The River of Shadows

by Robert V. S. Redick

  He looked expectantly at Pazel, who nodded reluctantly, knowing his face had given him away. He knitted his eyebrows. “Something like ‘victory’—no, ‘conquest’ is closer. ‘Infinite conquest,’ that’s it.”

  They all looked at him, shaken. “The boat was maimed,” said Cayer Vispek at last, “but only partly looted. We found fine goods—fabrics, dyes, leather boots of excellent workmanship, even gold coins, scattered underfoot. It was as if the attackers had struck in haste, or fury, intent on nothing but the death of everyone aboard.”

  “They took the food, though,” said Jalantri, frowning at the memory.

  “Why didn’t you return to the sea, once the sharks departed?” asked Pazel.

  “We could not,” said Vispek. “The Father tried to give us the power to change ourselves back and forth at will, but he never succeeded. Once we returned to human form, only the scepter in a Master’s hand could make us again into whales.”

  “And the scepter went down with the Jistrolloq?” said Hercól.

  “I told you that we came here with nothing,” said Cayer Vispek. “Our elder changed us a final time, even as the sea flooded the decks. That is the only reason we survived.”

  Neda glanced sidelong at the Tholjassan warrior. What a sly one. He knows the Cayer avoided his question. She busied herself with the gnawing of flesh from a bone, thinking how cautiously their leader was handling this moment, how attentive they would have to be to his signals. Above all we must say nothing of Malabron.

  Inside her the memory blazed, hideously clear. The collapsing hull, the grotesque speed of the inrushing sea, the old Cayerad bringing the scepter down against her chest and the instant agony of the transformation, no pain-trance to deaden it. Squeezing from the wreckage, the whirling disorientation before she spotted the glowing scepter again, in the aperture where the old man was working the change on a last sfvantskor: Malabron. She had watched his body swell like a blister. Confused and zealous Malabron; desperate, damned forevermore. He had believed in the utterances of mystics, believed they were nearing a time of cataclysm and the breaking of faiths. And with the enemy victorious and their mission a failure, Malabron the whale had done the unthinkable: bitten off the arm of the old Cayerad, swallowing it and the scepter whole, and vanishing into the sudden blackness of the sea.

  They had never seen him again, and Cayer Vispek had not speculated as to what had driven Malabron to such treason. Jalantri merely cursed his name. Neda, however, recalled his furious, quiet chatter, his ravings. In the last weeks they were almost continuous, in the hours when talking was allowed, and so much of it was outlandish nonsense that the others took no heed. But Neda heard it all, her manic memory sorting the drivel into categories and ranks. And in one category, by no means the largest, were his mutterings about “the path our fathers missed” and “those who fear to be purified.”

  Neda chewed savagely. You should have spoken. You could have warned Cayer Vispek before it was too late. For Malabron’s words had carried a sinister echo. They resembled the heresy once preached by the Shaggat Ness.

  She cringed, feigning some bone or gristle in her mouth. I couldn’t do it. Not to any of them. It had taken them five years to trust her, the foreign-born sfvantskor, almost a heresy in herself. Five years, and all the wrath and wisdom of the Father, taking her side. How could she have admitted that she did not trust them back—even just one of them? How could she have reported a brother?

  “Neda?”

  Pazel was staring at her. Devils, I must take care with him! For her birth-brother’s glance was piercing. Even now he could read her better than Vispek or Jalantri.

  She was struggling for calm. With an uncertain movement Pazel reached for her elbow.

  “Do not touch her,” said Cayer Vispek.

  Pazel jumped and shot him a look. “I was just—”

  “Coddling a sfvantskor,” said Jalantri, regarding Pazel with a mixture of amusement and contempt. “Now I see why the Father did not wish the two of you to meet, sister. He knew no good could come of it.”

  “Listen to me,” said Cayer Vispek to Pazel. “The one before you is no longer an Ormali, no longer Neda Pathkendle. I do not expect this to be easy for you to grasp, but know that every parent, brother or sister of a sfvantskor has faced the same kind of loss.”

  “The same, is it?” said Pazel, his eyes flashing. “I haven’t blary clapped eyes on my family in nearly six years.”

