The River of Shadows cv-3

by Robert V. S. Redick

  “Did I not say it, girl?” said Hercol, looking almost furious. “Tell me, did I not say it?”

  “You did,” she said, embracing him with arms and legs.

  “Now say it yourself,” he growled. “Say it now and believe it forever. Claim it, Thasha Isiq.”

  “Eyacaulgra,” she said. And as she kissed him, and Hercol lowered her to her feet, Pazel’s bewildered mind did the translating. The language was Hercol’s native Tholjassan, but the sentiment was her father’s maxim, his signature: Unvanquished.

  A few minutes later Prince Olik rose to leave. He was glad to have given them new hope, he said, but he warned them that the immediate peril was real.

  “I will leave you with three suggestions,” he said. “First, you should each pack a visiting bag-clothes and toothbrushes, sleepwear and such-to last you several days. Masalym hospitality is a ferocious business, and once he sees for himself that you’re not demons or dangerous lunatics, the Issar may very well insist on parading you through all the finer homes of the Upper City. You would cause great offense if you had to come back here for a change of socks.

  “Second, ask for nothing in the Upper City. As a rule we dlomu take pride in our generosity, but in Masalym that pride is an obsession, and among the well-to-do of Masalym it must be experienced to be believed. If you want water, you mention in passing that the weather tends to dry one’s throat. To make a direct request is to insult your host for not having provided it already.”

  “But all we did was ask, when we showed up in port,” said Marila. “Food, food. We practically begged on our knees.”

  “Yes,” said Olik, “and that made it terribly difficult to feed you. Vadu was preparing a grand feast, but when you begged, he was so offended that he ordered the cooks not to deliver it to the port. I was unable to change his mind until the following day.”

  “What about that first meal, the one that came by pulleys in the dark?”

  “You can thank Ibjen for that,” said the prince. “He was clever to mention those nursery rhymes about the feeling of hunger. The poor of the Lower City know the feeling well, and it was the poor who fed you. I doubt if the meal seemed excessive to you, starving as you were. But it would have fed ten times as many dlomic mouths. They gave you everything they could put their hands on-even though many of them believed you were ghosts. In our stories even ghosts need to eat.”

  “Perfect lunacy,” said Fiffengurt.

  “That too is forbidden!” Olik laughed. “A grave insult it is-a fighting insult-to call another mad.”

  “Ibjen explained already, Prince,” said Bolutu, “but even I have trouble remembering.”

  “See that you remember tomorrow,” said Olik. “Well, goodbye, my new friends. Rest today; you will soon need all your strength.”

  He rose then and bowed to Thasha and Marila-and then, catching himself, Ensyl. The captain led him to the door and opened it, and the prince was already in the passage when Pazel said, “Wait, Sire. What about your third suggestion? It wasn’t about madness, was it?”

  Olik turned in the doorway. He rested both hands on the frame. “No, it wasn’t, Mr. Pathkendle,” he said. “My third suggestion I nearly decided to keep to myself. But now I think I will speak after all.”

  His voice had a sudden, utterly chilling edge. “My third suggestion is that you be far more careful in whom you confide. As you say, you know little about me. I could well be an enemy-perhaps an ally of Arunis, or of Lady Macadra and the Raven Society. But you assumed I was a friend, and lavished information on me. You confirmed that the Nilstone and Arunis are aboard this ship-I was, in fact, guessing about both. You, Undrabust, named those who bear the mark of Erithusme: I did not know that you and Hercol were among them. You, Master Felthrup, revealed that you’re a woken animal-to a prince of the Imperium that labels such creatures maukslarets, little demons, and has hunted them to the edge of extinction.”

  Heart racing, Pazel moved in front of Felthrup and Marila. Thasha stepped up beside him. The prince’s smile was impenetrable. Then he turned and looked coldly at Bolutu.

  “And you, brother: you were the worst by far. You barely spoke, but when you did, you revealed your passionate hatred for the Ravens. You let me know that you would consider it a dark day if Bali Adro should ever be ruled by that noble Society, which counts both Arunis and Macadra among its founders. But you have been gone a long time, Bolutu, and that day has come. When I leave here I shall endeavor to forget that you spoke those words. I most earnestly advise you to do the same.”

