Angel Isle

CHAPTER

24

They vanished, animals and all, and Angel Isle was empty apart from the calling seabirds. Now, suddenly, the inward Maja asserted itself and a wave of apprehension swept through her. They must all have been feeling a good bit of adult anxiety but been too proud to admit it, in the case of the Lady Kzuva perhaps even to herself. This was different. This was a child’s terrors of being set in front of an audience of important men and women and being expected to perform some feat that would be far beyond her, even if she’d had the slightest idea how to begin. Without thought she squeezed Ribek’s hand for reassurance. He didn’t return the gesture but started to shuffle to the right, then realized his mistake and laughed aloud.

“False alarm,” he called. “Whoops!”

His grip on her hand tightened. Angel Isle vanished dim on her right. She felt a rushing motion, incredibly smooth, incredibly fast. She could see the glitter of ocean to her left, the glare of sky overhead, the mainland, but all hurtling away so quickly behind her that even with her younger eyes all detail would have been lost. The movement ended as instantaneously as it had begun, without any jolt or forward lurch of her body, and she was in an enclosed space unlike anything she had ever seen before. She tucked her cane under her arm and used her free hand to put her eyeglasses to her face.

They were in a metal-and-glass room more than twice as big as the kitchen at Woodbourne, but with three curved, outward-bulging walls that consisted mainly of large clear windows. One of these was immediately behind her. Through the one opposite her Maja could see two airboats floating along, a small one fairly near and a larger one in the distance, with blue and white banners flying from their bows.

There were a couple of dozen people in the room, four of them soldiers guarding the two closed doors in the straight, windowless wall to her right. These wore baggy lime-green uniforms and carried things that must be weapons, though they didn’t look as if they’d be much use for spearing or slashing or bashing anyone. Two more soldiers were sitting at a big table in the middle of the room, working at documents, another three were sitting at small fixed tables manipulating mysterious machines, and another was talking quietly into a shiny gadget he held in his hand. On her left, with their backs to the room, a dozen or more people were looking out through the single window that stretched almost the whole length of that wall. They were listening to a tall, pale, gaunt-faced man in a much smarter lime-green uniform as he explained to them something that was happening beyond the window. Looking at him, Maja saw at once why Saranja called the Pirates Sheep-faces. The language he was using was full of odd gargling sounds. Five of his audience were also in uniform, but the rest wore a variety of clothes, slightly odd in style, neat but dull. Three of them were women.

She sensed a presence behind her shoulder.

“Chanad?” she said in her head.

“I am here. I have their magicians. I am about to remove the guards.”

A flicker of movement to her right caught her eye. She turned and saw that the armed men by the doors had vanished. She was certain that the doors themselves hadn’t moved.

Ribek squeezed her hand twice in quick succession, waited and squeezed again—the signal for “Ready?” She squeezed once—“Yes.” He let go of her hand and they were visible. The man talking to the gadget broke off, stared, and gave a shout. Everyone turned back to the room. There was a moment of astonished stillness. The men at the tables started to rise, somebody shouted an order, eyes turned toward the wall with the doors in it, expressions varied from baffled astonishment to equally baffled indignation, then several of the soldiers by the window made as if to rush at the intruders.

Maja gripped her cane at the center and held it horizontally in front of her in a gesture Benayu had taught her on Angel Isle. A pulse of yellow light traveled rapidly along it, creating an invisible barrier across the room. Every movement beyond it froze.

“Forgive the intrusion,” said Ribek. “Do any of you speak Imperial…? Yes?”

A young man at one of the desks had thawed into movement. He didn’t look like a Sheep-face. Perhaps, like Striclan, he was the child of parents whom the Pirates had bought or snatched from the Empire.

“I speak both languages, er, sir,” he said, “but I’m in Intelligence. There are professional interpreters aboard for the landings.”

“Please bring one of them to mind…. Excellent. Lady Kzuva…”

Maja clicked her fingers and a man appeared out of nowhere. His eyes were rheumy with sleep and he was wearing only his underclothes.

“Perhaps you’d better go and get dressed,” said Ribek. Maja clicked her fingers again. The man vanished.

“While we are waiting,” he went on, “would you apologize to the Syndics and officers for our intrusion and their temporary immobility, and tell them that Lady Kzuva will release them on condition that they will then listen to what we have to say.”