  “Neda has left your family,” said Cayer Vispek. “She has become Neda Ygraël, Neda Phoenix-Flame. And she has been reborn into a life of service to the Grand Family of the Mzithrin, and the sfvantskor creed. Only if you remember this can I permit the two of you to speak.”

  “Permit us?” said Pazel, as though he couldn’t believe his ears. “She’s my sister! Neda, is this what you want?”

  Neda held herself very still. The eyes of all the men were upon her. With a ritual cadence to her words, she said, “My past is of no consequence. I am a sfvantskor, a keeper of the Old Faith, foe of devils, friend of the Unseen. The life before was a game of make-believe. I can recall the game, but I am grown now and wish to play it no more.”

  “So speaks our sister in the fullness of her choice,” said Cayer Vispek. “You must accept her decision or else insult her gravely. Is that your wish?”

  Pazel looked at the older man, and his dark eyes glinted with anger. But he held his tongue.

  The Cayer watched him a moment longer, as though noting a source of future danger. Then, turning to Hercól again, he said, “There is more I would know. What sort of land have we come to, where men are killed under the banner of infinite conquest? Who are these black beings with silver eyes? And where are the humans? We have only met with miserable savages, hardly better than beasts.”

  When the telling was done Neda felt wounded. As if some crushing harm had struck her body, some venom or germ that stole her strength and clouded her mind. She believed Hercól; his voice was too raw and bleeding to be feigned—and she had seen the men he called tol-chenni, and had thought them imbeciles from the start. But a plague of mindlessness. She squatted by the fire, clenching her fists. Protect us in this our black hour, she prayed. Defend us, that we may water Alifros with the blessings of your will. She addressed the prayer to the Unseen, the Nameless Ones, in the Mountains of Hoéled beyond the world. But did the Nameless Ones care about these strange Southern lands, or was their gaze fixed elsewhere? It was a troubling question, and probably forbidden.

  Hercól looked up at the sky. “Dawn comes,” he said. “Pazel and I must return to our shipmates. And you three must make your choice, for I expect to see a boat from the Chathrand approaching by the time we reach them.”

  “Choice?” said Neda, the bitterness rising in her again. “What choice is that? To return to your ship and be put in irons, or stay here and starve?”

  “We’ll do neither of those,” said Jalantri, “will we, Cayer Vispek?”

  The older sfvantskor pursed his lips and gave a thoughtful shake of his head. “Perhaps not,” he said—and flew in a blur at Hercól.

  The attack was one of the swiftest Neda had ever seen. Cayer Vispek bore the swordsman backward off his crate, and by the time the two men struck the sand there was a knife at Hercól’s throat. Pazel surged to his feet, but Jalantri was far faster, and deftly kicked the youth’s legs out from under him. Pazel fell inches from the fire. The sfvantskor came down on him with both knees, caught his arm and twisted it behind his back. Jalantri looked wildly at Neda.

  “I have him! Aid the Cayer, sister!”

  “The Cayer needs no aid,” said Vispek, still pressing his blade to Hercól’s neck.

  “That’s lucky!” snapped Jalantri. “Neda, you sat like a stone! What ails you? Were you afraid I might give your birth-brother a scratch?”

  Pazel twisted helplessly, grimacing with rage. Neda shuddered. She recalled that look of defiance. He had shown it to Arquali soldiers, once.

  “It was not
luck,” said Cayer Vispek. “The Tholjassan chose to yield. Chose, I say: you saw my intention, didn’t you, swordsman? As plain as though I had drawn it for you in the sand.”

  “I guessed,” said Hercól, motionless under the knife.

  “You are too humble. I saw your readiness even as I struck. You might even have disarmed me, but you chose not to try. That was an error. You are prisoners now, and it may not go well for you.”

  “What will you do now, Cayer?” asked Hercól.

  “We will take the rescue boat, by persuasion or force, and seek the mainland.”

  “If you take us as hostages on that boat, the Chathrand will know it,” said Hercól. “They can see our encampment plainly through their telescopes.”

  “They will not wish to see you harmed,” said Cayer Vispek.

  “You don’t know Arqualis,” gasped Pazel, turning his head painfully in the sand. “Prisoners of the Mzithrin are presumed good as dead. They’ll engage you whether we’re aboard or not. They’ll blow you to matchsticks.”

  “We can take the boat alone,” said Neda quietly. “Leave them here, Cayer. The Chathrand will send another for them.”

