The Ruling Sea

by Robert V. S. Redick

  “Trouble was, so did Raffa. He was the best pearl-diver in the village. He had boxes of ’em hidden in the smokehouse. He was saving up for a ticket to Opalt. A cousin had come back from there years before and told Raffa our palm roof was embarrassing. He said Sollochis lived like animals. That Ballytween City was the place for a man to get ahead.”

  Neeps fell silent. Thasha wanted to say something, but was afraid to; all at once she felt like a fraud. She’d grown up in a mansion on Maj Hill, in the heart of the world’s greatest city. She remembered Syrarys combing her hair, telling her that they lived in the only place in Alifros that nobody could look down on. Why don’t they hate me? she thought. Why doesn’t Pazel hate me?

  “Raffa never came back that day,” said Neeps. “I guess the price was too high.”

  Marila silently touched his arm. They stayed there, motionless, listening to the thumping and bellowing of men on other decks. Fiffengurt had said the work might go on all night, but to Thasha the noise was soothing; the warm stateroom felt like the center of a hive. As she closed her eyes she heard a wet sound that was either kissing or one of her dogs flopping down with a contented slobber. Then she realized Marila had her arms around Neeps. That blary vixen, she thought, and fell asleep.

  Felthrup slunk away from the divan when Neeps and Marila began to kiss. He was not quite clear why humans did such things—the written accounts varied wildly—but he knew they did not much care to be watched in the act. He crept over to Suzyt, who lay beside the washroom door.

  “I won’t go to sleep,” he told her.

  The mastiff’s tongue enveloped him like a warm, wet towel. Felthrup curled tight against her chest, looking out at the darkened stateroom. He had fought to remember the dreams until his brain ached, and had come up with almost nothing: a pair of glasses, a taste of candy and the words peppermint oil. He was a nervous idiot. What could be so terrible about dreams he did not even remember? There were a million rats in Alifros who would kill for the kind of safety he enjoyed.

  “Master Stargraven,” said a gently mocking voice.

  Felthrup gave a start. The dog slept on beside him, but how she had shrunk! No, she was the same—but he had done it, he had fallen asleep at last, and now everyone would pay for his weakness.

  He stood up and adjusted his spectacles.

  The three youths slept like the dead. He walked to the divan and looked down at them. So peaceful: Neeps’ head lay pillowed on Marila’s lap. He saw the damage his own teeth had done to the boy’s ear, and winced. But he had saved Thasha’s life.

  Surely it was Arunis who had called his name? There was no sign of anyone else in the room, but that would not keep him safe for long. In every dream he felt a compulsion to walk, to leave the shelter of the stateroom and wander, until the sorcerer found him and the torture began.

  Tonight was no exception: his feet were already guiding him toward the stateroom door. Twice he swerved and teetered clown-like back into the center of the room. But he could not hold still. I will betray them again. Every time it grows worse. I will be the reason they perish, the reason Arunis comes to rule the world.

  Suddenly he knew what to do. He could end the dreams as quickly as they began. But how? A sword? A mouthful of broken glass? No, no—that was the sort of thing Arunis did to him anyway. He would be swifter. He looked at the gallery windows, gave a pitiful squeal, and ran straight for them.

  He never arrived. Between one footfall and the next the ship spun about like a carousel, and instead of crashing through the window he found himself throwing open the stateroom door.

  Lamplight: the Turach soldiers were still at their post. Behind them, and as invisible to humans as Felthrup himself was during their dream-walks, stood Arunis. The mage’s eyes fixed him like spear-points. He crooked a finger.

  Get out here, you feeble, vacillating, sewer-pipe sniveler.

  The call was terribly powerful, but Felthrup, with a last mind-cracking effort, slammed the stateroom door and leaned against it. Help, he thought, help. This time I really will go mad.

  Then, very faintly, he heard the voice again. The first voice, the one by which he had woken into the dream. It was not the sorcerer’s. It was coming from Admiral Isiq’s sleeping cabin.

