We reached the Cimmerian Strait on a mostly-natural favorable wind. It was a night with very thick clouds but only a little bit of rain and a light cooperative natural wind going almost exactly in the direction we wished to go. As we sailed between the fortress-cities of Pantikapaion (belonging to the Sultanate) and Hermonassa (belonging to the Golden Empire), I saw that the latter’s many cannons were fully manned in spite of the late hour, though the former had only a light watch of a few men, curiously enough.
Fortunately, in spite of our decision to pass through the strait at an hour at which persons would normally be asleep, none of the soldiers atop either fort’s walls deemed our passage suspicious enough to sound an alarm or begin firing cannons. Either that, or all officers with the authority to make a decision had all gone to bed and the soldiers stuck on watch didn’t want to risk waking them. After all, even if there was a light rain, the thick clouds diffused the moonlight nicely and evenly, and there was no obscuring fog; if I could see the individual gun crews huddled close around the cannons of Hermonassa, surely they could see my triple-decked galley with its sails billowing.
Once we were safely through the strait, I went back to sleep, waking with the dawn over the peaceful waters of the Cimmerian Sea. Though I was wary of the fact that there was another circular battleship somewhere, we saw only scattered small fishing vessels as we sailed across the Cimmerian Sea. The fishing vessels kept their distance – understandable given that they had probably never seen any ship quite like our quinquereme. This left us with little to do but to finish repairs, sail, and tell stories to one another.
I had not planned on whiling away the hours telling stories, but Fyodor had once been to the capital of the Golden Empire (our destination), and I begged of him the story of his visit; and that began a long round of storytelling by one after another person, with a large and gathering audience who made excuses involving mending clothing or polishing armor or some other quiet sedentary chore. (In Gregor’s case, the excuse was that she was polishing my armor.) The blonde Circassian particularly wanted to hear stories about Ragnar, and no less than seven of the Swedish soldiers obliged (with our surgeon acting as translator), though I suspect half of the stories about Ragnar were pure fiction.
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As we drew within sight of the city called Rome upon the Tanais River – colloquially known as Tanais, as the city and river had been before the Undying Emperor received the fleeing senators who proclaimed him Emperor of Rome – I marveled at the architecture. The upper city with its palaces occupied a low hill on the south side of the southernmost mouth of the Tanais River; the lower city sprawled all the way up to the sea coast.
The upper city of Rome-upon-Tanais is a veritable city of palaces. Most of the Undying Emperor’s wives had given him at least one son; each favored son of an emperor deserved his own palace, and the Undying Emperor’s favor was fickle and changeable over the generations. Some had fallen into disrepair; others had been expanded upon by the more prosperous grandsons and great-grandsons of the Undying Emperor; below them huddled the homes and shops of ordinary citizens along with warehouses and factories, and between those the ample wharves of a port that Fyodor had told me was often as busy as Constantinople. And yet, along the wharves, there were not very many ships and only two or three were close to the size of our own quinquereme.
Then a red haze flickered into view, mostly obscuring the lower city. The red haze stretched fifty yards into the sky, taller than our mast.
“Out oars and slow to a stop,” I called out, uncertain if it would be safe to drive the ship into the glowing red haze.
After we had stopped, I discussed the red haze with several local seagulls, who told me that in spite of its translucency, it was an impenetrable barrier of considerable solidity that was raised irregularly but not infrequently and that I had better fly all the way over it if I wanted to get to the other side to the city where all the lovely garbage piles were. The seagulls waxed rhapsodic about the quality and quantity of the garbage of Rome-upon-Tanais for some time before I made my excuses to cut the conversation short; at that point, they followed their own advice and flew high over the barrier.
Then the oddest thing happened: A brass boat with a glass top bobbed to the top of the water in front of us. The glass top opened, revealing a pair of men in military garb – one an enlisted soldier, and the other a junior officer of some kind, the naval equivalent of a banneret, whatever that may be called.
They shouted up at us with demands to be let aboard; I shouted an affirmative answer back down at them in a more or less friendly fashion; then we lowered a rope ladder and the officer climbed up for more polite conversation at an ordinary volume. The enlisted soldier remained in the boat. After a few perfunctory polite greetings, he pulled a silver mirror from his jacket pocket and held it up towards me. I stared at my image in confusion for only a moment before it was replaced by another face, that of a rotund man of considerably greater rank. He introduced himself as the Underminister of Harbor Security and wished to know the origin of our ship.
“I am Mikolai,” I said, tapping my freshly polished Corsican brass armor with my hand and adjusting my brilliant cerulean cloak. Behind me, I heard a swirl of surprised whispers from those among the company who had only known me as Marcus. “I’m Ruthenian, a citizen of the Golden Empire. And this is my ship and my company.” I tapped the butt of my trident on the deck and gestured at the gathered crowd of curious people.
