The River of Shadows cv-3

by Robert V. S. Redick

  But after midnight, back in the safety of the clan house, the woman’s cries had resumed, ethereal and cold. Here I am! Your clan-sister, your wife! I’ll not be abandoned again!

  Myett scaled the inner hull, past the catwalks, seeking the ixchel door that gave entrance to the mercy deck. Taliktrum had admitted to a fondness for ghost stories. He had trusted her that much (only briefly, don’t start lying now, only in those minutes while you waited for his body’s appetite to build). They chill my blood, he’d whispered once, sharing a secret grin. Can you keep that to yourself, my little guardian?

  How did the story end? With the moan growing louder and louder, putting all the clan in danger. First the mice and burrowing creatures heard it, then surface animals, the prowling street dogs, the cats. Finally the giants themselves began to hear the ghost. What could be done? Myett’s grandfather would have known the right sort of penance, the act of contrition that a ghost would accept. But in the tale, the foolish clan heaped all the blame on the husband, and threw him into the sea at the place where his wife had perished. Monsters, murdering fools! Couldn’t they see that the woman had actually loved him? That she might love him still? They had earned their final punishment; they had begged for it.

  The hidden door-latch opened to her fingers. She crawled into the mercy deck and wandered aft, leaving the secret door ajar. Past the empty rice barrels, the swept-out bread room, the brig where guards stood exclaiming to their prisoners: Them fish-eyes have shipwrights underneath us already! They’re going to fix this old boat after all!

  The Mzithrini girl, Neda, looked out through her prison bars and saw her plainly. But that did not matter. All crawlies look the same in the shadows, don’t they? And besides, no one listens to the enemy.

  Minutes later she was teasing open another door: above the scrap-metals storeroom. The strongbox lay bolted in place, and wedged beneath it, Taliktrum’s key. She pried it out and laid it on her palm. How it had hurt, with all his weight pressing down. It had always been between them, a witness to his hunger, her addiction; a painful proof that she would never get closer than his skin.

  They had driven him away. With their worship, their torturous need. They had exiled him to a city of dark giants, a city without Houses, without safety. He might already have met his death.

  He’d been tender with her. More than once. But their worship had made his love impossible.

  She opened the box, set the other treasures aside, took out all the remaining antidote. She would give the clan what it had earned. No one could stop her. No law applied to a woman who had ceased to exist.

  The dlomu erected a stone oven on the quayside and kindled a fire within. Soon a sweet-smelling woodsmoke drifted over the Chathrand. Then carts began to arrive, some drawn by stout little horses, others by dogs. Crowds of workers assembled around these carts, making it difficult to see what they contained. Then someone scurried up to the fighting top and gave a shout: “Food, food! And loads of it, by the Tree! Bless them fish-eyes, they’re going to feed us at last!”

  It began with sausage, seared to bursting on the open flames, and ample servings of thick-skinned tubers. The hot food was placed in baskets like those of the first night, and the baskets were placed on hooks at the end of long poles and swung gingerly over the chasm to the Chathrand’s quarterdeck. Even as they passed out the food, the dlomu kept silent, although the humans and ixchel thanked them with great feeling. Still, as he watched the orderly business unfold, Pazel caught smiles, and even an occasional wink of a silver eye. They were covert, those looks. The dlomu were hiding their kindness, but less from the humans than from one another.

  Pazel mentioned the looks to Neeps. “You see? These blokes aren’t unfriendly-at least no more than they were that first night. They’re afraid of us, sure. But this not-talking business: it’s coming from somewhere else. I’d bet my right foot they’ve been ordered not to speak.”

  “Maybe,” said Neeps, watching the baskets collect on the quarterdeck. “Or maybe it’s spreading, that old woman’s idea about us bringing the end of the world. Maybe they even think we have a choice about it. ‘Treat us nice, see, or die in storms of fire.’ ”

  After the sausage came pies-round, glistening, stuffed with meat and curious vegetables and aromatic herbs. Rose fed his men in reverse order of rank: tarboys and ordinary seamen first, then rated sailors, Turachs, petty officers, lieutenants. The senior officers waited stoically: they had known all along that they would be last. Rose was merely applying the Sailing Code, and most of them knew the wisdom of the old law. Nothing would break a crew’s loyalty faster than injustice with food.

