A Dark Sacrifice Read online

  Iobhar took several limping steps into the center of the room. “I take it the natives depend on us to be in a panic—and for the most part too helpless to retaliate. Things are beginning to happen very swiftly now. I’ve spent much of this night with the garrison, where most of the men are violently ill, and every hour brings new cases. Moreover, I’ve received word that dozens of your men throughout the city are stricken as well. Some have already died. It seems the Mirazhites timed the burning of our ships very carefully.”

  Cuillioc could hear shouting down in the streets, a buzz of consternation passing from room to room inside the Citadel. He forced himself to stand still as the two knights began to arm him—but all the while he was cursing himself for a fool. Cities like this one bred contagion. Why had he lingered so long in Xanthipei?

  “It seems that we are all dying,” Iobhar went on in his passionless voice, “every Pharaxion in the city. In truth, we have been dying for months, without even knowing it.”

  “Dying of this Summer Fever, which only kills slaves?” Lifting his arms so that Gerig could buckle the breastplate in place, the Prince gave a bitter laugh.

  “There is no Summer Fever. The physician lied to us—just as you suspected all along. He also failed to tell us that we have been living on poisons ever since we first set foot on the soil of Mirizandi: imbibing them with every bite of food and sip of drink, taking them in with the air, soaking them in through our skins.”

  There was a clatter of metal on the tiled floor as someone—Cuillioc did not look to see if it was Brihac or Gerig—dropped a heavy piece of armor. “The Mirazhites have been secretly trying to kill us with poisons?”

  “For the most part we have been killing ourselves just by being here,” said Iobhar, slipping his hands inside the sleeves of his scarlet robe. “The land generates poisons, breathing them out in vaporous exhalations, contaminating everything and everyone. The birds and beasts seem to have made some internal accommodation, though many of the young ones die, but the human inhabitants can survive only by eating of a powerful herbal elixir. Combined with this medicine, the noxious vapors produce a pleasing sensation of lightness and well-being; without it, they have a slow but deadly effect. By the time that the more dramatic symptoms appear, death can follow in a matter of days—or hours.”

  Cuillioc caught his breath. So many things that had baffled him before were starting to assume new meanings: the waking dream of his first weeks in Mirizandi, his weakness and lethargy since. Even the fact that his scheming courtiers had been so strangely quiescent since the slaughter of the hostages. “Those leaves the servants stew in their own drinking water—the spice you can smell all over the marketplace—that is the elixir?” His eyes narrowed. “But then—how did you come to learn so much, Iobhar, and all of it so quickly?”

  “Most of this comes from your little guttersnipe page. He has been asking questions, gathering information, just as you instructed.”

  Knowing how the urchin feared Iobhar, Cuillioc was frankly incredulous. “And he came to you instead of to me?”

  “I met the boy on my way up from the barracks and convinced him to speak. I apologize for any rough handling, but it seemed expedient.” The furiádh stretched his pale lips into a hideous grimace, which may have been intended as an ingratiating smile. “Even as I questioned him, the boy was alternately burning with fever and shivering with an ague, and I feared he would not be able to give sensible answers for very much longer.”

  In that sticky heat Cuillioc felt a cold horror, right down to the marrow of his bones. “No wonder the natives never took arms against us. Why should they exert themselves, when they had only to welcome us into their city and we were doomed!”

  He felt sick with humiliation when he thought how they had gulled him, exploiting his ignorance, blinding him and his men with pleasure—yes, even inviting his contempt. Yet it boggled the mind to think that an entire city could keep such a dangerous secret for so many months, and not one of them speak out.

