22 Ilbrin 941
221st day from Etherhorde
Introductions were strained. The two younger sfvantskors had some Arquali, learned in preparation for Treaty Day; Cayer Vispek spoke barely a word. Pazel, on the other hand, spoke Mzithrini better than his sister. Vispek and Jalantri listened with open suspicion.
“You say you learned such diction, such grace with our tongue… from books?” the elder sfvantskor demanded.
Pazel glanced uneasily at Neda. “That’s how it started,” he said.
“It’s the truth, Cayer,” said Neda. “Pazel is a natural scholar. He taught himself Arquali by the time he was eight. Other languages, too. But they were mostly just nonsense from his grammar books, until our birth-mother cast the spell.”
“The one that changed him, but not you,” said Jalantri.
Neda shrugged, dropping her eyes. “It gave me white hair for three months.”
Cayer Vispek shook his head in wonder. “And made him able to collect languages as easily as a boy puts marbles in a bag.”
“Not that easily,” Pazel objected.
Neda sat between her brother sfvantskors and looked at Pazel much as they did, with doubt that was nearly accusation. Of course Pazel was shocked to learn that she had become a sfvantskor. But how much greater had her shock been! During the invasion of Ormael she had watched Arquali marines beat him senseless, while their fellow soldiers rampaged through the family house, smashing everything they could not eat or slip in their pockets. Five years later, hidden by a mask, she had seen Pazel with Thasha Isiq: daughter of the very admiral who led the invasion.
Every Mzithrini youth learned to hate Arqualis. There were reasons of history, war stories from uncles and teachers, scars on temple walls. But few of Neda’s age had as many reasons as she.
Nine of those reasons had crowded into a single hour. Nine reasons who had dragged her screaming into a barn.
Now her brother served those same Arqualis-cared for them, loved them maybe. Neda had known about him since the morning of Treaty Day, more than four months ago. But the thought still made her want to scream.
For she too had spoken but part of the truth. Her mother’s spell had done more than change the color of her hair. It was an augmentation hex; it took an innate gift, whatever one was naturally best at, and strengthened it a thousandfold. At first Neda thought that her mother had nearly killed her only to prove that she was plain and stupid: a girl with no gifts to augment. Only years later, in training to be a sfvantskor, had she realized that she did possess one gift: a prodigious memory. And as she aged, and so had more years of life to remember, the spell had come into its own.
Now her memory was vast and merciless. It rarely obeyed her will. She might try for hours to summon a specific fact, and fail. But when she made no effort her memory worked on, like an involuntary organ, pumping, flooding her with knowledge she did not want. As it was doing now. The dust sculpting beams of light through a high window in the barn. The nine voices of those soldiers. The underside of each chin.
Cayer Vispek offered to share the rabbit, but Pazel and the Tholjassan man gently declined; they could see that the others were starved. Neda and her comrades attacked the meal in earnest, and as they chewed the man called Hercol Stanapeth began to speak. His Mzithrini was halting, like something remembered from a distant time, but with Pazel’s help he told his tale.
And what a tale it was: the lie of the Great Peace, the treason plotted in Etherhorde, the riches hidden aboard the Chathrand, the fact that the Shaggat Ness had never died.
At this last confession Cayer Vispek had set down his plate. In the darkest of voices he asked Pazel to repeat Hercol’s words. Then he put out a hand to the two younger sfvantskors.
“Your weapons. Quickly.”
Neda and Jalantri were astounded, but they obeyed, unbuckling their knives and swords and placing them in their leader’s hands. Vispek closed his eyes for a long moment. When he opened them again they were deadly.
“The Ness,” he said to Hercol. “You have harbored the Shaggat Ness, the Blasphemer, stained with the blood of half a million of our people. The one who broke the Mzithrin family, and beggared us all.”
“Arqual has done so, yes,” said Hercol.
“And he is aboard your ship even now?”
“He is enchanted,” said Hercol. “Turned to lifeless stone; but we have reason to fear that the enchantment will be reversed. He is to be returned to his worshippers in Gurishal, to provoke a war inside your country.”
A brief silence; then Jalantri exploded to his feet. “Give him a weapon, Cayer, and give me mine. The Shaggat! This has all been about the Shaggat! They mean to destroy us, to plant their flag on the ruins of Babqri and Surahk and Srag! Don’t you, cannibals? Deny it if you dare!”
“The Father was right,” said Neda, with equal venom. “He warned us that the Chathrand was carrying death in its hold.”
“Death in the guise of peace!” shouted Jalantri. “Monsters! Cannibals!” He pointed contemptuously at Hercol. “I need no weapon! Stand and fight me, stooge of Arqual!”
Hercol’s eyes flashed at the insult, but he made no move to rise. “Jalantri Reha,” hissed Cayer Vispek. “Sit down ere you disgrace us all.”
The young sfvantskor’s mouth twisted in fury. He obeyed his master at last, but famished as he was he did not take another bite of his meal.
“We will not harm you,” said Vispek. “But know this, men of the Chathrand: the Shaggat razed twenty townships along the banks of the Nimga, where Jalantri’s people lived. Sailors in the delta said the river was like a vein gushing blood into the sea. Jalantri’s parents met as refugees in the Babqri slums, orphans in a swarm of orphans, a generation without hope. And the Shaggat ordered many such massacres. You would be wise to tell us the simple truth of this business, and not a word less.”
“The truth is not simple, Cayer,” said Hercol. “But it is true that Emperor Magad and his servants seek the ruin of the Mzithrin, and the expansion of Arqual across the whole world-the whole Northern world, I mean, which is all they comprehend of Alifros. They are meticulous deceivers. They held the Shaggat forty years, after all, before springing this trap. But there is a subtler enemy than Arqual, and a greater threat.”
Then Hercol told them of Arunis, the Shaggat’s mage, hiding even now somewhere aboard the Chathrand; and of a certain object that Arunis wished desperately to control. “It is there in plain sight in the Shaggat’s hand,” he said. “And Arunis has meant all along for the Shaggat to have it, for by its power the mad king might not just weaken your Empire but conquer it-and Arqual as well. He has turned the conspiracy back upon its authors. But neither Arunis nor the Shaggat has yet mastered this thing, for it is an abomination. Indeed, no more deadly thing exists on either side of the Ruling Sea. It has many names, but the most common is the Nilstone.”
Neda glanced sharply at Cayer Vispek; her master’s face was guarded and still. The Nilstone! Their own legends spoke of it: an object like a small glass sphere, made of the compressed ash of all the devils burned in the sacred Black Casket, until the Great Devil in his agonies split the Casket asunder. Neda had never known whether or not the Stone was real; if it was, she had supposed it would lie among the other treasures of Mzithrini antiquity, in the Citadel of Hing, protected by arms and spells.
“You stole it, then?” she demanded.
“No, Neda,” said Cayer Vispek. “That is one crime for which Arqual bears no guilt. The Shaggat himself took the Nilstone from us, in his last, suicidal raid on Babqri.” Vispek hesitated a moment, then added: “We rarely speak of that theft. It does no honor to the Pentarchy to have lost the Nilstone, though in fact we wished to be rid of it for centuries. The Father spoke of it to me-just once.”
Neda closed her eyes, feeling a cold stab of loss. The Father. He was a great Mzithrini mage-priest, and her rescuer, her patron. He had taken her from the hands of a lecherous diplomat and made her a sfvantskor: the only non-Mzithrini ever admitted to the fold.
“What did he say, Master?” asked Jalantri.
“That the Nilstone is more dangerous than all the ships and legions of Arqual put together,” said the older sfvantskor. “ ‘We could not use it, Vispek,’ he told me, ‘and we dared not cast it away. Nor could any power in Alifros destroy it-one cannot destroy an absence, the idea of zero, the cold of the stellar void. In the end we guarded it merely to keep it from the hands of our enemies. And even in that we failed.’ ”
“Not your people alone,” said Hercol. “The very world has failed in the matter of the Nilstone. We have never fully grasped its nature. Your legends describe a thing of demonic ash. Others call it the eyeball of a murth-lord, or a tumor cut from the Tree of Heaven, or even a keyhole in an unseen door, leading to a place no mortal thought can penetrate. Our own leader, the mage Ramachni, tells us it is a splinter of rock from the land of the dead-and death is what it brings to any who touch it with fear in their hearts.”
“We’ve seen that with our own eyes,” added Pazel.
Neda turned him a bitter look. “You’ve seen many things,” she said, “but a few you’ve chosen to forget.”
Pazel looked at her, startled. “What are you talking about?”
“So many fine friends you’ve made,” she said. “Such worthy pursuits. To return the Shaggat to Gurishal, armed with such a weapon! How could you, Pazel? What have you become?”
Pazel’s mouth worked fitfully; he was biting back a retort. But Hercol spoke first. “Your brother has become what the world so sorely needs-a man without blind loyalties. Those who would restore the Shaggat to power are no comrades of ours. Pazel knew nothing of the conspiracy or the Nilstone when he was brought aboard the Chathrand, but he has taken an oath to fight these men, and Arunis as well, until we find a way to place the Stone beyond the reach of them all. That is our charge. None of us knows how it is to be done, but we would have failed already without your brother. Several times already the fight has turned on his courage.”
Pazel flushed, more from Hercol’s praise than the sfvantskors’ dubious looks. “We have some damn good allies,” he murmured.
“Like Thasha Isiq?” asked Neda with contempt.
“Yes,” said Pazel. “Haven’t you been listening, Neda? Thasha was fooled along with the rest of us.”
“And her father too, no doubt,” said Jalantri. “Tricked into leading fleets against the Mzithrin, all those years.”
“No,” Pazel admitted reluctantly.
But Hercol said, “Yes, tricked. Eberzam Isiq loved Arqual and believed everything its Emperor proclaimed. The very Emperor who sent a woman to his bed, to become his consort and confidante, and to slowly poison him through his tea. She would have killed him as soon as Thasha married your prince. When we left Simja, Eberzam remained, determined to expose Arqual’s plot to the world.”
“Nonsense!” said Vispek. “We remained in port for five days after you sailed. I myself was often in the court of King Oshiram. There was no sign of Isiq about the castle, nor any mention of a plot.”
Hercol and Pazel looked at each other in dismay. “They got him,” said Pazel. “Oh Pitfire, Hercol. Someone got Isiq after all. What are we going to tell Thasha?”
The sfvantskors made sounds of amazement. Tell her! thought Neda. She’s alive, then! They lied about her death on top of everything!
Hercol looked deeply shaken by Vispek’s words. He steepled his fingers for a moment, then pressed on: “Honored Cayer, you can see that Pazel and I speak in good faith. That we come to you defenseless, when we might simply have waited for rescue from the Chathrand, and left you here, marooned as you clearly are. I do not ask for trust-”
“That is well,” said Cayer Vispek.