  Felthrup broke away from the door and ran toward the bedchamber, crashing against a shifted chair. Anything was better than what awaited him in the passage. He kicked the bearskin rug away from the door, reached for the knob—and froze. Surely this was another trick? What if Arunis had somehow penetrated the magic wall this far? What if the very act of opening the door was all he needed to breach their last defense? Felthrup cringed. He suddenly felt very ratlike indeed.

  “Turn the knob,” said the voice, almost too softly to be heard.

  Felthrup turned the knob, half expecting some horror to burst from the chamber, savage his sleeping friends, end their months of struggle in a heartbeat. Nothing of the kind occurred: the room held only dust, and the furniture Isiq had left behind. A large bed, two chests of drawers, Syrarys’ jewelry table, a dressing mirror, a mannequin draped in an elaborate gown: what the vicious woman had planned to wear on Simja, perhaps.

  “Over here, lad, hurry now.”

  The voice was louder, and suddenly Felthrup knew it, and gave a squeal of joy. He dashed into the room, afraid now only of waking, and cried, “Where are you, where are you?”

  “The mirror, Felthrup. Dust it off.”

  Felthrup looked at the mirror. It was tilted toward the ceiling, and the dust lay like a gray pelt upon the glass. He put his silk sleeve against the mirror and swept it clean.

  Within the mirror there was no reflection. Instead he found himself looking into a dark and cluttered chamber of stone. He had an impression of clocks and telescopes, astrolabes and smoked-glass spheres, an icy window, lamps that threw clots of whirling color on the floor.

  But all this he saw with but a corner of his mind, for directly before him stood a tall man in a sea-green cloak. The man was perfectly bald, but he had a thick white beard and enormous bottle-brush eyebrows, and beneath them eyes that were bottomless and dark.

  “It’s you, isn’t it?” said Felthrup, feeling a lump rise in his throat. “It’s how you really are.”

  “Right in the first count, wrong in the second,” the man replied. “Indeed I’m surprised one as afflicted with imagination as you still clings to the notion of real. Now step to one side—that’s it.”

  The old man turned and walked away, deeper into the stone chamber. When twenty feet separated him from Felthrup he turned again, and then ran, with the ease of a much younger man, straight at the surface of the mirror. At the last instant he leaped, headfirst—

  —and the black mink, Ramachni Fremken, sailed into the chamber as through an open door. This was the mage as Felthrup knew him: the one who had rescued him from drowning, slain fleshancs, taught Pazel the Master-Word that changed the Shaggat to stone. The one whose very name brought a look of fear into Arunis’ eyes, no matter how the sorcerer tried to conceal it. He landed in a cloud of dust on Isiq’s bed. Felthrup knelt beside him, sneezed, and burst into tears.

  “Stop that at once,” said Ramachni. “What on earth is the matter, Felthrup? Surely we meet in better circumstances than before?”

  “Oh no, Master, not at all.”

  Ramachni sprang from the bed and vanished into the stateroom. Felthrup rushed after him, still crying, though he could not have said exactly why. He found the mage on the arm of the divan, looking down at the three sleeping youths.

  “How untroubled they look,” said Ramachni, echoing Felthrup’s earlier thought. “And how fortunate that your dream-life is so splendid. But look what you have done to yourself tonight, my dear rat! Some turn themselves into warriors, angels, kings. You’ve become a librarian.”

  “Not just tonight, m’lord. This is the form I take in every dream.”

  “Every single dream?” said Ramachni, turning to him with surprise. “That is something
to ponder, when I have a moment. But can’t you hold still, Felthrup? Why do you keep starting for the door?”

  Felthrup checked himself, and dropped his head in shame. “Arunis is calling me. He never stops. He has a terrible power over me, and he is using me against our friends.”

  “We shall see about that,” said Ramachni with a hint of temper.

  “My lord!” said Felthrup, rubbing his chin with both hands in a most ratlike gesture. “Did you not say that Arunis was the stronger in this world, that when you travel here you leave a great part of your strength behind?”