  Springing the Trap

  1 Modobrin 941

  Later that morning Arunis killed again.

  This time the one who came for the Nilstone was Latzlo, the animal dealer and one of the “illustrious passengers” referred to in Old Gangrune’s report. He had once been illustrious enough, or at least very rich. To this day he still wore the same broad snakeskin belt, although he had lost so much weight that it could have gone twice around his middle, and the black scales were falling out. The journey had not been kind to Latzlo: he had come aboard to woo Pacu Lapadolma, a young woman who despised him, only to watch her marry the Mzithrini prince in Thasha’s stead. After Simja, like many others, he had been kept aboard at spear-point. During the crossing of the Nelluroq he had watched his fortune in exotic animals disappear one by one, sometimes into the galley, and thence the ever-hungrier mouths around Rose’s table. A great number had literally disappeared, during the battle with the rats. The animal-seller had grown steadily more ill-tempered and withdrawn.

  He was not universally despised, however. Mr. Thyne, the other “illustrious passenger” trapped against his will aboard the Great Ship, had kept up a friendship of sorts with Latzlo. When the disaster came the two men, along with a young midshipman by the name of Boone, were playing a fitful game of spenk on the topdeck.

  They were playing for sugar cubes. Latzlo was winning handily, though his face showed no joy. Thyne was down to six cubes when he executed a particularly daring bluff, and won a round.

  “Back in the game, Ernom!” He laughed, slapping Latzlo’s knee.

  “Ouch,” said Latzlo.

  “Never say die!” added Boone, who had a gold earring and a voice that sounded too deep for his skinny frame. “Bet you thought you had him, didn’t you, Mr. Latzlo?”

  Latzlo rubbed his knee, scowling. “I quit,” he said.

  “Oh, come now, that isn’t sporting,” said Thyne. “You’ve still got three-quarters of the cubes.”

  “Do you think it tickles, when you slap a man?”

  Startled, Thyne glanced at Latzlo’s knee. “What, have you got a rash there? I didn’t know.”

  Latzlo rose to his feet. “Keep the sugar,” he said. “I know where there’s something sweeter by half.”

  “Do you now?” said Thyne as Boone began to scoop up Latzlo’s cubes. “Where’s that, I should like to know?”

  “Where it’s always been,” said Latzlo. “Right there in his hand.”

  He turned to portside and walked quickly away, like a man with an urgent errand to perform. Thyne watched him a moment, frowning. Then he noticed Boone’s sugar-grab and forgot Latzlo for a moment. The men scuffled, scattering cards and sugar, until Thyne froze with horror in his eyes.

  “Rin’s Angel, he’s talking about the Shaggat Ness!”

  They bolted after the animal-seller. By now Latzlo was halfway down the No. 4 ladderway. When he heard them coming he too began to run. They caught up with him only as he reached the doors to the manger-unlocked, by the strangest coincidence, for the changing of the Turach guard.

  “Stop him, stop him! He’s going for the blary stone!”

  The replacement guards were due any minute. Of course the men of the earlier shift were still at their posts. Never for one minute would the Shaggat be left unattended.

  “Don’t hurt him!” cried Thyne.

  There were six Turachs in all, wielding maces and clubs. They had waited for such a moment since
the deaths of their comrades, and they formed a deadly line in front of the Shaggat. Latzlo went into a frenzy. He lunged for the Shaggat-and the soldiers slammed him to the ground. He had never been strong, and not even possession by Arunis could give him the strength to overpower half a dozen marines. Still, he writhed and kicked and spat and howled. He bit his tongue; blood oozed from his lips. Then suddenly he began to scream: “Thyne! Thyne! Help! My knee!”

  The soldiers dragged him to a corner. “His blary knee again,” said Boone. “Look, he’s hurting something awful!”

  A Turach poked Latzlo’s knee. The animal-seller howled in agony: “Get it off, Thyne! Cut it off! It’s burning straight through my leg!”

  “That snakeskin belt’s all in knots,” said a Turach.

  “Cut it away, there, something’s wrong!” shouted Thyne. “Hurry, you louts! It’s killing him!”

  “Nothing to cut with,” said the Turach in command. “No blades allowed in the same room with the Nilstone, after-!”