The man blinked and stared at Maja and spoke to the group by the big window. He was obviously saying a good bit more than Ribek had told him. Maja heard Lady Kzuva’s name, and guessed he was explaining who she was, and adding that to judge by their dress the other intruders were also fairly important people.

“You can lower the cane now,” said Chanad’s voice in her head.

Maja did so, and the magic-stilled movements completed themselves. The men who’d been rushing to confront the intruders pulled up short. A dozen voices spoke together. A man shouted an order and the voices were silent. He turned to the interpreter and spoke again in a steady, level voice full of controlled outrage.

He was short, stocky and muscular, bald, with a pale, square, flattish face and pale blue eyes. Another Sheep-face. The creases in his uniform trousers and the pleats on the pockets of his close-fitting jacket were as straight and sharp as ironing could make them. There were two broad gold bars on his epaulettes. He was a formidable presence. The inner Maja would have been terrified of him, but Lady Kzuva studied him with interest. She didn’t like him much, but she recognized him as an equal.

“Supreme General Olbog asks who you are and why you are here,” said the intelligence officer. “He would also like to know what has become of the men who were guarding the doors.”

“The guards are elsewhere and unharmed,” said Ribek, pausing between sentences for translation. “We don’t want anyone hurt. There has been more than enough of that around Tarshu. We will introduce ourselves individually later. For the moment I will say that we are a delegation from various major interests in the Empire, and we are here in the first place to persuade you to call off your assault on Larg, or, failing that, to prevent it; and in the second place to negotiate with the Syndics and your military command on a process leading up to your complete withdrawal from the Empire. To clarify matters, I should add that the so-called Watchers have ceased to exist. The magicians you have aboard will probably have reported a major eruption of magical activity yesterday, some distance up the coast, off Barda. That was caused by our destruction of the Watchers.”

The final sentence was followed by a hush of astonishment. Several voices spoke together, all asking what sounded like much the same question. General Olbog remained expressionless, but turned to the intelligence officer and nodded to him to translate.

“The Watchers are destroyed? You did it?”

“We, at the instigation of the late President of the Grand Magical Council, who was recently returned from a long absence and on the verge of death…. Please wait for me to finish before you ask more questions.

“The first magical outburst was our destruction of the Watchers, the second the passing away of both the late President and the Guardian of Larg. Ah, your official interpreter is now dressed and ready. Shall we pause to allow him to collect his wits?”

General Olbog nodded and gestured. The soldiers moved smartly up to one end of the window and the Syndics drifted to the other. Maja’s hip was starting to ache with standing, but as she was turning to beckon to Benayu Ribek laid his hand on her arm.

“He’s going to be busy,” he muttered. “Chair? Right.”

The two groups by the window were keeping their voices down, but by the time Ribek had fetched a chair from the central table and helped her to sit snatches of what they were saying were whispering in Maja’s mind.

“Now we’ve seen it all. I’d like to see bloody Olbog match that.”

“Think they’re what they say they are?”

“The old lady’s pretty impressive.”

“I really fancy the soldier lass.”

“Just conjuring tricks.”

“Have you still got a connection on that, Lieutenant?”

“Yessir.”

“Don’t let on. I’ll call you in a minute. Come over here with a couple of documents.”

“Will do, sir.”

“And find out what the hell’s happening with our tame magicians. Supposed to have one here, weren’t we?”

“Will do, sir.”

“What’s with the menagerie? We’re not children.”

“My dad’s a bug-hunter. He’d give his soul for that moth.”

“Prevent the landing, the fellow said. D’you think they could really do that?”

“One in the eye for bloody Olbog. Hope he tries it.”

“It’ll take more than conjuring tricks.”

“Bring me the abort file, will you, Lieutenant.”

“Yessir.”

“Must say, I’d like to see our weapons in action after what we’ve paid for them.”

“I wouldn’t mind seeing a couple of dragons—not too close, mind. Something to tell the kids.”

“Right, Lieutenant. Look over my shoulder. I’m showing you stuff in the file, right. You’re through to Attack Comm?”

“Yessir.”

“Tell them Code Nine Jiddi Nine. Immediate action. Got it? Yes, Pashgahr?”

“We are still moving faster than the air cover is able to. Troops will be landing without air cover.”

