The Ruling Sea

by Robert V. S. Redick

  “Do not wait!” Isiq shouted, waving him on. “All speed, Pathkendle! Protect her!”

  Affection as well as grief in the old warrior’s voice. Pazel raised a hand to him—he meant it as a promise, though it looked like a farewell—and staggered on.

  When he was six years old, Pazel’s mother disappeared. It was his first taste of terror, of the possibility of wounding loss, and he never forgot it, although his mother returned in just a week.

  A sentry on the city wall had watched her departure—men were always watching Suthinia Pathkendle—all the way to Black Stag Road, where she turned east toward the valley of the Cinderling. The neighbors relayed this news to Captain Gregory Pathkendle with their usual blend of sympathy and scorn. The Cinderling was an old battlefield, left for dead after the Second Sea War, and still a place of bandits and beggars and unmarked graves. The neighbors had sighed and clicked their tongues. Only Suthinia, they said.

  Pazel’s sister had taken the news with a shrug and a laugh; she was determined not to care. Captain Gregory had just rolled his eyes. “She’ll be back,” he said. “This isn’t the first time, but we can hope it’s the last.” Pazel had waited for his mother in silence, too frightened for tears.

  As it happened Gregory was right on both counts. Suthinia came back, sunburned and road-filthy but otherwise unharmed. Nor did she ever vanish again—until the Arquali invasion, when every beautiful woman in Ormael vanished, mostly into Imperial hands. No, Suthinia stayed put, because a few months after that mysterious week Gregory himself sailed out of Ormaelport, never to return. To make matters worse, Captain Gregory’s sister, who had helped out often with the children, picked that spring to elope to Étrej with a fallen monk. Suthinia, never the most attentive mother, was suddenly on her own.

  Pazel liked to think he’d not added to her worries. His father had declared him bright. Dr. Chadfallow, their illustrious family friend, had challenged him to become trilingual before his ninth birthday, and he was well on his way. Pazel wanted to sail like Gregory, but once he opened the grammar books Ignus provided, he somehow had a hard time putting them down.

  Neda was eleven and at war with everything. She hated her father for abandoning them, Suthinia for giving him reasons to, Chadfallow for not talking him out of it and Pazel for not hating the others with her own intensity. To top it all, her mother and Chadfallow were becoming close. This, she told a mystified Pazel, was a betrayal of the father who had betrayed them.

  Pazel just wished everyone would shut up. He loved them, despite a growing fear that they were all insane. Or rather all but Chadfallow—he was a gift from the Good Lord Rin. He had traveled the world; he could speak of medicine and history, wars and animals and earthquakes and ghosts. And in those days he still laughed, once in a long while, and the sound always surprised Pazel with its unguarded joy.

  Years went by, and their mother’s peculiarities deepened. She locked herself away with books, scaled the roof in thunderstorms, gave Pazel syrups designed to loosen his bowels and then studied the results with a long-handled spoon.

  Then came the day of the custard apples. From dawn to dusk, Suthinia had forced a gruel made of the strange fruit on her children, although one sip told them that the drink was dangerous. In fact it proved both poisonous and enchanted. After a monthlong coma, Pazel had awoken with his Gift, Neda with her anger at Suthinia redoubled.

  Their mother had become a witch. Or stopped hiding the fact. Either way it made her odder and more dangerous. She stopped bathing, and neglected to cook. When Neda moved out it took Suthinia three days to notice that she was gone.

  Later that year Mzithrini warships had begun raiding the Chereste coast. The mayor of Ormael turned to Chadfallow, Arqual’s Special Envoy, and begged for Imperial protection. Pazel learned another reason to adore Chadfallow: he was the Man with the Emperor’s Ear.

  One day Captain Gregory’s ship was spotted near Ormael, with Gregory himself at her wheel: but now the ship was flying the colors of the Mzithrin. Gregory was at once renamed Pathkendle the Traitor, and Pazel’s family shared in his disgrace. The neighbors looked through them; Pazel’s friends discovered that they had never really liked him at all. Neda, who had taken work on a goat farm, paid them brief, resentful visits, leaving gifts of sour cheese, but she never again spent a night under Suthinia’s roof.

