Heresy Book One by Anselm Audley

Author:Anselm Audley
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Published: 2011-09-12T21:00:00+00:00

Chapter XVII

We reached Lepidor three days later; battered though Fenicia was, she still made the passage from Pharassa twice as fast as the Parasur. I found Fenicia more comfortable, too, if a little dull. Staring at the empty ocean wasn’t quite as interesting as looking at the continents.

I was very glad to be coming home again at last, even though I didn’t intend to stay. It was all very well spending eighteen months away, and for the most part I’d enjoyed it. But it just wasn’t the same as home, and I was looking forward to a time of being Escount of Lepidor again, rather than a trainee heretic mage. The mage-training and being taught how to skulk around were considerably more exciting—sometimes a little too exciting, being taught how to escape from ropes, cells etc. came to mind—but it would be good to see the familiar faces of Lepidor again. For a while. There had been a time when I wouldn’t have minded spending a lot of my life in Lepidor as Count or an oceanographer, but now…

I was standing on the bridge again as Fenicia approached Lepidor’s undersea harbor. It seemed so small after Pharassa and Taneth, just the four gantries in a spiral around the hub. Only—it wasn’t four any more. There was a construction bubble over the lower levels, and the skeleton of a fifth gantry. I spotted another loading warehouse, too, just behind it, and wondered what was going on. I’d never seen such a major construction effort in Lepidor. It must be the iron profits, I thought, watching the hub; as we came closer, I could make out figures in the reception lobby.

We docked at the fourth gantry, and I noticed more new additions—an extra lift running down the side of the central core, which until now had been concealed behind the bulk of the main structure. The gantry was larger, too, I saw: the cargo loading platform had been widened, and a linking tunnel ran from that to the top end of the new warehouse.

“I forgot to tell you about this, Cathan,” Hamilcar said, smiling. “You’ll hardly recognize Lepidor; it’s changed hugely in the last year. Your father’s been ploughing all his profits back into the city.”

I wasn’t sure how I’d feel about huge changes in my home city, but thank Thetis that the decline we’d all been so worried about had been reversed.

From being a city that couldn’t afford to pay for forest clearing, now we were building new harbor gantries—an expensive improvement, and certainly one my father wouldn’t have undertaken lightly.

The docking clamps latched onto the Fenicia’s hull, and after the moment’s pause while the water drained out, the hatches opened. We thanked the captain, and Hamilcar gestured for me to go first out into the well— only two stories: the Fenicia was just over half the size of the Shadowstar—and along the corridor and the gantry. I picked up my bag, the same one I’d set out with except it

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