The Spindles of Spacetime
Volume 3
Irons in the Fire
Content warnings (may contain spoilers)
This chapter depicts explosions, burning buildings, and warfare from an on-the-ground perspective.
For the rest of the daylight hours, Liss and her company rode clockwise along Madan's coastal roads, tearing the counterspell apart one pole at a time. There was no chain of command to revert their work, no worthwhile obstruction except for a handful of loyalists, whom Liss left bloodied on the side of the road.
Before the setting sun had washed the sky crimson, they found King Vicola in the slums near the southeastern exit of the city, tied upside-down to the eaves of a brewery. Indeed he looked young for his station, dark face gleaming in the sun, jet black hair hanging from his scalp in three braids. When their cart of four trundled to a stop beside the inverted man, he called out to the group in Madani, then in Orsandin: “Are the rumours true? Is Madan freed?”
“Not all of it,” Lacar answered. “But if you were to side with the people, it surely will be.”
Vicola sighed. “I have spent the last five years bolstering Orsand…I don't know that their trust will return so easily.”
While Lacar lowered him by the rope around his feet, Noma tied a knot to cut him loose. Vicola groaned as he righted himself from the ground and clambered aboard the cart with them, rubbing his head. As Lacar flicked the reins, the king said, “How did it happen? Is the governor dead?”
“Yes, and so are the admiral and the chief of constabulary,” Liss said. “We saw to it.”
“You killed them,” he breathed.
“I had a hand in it—as did Lacar, Kori and Noma. We contrived this plot together.”
“Oh, it was mostly Liss’ creation,” Lacar murmured. “None of this would have been possible if not for this young lady.”
“You killed them,” he repeated, with a meaningful look at her.
This time, Liss heard the meaning beneath his words. “Yes, I did,” she replied.
*
They whiled the night in the empty palatial residence, patching up burns and scrapes. As the dined at Vicola’s table, the spread Lacar’s own handiwork, the king turned to Liss and said, “I think I shall address the people at the crack of dawn, and I would like you and Kori to stand with me. I will speak in Madan’s tongue—here is what I will say…”
In the blue light of morning, when Vicola entered the Port of Madan, there was a bristling among the crowds that saw him—but always, Liss stood by him and shouldered the crowds apart, and seeing her goodwill towards the king, they let him pass.
King Vicola ascended to the balcony of the drum tower as the sun rose to bathe the sky, waving Liss and Kori up after himself. Before she went, Liss turned to Noma, clasping her hand with a nod.
He stepped to the fore of the balcony at the top, face aglow in the sun. He declared the name of his people—Madan—and as if by some primordial reflex, an answer began to roll through the crowds, carried all the way from the streets to the factories. Liss could not understand their words, but her heart swelled at the voices gathering on the square beneath the drum tower.
Then, for the next hour, he spoke.
The first thing he did was tell the story of the battle. Liss did not understand most of what he said, but he had outlined the contents of his speech last night. His voice boomed across the square as he made heroes of Liss, Kori and Noma—dignitaries from islands abroad, who had aided them to today's victory.
And not twenty horse lengths up the esplanade, you will see the singed crater where Liss destroyed the constabulary force. This young hero beheaded Admiral Ecata, tore the Governor limb from limb, and ripped the Head of Police to shreds in his own bed, with his own gun!
He turned to wave Liss to the front of the balcony, and when she stepped into the sunlight, she saw a startling vision. The square looked to her like a nest of ants, except the ants were the heads of Madani people. There were perhaps more people here than lived in the harbour town of Henkor.
She and the priestess Korithamai came under our banner to crush the Orsandin yoke! We owe our victory today to them.
And now he waved for Kori, who stepped out on Vicola’s other side. A cheer rose from the masses, rolling into the king’s next words.
For too long have I stood by and accepted the Orsandin rule. All this was done under the threat of a death like my father's, but every day I was tethered, I quietly fomented a plan for our freedom, waiting only for the right moment to come.
That moment has come, my people.
Now, more than ever, we must unite with our neighbours. The rest of the isles. Doganir, from which Liss Legra and Noma Nekala have come. The Undying Ring, of which Korithamai is a dignitary. And our neighbours northeast, the first who will see Orsandin ships should they cross the Mouth again. The danger is not over. The Orsandin rats ruling over our neighbours will send warships once the news reaches their ports. When that comes, we must be ready to defend our coasts. We are not free until all our islands are free!