  “I have one! Take mine!” said Boone, unfolding his stockman’s knife.

  Latzlo twisted, screaming louder than ever. “Just cut the mucking trousers!” shouted Thyne.

  Boone leaned in and slashed. The knife was sharp; the cloth parted, and a soldier ripped the trouser leg open to Latzlo’s hip.

  There was no visible wound. But there was something. Words, in fact, scrawled in ink above the knee. Thyne leaned closer, morbidly curious, and read aloud:

  “All…of… you… in… time.”

  Latzlo stopped screaming. The chilling words hung in the air. Then came a dull thump: an object falling to the deck from a height of some six feet. It was the midshipman’s knife.

  Boone himself was nowhere to be seen. Once again, however, there was a small incision in the canvas hiding the Nilstone. And beneath the Shaggat’s upraised arm, several buttons, a gold earring and a few withered ounces of mortal remains.

  “It’s almost as though he planned it that way,” said Neeps.

  “Arunis, you mean?” said Pazel, blowing the sawdust from his sanding-stone.

  Neeps shook his head. “Olik. As though he’d warned us that he was with Arunis, and then had to prove it by nudging him to kill again.”

  They were on a scaffold over the tonnage hatch, along with Thasha, Marila and Hercol. They were sanding a part of the enormous pine trunk that would replace the makeshift foremast. The pine was their one spare mast-trunk, the other having been lost to fire. It was propped at a diagonal, one end jutting out over the quay, the other six decks below, where men were still ripping away the bark with drawknives, tackling knots with chisels and planes. The dlomu had taken charge of the Chathrand’s exterior-their own scaffolding rose on either side of her damaged hull-but they had so far left all other repairs to the crew.

  “He didn’t quite say he was with Arunis,” said Thasha. “I mean, yes, he said Arunis was with the Ravens, and he called them a ‘noble Society.’ But he never claimed to be part of that Society himself. And even when he stopped pretending to like us-stopped saying ‘my friends’ and all that, and told us how reckless we’d been-even then he never praised Arunis. It would have been easy to say ‘the Great Mage’ or ‘my master’ or anything of that kind. But he wasn’t gloating, the way Arunis does himself. He really did seem to be warning us.”

  “To judge by Bolutu’s despair,” said Hercol, “all such warnings must be in vain, if the Ravens have truly seized control of Bali Adro. They were, you recall, the very ‘gang of criminals’ who opposed the old, just regime he so proudly served-the gang who sent Arunis to the North in the first place, to seek the Nilstone.”

  “If Olik is with the Ravens,” said Neeps, “then we can’t trust what he said about the Red Storm, either. He may just have wanted to keep us off-balance, by giving us hope that we might return to our own time one day, or something close to it. So that we’d spend our time pondering that, instead of ways to fight him.”

  Hercol shook his head. “I think he spoke the truth about the Red Storm, at least. Think of Arunis. If we cannot return to the North without leaping centuries into the future, what sense is there in his plans? Either he has always been ignorant of the Storm’s nature, or he is counting on the Shaggat cult remaining powerful enough to trigger open warfare hundreds of years after his first rise to power. Neither is likely. Therefore Arunis, too, must be counting on a weakened Storm.”

  Neeps gave them a stubborn look. “I still say Olik’s lying big about something,” he said. “You know I can tell when people lie.”

  “Oh please,” said Marila.

  “There was something wrong about his whole visit,” said Pazel. “Neeps is right, it doesn’t add up. And every other time a mystery like this has surfaced, we’ve eventually traced it back to Arunis. Credek, we may have just let one of his servants walk around in the stateroom.”

  “Why is Arunis doing all this killing lately, anyway?” said Thasha. “Obviously he’s not afraid anymore of what will happen if he kills the spell-keeper, and the Shaggat comes back to life.”

  “Or rather,” said Hercol, “he is no longer constrained by the fear of chancing upon the spell-keeper, when he kills. And that can only mean that he has found a way to rule certain people out. And that can only be because he has learned who the spell-keeper is. Either that, or he has despaired of the Shaggat altogether, and no longer minds the risk. He had his own copy of the thirteenth Polylex for a short time, before Pazel destroyed it. Perhaps in that time he glimpsed some other method of using the Nilstone. Some more remote chance, but one that he never forgot. Maybe he is groping toward it even now.”

