Night closed in.
Where had he seen these columns?
The Capitol? New Orleans? Europe? They were all over Europe. The Gloriette. What the hell is a Gloriette?
Now you’re thinking.
It was dark again; the coral snake slithered onto the edge of the marble trough and waited between Mark’s boots.
‘Over the side! Over the side!’ Gilmour shouted, shoving Garec and Kellin towards the rail where the barge’s first mate had tethered their horses. ‘Just cut the reins, cut them!’ he yelled, checking to be sure the spell book and far portal were safely lashed to his saddle.
‘What is it?’ Steven followed the others. The magic was bubbling over, preparing for battle.
Gilmour ignored him. ‘Lead the horses to that shore. We’ll go north, find cover and dry out. But be quick now, quick. You have to get as far into the shallows as possible. Don’t look; just head for shore.’ The riverbank was no more than sixty or seventy paces off, but to Gilmour the relative safety of dry land seemed a Moon’s travel away.
‘Gilmour!’ Steven shouted, ‘what is it? What’s he doing? What’s coming for us?’
‘I was too tired, too rutting tired from yesterday, from chatting too long with Milla,’ he lamented. ‘I didn’t feel it – I should have, when those waves rolled past.’
‘The waves?’
Gilmour tried to untie his horse’s reins, then, frustrated, cast a noisy blast that blast through the starboard gunwale. ‘Just ride off the deck and into the water. But stay with your horse. They’ll be able to move through the shallows and up the riverbank faster than we will.’
Garec held his own horse by the bridle, trying to keep it steady after Gilmour’s explosion. ‘They won’t step into the river, Gilmour. They know how cold it is.’
‘I’ll help them,’ he said, his hand already glowing red. ‘Now, go.’ Gilmour slapped Kellin’s horse, sending a bolt of Larion lightning into the animal’s hindquarter, and with a loud whinny, the horse, with Kellin in tow, plunged through the broken slats and into the frigid waters of the Medera River.
‘You do have a way with women,’ Garec said with a wry grin.
‘No time to chat,’ Gilmour replied, and slapped Garec’s horse with a similar charge.
Still confused, Steven said, ‘It’s too cold. Why are we doing this? Let’s stand and fight here, where it’s dry.’
Gilmour took him by both shoulders and shoved him towards his horse. ‘Mount up. Stay in the saddle, just hang on. She’ll get to shore; you just hang on.’
‘Gilmour, what-?’
The old Larion Senator pointed downriver.
Steven gaped at the wall of water coming towards them. ‘Oh my dear Christ.’ It was massive, nearly eighty feet high, an unstoppable nightmare dragging all manner of debris: broken bits of lumber, cracked spars trailing torn sails, wooden doors, fence-posts, and scores of uprooted trees. What remained of a ship, wrenched in two, rode the crest of the rogue flood. There were carcasses, too: cows, a horse, most of a pig, and too many people. Steven set his jaw and looked away. Reaching shore was pointless; they would need to be at least a hundred feet higher to avoid being swept all the way back to Wellham Ridge. He knew they wouldn’t make it; the barge would be reduced to splinters.
Somewhere near the bow he heard a scream and then a splash. It was followed a moment later by two others. The crew was abandoning ship.
‘Go, go!’ Gilmour shouted, smacking Steven’s horse into the river behind Kellin and Garec. ‘Stay with her, hold on as long as you can.’ He checked a final time for the spell book and far portal, then spurred his own horse as, with a deafening roar, the floodtide ploughed its way towards Wellham Ridge.
The barge was lifted up and tumbled head over heels before it finally shattered in a prolonged ripping crack, like so many brittle bones snapping beneath the weight of a hundred thousand tons of water.
‘Alen?’ Milla touched him gently on the shoulder. ‘Alen? Are you awake?’
Cramped and stiff as a corpse, Alen Jasper opened one eye, swallowed dryly and groaned, ‘I am now, Pepperweed. What’s wrong? You need the pot? There’s a clean one under the-’
‘Something’s happening,’ the little girl cut him off.
Alen propped himself up and rubbed his eyes. Yawning, he asked, ‘What’s the matter?’
‘The people are in trouble. Should I try to help them?’
‘What are you-?’ Alen sat up, found a goblet beside the bed and drained whatever had been inside.
‘The people, they’re far away, but they’re in trouble from the water.’
Now Alen felt it begin, quietly at first, like the low hum of a familiar tune. He shrugged off his irritability and focused his attention inward. ‘What is it, Pepperweed? Can you tell where it’s coming from?’
‘Far away, back where Gilmour fell when I let him go,’ she whispered.
Alen tried to hone in on the monstrously powerful magic, but it was distant, half a world away. ‘You’re right, Milla,’ he said finally. ‘It’s coming right from where Fantu- um, Gilmour said he was going.’
‘Should I try to help them?’ she asked again.
‘Do you think you can?’ He let the distant drone fade, knowing the shockwaves would reach him in a moment, like huge ripples churning a mill pond.
‘I can try.’
Orindale Harbour was the busiest port in Eldarn, even during the coldest winter Twinmoon. Moorings were rented by the Moon when necessary, but most captains paid for a few days’ anchorage at a time. Cargoes were loaded, offloaded, speculated on, bought and sold, day and night, in all weathers and at all tides. The northern wharf was tucked into a crooked semi-circle of a cove, a natural jetty of topsoil and rocks rolled or dragged across southern Falkan by the river over the ages. The southern wharf was larger, if more sparsely populated, and it dominated the lower part of the waterfront, a sprawling testament to the city’s industrial growth.
On the day that Mark Jenkins sailed into the harbour, thinly disguised as Major Nell Tavon of Malagon Whitward’s occupation army, absent without leave and in command of a missing platoon, there were thirty-two merchant and naval vessels docked, moored or making their way into the harbour on the inbound tide. Hundreds more small barges, skiffs, ketches and transport vessels worked the harbour as well, but Mark was interested only in the fat ones, the fancy sailing ships rigged for the gusty headwinds that blew along the Ravenian Sea. A scattering of naval vessels monitored the passage of merchant ships to and from the wharf; Mark didn’t give these a second glance.
With the spell table opened, his first target was a Malakasian schooner, which started breaking apart audibly. When the mainmast snapped, it was loud enough that Captain Blackford covered his ears and he was still holding his head when the thick post crashed through the foredeck, bringing down the main and topsails in a tangle of canvas and rigging. The hull opened and the sea poured in, but by that time Blackford had been distracted by the devastation in other quarters and when he briefly looked back to the schooner, it was already gone, the few crew members who had escaped rowing towards shore in an overfilled launch boat Mark had overlooked – but before they reached the wharf, he’d spotted it and set the small boat aflame. A couple of sailors managed to swim the last few paces to shore, but that was all.
A Pragan galleon, crammed to bursting with textiles, tanned leather, mortar sand and quarried stone was also on fire. Her crew had been watching the schooner snap in two when their own vessel started to burn. Their screams filled the air as they tried to reach the sides and jump over. The flames, oddly resistant, quickly engulfed the galleon, and once the rigging went up and the fore, main and mizzen masts were burning, the firelight lit the whole harbour. Heat radiated across the water and the sailors working Major Tavon’s barge felt it warm their faces. The fire was a beacon, and could be seen from anywhere in the city, a harbinger of grim events yet to come.