“-but I pray that you will see one thing for yourselves. The world has changed beneath our feet. And none of us will survive unless we also change. Into what? I cannot imagine. But whatever is to come will try us all, and terribly. We need strength, Cayer-strength of mind and heart and hand. The kind of strength your order teaches.”
Jalantri laughed aloud. “What would you know of our order, stooge?”
“I know it forbids you to challenge another to a duel,” said Hercol, “unless your master commands it. To do otherwise”-he closed his eyes, remembering-“is to place pride above holy destiny, and anger over service to the Faith.”
Jalantri stared at him, abashed and furious. Cayer Vispek was surprised as well. “How is it that you quote so confidently from our scripture?” he demanded.
“Every member of the Secret Fist reads the Book of the Old Faith,” said Hercol. “My copy remained with me when I forsook Ott’s guild of spies. You see, Cayer, I know something of change. So does Neda’s brother, incidentally.”
Vispek’s eyes moved slowly from Hercol to Pazel and back again. He took a long breath, then pointed at the stack of crates across the basin.
“The one on top is full of clothing,” he said. “Go and dress. Then I will tell you of a kind of change you know nothing about.”
They had numbered seven once. Seven: the Mzithrin lucky number, the standard complement of sfvantskors dispatched as a team to a particular Mzithrin King, or an army brigade, or a warship of the White Fleet. The latter had been Vispek’s assignment: he was made votary to an elder aboard the Jistrolloq, deadliest ship in the Northern world, as famous for her speed and weaponry as the Chathrand was for size and age. Neda and Jalantri and several others came aboard after the murder of their teacher in Simja, and had been assigned to Vispek’s care. They were still aspirants, barely out of training; by rights they should have been returned to the Mzithrin to do just that. But their teacher had planned otherwise.
That teacher, the great Babqri Father, had long suspected a trap behind the Arqualis’ offer of peace. He had lived through more than a century of war and duplicity; but his knowledge was not merely that of years. He was the keeper of Sathek’s Scepter, an artifact older than the Mzithrin Empire itself, and one the Shaggat had not managed to steal. Crowning this golden rod was a crystal, and in the heart of the crystal lay a shard of the Black Casket, the broken centerpiece of the Old Faith.
Through the power of the scepter the Father had come to sense the evil approaching in the belly of the Chathrand. Weeks before Treaty Day, he had come to Simja with his aspirants, and taken up residence in the Mzithrini shrine outside the city walls. There he had held council with Mzithrini lords, merchants, soothsayers, spies, as they congregated ahead of the wedding meant to seal the Peace. And there, night after night, he put his disciples in a trance and sent them into the sea, and by the power of the scepter they cast off their human bodies and took the forms of whales.
“Whales?” said Pazel.
“Whales,” said Vispek. “The better to observe your approach, and your doings aboard the Chathrand.”
“Your crew spotted us,” said Jalantri. “We were a rare sort of whale, blue-black and small.”
“Cazencians,” said Pazel. “Yes, I saw you-but it was here, on this side of the Ruling Sea. Neda, was that you?”
She gave a curt nod. “We trailed you along the Sandwall.”
“Until attacked by sharks,” said Vispek. “They were vicious and innumerable; we escaped them only by hurling ourselves upon this shore.”
“And these possessions?”
Vispek gestured with a turn of his head. “Shipwreck. Three or four miles west, along the inner beach. A grim discovery, that. The bark itself was weird and slender, and partly burned; we thought it a derelict. But inside it was full of murdered creatures, like black men except for their hands, hair and eyes. Their throats were slit, all of them. On the deck where we found the bodies a word was scrawled in blood: PLATAZCRA. Can you tell us the meaning of that word, boy?”
He looked expectantly at Pazel, who nodded reluctantly, knowing his face had given him away. He knitted his eyebrows. “Something like ‘victory’-no, ‘conquest’ is closer. ‘Infinite conquest,’ that’s it.”
They all looked at him, shaken. “The boat was maimed,” said Cayer Vispek at last, “but only partly looted. We found fine goods-fabrics, dyes, leather boots of excellent workmanship, even gold coins, scattered underfoot. It was as if the attackers had struck in haste, or fury, intent on nothing but the death of everyone aboard.”
“They took the food, though,” said Jalantri, frowning at the memory.
“Why didn’t you return to the sea, once the sharks departed?” asked Pazel.
“We could not,” said Vispek. “The Father tried to give us the power to change ourselves back and forth at will, but he never succeeded. Once we returned to human form, only the scepter in a Master’s hand could make us again into whales.”
“And the scepter went down with the Jistrolloq?” said Hercol.
“I told you that we came here with nothing,” said Cayer Vispek. “Our elder changed us a final time, even as the sea flooded the decks. That is the only reason we survived.”
Neda glanced sidelong at the Tholjassan warrior. What a sly one. He knows the Cayer avoided his question. She busied herself with the gnawing of flesh from a bone, thinking how cautiously their leader was handling this moment, how attentive they would have to be to his signals. Above all we must say nothing of Malabron.
Inside her the memory blazed, hideously clear. The collapsing hull, the grotesque speed of the inrushing sea, the old Cayerad bringing the scepter down against her chest and the instant agony of the transformation, no pain-trance to deaden it. Squeezing from the wreckage, the whirling disorientation before she spotted the glowing scepter again, in the aperture where the old man was working the change on a last sfvantskor: Malabron. She had watched his body swell like a blister. Confused and zealous Malabron; desperate, damned forevermore. He had believed in the utterances of mystics, believed they were nearing a time of cataclysm and the breaking of faiths. And with the enemy victorious and their mission a failure, Malabron the whale had done the unthinkable: bitten off the arm of the old Cayerad, swallowing it and the scepter whole, and vanishing into the sudden blackness of the sea.
They had never seen him again, and Cayer Vispek had not speculated as to what had driven Malabron to such treason. Jalantri merely cursed his name. Neda, however, recalled his furious, quiet chatter, his ravings. In the last weeks they were almost continuous, in the hours when talking was allowed, and so much of it was outlandish nonsense that the others took no heed. But Neda heard it all, her manic memory sorting the drivel into categories and ranks. And in one category, by no means the largest, were his mutterings about “the path our fathers missed” and “those who fear to be purified.”
Neda chewed savagely. You should have spoken. You could have warned Cayer Vispek before it was too late. For Malabron’s words had carried a sinister echo. They resembled the heresy once preached by the Shaggat Ness.
She cringed, feigning some bone or gristle in her mouth. I couldn’t do it. Not to any of them. It had taken them five years to trust her, the foreign-born sfvantskor, almost a heresy in herself. Five years, and all the wrath and wisdom of the Father, taking her side. How could she have admitted that she did not trust them back-even just one of them? How could she have reported a brother?
“Neda?”
Pazel was staring at her. Devils, I must take care with him! For her birth-brother’s glance was piercing. Even now he could read her better than Vispek or Jalantri.
She was struggling for calm. With an uncertain movement Pazel reached for her elbow.
“Do not touch her,” said Cayer Vispek.
Pazel jumped and shot him a look. “I was just-”
“Coddling a sfvantskor,” said Jalantri, regarding Pazel with a mixture of amusement and contempt. “Now I see why the Father did not wish the two of you to meet, sister. He knew no good could come of it.”
“Listen to me,” said Cayer Vispek to Pazel. “The one before you is no longer an Ormali, no longer Neda Pathkendle. I do not expect this to be easy for you to grasp, but know that every parent, brother or sister of a sfvantskor has faced the same kind of loss.”
“The same, is it?” said Pazel, his eyes flashing. “I haven’t blary clapped eyes on my family in nearly six years.”
“Neda has left your family,” said Cayer Vispek. “She has become Neda Ygrael, Neda Phoenix-Flame. And she has been reborn into a life of service to the Grand Family of the Mzithrin, and the sfvantskor creed. Only if you remember this can I permit the two of you to speak.”
“Permit us?” said Pazel, as though he couldn’t believe his ears. “She’s my sister! Neda, is this what you want?”
Neda held herself very still. The eyes of all the men were upon her. With a ritual cadence to her words, she said, “My past is of no consequence. I am a sfvantskor, a keeper of the Old Faith, foe of devils, friend of the Unseen. The life before was a game of make-believe. I can recall the game, but I am grown now and wish to play it no more.”
“So speaks our sister in the fullness of her choice,” said Cayer Vispek. “You must accept her decision or else insult her gravely. Is that your wish?”
Pazel looked at the older man, and his dark eyes glinted with anger. But he held his tongue.
The Cayer watched him a moment longer, as though noting a source of future danger. Then, turning to Hercol again, he said, “There is more I would know. What sort of land have we come to, where men are killed under the banner of infinite conquest? Who are these black beings with silver eyes? And where are the humans? We have only met with miserable savages, hardly better than beasts.”
When the telling was done Neda felt wounded. As if some crushing harm had struck her body, some venom or germ that stole her strength and clouded her mind. She believed Hercol; his voice was too raw and bleeding to be feigned-and she had seen the men he called tol-chenni, and had thought them imbeciles from the start. But a plague of mindlessness. She squatted by the fire, clenching her fists. Protect us in this our black hour, she prayed. Defend us, that we may water Alifros with the blessings of your will. She addressed the prayer to the Unseen, the Nameless Ones, in the Mountains of Hoeled beyond the world. But did the Nameless Ones care about these strange Southern lands, or was their gaze fixed elsewhere? It was a troubling question, and probably forbidden.
Hercol looked up at the sky. “Dawn comes,” he said. “Pazel and I must return to our shipmates. And you three must make your choice, for I expect to see a boat from the Chathrand approaching by the time we reach them.”
“Choice?” said Neda, the bitterness rising in her again. “What choice is that? To return to your ship and be put in irons, or stay here and starve?”
“We’ll do neither of those,” said Jalantri, “will we, Cayer Vispek?”
The older sfvantskor pursed his lips and gave a thoughtful shake of his head. “Perhaps not,” he said-and flew in a blur at Hercol.
The attack was one of the swiftest Neda had ever seen. Cayer Vispek bore the swordsman backward off his crate, and by the time the two men struck the sand there was a knife at Hercol’s throat. Pazel surged to his feet, but Jalantri was far faster, and deftly kicked the youth’s legs out from under him. Pazel fell inches from the fire. The sfvantskor came down on him with both knees, caught his arm and twisted it behind his back. Jalantri looked wildly at Neda.
“I have him! Aid the Cayer, sister!”
“The Cayer needs no aid,” said Vispek, still pressing his blade to Hercol’s neck.
“That’s lucky!” snapped Jalantri. “Neda, you sat like a stone! What ails you? Were you afraid I might give your birth-brother a scratch?”
