Chapter Seven

“Death Above the Clouds”

1.

kak’hamish strained at the capstan bar along with the others.

“Backs into it,” he hissed, but softly. Voices carried far across the sky at night, and the grey-painted warship drew near on its interception course. The capstan turned, click by click, and slowly pivoted the raised gun mount to make the Lady Zumaat’s only cannon bear to port.

Above them the gun crew slowly, carefully, silently loaded the gun. First came the canvas powder charge, then a solid shot, then on top a metal cylinder filled with cut-shot, a lethal mixture of thumb-sized stones and long, thin metal rods, designed to shred rigging and wings—and any crewman unlucky enough to find himself in their way. The metal cylinder would hold the shot together long enough—in theory—for it to clear their own broad wing.

One shot, he had told them. We will have only one shot. Make it count.

Kak’hamish stepped away from the capstan and looked up. The gunner’s mate, positioned at the back of the carriage by the elevating screw, turned to him and raised his hand. Ready.

He joined Nathanial, Annabelle, Corporal Tolni, and Andan Moorie, captain of Lady Zumaat. Moorie had been reluctant at first, unsure of the legality of a move which seemed like a cross between mutiny and piracy, but a look at the sarcophagi, and the one twitching creature there which had crawled from the second shattered corpse, had convinced him. Captain Moorie now studied the faint outline of the approaching vessel, especially its sail-wing, which reflected more starlight than did the hull and so glowed softly.

“A Bloodrunner,” he said. “Faster than we are with that broad wing rig and narrow hull, and mounting two guns, fore and aft, on pivots. Her hold probably stinks of armed fanatics. If she drops a hook-an-line on us, we’re finished.”

Tolni translated for the others, which felt odd to Kak’hamish after having done so himself for so long. They looked to him.

“The cannon is loaded. We will see what one good shot can do. It may cripple her, but we cannot count on that alone. Once the gun fires, we must change course and run north, as fast as we can.”

“North?” Nathanial said. “Why not south, to Siruahn? We must be close by now. Surely the authorities there will deal with these bounders, once they have heard our story.”

“We would arrive in the early morning hours, shortly before dawn, when the rising is planned to take place. The key elements are the armed men with Shistomo and the men waiting on the ground to strike. Our arrival would trigger the revolt, and in the confusion which would follow, the city could easily fall. No, we must at all costs unhinge the plot to enslave those people. They suffered long enough under the stupid and vain.”

“But we have Jed-An,” Nathanial insisted. “We’ve severed the head of the revolt, surely.”

“The head of the revolt is over there,” Kak’hamish said, and pointed to the approaching wind-wing. “Jed-An is only a useful symbol.”

“If that is so,” Annabelle said, “then why will Shistomo follow us? Why will he not simply proceed to Siruahn, launch the revolt, and find another figurehead to sit atop the throne?”

“Because we have six of his sacred Old Ones. Well, four of them, although he doesn’t know that two have already been dispatched. If they are as important to his cult as the priests indicated, I do not think he can bring himself to let us carry them off and perhaps defile them.”

“That is so,” Corporal Tolni put in. “These Old Ones—horrible creatures, but very sacred to the Worm. They told me that the Old Ones make the dead rise and walk, but I think that is just to frighten people. The corpses in the cargo hold did not walk. But yes, very sacred.”

“They grow close,” Captain Moorie said.

“They will want to hail their party,” Kak’hamish said. “Bring Jed-An up.”

Corporal Tolni ran across the deck and slid down the companionway to the main deck. A moment later he reappeared nearly dragging a bound Jed-An, who struggled to keep both his balance and his dignity, up the steps and across the quarterdeck.

“Hail Lady Zumaat!” The voice from the Bloodrunner carried across the narrowing distance between the ships.

Captain Moorie lifted his own leather speaking trumpet. “What ship?” he called back.

The enemy wind-wing drifted closer, already in range of the cannon’s round shot, but still a bit far for the cutting shot. Kak’hamish looked to the gun platform. The gunner’s mate’s eyes flickered from the Bloodrunner to him, his left hand holding the firing lanyard taught. Across from them, the hostile ship eased its helm and came onto a parallel course, and lifted its nose to slow to their speed.

“Eclipse!” the voice came back, louder now. “Where is the priest called Antaan?”

“He is below. The prince is here,” Moorie answered, and handed the speaking trumpet to Kak’hamish. “I can see their aft gun reflect the stars,” Moorie added softly. “It is run in and centred. They suspect nothing.”