Liss had never heard voices join so loudly; three floors above the ground yet they were still deafening to her ears.
Liss, Kori and Noma have agreed to join us until all the Greater Isles have been liberated. And for that I thank them graciously. An alliance, not enmity, is what we need in these times. Gone are the days when we could mind our own business in our corners of Makor Kirikiri. Orsand showed us that. We move forward together!
It was only as the cheers dissipated that Vicola turned to Liss—and declared to the people what she knew to be his thanks and praise.
He lifted her hand into the air, and the gesture was answered by a surge of voices too vast to be fathomed. She understood, of course, that Vicola was using her tale, her bravery to relegitimise himself to the people he gave up for five years.
But she knew there was no winning this war without his alliance; neither Henkor nor Doganir alone could hold a candle to Orsand. So she grinned and raised her fist over her head, shouting their shared word for victory.
For five days, the new patrol fleet toured the bay while Madan’a sailors elected new captains among themselves. For five days they stocked the warships for the naval strife sure to come. Liss, Lacar, Noma and Kori, now elevated to the role of foreign advisors, were consulted by King Vicola on counter strategies.
He had realised what they had: that the two of them, Liss and Kori together, formed a deadly weapon.
Since the only language shared among the group of four was Orsandin, they could not help but to speak it together. “And to be clear,” said Vicola in the antechamber of his repossessed palace house, “we welcome you as warriors, on diplomatic terms. If, while you lead our people, you should cross our trust in any way, if you should harm our people or otherwise bring them to harm, then those terms are ended, and you must leave our islands. Do you understand and agree?”
“Yes,” said Liss. “Our shared enemy is too great for us to afford infighting.”
Vicola’s intuitions landed true. Two evenings later, a message came from the northeast of a fleet of five warships approaching. As the seahulks rose from the horizon, the foremost bearing a flag of purple and black, Vicola launched two to meet their foes, its Orsand colours torn down to be replaced by Madan’s brown and green.
It was not the warships that were of import: it was the tiny dinghy that sailed between them.
Liss had never been given to anxiety, but Kori incessantly shuffled her feet on the deck as Lacar and Noma set the sails. Leaning over, Liss grasped the woman’s arm and whispered, “This will be as easy as breaking eggs.”
The Madan warships shielded the weapon between them, drawing the attention of their foes. But well before the ally ships entered the range of their foes’ cannonballs, the dinghy shot forward. Then the plan was in full swing. Kori dashed to the front of the deck, lifted her hands on both sides, and began to cast her spell.
The horizon of Kori’s magic left a wide wake. The wind behaved in an odd way, accelerating as it entered the bubble. From within, it appeared that the ships were moving at a tenth of the normal speed, ploughing through waves seemingly frozen like glaciers. They saw cannonballs coming a minute before they would have hit, and jibed to dodge the sluggishly hovering projectiles.
Thirty seconds, on the outside, was all it took to bring Liss within range of the flagship and its dark cannons. Then, leaving the ropes to Noma, she repeated her feat with the admiral’s vessel a week ago.
The explosion unfolded in slow motion—blossoming firestorms of metal and powder, towering higher than the hills. Booms and masts began crumpling for what felt like forever.
Long before the first boat had completed its collapse, they had initiated the destruction of the next two.
For the first time in her life, Liss felt a new sensation creep up as she lowered her hands—a fatigue of her attention, as if she had spent several minutes concentrating on a single point without moving her eyes. But she repeated the motions as they reached the second pair in the V-formation, eyes aching.
While flames swallowed the cannons and a guttural boom shook their decks, the dinghy swooped around the back of the fleet like a fly among cattle, out of the path of the flying ashes. The last two ships, too, were ignited in due time.
Then Kori released her spell, tumbling backwards onto a thwart. Time began to run again. Fire and noise erupted—the volcanic thunder of a hundred cannons’ firepowder detonating at once.
Liss leaned against the mainmast, eyes unfocusing for a minute. She felt hungry. Her body was fresh, but her mind was scattered. “Food?” she asked hazily in Doganira.
“Your friend has some,” answered Kori in the same language, pointing to where Noma was trimming the mainsail. She jammed the ropes when she saw Liss staggering over, untying her haversack to produce a packet of sea biscuits.
Liss sat with Kori on the deck and ate, silhouetted by the flames and smoke behind them, while Lacar attended to the helm and Noma the sails. “Spectacular work,” he called out.
“What did I tell you? Like breaking eggs,” said Liss.