“Weren’t you listening? The Guardian of Larg has passed away. That means Larg must be without whatever defenses it may have had. Check, Intelligence?”

“Nothing on a Guardian as such in the files, sir. Speculation by the agent reporting lack of magical activity within and around Larg that some powerful force must be maintaining the situation.”

“Hear that, Syndic? No magic in Larg? Wasn’t in our briefing.”

“Fleet equipped to counter any magical activity they may meet, wasn’t it. Covers the point, I suppose?”

“Right, Pashgahr. How long before the boats are off, as of now?”

“We got it down to seventeen minutes forty in drill practice, General.”

“You take over the operations side then. I’ll spin things out here.”

“Very good, sir. I suggest, for the look of the thing, you get the Syndics to ask a question or two. Burdag is sound—he’s got a big holding in Gas Avionics in his sister’s name.”

“Good point. Time the bastards earned their keep instead of acting like we’re laying on a firework display for their amusement. All set? Interpreter?”

“I am ready, sir. I must apologize—”

“You can cut that out. Ask these people to tell us more about themselves and what proof they have of the authority they are claiming.”

“Everyone get all that?” muttered Ribek. “They’re playing into our hands. We’ve just got to get the timing right.”

“Find an excuse for Benayu to get me outside and disappear me,” said Saranja. “I’ll take Rocky, and if he keeps us invisible we can scout around and keep an eye on things.”

“We’ll need you back here when the moment comes.”

“Bennay, my brooch, please,” said Maja.

“Very good, my lady.”

He unpinned the brooch, placed it briefly between his palms and showed it to her before he pinned it back on. There were only two horses on it now.

The interpreter, a lanky, anxious young man in an ill-fitting uniform, turned toward them. He too didn’t look like a Sheep-face, but someone they might well have met at a way station on an Imperial Highway. Ribek nodded when he’d finished telling them some of what the general had said.

“As you wish,” he answered. “Would you begin, Lady Kzuva?”

Maja rose stiffly, stood leaning with both hands on her cane, and spoke directly to the group of Syndics. There was a pale-faced middle-aged woman among them that she liked the look of.

“I am the hereditary Landholder of Kzuva,” she said, “which is a large estate toward the north of the Empire and carries with it various offices and titles in the Imperial Household, and also considerable magical powers. I use these only when I must, as just now. I am not, of course, a professional magician. I have better things to do with my time, so I employ a woman for that purpose. Some of the renegades you have on board should at least have heard of me.”

She sat down and waited while the others introduced themselves in the roles they had talked about on Angel Isle. Ribek claimed to have inherited one particular magical power, but had never used more than a small part of it to maintain a regular supply of water through his millwheels. Striclan said he didn’t have any, as it was a condition of his job as Under-secretary in Magdep.

“I can do a bit of magic,” Saranja explained. “Not just ordinary hedge magic—better than that. There’s a lot of people like me in the Empire. Some of us could be serious professional magicians if we wanted, but we don’t use it much. It isn’t just that the Watchers cracked down on it, though there was that, of course, but even without them we don’t. As Lady Kzuva says, it gets in the way. I’ll show you the sort of thing.”

She drew her saber and sliced the air in front of her. One of the empty chairs at the central table fell neatly in two.

“That sort of thing runs in a lot of old military families,” she added. “Everyone in my regiment can do it, but we’re a picked regiment. You probably came across a bit of it around Tarshu.”

Maja saw some of the soldiers glancing anxiously toward the Syndics. That must have been a good guess of Benayu’s. Of course the Watchers would have given their troops magically enhanced weapons to fight the fantastical armory of the Pirates, and of course (from what she now knew of them) the generals wouldn’t have told the people back home about everything they were up against.

“And finally,” said Ribek, in exactly the same tone as he’d used to introduce everyone else, “this is Sponge. He and the other creatures who have come with us represent the animals of the Empire. Sponge here will speak for them.”

“Speak?” queried the interpreter before translating.

“I speak for animals,” said Sponge. His voice wasn’t the one Maja had forced into his throat in that other universe, but fully articulate, low in the register, each word separate from its neighbors with a slight snarl at the end. A couple of the Syndics clapped. Though others had frowned at them, Maja for the first time felt a little sympathy for General Olbog. The fate of the Empire might depend upon this meeting and here they were treating it as a show put on for their amusement.

