The Ruling Sea

by Robert V. S. Redick

  “Will one of you,” said the spymaster, “kindly take Mr. Pathkendle aside?”

  Alyash started to rise, but Drellarek waved him off. “Rest that leg while you can. I’ll get him.”

  “Decent of you,” said Alyash.

  The Turach stood and lumbered toward Pazel. He did not bother to draw a blade. When he saw Pazel’s fighting stance, he pointed and grinned. “Look at this one, Master Ott. I’m done for!”

  Pazel blocked his first blow with an upraised arm, but the strength behind the Turach’s fist was crushing. The second blow found his stomach; the third, to the back of his head, came close to knocking him out. As Ott sidled toward the doctor, turning the knife casually in his hand, Drellarek grabbed Pazel by the shirt and lifted him clear of the ground. Pazel lashed out with his legs and caught the man in the stomach. Drellarek winced and struck him again.

  Chadfallow was backing away from Ott, sword up, body rigid, boots shuffling awkward on the stones. His face was frozen, like an actor’s mask: the kind depicting some elemental sin, like folly or despair. Ott, however, looked like a man who had shed every worry. He was by far the older, but as he drove Chadfallow before him he was returned astonishingly to his youth. Relaxed and graceful, he took a dancing side-step, and lunged.

  Something terrible and bloody occurred, but it was not what anyone foresaw. Drellarek, Ott and Chadfallow simply disappeared. Where the party had stood an instant before there was only darkness and a blast of heat. Pazel felt himself thrown backward with terrible force. When he landed his upper body was dangling over the rimless edge of the wall, and a screaming horse lay sprawled across his legs. The animal surged to its feet, and Pazel, blind with pain and sliding toward death, flailed out with his hands and caught a stirrup. The horse spun on its hindquarters, eyes mad with terror, wrenching him back from the precipice even as the animal’s own forefeet slipped over the edge. Pazel could only let go the stirrup as the horse crashed into the trees below. Then he felt heat on the back of his neck, and turned.

  The eguar stood over him. Its white-hot eyes blazed in the dark crocodilian head. Pazel clawed at his throat, choking, and his eyes streamed with tears. He was inside its cocoon of vapors, and the smell was like acid thrown on hot coals; he was amazed not to have died already.

  But Drellarek was dead. The Turach’s body dangled from the creature’s mouth, and it was shriveling like an old squash roasted over a flame. The saliva of the eguar sizzled on Drellarek’s skin, and around its teeth the man’s very armor was in flames. Then the creature raised its head skyward and swallowed the Turach with three snaps of its jaws.

  Pazel felt his gorge rise. He could not turn his back on the eguar, so he dragged himself away with his arms, expecting death, that death, with every scraping inch. He saw Swift and Saroo on the wall beyond the creature, running for the fortress roof. Then he looked down. Ott and Chadfallow lay motionless beneath the eguar’s feet.

  Oh no. Ignus.

  Pazel had crawled free of the vapors and lay retching on his side. The eguar’s eyes were still fixed on him, burning his mind even as the vapors had burned his lungs. And then the creature spoke.

  This time Pazel was expecting the hurricane—and the eguar, perhaps, was aware of Pazel’s limits. He was not faced with the same flood of meaning as before, and yet it still seemed that the eguar put whole speeches into single words, and to hear them gave Pazel the grotesque sensation of gulping a meal in large, unmasticated chunks.

  I, Ma’tathgryl-eguar-child-of-the-South nameless-desireless-pitiless-all-these-are-prisons forward-and-backward perceive their plan, their venom, their cleverness-madness-debauchery-faith, perceive you, lidless-unarmored-unskinned child-man, mindthrown open, with them, apart.

  That was one word, one maddeningly complicated growl. Reeling from it, Pazel managed to climb to his feet and back a few more steps away. He knew his Gift would tell him how to answer, and struggled desperately against the urge to try. Hearing the eguar’s language with human ears was bad enough; thinking in it might drive him mad.

  He tried something far simpler: he used the language of the Leopard People. “Why did you help me?” he said.

  Shackles of certainty in cage of desire in dead spindrift isle of self.