  But there was no shortage. Fresh bread followed, and olives cured in wine, and small cuts of fish wrapped in aromatic leaves, and a second round of pies stuffed with sweet orange tubers and sprinkled with a spice that tasted like nutmeg and licorice at once and yet was neither. There was no shortage. They ate and they ate. Mr. Bolutu sat with his back to a hatch comb, using both hands, and Pazel saw tears in his eyes.

  Twenty years since he tasted his people’s food, he thought. And suddenly he wondered if he would ever again bite into an Ormali plum.

  For a time the Chathrand was a happy ship. The tarboys sang a tarboy shanty, but collapsed in disarray before the obscene punch line (even this was more than they had ever dared in Rose’s presence). The steerage passengers wolfed down everything they were given. The door of the forecastle house was opened just long enough for five baskets to be slid within, and all who stood near heard Lady Oggosk’s delighted cackle. When the dlomu sent over boxes of sticky mul as a final offering, the sailors even managed to finish a few out of politeness, though no one had yet explained what they were.

  Hercol brought Felthrup, Jorl and Suzyt to the topdeck, tied the dogs to a steel deadeye and brought them bread and fish. The dogs ate. Felthrup sat snug by Thasha’s knee, and ate. Deep in the ship, someone managed to wake the augrongs; their groans of monstrous satisfaction made the dlomu freeze, and the humans laugh.

  Even the ixchel celebrated, in their way. They were in shock over Taliktrum’s disappearance (the rumors had escaped already, and sprouted hydra-heads: He’s a runaway, a coward, some said, and others, He’s off talking with the lord of the dlomu. He and Talag planned it all from the start) but they still had appetites. They ate well, but in shifts, guarding one another as ixchel always did at mealtime. Only Ensyl ate alone, not quite joining the humans but shunned by her people.

  Pazel, Neeps and Marila sat in a crowd of tarboys near the spankermast. Marila made little chirping sounds of happiness as she chewed her fish. Neeps dipped morsels of bread in the juice from the meat pies, grinning as he popped each one into his mouth. Overhead, the dlomu watched in fascination, murmuring and occasionally pointing.

  “Feeding time at the zoo,” said Marila, glancing up at them.

  Neeps frowned at her. “There’s a cheery thought. What put that into your head?”

  “The way you eat,” said Marila.

  The tarboys laughed, and so did Pazel, for there was nothing mean or cutting in the other boys’ voices: they appeared ready, for the moment anyway, to let Pazel and Neeps back into their fold. About blary time, he thought.

  Then he saw Thasha a short distance away, eating olives from Fulbreech’s hand. She was turned away and did not see him-but Fulbreech did, and raised an eyebrow in his direction, a wry salute.

  Rage went through Pazel, sudden and murderous. He turned away with the remains of his meal. And found himself facing Ignus Chadfallow.

  “Hello,” said Pazel, not very warmly.

  Captivity had aged the doctor. His craggy face was stained with soot that no amount of washing had yet been able to remove. His deep-set eyes shone with a new, more desperate fervor. The nose Pazel had broken on Bramian had healed with a subtle clockwise twist.

  “I’ve been looking for you since yesterday, Pazel,” he said at last. “Why have you been avoiding me?”

  Pazel shrugged. “I’m
here now,” he said.

  They had crossed paths twice since the doctor gained his freedom. Both times Pazel had hurried by, mumbling about his duties. He had no desire to be cornered and questioned by the man.

  “You should eat less sausage, more fish and greens,” said the doctor. Neeps slid a whole sausage into his mouth.

  Pazel scowled. “What is it you want, Ignus? Missed trying out drugs on me?”

  “May I sit down?”

  Neeps and Marila glanced at each other and edged away. Pazel sighed, and Chadfallow lowered himself stiffly to the deck. He was not holding a plate. Instead he cradled a leather pouch in both hands. It appeared to contain some object no larger than a matchbox. Chadfallow held it as one might a fine glass figurine.

  “I’m a doctor,” he said. “I took an oath to defend life.”

  Pazel gave him a discouraging look. No philosophy, please.

  “Would you like to know what I’ve been asking myself this morning?” Chadfallow continued.