  “In fact, the poison is slow and subtle; it takes many months to kill,” said Iobhar. “And it sometimes happens that visitors who leave the country soon enough eventually recover. But the Mirazhites were not content to remain silent and leave us to perish in our own time. The grocers, wine merchants, and all the others who supply the Citadel have been sending us foods and wines in which the poison is particularly concentrated. Meanwhile, the grains and fruits the servants eat are far more wholesome, besides being sprinkled with the herbal elixir. It was unfortunate for the slave who died—and for those other trulls your men brought in from the brothels—that they were eating the same food as the garrison. Foreigners themselves, they knew no better. Naturally, with a woman’s weaker constitution, one of them was the first to succumb. Which,” the priest added, “undoubtedly alerted those in the city that the crisis was near. When the first cases appeared in the barracks they would have known it was time to act.”

  Waving his helpers aside, Cuillioc picked up his gilded vambraces and began to strap them on. “But the boy?” he asked, picturing that thin, wiry body, which no amount of feeding could ever fill out. “He should have succumbed long before the women did; what kept him alive all of this time?”

  “He has been taking some of his meals with the native servants, where he surely ate of the herb without even knowing it. Ironically, had he stayed with the galley slaves it would have been healthier. No one has been making a concerted effort to hasten their deaths.

  “As for my acolytes and me,” Iobhar added with a self-satisfied smile, “our abstemious habits have undoubtedly served us well.”

  Cuillioc (still busy with the arm guards) remembered how little the furiádh had seemed to suffer in the heat, and he wondered if it was even possible to poison someone whose very blood seemed to be two parts venom and the third part malice.

  “But for yourself and so many others…” Iobhar spread his hands wide, allowed his voice to trail off. There was no need to say anything more. They had all been eating and guzzling like pigs, and were going to suffer for it.

  The Prince closed his eyes, muttered a prayer to his mother, knowing all along that she would not hear him, would not help him if she did; she had so little patience with incompetence and failure. No, it was up to him to find a way out of this trap, and more than a thousand lives hung in the balance.

  He opened his eyes, made an effort to reorder his thoughts. “You said that some who leave these cursed shores live. Unless the situation at the harbor has grown worse since that first report, about half of our ships remain. The galley slaves will have to take their chances, whether the Mirazhites mean to poison them or claim ownership after we are gone—we’ll never find room for them now. The men-at-arms can row.” Cuillioc reached for his sword belt and girded it on. “If we act swiftly, while some of us still have strength, we may get as far as Nephuar or the archipelago—depending on how the winds favor us.”

  He cinched the belt in place. “We may all still die, but any chance is better than none.”

  It had not cooled much since midnight when Cuillioc finally prepared to leave the Citadel and set out for the docks. With so much smoke in the air every breath tasted like red-hot ashes.

  After hours spent receiving reports, making hurried plans, and sending out orders, it was time to see for himself that all the wheels had been set in motion for a swift departure. Just inside the gate leading out to the street, he met Iobhar, accompanied by his two haggard acolytes, Maël and Omair. The priest asked for a word aside, and Cuillioc consented.

  “It has occurred to me, Great Prince, that it would not be wise to tell the rest of our people too much,” said Iobhar when they had moved out of earshot of the others. “It would be difficult to hold them back from a wholesale slaughter if they knew that every man, woman, and child in the city had connived against them. Alas, this is no time for revenge. When we are whole and strong again, when we can lead a great force out of Phaôrax to strike quickly, punish them for their p
erfidy, and leave just as swiftly—”

  “I leave it to you to think on revenge,” Cuillioc interrupted him. He knew beyond any doubt that even if he should be one of a handful to survive, he would have no place in any future army sent back to Mirizandi. Another commander who had failed so spectacularly could expect to pay with his life; as Ouriána’s son, he merely faced humiliation and disgrace, but it would be years before she trusted him with another command, if she ever forgave him at all.

  Striding through the dark streets toward the place where the galleys were moored, with the remaining knights of his household in attendance (eight had been stricken and two had already died), Cuillioc felt his eyes smart and his throat burn, the smoke was still so heavy. Sometimes torches flared in the reek and shadowy figures hurried past. Each time his hand moved toward the hilt of his sword as he braced himself for trouble, but each time a closer look revealed that these were his own men, sent out earlier to seize supplies of food and water.

