52

ERRIS

Glorieux, Quarter Deck

The Endless Ocean

The rigging of the mainsail creaked as the ship rolled in the morning chop, thick waves pushing against her hull with force belying their small size. Pushing her west, back toward the coast of New Sarresant. The Glorieux was a small frigate—thirty-two guns on a single deck—but she deserved her name. By all accounts she was the fastest ship in the fleet. The admirals had suggested her to lead the farthest patrol sweeps, part of a net cast far and wide across the western reach of the Endless Ocean. Her captain boasted his ship could cover twice the distance of any other with a strong wind and an open sea.

“No sign of the Gand ships, High Commander,” the captain reported after they exchanged salutes. “We encountered a flotilla of Thellan merchant galleons with a pair of frigates for an escort last night, running south-southwest on a course toward the Thellan colonies. Another ship tailed behind their wake, just off the horizon. No flags, with movements on deck disorderly and un-navylike. Pirates, sir. We tacked clear and continued our sweep to the north.”

She nodded. “How long before this fog clears?”

“Likely by midday, sir.”

“Very good, Captain,” she said. “I will return then for further report.”

“Yes, sir,” he said, offering another salute.

She returned it.

Need faded and she returned to the chambers she had claimed for high command. Her requirements there had been surprisingly easy to meet. Expansive space, with close access to the burgeoning center of government here in Southgate. Multiple entryways to allow for messengers coming and going without disrupting operations. Private offices for the generals and admirals and their support staff, more senior commanders in one place than had ever been achieved during wartime.

The Lords’ Council chambers had proved perfect for her needs.

Voren had laughed at the symbolism of it, seeing to it the new assembly passed a resolution funding whatever she needed to transform the grounds. And transform them she had. In place of the rows of chairs and elevated dais, she’d had massive oak tables brought in and dedicated to each potential theater of battle. Cartographers were paid lordly sums to paint them with exactly accurate detail, while engineers built detachable surfaces, allowing her to customize the chamber for any operations, at any scale. And miniatures, miniatures by the hundreds: ships, horse, men, binders, wagons, supplies. At a glance any of her commanders could see a battle as she did in her mind’s eye, as a bird might see it flying overhead. With Need to provide accurate reports from vessels placed with each unit, they could confer and decide grand strategy at the smallest tactical levels, the movements of each regiment contributing toward the greater victory of the army. A greater upheaval to command than any in a hundred years, but the men had taken to it at once, seeing the benefits in coordination, information, and mobility. Gods send it was enough. Gods send they were ready.

“Glorieux reports no sign of the Gand ships,” she announced for the benefit of the table in front of her, painted a deep blue and strewn with miniatures representing the sweep of her ships in the western reaches of the ocean. “Continuing on in the fog bank, heading north, same course.”

Aides scrambled to update the display with the latest information, while the officers around the table shared weighing looks.

“That completes the morning sweep, yes, High Commander?” one of the captains asked.

“Yes,” she said. “When I recover enough Need I will return to the ships stuck in that fog bank. Expect a midday update.”

The table affirmed her words, returning to studying the plans they’d laid for the naval engagement, refining every detail in light of the fleet’s current position, the quadrants of the sea already swept, and the remaining angles of approach the Gand fleet might take.

She moved on, toward the table indicating the movements of the army as they marched south.

“Where do you need reports, gentlemen?” she asked.

The table saluted her approach, giving her the key troop positions and supplies for which they needed information. Efficient and orderly; thank the Gods the majority of the actual generals and admirals had deemed themselves too important to participate in her newly designed central command. Instead she’d interviewed their staff and found the aides, seconds, and subcommanders who’d kept the high officers afloat, consolidating as many of them here at the Lords’ Council as she could spare from the front lines.

She chose the five most pressing updates, cycling through them one by one, careful to conserve her Need. When she’d finished, she saluted the officers and aides who ringed the table, then excused herself to her private quarters, adjoining the hall. Sadrelle remained behind, posted at her door to wake her in time for midday.