“Animals do not want you in our places,” Sponge went on. “You do not understand our places, our humans, our animals. Now I tell you this. We too have magic. I use magic to speak to you. Watchers sent dragon against us. I fought it. I became big. I grew wings. I flew. I fought dragon, killed it. It wounded me. See.”

He turned to display the new-healed scar in his flank.

“Now think,” he went on. “You come to Empire. Humans use their magic. Fight you. We use our magic. Fight you. Not just big strong biters, tearers. One ant—little, little magic. How many ants in Empire? Millions of millions. Think. Ants, maggots, cockroaches, rats, mice in your food stores, lice, bugs in your bedding, snakes in your path, mosquitoes, wasps, ticks on your flesh, birds, bats watching what you do, where you go, millions of millions of us, all fight you alongside humans. You fight us? How? Think.”

General Olbog spoke, his rage by now barely under control. His words had the shape of a question, followed by a brief order to the interpreter.

“Where are our bloody magicians? Why didn’t they tell us any of this? Don’t translate that.”

“May we please proceed,” said Ribek smoothly. “I have not finished answering your questions. Let me do that, and then you can discuss what I’ve told you among yourselves before I try to answer any further questions that may arise. You asked for proof of the authority under which we claim to act. We have come in haste, in view of the imminent attack on Larg, and there hasn’t been time to obtain writs with the Emperor’s seal from Talagh—the Imperial bureaucracy is notoriously slow to move. However, the President-designate of the Grand Council has said that she will make herself available, if needed. She carries the Emperor’s seal of office, in the form of a ring. To put your minds at rest, it is very powerfully protected from any form of magical tampering or duplication, as well as plain theft. Only the President or President-designate can wear it. Captain Saranja will act as an escort. Ready, Captain?”

Saranja stretched her right arm out in front of her and opened her fist, palm down. For a fraction of an instant a small silver object started to fall, but in the rest of that instant it seemed to catch fire and explode, and in the next the blaze gathered itself into a great scarlet and golden shape, Rocky in all his splendor, winged and caparisoned, pawing gently at the deck with one front hoof as if eager for action. Effortlessly Saranja swung herself into the saddle, drew her saber, saluted Maja, the Syndics and General Olbog in that order, and disappeared.

“The President-designate will be with us shortly,” said Ribek as easily as if they had just witnessed some everyday event. “You will need your own magicians to authenticate the seal. You may have been wondering why they weren’t present. The answer is that we took them into our temporary protection to avoid the possibility of a magical conflict, which would have been a very risky undertaking not only for the participants but also for anyone who happened to be present. Lady Kzuva, if you would be so kind.”

Maja beckoned. Benayu appeared at her shoulder, knelt, took three apples out of his belt-pouch and placed them on the floor in front of her and stood back.

Maja touched each of the apples in turn with the tip of her cane. Instantly they shriveled and vanished, leaving nothing but three small brown seeds on the floor. Rapidly these sprouted and became three slim stems, each with a single bud at the top. As they continued to grow, a pair of twigs appeared on either side of each stem a little below the bud. These lengthened into drooping branches with a few leaves sprouting from the ends.

When the saplings were about as tall as a man, Maja touched them again with her cane. They stopped growing and swelled. The buds became heads, the side branches arms and the leaves fingers, and three not-quite-human figures stood before them. One was naked to the waist, revealing a well-built muscular body with a tiger-skin draped across his shoulders. The head of the tiger was the living head of the man. The second was a woman robed from head to foot in shimmering black. Only her silver face and hands were visible. The third was a head taller than anyone in the room, but grotesquely thin. His eyes were three times the size of human eyes, vivid yellow, and had slits for pupils.

The Lady Kzuva part of Maja smiled at the sheer vulgarity of this attempt to impress the barbarians, then shook her head, still smiling, because it wasn’t, after all, much different from what they themselves had been doing. The frivolous Syndics were right. It had been a show put on for their amusement. But still, the fate of the Empire depended on it. The shadow of a memory flickered in her mind. When she’d needed a new magician and interviewed applicants…Yes…The silver woman had looked almost human then, but that robe…she would be able to confirm that she was the real Lady Kzuva.

