Lightspeed Magazine - October 2016 by John Joseph Adams

Author:John Joseph Adams [Ed.] [Adams, John Joseph]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Science Fiction Magazine
Amazon: B01LYIMK8P
Publisher: John Joseph Adams
Published: 2016-10-01T11:00:00+00:00

• • • •

When first they hanged the pirate Black upon the beach

Little did the captains trow what they set upon the sea

Neither haunt nor hollow, down the long years between

Justice for the open waves, and a fire upon the deep

—Lords of the Horizon, Ebenstone (trad. attrib.)

By sharp contrast with the New Garaden Institute, the Thalassojustity Palace was arguably the oldest building in Highpassage. It was certainly the oldest building still in regular use. The legal and sovereign relationship between the Thalassojustity and its host city was ambiguous, strained by two millennia and more of precedent, treaty, and occasional open warfare.

In other words, arguably not in Highpassage proper. The Increate, as always, manifested Their power on the side of the big battalions.

Morgan Abutti was treated to a close view of the Pirate’s Steps, the ancient risers that led to the formal portico. A temple of the sea, the palace had been looking out across the Attik Main for over a third of recorded history. He knew the building well—impossible not to, as a fourth-degree Thalassocrete. The initiation ceremonies stressed history above all else.

Normally he used a discreet side door for the alternate Thursday lodge meetings. Only criminals and heads of state paraded up the Pirate’s Steps. He knew which he wasn’t.

“What have I done?” he asked of the two Marines for at least the sixth time. For at least the sixth time, they gave him no answer. Even the false smiles had vanished, to be replaced by a firm grip on each arm and the banging of one Marine’s firearm against Morgan’s hip.

At the top of the steps, he was hoisted around and faced outward, so that he stared at the bottle-green waters of the Attik Main. Shipping crowded the waves, as always at Highpassage, one of the busiest ports in the world. Great iron steamers from the yards at Urartu far to the east passed above dish-prowed fishing boats whose lines had not changed in a thousand years of beachfront ship building. A white-hulled Thalassojustity cutter cruised past barges and scows waiting for their dock pilots. Overhead, a pair of the new Iberiard dirigibles beat hard against the wind, engines straining as they slung urgent deck cargo to landfall from a vessel waiting too long for a slip.

Highpassage, crossroads of the world.

But the message wasn’t that, Morgan knew. He’d sat through too many initiations not to see the point the Marines were making. The hanging tree, the ultimate symbol of both justice and power across the world’s maritime extents, stood on the beach below him, memorialized as a granite monument to the largely legendary death of the largely legendary pirate Black. That angry court of captains and bosuns had met on a firelit beach in the teeth of a rising storm over two thousand years past to take justice in their own hands after the King of Highpassage had declined to act. The sailors had broken Black, so the story ran, and unintentionally founded a line of power that

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