“Remember what I told you to say,” Kak’hamish cautioned Jed-An.

“I remember, Ugly One,” he answered. Kak’hamish held the leather speaking trumpet up to Jed-An’s mouth. “Ambush!” he screamed.

Kak’hamish struck Jed-An in the side of the head with the heel of his hand and the ambassador crumpled to the deck unconscious. Someone barked urgent orders from the deck of Eclipse.

“Fire now!” Kak’hamish shouted.

The gunner’s mate pulled his lanyard, but already Eclipse had begun to drop like a stone. Lady Zumaat’s gun roared and for a moment they were blinded by black powder smoke. When it cleared, Eclipse was nowhere in sight.

“Hard starboard,” Moorie called to the helmsman. “Trim ten points down nose and give us eighth-weight!”

Kak’hamish held onto the quarterdeck rail as the wind-wing dove, banked to the right, and accelerated.

“Trim, two point on the nose. Lighten ship to sixteenth-weight. Helm, come steady on dead north. Where is the bastard?”

“Did we get him?” Nathanial asked in English. All the chatter on deck had been in Koline and so meant nothing to him.

“There!” Corporal Tolni called from the stern rail. “He banked port and lost a thousand yards on us. He’s just coming around to our course.”

Kak’hamish looked back and saw the soft glow of Eclipse’s sail wings, coming out of its bank and falling further behind. It stayed on that course for a few seconds, as if debating its next move, and then dipped its nose and accelerated. The chase was on.

“No, Nathanial, we did not. We are in for a chase and a fight. Annabelle, you may want to go below.”

“Reload!” the gunner’s mate shouted from above them. “Solid shot only. Turning party, crank us to stern.”

Annabelle looked around at the crew scurrying to man the capstan, others bringing more powder and shot up from below, and then looked back at Eclipse, now well below them and still gaining speed. “He will come on us from behind, I believe what they call a stern chase. Yes?”

“Yes, Annabelle.”

“And he will try to approach from below, both because it gives him the advantage of speed to dive beneath us, and because our gun cannot be depressed to fire at him through our own ship. Is that also true?”

“Yes.”

“Then it appears I will be safer here than below deck,” she concluded

“As you wish, but lash yourself to the railing above the trim station. The manoeuvres are likely to become violent.”

Kak’hamish looked down as Jed-An stirred at his feet. He reached down, pulled the ambassador to his feet by the front of his tunic, and pushed him toward the quarterdeck rail. Jed-An shook his head groggily but when he felt the rail against the small of his back his eyes cleared.

“You still need me,” Jed-An said quickly. “If you survive the fight with Shistomo, but I perish, my government will never believe your story. They will hound you as assassins and pirates, unless you return me unharmed. If you fall to Shistomo, I can keep his hand from your friends. I understand their value, and Shistomo is no fool like those other priests were. Face it, my ugly friend, I am an inconvenient necessity.”

Clack-clack.

“I disagree,” Kak’hamish said, and pushed him over the rail.

Jed-An screamed almost all the way to the ground.

Kak’hamish turned to see Annabelle staring at him, clearly shocked by his act of deliberate murder. “Should we have kept him as a pet?” he asked her.

“Mercy is sometimes―ˮ

“Mercy? Yes, he argued with the Worm priests over mercy, tried to get them to spare Nathanial. You know how? By convincing them to take you instead! He had a much easier death than he earned. Now lash yourself to that rail!”

Visibly shaken by the revelation, she did as she was ordered.

Captain Moorie came to his side. “Can your Queln friend help us in this?” he asked softly.

“She could not keep up with your ship, so fell behind during the day. She would ride hard through the night to make up the lost ground, while we coasted at altitude. But since she would not know of our change in course to the south, she must be somewhere north of us. Perhaps she heard the gun fire, and there will be more firing soon enough. She may yet find us.”

But did he want her to? This was not her fight but she would surely make it so.

2.

all night they ran north. Annabelle had lashed herself to the trim station rail, as Kak’hamish said, and she sat on the deck to rest her throbbing stump. This was as much purposeful walking, as opposed to routine exercise, she had done, and she felt it not only in the sore end of her stump itself, but also in the small of her back.

