The Second Empire by Paul Kearney Read Free Book Online Page A

through the trees.
    “Hello!” Murad shouted, his voice cracking with strain. “Anyone about?”
    The gates of the stockade had been smashed flat. A litter of bodies was scattered here, an arquebus trodden into the mud. Blood stood in puddles with a cloud of midges above every one.
    “Lord God,” Hawkwood said. Murad covered his eyes.
    Fort Abeleius was a charnel-house. The Governor’s residence had burnt to the ground and was still smouldering. Remnants and wreckage from other huts and buildings were scattered about in broken, splintered piles. And there were bodies and parts of bodies everywhere, scores of them.
    Bardolin turned aside and vomited.
    Hawkwood was holding the back of his hand to his nose. “I must see if the ship, survived. I pray to God—”
    He took off at a run, stumbling over corpses, leaping broken lumber, and disappeared in the direction of the beach beyond the clearing.
    Murad was turning over the bodies like a ghoul prowling a graveyard, nodding to himself, making a study of the whole ghastly spectacle.
    “The stockade was overrun from the north first,” he said. “That split our people in two. Some made a stand by the gate, but most I think fell back to the Governor’s residence…” He shambled over that way himself, and picked his way through the burnt ruins of the place that he was to have administered his colony from.
    “Here’s Sequero. I know him by the badge on his tunic. Yes, they all crammed in here’—he kicked aside a charred bone—‘and when they had held out for a while, some fool’s match set light to the thatch, or perhaps the powder took light. They might have held out through the night otherwise. It was quick. All so quick. Every one of them. Lord God.”
    Murad sank to his knees amid the wreckage and the burnt bodies and set the heels of his hands in his eyes. “We are in hell, Bardolin. We have found it here on earth.”
    Bardolin knew better, but said nothing. He felt enough of a turncoat already. There had been over a hundred and forty people here in the fort. Aruan had said the ship would survive. Who manned it now?
    “Let’s go down to the sea,” he said to Murad, taking the nobleman by the elbow. “Perhaps the ship is still there.”
    Murad came with him in a kind of grieved daze. Together they picked their way across the desolation, gagging on the smell of the dead, and then plunged into the forest once more. But there was that salt tang to the air, and the rush of waves breaking somewhere ahead, a sound from a previous world.
    The white blaze of the beach blinded them, and the horizon-wide sea seemed too vast to take in all at once. They had become used to the fetid confines of the rainforest, and it was pure exhilaration to be able to see a horizon again, a huge arc of blue sky. A wind blew off the sea into their hot faces. A landward wind, just as Aruan had promised.
    “Glory be!” Bardolin breathed.
    The
Gabrian Osprey
stood at anchor perhaps half a mile from the shore. She looked intact, and wholly deserted—until Bardolin glimpsed some movement on her forecastle. A man waving. And then he caught sight of the head bobbing in the waves halfway to the ship. Hawkwood was swimming out to her, pausing in his stroke every so often to wave to whatever crew remained and shout himself hoarse. Bardolin and Murad watched until he reached the carrack and clung to the wales on her side, too weak to pull himself up the tumble-home. A group of men appeared at the ship’s rail. Some were sailors, a couple wore the leather vests of soldiers. They hauled Hawkwood up the ship’s side, and Bardolin saw one of them embrace his captain.
    Murad had sunk down upon the sand. “Well, mage,” he said in something resembling his old manner. “At least one of us is happy. It is time to leave, I think. We have outstayed our welcome in this country. Thus ends New Hebrion.”
    But Bardolin knew that this was not the end of something. Whatever it was, it had only just