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“Kor will destroy Renda Bay and come back in time for the war. We are still building our ships.”
“Renda Bay!” Sounding like a crow, Chalk shook his scarred head and scuttled backward without speaking further. The skin of his shoulders, his arms, his back was pockmarked from the bites of hungry razorfish.
The Norukai king heeded Chalk’s visions, but the shaman was also eccentric, damaged. Patchy hair grew in bristly clumps around his head, wherever the follicles could poke through the scar tissue. Chalk swiped his knuckles across drool that leaked from his damaged lip. He stood in the sunlight and turned his face to the sky, bathing his bare skin in the warmth.
Even though the terrifying past ordeal had given Chalk his ability to see visions, Grieve still resented his father for allowing it. Grieve had been too young then to defy King Stern, and he had barely known Chalk, certainly not well enough to give his life to save the strange creature. After pulling the albino from the pool filled with razorfish, young Grieve had wrapped the torn and mutilated boy in sailcloth and tended him.
The other Norukai had assumed the freak was dead, but young Grieve rowed him across the inlet to a small neighboring island, little more than a hummock of rocks and grasses that poked like a stump above the waves. That was where the blind old fish woman kept her cottage, a woman whom many Norukai used as a healer, especially when their slashed mouths grew infected after the ritual cutting. The old woman was an expert in scars.
Grieve took Chalk to her and, using all the power of command he had learned from his father, told the old woman to save the boy. Without arguing, she coated Chalk’s torn skin with greasy, foul-smelling ointments made from guano and fish liver, and she wrapped the albino with strips of cloth, encasing the entire body like a cocoon.
Grieve couldn’t let King Stern or any other Norukai know that he tried to save the misfit they had meant to sacrifice. He secretly rowed over to the fish woman’s island every day and watched Chalk recover. Finally, when the scarred pale boy was conscious enough to speak, he gazed at Grieve with his oddly shifted eyes. “Don’t kill your father yet,” Chalk said, out of context, speaking from nowhere. “Let me tell you when it’s time. I will know.”
Grieve responded with only silence, staring at the blind fish woman, who pretended not to have heard. Until then, Grieve had never even considered killing his father. The idea of ruling the Norukai islands had felt so far in the future, but Chalk seemed absolutely certain. Grieve had felt gooseflesh crawl up his back and arms. He believed that Chalk would know and would tell him.
And he had.
Over the years he had visited the hundred main islands that formed the Norukai archipelago, as well as the coastline that the raiders pillaged and stripped of its resources. They forced slaves to cut down the forests, leaving the hillsides bare after seizing the wood, and they used slaves to mine in the mountains for iron, gold, and silver. But Grieve had always wanted more. Now, he intended to get it.
He agreed with the shaman’s prediction and Captain Kor’s assessment of Ildakar. If they took over the legendary city, that would plunge a knife through the heart of the Old World. From there, the Norukai could spread in all directions, up and down the Killraven River, blockade the estuary, swarm up the coast all the way to Tanimura and beyond.
Thousands of years ago, the Norukai tribes had been wild and fierce. They fought in countless tribal wars, leaving wreckage and sorrow in their wake. But while they ravaged the land, the Norukai were not organized enough to be invincible. When Sulachan’s powerful empire rose, the tribes were hunted down because they proved to be uncontrollable. When they refused to swear loyalty to Sulachan, the emperor ordered the extinction of the entire people. His armies drove the Norukai to the sea, and they retreated to countless defensible islands. The death toll on both sides was immense.
In the millennia since, the Norukai grew powerful again and took their slow revenge. But it was too slow.
Such impatience was one of the reasons that convinced Grieve to overthrow King Stern. And now his father’s skull, picked clean by the fishes, rested as a centerpiece in Chalk’s glass-walled tank in the throne room where he kept his favorite specimens.
Grieve and Chalk had become friends, and the albino shaman was devoted to his savior. Grieve had slain nine rude Norukai warriors who made the mistake of laughing at the strange young man, and after that, the other Norukai left Chalk alone, showing a grudging respect for Grieve, if not the odd shaman.
The king insisted on leaving Chalk behind when he went out on raids, even though he valued the shaman’s visions. Chalk was not a fighter, and Grieve knew that sometimes the walking meat could become violent. Whenever Grieve came home scarred with battle wounds, his friend was overjoyed to see him safe.
