then a sharp crack, like a broomstick broken over a knee. She can guess what that sound represented and feels ill. The agonizingly long moment before seems like nothing compared to the time it takes Thud to return to her. When she hears his soft voice ask, “Princess?” she could have laughed with relief. But she is both too smart and too frightened to do that.
“I am sure surprised to find a Guard down here!” he hisses. “They must want you real bad. It is a good thing they don’t know someone’s with you.”
It certainly is! And certainly nothing like the champion I have in you , Mr. Mollockle!
The passage of only a few hundred additional yards brings them around a sharp bend and the harbor opens before them. The stream runs directly into the Slideen, and the parallel walls that had been flanking the two fugitives go right to the water’s edge. The river water laps against the buildings’ foundations around either corner. The gravel bank has disappeared and the stream has widened to fill the space from wall to wall. Thud and Bronwyn are forced to wade to get beyond the limit of the brick and stone canyon. The water only covers their ankles when they first stepped into it, but it quickly deepens. It is above Bronwyn’s knees when they reach the point where the stream actually joins the river, and above her waist when they enter the harbor. The water only comes to the top of Thud’s elephantine thighs.
Turning to the right, they see a broad ledge running along the front of the building; steep stairs rise from it to meet doors at different levels in the façade. Steps also lead down into the water, apparently to allow access to boats of assorted sizes. The anchorage beyond is a confused mass of ships and boats of every imaginable size and shape: hulls, some like massive, square black mountains, others low-slung and rakish; a jungle of masts and spars, festooned with cobwebs of rigging; smokestacks, some squat and barrel like, others like slender pipes; the enormous striding spider-shapes of cranes and derricks. Pale clouds of steam and opaque clouds of smoke drift and shift among the tangle like ponderous and incurious cetaceans cruising through the lightless forests of the deep.
Wharves and piers protrude into the river like the teeth on a comb, adding to the general and disorienting confusion. From the palace on the island upstream shimmer lights that are twinkling and merry, giving Bronwyn’s heart a painful jab as if some secret joke was being emphasized. She has often watched the coming and going of the busy Slideen shipping. She remembers how she had spent hours on sunny afternoons or crimson evenings watching the elegant craft come and go. She would wonder where they had been, what kinds of cargos they were delivering into the warehouses, what might be in those mysteriously anonymous crates, cartons, bales, hogsheads and barrels she saw the cranes lifting from the deep wells of holds, like their feathered namesakes dipping into a pond to spear some surprised frog. True to the national distrust of anything foreign, few monarchs of Tamlaght, and fewer of its citizens, have ever wished to leave its borders, or ever have. In recent history, only the western portion of Londeac,
where it bulges toward the island of Guesclin ‘the great island of which Tamlaght occupies the largest part), separated by the few miles of the Strait, has been visited by a Tamlaghtan ruler. And then only because until just two generations earlier, it had been a territorial possession, since ceded to Londeac, thereby saving xenophobic future monarchs the trauma of ever again having to face the possibility of having to leave the island proper.
In all her life, Bronwyn has never been farther from Blavek than the estuary at the mouth of the Moltus, scarcely one hundred miles to the south. Those visits to what seemed to be the edge of the world haunted her. The great ships that came and went, where did they come from?
Where did they
“I am sure surprised to find a Guard down here!” he hisses. “They must want you real bad. It is a good thing they don’t know someone’s with you.”
It certainly is! And certainly nothing like the champion I have in you , Mr. Mollockle!
The passage of only a few hundred additional yards brings them around a sharp bend and the harbor opens before them. The stream runs directly into the Slideen, and the parallel walls that had been flanking the two fugitives go right to the water’s edge. The river water laps against the buildings’ foundations around either corner. The gravel bank has disappeared and the stream has widened to fill the space from wall to wall. Thud and Bronwyn are forced to wade to get beyond the limit of the brick and stone canyon. The water only covers their ankles when they first stepped into it, but it quickly deepens. It is above Bronwyn’s knees when they reach the point where the stream actually joins the river, and above her waist when they enter the harbor. The water only comes to the top of Thud’s elephantine thighs.
Turning to the right, they see a broad ledge running along the front of the building; steep stairs rise from it to meet doors at different levels in the façade. Steps also lead down into the water, apparently to allow access to boats of assorted sizes. The anchorage beyond is a confused mass of ships and boats of every imaginable size and shape: hulls, some like massive, square black mountains, others low-slung and rakish; a jungle of masts and spars, festooned with cobwebs of rigging; smokestacks, some squat and barrel like, others like slender pipes; the enormous striding spider-shapes of cranes and derricks. Pale clouds of steam and opaque clouds of smoke drift and shift among the tangle like ponderous and incurious cetaceans cruising through the lightless forests of the deep.
Wharves and piers protrude into the river like the teeth on a comb, adding to the general and disorienting confusion. From the palace on the island upstream shimmer lights that are twinkling and merry, giving Bronwyn’s heart a painful jab as if some secret joke was being emphasized. She has often watched the coming and going of the busy Slideen shipping. She remembers how she had spent hours on sunny afternoons or crimson evenings watching the elegant craft come and go. She would wonder where they had been, what kinds of cargos they were delivering into the warehouses, what might be in those mysteriously anonymous crates, cartons, bales, hogsheads and barrels she saw the cranes lifting from the deep wells of holds, like their feathered namesakes dipping into a pond to spear some surprised frog. True to the national distrust of anything foreign, few monarchs of Tamlaght, and fewer of its citizens, have ever wished to leave its borders, or ever have. In recent history, only the western portion of Londeac,
where it bulges toward the island of Guesclin ‘the great island of which Tamlaght occupies the largest part), separated by the few miles of the Strait, has been visited by a Tamlaghtan ruler. And then only because until just two generations earlier, it had been a territorial possession, since ceded to Londeac, thereby saving xenophobic future monarchs the trauma of ever again having to face the possibility of having to leave the island proper.
In all her life, Bronwyn has never been farther from Blavek than the estuary at the mouth of the Moltus, scarcely one hundred miles to the south. Those visits to what seemed to be the edge of the world haunted her. The great ships that came and went, where did they come from?
Where did they
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