“Please give them a moment to recover,” said Ribek. “It is an unnerving experience for any magician to be so mastered. And I should tell you that it would not have been done so easily if they had not been seriously weakened by being too long at sea, far from the sources of—”

He broke off abruptly and turned. Rocky had reappeared on their right and now stood waiting for his riders to dismount before he settled his wings. Saranja twisted down, neatly avoiding Chanad in the rear saddle, turned urgently to Maja, touched the hilt of her saber by way of salute and said, “My lady, the landing has started. We saw thirty or more boats laden with men, setting out for the shore.”

She turned to help Chanad dismount.

Maja swung round, ignoring the pang from her hip.

“Is this true, General Olbog?”

The General made a pacifying gesture with his hands and started to speak slowly and evenly, as if reasoning with a child. Striclan’s voice spoke in Maja’s mind.

“He is telling the interpreter to take it slowly. He is saying that it is an administrative error, and that the landing will now have to take place, but as soon as the soldiers are ashore they will be ordered to proceed no further.”

“Nonsense, General,” Maja snapped. “We heard you give the order with your own lips. Do you think we would have been so stupid as to come here and rely solely on your own interpreter, without the means to understand directly what you were saying? With your permission, Madam President-designate?”

“Please do what you must, Lady Kzuva,” said Chanad, shaking her head wearily, as if at the unplumbable stupidity of humankind. Maja turned back to General Olbog.

“Very well,” she said. “Since you refuse to stop the landing, we are now forced to do so ourselves. Captain, Mr. Ruddya, please carry on. Bennay, your shoulder. Stand aside, please.”

Leaning on Benayu she hobbled up to the long window with the others following. The spectators already there made room for them. Now she was able to see what they’d been looking at. Ahead of them, still three or four miles off, lay the shoreline and hills around Larg, their colors already muted by the approach of dusk. She could see the undying flame crowning the rock pillar that imprisoned the demon Azarod, the waves breaking gently against the harbor bar, the mild swell on the last reaches of ocean glistening into bars of light under the westering sun. Black against that brightness, two medium-sized airboats floated shoreward ahead of the much larger one she was on. There were several more lined out to either side of her. Below them ships of the Pirate fleet advanced slowly on the city, first a screen of smaller vessels, then several larger ones, and then, almost beneath where she was standing, three big, broad-beamed vessels, obviously not warships but carriers. These had stopped moving and had lowered platforms something like the drawbridge of a moated town, leaving a wide opening in the bows out of which had emerged three lines of open barges, each carrying forty or more armed men. They were advancing on Larg far faster than the rest of the fleet. The leading barges were already almost level with the forward screen.

“Captain, Mr. Ruddya, you had better act at once. Any nearer, and we shall discommode the good citizens of Larg.”

Saranja had Zald ready in her belt-pouch. She drew the great jewel out and held it in her left hand, with the surface toward her. The fingers of her right hand moved in a careful, dance-like pattern over the jewels surrounding the central amber. That done, she spoke five resonant syllables, with deliberate pauses between them. Each seemed to linger in the air like a bell note until she spoke the next. All were meaningless to Maja and probably to every one else in the room except Benayu, whom she’d seen telling Saranja what to do back on Angel Isle. As the last syllable faded away she lifted the amber jewel gently from its setting.

She cupped it in her right hand as if showing it to Ribek. He closed his own hand over hers and turned, not to the window, but to his right. North. They have a different magic in the north.

He started to sing, if you could call it singing. She remembered how oddly unable he’d been, on their journey through the desert, to carry the simplest tune, but this was different. Somehow she knew that he was singing it as it was meant to be sung, this steady, rippling drone, repetitive, endless but full of intricate little changes, like the surface of a flowing stream. In this hot country, far from the mountains of his home, he was singing, as his ancestors had done for generations before him, to the northern snows.

The sky darkened, and darkened further. The sea changed color, from blue-green to a curious pale mottled gray. The advancing fleet seemed to have come to a sudden halt. A snowflake drifted down past the window, and another, large as a child’s hand. The sea changed color again, as the sun, still reaching in from the west beneath the sudden astonishing darkness of the cloud layer, dazzled back off the whiteness below. Then everything vanished, blotted out by the falling snow. The room was suddenly as cold as a midwinter morning in the Valley. The owl on Saranja’s shoulder fluffed out its feathers and the squirrel on Ribek’s was huddling against his neck for warmth. She felt a fidgeting on her head and knew that her moth must have been triggered into hibernation and was burrowing in under her head-scarf.