  “Dying to,” said Pazel.

  “What if it were you in there? What would I be thinking now? Would I have even stopped to think?”

  “What are you talking about?” asked Pazel. “In where?”

  Chadfallow lifted his eyes in the direction of the forecastle house. Pazel grew still.

  “Hercol is my oldest friend, after Thasha’s father,” said Chadfallow, “and he loved an ixchel woman, desperately. I honestly don’t know what to do.”

  “Ignus,” said Pazel, trying to keep his eyes off the pouch, “what’s going on? What is that you’re carrying?”

  “I’ve just told you,” said Chadfallow, “the antidote.”

  Pazel gasped. “The permanent antidote? What, another pill?”

  “Another ten pills. One for every remaining hostage. At least, that is what the note said. When I reached my desk in the sickbay the pouch was waiting for me.”

  “But that’s fantastic! You can set them free!”

  “Softly, you fool,” hissed Chadfallow.

  Glancing about, Pazel quickly understood. There were ixchel all over the deck. And men who had been taught to hate ixchel all their lives. Thasha, he noticed suddenly, was now seated alone; Fulbreech had moved off to starboard. Perhaps they’re fighting, thought Pazel, with a vague sense of hope.

  “Why can’t it always be this way?” said Chadfallow suddenly, his eyes sweeping the deck. “Peace and cooperation, sanity. There’s enough room on this ship for men and ixchel. And Rin knows there’s enough room in Alifros. Why do we fight? Why don’t we get on with living, while we’re alive?”

  Now that the doctor pointed it out, the scene did look more harmonious than ever before. Men and ixchel milled about together, not exactly with warmth, but with a sated sort of tolerance, as if the feasting had crowded their mutual animosities to one side. At the starboard rail a Turach was holding an ixchel sword in the palm of his hand, squinting at it, while its owner chattered on about the workmanship. Beyond the circle of tarboys, several topmen actually seemed to be trading jokes with the little people.

  Diadrelu, Pazel thought. You should be here. I’m looking at your dream.

  But of course he wasn’t, really. The jokes had a bitter edge. Each side had too many deaths to blame on the other. Rose was an infamous crawly-killer, and others-Uskins, Alyash, Haddismal-were almost as bad.

  “Tell me about the note, Ignus,” said Pazel quietly.

  “It was vile and sarcastic,” said Chadfallow. “Play God, it said. Hand out life and death like sweets to children. The ones who die first may be the luckiest. It was written by an ixchel hand, I’m certain of that. And the ink was not yet dry.”

  Pazel looked away, and for several minutes he and the doctor just studied the deck. No, it was not all good. Taliktrum’s Dawn Soldiers were eating in a huddle apart, scowling at those of their brethren who mingled most freely with the humans. A Turach glanced from a pie to a group of ixchel and back again; he frowned, as though concluding that they had touched it.

  “You can’t just let them out,” whispered Pazel.

  “No,” said Chadfallow, “not yet.”

  “You should hide the pills.”

  After a moment the doctor nodded. “Hide them, and negotiate. Once we are certain who speaks for the little people. Is it Talag, now that his son has fled? Or Taliktrum’s security chief, the one called Saturyk? In either case, if we are intelligent we may prevent bloodshed altogether.”

  Their eyes met. To his own surprise Pazel actually smiled. “Diplomacy, Ignus?” he said.

  The doctor inclined his head. “My specialty.”

  They both laughed-and it hurt to share a laugh with Chadfallow, after so much betrayal and deceit. But it felt good, too. Ignus had once been like a second father. He had even saved Pazel from slavery. After Pazel’s real father, Captain Gregory, abandoned them, Chadfallow had protected the family, and at last revealed his consuming love for Pazel’s mother. But halfway across the Nelluroq, Mr. Druffle (who had also known Gregory) had told Pazel that the doctor’s love for Suthinia had begun years earlier-that it was, in fact, the very thing that had driven Gregory away. Pazel had begged Chadfallow to deny it. The doctor had only replied that things were more complicated than they appeared.

  Pazel doubted he could ever forgive Chadfallow for breaking up his family. Still, in the midst of so much waste and ruin and killing, that sort of sin, loving another man’s wife, suddenly appeared very small. Of course, Chadfallow had done other things, darker and more suspicious, things that love could not explain.

