Corsair

IX

The Sorentines had been a strange people in many ways. Their ascent from being just one more people among many to lords of a vast realm had been so rapid that they carried many of their oldest traditions up with them, barely changed. It was the evidence for one of those that told Yulan he had been right about this castle being their handiwork.

The postern gate at the base of the castle’s rearmost corner tower was framed by the gaping maw of a bull. Carved from the same hard stone as the walls themselves, its horns stretched an arm’s length on either side. To open the iron-bound door and walk through was to enter into the great bull’s mouth. Its flared nostrils formed the lintel, its tongue the step. Quite why the Sorentines had been so wedded to the image of the bull, Yulan did not know or care. That this one might give him a way out of the trap sprung by the Corsair King’s death, he did care about.

The sight that greeted them as he and Hamdan passed through the bull’s mouth was not as comforting as he might have hoped, though. They stood upon a precipitous high ledge, suddenly exposed to the buffets of the sea breeze. Down below, what felt dizzyingly far below, was the little cove in which Kottren had kept his humble, motley fleet. And between ledge and cove ran a steep, narrow staircase cut into the very face of the near vertical cliffs that held the castle aloft. The steps were rough-hewn and lacked the width for more than a single file descent.

The prize they sought was there waiting for them, though. Down in the cove at the foot of the stair, where the sea was blue and calm, rested three vessels. They rocked gently at anchor. Corena and the rest – the three children and four others of Kottren’s former subjects – were already halfway down the stair, racing for that prize.

‘Nice of them to wait for us,’ Hamdan grunted as he slammed the door shut behind them.

‘I wouldn’t have wanted them to,’ Yulan said.

He was regarding the steps that waited him uneasily. To his eye, they looked perilously uneven, slippery and generally treacherous. He had never been greatly enamoured of heights.

‘You’re sure it’s a child?’ Hamdan asked him gravely.

‘That wasn’t anyone who really knows what they’re doing, was it? Did you ever see one of our own Clevers do anything so imprecise, so wild?’

‘I suppose not,’ Hamdan conceded.

‘No. That was all instinct. Nothing measured or practised about it.’

Yulan’s mind was back in those moments in the menagerie when he had first seen the children. The girl Kottren had summoned to fetch food, with her pallor and scabs and crooked fingers and eyes that looked diseased. He had thought her appearance a result of hardship and an uncaring father, but of course it could have been the signs of a Clever ravaged by the flowing through her of a power no one had ever taught her how to properly ration or control. It had not even occurred to him at the time.

‘It’s not one of those three we’re trying to save, is it?’ Hamdan asked.

‘No.’ Yulan shook his head. ‘I know who it is. She’s just a little girl.’

They began their cautious descent. The steps were damp, glistening with the spray of the last storm. This face of the island was in deep shadow. No sun could reach it to cook away the moisture. Seagulls and other ocean birds wheeled close in, screeching at these human interlopers. Some had nests along the cliffs – not close, but close enough – and their droppings had stained the steps here and there.

It all made Yulan tense and attentive as he set one foot down after another. He could not help but spread his arms a touch, seeking a balance he did not really need for anything but comfort. The wind was unhelpful. This had not been the kind of danger he had expected joining the Free to bring. The prospect of dying with honour upon the blade of an enemy did not trouble him too greatly; falling off a stairway to be dashed upon rocks or drowned in an uninterested sea was not how he wished to end his days.

Directly above the calm waters of the cove, atop the sheer cliff, was the rear of the castle’s keep. There were balconies there, built out from the stonework. Intended no doubt to give the place’s original inhabitants a fine view, a refreshing breath of the sea air. Yulan did not see the appeal. He brought his gaze down again, to focus upon more immediate and pressing concerns. And to his considerable relief, found Corena and the rest waiting just ahead, at the edge of the little bay.

They stood on a wide platform made from vast slabs of worked stone. It had been laid over a tiny beach of shells. Ahead, cupped in the protective embrace of curving lines of boulders, waited the boats. On the left, to Yulan’s surprise for it had been invisible from above, a deep cave sank into the body of the island beneath the castle. The sea reached in there, too far back to make out its end. There must be a quay or landing stage within, he reasoned, for the stair was no fit way to load or unload ships. The Sorentines had burrowed through the body of the island itself to connect castle to ocean.

Yulan felt something he would not have thought himself capable of: an urgent desire to get aboard a boat and set sail. He glanced at Corena.

‘We all follow you now, captain.’

At which, without hesitation, she plunged into the water and began wading towards the nearest of the Corsair King’s orphaned vessels. The gentle waves lapped at her chest as she leaned into them and strode on.

‘Wait there until I tell you it’s seaworthy,’ she called back over her shoulder.

Yulan squatted down on his haunches beside the three children. They looked at him, all of them, with wide eyes.

‘One of your sisters is a Clever. Is that right?’

‘Her name’s Enna,’ the oldest of the three said.

