The Ruling Sea

by Robert V. S. Redick

  Our captor appears to be a young crawly messiah; he goes about in a suit of feathers, and a brooding funk, now gloating, now fearful and suspicious. A deranged but nubile crawly girl attends this figure, and chides and bullies the others into acts of devotion. Simulated acts, in many cases. They do not all beam at him with the fawning love of his pretty acolytes, or his shaven-headed guards. His father is apparently somewhere aboard, and ruled before him, but is unwilling or unable to take up the mantle again.

  The doors are not locked, but we are prisoners all the same. When we woke from the drugged sleep we found ourselves alone in the forecastle house. There were rope burns on our ankles, for we had been hoisted like so many slaughtered steers. How much time had passed I do not know: many hours, to be sure, for even with wheelblocks and six hundred crawlies it is no small feat to move a man. Our weapons were gone. In a corner of the room a little fire pot was burning, filling the room with a rather agreeable, sagebrush scent. We could hear the Vortex, like the gods’ own millstone, ready to grind us down to flour. From the single window I could see the clouds forming spiral-patterns above it, and the Red Storm filling half the sky.

  A scrap of parchment was nailed to the topdeck door. It was a “cordial notice,” explaining that anyone who left the cabin would die. It was signed by this selfsame messiah, whose name is absurdly unpronounceable. Below his name ran the words COMMANDER OF THE EX-IMPERIAL SHIP CHATHRAND AND HER LIBERATED CREW.

  At this provocation I flung open the door, and seeing only my own startled men on the topdeck, going about the business of hacking the burned rigging down from the masts, I stormed out, shouting for Uskins. But no sound escaped my lips. I collapsed in agony, my lungs simply aflame. Nearly senseless, I dragged myself back into the forecastle house, and felt relief at my first breath of the scented air. Only the fresh breeze through the door brought back the pain; naturally I slammed it fast.

  The crawly lordling soon made his appearance, through a clever bolt-hole they have carved into the ceiling, directly above the little fire. “Ixchel keep their promises, Captain—Mr. Rose,” he said. “If we say that this or that action means death, it means death.”

  The girl Marila startled us by shouting at him. “You double-crosser! I want to see Neeps, or Pazel or Thasha. And what have you done with your aunt? Let me speak to her!” When they told Marila that the “aunt” she wanted had been executed, the girl wept, as though they were speaking of a member of her own family.

  The lordling went on to describe the trap we were caught in, with such swaggering pride that I felt at once he was claiming another’s invention as his own. The mechanism is diabolical. If the little fire goes out, we die. If our lungs are deprived of the vapor for even a minute, we die. In our drugged sleep we were all made addicts, simply by breathing the stuff for a few hours. Most staggering of all, this poison was created (they allege) by none other than the Secret Fist, by crossing the deathsmoke vine with a kind of desert nightshade. But unlike deathsmoke, the poison does not weaken and wither the body, in fact it does no harm at all until one is deprived of it. At which point it kills faster than any rattlesnake.

  The smoke is produced by burning the dry berries of this plant, together with some coal to keep the fire going. The crawlies bring only a few berries at a time, hidden in their pockets, and none of my crew has had the slightest luck in determining where on the ship they keep them. If we are rowdy, or the crew disobedient, they simply withhold the berries, and we are soon screaming. But their craftiness goes even further. They possess a little pill that, if dissolved on the tongue, effects an immediate and total cure. This they demonstrated on the tarboy Swift: just hours after we awoke, a crawly presented him with the pill and told him he might go. He now walks the ship a free lad, although his brother, Saroo, remains with us. In this way the crawlies buy our submission, as much by hope as by punishment. And of course by their choice of hostages, they have put the whole ship into a state of fear. Everyone counts at least someone among us as too important to lose.

  Little Lord Unpronounceable has issued no orders, yet. Kruno Burnscove has concluded that they wish us no mortal harm: he rivals Uskins in idiocy, and that is an achievement. One only need consider the shifty cleverness of the trap to realize that they planned this assault years ago. Besides, I know crawlies. How could I not, being your son?* Like Ott, they have patience. And like Ott, or a wolverine for that matter, once they sink their teeth into something they simply do not let go.

