LITMIR.BIZ

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      ‘What of Crydee?’ asked Brendan.

      ‘They’re not simply landing an invasion force. They’re moving a colony in.’

      ‘Colony?’ asked Ruther.

      ‘Those men, women, and children that landed with the first wave were just the beginning. Hundreds, maybe thousands more are sitting in ships off the coast waiting to be offloaded.’

      ‘But why? Of all the places in the Kingdom, why the Far Coast?’ asked Brendan.

      ‘Not the Far Coast,’ answered Martin. He forced himself to chew and swallow a spoonful of tough meat in a thick stew, despite having no stomach for it. ‘Crydee.’

      ‘Why?’ asked Brendan.

      Martin took a dagger from his belt and quickly drew a rough map in the earth. ‘The Bitter Sea,’ he said after he’d drawn a diamond shape. Then he drew another line to the left of the diamond. ‘The Far Coast, and we are about here …’ He dug the point of his dagger in. ‘I believe Bethany’s father and Morris down at Tulan are not being attacked, but rather are being bottled up and prevented from moving north to aid us.

      ‘I think there’s a squadron or more of Keshian ships sailing up and down the Far Coast ensuring that no one gets out of either harbour or any of the fishing villages between the Straits and Crydee. I also believe that once they’ve established themselves in Crydee they’ll keep coming east, along this highway to seize Ylith. If they do, they’ll have removed the King’s Fleet from the Far Coast, and prevented Yabon from sending anyone south. Duke Gasson will be bottled up, unable to come any farther south than Zun and with that move Kesh will have trisected the Western Realm.

      ‘They can then move in strength against Krondor from the south, leaving the Kingdom in tatters. I cannot let Krondor be surrounded without support from the north. The only relief from the east is in Salador, and that would take weeks, and who can guess what Kesh is doing in the Sea of Kingdoms? The King may be very ill-disposed to stripping any of his eastern garrisons to come to Krondor’s aid.’

      ‘But how?’ asked Brendan. ‘How could they put so many men in the field at once?’

      ‘That, my brother, is the question,’ Martin said. ‘For the moment, we need rest.’

      ‘You and the others from Crydee sleep,’ said Brendan. ‘We’ll keep watch.’

      ‘What happened to that band of Leopards?’ Martin asked.

      ‘Brendan happened,’ said Bethany, patting him on the arm.

      ‘They rode right into us not knowing we had them by five to one,’ said Martin’s younger brother. ‘They are good, but it was over quickly.’ Then he smiled. ‘But we have their horses so you don’t have to walk to Ylith.’

      Sighing, Martin lay down, putting his head on a pack someone had set down behind him. ‘Ylith.’ After a moment as his eyes grew heavy, he said, ‘If Robert is bottled up in Carse, and Gasson cut off up in Yabon. …’

      Bethany came and lay down behind him, snuggling in close as if to keep him warm for the night. Bethany closed her eyes and was quickly asleep as well.

      Brendan saw his brother slip into deep slumber and turned to look at the two sergeants. ‘With Father dead and Hal in Roldem, that puts Martin in command.’

      Ruther looked at Magwin. The two sergeants were the oldest members of the garrison, save for Swordmaster Phillip who was with young Henry in Roldem for the Champions Tournament at the Masters’ Court. Finally Magwin said ‘Title or not, that makes him the King’s Warden of the West.’

      Ruther looked at the sleeping youth and said, ‘Now all he needs is an army.’

• CHAPTER TWENTY •

       Confluence

      JIM GROANED.

      His arms felt as if they were about to fall off, yet he knew he had another half-hour or more of pulling hard on the oars of this boat. He glanced over his shoulder and at once regretted it. Sorcerer’s Isle didn’t look a foot closer than it had the last time he had looked.

      His Keshian guide Nefu had proved as wily a smuggler as he had hoped, and if he had the chance he’d use him himself, if Kaseem would let him. They had run up the coast on a downwind tack, then turned and run before the wind northward. Twice they had seen sails on the horizon and Nefu had deftly sailed away before they were noticed.

      They had reached an imaginary line between the south-west tip of the island nation of Queg and the distant point of Land’s End over the horizon, and found that it was just as Nefu had feared: heavily patrolled by Keshian warships. He had quickly produced both a Keshian flag and a courier’s pennant and affixed them to the mast. As long as he kept sailing, didn’t get stopped and have to answer questions it would be fine. Though Jim judged it likely that Kaseem abu Hazara-Khan had provided Nefu with a fairly comprehensive set of false papers. There was a likelihood that because Kaseem had been betrayed and his network compromised that many of those patents and passes were no longer valid, but unless those who stopped the smuggler were privy to the most recent changes in the top echelons of government, they might get them through. Jim also knew that had he been in charge, Nefu would have a packet with a lot of impressive-looking seals that were to be opened only by a specific noble, one who wasn’t on whatever boat was stopping them.

      He was relieved they had not had to test those ploys. For Nefu was even more resourceful than Jim had imagined. They sailed along the line of ships, staying to the east and looking as if they were bound on imperial business for some destination behind the lines, until sundown, at which point Nefu sailed around in a lazy circle until he was where he wished to be. He had lowered the sails and sculled the ship silently through the darkness. Sculling was a primitive means of propelling a boat, probably used centuries before sail or oar. Jim was amazed to see the long oar come out of the hold; it was in sections that were quickly fitted together and put over the stern as the rudder was hoisted out of the water by means of a clever winch-and-cable mechanism. Then Nefu and two of his men fixed the twenty-five-foot-long oar in a iron cradle bolted to the stern of the boat, slipping it through a cut-out that Jim had assumed was a common feature to allow water splashing up on the deck to run off.

      Sculling took a lot of power, and this oar was massive, so two men worked it. It was a slow and tedious way to move a boat, but move the boat it did, and silently they crept between two sentry ships anchored along the line Jim had drawn on the imaginary map in his mind.

      By dawn an exhausted crew raised the sails and they set a course for Sorcerers’ Isle. They took down the Keshian pennants and kept a sharp watch for Kingdom warships.

      A day later they came within view of two things simultaneously: a smudge on the north-eastern horizon which Nefu claimed was Sorcerers’ Isle, and a dot of white to the south-east that the lookout claimed was a squadron of Kingdom warships.

      Despite Jim’s assurances that he could convince the commander of any Kingdom squadron they were there on official business, Nefu declined to see if Jim could effectively keep him and his crew out of a Kingdom prison and his boat from being confiscated. The fact that Jim was without identification of any kind, that the Kingdom was in a state of war, and that there was no guarantee that this particular squadron commander had ever met Baron James Jamison all weighed heavily in the smuggler’s decision.

      Hence Jim found himself rowing furiously against the current trying desperately to take him away from his destination. Not for the first time that morning did Jim curse Destan for disabling his Tsurani transport orb.

      Jim’s shoulders ached and his back hurt and he knew that this was the first time in his life he was seriously beginning to feel his age. At forty a man’s body begins to betray him, and it’s only male vanity that makes him not believe it.

      Jim

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