From behind the closed doors came the sound of alarm bells, urgent shouts of command. General Olbog was shouting too. Striclan’s voice spoke in Maja’s head.

“What the hell do you people think you are doing? You are endangering the ship!”

Maja waited for the translator’s more tactful version before she answered.

“Tell him that nobody will be hurt, unless they are stupid enough to harm each other. The ship is in no danger.”

Benayu’s shoulder was trembling beneath her hand.

“Are you all right?” she murmured. “You’ve done wonders.”

“I’m just about done for. I can’t keep everything going much longer.”

“It is not needed. I am not a sensitive, so the child is safe in my shelter. The sea is affecting you more strongly than you predicted?”

“It’s just the last straw. I can manage the little stuff, talking in your heads, that sort of thing. But I’m not up to anything else big. Nor’s Chanad. Ribek’s in charge now. This had better work. Ugh—I didn’t realize how cold it was going to be.”

He shuddered again. Maja turned from the window, looking for the three hired magicians. They were standing a little way back, their faces unreadable behind their chosen masks, but their postures tense and watchful. She beckoned them forward.

“I think I have met you before, haven’t I?” she said to the silver woman. “Your appearance was less, ah, striking then. You came for a post in my household, but I’d already chosen someone else. Your name begins with a Q, I think. Quirril?”

“Quiriul, my lady.”

“I’m sorry to find you here.”

“It was that or be conscripted by the Watchers, my lady. I chose what I thought was a lesser evil. The same with my colleagues here.”

“You must have had a hard time, so long out at sea.”

“Very hard, my lady. We became so feeble. It is like the weakness after a fever, and we dared not tell them.”

“Well, the Watchers are gone and that’s over now, so you can return home. When you are recovered, you could perhaps offer your services to the President-designate. She is going to need a lot of help. Meanwhile, if you are up to it, you could provide us with some warmth in here.”

She turned back to the window. Still nothing to see but densely falling snow. The two generals seemed to be engaged in a furious argument. Striclan came round to her other side. His snake had disappeared. Gone in under his shirt for warmth, presumably.

“Benayu is exhausted,” he said, “and Saranja and Ribek are fully occupied. I may as well simply tell you what is going on. Pashgahr wants to abort the landing—”

“It is already aborted, is it not?”

“I would have said so. But Olbog is determined to go ahead, whatever it costs.”

“He probably thinks he has been made a fool of. It is the one thing that type of man cannot endure.”

“What I suggest would mean pretending we can do something I doubt we can in fact do, with Benayu and Chanad out of action—”

“I would advise against it,” Maja interrupted. “The danger is that he might then try to destroy us before we can carry out our threat. Benayu is in no position to defend us. I have begun an attempt to suborn the hired magicians, but they too are greatly enfeebled. We are on a knife edge, Mr. Ruddya. We must stake everything on what Ribek is doing. It seems to be as effective as we could wish. Ah, that’s better.”

A faint draft had sprung up while she was speaking, warm, and smelling pleasantly of lowland pastures. Benayu stopped shivering.

“No doubt you are right,” said Striclan. “Look, I think the snowfall is less than it was.”

She glanced at the window. The flakes were already smaller and fewer, and in two or three minutes had ceased completely. The late sun appeared over the western hills once more, shining in under the cloud canopy onto a glittering island that reached in almost to the shoreline of the bay and further yet to north and south. It was far more than simply a rumpled surface of snow-covered ice, all at roughly the same level, every detail lost beneath the snow cover. Cliffs and crags of ice rose directly from the sea, and then rose further into three jagged parallel ridges, culminating in a rough peak almost level with the window through which she was looking.

Scattered among the ledges and crannies of this forbidding surface lodged the snow-swathed ships of the Pirate fleet. Among them were two airboats, forced down by the mass of snow on their gas bags, which, relieved of the weight of the boats themselves, still floated buoyant above them. The remaining airboats were still aloft, but sinking steadily to join them. Maja realized that the All-Conqueror itself was far lower than it had been before the snowfall. What an end to a proud invasion. But she felt no triumph. Not yet. They were still on a knife edge.