Pazel twisted helplessly, grimacing with rage. Neda shuddered. She recalled that look of defiance. He had shown it to Arquali soldiers, once.
“It was not luck,” said Cayer Vispek. “The Tholjassan chose to yield. Chose, I say: you saw my intention, didn’t you, swordsman? As plain as though I had drawn it for you in the sand.”
“I guessed,” said Hercol, motionless under the knife.
“You are too humble. I saw your readiness even as I struck. You might even have disarmed me, but you chose not to try. That was an error. You are prisoners now, and it may not go well for you.”
“What will you do now, Cayer?” asked Hercol.
“We will take the rescue boat, by persuasion or force, and seek the mainland.”
“If you take us as hostages on that boat, the Chathrand will know it,” said Hercol. “They can see our encampment plainly through their telescopes.”
“They will not wish to see you harmed,” said Cayer Vispek.
“You don’t know Arqualis,” gasped Pazel, turning his head painfully in the sand. “Prisoners of the Mzithrin are presumed good as dead. They’ll engage you whether we’re aboard or not. They’ll blow you to matchsticks.”
“We can take the boat alone,” said Neda quietly. “Leave them here, Cayer. The Chathrand will send another for them.”
“And for you, an extermination brigade,” said Hercol. “There are over a hundred Turachs aboard the Great Ship, and longboats that can outrun whatever little vessel they have dispatched to collect us.”
“We should have struck an hour ago,” growled Jalantri under his breath.
“Perhaps,” said Hercol, “but it is too late now.”
“Not too late for one thing,” said Jalantri.
“Cayer-” Neda began.
“Be silent, girl! Be silent, both of you!”
Their leader’s voice was tight with desperation. Neda and Jalantri held still as wolves about to spring. But spring where, on whom? The heresy of Neda’s thought appalled her.
“I fear Neda is right about the irons,” Hercol continued. “The crew tolerates our own freedom uneasily, since Rose charged us with mutiny. They will never tolerate yours. Nor can we hide those tattoos on your necks.”
“Those tattoos are never hidden,” snapped Cayer Vispek, pressing the knife tighter against the other’s flesh. “We are sfvantskors, not skulking thieves.” 2
“You may be reduced to worse than thieving,” said Hercol, “if you go alone into this country.”
Neda felt the readiness of her limbs, the killer’s focus trying to silence that other voice, the sister’s. Let me do it, Jalantri. If the Cayer commands us, let me end Pazel’s life.
“You grow careless with your words,” said Cayer Vispek. “If you truly know our ways, you know we cannot despair. For those who take the Last Oath it is a sin.”
“There is a related sin,” said Hercol, “but graver, in your teachings. Will you name it, or shall I?”
Cayer Vispek was very still. “Suicide,” he whispered.
When Hercol spoke again he did so courteously, almost with sorrow. “It is a hard thing, Cayer Vispek, but I must request your surrender.”
It was midmorning before the rescue skiff neared the Chathrand. Her crew was waiting in a ragged mob.
Some leaned out to help swing the hoisted boat over the scarlet rail. Most stood and watched. Never in all those months at sea had their spirits sunk so low, nor their eyes flashed so dangerously. The thirst! Not one of the eight hundred sailors had known such torturous want of water. The men’s very flesh had tightened on their bones. Their skin had peeled and blistered, and the blisters had shriveled from within. Their lips were cracked like old parchment.
They had watched in silence as the rescue boat tacked across the inlet, empty now of both serpents and ships. Passing telescopes, they had studied the captives, two men and one young woman (“Look at them arms, will you, she’s a bruiser, a wildcat, a hellion, why is every blary girl who comes aboard-”), and Old Gangrune the purser remarked on the way the strange young woman stared at Lady Thasha: with malice, or something very like.
The men had followed the boat with their eyes as it rounded the jetty, passed the great abandoned tower, and finally drew up to the landing near the village gate. They had watched ten or twelve dlomu step forth timidly, and cheered with faint derision when the creatures rolled out three small water casks and passed them down carefully to the skiff. Another mouthful each, they laughed bitterly, while over the tonnage hatch the sixty-foot yawl dangled in her harness, ready to launch, fourteen casks of five hundred gallons apiece lashed in her hold.
They had watched with impatience as Pathkendle and Lady Thasha spoke with the dlomic boy at the landing. The two youths pointed at the Chathrand; the boy shook his head. For several thirsty minutes the sailors watched a debate they could not hear. Then the young dlomu had made a gesture of surrender, and all three had climbed into the skiff, and the little boat had started out to the Chathrand.
Now they were hoisting it, dripping, above the rail. Six men caught the davit chains, guided her inboard, lowered her gently onto her skids. Haddismal shouted a quick command; the assembled Turachs surrounded the boat. The three human prisoners studied them keenly.
Fiffengurt beckoned at the water barrels. “Same ration as yesterday,” he declared, and the sailors groaned and snarled, though it could not be otherwise, and the ration, albeit painfully tiny, had been fair.
Pazel Pathkendle and the Lady Thasha leaped first from the skiff, then aided Fiffengurt, who appeared rather bruised. But when the quartermaster’s feet were planted on the deck, he straightened his back and swept the topdeck with his obedient eye.
The sfvantskors’ gaze followed his. The sailors looked where they looked, and then Fiffengurt turned to see where Pathkendle and the Lady Thasha were looking, and it was some seconds longer before they all became aware of this circular game, and stopped seeking what none could find: someone indisputably in command.
Of course Nilus Rose was still their captain. But Rose and thirteen others were hostages, caught in a trap so devious that the men struggled to believe it was the work of ixchel-crawlies-the eight-inch-tall beings that most humans had learned to fear and kill from their first days at sea. The crawlies had introduced a sleeping drug into the ship’s fresh water (hence the shortage) and when all were asleep had used ropes and wheelblocks to drag their victims to a cabin under the forecastle, which they had filled with a light, sweet-smelling smoke. The latter did no harm until one was deprived of it: then, in a matter of seconds, it killed. The hostages, all addicts now, stayed alive by tending a fire in a tiny smudge-pot, feeding it with dry berries provided several times a day by the ixchel. As long as the berry-fire sputtered on, they lived.
Given his plight, Captain Rose had temporarily entrusted the ship to Mr. Fiffengurt. So surely Fiffengurt was in command? But Sergeant Haddismal walked free as well-the crawlies had fed him an antidote that morning, fearing the Turachs might riot without their commander. Perhaps it was time for the military to take charge? But Haddismal was not the highest military officer on the Chathrand: that was Sandor Ott, the Imperial spymaster, the architect of their deadly mission. And Ott remained a hostage.
All told, an intolerable situation. Mutiny was the obvious answer-but how, and against whom? Kruno Burnscove or Darius Plapp might have led a few hundred gang members in such a rebellion-but the ixchel, thorough to a fault, had seized these two rival gang leaders as well.
So it was that the roving eyes converged at last on a tiny, copper-skinned figure, balanced on the mainmast rail. He was attended by six shaven-headed spearmen, and he wore a suit of fine black swallow feathers that shimmered when he walked. Those who were close enough saw his haughty chin, the plumb-line posture, the eyes that managed somehow to convey both ferocity and fear. It was galling, but inescapable: the most powerful figure on the Chathrand was this young ixchel lord, a crawly they could have batted overboard with one sweep of the hand.
“Well, Quartermaster?” he demanded. “Hasn’t my crew thirsted enough? Will you deliver them from misery, or not?”
His voice came out high and reedy: the effect of bending it into the register of the human ear. It was clear from his expression that he found the effort distasteful.
Fiffengurt scowled and deliberately turned away, busying himself with a davit strap. “My crew,” he muttered.
One of the ixchel guards snapped furiously: “You will answer Lord Taliktrum at once!”
Fiffengurt, Pazel and Thasha exchanged nervous looks. Behind them, Hercol Stanapeth leaped onto the deck and bent to whisper in the quartermaster’s ear. Fiffengurt nodded, then turned uneasily to face the crew.
“Now, ah, listen sharp, lads,” he said. “There’s danger ashore. The villagers can’t let us back inside their walls-”
Roars, howls: Fiffengurt was announcing a death sentence. The only danger anyone believed in was thirst, and the only fresh water this side of the gulf was the well in the village square. The men pressed closer, and their shouting increased. Fiffengurt waved desperately for silence.
“-but they’ve agreed to fill any casks we bring ’em, and to hand ’em off right there at the gatehouse. Mr. Fegin, get that yawl in the water! Thirty hands for duty ashore! Who’s prepared? Volunteers get their ration first.”
Instantly the roars became cheers, this time in earnest. Countless hands shot skyward. “Let it be done!” cried Taliktrum from his perch, but no one listened to him now. Already Fegin was ordering men to the capstans, and topmen were loosing cables to allow the big yawl to be hoisted.
Pazel and Thasha grinned at Fiffengurt, who breathed a sigh of relief. Bolutu descended from the skiff, pushing his way through Turach spears. Haddismal directed the prisoners to climb down from the boat. “On guard, marines, those are blary sfvantskors!” he shouted over the mayhem.
Haddismal possessed a voice to cut through storm and battle. Yet somehow one of the newly summoned Turachs did not heed him, and in the space of five seconds disaster struck. The soldier was stationed behind Neda, who had yet to rise to her feet. Leaning forward, he prodded her with one hand in the small of her back. Then his eyes found a long rip in Neda’s breeches. His hand developed a will of its own, and three fingers groped for an instant over the flesh of her thigh.
Neda simply exploded. With a backward elbow-thrust she broke the man’s front teeth, then spun on the bench and delivered a lightning kick to the chest of a second Turach before he could bring his spear to bear. Suddenly everyone was moving. Cayer Vispek’s boot deflected another spear; then he leaped into the rigging as the startled Turachs stabbed at his legs. Jalantri whirled toward Neda, but Haddismal clubbed him savagely across the face, and three Turachs fell on the young sfvantskor like boulders, grappling, while a fourth kicked at his stomach.
Neda instantly pulled her legs back against her chest, then snapped forward, rolling over the side of the skiff with a violent lurch. She came out of the roll with a twist of her upper body, and rose facing her would-be attackers. To the crew she seemed to have passed through the Turachs like a shadow-except that two lay senseless on the ground.
The crowd drew back. Neda whirled, as though suddenly aware of the vast, empty deck surrounding her, the futility of flight. And now the Turachs had recovered. They did not have the grace of sfvantskors, but they were terrible fighters, and they could spear anything that moved.
Neda almost became the proof of this, for eight soldiers had taken aim. But before they could let fly Thasha flung herself between them and their target.
Her friends shouted in horror. But the Turachs froze. Neda seized Thasha brutally from behind, catching the younger woman’s throat in the crook of her elbow. Thasha gasped but did not fight back.