  “I did,” said Ramachni, “although when next I come to Alifros it shall be with a strength you have never seen. But tonight, Felthrup, the only traveler is you. When your dream began, you departed the Alifros you know and came here, to a dream-Alifros, only a small part of which was created by your mind. Arunis and I were here already, for dreams exist in a territory that the mage never entirely ceases to inhabit.”

  “He is standing just outside your magic wall.”

  Ramachni shook his head. “That wall is not of my making.”

  “Not of your making!” cried Felthrup. “Then there is some other mage aboard, who wishes us well?”

  “Perhaps,” said Ramachni, glancing curiously around the stateroom. “But this I can tell you for certain: the spell that made the magic wall was cast long before the Chathrand left Etherhorde—years before, in fact. How cunningly hidden it must have been, to keep me from detecting it! I wonder if there are more such surprises, and if they will all prove so helpful.”

  Suddenly he turned and sniffed the air. Then he bounded across the room and onto the table, where he peered suspiciously at the pigsfoot casserole.

  “Do not eat this,” he said. “Someone besides Mr. Teggatz had a hand in its preparation. There is a whiff of magic about it—dark magic, you understand. It is only a distant aftertaste, nothing so obvious as a curse or a potion. But we must take no chances.”

  Felthrup clenched his hands in fists, and stared at them as if he had never seen anything more impressive. Then he picked up the casserole, crossed the room to the window and flung the dish overboard.

  No sooner had he closed the window, however, than doubt returned to his face. “In my first dream Arunis flung Sniraga into the sea,” he said, “but the cat is still aboard. My dreams change nothing, do they? When I wake that dish will again be on the table. And my waking self remembers nothing of what passes in these dreams. I shall not be able to warn them, Ramachni.”

  “Do not be so certain, lad. Your dreams certainly change you. I hear the exhaustion in your voice: you’ve been fighting for your very soul. In any case, you must try. Whatever is in that food was put there with malice of the blackest sort.”

  Felthrup jumped, remembering. “Neeps took a bite!” he said. “And a short time later he went mad and tried to kill Lady Thasha. He almost succeeded.”

  Ramachni looked up from the table. Now the anger in his eyes was terrible to behold. “It is time, Felthrup. You called out for help, and I am here to give it. Let us go and see the sorcerer.”

  Felthrup swallowed, and pushed his spectacles up his nose. Ramachni jumped to the floor, crossed once more to the divan, and crawled up beside Thasha’s shoulder. His pink tongue dabbed once at her forehead; then he turned and studied the chamber again. His eyes settled on the bearskin rug. A look of satisfaction crept over his face.

  “How dare you keep me waiting.”

  The sorcerer waited just beyond the red stripe, his mouth twisted with anger. The four Turachs leaned against the walls. Arunis watched the thin, bespectacled man leave the stateroom without closing the door.

  “So you can fight my summons now? Well, after tonight you’ll wish you’d never tried, you mangled, three-legged misery of a rat. Get out here!”

  The thin man took his time, but at last he reached the magic wall. He did not immediately step through it, however. Instead he paused with his face just inches from the sorcerer’s own.

  “After tonight,” he said quietly, “you will wish you’d never invaded his dreams.”

  “Whose dreams?”

  “Felthrup’s, you fool.”

  With that the man in spectacles reached through the wall and seized Arunis by his scarf. At his touch the mage gasped aloud and tried to pull away. But the thin man held him fast, and began to chant:

  Light is the purse that brimmed with deceit

  Fierce are the hunters, and swift their feet

  And the night so late and lonely.

  Bribe them you might, but what can you offer?

  A curse, and a kick, and a black barren coffer,

  And the taste of treason only.

  Dear have you cost us, but never so dear

  That we’ll tender our souls to a peddler of fear.

  Pride may be costly, but pain is free:

  For thee, old deceiver, it comes for thee.

  On the last word he let go of the scarf, dropped to the deck, and became once more a mink. Arunis leaped back in terror. But the mink did not attack him. It fled.

  “What’s this?” roared Arunis. “The great Ramachni, turning tail? Have you nothing but rhymes to fight with?”