The man holding the mirror slowly turned the mirror back and forth, muttering a quick description of what he could see. As far as he was concerned, we were clearly pirates, a motley crew of well-armed foreigners, our ship brimming with loot ready for sale ranging from high-quality furniture to slaves. I felt a sense of relief that he did not recognize the dining table of the Holmgard as such; trying to prove my innocence in the ship’s destruction could have been difficult.
“You seem to have quite a few soldiers on board. Foreign warships are not permitted to dock here,” the man in the mirror informed me. “Unless you perhaps are one of our privateers, bearing a letter of marque?”
I demurred, saying I had no such document, having acquired the ship in Venice; and then he offered to sell me a letter of marque.
“Naturally, given the irregular circumstances, I must ask for some personal consideration,” the man in the mirror said. “And, of course, with your cargo predating the letter, the tariffs will be quite steep, but if I make the letter out with a retroactive date, I can classify it as prize material and tariff it at a lower rate.” He paused, counting under his breath. “Show me around again?” The junior officer slowly turned around in a circle. “Three hundred Venetian ducats or thirty thousand Turkish akcheh and I’ll put it a year back and make you a separated veteran of the naval service. No, I’ll be reasonable and give you a discount. Half that plus the lovely redheaded slave.”
Katya bristled. I put my arm around her. “Katya is one of my officers and not a slave for sale,” I informed the man in the mirror bluntly.
“No, no, I wasn’t talking about the cripple with the mechanical arm,” the man in the mirror said blithely, waving his hand. “Goodness, no. She’s one of your bloodthirsty pirates, I can see that readily enough. I meant the girl in Turkish silks.” He then offered some further commentary on Gulben’s appearance as contrasted to Katya’s.
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Katya’s lips pressed into a thin line. I patted her on the back, keenly aware of how she must feel and appreciative that she didn’t express those feelings aloud.
Gulben sputtered. “Giving me to some two-bit functionary of the Golden Empire as a bribe would be outrageous!” Her eyes widened and her hand clapped against her stomach, and she continued woodenly as she looked down, staring at her feet. “If you order me to serve that man, I will obey, Colonel Corvus.”
I looked at Gulben and frowned. “Really?”
“Yes,” Gulben said. She pulled her head up, speaking in an expressionless monotone. “I will wastefully humiliate and degrade myself in such a manner if you so command, for the paltry and insulting sum of a hundred fifty solid gold ducats.”
The man in the mirror sputtered incoherently, surprised at Gulben’s opinion of her own value.
“Gulben, I appreciate your willingness to volunteer for such a duty, but I do not think it is necessary,” I said. “The Underminister is making unreasonable demands. A whole grivna of gold is a ludicrous bribe for a docking fee, and he asked for more than two. No, he has seen we have a fortune aboard, and he wishes to rob us of it to dishonestly line his own pockets.”
The man in the mirror expressed confidence in his negotiating position, temporizing for a bit and then asking for two grivnas of gold plus either Gulben or both of the Circassians. “There is nothing you can do here without my say-so,” he added. “I control the barrier and you cannot sell your goods for a fraction of their value anywhere else along the whole Cimmerian coast. Indeed, with a ship that size and no letter of marque, you cannot even attempt to pass through the strait without having it seized and pressed into service in the west. I hold every card in the deck, and you must accept what I choose to deal to you.”
My annoyance grew. I glared. Gulben shivered. Vitold cursed under his breath, jamming his fingers under his armpit. Katya raised flexed her mechanical hand, a thin layer of ice falling off. Frost rimed the edges of the mirror and crept across its face. The two Circassian girls huddled together, teeth chattering. In the distance, there was the sound of cawing, a distant murder of crows having been stirred into action by some disturbance. Quite suddenly, every seagull within a hundred yards found that they wished to be somewhere else.
“Underminister,” I said, addressing the blurry face in the frosted mirror, “I believe you are responsible for the security of the city against attack, and therefore will be held directly responsible for any damages to any buildings in the city from cannon fire.”
“I have an impenetrable magical barrier between us,” the eyeball said. “No cannon can pierce it!”
I looked at the red haze extending some fifty yards up from the sea, considering the angle required to clear it. Then I looked at the upper city, mentally calculating a crude parabola. Then I looked at Fyodor. “I think a demonstration is in order. Perhaps an air burst? I don’t wish to cause the Underminister any serious trouble yet, you understand.”
“I have to use some sort of aiming point,” Fyodor said cautiously. “And if we range low or the fuse runs long, I might just hit it.”
Staring at the upper city through the red haze, I glanced from tower to tower, ignoring the alternating threats and confused questions being emitted by the mirror; then my eyes settled on one particular target. I could feel my good-luck stone warm against my chest. From what I could see through the translucent red blur of the barrier and the diamond-shaped panes of the windows spaced around the top level of the tower, the top room of the tower had not been used for some time; there was a thick layer of dust over everything, from the bookshelves to the glass case that enclosed a crudely stuffed hare with a bulging fat body. If someone had told me that the hare was the result of a crude effort at taxidermy by a twelve-year-old boy proud of his first successful hunt, I would have believed them.