  Pazel understood. He must not assume the eguar meant him well. And as if to underscore the point the creature opened its mouth wide and breathed in his direction, and Pazel felt the vapor cloud billow over him again, but now mixed with some new bile or potion from the gullet of the beast. The vapor weakened him, and his knees gave out. He fell forward, staring up at the creature, trapped by those white-hot eyes. Then the eguar spoke again, and Pazel began to scream as never before in his life.

  He was not in pain, but he was horribly violated. The eguar had peeled open his mind like an orange, and was examining all it contained. Pazel did not just feel naked; he felt as though someone had cut away his skin, and shone a bright light on his muscles and veins, and told him to dance.

  But he would not dance (the eguar knew this, knew it before Pazel did, knew every twitch and motive of his soul). The beast was looking for something very specific, and Pazel somehow knew he must not give it up. His rage at the intrusion was searing; he would have tried to kill any human who invaded him in this way, he was thinking like a lunatic, like an assassin, like Ott.

  The eguar might have been amused. With another battering-ram of a word it told Pazel that it had already looked into Sandor Ott’s mind, and that Pazel’s rage bore little resemblance to the spymaster’s. Then he offered to show the killer’s mind to Pazel. And before Pazel could refuse the eguar gave him a foretaste.

  Like floodwater released from a dam, Sandor Ott’s life history washed over him. Pazel could barely stand what he saw. Dark infant years in a slum; women’s hands feeding, then gouging him, twisting his limbs; other children screaming, horrible men always enraged. Slammed doors, broken windows, a barnyard stench in the crowded bedrooms, the dead wrapped in threadbare sheets. Alleys full of muttering men, victims of the talking fever; they seized at his ankles and he barely escaped. Epidemic, someone said. A cart heaped with paupers fleeing the city by night.

  Then exile, a mud-wattle village on the side of a gritty, treeless hill. Threats from the cattlemen and gentry, the owners of that useless knob. Torched roofs, tortured parents, an elder staked and writhing on the ground. More years of road-wandering, sores on his shoeless feet, a beggar’s bowl tied to a string at his waist. Cold riverbanks, hard street corners, kicks. The taste of spoiled meat, fermented cabbage, potato skins scraped from the cobbles with a knife.

  Pazel was tearing at his own face with his fingernails. “Make it stop! Make it stop!” he begged. The memories had spanned less than Ott’s first decade of life.

  The eguar took its claw from Ott’s chest, and the flood ceased instantly. The spymaster began to moan and stir. The creature prepared once more to delve into Pazel’s mind. And all at once Pazel knew what it wanted, and knew the weapon he could use against the thing before him. The Master-Words.

  He had two of them left, Ramachni’s gifts, a word to tame fire and a word that would “blind to give new sight.” He had no idea what the latter would do, but he knew that the Fire-Word might save him, might even destroy this beast and its blazing power.

  No sooner had he formed the thought than the eguar knew it too. With the speed of a rattlesnake it coiled its body and leaped. A great wind threw Pazel flat. Then the eguar and its cloud of dark vapors were gone, and the weakness in his limbs disappeared.

  He got to his hands and knees. The wall was slick with silvery ooze. Ott and Chadfallow lay moaning a few yards away. Pazel crawled toward the doctor and shook him. Chadfallow’s eyes were open but did not seem to see.

  “Wake up,” said Pazel, his voice raw and burned.

  From the jungle on the wall’s north side came a loud crack. Pazel turned, punch-drunk. Some hundred yards away, great trees were shuddering and bending. Then he saw the eguar slide its bulk o
nto a huge limb. Once more the white eyes gleamed—but this time Pazel looked away before it was too late.

  “Child of Ormael,” said the eguar.

  “Damn you to the Pits!” cried Pazel, weeping with rage. “You could speak like a human all this time?”

  “The Pits have no place for me,” said the eguar. “Listen, Smythídor: I know where you are bound, and what awaits you there, and what you will need to face it.”

  Pazel covered his ears. He would not speak with the creature, not when it had just eaten—

  “Your enemy,” said the eguar, as if Pazel had spoken aloud. “A man hoping for the chance to kill you. But I do not think you should die yet, not while the Stone moves over the waters. Not while a war is struggling to be hatched—kicking, writhing in blood and fire from its shell. Not before you see the wondrous South, the world my brethren made. Rejoice, human, rejoice in your skinlessness, your immolation, the nakedness of nerves. Rejoice above all in your fellowship, ere you turn and find it a memory, a dry shell without warmth. But you must never again refuse knowledge, Smythídor. I would have shown you the doctor’s mind next.”