  The crawly messiah does not pretend to understand the mechanics of the ship. And yet he forbids me to issue orders to the crew. The hour-by-hour decisions, therefore, have fallen to Uskins, and in this emergency the man has proven himself an irredeemable fool.

  Fate [illegible] our family [illegible]*

  By rights we should have perished shortly after waking—not by crawly poison, but in the Vortex. We were already in its grip before they drugged us, in fact. Just before the nightmare with the rats, I had to leave the topdeck for a time, in order to crush Pathkendle’s mutiny. It was while I was below that Elkstem issued the warning: we had entered the whirlpool’s outer spiral. I left Uskins in command (he shall never again command so much as a garbage scow), having reviewed with him exactly how one escapes such a predicament. The buffoon assured me he understood, and at the time he appeared to. But his mental frailty has worsened. I trusted him to keep watch on Arunis, and something about the task has left him distracted and easily confused, and afraid of his own shadow.

  I hardly need tell you, sir, that an aggressive tack away from the eye of a whirlpool must fail, unless the wind is fierce and perfectly abeam (it was neither). But that is exactly what Uskins called for. The result was disaster: at each change of tack, the line of the ship fell hard athwart the centrifuge of the Vortex. This rolled us nearly onto our beam-ends, and built up such a force that we slingshotted deeper into the spiral as we completed the turn.

  The first failure was difficult to prove: we were still too far from the heart of the Vortex to be sure just how quickly we were sliding into it. But Uskins repeated the order twice, trying to make the tack sharper, and failing more spectacularly each time. All the while Elkstem and Alyash begged him to desist, and repeated the sane alternative: to run with the spiral, using its strength and any cooperative wind to help the ship cut slowly, steadily outward. Had we done that within the first few hours of Elkstem’s warning, all would have been well. Uskins, however, brought us at least five miles closer to the eye.

  After the third failed tack Elkstem was contemplating a mutiny of his own. But at that point the giant rats began their siege. Elkstem remained at the wheel throughout the fighting, but he could not find enough men with their wits about them to brace the mains. Working two topsails alone, he and some thirty stout lads kept us from sliding any deeper into the Vortex, but they could not break free. And then the crawly sleeping-poison felled us, and we became a cork adrift.

  By the time I awoke, imprisoned, matters had gone from bad to critical. It was midmorning. We were caught now in the lungs as well as the arms of the Vortex: the wind was cycloning toward the eye, six miles off. There were storm clouds; from the chamber’s single window I saw a gray sheet of rain bend away from us as it descended, and twist into a miles-long whipcord that vanished into the maw. The portside of every object was taking on a scarlet glow. The Red Storm, whatever it was, looked set to overtake us as surely as the Vortex itself. Do you remember that mad dog on Mereldín that ran in circles continually, all over the island, until one circle took him over a cliff? That was how we moved: around and around the Vortex, even as the Vortex itself drifted toward the storm. Which would claim us first? There was simply no way to know.

  From the window I looked on as the crew struggled to replace the burned rigging, without dropping a mast into the Nelluroq, or being swept away themselves. In Etherhorde the shipwrights would take a month for such a job, in a calm port, with scaffolding and cranes. The men were trying to do it in mere hours, after
bloody mayhem, at thirty knots and growing.

  I will say this for Fiffengurt: the man has strength. Six hours I’d kept him tied and hooded. Then came the battle with the rats, the crawlies’ poison—and immediately thereafter, the battle to save a ship without sails or rigging from the greatest calamity in all the seas. He marched first to Uskins, a broken-off Turach spear in his hand, and set the point against his chest.

  “Your badges or your blood, Stukey. I’ll give you five seconds to decide.” Uskins saw he meant it, and took the gold bars from his uniform. Fiffengurt took his hat too, lest there be any confusion, and sent him away to work the pumps.