Beyond the closed doors an alarm bell still sounded, but the cries of command had stopped. No doubt all orders had been given and the crew were readying themselves for the landing. There was silence too in the command deck, but not for long. Murmurs broke out and increased—astonishment, alarm, anger, apprehension. Ribek raised his voice above the incipient hubbub.

“Silence, please, ladies and gentlemen. I want to show you something more important than anything you have yet seen. Will you all come to the window and stand in a single line…Thank you. Now, I want you to look through my eyes and see what I am seeing. I promise you that I will not tamper with your inner selves in any way. You will remain exactly what you are, apart from having seen something that very few humans have seen before you, and perhaps having a greater knowledge and understanding than you have now. For that purpose, will you please hold hands all along the line.”

Maja felt him take her hand in his. She sensed a hesitation on her left and turned to see what was happening. General Pashgahr was already in the line, and two of the others had joined him, but the rest were waiting to follow General Olbog’s lead, and he was still standing where he had been, a little back from the window, looking steadfastly at Ribek as if he could destroy him by glaring.

Even powerful men such as those we will be meeting have an instinct to respect women such as yourself. Maja moved a little back, interrupting his line of sight, held out her hand to him, and smiled her grandest, kindliest smile.

“General Olbog…,” she murmured.

He came, a child at a party, who has arrived determined not to participate but then been overwhelmed by the greater moral force of the adult presence. Again he hesitated, but took her hand. His own was dry and muscular, the grip of a man who prides himself on a firm handshake.

“Be gentle with it,” she told him. “Old bones, you know.”

He forced his lips into the flicker of a smile and grabbed the hand of the man next in line. Together they turned to the window and saw what Ribek was seeing. She heard the gasps spreading along the line.

Nothing had changed, and everything. The impossible island was still there, not one snowflake, not one ice-splinter different. It was its nature that had changed. What had been a series of rugged infolded ridges was now the scaly loops and coils of an immense reptilian body. The dragon that had hunted them down the sunken lane above Larg would have seemed ant-sized beside it.

She had only a glimpse, and then it was gone, and the frozen island was there once more. Then, for a flicker, it was the incredible immense creature before the island returned. The flickering increased in speed until the dizzying double visions merged and she was staring more steadily at something that hung, poised, solid and real, between two possibilities, both equally impossible, the frozen island that in the space of a few minutes had emerged out of nowhere into these sub-tropic seas and showed no sign of melting, and the gigantic animal, far colder than any temperature at which life could exist, far larger than any size at which it could sustain itself.

Even in detail the uncertainty remained, as though every part of it refused to choose between One or Other, and insisted on its existence as both. The odd-shaped summit, with its swaths of snow lying between ice-green scaurs and outcrops, and pocked and pitted here and there as if some huge hand had thrown a fistful of boulders against it, was certainly an icy summit, but equally certainly it was the creature’s head, resting on the curving outer fold of the body. The two largest holes were just empty pits, but gleamed with the liquid luminosity of deep-sunk eyes. Two apparently random mounds marked by shallow pocks also existed as a pair of scaly hummocks bearing the quadruple nostrils on the blunt snout, lidded with flaps of skin that stirred to the slow breathing of the cavernous lungs. Hollows and crevasses were folds and moldings of the tough hide, as it followed the shape of the skull beneath. Beyond it the central ridge was the vast reptilian body, curving round in the form of the northern ridge, and back again beneath the head to become the southern ridge as it dwindled into the tail. Every detail both This and That, occupying the same space at the same time. Things that could not either separately or simultaneously be true, but were.

Human eyes are not made for such seeing. Maja’s fought for mastery, for the right to choose between This and That. Her mind resisted, fully certain of what it was seeing through those eyes, the absolute thereness of the creature, its presence, its power. All along the line she could hear murmurs of the same struggle.

She turned to see how General Olbog was taking it. He was also struggling, being forced to recognize the reality of the vision, and hating it. In the middle of your worst nightmare some part of you still knows it to be only a dream. What if you then wake to find that it’s true? General Olbog didn’t look like a man who paid much attention to whatever dreams he had, if he remembered them at all. As soon as he stopped gazing through the window he would try to treat what he had seen like that—a trick of the light, another stupid bit of conjuring, pay no attention—but henceforth it would return to him in his dreams, and he would remember them on waking. For the moment, though, he couldn’t tear his eyes away from it, but stood staring out of the window and shaking his head, like a drunk man trying to clear his mind.