  Even supposing anyone survived so long, Cuillioc knew that his crippled armada would be several days at sea. And thus the wicked conundrum: whatever privations the rest would have to endure, those who were strong enough to row must eat and drink to keep up their strength, though they took in more poison in the process. After torturing himself over that question for the better part of an hour, he had finally arrived at this uneasy compromise between conscience and necessity, sending out his armed scavengers to raid the larger houses, to pillage the cookshops and food stalls in the bazaar—to go anywhere that food might be gathered quickly and in sufficient quantities—reasoning that those things the people kept for themselves would be at least more wholesome than the supplies they had sent to the palace.

  So now his men went from house to house, forcing a way in, emerging shortly afterward with whatever they could carry off, then loading their plunder onto one of the donkey carts they had commandeered earlier. Otherwise, the streets were silent and empty. The inhabitants had been mysteriously quiet ever since the ship-burning.

  He arrived at the docks without incident, walking into a scene of milling confusion. Torchlight burned on the waters of the bay and wherever puddles of sea-spray had formed on the marble piers. The air stank of wood smoke, boiling tar, and burnt rope, but it was beginning to clear.

  Squinting in the bright light, the Prince took charge. Before very long, he had managed to organize things so that a steady stream of people and supplies was being loaded aboard the remaining galleys in a more or less orderly fashion. At the same time, he sent out men in rowboats to clear away the wreckage of scorched timbers and other debris lest it foul the oars when it came time to depart.

  Yet it was a delicate balance to keep everyone moving, to convince them of the urgency without starting a panic. Perhaps he was aided by the effects of the poison, which made so many of them docile, too dull-witted to ask the sort of questions that would create an uproar.

  The eastern sky was glowing like a furnace, turning the waters of the bay to molten copper, before they had finished loading. The rising sun found them still hard at work, none of the ships ready to depart.

  During a momentary lull in the activity on the docks, Cuillioc paused to listen, conscious of an increased hustle and bustle in the adjacent streets, a noise that overwhelmed even the clamor of seabirds.

  He turned to get a better look, and an extraordinary sight met his eyes: richly dressed merchants mounted on camels; princes and nobles of the city seated in howdahs atop great elephants or riding in gorgeous zebra-drawn litters. Advancing in stately procession, they skirted the wharves, heading for a short stretch of beach following the curve of the bay. Once they reached the beach, they settled down to wait on the sand, with no other purpose, so far as he could see, but to watch the invaders depart.

  “They think us a spectacle arranged for their amusement,” hissed a voice behind him, and Maël, the older of Iobhar’s acolyte-servants, moved past, shaking a bony fist at the growing crowd on the beach.

  Cuillioc nodded grimly. He had a sudden bloody vision of what would happen if he sent a hundred or so able-bodied men in among the spectators—a thought he entertained for only a moment before letting it go and turning back to his task. Although the provocation was extreme, he was neither vicious enough nor foolish enough to order a massacre.

  The morning light, at first so gentle on the skin, had hardened and become crueller by the time the last of the sick and dying were carried aboard the galleys, the oar ports opened, and the oars slipped into place. Then everyone waited for the Prince to give the final order.

  Cuillioc boarded his flagship, followed by the priest and his attendants. It was his misfortune that Iobhar’s galley had been destroyed in the fire, that courtesy demanded he be offered a place on the Prince’s own. Yet it was likely to be a brief voyage, Cuillioc consoled himself with grim humor, and it hardly seemed possible that Iobhar’s presence could make things any worse than they already were.

  He took a last look around him, searching for familiar faces, counting heads, making certain that all the surviving members of his household were present and accounted for, that none of his attendants, sick or well, had been mistakenly left behind. One face was missing.

  “Does anyone know if my page came aboard?”

