21
(One more installment after this, probably sometime this weekend)
After he had sent Asaia on her way, Disan turned to the work of organizing the fleet from Soromir. It was mostly numbing and tedious work, but it was punctuated by one event of extraordinary excitement; someone tried to assassinate him.
He was at the docks for a meeting with a number of captains to discuss various problems associated with the great embarkation, and he had just left it in the company of a few of his guards. The dock was quite crowded, as it would be with so much going on, and in the midst of it all, a man rushed at him with a knife. Disan, purely reflexively, dodged it and Disan's men wrestled the man to the ground very roughly. The would-be assassin was a Sorean merchant who had just come from Tavra up the Great Canal with a shipment for provisioning the fleet, but it was impossible to get any coherent story out of him; he seemed to have no motive, and, indeed, seemed not to understand himself what he had done or why he had done it. When Disan asked him about his stay in Tavra, he broke down into further incoherence, and apparently could remember nothing clearly about it.
Disan pondered all sides of this, and said to himself, "'Beware the Honey Witch, for she has power from the Court of Night to bend the mind.' We should have paid your message more attention, Envren." He selected a number of trustworthy men, carefully making sure that none of them had any connection to Tavra, or had even traveled there in any time within the past few years, and sent them on to protect Baia in Mir Salal with a letter. He spent a great deal of agonized thought on how much he should say in it, and finally, and with considerable reluctance, concluded that he should not explicitly mention anything about the assassination itself. First, he did not want to worry Baia; second, the attempt had been clumsy and apparently even haphazard, which suggested to Disan that there was no systematic plan; and third, it seemed best in general to keep knowledge of the assassination attempt to as few as possible, until further investigation turned up more information. He had misgivings, however, and not long after the guards had been sent, he considered having them called back to change the letter; but he did not do it.
Other than the considerable worry and anxiety caused by this event, much of Disan's time consisted in reviewing lists and checklists and talking with supervisors. As the embarkation day for the first fleet drew near, there were the expected stacks of messages bearing excuses, but Disan was pleased enough that anyone was arriving that the bare fact that the population of Soromir was obviously and visibly swelling made the excuses easy to dismiss. He looked forward to actually completing this stage, knowing that the later stages would be harder. And everything was proceeding on schedule, which was something of a wonder.
Soon the embarkation day for the first fleet arrived. It went without an actual hitch, but there were so many people in Soromir that it was a far slower process than Disan had hoped. He went down to the docks himself and spent an immense amount of time and energy trying to keep the process running smoothly. There are few things more effective at resolving many kinds of problems than the word of a king, but even kings cannot solve problems that pile all around them in masses, and Disan was quite overwhelmed.
He had just seen off a boat carrying elderly passengers and some cargo to a ship in the harbor, when the air grew suddenly very still. There seemed no wind at all below, but high above dark clouds began swiftly to gather. Even the sea seemed to quiet down in some hushed expectation. Then he, and everyone else in sight clutched their ears. Disan kept his feet, but more than few people collapsed to the ground. A vast and fathomless voice resounded through the air. It did not come, as voices usually do, from a direction. It came from all directions. It did not, as voices usually do, lightly touch the ears through the air. The entire ocean of air seemed to speak. You felt the force of its words with your whole body as if they were great waves in the ocean. For it was not a voice. It was The Voice.
HEAR NOW THE VOICE OF FATH, THE HERALD OF THE POWERS THAT GOVERN THE WORLD!
THE HANDS OF THE POWERS ARE HELD BACK IN MERCY NO LONGER. FOR THREE TRANSGRESSIONS AND FOR FOUR, YOU ARE ALL CALLED TO JUDGMENT. YOU HAVE BEEN WEIGHED AND FOUND WANTING.
YOU HAVE VAUNTED YOURSELVES GREAT AMONG THE PEOPLES OF THE WORLD, AND WITH ARROGANT AND GREEDY HAND YOU HAVE BEGUN TO STRETCH FORTH TO SEIZE WHAT WAS NEVER GIVEN TO YOU. YOU HAVE EXALTED YOURSELF AGAINST THE VERY POWERS OF THE WORLD AS IF YOU WERE THEIR EQUALS. THEREFORE THE POWERS DECREE THAT ALL YOUR MIGHT AND SPLENDOR SHALL FALL IN ONE DAY.
At this, the earth began to make a strange groaning sound. The wind began to pick up. Lightning flashed in the sky.
IN A THOUSAND WAYS, YOU HAVE DEFIED BOTH THE COUNSEL AND THE COMMAND OF THE POWERS, AND IN TEN THOUSAND WAYS YOU HAVE VIOLATED THE LAW SET IN INVIOLABLE ORIKHALH. FAITHLESS IN YOUR VOWS, WICKED IN YOUR WAYS, YOU HAVE MISUSED THE PACTS AND COVENANTS THAT DEPEND ON THAT LAW. THEREFORE THE PACTS AND THE COVENANTS ARE OVERTURNED AND MADE NULL.