  Only Chadfallow was unchanged. He still came to dinner—brought dinner, usually, for Suthinia was all but destitute—and drilled Pazel in Arquali for an hour. He was the best thing that could have happened to a traitor’s son. Until he became the worst.

  The night before the invasion—about which Chadfallow had breathed not a word—Pazel had found himself seated beside the doctor, under Neda’s orange tree, assembling a kite. Pazel could not recall much of what they talked about (his mind was on the doctor’s present more than his words), but the last part of the conversation he would never forget.

  “Ignus, where did my mother go? That time she ran away.”

  “You should ask her, my boy.”

  Pazel said nothing; they both knew he had asked a thousand times.

  “Well,” said the doctor reluctantly, “let us say that she went to be with her own people awhile.”

  “My father never came back. What if she hadn’t either?”

  “She came back. You’re her son and she loves you.”

  “What if she hadn’t?”

  Pazel’s question was a plea. As if he could already sense them, somehow: the fire and the death shrieks, the enslavements, the notion of rape, the battle-axe history was about to take to his world.

  Chadfallow looked at him squarely. Lowering his voice, he said, “If she had not returned I would have taken you to Etherhorde, and made a proper Arquali of you, and sent you to a proper school. One of the three High Academies, to be sure. And when you graduated, you would not have received a pat on the head, but a line of your own in the Endless Scroll, which the Young Scholars of the Imperium have signed for eight centuries. And you should have had friends who loved you for your cleverness instead of being jealous of it. And though you may not believe me, in a few years you would have forgotten these dullards and jackanapes, and been at home as never before.”

  Pazel was dumbstruck. He couldn’t possibly deserve all that. Chadfallow looked at him, almost smirking—until Suthinia appeared from nowhere, pushed the doctor back in his chair, and smacked him hard.

  “You’ll take him when they bury me, Ignus,” she said. Then she grabbed Pazel by the arm and marched him into the house.

  “Mother, Mother,” Pazel said as they rushed up the stairs. “He meant if I was alone, if something happened to you. Let go. You don’t understand.”

  “I understand more than you think,” she snapped.

  She was hurting his arm. “You’re an animal,” he shouted, inspired. “I wish you had stayed away. I want to go with him to Etherhorde.”

  She dragged him into the washroom, thrust him before the mirror. “Look at your skin. In Etherhorde they’d take you for a tarboy, or a slave.”

  He bellowed right back at her: “I’m not the color of Ormalis either!” Which was true, if just barely: he had a bit too much caramel in his complexion, and his hair was too brown.

  Suthinia shrugged. “You’re close enough.”

  “I look like you,” he sobbed. At that moment it was the worst insult that occurred to him. His mother began to laugh, which enraged him all the more. “Etherhorde’s a proper city,” he shouted. “Ignus belongs there, and so could I, if you’d just leave me alone.”

  She would leave him the very next day, and possibly forever, but at that moment his words had a curious effect. Her laughter and her fury vanished, and she looked at him with a kind of sad wonder, as if she had only just understood what they were talking about.

  “You couldn’t belong there,” she said. “We will never belong among those who belong. The best thing to do is to cobble together some tribe of outcasts, when you’re old enough to find t
hem.”

  “But Ignus—”

  “Ignus is a dreamer. He’s thinking of some other boy, some life that might have been, if the world were very different. I don’t care if you believe what I say. Just remember it, love, and decide for yourself who told the truth.”

  Pazel stumbled, bashing Thasha with his shins. Her body was growing heavy. Fiffengurt was hobbling, favoring a knee.

  “This blary guard’s right on top of us,” he said in a low voice, glancing nervously at Pazel. “You’ll never be able to—you know.”

  “Sure he will,” said Neeps. “You didn’t see us in the Crab Fens, with the Volpeks behind us. My mate here can run like a whiplash hound.”

  Pazel smiled grimly. He had a stitch in his side. “I’ll lose them, don’t worry,” he said.

  “They may not even try to stop you,” said Hercól. But his voice was reluctant, as though something else entirely was worrying his thoughts.

  Fiffengurt took no notice. “I’ll miss you, Pathkendle,” he said gruffly, “damned troublemaker though you are.”