Once, before a typical raid, the shaman was inexplicably terrified. Grieve intended to accompany four ships south to raid a mining village they had not preyed upon for fifteen years. The children they’d left alive would be grown up now, the population fat and lazy. It should have been a simple raid, but Chalk begged Grieve to stay home. He wouldn’t explain why, but he grew more frantic, his jagged voice shrill. “Don’t go, don’t go!”
Grieve would never admit he was afraid, but Chalk’s insistence chilled him. The other Norukai were puzzled as to why he would back out of the raid, but he owed them no explanation. When one brutish female warrior, Atta, laughed too loud and pressed too hard, Grieve broke her nose and shattered her cheekbone, injuring her so severely that she had to stay home from the raid as well.
Grieve learned later of a tremendous storm that had swamped the raiding expedition. Three of the ships were sunk outright, and the last one attempted to limp home, only to be set upon by vicious selka. The undersea creatures tore the vessel apart, and only three survivors were found in the wreckage. If Grieve had gone along on the raid, he would have died.
From that point on, he always listened to Chalk, even if he didn’t understand his mysterious predictions.
Now, in the harbor below, iron bells rang out, the clangor ricocheting along the cliffs louder than the roar of the ocean and the whistle of the wind. The six serpent ships set their dark sails and engaged their weather spells to catch the wind. Muscular Norukai manned the oars to drive the vessels like knives out of the narrow, protected harbor. The iron bells continued to ring.
“Renda Bay, Renda Bay!” Chalk scuttled up to him again. “Plan for Ildakar, and the whole world, my Grieve, King Grieve! They’ll all grieve.”
“I’m building my fleet,” he said. “We won’t invade until our fighters are ready. Our navy will be like a school of sharks.”
As Kor’s raiding vessels sailed away from the main island, Grieve shaded his eyes and gazed across the water to the misty hummocks of other islands dotting the sea, with barely navigable passageways through the reefs. On the leeward side of the islands, long docks had been built where more ships were being constructed, in addition to all the serpent ships that already existed. Grieve had ordered the nearest mainland stripped of lumber, the tallest trees seized for masts, with other logs to be sawn into hull planks. Ribs curved along the keels, growing into fearsome serpent ships, dozens and dozens of them.
Each island had its own master wood carver, and skilled artisans used knives and chisels to fashion a distinctive figurehead, a unique representation of the serpent god for the bow of each ship, one great vessel for every main island. Thirty new warships had already been completed in the past two weeks, with fifty more under construction and dozens more planned. From the top of the Bastion, Grieve heard the distant hum of activity as Norukai shipbuilders took advantage of the good weather to make swift progress.
King Stern had taken far too long to launch his war against the mainland, and young Grieve had lost patience. When Chalk told him it was time, Grieve hadn’t hesitated. He had challenged and killed his father. Stern hadn’t led the Norukai to the glory they deserved, but Grieve would.
Now, as he surveyed his extensive, growin
g navy across the water, he knew it was only a matter of time.
“They’ll all grieve,” he muttered to himself, and Chalk grinned.
CHAPTER 15
Inside his headquarters structure, General Utros brooded in darkness, wrestling with disbelief and dread certainty. The sun fell behind the western hills in the direction of Kol Adair, but even before darkness gathered, Utros pulled the shutters closed. Inside the dim, stuffy building, Ava and Ruva built up the hot coals in the braziers, filling the shadows with orange fire, and then acrid herbs. The smoke that swirled around the enclosed room had a bitter smell, but not as bitter as what Utros had learned.
With so many small kingdoms and principalities in turmoil after his armies smashed them, news would have taken a long time to travel across the Old World. Could it be that Utros had conquered the continent, crossed over the mountain passes and placed Ildakar under siege, in the name of an empire that had already crumbled? How could history be so cruel? How could time have abandoned him after so many unparalleled triumphs?
And yet, in his heart, he believed what Nathan and Nicci had told him. He could not deny the evidence.
For now, with the door and windows closed, with guards stationed outside so that no subcommander would enter with a report, Utros kept only the sorceresses with him, but even their powerful magic could not drive away his doubts.
Iron Fang was truly gone, his empire crumbled into dust by the march of time. Empress Majel, beautiful Majel, was also dead in the most horrible way imaginable. Utros would have mourned his beloved in any case, but to know that her own husband had flayed the skin from her creamy shoulders, her rounded breasts, her flat stomach, her smooth thighs …
Utros squeezed his eyes shut, picturing Majel’s classically beautiful face, and those shimmering dark eyes that had gazed on him with so much love and forbidden passion. When they were together, she had felt such joy to be held in the arms of someone who wanted to love her, rather than possess her.