  “I don’t want to see—and what I saw of Ott’s mind was hideous. Stay away, stay away, or I swear I’ll use that word.” He shook Chadfallow again. “Wake up, damn you, I need your help.”

  Then the eguar hissed a final word in its own language, making Pazel wince—although it was, compared with earlier utterances, remarkably brief:

  Acceptance is agony denial is death.

  With that the creature departed, thrashing and tearing through the trees. Pazel got shakily to his feet and put his hands over his ears. He could see Alyash running toward them along the wall. When he turned around Chadfallow was sitting up, filthy with slime and blood. His nose was bent sharply to the right.

  “Get up,” said Pazel, smoldering. “What happens next is your problem.”

  “I have no idea what you’re talking about,” said Chadfallow.

  Pazel looked the doctor in the eye, and waited. One breath, two. And then he dropped to a crouch and squeezed his eyes shut as the mind-fit erupted in his skull.

  26

  The Taste of Treason

  23 Freala 941

  That evening on the Chathrand, Pazel’s friends found it hard to keep up their spirits. The landing party had been two days ashore. Hercól remained locked in the brig; Thasha, Neeps and Marila were hardly less prisoners themselves, albeit in grander quarters. Mr. Uskins had painted a red line on the deck along the base of Ramachni’s magic wall, and placed four soldiers there with orders to let no one in or out without his permission. Each time Thasha appeared in the doorway, they glared. They were the proudest soldiers in Alifros, and they’d bungled orders to arrest a sixteen-year-old girl.

  Mr. Fiffengurt came to the stateroom at eight bells, carrying a jug of drinking water and a plate of Mr. Teggatz’s pigsfoot-and-barley casserole. He also bore the dismal news that the skiff had not returned from Bramian, and presumably would not do so before morning.

  The quartermaster did not linger, for the ship was in an uproar of last-minute preparations for the voyage out. “Don’t worry about Pathkendle,” he said as he turned to go. “The lad’s no use to them dead. They may not like him, but they’ll keep him safe.”

  “It’s not what they’ll do that worries me,” said Neeps. “Pazel can get in trouble all by himself.”

  Neeps wanted to pounce on the casserole, but Thasha insisted on a fighting-class first, despite Hercól’s absence.

  “Forget your stomach for once,” she said, cutting off his objections before they began, “and come at me hard, because if I don’t think you’re trying to kill me I’m blary well going to show you how it’s done.”

  Neeps hesitated, fuming. He wolfed one bite of the casserole, slammed down his fork and retreated to the washroom to change into his fighting-rags. Thasha whistled her dogs into her own cabin and changed as well, strapping the wooden shield to her arm and tying a leather neck-guard in place.

  They unscrewed the furniture and slid it against the walls, and rolled up the bearskin rug. While Marila sat reading quietly in a corner, and Felthrup balanced on the back of her chair, muttering and swaying with exhaustion, Thasha and Neeps battled all around the stateroom with the balsa swords.

  For once Neeps rose to her challenge. He had long passed the stage of angry charges, having tired of finding himself flat on the ground or symbolically beheaded. Thasha would not have told him (for Neeps’ pride needed no encouragement) but she was astonished at his progress. He was the only young person she had ever known more hotheaded than herself, and yet here he was, biding his time, matching his movements to hers—fighting with his mind. And his form when attacking was better too: his jerky tarboy strength was mellowing into something more fluid, more likely to keep him alive.

  It was almost a shame to have to keep winning. Still, Thasha could not approach combat with any outlook but victory: the sixth apothegm reminded students that practice is never a game, but the prelude to a moment when a life may end.

  “Surprise me,” she taunted him, darting from one side of a stanchion to another, bruising his left side and then his right, turning him at bay or forcing a retreat. “Do something I haven’t seen you do fifty times. Tired, are you? That’s when you die, you Sollochi runt. Come at me!”

  Neeps did not even blink. He was shutting out her insults, refusing to be drawn. To Thasha this seemed almost a miracle.

  At last she raised her hand and stopped him. Neeps dropped his wooden sword and bent over, gasping, his face like a bruised tomato. He fumbled at the buckle on his shield. “You did well,” Thasha conceded, stepping toward him. “What made the difference, this time?”