  The quartermaster himself summarily took charge, assigning a team to each mast, with orders to give a test-haul to every line that remained. “If you don’t like the feel of it, cut it down! Don’t wait for my say-so! We can afford the rope, but not another bad tack! And no scrap over the sides, boys—toss it from the stern! If we foul the rudder we can all start singing Bakru’s lullaby.”

  The Chathrand was running smooth now—but only because the Vortex had churned the waves down to a swirling cream. The ship was settling into a glide, listing ten or fifteen degrees to port, and though I could not see the Vortex from the window, I noted how men tried not to look in that direction, and what came over their features when they did. Never did a crew attack a rig so quickly, or so well. But with every minute that passed they had to cling tighter to the ropes and rails—not against the angle of the ship, but against the surging, screaming wind. It had grown prodigiously in the last quarter hour. Rain from farther off was cracking against the deck like drumsticks. The seal on the tonnage hatch was flapping loose. The lifeboats danced airborne in their chains.

  The noise, Father. No storm you or I ever braved had a tenth the voice of that gods’ monstrosity of noise. In the forecastle house, the wind blasting under the door and through a dozen cracks and crevices began to disperse the vapor; we felt stabbed in the chest, and plugged the gaps with shirts and rags and straw from the henhouse. We crowded around the little fire pot to shield it with our bodies. Some prayed; Sandor Ott sat brooding apart; Lady Oggosk chanted the Prayer of Last Parting, which I have not heard her speak since I was a boy on Littelcatch, that time we feared you and Mother had died. Chadfallow folded his hands before his face, like one preparing to accept the worst. “Men are still bleeding out there, still dying,” he said helplessly to Marila. Then he added: “My family is out there. Why am I always kept apart?”

  When I could stand it no longer, I gulped a chestful of poison, held my breath, and stepped out through the door again, slamming it fast behind me. The wind like a mule kick, the spray like a wetted lash. I climbed the forecastle ladder, half blinded by the glow of the Red Storm, and turned at the top rung to look at the abyss.

  There was no hope, none at all. I was gazing into the mouth of a demon, and the mouth was a mile wide and deep as thought. Were I not your son I should have released my breath then and there. But I would not be swept from the ship, I would perish aboard her as befits her captain. I struggled back to the forecastle house.

  Faint screams above the cacophony: I raised my eyes to the window and saw two men at topgallant height, clinging to a forestay. The rope was straining toward the Vortex, and when it snapped an instant later the men did not so much fall as fly, like two weird ungainly birds, gray on one side and glowing red on the other.

  “Well, Ott,” I said, catching the spymaster’s eye, “you can keep the bonus pay we discussed. But then a third of Magad’s treasury’s going into that damned hole, along with the Nilstone and the Shaggat and the lot of us.”

  “Is that all you wish to say, at the end of a life?” said Ott, smiling acidly.

  I shook my head. “One thing more. I piss on your Emperor.”

  He uncrossed his legs and stood, and would have done something painful to me had I not placed my hand on the doorknob. For once I had a way to kill faster than Ott, and more democratically.

  Then, to my astonishment, the door was wrenched open from the outside, and who should fly in under my hand but Neeps Undrabust. We all reeled from the burst of fresh air, and I, closest to the door, nearly collapsed with the pain. When I recovered I saw Undrabust struggling with the stowaway girl. He was trying to embrace her; she was striking and shoving him back toward the door. “What are you doing!” she shrieked. “Get out of here! Don’t breathe! You’ll be trapped like the rest of us!”

  There came a thump at the door—but this time I held the knob fast. Pathkendle and Thasha Isiq were out there, shouting much the same thing as Marila. But Undrabust stood his ground, trying to calm and hold her, telling her he had nowhere else to be. “Stop it, Marila. There’s just minutes left, you hear me? Keep still. You don’t have to fight anymore.”