  Pazel dropped his eyes. He would miss them too. For somewhere in the heart of the city he was going to slip away. He had to do it; even Hercól had agreed. There was a fight to be waged on the Chathrand, but there was another, just as vital, ashore: the fight to expose the conspiracy. No better chance would come than this one, with delegations from every land packed into Simjalla. And no better person existed for the job than Pazel. He had learned something from his Gift: when you spoke to people in their own language, they tended to listen. Pazel would speak the truth to everyone he met—servants, sailors, kings—until it was the talk of Simja, and no power on earth could suppress it.

  “You won’t be missing him long,” said Neeps vehemently. “Just watch, he’ll be aboard the Chathrand by nightfall.”

  No one said anything to that. There was no telling what would become of Pazel, once he started speaking the truth. It was more likely that sunset would find him in some kitchen, cowering under the sink, or at the bottom of a laundry hamper, or in a temple belfry, hiding from the Secret Fist. And then only if he managed to win someone’s trust. If he sounded not just clever, but sane.

  They had carried Thasha as far as the stormbreak pines when the Fulbreech youth reappeared. The palace guard warded him off at spear-point, until Hercól told them to let him approach.

  “The lady Thasha is dead,” he said to Fulbreech. “Send a carriage for her father—that is him on the road behind us—and find us at the docks, straightaway. You and I must speak again, Fulbreech.”

  The youth stared at Thasha, wide-eyed. “I shall fetch that carriage,” he said at last, and dashed ahead of them toward the city.

  Pazel was burning to ask Hercól about Fulbreech. Who was he, why did he keep popping up? But the Tholjassan’s face made it plain that he would breathe no word of explanation, at least not here in the presence of the guard.

  Some minutes later they reached the city gate. Poor folk were busy here, filling sacks with isporelli petals to render into perfume. Thasha’s body gave them a terrible shock. Old monks, too feeble for the march to the shrine, burst into shouts of Aya Rin! Children screamed; old women raised their arms to heaven and wept.

  Straight through Simjalla they ran, a morbid reversal of the procession, and with every block the wails grew louder. Pazel was tensed, now, waiting for his chance to break away. But the chance did not come. The captain of the guard was following the king’s instructions to the letter: his men ran ahead and behind the foursome and let no one approach. Pazel glanced beseechingly at Neeps, who frowned and shook his head.

  As they neared the port the streets were lined with men and women, moaning in disbelief, flags of Arqual and the Mzithrin slipping forgotten from their hands. Pazel was growing desperate. Once they put him in a boat it would be too late.

  They turned another corner. At the end of the block, Pazel could see masts and rigging and wooden hulls crowding the quay. “Listen,” he whispered urgently to the others, “I’m going, it’s time.”

  “Pazel, no!” hissed Neeps. “Everybody and his brother’s watching us!”

  “So what? It’s Thasha they’re worried about.”

  “This mob’s crazy with grief,” said Fiffengurt. “You run off now and someone’s likely to chase you down and break your teeth with a brick.”

  “They don’t care about me,” Pazel insisted. “I’m just a tarboy who happened to know her.”

  Hercól too shook his head. “You cannot go now, lad. We must find another way.”

  Pazel looked from friend to friend. They were protecting him, even at the cost of disaster. Just as old Isiq would have done, if they’d tried to reason with him, explain the path Thasha had chosen.

  Pazel did not look at her, fearing he would choke if he saw her pale, cold face. How had her last minutes been with Isiq? You knew, didn’t you, Thasha? A time comes when you just stop arguing.

  Seconds later he was leaping and shoving his way through startled onlookers, making for a side street, running for all he was worth. The other three cried out, but they were still supporting Thasha and could not let her fall. Members of the guard hooted and jeered—“Run, you bastard! Fair-weather friend!”—but as he’d expected, none gave chase. The side street had been roped off during the procession, and it was not hard to see why. It was narrow and steep, twisting up a hill by way of many crumbling staircases. After the first bend he saw only a handful of people; after the second, none at all. Still he kept running, as though speed were the only way to make sure he went through with the plan. He thought: Lose yourself. That life’s finished. A new one has to begin. True, Ramachni had said that their greatest strength lay in the family they’d built on the voyage to Simja. But families splintered, and Ramachni was gone—he had been, Pazel suddenly reflected, the very first one to leave.