Nathanial stood beside her and watched in turn the trimsman below, the gun crew, the helmsman, and the pursuing Eclipse. Most of the orders and exchanges on the quarterdeck meant nothing to him, so Annabelle provided as good a translation as she could, although her Koline was not up to all the technical terms covering aerial vessels and ship’s artillery.

Eclipse was the faster ship and Annabelle gathered it could have brought Lady Zumaat down in short order had that been its goal. An hour served to close the distance enough for Eclipse to have the higher position astern, from which it could have made one long, fast dive to below Lady Zumaat, and then discharged a gun into the stern lifting panels. One or two good hits, according to Captain Moorie, would destroy enough of the louvers to render maintenance of proper trim impossible, and leave the merchant vessel to tumble from the sky and crash. But wrecking the kite, and destroying its sacred cargo, apparently would not do.

Instead, Eclipse worked on Lady Zumaat’s rigging. The dive, when it came, left Eclipse below and to port, with its bow gun loaded with cutting shot and cranked aloft. Captain Moorie banked away, Eclipse fired, and the cutting shot made popping sounds as it tore through the port canvas wing. The gun’s recoil bled off Eclipse’s speed and Lady Zumaat drew ahead. Eclipse gained altitude, again falling further behind, then slowly overtook them until again positioned for a dive. And so the chase went for hour after hour.

All the while Nathanial studied the workings of the ship with single-minded focus, almost a desperate determination. At one point, when Lady Zumaat nosed up sharply in a bank, the linen wings fluttered oddly, the ship seemed to hesitate, and the deck seemed to fall away under them for a moment. Then the nose came down, the bank levelled, and the ship regained its stability.

“Hmmm!” Nathanial said, his brow furrowed in intense thought, as if grappling with a problem of enormous complexity.

Lady Zumaat’s own gunners seldom had a clear shot. The capstan turned the platform so slowly, and the aiming screw changed elevation no faster, that it was impossible to track the moving, banking, diving target. Instead, the gunner tried to guess which angle the enemy would choose next, aim the gun there, and sometimes call for a bank to port or starboard to help bring the gun on track. Most of their shots went wide, and each discharge enveloped the quarterdeck with choking, sulphurous smoke. Once they put a solid shot through the port wing on Eclipse, which raised a cheer from Lady Zumaat’s crew, but the enemy kite seemed to lose none of her speed for the small hole the shot made.

The one positive effect of Lady Zumaat’s fire was the recoil, which gave them a little more speed each discharge. Annabelle wondered if this might be used to pull further ahead, but Corporal Tolni explained the merchant vessel did not carry enough powder and shot to keep discharging its gun endlessly—probably no more than a score of rounds were all they carried in the shot locker, he said. That did not seem like a great many to Annabelle, and by the time the western horizon began turning orange with the approach of dawn, they had fired ten or twelve times.

As the sky lightened, she saw the crew around her, faces blackened with powder smoke from the discharges of the gun, and lined with fatigue and anxiety. She was surprised to see her own hand on the rail, grimy with spent powder, and Nathanial’s face was as well. Two ship’s boys carried leather water buckets, one up to the crew of the gun, who drank thirstily, the other among the quarterdeck crew. He came to Nathanial and her and offered the wooden ladle, and she was surprised how parched she suddenly felt, and unlike the others, she had done nothing but sit and watch. The water tasted cool and delightfully sweet.

“She’s ready for another dive,” Nathanial said, pointing up and squinting, as the sun was now full-up to the east. “How many more passes can we take, I wonder?”

“Hands inboard!” Captain Moorie shouted, “Lively, now!” The sidemen were busy patching holes in the port sail-wing, and re-splicing severed lines, hurried back along the spars for the safety of the deck. That wing still looked tattered and frail. Moorie had reduced their speed after the last attack for fear the wing would fail altogether in a steeper dive. That was Eclipse’s strategy, wasn’t it?

Annabelle shaded her eyes and looked up at their relentless pursuer, the ship she now hated as if it were a living thing. With the sun above the eastern horizon, the port side of Eclipse was black with shadow, as if in confirmation of its name. But further to her left Annabelle saw another flicker of movement, a lone skrill in a rapid, shallow dive at right angles to Eclipse. The skrill had the sun behind it, would be invisible to the hostile ship.

“Ha!” Kak’hamish called in triumph, seeing the skrill as well.

Eclipse began to nose over, but before it began its dive the skrill streaked past it, its flight path jogged, slowed by collision with something. Then a long panel of the starboard wing flapped free above the kite and it heeled over sharply to that side, began to side-slip, and then fell away out of her sight. Nathanial ran to the aft rail to see.

