Ships from the West

She dried her eyes quickly. 'He was the greatest mariner of the age. He made a voyage which has passed already into legend, though small reward he received for it, for he was of low blood. He was a good man, and I - I loved him once. I think perhaps he loved me, back in the years when the world was a sane place.' The tears came again, though her face remained unchanged. More than anything she wanted to tell Bleyn who this man really was, but she could not. He must never know, not if he were to make his claim to Hebrion with any conviction.

Even to herself, Jemilla's reasoning seemed hollow. The Five Kingdoms were gone, their last hope, Toru

The day passed around them u

'Clew up, clew up there,' he whispered in a cracked dry voice. 'Billerand, set courses and topsails. Steer due west with the wind on the quarter.'

Then he sighed, and the pressure of his fingers relaxed. The light faded from his eye. Richard Hawkwood's long voyaging was over.

Twenty-one

Aruan woke out of sleep with the knowledge that something had changed in the black hours of the night, some balance had shifted. He was a master of soothsaying as he was of every other Discipline, but this feeling had nothing to do with the Dweomer. It was more akin to an old man's aches before a storm.

He rose and called for his valet and was quickly washed and robed in the austere splendour of the Pontifical apart­ments, for he resided there now though Himerius and not he was Pontiff in the eyes of the world. He looked out of the high window upon the cloisters of Charibon below and saw that the dawn had not yet come and the last hours of the night still hung heavy above the horns of the cathedral and the Library of St Garaso.

He clenched and unclenched one blue-veined fist and stared at it darkly. He had overtired himself in his travels, bending the wills and raising the hearts of men up and down the length of the continent. But now Rone had fallen and southern Toru

But still he was afflicted by a restless uneasiness. He felt that he had overlooked some piece of his opponent's upon the gaming board of war, and it troubled him.

As dawn finally broke open the sky in bands of scarlet behind the white peaks of the Cimbrics, King Corfe Cear-Inaf brought his army down from the foothills to the shores of the Sea of Tor, and where the land levelled out into the first wolds of the Torian Plains, he set his men into line of battle, a scant four miles from the outskirts of Charibon itself. It was the eleventh day of Enderialon in the Year of the Saint 567, and it was thirty-one days since he had set out from Toru

The army he led was a good deal smaller than that which had taken ship on the Torrin river those weeks before. Many had died in the unforgiving mountains, and over two thous­and men, Fimbrians and Toru

So it was with less than twenty-two thousand troops that Corfe descended from the high places to give battle to the forces of the Second Empire before the very gates of their capital. It was still dark as he set his men into line, and despite their depleted numbers their ranks stretched for over two and a half miles.

He rested his right flank on the shore of the sea itself, and there three thousand Toru

Behind this first wave, and closer to the left of the line than its centre, rode the Toru

He had no illusions about the slimness of the thread from which his men's survival hung, and he knew that even if they were victorious before the monastery-city, there was little hope of their ever returning to Toru

Ahead of the Toru

Albrec had passionately disagreed when Corfe had told him of his intentions back in Toru