Half out of his mind, Pazel rushed at them. “Neda, don’t! Thasha-”
As Neda’s grip tightened, Hercol lunged forward and caught Pazel by the arm. “Hear me, all of you!” he shouted, raising his black sword high. “On Heaven’s Tree I swear it: the one who harms Thasha Isiq will answer to me!”
“Hold, you dogs!” bellowed Haddismal. “Damn you, Stanapeth, what do you expect of us? The girl went mad!”
“I am doing kill!” shrieked Neda, in rough Arquali.
“Neda,” said Thasha, her voice constricted but wry, “I just saved your blary skin.”
Then Cayer Vispek spoke from the rigging. “The Turach groped at her womanhood. Perhaps Arquali women brook such treatment, but ours do not. You gave your word she would suffer no man’s abuse-and yet it begins before she sets foot on the deck.”
“All the more reason to get her safely to the brig,” snarled Haddismal. Then he looked down at his fallen soldier. “You muckin’ dullard, Vered! If you’d raised your eyes from her crotch to her blary tattoos you’d still have all your teeth! She’s a sfvantskor!”
For an amazed moment the sailors even forgot their thirst. Sfvantskors! It’s true! Look at them tattooed necks! They’re the enemy, by Rin!
“Muckin’ Sizzies!” bellowed someone. “Killers! Crazies!”
“Animals, is what they are!” hissed another. “It’s one of them what hacked my old man’s arm off in the war!”
“We shouldn’t have to share our water-”
“We should gut ’em, here and now-”
“You will place them in the brig!” cried Taliktrum suddenly. “You above there, come down, unless you would fight the whole ship’s company. Girl, I will appoint one of my own lieutenants to watch over you-and besides, that part of the ship is off-limits to humans, unless escorted by us. Have no fear! We ixchel determine the course of events on the Chathrand.”
“The boy requires a doctor,” said Cayer Vispek, pointing at Jalantri.
Taliktrum studied the moaning figure. “Let him go to the forecastle house. Dr. Chadfallow is already there. Now yield, sfvantskor girl. We are in dangerous waters, and this delay imperils us all.”
Neda tightened her grip on Thasha’s neck. She looked quite capable of murder. Through her teeth, and still in Arquali, she spoke: “No… Turach… touching me… again.”
“Right,” said Haddismal, waving off his men with a sigh. “I’d say you’ve made that blary clear.”
But the other Turachs, and especially the friends of the wounded men, studied Neda with hatred, and their eyes seemed to mark her.
1. It should now be abundantly clear that all such cited dates are open to question. -EDITOR.
2. Sfvantskors may never conceal or fully cover these marks, which declare not only their tribe but their first master’s name, royal affiliation (pentarchrin) and stage of enlightenment. Facing execution, a sfvantskor will always ask to be stabbed or drowned rather than beheaded or hanged, so that his neck will remain intact, and his spirit pass with dignity through the regions of death. -EDITOR.
The Debate in the Manger
At first glance we saw animals in clothes. We recoiled; it was not proper to look at such things; it was not right to acknowledge their existence. But we could not help ourselves. Looking again we saw avenging demons, straight out of our past. We saw the bottomless fury of demons, the violence, the hatred even for themselves, when they slew one another on the deck of that immense ship, howling in an archaic language that was almost our own. That is when we clung to one another in greatest fear. We knew catastrophe was close; it had befallen nearly everyone else already. And heaven knows these human beings had much to avenge. -Masalym Before the Storm: Recollections,
22 Ilbrin 941
“You don’t have to do this,” said Pazel.
“Stop saying that,” said Thasha. “I told you Neda didn’t hurt me. You’re the one covered with bruises.”
Thasha passed under a glass plank, and the afternoon sun touched her hair-brushed and tied but still brittle; she had not yet rinsed out the salt. They were in a passage on the main deck, heading for the Silver Stair. Jorl and Suzyt, Thasha’s enormous blue mastiffs, walked before her like a pair of guardian lions, too proud to tug at their leads. Overhead, boots clomped and clattered; men were laughing, almost giddy. Literally drunk on water. Men had wept at the cool mineral taste. The dogs had lapped two quarts apiece, and looked up hopefully for more.
“It’s not bruises I’m worried about,” said Pazel.
Thasha flicked Pazel a glance. “What is it, then?” she said.
Pazel wished she would slow down. “Lady Oggosk, for starters,” he said.
Thasha looked baffled. They were about to face some of their worst enemies, but Oggosk would not be among them. The witch remained imprisoned in the forecastle house, along with the captain she so fiercely adored.
“They’re plotting something,” said Pazel. “Oggosk, and Rose, and maybe Ott for that matter. I went to see Neeps the minute the guards took Neda away. All three of them were at the window, talking to Alyash.”
“Well, of course they were,” said Thasha. “He’s the bosun, you dolt. He’s Rose’s blary right-hand man, now that Uskins is falling apart.”
At the ladderway a fungal stench met their nostrils. They started down into the warm gloom of the lower decks, the big dogs struggling for balance on the stairs. Men and tarboys shrank from the dogs, tipped their hats to Thasha, eyed Pazel with a confused mix of fascination and fear. Some still blamed him for the ship’s evil luck; others had heard that he was the only reason the Chathrand was still afloat.
Pazel leaned closer to Thasha. “I heard Oggosk say, ‘The girl,’ ” he murmured.
“For Rin’s sake,” cried Thasha, “is that all it takes to rattle you? Oggosk was probably talking about poor Marila. She’s the one locked in with them all.”
Beneath the level of the gun decks they had the stairs to themselves. “Come off it,” said Pazel. “You know that hag is obsessed with you. And this time she sounded mean. Kind of desperate, like.”
“I’d be desperate too, if I were stuck in that compartment with Sandor Ott.”
Aware that his own desperation was mounting, Pazel thrust his arm across her path.
“It’s not just Oggosk, damn it,” he sputtered. “It’s that we’re going… there. Where it happened to you. Where the rats went mad, and the Stone-where you… you-”
“Where I touched it,” she said, touching him.
Pazel flinched; but her fingers on his cheek were just her fingers; no lightning jumped from them but the kind he expected, the thrill and promise that tore him from sleep with thoughts of her. He closed his eyes. Stop shaking, Pazel, you’re not doing anything wrong. There had been months when her touch, her very nearness, had brought scalding pain, but that spell (laid on him by a murth-girl thousands of miles to the north) was broken or dormant. There had been threats from Lady Oggosk, who harbored some unfathomable plan for Thasha, a plan that required her to be unloved. But Oggosk had nothing to threaten them with anymore. Pazel took her hand, slid his fingers from her palm to her wrist. The Blessing-Band was still there.
“I thought you’d lost this in the gulf,” he said.
Thasha lowered her hand from his cheek to the blue silk ribbon, turned it until they could read the words embroidered in gold thread: Ye depart for a world unknown, and love alone shall keep thee
“I left it behind in the stateroom,” she said, tracing the words with her fingers. “It’s not something I’m willing to lose.”
The silk band was to have played a role in Thasha’s wedding back in Simja. Three nights ago, Pazel had at last performed the tiny part of the ceremony allotted to him, and tied it around her wrist. The meaning of the act, of course, had utterly changed, but those ambiguous words troubled him yet. Wasn’t she still departing? Not into life with a Mzithrini husband, but into some region of the mind where he could not follow?
Nonsense. Nerves. Thasha was touched by magic, somehow-but not touched in the head. Pazel himself had been living for years under a potent charm and had managed to remain who he was. He put his arm around her, drew her closer, felt her breath tickling his chin.
“You’re trembling,” she whispered. “Why are you afraid?”
Why was he afraid? He had torn a cursed necklace away from her throat, dragged her up flaming stairwells; he had seen her naked and bleeding on a beach. He could kiss her here and now (so far she had planted the kisses, though not always on him) and no disaster would follow.
Presumably.
It was never supposed to happen. You believe me, don’t you?
Rin’s teeth, he was sweating. And Thasha, impatient, was slipping under his arm and down the staircase, slipping away.
“I’m stronger now,” she said. “I can face them. They can’t make me do anything I don’t want to do.”
On they went, past the berth deck with its sound of snoring (some forty victims of the ixchel’s sleep-drug remained unconscious) and out into the rear compartment of the orlop deck. The darkness increased, and so did the stench. And flies-more flies with every step, droning like tormented ghosts.
Then Pazel stopped, overcome with sudden disgust. Pitfire, they’ve still not cleaned the lower decks. He was smelling dead men, dead animals-above all, dead rats. Six weeks ago, every last rat on the Chathrand had suffered a hideous change, swollen to the size of Thasha’s dogs, and rampaged through the ship. Only their mass suicide had prevented the creatures from killing everyone aboard.
“Pathkendle. Thasha.”
Hercol was crossing the dim compartment. As he drew close, the swordsman noticed Pazel’s look of revulsion. “The bodies are gone,” he said, “but not the blood. Fiffengurt chose to risk disease rather than oblige the men to sweat away the last of their water scrubbing gore out of the planks.”
He and Thasha regarded each other warily. They had exchanged many such looks recently, before and after their arrival at the cape. Pazel had no idea what those looks were about, but he knew that Thasha’s mood darkened whenever the swordsman approached, as though he reminded her of some unwelcome duty or predicament.
“I hoped Pazel would convince you not to attend this council,” he said.
“He failed,” said Thasha, “and so will you. Enough nonsense, Hercol. I want to get this over with.”
Hercol gripped her shoulder, looking at them each in turn. “Let them wait a bit longer. Come with me first, won’t you?”
He led them across the dim compartment, around a jagged hole in the floor (there were many such scars on the Chathrand, marks of the suicide-fire of the rats) and out through the bulkhead door in the north wall. They stepped into a small square cabin with two other doors, through one of which some light poured down from a shaft in the adjoining corridor. Dominating the room was a round porcelain washtub. This was the “silk knickers room” (as tarboys called it): the chamber where first-class servants scrubbed their employers’ socks and shirts and petticoats. The big tub had survived the crossing, but it was smeared with dried blood and fur, and the benches and washboards had been reduced to charcoal.
Hercol closed the door by which they had entered. “Once we join the others we must watch our every word. It is well that we told Taliktrum of the mind-plague, but of the time-skip His Lordship knows nothing, and I do not think we should enlighten him today. Let us not speak of it.”
“Let’s not speak to him at all,” said Pazel. “He’s not fit to lead his clan, let alone this ship.”
Hercol looked at him severely, but made no rebuttal. “Even allies like Mr. Fiffengurt may not yet be ready to face the truth of it. One could almost wish that his dear Annabel’s final letter had never reached him, telling him that she was with child.”