They’d found no more Need binders.

Only a small handful who could—like Acherre—see the golden light. But none who could tether it. None who might spell her from the fatigue of coordinating the army, the navy, the supply trains, the scouts, even the priests she had posted along the Great Barrier, just in case.

A great disappointment. Fifteen years ago she might have preened at the thought that she was unique, that her talents were rare and unprecedented. Now she felt only exhaustion. All of this effort on her behalf and it would fall to her to be the lynchpin of the entire command. Conserving her energy was of the utmost importance, and so she slept between bindings in an effort to ward off the crippling fatigue lingering at the edge of her consciousness. No time to be exhausted. The enemy was coming. She knew it, felt the surety of it at her very core.

Where were they? What had she missed?

She slept.

“Sir, you asked for me to wake you at midday.”

Sadrelle’s voice. By some miracle she had fallen asleep straightaway, an eyeblink between lying down—still in full dress uniform—and being roused for another round of reports.

She rubbed the sleep from her eyes, her field training coming to the fore as her senses forced her body out of its fog. Rising to her feet, she thanked the lieutenant, rinsing her face with a splash of cold water and looking over her appearance in the stand mirror. This chamber had been a sitting room, a private office of some lord or another. Now it was hers. High Commander Erris d’Arrent. The face looking back from the mirror had already aged a few years since the last time she’d bothered examining herself.

Her eyes went to the backs of her hands, scarred as ever. No marques there—not for her, not until she’d completed the service she owed the King. Only now there was no debt. They said the citizens’ assembly had declared the abduction of children an abomination, that instead there was to be publicly funded education for those who passed the binder’s test, enough to prevent them harming themselves or others with their gift. Voren had seen to it there was still compulsory military service for fullbinders and those especially skilled with Body, Mind, and Entropy. So it was that the arc of her life, the path of service to earn a royal marque upon retirement, was only a memory now. She was a free woman, as free to bind the leylines as any noble-born who bought themselves a dispensation. Somehow she felt no differently for her freedom.

She made her way back to the main hall, checking in with the navy officers arrayed around the table showing the current maps of the Endless Ocean. All agreed it was likely the fog had burned off by now.

She found her vessels by instinct, as easy as telling one finger from another, no matter that she had hundreds of them now.

Lieutenant Gavrien, aboard the Solitaire. Seaman Colliers, of the Concorde. Seaman Baumont, of the Frelon. More.

All quiet, on open seas.

Finally the last vessel called to her, the midshipman aboard the Glorieux. She stepped into his skin, feeling the rush of the salt spray on the air, hearing the sails snap into the wind.

“Sir.” The captain saluted beside her, the golden eyes giving him sign she had come even before her senses had settled.

“Report, Captain,” she said. “Tell me you’ve sighted them.”

“No, sir.” He shook his head. “Nothing to report.”

She closed her eyes, suppressing a sigh of frustration. Without another word she let go the binding, returning to the council chambers.

“Anything, sir?” one of her officers asked.

She shook her head.

“Could we have missed a span of the sea?” she asked. “Could they be out there, sailing past our lines?”

The captains and aides exchanged a look. “It’s possible, sir,” one of them spoke. “The ocean is vast. But we have been as thorough as we can with our numbers.”

“Unless they had foreknowledge of our disposition—” another began.

“With so many Gand ships, they would—”

“Enough.” She raised a hand, signaling them to quiet. “Recheck the coverage of our patrols. If there has been a window the Gandsmen could have slipped through, we must know where, and when they could make a landing.”

“Yes, sir,” the table replied.

Crossing the chamber, she went to a long table depicting the lands around the city itself. The forests that ran to the north, the cleared farmland to the south, crisscrossed by trade roads running into the southern colonies. And the Great Barrier. Fifty leagues north of the city, the lands of the colonies ended and the wilds began, the true wildlands behind the barrier itself. Lone figures represented her scouts along the barrier, spaced leagues apart, the brown-robed priests watching for signs of Death.