“That tower there, the third one from the left – I think it is long-unused. A good demonstration target,” I said, gesturing expressively until I felt sure that Fyodor had confirmed his target. At a quiet order from Felix, a pair of burly Swedish soldiers bracketed the junior officer.
Fyodor selected a small and neatly-decorated bronze cannon. Baron Asman von Vasco had been a poor employer in many ways, but his Silesian craftsmen were excellent with bronze, whether they were casting bells or cannon. Fyodor wanted to use our most accurate piece; that particular souvenir of our employment in the Gothic Empire was the gun he trusted the most. He measured and loaded powder, sighting along the barrel carefully and checking its angle of elevation as the ship rolled back and forth gently in the waves. After touching a slow match to the fuse, Fyodor carefully slid the shell into the cannon with a deft motion that pulled his fingers and face away from its muzzle before the shell butted against the wadding.
He paused for a moment, pushing the cannon just a little to the left as he waited for the motion of the waves for half a heartbeat. I was reminded of what Georg had told me: Fyodor could read the wind. The little adjustment likely meant that the wind had shifted a little bit. What did he see when he looked into the sky? I wondered for a moment what the wind looked like for someone with the ability to see it directly. Then Fyodor struck the phoenix stone set into the butt of the cannon with his mallet and I stopped thinking about his small magical talent.
My ears rang and my nostrils filled with the distinctive scent of gunpowder as the shell arced through the air. Hopefully, it would explode high in the air close to the tower, a visible display of both our ability to fight back but harmless; if it did not, the damage would be limited to a long-abandoned tower.
Fyodor’s aim was true to the tower, striking it directly. The shell smashed through the window I had noticed, smashing through a set of shelves and the glass case. As the shell ricocheted off the back stone wall and into the floor, lighter debris flew up into the air – the pages from a book and the detached dusty head of the crudely stuffed hare.
A moment later, the window disappeared in smoke and flame as the fuse finished burning deeper into the shell, reaching the store of powder within. An instant later, a varied assortment of debris came into view as it fell beneath the billowing smoke – scorched pages of paper, bits of ancient fur, an intact Persian rug, a silver mirror, half a dozen candles, the pieces of a hollow carved wooden duck decoy, and a jeweled egg that had somehow miraculously survived the blast. Perhaps it had been inside a smaller container of some kind.
Most of the debris rained down onto the top of a wall fifty feet below, the egg shattering as it hit the stone. Its attention initially drawn by the noise of the blast and then redirected by the falling debris, a curious raven flew over, looking for anything shiny or edible; picking over the broken remnants of the egg, the raven found a particularly bright and shiny silver needle, which it took up in its beak; however, while attractively shiny, the needle was brittle, and it snapped in two under the pressure of the raven’s beak.
For a moment, I felt as though everything in the world stopped, freezing in place as the two halves of the needle fell to either side of the raven’s beak; then the sensation passed. Then I heard a slow dull roar building as first dozens, then hundreds, then thousands of voices raised across the city. Less than two minutes after Fyodor fired, bells began to ring across the city; and within five minutes, every single bell tower in the city was ringing all at once. City guards ran this way and that; so did brightly-dressed citizens and brightly-but-more-impractically-dressed nobles, long-toed shoes causing some of them to trip as they hastily ran from building to building.
The junior officer holding the mirror turned his head to look at the city, the pair of burly Swedish soldiers standing on either side of him. He turned the mirror to himself, wiping frost off with his shirt. “Sir, I can confirm that they have fired over the barrier.” There was silence from the mirror. “Sir, are you there?”
I could hear the muffled and distant sound of shouting through the mirror, multiple voices that sounded as if they were quite far away.
“But he’s the Undying Emperor! He doesn’t die!” Between the lowered volume and the panicked pitch, I could barely recognize the underminister’s voice.
“The House of the Seventeenth Heir-son requires your support, man, snap out of it,” said a gruff angry voice. “With the Minister of Harbor Security under arrest, you are the only ones who can order the harbor cannons trained upon the Ministry of Internal Affairs.”
The junior officer shook the mirror, ignoring the distant conversation. “Hello? Where did you go? Sir, what’s going on? Sir?” By the second ‘sir,’ he had escalated from normal speech to shouting.
The red haze began to slowly fade. I looked at the city and the chaos therein. By wild coincidence, the explosion of Fyodor’s carefully-fused shell had happened only moments before Emperor Koschei of the Golden Empire, in full view of his assembled ministers, had suddenly stood bolt upright, let out a terrible gasp, and then dropped dead, collapsing suddenly.
The Undying Emperor was dead.