“You could wish it, maybe,” said Thasha. Pazel looked at her in shock. “I mean,” she added hastily, “that we can’t begin to guess what he feels like. They were going to be married; he’s been saving his pay ten years. I don’t think we should ever tell him. Let him think they’re alive, for as long as he can-Annabel and that little boy or girl. Let him hope. That’s not too much to ask, is it?”
She was still watching Hercol with surprising ire. But if her old mentor understood her anger, he did not rise to the bait. “You’re right,” he said after a moment. “In time we may be forced to tell him, or he may find out some other way; but for now it can do little good. Yet we must not forget the truth for a minute, however much we long to, if we are to find a way out of this darkness.”
“There is no way out,” said Pazel, and immediately wished he hadn’t spoken. The others turned to him, astonished-and then a voice rang out in the darkness.
“I should bite you for that, Pazel Pathkendle! No way out, for shame.”
“Felthrup!” cried Pazel. “Are you mad? What are you doing here?”
His tiny figure emerged from the gloom: a black rat with half a tail and a mangled forepaw. Thasha’s dogs pounced, licking and snuffling; their adoration of Felthrup knew no bounds. With a quick leap the rat was astride Suzyt, balanced between her shoulder blades. His dark eyes glistened, and a sweet, resinous smell wafted from his fur.
“Should I be content to hide forever behind the stateroom’s magic wall?” he asked. “Ashore they may have condemned all woken beasts, but not on the Chathrand. Not yet.”
“The crew will not stop to talk to you,” said Hercol. “They will see a rat, and they will kill it.”
“Only if they catch it,” said Felthrup. “But the men of Chathrand are not all ignorant brutes. They do not know what is happening-and I agree that you must not tell them, yet-but they know something is terribly amiss, and a few may recall that it was I who first said so, when I smelled the emptiness of the village. Surely they will realize the utility-is that the word I want, utility?-of having a rat’s olfactory prowess at their disposal. Utility, avail, expedience-”
“No,” said Thasha, “they won’t. They’ll be afraid that you’re about to turn into a monster before their eyes.”
“They should fear no such thing,” said Felthrup. “I am safe, thanks to Lady Syrarys.”
“Syrarys?” said Pazel. “Felthrup, what are you talking about?”
Syrarys, the consort of Thasha’s father Admiral Isiq, had been revealed to be in league with Sandor Ott. She had worked for Thasha’s death, and nearly killed the admiral by poisoning his tea.
“How excitable you are!” said Felthrup. “I was only speaking of mysorwood oil. The wicked lady used to dab it on her neck, but Mr. Bolutu pointed out that it is better even than peppermint oil at deterring fleas. He applied it to my fur, and I am a new rat! Freed, emancipated, delivered from their masticatory assaults-and are we not agreed that those hungry vermin inflicted the mutation upon the rats, and not vice versa? Rats do not, you will allow, bite fleas. But this despair, Pazel! How unlike you, how unbecoming!”
“Unbecoming.” Pazel stared at the rat. “Do you understand that our families are dead?”
“Your sister is not dead,” said Felthrup. “And as for my family-it is aboard this ship. My rat-brethren back in Noonfirth cast me out, the very day I woke. They were terrified of my verbosity. They slew my mother’s second litter before her eyes, ten blind bleating things not a day old, and chased her off into the streets. When I fled they were trying to determine who had mated with her, so that they could kill or scatter those unlucky males as well.”
Pazel closed his eyes. He was, in fact, intensely grateful for Felthrup’s presence, his grounding inanities and madcap wisdom. But you had to have patience, barrels of it, whenever the rat warmed to a theme.
Thasha managed it better than anyone. “We’re late for the council, Felthrup dear,” she said. “What is it you wanted to tell us?”
“That I have been eavesdropping,” he said. “Dr. Rain has lately been interrogated by several officers concerning one of his patients. Have you heard the rumors surrounding the topman, Mr. Dupris?”
“I heard that Rain had quarantined the man,” said Hercol. “Something about a fever.”
“He has no fever now,” said Felthrup. “When that serpent neared the Chathrand, and every man aboard feared the worst, Mr. Dupris fled his post, screaming, ‘I won’t touch it, I won’t, I won’t!’ That sort of nonsense. Later his friends dragged him to sickbay. He was in a terrible state, but he grew calmer once they strapped him down: indeed he thanked the doctor for strapping him down. But then the surgeon’s mate discovered his high temperature. Fearing he might infect the rest of the ward, he persuaded Rain to send the man to an empty cabin. They moved him late at night. But on the way to the cabin, Dupris asked for some fresh air, so Rain and the mate brought him to one of the open gunports and let him bend down. He took a deep breath. Then he looked over his shoulder at them. ‘He cannot make me do it. I’ll never touch that cursed thing.’ With those words Dupris cast himself into the sea.”
A silence fell. “Arunis,” said Pazel at last. “He was talking about Arunis.”
Thasha sighed. “And the Nilstone, of course.”
“So Arunis has begun to kill,” said Hercol, “as he always promised he would. It is terrible news that he has grown strong enough to attack our minds in such a way. I always thought that he managed it with Mr. Druffle through some prolonged contact with the man-through potions or torture. Now it appears he can do so without ever touching his victim-from hiding, where no one can interfere. During the crossing, when the Turach committed suicide by placing his hand on the Stone, I thought the poor man had simply despaired. Now I wonder.”
“Why isn’t the whole ship talking about Dupris?” asked Pazel.
“Mr. Alyash feared to start a panic,” said Felthrup, “and so he ordered Rain and Fulbreech to keep the man’s death a secret. But I can tell you something more, friends: I was not alone in listening to their conversation. There were ixchel, somewhere close, for I heard their whispers. They did not hear me, I think. I have become a better spy on this voyage, if nothing else.”
“What did they say?” asked Thasha.
“Something very curious. They said, ‘So it’s happening to the giants as well.’ ”
A low groan escaped Pazel’s chest. “Arunis must be working on the ixchel too. And why not, since they’re in charge? But what in blazes does he want? He still needs a crew to sail the ship, doesn’t he?”
“We should go to the council,” said Thasha. “Not that anyone’s going to listen to us.”
“Whether they listen or not, we must keep our purpose clear,” said Hercol. “We swore to place the Stone beyond the reach of evil-and that we must do, somehow. Where is that place? I do not know. Even Erithusme, greatest wizardess since the time of the Amber Kings, did not know. But it exists, or Ramachni would not have set us looking for it. Taking the Nilstone to that place will be impossible, however, so long as the Chathrand remains in the grip of evil men. We must break that grip.”
“That could mean killing,” said Thasha.
“I expect it will,” said Hercol. “Arunis will never relent; Sandor Ott does not know how. If we have truly leaped forward two centuries, then his Emperor is dead, and the very dynasty of the Magads may well have failed. That at least would be no tragedy. But Ott does not know this, and my heart tells me he would not believe it even if he stood before the tomb of the last Magad to sit on the Ametrine Throne. No, he will fight on, even as a prisoner of the ixchel. Other hearts may change, however. In that possibility we must always have faith.”
“Not all change is for the better,” said Felthrup.
“That’s blary true,” said Thasha. “Those horrid ships-they were flying Bali Adro flags. The whole Empire that Bolutu thought would come to our rescue must have turned into something foul.” She looked up at Hercol with sudden dread. “We can’t let them take the Chathrand.”
“Now you see it,” said Hercol. “If Bali Adro is ruled by mass murderers, what greater crime could we commit than to bring them the Nilstone? We are charged with keeping it from evil, not laying it at evil’s foot. Once we imagined the South an empty land, where we might persuade the crew to abandon ship in sufficient numbers to strand her, until the villains gave command of her to us. Now the villains may well be everywhere. A sound ship and a willing crew are our only hope of survival.”
Pazel felt anger tightening his chest. “You want us to go on helping these bastards? Helping Rose and Ott, Alyash and Taliktrum and his gang?”
“We cannot proceed without them, Pazel. Of course I don’t imagine that they will make it easy. But we must remember the lesson of the fishermen and the crocodile.”
“Ah!” said Felthrup. “An excellent parable; I have heard it myself. Two fishermen made long war over a favorite spot to cast their nets. Each day they came and bickered, racing each other in their labors. Finally, at the end of one hot, sticky, altogether infelicitous day, they came to blows, and one man clubbed the other nearly senseless, and left him crawling on the banks. There Tivali the crocodile found him, and delightedly feasted.”
“Oh joy,” said Pazel.
“I have not finished, Pazel,” said the rat. “When the other fisherman returned, he was glad to have the spot to himself, and stayed all day, filling his baskets. But in the shadows of evening Tivali crept up and seized his leg. The crocodile was strengthened by his earlier meal, and before he ate again, he remarked through his teeth that he had never dared attack both men together. ‘You did my work for me,’ he said. ‘I knew I could depend on you.’ You’re right, Master Hercol. Rose and Ott may be monstrous, but without them we cannot face the crocodile. And we all know who that is.”
“Arunis,” said Pazel, “of course. But Pitfire, there must be a better choice than that.”
“There will be,” said Hercol, “when Ramachni returns.”
“ ‘When a darkness comes beyond today’s imagining,’ ” said Thasha, echoing the mage’s parting words. “But hasn’t that time come and gone, Hercol? I don’t have any intention of giving up-and neither does Pazel, he just talks rot-but Rin’s eyeballs, how dark is dark enough?”
“Ramachni has never failed us,” said Hercol, “and I cannot believe that he will fail us now, as the battle of his lifetime nears its conclusion. But we must go. The villains await us in the manger.”
“I will be near you, under the floor,” said Felthrup. “There are passages the ixchel never dared to use, passages that belonged to the rats. They are all mine, now.”
“For a time, perhaps,” said Hercol. “Go softly, little brother.”
Felthrup scurried off. The humans returned the way they had come, and proceeded to the aftmost passage of the orlop deck. Foul air, sticky floorboards. Pazel knew with a hint of shame that he had not only been worrying for Thasha’s sake. He hated the manger like no other part of the ship.
The passage brought them to the looted granary, and thence to the manger door. Here the stench was astonishing: fur, blood, bile, ashes, rot. Pazel saw the flicker of lamplight, heard the voices of men and ixchel, arguing.
“-can’t let one person beyond this room know what’s happened to human beings,” Fiffengurt was saying. “I’ve seen vessels in the grip of plague-panic. They can’t be sailed. The men get frightened of every cough, sneeze, hiccup-”
Thasha and her dogs stepped into the chamber. The mastiffs tensed and growled, and the talking ceased.
“At last,” snapped Taliktrum’s voice. “What took you so long, girl? Do you think we assembled here for the pleasure of one another’s company?”
