"What are you doing, child?" The servant almost grabbed her arm to pull her away, but then thought better of taking such a liberty. "Come away. A cannonball will kill you!"
"Don't be foolish, Eril." Whatever else she might be, Pelaya was her fa¬ther's daughter. "They cannot shoot their cannon this far, all the way to the citadel, not unless they are inside our walls already. But, oh, sweet mother Siveda, look!"
A thick plume of gray black smoke was rising beside the ancient walls-one of the buildings along the quay of the Harbor of Nektarios.
"It must be the powder magazine, hit by some stray shot. Oh, look at it burn!" Had her forward-thinking father not moved much of the powder stored for convenience in the immense harbor magazine, parceling it out to at least a dozen different storage places all over the city, half of the city's black powder would be gone now, not to mention the harbor itself, which would have almost certainly been destroyed. Instead, it looked as though only one building, the magazine itself, had been ruined, and if the fire could be put out quickly the loss would be bearable.
"I must tell my father," she said, leaving Eril to catch up as best he could as she scuttled back up the stairs.
"What are you doing?" her father shouted as she came in. He looked angry, truly angry, and for the first time she realized that the city might fall-that they all might die. She was so overwhelmed by this sudden, ter¬rifying understanding that for a moment she could not speak.
"The magazine…" she said at last. "The one in the Harbor of Nektar¬ios. It was hit by… it's exploded."
His expression softened a little. "I know. There is a window in the next room, do not forget. Go, and hurry to your mother as I told you. She will be frightened-I'm sure she could hear that crash in Landsman's Market."
He is defending the whole city, she thought, staring at him. Her father had already turned back to the table and was examining his charts again, his big hands splayed across the curling parchments like the roots of tall trees. For a moment she found it hard to breathe.
Pinimmon Vash, Paramount Minister to the Golden One Sulepis, Autarch of Xis, did not like traveling on ships. The sea air that had so de¬lighted his ancestors when they came out of the deserts of Xand and set¬tled on the northern shore of the continent smelled to him of putrefaction. The rolling motion of the waves made him feel again as he had in his child¬hood, when he had caught the bilious fever and lain for days near death, unable to keep anything in his stomach, shivering and sweating. In fact, his survival of that fever had been so unexpected that his father had dedicated the sacrifice of an entire ram to the goddess Sawamat (something that Vash
would never have mentioned to the autarch, who barely acknowledged that any other gods beside Nushash existed).
Now, as he teetered down the ramp, he was so grateful to be on dry land again that he offered a silent prayer of thanks to her and to Efiyal, lord of the sea.
The long bight of land known as the Finger, which jutted out into the Kulloan Strait parallel to the western shore of Hierosol, was almost invisi¬ble from where he stood at its southernmost tip. Billows of gray and stink¬ing yellow smoke hung close to the ground, so that in the few places where the walled fortifications could be seen at all they seemed to float atop clouds like the palaces of the gods. The fighting, which had begun at mid¬night with an invasion of the autarch's marines from both the landward edge of the Finger and the place where Vash's ship had just landed, was al¬most over. The Hierosoline garrisons, undermanned because Drakava had (against the recommendations of his leading advisers) withdrawn so many soldiers in preparation for the siege, had put up a brave resistance, but the small fortresses had proved vulnerable to the missiles of burning sulfur and straw the autarch's catapults had flung over the walls by the hundreds be¬fore the morning sun had climbed above the horizon. The defenders, choking, blinded, many of them dying from the poisonous smoke, had been unable to repel the autarch's marines, who, protected by masks of wet San-ian cotton, were able to hoist their siege ladders and clamber over the walls almost unopposed once the worst of the smoke had blown away. The de¬fenders had offered resistance, but weakened, breathless, and blinded, they had fallen before the marines like brave children fighting grown men.
If we could use that tactic on Hierosol itself, Vash thought, the war would be over in a few days. But there was not enough sulfur for that in all of Xand, nor enough catapults to throw it, even in the autarch's huge army. Still, he could not help admiring how well Ikelis Johar and the other polemarchs had planned for the siege. The cannons jutting from the walls of the fortresses along the Finger might not be able to reach the walls of Hierosol, but they were an invaluable aid to its defense, able to rake the near side of any ships in the strait, or drive them in under the bigger guns of the city walls.
The autarch's pavilion had already been mounted on the slope beside the gangplank of his flagship, the Flame of Nushash, a towering four-masted warship painted (in defiance of any secrecy about its semi-divine passenger) in blindingly bright shades of red and gold and purple, with the great, flaming god's eye on either side of the bow and the autarch's royal falcon spread-winged in gold across the red sails. The recently erected pavilion was no more restrained, a striped cone almost fifty paces across Hying two dozen falcon banners. Vash limped toward it, angrily waving away the of¬fers of help from his guards. Sulepis, the Golden One, had already made it clear he suspected his paramount ministers loyalty: the last thing Vash needed was for the youthful autarch to see him staggering in on the arms of soldiers. He might as well announce himself old and useless and be done with it.
The autarch, dressed in his fanciful battle-array of golden armor and the flame-scalloped Battle Crown, was sitting on his war throne atop a raised platform at the center of the tent, talking to the Overseer of the Armies. Dozens of slaves and priests surrounded him, of course, along with a full troop of his Leopard guards in armor, muskets in hand, their eyes as brightly remorseless as those of their namesakes.
"Vash, welcome!" The autarch spread his fingers like claws, then scratched himself under the chin with the figured tip of his golden gaunt¬let. "You should have stayed on the ship a little longer, resting yourself, since we are going back to the landing spot soon anyway."
"I'm sorry, Golden One, I don't understand."
The autarch smiled and looked to Ikelis Johar, who nodded but main¬tained his customary stony expression. "The Royal Crocodiles are coming ashore."
For a moment Vash was completely confused, wondering what bizarre new plan his impulsive master had conceived. Was he going to put some of the massive reptiles from Xis' canals into the strait, or even introduce them somehow to the waterways behind the Hierosoline walls? The great beasts were certainly fearsome enough, even the younger adults longer than a fishing boat and armored like a siege engine, but who could make them do anything useful?
It was a mark of how strange and impulsive the autarch was, and how unpredictable life was in his service, that Vash was still trying to understand how crocodiles could be used in warfare even as he and Ikelis Johar and a crowd of servants and soldiers followed the autarch's litter back toward the ships. Only as he saw the monstrous thing being swung up from the hold of one of the six biggest cargo ships did Pinimmon Vash remember.
"Ah, Golden One, of course! The guns!"
"The largest, most beautiful in the history of mankind," said the autarch
happily. Each crafted like exquisite jewelry. What a roar they will make, my crocodiles! What a fiendish, terrifying roar!"