The River of Shadows

by Robert V. S. Redick

  He snorted: “What rubbish is that? She chose him—chose all of you, and turned her back on her people.”

  “She was ready to kill herself, Taliktrum. She told Stanapeth she’d rather die than see the clan break into factions, some with you, others with her.”

  “Anyone can make such a boast,” he replied.

  “You’ll believe what you want to,” I said, & tossed him my gold coin. “All the same, it’s your turn.”

  He set the pearl on the floor & turned his back, hands in fists. This talk of Diadrelu had rattled him. Still burning with guilt, I imagined, as well he should be. When he looked at me again his face was a mask.

  He set his foot on the pearl. “If you take this and depart, sharing nothing, I will be your enemy forever.”

  “I’m no cheat, Taliktrum.”

  He kicked the pearl in my direction. Then he said, “I am leaving.”

  “What?”

  “Leaving the ship. My people, the clan, everyone. I am going ashore, tonight. I … I cannot wait.”

  “You don’t mean that.”

  “After I leave this room, I will return to my people’s stronghold one last time. I will write a letter telling them that I have gone ahead of them, to the land we are destined to repossess, and that they must follow Lord Talag once more, until we are all reunited”—he laughed miserably—“in paradise. Then I’ll slip ashore. The cables around the ship are many. I’ll have no difficulty there.”

  “Taliktrum, stop. You’re their commander.”

  “I am their demigod,” he said, with acid on his tongue. “My soldiers are carving little statues of me, and carrying them about like idols. Two brothers fought yesterday over which of them I favored more, and one stabbed the other in the leg. A woman came to me tonight and said that our ancestors had told her she was to have my child. They are insatiable, Fiffengurt. And I am the one who made them that way.” He put his hands in his hair. “This cult of He-Who-Sees. It should be He-Who-Is-Seen—seen, followed, imitated, aped. I live in a prison, a prison of their adoring eyes. You cannot imagine what it took to elude them long enough to come here.”

  “But you’ll be all alone, man! You don’t even know if crawlies—if ixchel exist in this part of the world.”

  “Unless they have gone the way of human beings, they exist. We came from this side of the Nelluroq, you fool.”

  “Ixchel came … from the South?”

  “Centuries ago. In human ships, human cages.” He paused, suddenly struck. “Do you mean that Diadrelu did not even tell you why our people boarded Chathrand?”

  I shook my head. “There were things she never would talk about. She wasn’t a traitor, I tell you.”

  He was shocked. It was a long time before he found his voice. “There is a traitor in our midst today, however,” he said at last. “The person who switched the antidote pills.”

  “Do you have an idea who that person is?” I asked.

  “I know who he is with a certainty,” said Taliktrum, “because that person is me.”

  I gaped at him. Taliktrum smiled, but it was a smile of self-loathing. “Once a person takes the antidote,” he said, “the least whiff of the poison vapor warns them off. The captain, Undrabust, and Marila would have balked at the door of the forecastle house, even if Rose had not guessed that they were cured. I did not release them as a humanitarian act. Hercól’s suggestion merely gave me an excuse to thin the ranks of the hostages, thus buying us a few more days. But I was clumsy. I should have foreseen that Oggosk might give her pill to the captain. He and Sandor Ott were never, under any circumstances, to be freed.”

  That didn’t surprise me. “So, you’ve made some mistakes,” I said, “and now you’re running away from them.”

  “Now I am accepting the consequences,” he said. “There is no other path for me. We are the rose that prunes itself: so states a motto of my people. And it is the simple truth. When an ixchel knows that his presence in a clan is irredeemably harmful, he must choose exile, or death. But I wanted someone to know the truth about me—that I did this not for the clan, but for myself. I cannot tell anyone of Ixphir House, for like divided leadership, the truth would destroy them.”

  “Are you so sure of that?”

  He ignored my question. “My father promised to take them to paradise,” he said, “to Sanctuary-Beyond-the-Sea. I do not believe they will ever arrive.”

  “Not on this boat,” I agreed.

