“High Excellency,” the man said after the longest possible pause and with the bare minimum tilt of his head.
A lordling, then. A merchant wouldn’t dare so little respect.
“Do you know how the rest of that sentence goes?” Andross asked.
“No.”
The old man added no honorific. Very odd. There was something familiar about those eyes, as blue as the morning sky, but Andross was certain he’d never met the man before. Perhaps he’d known a relation?
That didn’t limit the circle much. Andross met thousands of people each year. One of the things that had most pained him about his long confinement had been not meeting people, not seeing others overawed at his presence, or having occasion to prove that their awe was justified.
It niggled more than a little that this old man seemed . . . what was it? Not exactly hostile. Disgusted, maybe.
Contemptuous?
Oho, now, that tempted Andross toward violence.
The old man shook his head. “Disappointing. Here I’ve forgiven you a thousand times for all the ruin you brought to my house. No, ten thousand. Every day three times with my prayers for every one of these long years, at least when I could bear it. And yet still my heart longs to hate you.”
“Excuse me?” Andross asked. Blankly curious.
“I was told not to tell you my name, and that how long it took for you to guess it would tell us both something.”
Oh please. “How tiresome,” Andross said. “Do you have something for me, or not? You asked to see me, after all.”
“No, I didn’t ask for this at all. I was sent to see you. You are to finish the quote. She insisted you could.” He clearly had his doubts.
Andross sighed. Better to get this over with, he supposed. “Ninharissi called me ‘A man of Parnassian storms and no wonder, for in you are joined a volcanic wit and glacial emotions. When they mix, it is a cataclysm of fire and rain and lightning and molten rock, flames and floods, lava flows and mudslides, laying waste to everything and everyone in a thousand leagues.’ ”
His memory hadn’t abandoned him after all. Who else could recall such, so perfectly?
“She adjudged you well,” the old man said. “No wonder she wanted nothing to do with you.”
It was a misstep. “Was Ninharissi your lady, then?” Andross asked.
“No. But I see why the Third Eye gave me those words to say. They were for both of us.”
Of course. Now it made sense.
The message wasn’t from Ninharissi herself, but merely from a Seer who had stolen them from the ether. A little magical eavesdropper, spying on a couple’s intimate moments. Disgusting.
Andross had hoped the message was some word from beyond the grave, a treasure a dead woman had wished delivered to him while he was in these straits.
It was all very disappointing, but it made sense. Of course, only the Third Eye could see where she had never been, and into the past as well as into the future. She was an ally more dangerous than even Janus Borig, but couldn’t be taken from the game, for she would be a foe far more dangerous still.
Thus, Andross had made no move against her, but he was glad she’d chosen to stay far away.
“How is Polyhymnia?” he asked. He wasn’t supposed to know that name. No one was. But swive her for pretending to speak for one he loved. “Has she some guidance for the war?” He felt some hope. After all, Orholam’s Seers might choose not to join sides in any normal war, but in a war against heretics and pagans? Surely this visit meant she was answering Andross’s letters at last.
“I don’t know who that is,” the old man said, “but the Third Eye told me she’d be dead by the time I reached you. Murdered by the Order of the Broken Eye. She said anything she did to stop her assassination would only forestall it, wouldn’t affect the course of the war, and would have other costs too great for her to countenance.”
“Worthless to me, then. Figures. You know, I’ve met dozens of prophets and Seers through the years. Charlatans and half-wits, most of them. But at least those could be used against the kind of people who believe them. Yet the real ones were never any use at all.”
The near-blasphemy spurred no anger from the old Parian. He only stared at Andross calmly.
“What are you here for, old man?” Andross asked.
The old man smiled, finally. “I overestimated you. I thought surely you would place me in an instant. The Third Eye said that for a man who’d had the light restored to his eyes, you were remarkably blind, for you hardly ever look at other people, except to see how you might use them.”
Andross looked now. The age. The vocabulary. The diction. The red-gold buttons on his satchel, such as librarians use to carry their scrolls in Azûlay.
His heart suddenly clenched.
But the old man was already speaking: “You seduced my daughter. You convinced her to betray her oaths to her city and tribe and family. You turned her into a thief, and you left her banished, destitute, and pregnant.”
Aha. He’d arrived at it only a moment too late. “Asafa ar Veyda de Lauria del Luccia verd’Avonte. A pleasure to meet a Keeper of the Word, Chief Librarian.” This was Katalina Delauria’s father; this was Kip’s maternal grandfather.
Asafa’s eyes were burning embers in a face like coal ready to take the flame. He said, “Before you took her from me, Lina and I were very close. She was my joy, my everything. For a time, she wrote me letters even after she fled in disgrace,” Asafa said. “Long letters, unsparing of herself or others. She told me everything. And I’ve come, Andross Guile, to upend all you know and break your glacial heart.”
Chapter 67
As the first cannons began firing at them, the command skimmer broke apart.
But the enemy had no Gunner directing their fire. The shots—twenty of them at least—all sailed wide, short, or long. Few of them were even close.
Still, there was the familiar jolt of excitement at being shot at with no effect. That bracing, ‘Holy shit! I’m alive and I could have been dead and someone just wanted me dead and did all they could to make me dead, but I’m alive, hell yeah, you bastards!’
The Mighty were near enough the wall of galleys and galleons under the flying flags of broken chains on a black background that the roar of the guns was nearly simultaneous with the gushers of the smoke and the splash of the cannonballs, jetting water into the air.
Kip’s eyes were dragged below the line of the cannons, though, in front of the ripples that spread around each as the shock waves left their imprint on the waters beside the ships.
In a unison not possible for wild animals, dozens—no, hundreds—of sharks rose, dorsal fins in ranks, heading straight for the Mighty.
A primal fear struck him then, thalassophobia, a dread that man was not made for the depths, that the water was not his home, that this vast sea was itself hostile to him, hateful. If the foils of his skimmer hit a shark, Kip might kill the shark, but the collision would certainly pitch him into the water.
He would be helpless. Torn apart by those alien, unforgiving teeth.
The skimmer shivering as a musket ball ricocheted off the deck broke Kip’s brief paralysis. He aimed it down lower into the waves. The increased drag slowed him considerably.