Pazel and Hercol followed her inside. The manger was wide and deep, built to store fodder for two hundred cattle, in the days when the Great Ship had carried whole herds across the Narrow Sea. Their own cattle had all perished: some had broken legs or hips during the Nelluroq storms and had to be slaughtered quickly; most were savaged by the rats. But no one had yet removed the hay.
Pazel looked at the wall of square bales tied up at the back of the chamber, saw the stain down the front like a dark dried stream. He and Thasha had made their stand on that wall. The rats had seemed endless in number, demonic in their hate. Pazel had fought with every ounce of his strength; Thasha, ten times the fighter he was, had hewn the creatures down like weeds. But the rats had swarmed around them, leaping from behind. They would have perished in minutes without the Nilstone.
It was still there, at the center of the manger, clenched in the stone hand of the Shaggat Ness, that lifeless maniac, that king become a statue. Pazel could not see the Stone-Fiffengurt had ordered the Shaggat’s arm draped with cloth, and the cloth firmly tied about the statue’s wrist-but he could feel it all the same. What was he sensing? Not a sound, not a glimmer. The feeling was closest to heat. With every step into the chamber he could feel it grow.
The Shaggat himself was kept upright by a wooden frame, girdling his waist and bolted heavily to the floor. He stared at his upraised hand with a weirdly shifting expression: triumph giving way to terror and shock. He had remained flesh and blood just long enough to see the weapon he craved begin to kill him.
On the mad king’s shoulder stood tiny Lord Taliktrum. His consort, Myett, crouched beside him, one hand on his calf, tensed for flight or combat as she always was when humans approached. Pazel felt a keen hatred for the pair. Murderers. They had not actually slain Diadrelu, Pazel and Thasha’s dear friend and the ixchel’s former commander. But they might as well have. Steldak, the ixchel man who had jerked the spear through her neck, was deranged, and perished himself in short order. It was Taliktrum and his fanatics who had ambushed Diadrelu, and held her while the deed was done. Pazel would never forgive them.
Around the statue were gathered some twelve or thirteen humans, along with Bolutu and Ibjen. Pazel still marveled at the dlomic boy’s willingness to help them. He had said no more about it since the fire on the beach, never explained who had told him that some on the Chathrand were trying to “redeem the world.” But his courage was being sorely tested. He’d been promised a safe return to the village by nightfall. From the look on his face he was counting the hours.
Six Turachs were present, including Haddismal. And there was Big Skip Sunderling: a welcome surprise, for the carpenter’s mate was a trusted friend. Not so the bosun, Mr. Alyash, who greeted the newcomers with a scowl: a gruesome expression, owing to the blotchy scars that covered him from mouth to chest. Alyash was a spy in the service of Sandor Ott. The scars, Pazel had heard him claim, were marks of torture with a sarcophagus jellyfish by the followers of the Shaggat Ness.
Mr. Uskins was here as well-tall, fair Uskins, the disgraced first mate. The man had loathed Pazel and Neeps from the start-they belonged to inferior races, but failed to cringe before their betters-and the tarboys returned the sentiment. But lately Pazel had begun to feel sorry for Uskins. The man looked like a shipwreck. Once fastidious in the extreme, he had neglected both his beard and his uniform. His blond hair dangled greasy and uncombed. When he looked at Pazel his eyes lit with antipathy, but it was a vague, distracted sort of hate.
The last two figures were even more unexpected. One was Claudius Rain-addled Dr. Rain, the worst quack Pazel had ever encountered. Rain had barely stirred from his cabin since the legendary Dr. Chadfallow replaced him as ship’s surgeon. But here he was, following the flies with his gaze, muttering to himself. And there beside him, damn it all, stood the surgeon’s mate, Greysan Fulbreech.
The handsome Simjan youth beamed at Thasha, who returned a brief, uneasy smile. Pazel wanted to smash something. He was visited by the absurd idea that Fulbreech, five or six years older and unbearably decent to everyone, was the true reason Thasha had insisted on attending the meeting. Fulbreech had appeared suddenly one day in the wedding crowd on Simja, bearing a mysterious message for Hercol. Pazel had mistrusted him from that first moment, though he had to admit he had no definite cause. Not for mistrust, anyway; jealousy was another matter. He knew quite well that Thasha had fancied the surgeon’s mate-had kissed him once or twice, even, when Oggosk’s threats made Pazel treat her with disdain. Of course, that was over now Fulbreech gave him a frank, friendly smile. “Hello, Pathkendle.”
Pazel nodded, failing to bring an answering smile to his lips. Do I hate him just because Thasha doesn’t? What’s the matter with me?
Behind them, Alyash closed the chamber door.
Taliktrum cleared his throat. “We’re alive,” he said. “That is something. But no one should suppose that we have earned the right to breathe easy. Only giants think in terms of merits and rewards; our people think of survival. That is what we are here to determine: how to survive together, until we can go our separate ways.”
Fiffengurt laughed grimly. “Did you see that Gods-forsaken serpent? Did you hear those drums? We’re babes in the woods, Mr. Taliktrum. How in Pitfire do you determine the best way to survive in a world you know nothing about?”
“You must address him as ‘commander’ or ‘lord,’ ” hissed Myett.
“You are not equipped to understand,” said Taliktrum, “but we are. The ixchel have not grown fat in their time of exile; they have not grown soft and selfish. Every house in Etherhorde, every dog-prowled, cat-infested alley, was to us a place of menace and persecution. Do you see how fortunate you are that we seized your drifting helm? Trust me, you are adrift no longer. The Chathrand shall move through this great, strange South as the ixchel move through a city: in the shadows, in darting runs and swift concealments, inch by hard-won inch.”
His words tumbled out like an unpracticed speech, or a man trying to convince himself of his own consequence. When he finished, he appeared at a loss. Without releasing his leg, Myett looked up and caught his eye, and then subtly directed his attention to Old Gangrune.
“I have asked our purser,” said Taliktrum at once, “to remind us of the assets that remain aboard this ship. That is the purser’s duty, among other things. Are you prepared, Mr. Gangrune?”
The old, bent fellow nodded sourly. He was fussing with an extremely tattered and dog-eared accounting book.
“Well, proceed,” said Taliktrum.
Gangrune took a pair of horn-rimmed glasses from his vest pocket, considered the filthy lenses, folded them anew. He opened the logbook and considered it for nearly a minute with the deepest disappointment. At last Haddismal snatched the book, flipped it right-side up, and placed it again in Gangrune’s hands. The old man glared at the sergeant as though he had been tricked. Then he cleared his throat.
“It is my joy,” he shouted, “in this, my thirty-seventh year as purser aboard the Imperial Mercantile Ship Chathrand, registration four-o-two-seven-nine Etherhorde, to present you with another exact and impeccable accounting. To begin with the human assets, gentlemen: our splendid vessel currently boasts three hundred and ninety-one ordinary seamen, one hundred and forty able seamen, twenty-two midshipmen, sixteen lieutenants and sub-lieutenants, two gun captains, six deck officers in full command of their mental faculties, another deck officer, a glorious and decorated captain, a famous and educated sailmaster, a doctor and another who petitions our belief that he is such, a surgeon’s mate, two illustrious passengers entitled to partial refunds due to our tardiness in returning to Etherhorde, nine specialists, seven mates, a veterinarian with webbed fingers, a master cook, a tailor, thirty-four tarboys of no distinction or morals, ninety-one Turach marines with full mobility and one who suffers headaches and is prone to falling forward, a regimental clerk, a foul witch, an experienced whaling-ship commander and his nineteen surviving crew members, including four Quezan warriors indecently fond of nakedness, thirty-three steerage passengers, among them twelve women, four boys, three girls and an infant with a cleft lip, eight-”
“Silence!” screamed Taliktrum. “Mr. Gangrune, what are we to do with such a rubbish heap of detail? I asked you for a summary statement.”
Gangrune countered that he was presenting a summary, that a full company report would have required him to be “rather more specific.” He was about to resume his reading, but Taliktrum cut him off.
“That will do, Purser, thank you ever so much. Post your summary in the wardroom as I requested. Now then-” The young lord’s eyes swept the room, and at last settled on Thasha again. “Step forward, girl.”
Thasha hesitated, then moved toward the ixchel and the Shaggat Ness. She regarded Taliktrum coldly.
“We have decided to keep this plague of idiocy a secret from the crew of the Chathrand. Have you or your friends spoken of it to anyone?”
“Of course not,” said Thasha.
Nothing about the time-skip, Pazel thought. Hercol’s right. It’s safer this way.
“When we fought the rats in this chamber,” Taliktrum went on, “I saw a thing I cannot explain. Pathkendle saw it too, and my father, and a handful of my guards. I am not sure whether you saved our lives or inspired the rats to start the bonfire that nearly killed us all. Will you tell us what happened?”
A brief pause, then Thasha shook her head.
“Perhaps you distrust certain persons here?” suggested Taliktrum. “Will you speak to me privately, to help me better command this vessel?”
Grunts and murmurs escaped the humans. Command, he says. One of the Turachs turned aside to spit.
“No,” said Thasha, “I won’t.”
“Do not toy with us,” said Taliktrum, his voice rising. “By now you of all people must know that we of Ixphir House do not bluff. We have no desire to see any more of your people killed-”
“What about your own?” muttered Fiffengurt.
“-but if you refuse to face the truth of your situation, you will leave us no choice. Look at me when I address you, girl.”
“Her name is Thasha Isiq,” said Hercol.
Every head in the chamber turned. Taliktrum started; Myett’s hand went to her bow. Hercol had spoken quietly, but Pazel had rarely heard such depths of hatred in a voice.
Hercol and Diadrelu had been lovers. Pazel did not know what that meant, between a human and an eight-inch-tall ixchel queen. A few months ago he would not have believed it possible: it was the stuff of tarboy jokes. But he had seen Hercol when they found her, hours too late but still beautiful, naked save for her bandaged neck, surrounded by those of her clan who had loved her to the end. Hercol’s agony had been like a second death, and Pazel had felt ashamed of his doubt.
That courage, he thought, and that proud, quiet loneliness. She was perfect for him.
A sudden rustling from the hay bales. Pazel raised his eyes: eighty or ninety ixchel had materialized there in an eyeblink, ranged like a miniature battalion, armed and silent. Every one of them was focused on Hercol.
Alyash gestured irritably. “We’re all on the same blasted ship, Stanapeth. We’ve the right to know what her game is.”
The right to know! Pazel was speechless at the bosun’s gall. But he wouldn’t be speechless, not this time, he “Awful, isn’t it,” said Fulbreech, his voice dripping sarcasm, “when people keep secrets?”
Thasha smiled at Fulbreech again.
“You shut your Gods-damned mouth, boy,” said Alyash. “You’ve no business here anyway.”
“We were summoned, we were dragged,” Dr. Rain protested.