  A deafening roar filled the passage behind him.

  Arunis whirled, and for one second he gaped at the bear, a huge brown boulder of a creature, looming over him, so tall its shoulder touched the roof of the passage.

  “Stop, Felthrup!” he shrieked. “I order you—”

  Then its weight was upon him, and its claws like mallet-driven spikes, and its teeth that ripped his dream-flesh like so much tissue paper, like the wrapping on a box that held no gift, nothing but emptiness and a voice that cursed and was gone.

  27

  The Ambush

  24 Freala 941

  133rd day from Etherhorde

  By the time they reached the hill overlooking the Chathrand, Diadrelu was winded, and the man beside her was panting like a hound. Even at nine in the morning the heat was fierce—particularly at eight inches above the barren ground. Seabirds whirled over them, innumerable: the dry side of Sandplume was one great eyrie, where gull and plover and albatross and tern vied for every available inch of nesting space. The birds had no real stomach for fighting creatures who could take off one of their wings with the swipe of a blade, but their pecking and diving made it hard to attend to other matters. Their noises—outraged wails, honks, brays, screeches—made Diadrelu think of the torments of the damned.

  “A fool’s errand,” grunted the man, whose name was Steldak.

  Diadrelu shaded her eyes. Three hundred feet below them, the Chathrand and Sandor Ott’s single-masted ship lay at anchor, hidden on three sides by the horseshoe-shaped isle.

  “Look there.”

  She pointed. From behind the cutter the Chathrand’s skiff was gliding into view. Her sail was down already. Aboard the Great Ship men were running out the davit-chains to receive the little craft.

  Diadrelu took a short monocular telescope from her pocket and raised it to her eye. There was Pazel. She heaved a great sigh of relief. The boy had survived another misadventure ashore. Rin only knew what they had done to him this time.

  “Erthalon Ness is not aboard,” she said aloud.

  Steldak hissed through his teeth. “It’s as I foretold, then,” he said. “They have given him to someone on Bramian, someone who will put him to evil use. How I wish you had stabbed them both!”

  The rejoinder flashed through Dri’s mind: How I wish I’d stabbed you. She closed her eyes, deeply shamed by the thought. Steldak was gaunt, despite the food and nursing lavished on him these past two months. He had spent years in a cage in Rose’s desk, lifted out only at mealtimes, to test the captain’s food for poison. His rescue had been a triumph of cunning on her brother’s part. But Steldak’s disobedience—he had tried to assassinate Rose on the spot—had cost Lord Talag his life.

  He was delirious, Dri reminded herself. He’d believed for years that
he would die in that cage. And he has done his penance, and sworn an oath to the clan.

  Still, she was glad she’d remembered the little scope, if only to give her something besides Steldak to focus on. The very sound of his breathing set her teeth on edge. Hate (so her people’s adage went) was the place where death entered the living, the blind mote in the eye of the soul. Dri had always liked the adage, although she could not remember the last time she heard it on any tongue but her own. It was wrong to hate Steldak. But she did.

  “There was a death ashore—a military death.” She pointed at a black ribbon of canvas snapping in the breeze from the masthead. “I do not see Drellarek, the Turach commander. I wonder if it was he who fell.”

  Steldak shrugged. “It was not Rose, more’s the pity. Beyond that I am not much interested.” He lunged at a gull, which sheered away with a ravenous wail. “Let us go, Diadrelu. There is nothing more to be learned here.”

  “What of the winds?” she asked. Steldak, who claimed to have been born at sea, had also declared himself a fine judge of weather.

  “A storm from the northeast,” he said, glancing vaguely at the sky. “These westerlies are not half what they were twelve hours ago. Some gale is sucking all the force from them. Soon they will turn back on themselves, and then we shall see.”

  “How soon?”

  Steldak’s eyes traveled the horizon. “After midday, if you force me to guess. But Bakru’s lions answer to no one but Bakru, and sometimes not even to him. Lady Dri, I would return to our commander’s side. He may have need of us.”