Had she been foolish to post so few? Could the enemy have made his crossing in the far north, threatening to breach the barrier in a repeat of his summer gambit?

A suicidal move even without the threat of the great beasts. New Sarresant would stand in the way of whatever southern progress they could hope to make, forcing a fight to take it that would bleed the Gand numbers and entangle their supply train. The wiser course by far was to threaten New Sarresant to force her deployment, then to sail south and make landfall in a safe port or natural harbor. An army loosed behind her borders meant the Gandsmen could maneuver in the open to find themselves a fight on favorable ground. Pinning themselves into the walls of New Sarresant meant a bloodbath.

Only, hadn’t the enemy commander promised her as much?

She shivered.

Checking her stores of Need, she found a good amount remaining. The priests along the barrier weren’t due for a report for another day at least, but her senses itched to find whatever piece of this puzzle had gone missing.

She reached for Sister Elise, reunited with the priests of Arentaigne on duty in the north.

At once the towering haze of blue film came into view, dwarfing the trees at its base. Even now the barrier inspired awe, forcing the eyes higher, ever higher, to try to catch a glimpse of its end. Here alongside it one felt small indeed.

“Sister, what is …?” a voice beside her asked. “Your eyes …?” A pause before recognition dawned. “Oh. Oh, yes. Commander.”

Another brown-robed priest stood next to Sister Elise, a young woman she didn’t recognize from their prior efforts to seal the barrier.

“Any report, Sister?”

“No, Commander,” the priestess said. “See for yourself, it’s as quiet as ever. Not even any weakening or stretches in need of repair.”

She sighed in full, not bothering to hide her disappointment.

“You can bind Shelter?” she asked.

“Oh no, I’m a Death binder, Commander,” the priestess replied. “The abbess thought it wise to pair us with her Shelter binders to help them spot, ah, enemy activities.”

She nodded. A wise decision.

She closed her eyes, shifting her vision to the leylines. As she’d expected, the only energies she could see while wearing Sister Elise’s skin were the white pearls of Shelter—the only energy with which the abbess was skilled. The rest was gray haze, for all that she would have been able to make out the fine details if she saw it with her own eyes.

The Great Barrier itself was a construct of pure Shelter, sustaining itself from the stores it generated, the swelling pools of white at its base. All around it the leylines curved in disorderly fashion, as they often did in the wilder, untamed places of the world. Gray haze clung to them, fed by the activity of the surrounding forest. There would be Life in abundance, and Body, and Death. It was the latter they had cause to fear; a few pools of inky Death were to be expected in the wild, but a swelling indicated the Gandsmen could be preparing to attempt another breach.

She scanned the barrier up and down with her vision shifted. No flaws in the Shelter that she could see. But there, on the far side, a thick haze did settle around the twisting lines, thicker than she would have expected from just the activity of the wild.

“That there,” she said to the priestess. “That haze. It isn’t …?”

“Oh no, Commander,” the priestess said. “I’ve been watching that. No Death at all. It’s probably Life, a herd of animals perhaps. We’ve seen a few of those, moving up the barrier.”

“Could it be soldiers?”

The question seemed to take the priestess by surprise. “I suppose it could be. But, sir, wouldn’t we have warning from Death if they were trying to …?” She swallowed.

“Yes, Sister. But even so, any large concentration of Life might mean—”

The words died on her tongue.

One moment the barrier stood, a hundred spans high and more. The next it vanished, an enormous bore the size of the council hall cut away from the swirling haze. And behind it stood a woman in white, a native tribeswoman, her face painted with lines of red, grinning as she leveled a look at the two of them, standing there.

Beside the woman was a cat, a cat the size of a horse with eyes of flame, flanked by a host of painted tribesmen, hefting muskets and cheering.

And red coats, the red coats of Gand. Long ranks of them beside the natives, muskets shouldered as they began to march.