  “You let Arunis board the ship, Ignus,” he said. “That day in the Straits of Simja. Why in the Pits did you do that?”

  “He was about to kill Thasha with that necklace. Wouldn’t you have done the same?”

  Pazel scowled. He’d asked himself the same question, many times. No answer he could come up with made him feel good.

  “You would have done so out of love for the girl,” said the doctor. “I might have wished to do so out of love for her father, but I would not have. No, I would have let her die, if I had not felt-”

  “What?”

  Chadfallow drew a slow breath. “A hunch, nothing more,” he said at last. “An instinct, that her death would bring a greater disaster than any of us could foresee. I feel it still. In the way Hercol speaks of her; the way Ramachni called her ‘my champion.’ They have never trusted me with the whole story of Thasha Isiq. Nor have any of you.”

  Pazel averted his eyes. He thinks I know more than I do. But he’s right, I haven’t trusted him. How could I, how could I, after “Ignus,” he heard himself say, “why didn’t you warn us of the invasion? You could have saved us then and there. We could have escaped.”

  It was the question he had never dared ask, the question that had burned inside him for almost six years. Chadfallow looked as though he had expected it.

  “Escape?” he said. “Do you think Suthinia Sadralin Pathkendle would have been content to escape, to run off into the Highlands with her children? Or”-he hesitated, swallowed; his face was suddenly vulnerable and young-“with me?”

  “Definitely not with you,” said Pazel. “Oh, damn it-that’s not what I meant-”

  “She would have raised the alarm. She would have stormed out into the city and told everyone the Arqualis were coming.”

  “They’d never have listened. They all thought she was crazy.”

  “But they did not think I was,” said Chadfallow. “Suthinia would have named me as her source immediately. And I could not afford to lie. I was doing everything I could to negotiate Ormael’s peaceful surrender, with guarantees that the city would not be looted, the people enslaved or slaughtered, the women raped.”

  Pazel shut his eyes. Neda, he thought.

  “Admiral Isiq agreed,” said Chadfallow, “although it meant disobeying his Emperor. We had it all arranged, Pazel. Not a shot was to be fired, not a woman touched. The Turachs hated the plan, but we had them under control. Tenuous co
ntrol, boy. Any friction and we knew they’d riot. It was your own lord, the Suzain of Ormael, who provided that friction. He dug in his heels and swore Ormael would fight to the last man.”

  Pazel’s head felt rather light. “Against all those Turach battalions? Against that whole mucking fleet?”

  “Why do you think the palace was so badly damaged? They had to pry him out like an oyster from a shell. Your fool of a leader could not accept the simple truth, that his days of courtesans and clotted cream were over. He preferred to bask in glory-in the bonfire Arqual made of your city.”

  “But for Rin’s sake, Ignus! Why didn’t Thasha’s father just tell me all this? Did he think I wouldn’t believe him?”

  “You had just called him a mass murderer, as I recall,” said Chadfallow.

  Pazel squeezed his eyes shut in pure frustration. A peaceful surrender. It wouldn’t have been justice, but it wouldn’t have been that, either: the burning and looting, the blood and death and rape. The terrible words of the eguar rang in his ears: Acceptance is agony, denial is death.

  Suddenly he realized that he was once more staring at the leather pouch with the antidote inside. He started. “Pitfire, Ignus, you shouldn’t be walking around with that thing!”

  “I don’t know where to hide it,” said Chadfallow. “Someone is still doing Ott’s work, you know. I find small items moved in my cabin, and in the surgery too.”

  “Well put it in your pocket, for Rin’s sake. Are you daft?”

  Chadfallow glared at him, then sighed and looked down at the pouch.

  “Listen,” said Pazel, “why don’t you let me hide them in the stateroom? There’s no safer place. Thasha hasn’t shut me out, yet, and even if she does, Neeps or Marila could-”

  “Hello there, Doctor.”

  The voice, loud and abrasively cheerful, belonged to Alyash. He had sidled up to them without a sound. Above the grotesque scars on his throat and chin he was smiling, and his eyes were bright and merry. His hands dangled empty at his sides.