GREAT GIFTS YOU HAVE BEEN GIVEN BY THE POWERS, INCLUDING THE VERY LAND THAT IS YOUR HOME, BUT YOU HAVE USED YOUR GIFTS TO DO EVIL AND HAVE STAINED THE LAND WITH UNHOLY BLOOD. THEREFORE THE GIFTS AND THE LAND WE TAKE BACK.
There was a great cracking noise from the earth. Rain began to fall, first slowly and then heavily, and finally in torrents, soaking them all, but nobody in the rain could run to shelter due to the overwhelming power of the Voice.
YOU HAVE SOUGHT EVILS UNSPEAKABLE FROM DARKEST ABOMINATION. THEREFORE YOU SHALL WITHOUT DELAY RECEIVE THE DESOLATION THAT IS YOUR DESERVED END.
YOUR JUDGMENT IS PROCLAIMED. THE VOICE OF FATH HAS SPOKEN ON BEHALF OF ALL OF THE POWERS. LET IT BE DONE.
And with those final words, it seemed like the entire world went mad. If you ever stood on a boat when suddenly it lurched to the side, knocking you down, this is what everybody felt, but it was the very land itself that lurched. Anyone who had been standing, like Disan, was knocked flat. The earth began to shake heavily. Disan attempted to invoke the pacts and covenants to calm the earth, as he had done before, but he knew as he did so that it would not succeed, and it did not. There were no pacts and there were no covenants. The rain fell in sheets and began to be mixed with hail. The people at the docks began to stampede toward shelter.
"No! No!" shouted Disan as loud as he could. "To the ships! To the ships!"
Most still drove inland, never to be seen again. Some heard him and he began to get them on ships at the docks and on boats to take them out to the ships anchored farther out.
But the boats and ships were themselves beginning to have great difficulty. The semblance of life in the ships, even without the pacts and covenants, was friendly, but without the pacts and the covenants they could not seamlessly and easily respond to their crews as they once would have. This would not in itself have been devastating, as all sailors begin their experiences with ordinary boats like fishing boats, rather than the great ships of the Sorean fleet, and they knew their trade as no sailors in the world have known since. But no experience, no skill, was adequate to the occasion. The sea itself began to go mad. The waves had no pattern and went as they would. They rose out of nothing and collapsed into nothing. They waved this way and that, north south, east, west, even some in spirals around and around. They collided into each other in a confusion no sailor could navigate.
Those who followed Disan crowded on the slippery docks to fill the last embarkation boats that were there. Disan at one point stepped in, his boots sloshing in the rainwater that was filling the boat, to help people get on board. He had hardly done so when the dock itself violently twisted and tore away. Those who were in the process of embarking collapsed on to Disan and those who were still on the dock were thrown into the sea and swept away. When Disan managed to untangle himself, he looked with horror at the chaos that he could see in Soromir even through the wind-gusting rain. So many were the lightning strikes that fires were springing up in the city despite the torrential downpour. The land itself seemed like a sea, waving slowly up and down with rumble and roar. Buildings collapsed like sand. No people could be seen anywhere anymore.
On the sea-side, in the harbor, one of the great ships laden with Sorean treasures was caught in a sudden whirlpool that formed beneath it. Around and around it went, its anchor-chain snapping like twine, down and down; but then suddenly the whirlpool collapsed, spitting out the ship with a force that drove it toward the cliffs overlooking the city. A great groaning and rumbling resounded even through the tumultuous roar. As Disan watched, still as stone, he saw the great cliffs on which Neyat Sor stood begin to crumble. One moment, one could still make out the shining, glittering spires of Neyat Sor. The next moment it was gone forever. The ship that had been driven toward the cliffs was caught in a cataract of rock. Sorean ships were built to be unsinkable. They could withstand any ordinary storm. Many had survived collisions with other ships. Ramming them would not harm them; reefs could not hurt them. But no human ship that has ever been made that can withstand an avalanche of boulders. They tore through its untearable sails as if they were wet paper. They splintered its invulnerable hull as if it were balsam. They poured through its frame as if it were not even there and the unsinkable ship sank like a stone.
The rain intensified as if the very heavens were falling on their heads. The sailors in Disan's boat attempted to navigate through the rabidly foaming, anarchical waves as they set the passengers to bailing out the rainwater. Slowly they made their way to the ships. But the seas were growing perilous with flotsam as well as wave, and the boat suddenly hit something. Disan, who had been watching all the devastation and had, without thinking loosened his grip from the terror of the sight, was thrown overboard into the shocking cold of the sea.
It was difficult to keep a head above the water, but he managed to do so.
"Overboard!" he heard someone call. But it was the last thing he definitely heard above the surface of the ocean, because his head was driven by a wave into something hard. He saw lightning in his head, and all went red. He was still conscious, but it seemed like his body would no longer obey; he was disoriented and knew not up or down. He hit something again and sank beneath the water.