  I pressed my face to the window, and saw a gruesome sight: the watery horizon was higher than the rail. We were below the rim, descending, speeding up. We had entered the demon’s mouth. Pathkendle and the girl were the only figures anywhere close to the forecastle. They must have been pursuing Undrabust, guessing what he meant to do. The lad was right, of course: it no longer mattered. I watched Pathkendle draw the girl down beside him in the biting spray. They crouched with their backs to the door, holding each other, like a pair of orphans in a picture book, and the outlandish notion came to me that perhaps these four youths were the sanest of us all, for in the midst of insanity they were caring for one another, which I might assert, Father, is an aspect of the healthy mind.

  Suddenly Thasha Isiq raised her head, tensing like a deer. Pathkendle was staring at her, mouthing some question. Very firmly and quickly, she freed herself from his arms. She stood. He tried to grab hold of her again, but she fended him off with great force, her eyes still looking skyward. Then like a woman in a trance she stepped forward, oblivious to the death she was courting, and stretched her arms high above her head. The wind surged, lifting her like a doll. Pathkendle threw himself on her legs; she did not know he was there. And then the Red Storm swept over the deck.

  It was like the glow from some unthinkably colossal fire, but there was no heat. The rain and spray turned to red gold, the deck red amber; the rigging was like wire heated nearly to melting. We had completed another circuit of the Vortex, and plowed into the red cloud at last. Cloud, I say—but it was neither cloud nor aurora, neither rainbow nor reflection. It was just what the Bolutu-thing called it: a storm of light. Liquid light, and vaporous, and edged like whirling snowflakes. It snagged on the gunnels and dripped from the spars. It burned through the outstretched fingers of Thasha Isiq.

  As we plunged deeper, several things happened. The first was the cessation of all noise. The grinding of the Vortex faded swiftly, like the noise of a foundry when you walk away from it, shutting door after door behind you. That led me to a second, absolutely wondrous and blessed discovery: the Vortex itself was gone.

  Not dispersed, not disrupted. Gone, as if it had been no more than a soap bubble on the waves. Men crept from the hatches, stark wonder in their eyes. We were no longer heeled over, no longer caught in a death-spiral on a butter-smooth sea. There were waves again, and we were pitching on them, the wind from starboard abeam.

  Then I saw that the clouds too had vanished: I mean the thunderheads beyond the Red Storm. The sky was swept clean of them, and in their place I could glimpse only shreds of cloud burning like embers in the south. The whole sky beyond the storm was new—and though I could not be sure from within that bright madness, it seemed to me that the sun itself had changed position.

  Thasha Isiq was staggering toward the forecastle, red light splashing about her ankles. Pazel was still kneeling on the deck where he had held her. In the sudden quiet, he shouted: “What in the Nine Pits is happening to you, Thasha? What did you do?”

  She turned unsteadily. “I didn’t do anything. It was the storm.”

  “The storm destroyed the Vortex?”

  The girl shook her head. “Nothing happened to the Vortex. The s
torm did something to us. Can’t you feel it?”

  She walked up to the window, so that we stood face to face. Light was actually dripping from her chin, from her eyelashes. She shook her head: light sprayed in droplets against the glass. “Would you really have strangled him?” she asked me.

  She was speaking of Pathkendle, naturally. But before I found words to answer her the duchess gave a scream. I whirled—and beheld a creature where Bolutu had stood a moment ago. The thing wore the veterinarian’s clothes, and his smile, but it was not a human being. At the same time it was more like a human than any flikker or nunekkam, or even the sedge-men one sees in the Etherhorde Natural History Museum. This thing before me had a human body and face. It was svelte, and cinder-black, with silver hair and eyelashes, and large silver eyes. Those eyes were its strangest aspect. They had cat-like slits instead of pupils, and a double set of lids. The inner lids were clear as glass; I do not know what purpose they can serve.

  The creature raised a hand to calm us, then thought better of it and hid the hand in his pocket. But we had all seen it, the black batskin stretched between his fingers as high as the middle joint. Then he laughed, a little nervously, and brought out his hands for all to see.

  “I play the flute, you know. In the past twenty years I grew quite good at the human sort. I will have to go back to dlömic flutes now—the holes are farther apart, to accommodate our webbing.”