Thasha just shook her head. “I won’t explain because I can’t. I simply don’t know what happened that day. I touched the Nilstone and it didn’t kill me, though it should have. And I told the rats I was the Angel they worshipped, and they believed me. Of course I didn’t know that the Angel’s coming would make them want to go to heaven on a puff of smoke.”
Taliktrum stared at her a moment, then nodded to Myett. Agile as spiders, the two ixchel crawled onto the Shaggat’s arm and set about untying the ropes.
The cloth slithered to the ground. “Behold your ally, men of Arqual,” said Taliktrum.
The hand, etched in stone but withered to a skeleton, was every bit as hideous as Pazel recalled, but now he saw long cracks extending down the arm, nearly to the shoulder. And there, clenched in the fleshless fingers, was the Nilstone. It was no larger than a walnut, but terrifying all the same, for the Nilstone was black beyond seeing. To look at it was like staring at the sun: a black sun, that dazzled without light.
“Oh,” said a man’s voice, weak and troubled. “Oh dear, that is wrong.” It was Dr. Rain. He was shaking his head and pointing at the Stone. “Crawlies, Mr. Fiffengurt-that is all wrong. Do you hear me? Wrong! Wrong!”
Suddenly he was shouting, red-faced, hands in fists, stamping his foot so hard on each Wrong! that his body jerked in a kind of circular war-dance.
“Get him out of here!” snapped Haddismal, gesturing to his men. But before any of them could move Rain straightened up, drew a great sucking breath and fled the chamber.
“Why in the belching Pits did you summon that fool?” said Alyash.
“He’s a doctor,” said Myett, her voice low and feline, “and your precious Shaggat is disintegrating.”
“From his dead hand down,” said Taliktrum. “Mr. Fulbreech, Mr. Bolutu, you’re the only medical men left here. What do you see? What would happen to this madman should the enchantment end?”
Fulbreech and Bolutu approached the Shaggat, flinching when their eyes passed over the Nilstone. Bolutu, among so much else, was a renowned veterinarian. Fulbreech, by contrast, was a mere surgeon’s mate, and a new one at that. But his tutor over the past four months of storm and combat had been none other than Ignus Chadfallow, and Pazel well knew what a driven teacher the doctor could be.
“If those cracks become lesions?” mused Fulbreech. “No question, gentlemen. He will lose the arm.”
“And his life, should the cracks spread greatly,” added Bolutu.
“A tourniquet can stop the bleeding only if it can be fastened to a stump.”
“Then what’re you waiting for?” growled Haddismal. “Patch up his blary arm! Gods of death, Bolutu, the fortunes of our Empire rest on that man!”
“Your Empire,” said Bolutu. “I came north to fight Arunis and the evil he would do to all lands. But Arqual has never been my home. Your contempt for my skin assured that, as much as your vile ambition to destroy the Mzithrinis.”
“Why has no one stabilized the arm?” demanded Taliktrum.
“Chadfallow warned ’em off,” said Alyash. He waved a hand imperiously, spoke in a fair imitation of the doctor’s stentorian voice. “ ‘Nothing you do will slow the decay. Plasters, splints, bandages-none of these can help. You’ll only crumble him the faster, mark my word, mark my word.’ ”
Bolutu and Fulbreech looked at each other and frowned, as though they doubted the verdict. But Alyash pointed irritably at the Shaggat’s hand.
“It’s that Stone we have to deal with, if we want to save the monster,” he said. “He’ll be dead before you can sing him a fare-thee-well, if he turns back to flesh with that thing in his hand. And if Arunis is still aboard-”
“He is,” said Mr. Uskins suddenly.
Pazel started; he had almost forgotten that Uskins was in the room.
Alyash, flustered, carried on: “-then we know he’s toiling away in a fever, trying to learn how to use it.”
“And failing, so far,” said Haddismal. Turning Thasha a skeptical look, he added, “You expect us to believe that you did something that mucking sorcerer won’t even try?”
“I touched the Stone,” Thasha stated flatly, “once.”
“Just reached up and gave it a squeeze,” scoffed Haddismal. “On a whim, like. The deadliest blary thing in Alifros.”
“If I hadn’t we’d have died anyway,” said Thasha.
“Do it again,” said Taliktrum.
Uproar, loud and general. Taliktrum and Myett leaped straight up from the Shaggat onto a crossbeam above. Every human voice (and two dlomic) in the chamber cried out against the notion, and Jorl and Suzyt erupted in howls. Pazel squeezed Thasha’s elbow. No, no, no, his shaking head proclaimed.
“You’ll shatter the arm!” shouted Alyash.
“Be quiet!” Thasha bellowed, and everyone obeyed. Thasha handed the dog’s leashes to Pazel. Then she walked right up to the Shaggat Ness, raised a hand and touched the statue’s arm, spreading her fingers wide.
“Thasha, don’t!” hissed Pazel.
Thasha closed her eyes, tracing the stone bicep, sliding her fingers around and upward in what was almost a caress. She reached the elbow, lingered there, then moved her hand slowly higher.
“I could,” she said, and as she spoke Pazel thought the manger darkened, and a cold, prickling sensation swept over his body. The men looked at one another, aghast. Thasha reached higher still, until her fingers rested atop the Shaggat’s own, with the throbbing blackness of the Nilstone lancing between them. “I could take it from his hand, right here and now. But what would be the point?”
She dropped her hand, and a sigh of relief passed through the room. Pazel felt light-headed, as though he had just caught his balance at the edge of a cliff. But Alyash gave a mirthless laugh.
“You’re lying through your pretty teeth,” he said to Thasha. “You know what the point would be. You could send Arunis flying from this ship like a cannonball. The rest of us, too. You could get your friends out of the crawly trap, whisk us home across the Nelluroq and be sittin’ down to tea and toast with Daddy by New Year’s Day. Pitfire, you could topple Magad the Fifth and take his place as Emperor of Arqual. The whole blary game’s up if someone masters the Nilstone.”
“I never said I could master it,” said Thasha. “I’m no mage. I only told you I could claim it.”
“Do you mean to say that while you can survive the touch of the Stone, you’re unable to use it at all?” asked Taliktrum.
“I don’t know how long I’d survive, if I took it from him,” said Thasha. “I have a feeling it would kill me too, just a bit more slowly.”
“You see?” said Taliktrum, glancing quickly around the chamber. “She is in some sense mightier than Arunis, who fears to touch it at all. Why haven’t you applied yourself to its mastery? Have you no desire to help us?”
Thasha gave him a long, poisonous look. “If I survived the attempt,” she said, “I still couldn’t do anything with the Stone that isn’t ugly.”
“Ugly,” said Taliktrum. “What does that mean? War is ugly, girl. Killing, hunger, disease are ugly. You must risk it. We must be prepared to use every tool in our arsenal.”
Thasha turned and walked back to her friends. “Not this one,” she said.
“Taliktrum,” said Fiffengurt suddenly, “you want to play captain? Try acting the part. You said this meeting would be ‘brief and decisive,’ as I recall. Well, it ain’t been brief, and we’ve not decided a blessed thing.”
“That’s about to change,” said Haddismal.
Drawing his Turach broadsword, he stepped forward and thrust it at Taliktrum, the blade horizontal, in the ritual challenge of the Arquali military. “We can have this out right now,” he said. “You’re holdin’ hostages, our true captain among them. But there ain’t a man on this ship-or a woman either-who hasn’t stared down death these past few months. And whether you kill them or not, you’ll have doomed yourselves. We’ll smoke you out of your holes and deal with you the Arquali way, and your people will die cursing the day they ever heard the name Tliktrum-Talakitrim-”
“Taliktrum, you great oaf,” muttered Bolutu.
“Withhold the berries, my lord,” said Myett. “See how fierce they are when their people feel the claws of the poison ripping at their lungs.”
Alyash drew his sword in turn. “You think you’ve got us by the gills, don’t you?” he said.
Taliktrum nodded. “Exactly right, Bosun: we have you by the gills. My father, Lord Talag, is never careless with detail, and he planned this campaign for twelve years.”
“And the Secret Fist planned for forty,” said Haddismal. “You have no muckin’ idea who you’re dealin’ with. The water emergency’s over, crawly, and so’s your little game. We’ll drop this ship to the seabed before we let ourselves be run by ship lice.”
“Leave bigotry to one side, all of you,” said Hercol. “It will not achieve the ends you want. We are all thinking creatures, and each of us bears a soul.” His voice was strained, as though he was making a great effort to heed his own words. Facing Taliktrum, he said, “I will never address you as ‘captain’ or ‘commander,’ for you have no right to either title. But your own people count you a lord, and so shall I for the present.
“Lord Taliktrum, your prisoners are in squalor. Thirty days they have been crammed in that space. They are filthy, sore and maddened by inactivity. They sleep poorly and eat little better. You showed a moment’s kindness when we first spotted land: you gave a temporary antidote to the captain, and let him walk free an hour upon the quarterdeck. Will you not extend that kindness to the others? Let one or two out at a time, to breathe the free air, wash themselves, regain their dignity, if only for an hour.”
Shouts of agreement from the humans. Taliktrum crossed his arms and waited for silence.
“Cages are abhorrent to our people,” he said. “You giants made sure we learned to hate them to our core. And unlike you we are not needlessly cruel. Besides, the antidote is flawless. What have we to lose? Three, yes, three hostages at a time will have their hour’s freedom. The women first, and the youngest.”
Pazel felt his heart lift. He caught Thasha’s eye and saw the same excitement. The youngest hostages were Neeps and Marila.
Hercol bowed ever so slightly to Taliktrum. “Now to another matter,” he said. “We cannot stay here, Lord Taliktrum. The Chathrand is hidden behind a rocky islet barely taller than her mainmast, and that is not safety enough. If the armada had passed a few miles closer to the village, we might all be in prison now, or worse.”
“I know that,” said Taliktrum. “Of course we must sail. The question is, where?”
“And before that, the question’s how,” said Fiffengurt. “As in, how far can we get? We have water but precious little food. The rats fouled most of the grain in the hold, and devoured everything in the smokehouse, and ate through the tin walls of the bread room. And all the animals are dead.”
“You lie,” shouted a voice from among the ixchel standing on the hay bales. “I heard a goat bleating on the orlop deck this morning, m’lord, as plain as I hear you now.”
“Can’t be,” said Big Skip, shaking his head. “Teggatz and I did the inventory. There are carcasses we couldn’t account for, true enough. But they must have been burned to cinders, or else hurled themselves over the sides. There’s no blessed way we missed a goat.”
“Goat or no goat, we’ll soon be hungry,” said Pazel.
“That’s right, Muketch,” said Haddismal, “and without decent food the men won’t be fit to fight, should it come to that.”
“We lack medical supplies as well,” said Fulbreech.
