The Sea is Full of Stars

“Most High, when do you wish me at your side?” Jaysu asked the older woman. “I am new enough here that I feel as if I will be deserting them before they are even used to me.”

“The council takes some preparation, and we feel we have some time. Plan on six weeks from today to begin your journey to me. Use the gate at the Center. It will bring you to me instantly, and return you there when done. I assume you can get transport of some kind from here to there and back? I, too, do not want you away any longer than you have to be.”

“I can do it, Most High. But surely one of the others, the Frog to the north or the Rodent to the south, would be equally likely targets and would serve as well, and they are both more experienced than I.”

“Enough!” the Grand High Priestess snapped. “It is decided!” And that, of course, was that.

It was not necessary that she explain her actions, and the Grand High Priestess had no desire to show weakness by doing so. It might not ever be necessary for any of them to know that the new High Priestess had been specifically requested.

Ochoa

It was hell to have to get most of the news and information second- or thirdhand, but Tann Nakitt did what she could. Maybe she didn’t have a translator and might never afford one, but you would have thought that the crew of these big international ships would all have them, she thought sourly.

They didn’t, though. Only the officers and some of the mates were so outfitted. It made things simpler when things got rough. You might desert if you could speak all the languages and negotiate your way home and onto other ships, but you wouldn’t be much of a risk if the only others who could understand you were those who spoke the nautical shorthand language developed over thousands of years for the crews, and your own, often unique tongue which others might not even recognize as a language.

Nakitt could still remember Ghoman, which was even less useful here than on, say, the City of Modar, and the Realm’s standard commercial language, which might help if she ever encountered one of those who got here the same way she did. On the other hand, she thought automatically in Ochoan now, a language so unlike the other two that none who didn’t have the right physical equipment in the throat, which meant being of the Ochoan race, could hear it as more than grunts, growls, squeeks, clicks, and squawks.

Anyway, the officers tended to deal only with the nobility like His Lordship, and the mates dealt with the heads of the stores and senior trade representatives, such as there were here, and not at all with the common folk who were always flitting around, asking a million questions and just generally getting in the way.

More than once she considered stowing away, perhaps after the great ships were well out to sea, but there were a lot of grim tales of such stowaways being worked like slaves then tossed overboard before the next port, and while most were exaggerations and many were doubtless fanned by shipping companies, there were the occasional really rotten crews, so you couldn’t tell for sure. Tann Nakitt knew that the best con men were the ones you’d embrace and then buy dinner and toast their good health even when they were stealing you blind.

Hell, in reverse circumstances, that’s what she’d do.

In a sense, that was the real problem with this new race, new life, new future. Not where or what, but the fact that Tann Nakitt had been born and raised a Ghoman, and had felt real pride and a sense of belonging because of that. You might lie, cheat, and steal for Ghoma, and you might even do it to alien races for the fun and profit of it, but you didn’t do that to your own people. After living years of the crooked but quite pleasant life, Nakitt had been asked by his people to put his unique talents to patriotic use, and it had been done almost without thinking, almost as a way of justifying being a con artist and general scoundrel. Maybe the gods of Ghoma had steered this course in their service. Now that was gone. Even if she were to somehow return to the Realm, she’d not only not be a Ghoman, she’d not be related to any known race or world. Oh, there was probably an Ochoan world there someplace in the vast universe, but that, too, wouldn’t be the same.

And if that was taken from her, what was left? Only the scoundrel.

Haqua and Czua, on the other hand, she had grown very fond of, but what was their future? They didn’t even have any of the worldly experiences of a Tann Nakitt, nor know of other worlds and what it was like to be someone, something, else. There was still something within the newcomer that they found attractive, though; a confidence and arrogance that usually radiated from males. It wouldn’t last, though. Hormones would win out during the mating season, if not the forthcoming one then the next. Nobody stayed unmarried here. Biology and the system both worked too much against it. Worse, as orphans of no clear bloodline, they were doomed to be low ranking wives, the kind that did the work and got little of the rewards.

“So, Nakitti, what were you doing over on High Katoor?” Czua asked her. “I saw you there by the forest.” High Katoor was an island up the chain, perhaps five kilometers away, lush but essentially uninhabited. Where it wasn’t too high to be comfortable, it was too overgrown, and far be it that the Ochoans would stoop to actually developing such a place.

“I was mixing drugs and poisons,” Tann Nakitt responded matter of factly.

“You weren’t! Come. What were you really doing over there?”

“Having secret romantic trysts with my countless boy toys,” he replied in the same tone. In fact, he’d answered her query fairly truthfully the first time. She’d been using her old knowledge of chemistry, particularly biochemistry, and matching it with information on drugs and poisons gleaned from the bored keepers of the various ship’s berths in the chain, and with old political hands among Ochoans who were delighted to tell much of their knowledge of what did what to whom. Some of it was pure old wives’ tales and folklore, but others had clear effect and were actually used in medicines and various treatments the same way a doctor might prescribe a headache pill in a more progressive nation. So much of poisons were part of folk medicines, and this knowledge was always passed down to those with an aptitude for it. Though hardly an expert yet, she had made some rather remarkable discoveries about various plants and mineral combinations here.

“Oh, very well! If you will not tell, you will not. Did you see the two ships come in this morning before dawn?”

“I saw them after they docked, yes,” Nakitt responded. “More refugees, more sad faces, more evidence of war in the west. What is most upsetting is that the traffic seems one way. They are coming from the west to the east through us. That implies that trade in the eastern Overdark is just about at a standstill, or at least relegated to the coastal trade. This Josich and his family are unbelievably fast and efficient.”

“But it is so far away from here. What is it to us?”

Tann Nakitt looked back out at the ocean in the distance and took a deep breath. “We too lightly follow easy gods of good and plenty,” she commented philosophically. “We even celebrate the rogues and rascals now and then, the gods of drink and revelry. We dismiss evil as a simple mental disorder. ‘Oh, he had an abusive mother,’ or ‘Oh, she had her brains scrambled by drugs,’ and we excuse the most terrible of behaviors as simply excesses of what we know. Believe it, girl. There is true evil. Not merely as a counter to good and as some kind of relative moral judgment we can adjust up or down to suit our moods—real evil, existing for its own sake.”

“You are scaring me now.”

“I am scared myself, and for good reason. I’ve seen faces like those in the ships before, and I know that if those faces exist here, this far away from the horror, then what is happening back there is almost beyond our imagining. But that’s no devil or demon out there; it’s no bad god or nasty spirits. They are flesh and blood, the worst kind of evil.” She looked out again, as if trying to see something beyond the ability of eyes and ears and nose to see. Looked out as she’d been looking out since she’d seen that first shipload of refugees.

“They’ll be coming one day for us,” she said with a shudder. “What will we do when they come? Where will we run? To whom will we be able to turn? That is why I am learning what I need to learn. I do not necessarily believe in destiny, but somehow I think I’ve been dropped here because I know how to help. Maybe not win, but help. I wish I could convince any of the young men of this, let alone the noble houses. They all think I’m off the wall and over the cliffs on this. I’m sure that’s what they thought, too. Their leaders, that is. The ones who told those in those ships, and also told the ones who didn’t get to the ships, not to worry about it.”