  “You think he’s doing some kind of experiment?” said Neeps. “Sending one person after another to touch the Nilstone, and watching what happens?”

  “But the same thing happens with each of them,” said Pazel. “They shrivel up and die. And anyway he’s not there watching, unless he’s turned into an ant or a flea.”

  “Maybe he’s watching their minds, not their bodies,” said Thasha.

  They worked in silence for several minutes, and then Pazel spoke again. “I’m going to have a fit.”

  All the others stopped work and looked at him. They knew what “a fit” meant in Pazel’s case. Thasha reached out as if to touch his arm, but hesitated. “Soon?” she said.

  Pazel shrugged, applying his sanding-stone with force. “Maybe two days from now. Four at the most. The taste in my mouth started this morning. And the purring sound.”

  “No fear, mate,” said Neeps. “We know what to do. You just run for the stateroom, bury your head in pillows. You won’t hear much in-well, in the admiral’s old room.”

  The last time Pazel’s fits had come, he had fled to the reading cabin-that tiny, beautiful, glassed-in chamber off the stateroom. But the reading cabin was adjacent to Thasha’s own. For days now she and Fulbreech had passed an hour or two each evening in her cabin, laughing and murmuring. They kept their voices low, but it pierced the walls nonetheless. During his fits any voices at all were a torture to Pazel. Thasha and Fulbreech’s would be unbearable.

  “Those signs, the purring and the evil taste,” said Hercol, “mean that your Gift is at work even now?”

  “This very minute,” said Pazel, “for all the good that does us.”

  “And your hearing’s sharper too?” asked Marila.

  “I don’t know yet,” said Pazel. “It used to work only with translated voices-as if my mind was reaching for them, you understand? But the last time, when Chadfallow gave me that drug, I could hear almost everything. Birds, breathing, whispers fifty feet away. That was on Bramian. A lot of things changed on Bramian.”

  Thasha was looking at him, pensive. “That thing you spoke with. The eguar.”

  Pazel’s encounter with the deadly, magic-steeped eguar was one of the worst moments of his life. “What about it?” he said.

  “It mentioned the South, didn’t it?”

  “Yes,” said Pazel. “I told you. It calle
d the South the world my brethren made.”

  Thasha nodded. “Last night I was reading-”

  Pazel bit his lips. With your darling Fulbreech.

  “-and I learned something about eguar. Not under ‘Eguar’ of course; the Polylex doesn’t make anything that easy. But there was a little paragraph under Longevity. It says that eguar live an extraordinarily long time-longer than the oldest trees. Some of the oldest were born before the Dawn War, in the time when demons ruled Alifros. They can spend a year without moving, a decade between meals. And the book said, This near-immortality, along with the terrible black magic concentrated in their blood and bone, has long fascinated the wizarding folk of the South.”

  “Ah! That is telling,” said Hercol. “Bolutu studied magic at Ramachni’s knee, though he says he never succeeded in becoming a mage. And he reacted strongly when you mentioned the eguar, I believe.”

  “Strongly!” said Pazel. “He acted as though I’d met the prince of all devils, and caught the talking fever to boot. And Chadfallow wasn’t much better. He said Ramachni had spoken to him about eguar. He made us bathe in the first river we came to. When we got back to the camp he burned all our clothes, and made Ott’s men scrub the horses down with gloves on.”

  “Well then,” said Neeps, “those Ravens wanted the Nilstone, but they haven’t got it. Maybe they found some other way to make themselves mighty-something involving the eguar.”

  “Gods,” said Pazel, suddenly shaken, “that’s right, I’m sure it is. That shimmer over the armada-that weird, bright haze, you remember? It was how the air looked around the eguar, from a distance, when we first saw it basking in the sun. And the leader of the swimmers who attacked us-there was something of it around him as well. Just a touch. I could barely see it through the telescope.”

  “I will speak to Bolutu about these eguar,” said Hercol. “In any case, Pazel, I am glad the creature never touched you.”

  “It didn’t have to touch me,” said Pazel, flinching at the memory. He began to sand again, quickly, needing to move. Once more Thasha reached for him, and once more she stopped her hand.