“And the ship needs repairs,” said Fiffengurt. “That foremast is only a jury-rig-one more hard blow and she’ll fall. And probably take the kevels and the chase-beams with her. The gun carriages want attention, too.”
Suddenly Uskins giggled, loud and shrill. “Fit to fight!” he said. “Who do you think to fight, Sergeant Haddismal? That armada, maybe? What odds would you give them, eh, crawlies? Let’s wager, let’s have a little fun-”
Taliktrum’s finger stabbed down at Uskins. “That buffoon should not have been admitted. Who brought him?”
Uskins lowered his voice. “No one brought me, Lord Taliktrum. I merely followed my friends.”
Now it was Alyash’s turn to laugh. “What blary friends?”
Uskins’ mouth twisted, but he made no reply.
“Quarreling imbeciles!” said Taliktrum. “Your race truly is a misstep on the part of nature. By the sun and stars, act like men! Where is the sorcerer? When can we expect his next attack?”
The argument exploded again. Haddismal pointed out that Arunis’ last attack had only occurred after the ixchel drugged every human aboard. The ixchel fired back that drugged sleep was kinder than what giants had meted out to their people for five hundred years. Jeers and insults flew. When order at last returned, however, it was clear that no one knew where Arunis was hiding.
“I will say this,” said Bolutu. “He will not wait long. The South is changed, and powers have arisen that were not here… before. Arunis will not risk his prize being snatched by some mage or ruler mightier than himself.”
“What can he do, though?” asked Big Skip. “If he could use the Stone, he’d have come for it already, wouldn’t he?”
“Let him try,” said Haddismal, and his men rumbled in agreement.
“You speak in ignorance,” said Hercol. “The mage is three thousand years old. He has survived cataclysms beyond anything we have experienced. Do you think he will let himself be thwarted by a small company of marines? No, it is the Nilstone itself that thwarts him, for the present. And it is these two”-he indicated Pazel and Thasha-“who have best understood his tactics. How does one handle a poker heated in the furnace? With a glove, of course. That simple insight, when Thasha brought it to me, explained so much of the sorcerer’s efforts and schemes. This creature”-Hercol gestured at the Shaggat-“is his chosen glove. Arunis cares nothing for him or his deformed version of the Old Faith. He merely believes the Shaggat will serve his purpose.”
“Arqual’s purpose, too,” hissed Myett.
“Now, that just ain’t so,” said Haddismal. “The Emperor wants the downfall of the Mzithrin Kings, and he planned to use the Shaggat against them. That’s true, and well deserved, after all their crimes. But His Supremacy knew nothing about the Nilstone, or Arunis for that matter. He never meant things to come to such a pass.”
“Tell that to the survivors.”
Everyone turned. It was Lord Talag, Taliktrum’s father. He stood in the midst of the ixchel on the hay bales, leaning on the shoulder of a younger man. His thick gray hair was tied back in the style of elder ixchel, and his eyes blazed with fury. “Tell them!” he spat again. “The limbless, the eyeless, the orphaned, the mad. ‘Don’t blame Arqual. We never meant the Shaggat to do so well. We thought he would only sack a few cities, burn a few regions, exterminate a people or two. A brief civil war is all we had in mind-a war to break your will to fight us, when our fleets came in turn.’ Give them comfort, giant. Tell them how much better their lives will be under the Arquali heel.”
Pazel was alarmed. Since his abuse by the rats, Talag had been quiet and withdrawn. But here he was again in all his ferocity, Talag the mastermind, who had swept all his people up in his dream of a homecoming, who had exploited Ott’s war conspiracy as deftly as Arunis had. Here was the genius, the human-hater, Diadrelu’s brother and her twisted reflection. As much as anyone aboard, Talag had brought them to this moment. Was he recovered enough to lead the clan once more? And which was worse, the clear-eyed hatred of the father, or the hazy delusions of the son?
Talag began to cough; perhaps he was not so recovered after all. When the fit finally ended he shook his head. “In any case, your plans for the mad king have failed. The soul entombed in that statue will never breathe again, let alone reach his fanatics on Gurishal to lead them in a new holy war. The sorcerer may do all that you fear, if and when he comes for the Stone-but not with the aid of the Shaggat. My son has foreseen this, and much else that he has yet to reveal.”
Thasha looked at Pazel and rolled her eyes.
“Go to your rest, Father,” said Taliktrum. “Lehdra, Nasonnok, escort him.” Turning to the humans, he drew a deep breath. “In sum: you cannot locate Arunis, you have no idea what to do with the Nilstone, you do not know the first thing about the surrounding country or the armada that passed us, and you do not have a plan. Am I leaving anything out?”
“We’ve gold enough to buy a fair-sized realm,” said Haddismal. “We can hire the best curse-breakers this South has to offer. They’ll fix the Shaggat, if he can be fixed. And if we can pop that stone out of his hand without killing him.”
“Or yourselves,” said Taliktrum.
“And meanwhile,” put in Alyash, “we look for a place called Stath Balfyr. We have course headings from there, as you probably know. Headings for a safer, western return across the Nelluroq, behind the Mzithrini defenses, to the Shaggat’s homeland of Gurishal.”
“Y-ess,” said Taliktrum. “From Stath Balfyr. So I’ve been told.”
Pazel saw the sudden alertness in every ixchel’s face, and knew its source. Diadrelu had told Hercol everything, a few hours before her death. The ixchel had deceived the deceivers. The course headings were a fiction, the old documents that contained them forgeries. Stath Balfyr was real, but it was no starting point for a run across the Ruling Sea. It was the ixchel homeland, a country ruled by the little people, the land Talag had sworn they would return to and reclaim.
He’s not going to tell them, Pazel realized. He’s no fool: better that they should want to find Stath Balfyr than that he should have to drive them there with threats. Of course it may come to that in the end.
“Sirs?” said a thin voice from the edge of the chamber.
It was Ibjen, the dlomic boy.
Taliktrum looked at him dubiously. “You have something to add?”
“The armada, sirs,” said Ibjen, his voice shaking. “There was talk of it in the village. Just talk, you understand. We are simple folk-”
“You don’t have to convince us of that,” said Taliktrum. “Speak quickly, and be done.”
“Out here we have little to do with the Empire, sir,” said Ibjen, “and the news we do have comes by way of Masalym. When my father came out to the Sandwall, boats still made the crossing from the city every day or two, and soldiers would be billeted with the townsfolk, and speak of the Platazcra, the Infinite Conquest. But that was years ago. For a long time now we have been abandoned-that is why my mother chose to send me here.”
“You ramble, boy.”
Ibjen made an apologetic nod. “Sir, before your ship we had had no visitors in half a year. And the last visitor died of fever in just three days. We have no doctor, so my father and I tended him as best we could. He was not a man of Masalym. Some guessed that he came from Orbilesc, others from Calambri.”
“These names mean nothing to us,” said Taliktrum. “If you cannot get to the point-”
“Listen to him!” said Thasha. “He’s doing us a favor, being here.”
“And those words blary well do mean something-one of ’em at least,” added Fiffengurt. “ORBILESC is engraved on our blary sheet anchors, though the letters are faded now. I always wondered if it referred to her home port.” He gestured at Ibjen. “You carry on, lad. I say you’re mighty brave, to step aboard this ship.”
Ibjen did not look brave at that moment. “Orbilesc and Calambri are cities far to the west, in the heart of Bali Adro,” he said. “And it is true that the Empire’s greatest shipyards are there.” He looked at Thasha and swallowed. “My father sent me to the neighbors’ house when the stranger began to die. But last night he told me something he had never mentioned before. That the dying man had broken his silence before the end. That he’d said he came from a village on the banks of the River Sundral, near Orbilesc. He said that the whole of the city had been caught up in some huge, secret effort, for years. That Imperial warships turned away all private vessels at a distance of fifty miles, and that a strange glow hung over Orbilesc by night. Later the mountains began to shake, and boulders crashed down upon his village. The fell light grew stronger. And finally the river gushed with boiling water that killed every fish, every frog and snake and wading bird-even the trees whose roots drank from the stream. That, the man had claimed, was when he fled east.”
Ibjen gazed beseechingly at his listeners. “My father thought it but the ravings of a dying man. Until yesterday, that is. Now he believes that Orbilesc was building ships for the Emperor. The same ships that passed in the gulf, Thashiziq. The ships of the armada.”
There was a long pause; the men were too unsettled to speak. To Pazel’s surprise it was Big Skip who broke the silence.
“Right,” he said. “Fleet or no fleet, we have to sail before we starve. And it can’t be north across the Nelluroq, even if we wished to-”
“Which we do not,” said Haddismal, “until we reach Stath Balfyr, wherever that may be. This is an Arquali ship, and Magad’s word is law, even here on the far side of Alifros.”
“Glory to the Ametrine Throne,” said Alyash drily, “and if that ain’t motivation enough, there’s the small matter of him crucifying us, with our families, if we return to Arqual without completing the mission.”
Pazel kept his face expressionless. Magad’s done all the punishing he’s going to do, he thought.
“So,” said Big Skip, “turn east and we might catch up with that hellish armada; turn west and we might find the hellish place it came from. And either way we won’t get far before we’re too hungry to do our jobs. Ain’t it simple, then? We head due south-to this Masalym, thirty miles across the bay.”
No one seconded the motion. Big Skip raised his bushy eyebrows. “It’s a city,” he insisted. “They’ll feed us, just as these good village folk gave us water. What about it, mates? Thirty miles to the butcher’s shop, says I.”
But Bolutu shook his head. “The Masalym of my day would have been a good choice,” he said. “It was a trading city, and so used to visitors-either by sea, or out of the strange mountains of the Efaroc Peninsula at its back. Yet if Masalym today is ruled by the same power that launched those ships, then I for one would rather keep my distance from the butcher’s shop.”
“Ha!” blurted Uskins. “The butcher’s shop!”
His laugh was jarring, almost a scream, and nearly everyone looked at him in anger. Uskins flinched, as though expecting a blow. Whether or not his fear was justified Pazel never learned, however, for at that moment the ship’s drums erupted in pandemonium.
“Beat to quarters! Beat to quarters!” Already the cries resounded through the ship.
“Damnation, we’re still at anchor!” shouted Fiffengurt. “Alyash, get to the starboard battery! Sunderling, on deck! Set Fegin and his men to bracing that foremast! Go!”
“Are we under attack?” Taliktrum shouted. “Fiffengurt, how can this be?”
“It can’t!” snapped Fiffengurt. “There’s no way in Alifros a ship’s crept up on us! But who knows, who knows, in this mad country?” He turned wildly about. “Pathkendle! Wake the anchor-lifters! We can’t afford to leave more iron on the seafloor! Run, by the Sweet Tree, run!”