Empire Of Blood

Prince Durouman's face was u

There was little else to do. Kukon was undamaged-the grounding had done no harm. Her dead were buried, her wounded carried ashore, and her magazine replenished. Fifty pirates came aboard to fill the gaps in her crew. Five hundred would have gone if there had been room for them.

Just before sunset Kukon weighed anchor. Her sails filled, and her rowing drums sounded the cruising stroke. The cheers of the pirates on shore and aboard their galleys roared louder than the night's battle. Kukon turned and headed out to sea.

Chapter 24

They first guessed what had happened to Parine when they were a day's sail away.

Kukon took a course that swung to the east of the principality, toward the coast of Nullar. In those waters there would be less danger of meeting the Imperial fleet. There would also be a greater chance of meeting a ship from Nullar or one of the other Five Kingdoms, one that could take the message of the new alliance to the kings and fleets on the mainland.

They found neither. Instead, they found a fishing boat of Parine, drifting aimlessly. Aboard were four men, three dead and one dying. All four of them showed the unmistakable signs of prolonged and horrible torture in the style of Saram. The dying man died without speaking a coherent word, but no one aboard Kukon needed to be told what had happened. Blade doubled the lookouts and pressed on.

Two hours later they began to smell smoke on the wind that blew out of the west-from Parine. Just before sunset they passed a mass of floating timber, much of it charred black. They moved on through the darkness, the rowers setting a fast cruising stroke whether the drummers beat it out or not. The smoke smell grew stronger hour by hour. Three more times they passed floating wreckage or abandoned fishing boats.

Then the dawn came, and with it gray smoke smeared all across the western horizon. Under that smoke they found Parine, but so changed that it hardly seemed right to call it by the same name as the island they'd left. It was as if mad giants had swarmed across the island, killing everything that lived, burning everything that would burn, and stamping into rubble everything that was neither living nor burnable.

They swung in close enough to the harbor and town to see that the harbor was a mass of floating wreckage and the town a mass of rubble that still trickled smoke. The main fort on top of the cliffs had been blackened and split open by a tremendous explosion.

Bodies floated or lay everywhere-men, women, and children of Parine, soldiers of the forts' garrisons and the princess' household troops, mules and horses and goats, and a surprising number of the soldiers and sailors of the Empire of Saram.

«Our friends of Parine died hard,» said Prince Durouman quietly. «I hope the gods give them better thanks for that than I can.»

Blade nodded. «I wonder-did they all die?»

The two men's eyes met. Each knew without a word what was in the other's mind. Finally Prince Durouman shrugged.

«We can only go and find out.»

Kukon left the ruined town and harbor and headed toward the north coast of the island. The shortest overland route to the little white palace in the valley started there. Blade did not want to take much of an overland journey now or leave his ship very long. Some of Kul-Nam's soldiers might still be roaming the interior of the island or his galleys sweeping along the coast.

They found nothing except more death and destruction all the way to their landing place. It was no different when Blade and Prince Durouman led inland a party of forty men, all of them armed to the teeth. The only variation was the number of Kul-Nam's soldiers among the corpses. Usually there were a great many-sometimes half the total. Blade's spirits could not rise among such ghastly scenes, but he began to wonder just how many men Kul-Nam had lost here on Parine. Enough to weaken him? Perhaps.

There was no surprise when they finally reached Princess Tarassa's private valley. The bodies of soldiers from both sides lay thicker here than anywhere else, and from them rose such a stench that the air was almost unbreathable. Blade could see that many of Tarassa's guards had died literally fighting tooth and nail, biting and clawing at their enemies. But they had all died in the end, and so had Princess Tarassa.

They found her lying behind the blackened rubble of the palace. She had been a long and horrible time dying. Her face was already so swollen and blackened that it was impossible to see what expression had been on it when she died. That was just as well.

They buried Tarassa as deeply as they could and piled blocks of marble from her palace over the grave to make it safe. It was only after the princess was buried that Prince Durouman finally went off behind some blackened stumps and vomited himself empty. When he returned his face was still pale, but there was a ghastly, cold control in his voice when he spoke.

«I think there is no more question of whether the Five Kingdoms will come to aid us. The only question is which one will send the first ships.» His face split in a grim smile. «Would you care to make a bet on it, Blade?»

The first ships came in on the evening of the next day, three galleys from Belthanor, the southernmost of the Five Kingdoms. Blade and Prince Durouman told the captains all they needed to know of the situation and organized the crews into search parties. Prince Durouman would gladly have left the island and its dead behind. Blade thought otherwise. He was determined to comb Parine thoroughly for survivors and anything Kul-Nam's men might have left behind that might be useful in the coming war.

«Besides,» he added, «what better way to convince people of what is at stake in this war than by showing them Parine? You will have few traitors among those who have seen this.» He swept a hand around them, taking in all the rubble and corpses.

Prince Durouman had to admit Blade's point.

The search parties turned up two welcome surprises in the first two days. One was Princess Tarassa's son, alive and reasonably healthy. Two of the household servants had fled with him before the palace was surrounded and had hidden in a cave. The other surprise was more than a thousand of Parine's famous barrels, seasoned and ready for use, left completely intact in their sheds in the countryside.

«Kul-Nam's soldiers must have found them too bulky to carry away and not valuable enough to be worth destroying,» said Prince Durouman. «I imagine they'll be useful for our supplies when we sail, but-Blade, why are you smiling like that?»

So Blade finally had to explain the weapon he had conceived for use against the sailing ships of Kul-Nam's fleet.

It was extremely simple. Put a sealed barrel of gunpowder on the end of a long spar, preferably at least sixty feet long-

«A ship's mast?» asked the prince.

«Perhaps. Something long and strong, in any case.»

In the end of the barrel, put an iron rod, moving back and forth through a hole sealed with greased leather. Fasten the other end of the spar to the ram of a galley. Row the galley straight at a sailing ship until the barrel strikes the enemy's side. The iron rod is driven in through the hole, passing across a piece of flint. This strikes sparks. The sparks set off the powder. Anything from sixty to four hundred pounds of gunpowder- explodes against the enemy's hull well below the water line.

«That will blow a hole large enough for a man to ride through on horseback,» said Blade. «The ship will be on the bottom in minutes.»

«It will also knock the caulking out of every seam in the galley and the teeth out of the jaws of every man aboard her,» said Prince Durouman. «Assuming the sailing ship's guns haven't sunk the galley on the way in.»