The shouts of the Foragers got Rik’s attention. He woke groggily, still dazed after yet another night of forced learning. There had been so much teaching on this trip and so many spells that he barely remembered the river voyage. After the healing spells had come spells to increase his strength and then his speed, spells to make him more perceptive, spells to let him sense the presence of magic. Asea had claimed they were all simple spells but they did not seem that way to him. He felt like he was slowly drowning in a sea of knowledge that would swamp his brain. He was tired and sick and he wanted the whole process to stop.
The shouts from above continued. He forced himself to rise and staggered up the wooden stairs onto the deck.
“Looks like we have arrived,” said Weasel, joining him at the bow of the River Dragon to get a better view. “You look like shit, by the way.”
“Lady Asea keeping you busy at night, is she? You lucky bastard,” added the Barbarian.
Rik did not want to tell them how drained and empty he felt. Strange words drifted up from his unconsciousness and he had to all but force his hands not to move through the ritual gestures associated with certain spells. He could see now the dangers this method of teaching posed. His whole brain felt bruised and his thoughts were foggy. The drugs and the rituals were taking an unholy toll. He hoped that it was all worth it.
He shaded his eyes with his hand, for the estuarine light seemed too bright, and forced himself to look in the direction in which the others were gaping. It was clear that they had indeed arrived.
Ahead of them the river widened as it met the sea. Along the banks lay a scum of cheap housing that grew more solid and respectable as it rose up the hills on either side of the river. Dozens of piers lined the water’s edge. Hundreds of boats were moored, but it was not the houses on the riverbanks that commanded the attention. In the river itself were several large islands. Towers crowded them, leaning together in places like drunk men clutching each other for support. Bridges leapt from tower to tower. Strange wooden carriages moved along pulleyways between them, sometimes spanning the gap between islands in what from a distance looked like an enormous cobweb of ropes.
Massive thick walls surrounded each island. The river itself provided a moat. Rik studied the city with a cautious eye. Each island was a fortress that could provide covering fire for every other island like the bastions of a fortified town. Tall-masted ships crowded the waters between them. Messenger birds flocked in the skies.
Asea strode on deck. She looked none the worse for their long nights of teaching. “We are early,” she said. “We must have made better time than the captain thought.”
“Maybe it just seems that way because we have been studying so hard.” Her warning look told him he had made a mistake mentioning this where others might hear. He was tired. It was not an error he would normally have made. Fortunately nobody appeared to be paying the slightest attention.
“Those islands would be almost impossible to take without a superior fleet,” said Rik.
Asea nodded. “Even with one, so long as Harven is allied with the Quan. Fortunately no one is talking about taking the city.”
“Getting ready to be diplomatic?” he asked. She nodded.
“And so should you,” she said.
“What are those islands called?”
“The nearer one — with the huge black central tower is the Island of the Sorcerers. The largest one with the white painted walls is the Island of Gold where the richest of the merchant prince’s dwell. The one furthest out is the called simply Temple although there is no temple to any god we worship on it.”
“That is where the Quan come ashore then?”
“Indeed. It is said that in the main Temple there are numerous pools connected with the sea, and that the Sea Devils emerge from those to communicate with the Intercessors, the priests who deal with them. There are other tales of human sacrifice that it would be wise not to repeat when we get to shore.”
“You’ve been here before?”
“On numerous occasions. The Book Market is famous.”
“What are the Quan like?”
“Look for yourself — down there in the water.”
Rik looked down over the wooden railing. There was something in the water, a shadowy sinister shape that made his flesh crawl. It was about the size of a man and looked as if it was of roughly human mass. There was a suggestion of a human-like head at the front but the whole body undulated bonelessly in the water, a mass of writhing tentacles streaming out behind it. Even as he watched the thing seemed to become aware it was under observation. Twisting like an eel it dived down out of sight into the murk.
“What was it doing?” Rik asked.
“I don’t know. Probably just scouting the ship. Maybe it had business of its own.”
It did not seem like a good omen to Rik but he kept the thought to himself, as he watched the massive buildings come closer. Looking beyond them, out into the estuary, he realised that for the first time in his life he was seeing the sea. A strange thrill of fear and fascination and something else passed through him and he knew with utter certainty that he was now a long, long way from home.
Chapter Nineteen
The River Dragon dropped anchor in the waters of Nearshore, the area of land on the bay closest to the islands. Draymen unharnessed the towing wyrm and roped smaller ones to the ship to pull them into dock. Rik’s pulse quickened as he studied the bustling wharves. He recalled the tales of the place he had heard as a youth.
Harven was one of the world’s great port cities, famously wealthy and famously corrupt. Impregnable, with the sea as its moat, and its allied monsters lurking in the waters, it went its own way in the world and paid tribute to none of the realms that surrounded it. It was a place where people went to make fortunes, where humans and Terrarchs mingled in a way that was not possible anywhere else, where money counted more than birth and the merchant was king.
Perhaps it was something else that stirred within him — ambition. As a youth, before the army and before Asea, he had sometimes dreamed of coming here and making his fortune. Death was easy to find on the streets of Harven they said, but so was gold. In another life, this place might have been his home and his testing ground. Koralyn, his first master, the man who had taught him thievery, had come from here or so he sometimes claimed, and his stories of the place had excited Rik.
He sniffed the air. It stank of money and life and something else; fish, tons of it, brought in by the hundreds of small fishing boats who trawled the Sea of Dragons, and who followed the cod far out into the Western Ocean.
He smelled bubbling fat and a sickly sweet perfume coming from a great ship that held its distance out in the harbour. Seeing the direction of his gaze Asea said; “Whaler — they hunt the great fishes and wyrms of the sea for blubber and ambergris and whalebone and other things.”
There were other ships, vast prison hulks floating half-submerged in the waters. These had featured in many of the more horrific tales he had read as a boy, with unjustly imprisoned men watching the sea roll in through the stoved-in side of the hulk, unable to escape because of the weight of the chains that bound them. Those had been particularly vivid images that the Old Witch had, for some reason, delighted to read aloud.
Ships from dozens of nations filled the harbour. Fat merchantmen from the Isles of Greed; great ocean-going galleons from the far colonies of the Lost Continent; low sleek ships of an alien design from the Midworld Sea. Enormous wyrms moved between them, towing them, bearing cargoes loaded on howdahs. Some carried important visitors. He could not recognise more than half a dozen of the hundred flags he saw here. But he resolved that given time he would. The cold winter wind cut at his cheeks like a knife. Unease, fatigue and excitement warred within his soul, clashing their swords, making his heart beat faster with their bugles.