‘What’s your name?’ Yulan asked the girl.

‘Navene.’

‘Listen, Navene, do you think your sister might really want to hurt us, or you? Can we talk to her, perhaps?’

‘I don’t know. She’s not … she’s not the same as us. She’s strange.’

Yulan ran a hand back through his long hair. For all that he had half-expected that answer, he did not like it.

‘She was father’s favourite, once he saw what she could do,’ Navene murmured. ‘He wanted us all to be like her then. Really wanted. He said he would scourge it out of us, make us wake up just as he did her.’

‘Scourge?’ Yulan said.

She tugged the collar of her ragged shirt down from her shoulder, twisted a little to show him the top of her back. There were scars there. Old ones, laid into her skin by a whip.

Hamdan was watching too, and Yulan heard the archer sucking in breath through clenched teeth. Wordlessly, Hamdan reached out and took Navene’s hand in his own for a moment. He pushed her sleeve up a little way. Her forearm was slightly crooked, a knot in the bone halfway along its length. Neither he nor Yulan said anything, but they both recognised a break that had never been allowed or helped to heal properly.

‘Man needed killing, just like you said,’ Hamdan muttered. He said it to Yulan, though he was smiling gently at Navene as he spoke.

‘Does Enna know your father’s dead?’ Yulan asked.

And Navene nodded. ‘She’s very upset.’

At the very moment she spoke the words, the castle above them gave a muffled, sonorous boom. Yulan looked up – they all did – in time to see a plume of brownish dust and debris spouting out from one of the high windows.

‘Upset, right enough,’ Hamdan said.

He edged away a short distance and beckoned Yulan to follow him.

‘If this Enna doesn’t know what she’s doing …’ Hamdan whispered softly enough that no one else should hear, ‘if she loses control of the entelechs she’s playing with, we could get a Permanence here. Then, most likely, there’s not one of us getting off this piece of rock alive.’

A Permanence. Yulan had heard tales of them, never seen one. He knew only what everyone knew: a Clever overwhelmed by the raw power they wielded could be snuffed out like a candle flame, becoming only the vessel by which a Permanence was born. Not a merging and mingling of the entelechs such as was all the normal substance and sentiment of the world, but a pure and potent expression of a single entelech. Ungovernable, unpredictable, set loose in the world. And once loosed, something no sword or bow could ever hope to oppose. Some, like the Bereaved, had killed thousands. Some, like the Unhomed Host, had reshaped the history of the world. It was not a possibility Yulan wanted to contemplate.

He stared up at the castle above them. Dull thumps and groans were emanating from it still. Breakings and grindings. He could not shed from his mind the thought of a frightened girl, grief-stricken and enraged. A power she must barely understand coursing through her, giving form and strength to the feelings that possessed her. Trapped, as much as any of them, by her father’s death.

He sighed and lowered his gaze. Hamdan had moved away, and when Yulan looked for him he found him standing at the edge of the water. He had his bow in one hand, the smallest and youngest of the children in the other. She sat on his supportive arm and had her hands locked behind his neck. She looked comfortable there.

‘Too deep for the little ones,’ Hamdan said. ‘This here’s Estrell, and it seems she’s decided to come with me. You’d best get one up on your back, too.’

Yulan turned to the two other children: Navene and a boy, smaller and frailer than her. Navene was glowering at him.

‘I can manage,’ she said stubbornly.

Perhaps she could. Yulan was not sure. Her frame looked devoid of strength. She probably did have the height to keep her head above water, though. He beckoned the boy to come closer, and tried to smile reassuringly.

‘What do I call you?’ he asked.

‘Tessunt.’

The boy’s voice was rough and thin, as if he had a throat sickness. His cheeks were sunken.

‘Climb up on my back and hold on tight, Tessunt.’

Yulan knelt and turned his back to the boy. The movement set his face towards the open sea and that was why he was the first to see the death of their hopes. He felt Tessunt’s arms come across his shoulders, felt the boy’s knees clasping around his waist, and even as he was feeling those things he was staring at the boats rounding the rocks at the mouth of the cove and heading in. Lake’s sleek raider and lumbering along behind it, quite some way behind it, Corena’s scow.

He stood up so suddenly that Tessunt almost slipped from his back, and he had to reach back to hold the boy there.

‘Corena!’ he shouted, only to find that Tessunt had such a tight lock on his neck the sound came out half-choked.

‘Loosen off a bit there,’ Yulan said, and as soon as the pressure on his throat grew less he cried out more heartily: ‘Corena!’

She stopped, with the water up almost to her shoulders now, and turned. Yulan nodded out towards the approaching vessels, and Corena waded a few paces back to get a clear view. He saw her cock her head slightly to one side. There were men, perhaps half a dozen of them, gathered near the prow of the leading boat. Yulan could see swords and spears at the ready.

Corena began striding back towards the platform on which the rest of them stood.

‘Can’t get past that,’ she called.