  “But if that day should somehow dawn, when the swallows come for my people, tell Lord Talag before he departs. Tell him he was wrong to break my flute across his knee. Can you remember that?”

  I nodded slowly. “I’ll remember. But you should tell him that yourself, you coward. Running away’s no good.”

  “Neither is talking. Some problems can’t be solved.”

  “What about your woman?”

  “Who, Myett?” He looked genuinely surprised. “That girl was … an entertainment. A prophet’s plaything, though my father thinks all prophets should be like those of old, chaste and ragged.”

  “She’s lovely,” I ventured.

  At that he glared, as if to say, Not you as well. “She makes a spectacle of her charms—such charms as she possesses. No, Myett was never a suitable match. She is unstable. She took to following me, picking fights with any woman I chanced to look at. My father even thought she might have been the one who switched the antidotes.”

  “I’ll bet you played along,” I said (his woman problems were intensely irritating). “You’d probably even accuse her of the crime, although you did it yourself.”

  “I would,” he said without hesitation, “if I determined that to do so was for the good of the clan.”

  “If you were my size I’d fight you here and now,” I said. “It’s blary unforgivable. You’d make love to her one day and destroy her the next.”

  “Unforgivable?” The familiar, belligerent gleam was back in his eyes. “The game isn’t over, Fiffengurt. You hold both pearls. You must give me a secret to match my own. Do not speak! I will tell you the secret I want.”

  He crossed the tool room—& leaped in one swift movement onto a sawhorse, so that our eyes were on the same level. “Here is what I would know, Fiffengurt: can you choose between life and death?”

  “What in the Pits does that mean?”

  “We cannot keep all the hostages alive. Some will die. All will die eventually, if they remain in the forecastle house. But I am willing to free two more tonight. Not the spymaster or his protégé, Dastu: they are simply too dangerous. And not the witch. Even if she is not Rose’s mother, he loves her. That makes her too precious to give up, now that Rose himself walks free.

  “Two more, then. Name your choices, and I will send my Dawn Soldiers to deliver the antidote this evening—my last act as commander. But you must decide who is to be saved. Dr. Chadfallow, surely? Or perhaps the two gang leaders, on the condition that they swear a truce? Or Elkstem, your sailmaster, the man whose hand on the wheel has saved the ship more than once already? Or the remaining tarboy, Saroo, with so many years to live?”

  I couldn’t believe my ears. “You swine,” I said.

  “Of course an ixchel would never choose the tarboy,” he went on. “The question of who might deserve life the most never occupies our thoughts as deeply as that of who is the most useful. If you look at things our way, you might do best to free the pair of soldiers. Their return would improve morale for the entire battalion.”

  “You can take a leap off those cliffs,” I said. “I don’t make choices like that.”

  “You don’t, because you have not had to,” he said. “Name them, Fiffengurt. Otherwise I will free no one at all.”

  I slammed both pearls down beside him. “Not a chance. You’re the monsters who took ’em in the first place.”

  “Rose would have killed us if I hadn’t. Now I’m willing to reduce our advantage, and you will not even choose?”

  “I can’t, and I won’t. It’s inhu
man.”

  I must have been screaming. In the passage, two or three anxious men called my name, clearly afraid I was in danger. I wrenched open the door & yelled at them to keep their distance. When I turned back to the room I could not see Taliktrum or his pearls.

  “What if you had enough antidote for them all?”

  His voice came from near the ceiling. I looked up but could not spot him on any of the shelves or cabinets.

  “That’s a stupid question, ain’t it?” I snapped. “I’d free every one of them.”

  “And guarantee that my people would be hunted down, murdered, exterminated in a matter of hours?”

  “Pitfire,” I sputtered. “Not … necessarily. I don’t hate you—I mean, I haven’t blary thought about it!”

  “We have thought about it, Mr. Fiffengurt,” he said. “Never fear; I gave the order before I came looking for you. The doctor & the sailmaster are already free. Listen, you can hear them shouting.”

  And it was true, when I fell silent: high above, & at the other end of the Chathrand, I could just catch the cries: Chadfallow! Elkstem! Hurrah!

  “Then why’d you put me through all this, damn you?” I shouted.