Now Madan’s sailors had witnessed the devastation firsthand, any lingering scepticism about Vicola’s new allies evaporated.
Once the Orsandin satellites knew their cannons had become a fatal vulnerability, the ships began to arrive with land trebuchets instead, poorly tuned to the vagaries of the sea. Then they were sitting ducks to the artillery ashore—twenty mounted cannons, refurbished from Orsandin stores and carted to three coastal towns within its territory.
While Madan was defended, they restored its maritime signalling systems: chains of islands from the borders, scouts and keepers relaying warnings back and forth with horns.
What Lacar had said of the Greater Isles—that they were artisans of war—quickly proved its truth. King Vicola had been training in the art of war since before he had learned to talk. From reports from scouts and an understanding of his own kingdom’s geography, he knew where Orsand might attack next, and where more firepower would be best spent.
His orders were decisive, relayed across the island by mounted messengers. Riding through the mountains, they made contact again with the nation of Igon on the island’s northern coast, where Orsandin police still held station. In times of yore, Igon had terrorised Madan’s shores with their lightweight fleet and vicious naval tactics.
But Orsand had thrown that old order into disarray. Today, the two foes traded embraces when Madan’s warriors arrived on stags and vessels and, together with Igon’s chiefs-in-hiding, freed the city in fire and ash.
After Igon joined their side, the island heard nothing from Orsand for a week. Vicola wasted not one minute of that pregnant silence, organising at once to strike the stronghold from which these enemy ships were issuing: the island of Andan.
*
Andan was the second largest settlement of the Greater Isles. The closest Orsandin base northeast of them, it was unreachable from Doganir—or so Vicola determined—without Madan as a port of call. Strung to Madan by a scattered chain of islands, Andan was defended by a single vast fortress and a fleet greatly diminished by its recent failed retaliations.
In the centre of that vast fortress—said the captive they had kept alive from the last sinking—there was a large golden bell.
With Liss, Kori, and the rest of the force borne by a phalanx of three Igon sampans, they flew from outpost to island outpost across three nights. On the third, they made landfall with barely five hours’ sleep.
The fleets let down the band of twenty, who made camp on the mangrove swamp, spending one evening recuperating their energy.
Then on the dawn of the second day, while ten of the twenty stayed to ready the retrieval, the other ten stole towards the city, fording streams through ferns and figs, passing a waterfall not unlike the one on Henkor.
There were guards on the edge of the forest, patrolling the tops of the city walls. From here there was no line of sight to anything—so two scouts were sent up the knoll towards the northeast, returning two hours later to report.
“There are watchtowers all the way along the perimeter,” whispered one, an Igoni woman named Alena whom Liss esteemed well. “The walls are stone but the town is wood. Plenty of kindling, if you catch my drift.”
“Where is the best vantage?” Liss asked, taking Kori by the arm.
“The top of the wall should do it. We will shelter you. Let’s go.”
*
It began with the boom of the eastern gate collapsing. Guards were crushed by rubble, tumbling from their towers in piles, answered at once by a grand and godlike ringing far away, a rain of arrows from above. Left and right and fore and aft, Liss watched their flankers lift their shields to deflect the projectiles from the pair.
Liss grasped Kori's hand, guiding the sightless woman up the stones as the band sprinted across the pile of fallen rubble that the gate had become. Kori lifted her hand, and together they began their climb to the wall—up into the open. Up into the sight of every watchtower.
The houses sat placidly, thatched roofs gleaming around the temple in the heart.
Almost as soon as Kori lowered the spell, there was a twang of bowstrings across the fortress wall. Arrows flitted, incessant as a flock of wasps, a fatal peppering of stingers. “Do it!” cried Alena, while they lifted their shields into a shell about their heads.
Liss heard the arrows pelt, a tumult of cries erupting about her. She squinted into the sunlight in the gap between the shields. Alena gasped, and her body thudded against Liss’ calves. Through the eye of the needle, she saw the golden bell that swung in the temple pinnacle, clanging over and over.
She stared, and her stare burned. Blood splashed her cheek; a shield clattered to the ground. She lifted her palm to eclipse its golden sheen, then closed her hand into a fist.
Far away, the gleam of the bell brightened, and swelled, and then it blossomed into fire that mushroomed into the sky.
The explosion took half a second to reach them, rattling every loose beam and stone. Then the wave of scorching heat did, slamming into their faces. It was like thunder that brought fire—rubble and flame descending upon the thatching and boards.