“Blast!” he shouted. “The bounders have regained their trim. They’ve lost three or four hundred feet of altitude, though. That will show them!” he shouted, and he shook his fist at them in triumph.

Annabelle now clearly saw the skrill and its rider in a long, gentle banking turn. The rider’s long red hair rippled in the wind and she—for somehow Annabelle sensed this was a woman, although she knew not how—looked back over her shoulder at Eclipse below. The skrill levelled, its course now back toward Eclipse, and then dove again.

“No!” Kak’hamish called, and then shouted in a language entirely foreign to Annabelle. Whatever he said, the skrill and rider paid no mind and continued their dive out of her sight.

Annabelle heard the crackle of musket fire, and then Nathanial turned quickly away from the rail, his face twisted with disappointment. Kak’hamish remained at the rail, watching for almost a minute as Nathanial made his way back and sat heavily by her side.

“Shot,” he said. “I saw the beast crumble myself, although it fell through the rigging and seemed to knock something loose.”

Annabelle cared little about that for the moment. Her eyes remained on Kak’hamish’s back and when he turned his face was composed, if sad. He met her eyes.

“The skrill recovered before it reached ground. She may still live,” he said, but with little real hope. Then he turned to Moorie. “Now’s our chance, Captain, while Eclipse has lost way and her rigging’s (something),” he said with animation. She hadn’t understood the last word, but suspected it meant confused, or asunder.

“Helm, hard a starboard!” Moorie ordered. “Trim, five points down-nose, not a knife’s blade more, and give us sixteenth-weight. Gunner, we’ll cut under the bastard and you blow his bottom out.”

“Double shot!” the gunner’s mate ordered as the wind-wing banked and then dove toward Eclipse. The dive was shallow and Moorie ran to the port rail to watch the wing there, anxiety in every line in his face. Would the wing hold? The gunner’s mate sweated as he cranked the elevating screw as fast as he could and the muzzle of the cannon climbed even as the loader rammed home a second round shot and wadding. The gun crew cast anxious glances over their shoulders as they worked.

Would the wing hold?

It held. For a moment the shadow of Eclipse passed over the quarterdeck deck of Lady Zumaat, then the sun appeared again and the gunner pulled the lanyard. Annabelle closed her eyes.

Instead of the thunderous report she had grown used to, this was shorter, a higher-pitched crack, accompanied by the sound of breaking metal and the screams of men close-by. Smoke still enveloped her but she opened her eyes to see anyway. As the passing air tore the smoke away, she heard a deep groaning and splintering of wood. She looked forward—the gun had burst! The gun crew lay dead or maimed on the deck around the ruin of the platform and, as she watched, the damaged timber supports on the port side collapsed, the split and broken bronze cannon barrel thundered to the deck, and it began to roll. She realised the ship had drifted into a shallow bank to port and now the gun barrel rolled that way, the broken stubs of its trunnions thudding and gouging the deck as it did. Captain Moorie stood with his back to the rail, transfixed by fear, until the cannon barrel rolled over him and took him and a twelve-foot section of the quarterdeck railing over the side, tearing loose more of the port side wing rigging as it fell.

She looked aft across the quarterdeck and saw its surface gouged by debris from the exploded gun, saw the helmsman trying to hold the tiller steady as blood streamed down his face, and then her heart seemed to skip a beat.

Kak’hamish was down!

“Oh, no! Ohno-ohno-ohno,” she cried as she pulled at the line tying her to the railing. Nathanial dashed over to the Martian’s still form and gently rolled him over. Corporal Tolni joined him by the time Annabelle had scrambled to them.

Kak’hamish’s eyes fluttered open. He looked down at the red stain spreading across his abdomen and he sighed. “Not what I wanted,” he said, his voice weak. His eyes turned to Tolni. He pulled Nathanial’s pistol from his waist sash and thrust the grip toward the corporal. “Your duty now,” he said.

“While I live, no harm shall come to them,” Tolni said. He took the pistol. “While I live,” he said again.

Kak’hamish shuddered and his eyes closed.

“Is he gone?” Nathanial asked.

Annabelle felt his throat, felt a pulse, although weak. “No, merely unconscious, but we must stop the bleeding.”

