Father has been taken by deceit. Of all men, Vlad Li Tam was the least likely to be deceived in any way. The notion that he’d been caught in someone’s net normally would not cipher for her.
Except.
She swallowed the fear that suddenly tasted like iron in her mouth. They had left the Named Lands quickly. He’d pulled down his network, bundled all but his forty-second daughter into the iron ships, and fled in search of someone. They’d not spoken frankly of it, but she’d suspected for a time that somehow, their family had been compromised in their work to bring about intentional, carefully crafted change in the New World. Otherwise, why flee with the entire family? Certainly, her father could have sent his ships out in search of this invisible foe he suspected without bringing the entire House.
Beyond that, this message today clearly supported her belief that her father had been lured out of the Named Lands, he and his spider’s web of children and children’s children, for some dark purpose. They’d been out of touch with the Named Lands for months now, and in this moment, she found herself wondering if that wasn’t part of some larger strategy as well. Perhaps separating House Li Tam from the Named Lands served more than one purpose. It culled them out from potential allies, leaving them alone and far from home; it left the Named Lands without her father’s eyes and ears, and worse, without his strategic influence.
In the absence of light, P’Andro Whym had asserted in his twelfth gospel, walk slow and with measured step into that waiting darkness.
Yes, she thought. She would walk slow into this with her eyes and ears open.
Scowling once more at the flagship where it waited, Rae Li Tam handed the spyglass to her husband. She turned and looked north toward the Named Lands. “We’ve been silent for too long,” she said beneath her breath. Then, louder: “Have the birder meet me in my cabin.”
He nodded, and she left the pilot house. She had much to do. First, a note to her sister and her betrothed in the Ninefold Forest. Second, a coded message to whomever now captained her father’s flagship.
After which, she would have to make a decision.
She glanced once more to the vessel where it lay at anchor and wondered again where it had come from after so long away.
Rudolfo
The taste of the powders were still bitter in his mouth when Rudolfo joined Rafe Merrique at the helm of the Kinshark. Most of his life, he’d used the magicks to hide his men but not himself. It was unseemly for a noble to do otherwise. Yet in the last year he’d used the magicks more and more, though each time it went against the grain of his heritage. Worse, it went against his father’s teaching. Still, it had to be done. Two hours ago, birds had been sighted from the south, moving northeast beneath the new-risen sun-a larger, darker bird in fast pursuit.
And now, all hands had been called, and an out-of-breath sailor had fetched him topside at the captain’s order.
He’d hoped, at least, that the headaches and nausea, the uneasy twitch of over-ready muscles, would subside with more exposure to the white dust. So far, that was not the case.
He moved slowly, not as surefooted as Merrique and his men, and the rocking of the ship and the movement of the waves all around him wreaked its disaster on his stomach. The magicked ship was a wonder to be certain, but one that cost him every time he left the relative normalcy below the deck.
He clicked his tongue to the roof of his mouth and heard the answering clicks of the crew around him as he made his way to the bridge. Steady hands aided him as his feet found the narrow stairs. He felt something cold and metal pushed into his hands.
“It’s a telescope,” Rafe Merrique said. He felt the captain’s hands on his shoulder, turning him in a direction. “Look dead ahead.”
Rudolfo raised the glass to his eye and watched the ocean surge at him. He raised it higher, caught the horizon, and scanned it. The iron ships were not easy to miss.
Rudolfo sucked in his breath at the sight of them. He’d tossed and turned through four sleepless nights after his decision to pursue Sanctorum Lux. He’d known it was the best path left to him, but it haunted him. He prided himself on the inner compass his father had gifted him with-confidence in the right direction to take at any point in time. But how to choose the best of two courses of action where neither offered any reasonable assurance of success? And now, having placed his hope in Charles’s knowledge of another unlikely path, he found himself confronting Vlad Li Tam’s iron armada.
He counted the ships-a slow moving circle of six with one anchored in the center.
Rudolfo realized he was holding his breath and released it. “It’s Tam’s fleet.” But just more than half of it, he realized.
“Aye,” Rafe Merrique answered. “One flies a flag of quarantine. And the one in the center flies colors of distress.”
The anchored ship was sleeker and slightly smaller than the others, suggesting that it might be the flagship. Rudolfo couldn’t be certain, but it was as good a place as any to start. “I need to speak with them.”
He heard wariness in Rafe’s voice. “The six are at Third Alarm,” he said. “They’ve manned their guns-better than the one the Androfrancines granted me, I’ll wager-and they’ve longboats in the water under colors of parley. I’ll not put the Kinshark in cannon range. We wait and watch.”
Rudolfo opened his mouth to protest, but a muffled boom-followed quickly by another-closed it. He saw smoke and panned the spyglass until he found the source of it-the pilot house of the quarantined vessel had collapsed in a ruin of bent metal, smoke and flames. It veered off course toward the open sea. And this time, Rudolfo saw a flash and gout of smoke from a seemingly empty patch of sea in a close-range broadside shot that opened a tear in the hull at the vessel’s waterline. “They’re under fire.”
Rafe Merrique snatched the telescope from his hands. “Under fire?”
Rudolfo had spent little time at sea, but he knew full well how jealously the Androfrancines guarded the ancient war-making knowledge. He’d seen firsthand what it could do-losing a Gypsy Scout to Resolute’s hand cannon in the last war. The very hand cannon that false Pope had used to end his life. These cannons were far larger, and Rudolfo had seen them only on Tam’s iron armada and Merrique’s Kinshark.
But who else?
More explosions drifted across the whitecapped morning sea. “It’s an ambush,” Rafe Merrique said incredulously.
Rudolfo squinted ahead. He now could just make out the ships as the Kinshark made its careful approach. “How is an ambush possible on the open sea?” But even as he said it, he knew the answer. They weren’t the only magicked vessel in the water. At least two more attacked Vlad Li Tam’s iron armada-magicked and armed with bits of so-called Androfrancine light.
He heard Rafe Merrique exhale suddenly. “They’re being boarded.” Then, his voice rose. “Take us in slow; keep us hidden and out of range.” He passed the glass to Rudolfo’s hands.
Raising it to his eye, he watched as an invisible blade cut through a crowd of armed men in saffron robes. He watched as groups of three or four of Tam’s household tried to bring down even one of the boarders and suddenly, he was in his own banquet hall, his nose filled with blood and sweat and his ears full of shouting and screaming as the hurricane of assassins slashed through them to take Hanric and Ansylus.
He watched the decks cleared and watched as children were herded onto the deck by invisible soldiers. It stirred something in him, and Jakob’s face flashed across his inner eye. He loathed Tam, and yet he remembered also the tear he’d seen on that day at the bonfire, when he’d confronted his father-in-law about the murder of his brother and his parents. He’d told him that day that if he ever had a child, he’d not use him as a game piece. And yet, he did not doubt that Tam loved his children in some way-even the ones he sacrificed so readily in service to his strategic cause.