down his beard and then gave it a tug. “It’s quite a regime they have set up. I don’t know much about it-just what some of the Ishtat let slip when drunk and disgruntled with Papa. Seems that all the leaguemen are descended from just a handful of founding members. They breed children, and select some of them to have their heads bound. Those become leaguemen. Others they make Ishtat. Others become workers and all that. Some get discarded. Heard about worse things, but you don’t even want to know the details.”
Melio did not want to know the details, the logistics, the methods of such mass impregnation. Yet he could not help thinking about it. He saw storehouses of beds, leaguemen moving from one to another, a woman in each, babies crying beside them. He hated the thought. Leaguemen raising children like livestock, while he and Mena had not made their real love into a child. He still wanted nothing more than that. By the Giver, if she had only allowed it when they had the chance!
“I see you’re thinking about it,” Kartholome said. “Don’t. Like I said, the Ishtat are raised on another island. These guys are a newer thing, not the same bloodline. Sire El’s army. They’re from quota stock, born and raised for it. If they don’t show an aptitude for fighting, they’re sent away as regular quota. Or they used to be sent as quota. That’s all changed now.”
Melio asked, “So what are they training for?”
“Good question. Answer: any eventuality. To the league it doesn’t really matter who wins or loses, because they know that either way they’re the real winners. If that’s all that matters to you-if you don’t have a sliver of morality in your body-well… it’s easier to adapt. No qualms and questions to wake you at night, you know? These soldiers may help take over the Other Lands. They may be given something to do in the Known World. I think it all depends on what happens with the Auldek invasion.”
“Any chance they’re being trained to help protect the empire?”
Kartholome turned a withering look on Melio. “I think the league has decided that the empire’s days are numbered. Maybe the Auldek will finish it. If they don’t manage it, Sire El’s boys will finish whatever’s left. Either way…” He slid his fingers down his beard again and let the fate he pulled from it loose on the air.
All three men heard the running feet at the same time. Geena bounded into view. She slid to a halt and wiped her ginger hair back from her forehead before saying, “We have a problem. An Ishtat patrol found our boat.”
Clytus cursed.
“Gets worse. They saw me.”
The plan they came up with was simple. Geena smirked disapprovingly at it, but she took up her post without a word. Using the point of Kartholome’s fishing knife, she made a small cut in the flesh just above her knee. She smeared blood up and down her leg, and then she sprawled across the path as if she had fallen. Melio and Kartholome hid behind trees off to one side. Clytus sank down behind a root network on the other, draping a few palm fronds over him for good measure.
It’s mad to do this, Melio thought. We’re not at war with the league. I could approach them and explain… what? That the queen had sent him to spy on them? Would he convince them that he had not seen or would not report what was clearly in view? If he named himself he would die just the same as if he did not. He had not fully understood it before, but he was so pressed up against the league’s private parts that nothing he could say to them would explain it away. What the league was doing was deeply wrong. Witnessing it put him at war with them,