Nathanial pulled off his shirt and ripped it in two. Annabelle hesitated only for a moment, then pushed the wadded cloth over and into the hole in Kak’hamish’s abdomen. They rolled him and did the same with the smaller hole in his back, although the blood stain on the deck was now quite large.

A shadow fell across the quarterdeck. They all looked up and saw Eclipse, two hundred feet above them, drifting with the wind but with men swarming on the spars and outriggers, mending the damage. Their own helmsman had fallen unconscious by the tiller and Lady Zumaat coasted in a broad, shallow banking dive.

“The ship,” Annabelle ordered. “You must look to the ship. There is no one else. Leave Kak’hamish to me.”

Nathanial looked around for a moment, his eyes wild, and then he seemed to grow calm. “Corporal Tolni, I have a plan. Do you trust my judgment?”

“Well…no, sir,” the corporal said apologetically.

“Trust him,” Kak’hamish whispered.

3.

fluid dynamics, Nathanial thought to himself. That’s all this gliding business was, just fluid dynamics. Compression and flow, velocity and direction.

Damned complicated fluid dynamics, that was certain, but physics all the same. And when they stopped gliding—well, that’s when old Newton kicked in with a vengeance, didn’t he? Yes, damned if he didn’t.

“Corporal, tell them to make sure the leading edge of the wing is as strong as they can make it.”

“Yes, sir,” Tolni replied and shouted an order to the sidemen. Most of them were on the port outriggers already, trying to lash together enough of a wing to take a strong dive, just one strong dive. Once the helmsman was revived and bandaged, he’d been able to keep them on a steady course to the east, and Nathanial had the trimsman keep the kite in a shallow enough dive they maintained their speed but put as little strain on the port wing as possible. The helmsman and trimsman were the closest men left to officers on the ship, and they were frightened enough to take orders from anyone with a plan. Yes, a plan…

Eclipse would dive under them and then make a slight bank to the left to put their gun under their port wing. Lady Zumaat would bank to the right, as Moorie always had, to pull the port wing out of their gun sight. Eclipse would follow the bank right, to keep the wing in its sights…

“He’s gaining on us quickly,” Tolni said, looking back over the stern rail.

Nathanial looked back. Eclipse had rested dead in the air for fifteen or twenty minutes, repairing her rigging, but now that she was under way, she came on like a meteor.

“They’ll slow, once they are in position,” Nathanial said. “If they come in too fast, the shot will be difficult. With our gun gone, they have nothing to fear.”

He looked to Annabelle and Kak’hamish, both now lashed to the railing by the trim station. The broad stain of blood Kak’hamish had left when they dragged him over now made Nathanial’s chest turn cold. Too much blood, he thought.

“Better bring in those sidemen. I don’t want to lose any of them over the side.”

Tolni shouted the order and some of the crew came back, but others looked over their shoulder at Eclipse, shouted an answer, and kept working.

“Why aren’t they coming inboard?” Nathanial asked.

“They say there is still time to give you a strong forward wing. You need the wing, don’t you?”

Nathanial nodded, for the moment too moved to speak. Men imperilled their lives out there, dangling three thousand feet above the surface of the world with nothing but a slack line under their feet and a spar against their belly. Just thinking about it made him dizzy. They gambled their lives on no better prospect than the hope a plan, his plan, might work. They did not even know its details.

“Let’s make sure the helmsman knows the signals,” Nathanial said to give him an excuse to look away from the dangling sidemen. “There will be no time for a translation once it starts.”

Tolni needed to know as well, as he would bark the orders down to the trimsman as soon as Nathanial signalled them. The trimsman could not look away from his plumb bobs and spirit levels before the manoeuvre started, and once it did he could not afford to turn his head, lest he lose his sense of balance and orientation.

“He slows, Mister Stone,” Tolni said after a minute or two of additional practice. “He will be in position any second.”

“Get the sidemen in, and no arguments.”

Now they scrambled inboard and slipped into the rope loops Nathanial had ordered secured to the rail at the ship’s waist. Tolni took his place at the front of the trim station rail and tied his own rope, and Nathanial did the same at the aft port corner rail, where he had a clear view down and to the left.

Above and behind them, Eclipse began its dive. This dive was shallow, the warship overtook them slowly, almost leisurely.

“Tolni, start our own dive,” Nathanial called, and Lady Zumaat nosed over and picked up speed. Nathanial looked over his shoulder; the port wing held.

