The ancient larch keel of the quinquereme shuddered as it tasted the freshwater of the Tanais River, the wooden creak of its flexion sounding like a moan. For a moment, I wondered if I heard the echo of a dead nymph’s voice groaning in pleasure like a tree bending in the wind.

  According to the dolphins I had spoken with, the mermaids living in the lagoon that surrounded Venice claimed that the keel had been cut from the tree of a liachiad with neither care nor permission, and the god of the sea had refused to let the boat rot on that account. And, indeed, while the still-submerged ship had looked rather waterlogged when certain marine animals possessed of blowholes and earthy attitudes towed it to shore, aided by the rope-tying capabilities of certain other marine animals possessed of fingers and flights of fancy, it looked to be in remarkably good condition after an earthquake raised it (and me) from the waters of the lagoon.

  That I happened to be attempting to pull an orichalcum-plated trident out of the muddy bottom of the lagoon at that particular moment should be viewed as a coincidence. While I must confess to having learned some magical skills by that point in time, I had not yet been tutored in earth magic, and earthquakes have been known to occur naturally in Venice. It is not clear to me why, after being so friendly as to donate oars and sails to hasten our departure, the Venetians would embrace such lurid rumors about me. Given that I have half a dozen older brothers, the notion that my church-going mother would have sought a cure for infertility in a seaside temple to a certain pagan deity and conceived me unnaturally there was particularly absurd.

  Since dolphins are no more honest than the human rumor-mongers of Venice and I have known mermaids to entertain curious flights of fancy, I am not sure how much credence to put in the twice-relayed story of the liachiad and the aforementioned deity, but as I rode my larch-keeled ship into the river’s mouth and it shuddered, I could not help but think of how much a parched person adrift upon the ocean craves the only sort of water that can truly quench their thirst—fresh water, not the saltwater of the sea. Liachiads are not nymphs of the sea; I would not expect one to be at home in salt water any more than a living larch tree.

  Unfortunately, at the time that the keel drank in its first taste of freshwater in a millennium, I had only the briefest of moments to try to recall why the keel of my ship might sound distinctly feminine yet not wholly human. The period I could spare for reflection and recollection measured no more than a handful of heartbeats before my attention was torn away from my attempts to recall the story of the nymph and the full set of circumstances under which I acquired the ship. The distraction came in the form of a physically minute set of vibrations of the air, or, more specifically, the sound of a ragged volley of arquebus fire. One lead ball out of that volley splattered as if molten against the mage-tempered Corsican brass of my breastplate, the softness of lead like that of clay in comparison. The imperial ensign standing next to me flinched, ducking low. Yuri barked worriedly. By the time I looked around, Katya was lying flat on the deck and already working on reloading her rifle as a scattering of my men returned fire in a sequence so ragged it could not be reasonably called a volley at all.

  “The House of the Ninth Heir-Son controls the Ministry of Internal Affairs,” the ensign said, by way of explanation. As an explanation, it went only as far as identifying that the attacking arquebusiers did so on behalf of a royal house that I knew next to nothing about.

  “Why would they shoot at us?” I asked as I frantically motioned for a stop to the shooting. My men continued to reload and ready their weapons, but none sought to shoot through the faint shimmer of turquoise light surrounding the ship, whether through obedience to my order or because they expected the magical shield to block fire in both directions. “We didn’t shoot at them except in reply,” I added, prodding the crouching ensign with my boot.

  The imperial officer’s eyes flickered back to the submersible brass boat sitting on the quinquereme’s deck but then proceeded to offer an explanation unrelated to the presence of the boat sent by the Underminister of Harbor Security. “You did fire at the Imperial Palace,” he said, then paused as a second, more ragged volley bounced off the air surrounding my ship, turquoise light flickering at the points of invisible impact. “And they don’t know who you are, which means you must be one of their enemies.”

  “They have that many enemies?” I gripped the railing, willing the shield to stay in place. The rumbling of steam engines announced that steam knights and mechs were beginning to ready themselves for action.

  “There are fifteen or so extant great houses with a claim on imperial inheritance,” the ensign said. “The quantity is not exact because there could be some secret marital mergers or a hidden house—it has previously happened that the demise of an heir-son’s house was apparent rather than permanent. The Ninth may have two or three allies, but that means they have four or five times as many enemies as allies in action today.”

  The squad of arquebusiers grew more distant as the ship traveled up the river. A third volley would have been possible, but instead of attempting one, they collected their dead and wounded and retreated into an alleyway out of sight. As the immediate threat faded, I spared the ensign a skeptical look, taking my hands off the railing. “Surely, some of the great houses must see the value of neutrality. Or at least circumstantial alliance—the lesson of the circle of kings has been written about for over a thousand years.”

  “I do not know what you mean by a circle of kings, but the Ministry of Internal Affairs is a very powerful ministry; no house can afford to ignore the position of the Ninth,” the ensign said.

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  “But surely, as an educated man working so closely with the government in Tanais, you must have read Kautilia’s famous scholarly treatise on statecraft,” I said. “The enemy of one’s enemy should be at least momentarily considered an ally of convenience—it is very mathematically difficult to have that many enemies at once without trying very hard.”