  No one did know, and a quick search of the ship failed to locate him. Cuillioc ran a hand through his hair, torn between the danger of any further delay and those same odd impulses that had caused him to take the young thief under his protection in the first place.

  “Would you risk the lives of so many, merely to go back for a little gutter-rat your mother’s laws have already condemned?” asked Iobhar. He had previously drawn up the hood of his cowl to protect his white skin from the sun; now he lowered it, leaned closer, and pitched his voice so low that only the Prince could hear him. “He hardly looked capable of lasting the night when I saw him. Yet on the very small chance he has survived this long, his friends in the Citadel can do more to keep him alive than we can.

  “Perhaps,” he added carelessly, “they will even choose to do so.”

  Aware that the furiádh spoke good sense, Cuillioc reluctantly gave the order to loose the chains and raise the gangplank. In a few moments more, the oars had been raised and the drumbeat began. Slowly, and not at all smoothly, because the rowers were so inexperienced, the oars fell and rose, fell and rose, and one by one the ships slipped away from the quay, their shadows running before them.

  Cuillioc now had the leisure to take note of his own condition, to recognize that he himself was far from well. The day was warm—only moments before he had been sweating—but now his teeth were rattling inside his skull and he shivered inside his padded armor. Even when someone produced a lightweight cloak and he gathered it around him, the shivering continued. His world was beginning to fragment, separating into a series of brief, bright moments with blanks in between, and it grew increasingly hard to keep track of consecutive events.

  Deciding it was too much effort to go so far as his own cabin, he found a place to sit on the deck, with his back to a water keg. Resting his head against the barrel, he closed his eyes. The rusty-hinge voices of the gulls slowly faded, and he slipped into a quiet, dark place.

  A movement of air across his face brought him abruptly back. Stumbling to his feet, he was astonished by how distant and tiny the domed roofs and crazy leaning ziggurats of the city had already become. While he dozed, the flagship and two other galleys had reached the mouth of the bay and were about to cross into the light-drenched waters of the open sea. He had been roused by a strong breeze blowing across the bow from the southwest.

  Up on the bridge, the ship’s master shouted an order to raise the sail and ship the oars. At the same time, men on board the two galleys just ahead and directly behind performed the same actions. When the great squares of scarlet silk began to fill with wind, Cuillioc felt heartened in spite of himself.

  He inhaled deeply, savoring the brisk salt air. Even the motion of t
he ship felt good—and why not? Island born and island bred, he had been taught to regard the great ocean-sea encircling the world like a serpent biting its own tail as his second home. In truth, he felt easier out here with the wind and the waves than he had ever felt in his mother’s palace at Apharos.

  Perhaps, he thought, I need not die after all. If the air of Mirizandi was pure poison, might not the fresh ocean breezes serve as a powerful medicine? Already he felt stronger.

  Then someone near the prow of the ship gave a shout. As heads turned in that direction, other voices rose as well. Cuillioc swerved around to look too.

  A pair of ships had been sighted to the south, past a ridge of high cliffs forming a partial barrier between the restless waves of the ocean and the placid sapphire waters of the Bay of Mir. As the galley left the cliffs behind and Cuillioc gained a wider view, it seemed to him, for a dizzying moment, that the whole surface of the water, north, west, and south, was covered with sails: sun yellow, tiger orange, peacock blue. A great fleet of two-masted feluccas and xebecs, along with more formidable vessels of three, four, and even five masts, was closing in from both sides—and every deck on every ship was crowded with armed men whose shields and weapons flashed white fire in the sunlight.

  In that incredible proliferation of masts and sails, it was difficult to get any clear idea of the number of enemy ships. One thing only was obvious: Cuillioc and his thirty-eight galleys were vastly outnumbered.

  “But where have they come from?”

  “In all probability from Persit and Meraz,” answered Iobhar, appearing beside him. “Though how they managed to exchange such swift communications with Xanthipei remains a puzzle. One can almost admire their cunning,” he added with a snarl, “how well they have executed the entire plan from first to last.”