Eclipse dropped its nose into a steeper dive and began overtaking them. As it grew closer Nathanial could make out movement on the kite’s deck, then individual figures, and finally faces as Eclipse came even with their altitude no more than sixty feet astern. The gun crew stood well behind their piece, save the gunner who crouched beside it, his hand on the lanyard. The gun’s barrel was elevated perhaps thirty degrees.

On the other side of the gun stood a tall figure in dark grey robes, layers and layers of robes, all of them rotting and tattered, the long sleeves and skirts trailing in the wind. The man’s head was shaven, the first Martian Nathanial had seen to do so, his eyes deep-set, his arms folded across his chest. The man’s eyes locked on Nathanial’s and as Eclipse sank below the level of the stern, the man raised one hand in salute.

Nathanial raised both of his arms and held them straight out to the side. The robed man frowned, unfamiliar with this greeting. Eclipse slid slightly to the left, Nathanial’s right, and the gunner made his lanyard taught.

Nathanial tilted his arms to his left, and Lady Zumaat banked in that direction. Below them Eclipse started to bank in response. Nathanial brought his arms sharply back the other way. The robed man saw the gesture, turned and shouted, but it was too late. Lady Zumaat banked back and just as Eclipse levelled to fire, Nathanial pulled his arms sharply into his body.

Lady Zumaat’s nose shot up until the kite stood at nearly a forty-five degree angle. Its wings groaned and protested but held. Nathanial now looked almost directly down on Eclipse, saw its broad, round foredeck and quarterdeck with a narrower catwalk between, saw the fore gun on its pivot mount as it fired, and the cutshot rattled off the stern of Lady Zumaat and brushed past Nathanial’s arms. The merchant ship’s wings shuddered, the linen rippled as he saw it do before, and the air spilled out the front, driving the ship back and down just as the lifters lost half their efficiency at this steep angle and the merchant ship went from an apparent weight of thirty tons to two hundred and fifty.

Nathanial watched the upturned faces grow in size as their looks turned to horror, and then the stern crushed the foredeck of Eclipse with a splintering crash, carried it down with the massive falling kite, and in a second had turned the smaller vessel directly nose down.

Nathanial gave no more orders; the trimsman knew what to do, if he was able. He shifted lift to the back, left the bow fall, and then when the deck came level, went to full lift. The Eclipse’s quarterdeck, now perpendicular to the ground, shot past Nathanial, not ten feet away, and its stern rail snagged and shattered Lady Zumaat’s rudder, showering Nathanial with splinters, but then it was gone. Lady Zumaat righted itself and continued to rise on full lift.

“Level the ship,” someone said.

He said it, but the sound seemed to come from far away. He looked over the rail and over a thousand feet below he saw Eclipse hurtling straight down toward the surface of Mars, its angle so acute the lifters had no effect, no ability to recover. It continued accelerating until finally it hit the ground, disappearing into an enormous cloud of dust.

He turned away, pulled the rope loose, and made his way forward to where Annabelle cradled Kak’hamish’s head on her lap. Tears stained her cheek, tracing long black tracks through the caked grime of the powder smoke. Nathanial knelt by them.

“You are injured, Nathanial,” Kak’hamish said weakly, and Nathanial saw his friend’s mouth had filled with blood and run down his jaw. Nathanial looked at his left arm and saw a long splinter, perhaps eight inches long, that had pierced the middle of his forearm.

“It is nothing,” he said. “How do you fare?”

“I am dying, but I fare well. If Gillsa lives, give my body to her. She will take it to the desert.”

“Don’t speak,” Nathanial said.

Kak’hamish smiled. “If not now, when? You must go to Siruahn. Tell them what you know of the plot. Tolni?”

“I am here, sir,’ the corporal answered, and knelt beside them as well.

“Tell the council. When you do, give them this. They will know what to do with it.” He touched the small leather medicine bag around his throat and tried to pull the thong free but lacked the strength.

“I will do as you ask, sir,” Tolni said.

“Good. Annabelle and Nathanial, the council will argue about what to do with you, but in the end they will treat you fairly. They are fools, but then all men are. I think you will find a few good fools there, which is all a wise person can hope for. Now, fare you well. We will not speak again.”

Nathanial looked at him but said nothing, did not know what to say.

“A question troubles you,” Kak’hamish said.

“Why, Kak’hamish? Why did you go into the desert to die? I would like to know.”

“Nathanial, my very good friend—the world is not an open book.”

And he was gone.