Of course, none of your kind has yet tried it.
11. A Little Hard Work
The three children Oneyna birthed were Zmeos, the Horned Serpent, his brother Khors Moonlord, and their sister Zuriyal, who was called Merciless. And for long no one knew these three existed. But Sveros was a tyrannical ruler, and his true sons Perin, Erivor, and Kernios made compact to dethrone him. They fought courageously against him and threw him down, and then returned him to the Void of Unbeing.
The skies over Hierosol were bright on this mild winter day, clouds piled high and white as the snowfall on the distant summit of Mount Sarissa and its neighbors. The thousand sails in the huge Harbor of Nektarios seemed a reflection of those clouds, as if the bay were a great green mirror.
The small inspector’s boat that had tied up beside the much larger trading vessel now cast free, the rowers ferrying the petty official back to the the harbor master’s office in the labyrinth of buildings behind the high eastern harbor wall where all legitimate business of the mighty port was transacted (and a great deal of its shadier workings, too). The trading ship, having duly submitted to the official’s inspection—a rather cursory one, noted Daikonas Vo— was now free to move toward its designated harbor slip.
Vo did not think much of the harbor master’s defenses against smuggling, and thought it likely that the lackey’s visit had been more about the ceremonial exchange of bribes for permits than any actual search for contraband, but he could not help admiring the city’s fortifications. Hierosol’s eastern peninsula, which contained most of the anchorage, was as formidable as its reputation suggested, the seawalls ten times the height of a man, studded with gunports and bristling with cannon like the quills of a porcupine. On the far side of the KulloanStrait stood the Finger, a narrow strip of land with its own heavy fortifications. Modern planners, reexamining the walls in this new age of cannonfire, had realized that if a determined attack should overthrow the much more thinly defended areas along the Finger, the heart of Hierosol would then be vulnerable to the citadel’s own guns. Thus, they had mounted smaller guns in those forts on the western side of the isthmus facing the city—cannons which could reach the middle of the strait, well within the compass of the eastern guns, but could not themselves reach the eastern wall.
Vo respected that in his cold way, as he respected most types of careful planning. If, as rumors suggested, Autarch Sulepis truly intended a conquest of Hierosol, Xis’ ancient rival, the Golden One would have hard work laid out before him.
Still, it would be interesting—a problem well worth the time and trouble, even without the rich reward of plunder, not to mention the choke hold a successful conqueror of Hierosol would gain on vast Lake Strivothos, the still mighty (and wealthy) kingdom of Syan, and the rest of the interior of Eion. Perhaps, Vo mused, after his own project was successfully concluded he might find himself moving higher in the circles of the autarch’s advisers. Yes, it would be a grand entertainment to devote adequate time and attention to cracking open Hierosol’s mighty walls like a nut, exposing all the frail, human flesh within to the mercies of the autarch’s armies, especially Vo’s own comrades, the White Hounds. If such a day came the Hounds would bloody their muzzles well, there was no doubt about that. Vo did not think particularly highly of the cleverness of his fellow Perikalese mercenaries but he had a deep respect for their essential hunger for combat. They were well-named: you could kennel them for years, but when you let them out, they struck like red Nature.
As he thought about it he could almost smell blood in the salty air, and for a moment the seagulls’ shrill cries seemed the lamentation of bereaved women. Daikonas Vo felt a thrill of anticipation, like a child being taken to the fair.
His belongings in a seabag slung across his shoulder, Vo gave the trading ship’s captain a farewell nod as he stepped onto the gangplank. The captain, flush with the pride of a man about to unload a full cargo hold, returned the gesture with magisterial condescension.
The merchant captain had proved to be a garrulous fool, and for that Vo was grateful. During their conversations on the eight-day crossing from Xis to Hierosol he had told Vo so much about his fellow captain Axamis Dorza that he had saved Vo days of work, without ever once wondering why this low-level servant of the palace (for so Daikonas Vo had presented himself) should be asking all those questions. In ordinary circumstances Vo would have found it hard to resist killing the captain and throwing him overboard—the man talked with his mouth full as he ate, for one thing, and dribbled bits of food onto his beard and clothes, and he had an even more annoying habit of saying, “I swear it, by the red-hot doors of the house of Nushash!” a dozen times or so in every conversation—but Vo was not going to complicate his mission. The memory of the autarch’s cousin spewing blood and writhing helplessly on the floor was very much with him.
Daikonas Vo did not know whether he believed in the gods or not. He certainly did not much care whether they existed —if they did, their interest and involvement in human life was so capricious as to be, ultimately, no different in effect than pure chance. What he did believe in was Daikonas Vo: his own subtle pleasures and displeasures made up the whole of his cosmos. He did not want that cosmos to come to an early end. A world without Daikonas Vo at the center of it could not exist.
Very few people looked at him as he made his way along the busy harbor front, and those who did scarcely seemed able to see him, as though he were not fully visible. That was in part because of his outward appearance, which, because of his Perikalese ancestry, was similar to many of the folk he passed. He was also slight in build, or at least appeared that way, not short, but certainly not tall. Mostly, though, eyes slid off him because Daikonas Vo wanted it that way. He had discovered the trick of stillness when he was young, when first his father and then later his mother’s other male friends had stormed through the house, drunk and angry, or his mother had played out her own shrieking madness; the trick had been to become so calm, so invisible, that all the rage blew past him like a thunderstorm while he lay sheltered in the secret cove of his own silence.
The passersby might not look at him, but Vo looked at them. He was a spy by nature, curious in a mildly contemptuous way as always about creatures that seemed to him like another species from himself, things that wore their emotions as openly as their clothes, faces that reflected fear and anger and something he had come to recognize as joy, although he could not connect it to his own more abstract pleasures. They were like apes, these ordinary folk, carrying on their private lives in the full sight of anyone with eyes to see, the adults as uncontrolled in their bleatings and grimaces as the children. In this regard the Hierosolines around him now were barely different from the people of Xis, who did at least have the sense to clothe the revealing nakedness of their wives and daughters from foot to crown, although not for the reason Vo would have done so. Here in Hierosol the women seemed to dress any way they chose, some decently modest in loose robes and veils or scarves that covered their heads and part of their faces, but some nearly as shameless as the men, with necks, shoulders, legs, and most especially their faces exposed for all to see. Vo had seen women naked, of course, and many times at that. Like his fellow Perikalese mercenaries he had visited the brothels outside the palace’s Lily Gate many times, although in his case it had been mostly because not to do so would have attracted attention, and Vo hated attention even more than he disliked pain. He had used some of the women as they chose to be used, but after the first time, when the oddness of the experience had some value in itself, it had meant little to him. He understood that copulation was a great motivator of mankind and perhaps even womankind as well, but to him it seemed only another ape trick, different from eating and defecating only because it could not be practiced solitarily, but required company.