  “I have never heard of it,” the ensign said. “But I would not trust my enemy’s enemy; I would fight all of my enemies whether or not they are fighting each other.”

  I shook my head. “This is why you are an ensign, and I am a colonel,” I said. “I do not wish to take sides either for or against the House of the Ninth Heir-Son.” Though my self-assigned rank could be argued as illegitimate, I felt that I had enough experience with independent command to be fully confident that fighting was frequently a bad idea compared to waiting. It is frequently said that Leon the Usurper took care never to interrupt his enemies’ mistakes, and it has been my experience that battles usually are joined as a result of a mistake on the part of one of the participants.

  The ensign’s eyes flickered guiltily to the brass submersible boat. “It would never have occurred to me to pit my enemies against each other,” he said, his face carefully controlled to calmness.

  This careful control seemed a sign that the ensign had not told me everything that he could; however, before I could follow up with additional questions or a more hostile repetition of my original inquiry, I was interrupted.

  “Sir?” It was Georg, holding a blue ledger.

  “Oh, yes,” I said, remembering my promise to let men disembark. “The men who wish to disembark. Thank you for the reminder,” I added, making my way back to the helm, followed closely by Yuri and less closely by a string of women that included Georg and the two Circassians.

  Katya and Gulben stayed behind, the former providing a direct physical threat to the ensign with a drawn weapon and the latter engaged in a discussion about some sort of spellwork with Lieutenant Teushpa. Not having been classically educated in magic, I could not follow the technical jargon used by the princess and the fraud, though I was glad to see them working together; Gulben had little cause for loyalty to me, but attacks on the ship from the ensign’s enemies or allies would pose every bit as much risk to her as the rest of us. Perhaps more; she was not wearing any armor, and I doubted she was well-protected by shielding magics.

  “Sir, I just wanted to—” Georg frowned as she hastened after me in her ill-fitted clothing.

  “We will want to make for a dock,” I told the helmsman, waving my hand curtly to cut off Georg before she could list out which soldiers had decided to leave my service. “Let me see… that one, I think, fourth on the left. That looks as if it is meant to accommodate galleys under oar.”

  Georg let out a frustrated breath, a stray lock of hair the color of aged cheese rising in response, but obeyed the unspoken order to stop talking while orders were relayed, shouted out over the thrumming of the rowing-engine and the deep contralto groans of the keel.

  I felt confident that it did not matter who wanted to disembark in Tanais—I had made a promise, and now that we were no longer actively being attacked, I would honor it promptly and efficiently. With the chaos consuming Tanais, I doubted that such opportunities would arise frequently in the near future, and I did not wish to linger in the city to wait for another one.

  And so, we pulled in to dock at a slip on the Tanais River meant for galleys, rather than barges or sailing ships. Galleys tend to be military or semi-military in purpose, as it is expensive to conventionally man full banks of oars and the principal advantage of galleys at sea is in the tactical scale of maneuver. The Imperial Navy is the principal operator of galleys within the Golden Empire, but they operate mainly in the Cimmerian Sea, the Axine Sea, and the Khazarian Sea, and their Tanais dockyard lies on the Cimmerian coastline.

  It did not occur to me to ask who might own a dock meant for use by galleys until I could see behind the rows of barrels lining the dock and noticed the pair of brass submersible boats laid up on solid ground. The ancient bronze ram of the quinquereme gently tapped one of the pilings under the dock as we came to a stop, a loud thud that reverberated throughout the principal headquarters of the Ministry of Harbor Security.

  Translator’s note: Mikolai’s previous accounts were delivered principally in Latin, with exceptions for verbatim dialogue and modern or technical subjects for which old Latin is lacking in vocabulary. Comments made to Mikolai’s Loegrian agent were passed back to Mikolai in some manner which led to the agent reporting to us that the text of Mikolai’s new memoir would be delivered in Loegrian. After considerable enthusiastic anticipation, we received a manuscript with an attached note that read “Hw?t! Syeean ?rest ic mine gidd wrat, ic write nu on Loegrisc.” Rather than being written in Loegrian, the manuscript appeared to have been written mostly (with similar exceptions for dialogue and technical subjects) in some obscure dialect resembling Old Frisian, which did not make the task of translating this historically important account easier. The term we have chosen to render as “ensign” in this and subsequent chapters was written by Mikolai as “sciphere-cumbles-hyrde,” which may mean “ship-army-standard-bearer” or “naval banneret.” While “ensign” is technically French, it is French for “banneret,” and thus has been widely used within Loegria as the term for the lowest rank of commissioned naval officers since the conclusion of the Century War.

  Editor’s note: Neither have we. Our experts were able to transliterate but not translate Каутилйа, which I have been assured is not a real Slavonic word or name in spite of the lines of dialogue being rendered in the Slavonic in which they were presumably originally spoken.

  Editor’s note: It was common practice in conversation within the Golden Empire to refer to Leon I, Emperor in Paris, High King over Loegria, Lord of the Seven Great Isles, and Protector of Jerusalem and Cyprus as “Leon the Usurper.” While a loyal Loegrian citizen, it is incumbent on me as editor to refrain from misrepresenting Mikolai’s words, except to the modest degree rendered inevitable by difficulties in translation.

  Shackled Destiny. It's worth a look.