“You are looking at the great Ice-dragon of the northern wastes,” said Ribek quietly. “It and its partner to the south built and maintain the two realms of ice and snow on which the well-being of this world depends. We do not have the power to summon it, the Captain and I. Nobody has that, no magician or group of magicians, however powerful, has that. All that we two can do is ask it. Nothing that has happened since we came to the window was done by us—it is all the Ice-dragon. It came of its own will. It brought the ice and snow of its own will. If it had chosen it could have crushed every ship of your navy in the grip of its ice as easily as a cobnut is cracked open between two stones. Instead, of its own will it has chosen that you should see it. Though the power to call to it runs in my family, only once in several generations does one of us see it, and then never as clearly as you are now doing.

“Why you? you may ask. The task of the two Ice-dragons is to maintain the well-being of this world. More than once in the remote past, the earth has sickened and needed first cleansing, then renewal. The two Ice-dragons have extended their realms to cover the entire earth, frozen it for a long age, and then withdrawn to allow the life of the world to renew itself among the tiny, unnoticed creatures that survived below the ice.

“Now, once again, there were signs that such a time was coming. The so-called Watchers, with their insatiable lust for power, were one such sign. Their ultimate purpose was to incorporate all life on earth into themselves. In the eyes of the Ice-dragon they were the seeds of a disease that would in the end have sickened the whole earth. Fortunately we were able to act in time and destroy them before it needed to do so itself.

“I cannot expect you to see yourselves in a similar light, but I can assure you that the Ice-dragon does. It has not come here, as we have, to prevent you from committing a single great wrong. It has come as a warning to you of what will follow if you continue on the course that you seem to have set yourselves. The very name of the great vessel that carries us all is a signpost on that course. I do not tell you this of my own knowledge. Like the vision of the Ice-dragon that you saw through my eyes, you are hearing through my mouth what it wishes you to be told.

“Now I think we have seen enough. It is dangerous to look too long on such a being. It can madden the strongest mind.”

He withdrew his hand from Maja’s and the island was only a craggy patch of ice, littered with the ships of the pirate navy. The tension broke like a wave breaking, into a hubbub of comments and questions. Maja turned to General Olbog.

“Thank you for joining us, General,” she said. “It was interesting, was it not?”

There was nobody handy to interpret, but he caught her tone, favored her with his mini-smile, grunted some guttural politeness, nodded by way of farewell and turned away.

“I’ve got to get us out of here,” muttered Benayu. “Fading faster than I expected. Won’t have anything left if I don’t go soon. Need Chanad to help, as it is.”

“I will talk to Ribek. You go and sit down.”

A dozen people, Syndics and soldiers, were already crowded round Ribek, bombarding him with questions. Most were men, taller than she was. She rapped an officer on the shoulder with the handle of her cane. He turned his head, cut his protest short when he saw who it was, and made a gap. The movement caught Ribek’s eye. She beckoned, drew aside and waited for him to join her. Out of the corner of her eye she saw somebody sidling in earshot. The Pirates’ translator.

“My boy Bennay’s been taken ill, and I do not have the remedy with me,” she said. “I must get him ashore.”

“It’s time we went in any case, my lady,” he said. “If you would be so good as to tell the others…”

He turned to his audience.

“Please,” he said. “No more questions for the moment. We have to leave in a minute. We have done what we came to do by preventing your attack on Larg. This was an emergency action. We do not have the authority to act further on behalf of the Imperial Government. We will leave you to discuss what you have seen and heard, and we will be ready to meet you for a truce conference an hour before noon tomorrow morning on the headland you can see to the south of Larg. We will permit one airboat large enough to carry your delegation, but no larger, to be cleared of snow to bring them ashore under our safe conduct. This will be a sign that you accept our conditions. If we receive no such signal your fleet will be destroyed at sunset.

“So we bid you farewell, and hope to see you tomorrow on the headland. Madam President-designate, if you are ready.”

Chanad was talking to the three renegades. She looked down and nodded. Maja and the others gathered around her. Saranja turned and saluted the room. Chanad made a gentle gesture of closure, and the space where they had been standing was empty.