*
It was easy work thereafter, immolating the town houses from afar.
Long before the fire began to eat the town in earnest, the band of raiders—now carrying three of their number as corpses—were flying off beneath the forest canopies, expedited by Kori’s spell. They smelled the burning as it roiled up behind them, turning the shadows darker—there was no saying how much of Andan would remain once the hungry blaze was through.
But that was not for them to worry about today. Their escape party had their gangplanks down, and almost as soon as their feet hit the beach, they were launched off to sea.
Only now, leaning on the bulwark at the foremost ship’s bow, watching the flames lick at the faraway walls, did the scale of the smoking column become clear. It was taller than the hills, taller than the clouds, a signal visible as far as the horizon, blotting out part of the sky even from the vantage of Madan’s port.
She had done that with her bare hands.
Meanwhile, the raiders sat among their fallen on deck, singing and drumming a vigil, a song to lead them down the river from this world to the Being beyond.
Liss began to realise, then, that something small but consequential had changed in her.
Her allies had died protecting her. They had wagered their deaths on the certainty that she would free their people from Orsand’s stranglehold. Perhaps someone lesser would tremble at the thought, but she knew, without question, that she would prove them right.
*
Today, as always, Vicola upheld Liss’ and Kori’s deeds before the crowds—Madan’s allies from abroad, their friendship the symbol of the union of the isles. By the king’s goodwill, she had been given a home, along with her band of four, in the house of the dead admiral.
Accordingly, Liss and Kori became minor celebrities among Madan—the explosive girl with pink hair and the time shifter with skin dark as night were well-known even in the outer towns.
But the three chiefs of Igon did not spare her any smiles or cajoling. Perhaps this was because their commander Alena had died to shield her. Perhaps there was something she did not yet understand. But when Vicola brought her to their war meetings, she saw their testy squints. She was only ever “the Henkora girl” to them.
Meanwhile, her Madani comrades spilled over with questions, adulations, and dares—and at first she answered them, sometimes out of pride and others because no fear ever compelled her otherwise.
But one day, departing the square with the young king, he turned to her with a serious look and said, “Do not speak so freely of our plans. We do not know who among them are spies.”
And in the sun, she saw a glint of something in his eye, and at once she knew he did not tell her everything, either.
“Noma,” said Liss. Her friend reclined in the admiral’s leather couch, writing on his pristine paper.
She stretched her aching neck left and right—it had been another day practising explosions on the bay, igniting the ruins beneath the waves. She sat down on the scrolled armrest of the couch, just by Noma’s head.
“How are you liking these new lodgings?” she asked.
Noma looked up from her writing. “This is so much comfier than any other place I’ve ever lived.” Her expression sank. “Sometimes, I feel almost guilty for enjoying such comforts when my family—our families—are still enslaved.”
Liss shook her head. “There is no use in such thinking,” she replied. “The greater our morale, the more effective we are, and the sooner we can free Henkor.”
“You’re right.” When Liss clasped a hand over Noma’s shoulder, she felt a shudder travel through the other girl’s body. Noma’s eyes were wide, reflecting Liss’ silhouette. She beamed at that complex surprise, wondering again at how lucky she was that Noma had followed her this far. But she did not question Noma on the curious look in her eyes.
One week of naval skirmishes bled into two, the alliance of Madan and Igon clawing back networks of islands through the force of their combined navy. Liss did not even have to sail out with Kori all that often, only going when Vicola asked. From the threat alone, Orsandin ships could bring none of the iron weaponry that had cemented their foothold here.
Then, three weeks later, there was a silence. “Do not be fooled,” said Vicola at the next war council. “The remaining Orsandin forces must be rallying an armada in their final stronghold, Doganir.”
And so the Greater Isles began amassing forces in kind. From the northwestern city of Igon came its fleet of raiders. From the island of Andan fled their expelled general and his loyalists, offering intelligence and strategic aid. The clamour of shipyards and the chatter of a hundred crews pervaded the aged port.
One morning, as the dry season was drawing to its peak, the war council formed by the general of Andan, the three chiefs of Igon, and King Vicola met in the palatial residence. They left with a directive to shore up their forces towards a singular purpose: a strike on Doganir before the Orsandin armada was ready to set sail.
A month ago, the Andani informants had learned from Orsandin defectors about the distribution of control in the Doganir archipelago. It was from their intelligence that the war council decided that the first settlement they would take—the least guarded, and the best staging point—was Henkor.