  “And for you, an extermination brigade,” said Hercól. “There are over a hundred Turachs aboard the Great Ship, and longboats that can outrun whatever little vessel they have dispatched to collect us.”

  “We should have struck an hour ago,” growled Jalantri under his breath.

  “Perhaps,” said Hercól, “but it is too late now.”

  “Not too late for one thing,” said Jalantri.

  “Cayer—” Neda began.

  “Be silent, girl! Be silent, both of you!”

  Their leader’s voice was tight with desperation. Neda and Jalantri held still as wolves about to spring. But spring where, on whom? The heresy of Neda’s thought appalled her.

  “I fear Neda is right about the irons,” Hercól continued. “The crew tolerates our own freedom uneasily, since Rose charged us with mutiny. They will never tolerate yours. Nor can we hide those tattoos on your necks.”

  “Those tattoos are never hidden,” snapped Cayer Vispek, pressing the knife tighter against the other’s flesh. “We are sfvantskors, not skulking thieves.”

  2

  “You may be reduced to worse than thieving,” said Hercól, “if you go alone into this country.”

  Neda felt the readiness of her limbs, the killer’s focus trying to silence that other voice, the sister’s. Let me do it, Jalantri. If the Cayer commands us, let me end Pazel’s life.

  “You grow careless with your words,” said Cayer Vispek. “If you truly know our ways, you know we cannot despair. For those who take the Last Oath it is a sin.”

  “There is a related sin,” said Hercól, “but graver, in your teachings. Will you name it, or shall I?”

  Cayer Vispek was very still. “Suicide,” he whispered.

  When Hercól spoke again he did so courteously, almost with sorrow. “It is a hard thing, Cayer Vispek, but I must request your surrender.”

  It was midmorning before the rescue skiff neared the Chathrand. Her crew was waiting in a ragged mob.

  Some leaned out to help swing the hoisted boat over the scarlet rail. Most stood and watched. Never in all those months at sea had their spirits sunk so low, nor their eyes flashed so dangerously. The thirst! Not one of the eight hundred sailors had known such torturous want of water. The men’s very flesh had tightened on their bones. Their skin had peeled and blistered, and the blisters had shriveled from within. Their lips were cracked like old parchment.

  They had watched in silence as the rescue boat tacked across the inlet, empty now of both serpents and ships. Passing telescopes, they had studied the captives, two men and one young woman (“Look at them arms, will you, she’s a bruiser, a wildcat, a hellion, why is every blary girl who comes aboard—”), and Old Gangrüne the purser remarked on the way the strange young woman stared at Lady Thasha: with malice, or something very like.

  The men had followed the boat with their eyes as it rounded the jetty, passed the great abandoned tower, and finally drew up to the landing near the village gate. They had watched ten or twelve dlömu step forth timidly, and cheered with faint derision when the creatures rolled out three small water casks and passed them down carefully to the skiff. Another mouthful each, they laughed bitterly, while over the tonnage hatch the sixty-foot yawl dangled in her harness, ready to launch, fourteen casks of five hundred gallons apiece lashed in her hold.

  They had watched with impatience as Pathkendle and Lady Thasha spoke with the dlömic boy at the landing. The two youths pointed at the Chathrand; the boy shook his head. For several thirsty minutes the sailors watched a debate they could not hear. Then the young dlömu had made a gesture of surrender, and all three had climbed into the skiff, and the little boat had started out to the Chathrand.

  Now they were hoisting it, dripping, above the rail. Six men caught the davit chains, guided her inboard, lowered her gently onto her skids. Haddismal shouted a quick command; the assembled Turachs surrounded the boat. The three human prisoners studied them keenly.

  Fiffengurt beckoned at the water barrels. “Same ration as yesterday,” he declared, and the sailors groaned and snarled, though it could not be otherwise, and the ration, albeit painfully tiny, had been fair.

  Pazel Pathkendle and the Lady Thasha leaped first from the skiff, then aided Fiffengurt, who appeared rather bruised. But when the quartermaster’s feet were planted on the deck, he straightened his back and swept the topdeck with his obedient eye.

  The sfvantskors’ gaze followed his. The sailors looked where they looked, and then Fiffengurt turned to see where Pathkendle and the Lady Thasha were looking, and it was some seconds longer before they all became aware of this circular game, and stopped seeking what none could find: someone indisputably in command.

