Ships from the West

the same month. The city was still unsettled and volatile, but the presence within its walls of a host of soldiery entirely loyal to Sultan Nasir had a considerable soothing effect. The harem had been purged of all those who had fomented intrigue in the brief interregnum and Ostrabar's absolute ruler had proved his mettle, acting swiftly and without mercy. A youth he might be, but he had an able vizier in the shape of Shahr Baraz the Younger, and it was rumoured that his new Ramusian wife was a great aid to him in the consolidation of his position. A sorceress of power she was reputed to be, even mightier than her witch of a mother. Unruly Aurungabar had been swiftly cowed therefore, and it was rumoured through­out the city that the Sultan already felt sure enough of his position to wish to set out immediately for the wars of the west.

He was closeted with his new vizier in one of the smaller suites off the Royal Bedchamber. He sat at a desk leafing through a pile of papers whilst Shahr Baraz stood looking over his shoulder, pointing something out now and again, and the spring rain lashed at the windows and the firelight sprang up yellow in the hearth to one side. A set of Merduk half-armour stood on a wooden stand by the door, and a scab-barded tulwar had been set on the mantelpiece. At last Nasir rubbed his eyes and straightened back from the desk with a mighty yawn. He was slim and dark, with olive skin and grey eyes, and he was dressed in a robe of black silk which shimmered in the firelight.

'All this can wait, Baraz. It's frivolous stuff, this granting of offices and remission of taxes.'

'It is not, Nasir,' the older man said forcefully. 'Through such little boons you buy men's loyalty.'

'If it must be bought it is not worth having.'

Shahr Baraz gave a twisted smile. 'That sounds like your mother speaking.'

Nasir bowed his head, and his clear eyes darkened. 'Yes. I never thought I would get it this way, Baraz. Not this way.'

The vizier laid a hand on his shoulder. ‘I know, my Sultan. But it rests on your shoulders now. You will grow into it in time. And you have made a fair beginning.'

Nasir's face lit up again, and he turned round. 'Only fair?' They both laughed.

The door was knocked, and without further ceremony the Queen entered, also clad in midnight silk. Her golden hair was down and her marmoset clung to her shoulder cluttering gently, its eyes bright as jewels.

'Nasir, are you ever coming to bed? It's hours past the middle of the—' She saw Shahr Baraz and folded her arms.

Nasir rose and went to her. The vizier watched them as they looked upon each other, half shy still, but an eagerness in their eyes. That, at least, had turned out well, he thought. One must be thankful for small mercies. And those not so small.

'I'm being drowned in dusty details,' Nasir told his wife, 'when all I want is to get on the road with the army.'

'Are you sure that is all you want, my lord?' They grinned at one another like two mischievous children, and indeed they were neither of them yet eighteen years of age.

'The army marches in the morning, my Queen,' Shahr Baraz said, his deep old voice bringing them up short.

'I knew that,' Mirren said with the laughter gone from her face. 'Golophin spoke to me. He has been in and out of here for days. If Nasir is to be up before the dawn he must have some rest at least.'

‘I quite agree,' Shahr Baraz said. 'Now the Sultan and I have some last business to attend to, lady, and the night is passing.'

Mirren's eyes narrowed, and the marmoset hissed at Shahr Baraz. The rebellion in her face faded however, seeing the vizier's implacable eyes. She kissed Nasir on the mouth and left. When the Sultan turned around with a sigh he found the old man shaking his head and smiling.

'You make a handsome pair, the dark and the gold. Your children will be fair indeed, Nasir. You have found yourself a fine queen, but she is as strong-willed and stubborn as an army mule.' When Nasir's mouth opened in outrage Shahr Baraz laughed, and bowed. 'So says Golophin. For he has spoken to me also, the old meddler. She is her father's daughter in more ways than one. And in truth she reminds me somewhat of—' And then he stopped, though they both knew what he had been about to say.

The Merduk army marched out before sunrise, when the streets were as quiet as they ever became in the capital. They formed up in Glory of God Square where once the statue of Myrnius Kuln had frowned, and then led off in long files by prearranged streets to the West Gate. It was a cold, clear night with the sun not yet begun to glimmer over the Jafrar in the east, and King Corfe of Torunna, who had once fled through this very gate as Aekir burned about him, was not yet in the high foothills of the Cimbrics. Nasir was leading fifteen thousand heavily armoured cavalry westwards to the aid of the kingdom which had once been his people's bitterest foe. But he was young, and dwelt seldom on such ironies. Besides, half of his own blood belonged to that people. As did his new wife, whom he already knew he loved.

That same dawn found two ships coursing swift as cantering horses across the eastern Levangore. Their masts were rigid with almost every sail they possessed and their decks were black with men. All through the previous evening and the night they had been hurtling north-north-east with the freshening wind on their larboard quarters, and now to port loomed the purple shapes of the southern Cimbric Mountains as they marched down to the sea east of the Candelan river. Torunna, last free Kingdom of the West, rising up in the dawn light with the snow on the summits of the mountains catching the sun first, so that they tinted scarlet and pink and seemed to be disembodied shapes floating over the darker hills below.

Murad stared at that sunrise briefly and then focused once more on the ship ahead. The xebec had tried to lose them in the night, but the moonlight had been too bright and the eyes of the pursuers too keen. She was little more than four cables ahead now, almost within gunshot, and the Revenant was closing the gap.

The thing which had once been the Lord of Galiapeno glanced aft to see a man in the black of an Inceptine habit standing before the mainmast, solid and unyielding as a stone gargoyle despite the pitch and roll of the barquentine. From him there seemed to hum a silent vibration which could be felt underfoot in the wood of the decks. A soundless mrumming which, Murad knew, was responsible for the present speed, or part of it.

For Richard Hawkwood was too canny a sailor to be caught by conventional seamanship. He had survived the storm sent to sink him and they had almost lost him in the vast sea wastes of the Levangore, until one of Murad's homunculi had glimpsed him by chance as it flew high and far beyond its master in search of news. There would be no second storm -such tactics were obviously inadequate. No, to Murad's great joy Aruan had given him leave to capture the Seahare intact if he chose, and dispose of her crew in any way he wished -provided Hebrion's Queen met her end in the process. What a pleasure it would be to meet his old shipmate and comrade again, and to preside over his unhurried death.

Murad knew much of death. On the night of the fleet's destruction he had become lost in the fog on his way back from the flagship, and thus had watched from his longboat as that great armada was reduced to matchwood all about him. He remembered prising the fingers of desperate drowning survivors from the gunwales of his little craft lest they swamp it in their panic. He had bade his men row them out, far out into the fog, and there they had leant on their oars and watched the ships burning through the mist, listening to the screams. They had escaped that slaughter, or so he had thought.

Then the mage had come in a furious storm of black flame which incinerated Murad's companions in a flashing second and seemed like to do the same to himself. But a curious thing had happened.

‘ know you, a voice had said. Murad had lain in the smoking bottom of the longboat with the swells washing around his charred body, and the thing had hovered over him like a great bat. He felt he were being turned this way and that for inspection, though he had not been touched.

Kill him, another voice said, a familiar voice. But the first laughed.

‘ think not. He may well prove useful.

Kill him!

No. Put aside your past hates and prejudices. You and he are more similar than you think. He is mine.

And thus had Murad of Galiapeno been taken into the service of the Second Empire.

And he had been willing to serve. All his life he had hated mages and witches and the workings of the Dweomer, but more than that Murad had chafed at his subordination to men he deemed less able than himself, even Hebrion's last King. Now he took orders from one he acknowledged to be his superior, and there was a