  “I just—”

  He slashed at her with the edge of his shield, catching her squarely in the gut.

  “—pretended—”

  He had her down, pulled her against him, caught her neck in the crook of his arm.

  “—that you were Raffa, Raffa—”

  He spat the name, and tightened his grip uncomfortably. Thasha was furious—surprise me did not mean attack when the drill is over—and resolved to teach him a lesson. But when she thrust her elbow hard into his side, none too gently, his response was not at all what she expected. Instead of doubling over as she had done upon his shield, Neeps hurled them both backward onto the floor with amazing violence, and at the same time tightened his grip on her neck even further. Much further: Thasha remembered the bite of her necklace: the youth’s arm was crushing her windpipe with the same deadly force. She clawed at him. She felt him buck and twist, slamming her face against the wooden floor, putting the weight of his chest against her temple. Her dogs were howling behind the cabin door; Marila was screaming, “Stop it! Stop it!” and then came an explosion of glass and water. But Neeps did not stop, and Thasha felt her vision dim. She had a vague impression of his sweaty, wild-eyed face above her own, still mouthing the name.

  And then, thank all the gods, he let her go—and began to scream himself. Thasha fell on her side and saw Neeps throwing himself from side to side. Felthrup’s teeth were locked on his ear.

  “Let go! Let go! Damn you, Felthrup, you’re out of your mind!”

  “He’s not!” shouted Marila from the far side of the room.

  Thasha drew a strangled breath, and Neeps whirled. A look of indescribable horror filled his eyes. “Aya Rin,” he whispered. “Thasha, Thasha. What’ve I done?”

  Ten minutes later the four of them—Thasha, Marila, Neeps and Felthrup—were all collapsed together on the divan. Thasha was massaging her neck, while Felthrup teased bits of glass (shards of the water jug Marila had hurled at Neeps) from his fur and the fabric of her shirt. Marila, leaning back against Thasha’s knees, was holding one of the Great Peace dinner napkins against Neeps’ bloody ear. Neeps himself sat curled in a ball, staring at nothing. When the lamp sputtered out they were glad of it; none of them could quite stand to look the others in the face.<
br />
  “I almost let the dogs out,” said Marila.

  “Oh gods,” said Thasha with a violent shudder. “He would have died. I’d lost my voice, Marila, I couldn’t have called them off. They’d have torn him to pieces.”

  “That occurred to me,” said Marila, “when I heard the door starting to splinter.”

  “One of you was meant to die, I think,” said Felthrup.

  “Neeps,” said Thasha, touching him with her foot. “It wasn’t you.”

  “Yes it was,” said Neeps quietly. “That’s just it. The … madness. It came from inside me.”

  “That still doesn’t make it your fault,” said Marila.

  “Then I’d like to know whose fault it is,” said Neeps.

  “Now you are asking the right question,” said Felthrup.

  “You were magicked, somehow,” said Marila, dabbing at his ear. “I saw the change halfway through the practice session. Your eyes went all funny. I thought you’d had too many whacks on the head.”

  “Thasha—” Neeps began.

  Thasha squirmed abruptly; the divan shuddered and groaned. “This blary thing’s too small,” she said. “Unless anyone wants dinner I suggest we all go to sleep.”

  No one moved. “I don’t want to sleep,” said Felthrup.

  “You’ve been up for days,” said Thasha.

  “Neeps,” said Marila. “You kept saying Raffa, Raffa. What was all that about? Raffa who?”

  Neeps took the napkin from her hand and turned to face the window. After a long silence he said, “Undrabust.”

  “Ah,” said Thasha.

  Neeps’ voice was hollow. “I told Pazel a bit, once. How I jumped my ship when it landed at Sollochstol, and ran home to my village. And how the Arqualis came after me, and caught me the same afternoon. But that’s not … the worst part.”

  He looked at them, angry and beseeching. “My older brother, Raffa, asked ’em how much it would cost for them to let me go. While they were still lounging around the village, drinking. Three pounds of pearls, they said. And Raffa haggled. Right there in front of me, wheedling like, until finally they caved in. ‘Two pounds, since he’s so small, and you’re such a nuisance.’ Raffa told ’em he’d see what he could find. The Arqualis said they’d only wait an hour. But in fact they waited all afternoon. They wanted those pearls more than they wanted me.