  Of course Nilus Rose was still their captain. But Rose and thirteen others were hostages, caught in a trap so devious that the men struggled to believe it was the work of ixchel—crawlies—the eight-inch-tall beings that most humans had learned to fear and kill from their first days at sea. The crawlies had introduced a sleeping drug into the ship’s fresh water (hence the shortage) and when all were asleep had used ropes and wheelblocks to drag their victims to a cabin under the forecastle, which they had filled with a light, sweet-smelling smoke. The latter did no harm until one was deprived of it: then, in a matter of seconds, it killed. The hostages, all addicts now, stayed alive by tending a fire in a tiny smudge-pot, feeding it with dry berries provided several times a day by the ixchel. As long as the berry-fire sputtered on, they lived.

  Given his plight, Captain Rose had temporarily entrusted the ship to Mr. Fiffengurt. So surely Fiffengurt was in command? But Sergeant Haddismal walked free as well—the crawlies had fed him an antidote that morning, fearing the Turachs might riot without their commander. Perhaps it was time for the military to take charge? But Haddismal was not the highest military officer on the Chathrand: that was Sandor Ott, the Imperial spymaster, the architect of their deadly mission. And Ott remained a hostage.

  All told, an intolerable situation. Mutiny was the obvious answer—but how, and against whom? Kruno Burnscove or Darius Plapp might have led a few hundred gang members in such a rebellion—but the ixchel, thorough to a fault, had seized these two rival gang leaders as well.

  So it was that the roving eyes converged at last on a tiny, copper-skinned figure, balanced on the mainmast rail. He was attended by six shaven-headed spearmen, and he wore a suit of fine black swallow feathers that shimmered when he walked. Those who were close enough saw his haughty chin, the plumb-line posture, the eyes that managed somehow to convey both ferocity and fear. It was galling, but inescapable: the most powerful figure on the Chathrand was this young ixchel lord, a crawly they could have batted overboard with one sweep of the hand.

  “Well, Quartermaster?” he demanded. “Hasn’t my crew thirsted enough? Will you deliver them from mis
ery, or not?”

  His voice came out high and reedy: the effect of bending it into the register of the human ear. It was clear from his expression that he found the effort distasteful.

  Fiffengurt scowled and deliberately turned away, busying himself with a davit strap. “My crew,” he muttered.

  One of the ixchel guards snapped furiously: “You will answer Lord Taliktrum at once!”

  Fiffengurt, Pazel and Thasha exchanged nervous looks. Behind them, Hercól Stanapeth leaped onto the deck and bent to whisper in the quartermaster’s ear. Fiffengurt nodded, then turned uneasily to face the crew.

  “Now, ah, listen sharp, lads,” he said. “There’s danger ashore. The villagers can’t let us back inside their walls—”

  Roars, howls: Fiffengurt was announcing a death sentence. The only danger anyone believed in was thirst, and the only fresh water this side of the gulf was the well in the village square. The men pressed closer, and their shouting increased. Fiffengurt waved desperately for silence.

  “—but they’ve agreed to fill any casks we bring ’em, and to hand ’em off right there at the gatehouse. Mr. Fegin, get that yawl in the water! Thirty hands for duty ashore! Who’s prepared? Volunteers get their ration first.”

  Instantly the roars became cheers, this time in earnest. Countless hands shot skyward. “Let it be done!” cried Taliktrum from his perch, but no one listened to him now. Already Fegin was ordering men to the capstans, and topmen were loosing cables to allow the big yawl to be hoisted.

  Pazel and Thasha grinned at Fiffengurt, who breathed a sigh of relief. Bolutu descended from the skiff, pushing his way through Turach spears. Haddismal directed the prisoners to climb down from the boat. “On guard, marines, those are blary sfvantskors!” he shouted over the mayhem.

  Haddismal possessed a voice to cut through storm and battle. Yet somehow one of the newly summoned Turachs did not heed him, and in the space of five seconds disaster struck. The soldier was stationed behind Neda, who had yet to rise to her feet. Leaning forward, he prodded her with one hand in the small of her back. Then his eyes found a long rip in Neda’s breeches. His hand developed a will of its own, and three fingers groped for an instant over the flesh of her thigh.