  He turned left into an even narrower street. Here at last he allowed himself to catch his breath. He was well away from the port and the mob of mourners. It was time to think about where he should be going.

  Unconsciously he put his hand in his pocket. Something sheer and light met his fingers, and he drew it out. It was the Blessing-Band, the blue silk ribbon from Thasha’s Lorg Academy. YE DEPART FOR A WORLD UNKNOWN, AND LOVE ALONE SHALL KEEP THEE. How had it gotten there? He could distinctly remember dropping it in the shrine.

  Pazel looked down the street. Decrepit balconies, bright streamers of hanging laundry. Then he lowered his eyes and saw that someone had entered the street from the far end. It was a rider, seated on one of Simja’s giant messenger birds. He stopped the bird with a sharp tug on its wing harness some thirty feet from Pazel, and stared openly at the boy.

  A soft sound behind him. Pazel whirled and saw another man, afoot, leaning in a doorway that had been empty a moment before. He was dressed in humble Simjan work clothes, a street-sweeper or a mason perhaps. But he looked at Pazel with the same intensity as the rider.

  Pazel felt the danger in them at once. Impulsively he began to walk down the alley toward the rider, as though merely continuing on his way. The bird pranced and croaked, and then the rider moved into his path. He held up his hand for Pazel to stop.

  “The grain in the fields is yellow, but?” he said.

  “I b-beg your—?”

  “That is the wrong answer.”

  The man spurred his mount toward Pazel, and the bird lowered its head and struck him a blow like a blunt axe to the chest. Pazel staggered, his breath knocked out of him. The man in work clothes was strolling toward him, grinning. The rider turned the messenger bird again, and Pazel saw a long steel nail protruding from the toe of his boot. Pazel leaped sidelong as the man lashed out. The nail missed by inches. Cursing, the man began to dismount.

  Then his head shot up. Pazel turned and saw Hercól leap into the air like a dancer, feint with his right leg, and deliver a lightning strike with the left that felled the man in work clothes like a puppet whose strings have snapped.

 
The moment he touched the ground Hercól was sprinting for Pazel. The rider hauled his bird about, kicking savagely with his heels. With a deep croak the bird bore him away.

  Hercól seized Pazel by the chin. “All right?” he said.

  “I think so. Ouch!” He put a hand to his chest.

  “You’ll be sore for a fortnight, if it was that fenneg bird that struck you.” He shook his head. “Why didn’t you listen, Pazel? I told you not to go through with it.”

  “I thought you were just trying to protect me,” said Pazel.

  “So I was! I saw the Secret Fist watching us from every third corner the moment we entered the gates. Come quickly! When that rider sounds the alarm they’ll fall on us in force.”

  They ran back the way Pazel had come. The man Hercól had kicked lay still, his neck twisted at an unnatural angle. Pazel shut his eyes a moment, but he never forgot the man’s look of shock, the gape of the bloodied mouth, the wide-open eyes. Like the faces of so many dead, he would glimpse it in dreams for years to come.

  When they reached the port they had to fight their way through the crowd. Even in the short time he had been gone it had swollen, and its anxiety had increased. Some were literally weeping with fear. There would be war, another eternity of war; how had they ever let themselves hope it could end? Others vented their anguish on Pazel: “Caught the little deserter! Good work! Always whip a ship-jumper, I say!”

  Hercól led him to a fishing pier, at the foot of which King Oshiram’s men were holding back the crowd. They were let through, and Pazel saw Fiffengurt and Neeps standing beside Thasha’s body at the end of the pier. Both were looking in the direction of the Chathrand, which loomed like a sea fortress three miles offshore.

  Their faces lit up at the sight of Pazel. “Welcome back, fool,” said Neeps.

  Pazel didn’t argue the point. “What are we going to do now?” he said.

  “First, get Thasha back to the Chathrand,” said Hercól. “When that is done, we shall seek another way to reveal Arqual’s plot to the world. A way that doesn’t require tarboys to play cat and mouse with assassins.”