  As if in answer, something bounced off a high shelf & fell toward my chest. I caught it: Taliktrum’s pearl.

  His laughter mocked me from above. “Not necessarily, you say. And I’d hoped to hear it straight from a giant’s mouth, just this once: either Yes, I would kill you all. Or No, I would fight for your people even against my own. The way my aunt did, Fiffengurt. But of course, you haven’t thought about it. Goodbye.”

  There was a slight scraping noise in an upper corner. He’s slipping out some rat-hole or secret door, I thought. On an impulse, I called out, “Lord Taliktrum?”

  The scraping stopped.

  “Diadrelu was only going to kill herself if she was certain it was best for the clan. Not because something wounded her heart, or pained her personally. Although many things did. You understand?”

  Silence. I cleared my throat & went on: “You’re not selfish, you little people. You’re better than us in that respect. Don’t be selfish about your pain, man. Go, if you have to. Run away from your cult, or from your old man. But don’t write any letter swearing you won’t be back. Tell them you’re off—following a vision or whatnot. Surely it’s better for ’em to have someone they can go on believing in? And I’ll tell you this as well: I’ve done some running in my time. All sailors have. But if you live long enough you’ll find that most of us are running in circles.”

  Taliktrum said nothing & there was no more noise from above. I suppose I’ll never know if he heard my advice. But as I sat there, listening to the cheers grow louder, it occurred to me for the very first time that Taliktrum was an Etherhorder, like me.

  I am exhausted; the lamp is sputtering out. I wonder where he has gone in this alien city. Rin keep him, the little tyrant, first of us to abandon Chathrand of his own free will.

  7. Scribbled in the margin of this page, Fiffengurt adds: “This far south, only the tips & branches of the Holy Tree peek over the horizon, in the hour before dawn. Mr. Bolutu has ventured the farcical opinion that the Milk Tree is no tree at all, but merely the diffuse light of millions of stars, too faint to be spied one by one. I fear at times that the fellow is delusional. He sometimes speaks of Arqual & the Mzithrin in the past tense, as one might of nations that have ceased to exist.” —EDITOR.

  8. Rule Thirty of the Ninety Rules of the Rinfaith: “What a man cannot afford to lose at dice should not be wagered; what he can should be given to those in need. Thus the man of virtue wallows not in sordid games.” Younger monks of the Rinfaith (starting with Artus in 916) labeled this one of the “Killjoy Rules,” and it is likely that Fiffengurt was aware of this noisy minority. Artus claims further that “sordid games” is a willful mistranslation, and indeed the original Ullumaic is closer to “addiction to risk.” Artus published his suggestions for a gentler, more loving Ninety Rules in a treatise titled When Rin Sees Us, Does He Smile? Days after its publication the man was expelled from the Brotherhood of Serenity; his house was also mysteriously burned down, and his dog pelted with eggs by fellow monks who thought themselves unobserved. —EDITOR.

  Myett Alone

  27 Ilbrin 941

  226th day from Etherhorde

  You’d probably even accuse her of the crime, although you did it yourself … you’d make love to her one day and destroy her the next.

  She lay in a darkness so deep not even ixchel eyes could pierce it. Somewhere in the bilge well, under the ancient floorboards of the hold. On her back, floating in the filth. It had taken determination even for an ixchel to reach this place.

  She is unstable. She took to following me …

  The water, like the ship, was still: there were no tides or waves in the basin to make it slosh about. Yet it was rising quickly. When her ears slipped underwater she could actually hear the bubbling of displaced air. The water should have been even fouler, here in the rank bottom of the boat, the place all slop and slime washed down to. But so much of the water was new, fresh from the crystalline gulf and the cold, gushing river that flowed through Masalym.

  Had she lost the wineskin? No, here it was about her neck. She turned her head to the side and drank an ample throatful. An entertainment. A prophet’s plaything.

  Already she could touch the boards above her, when she raised her hand. She imagined the wound in the hull. Poor Chathrand, stabbed in the darkness by a fellow ship. Wound a body and it bleeds. Wound a ship and it turns to drink, and never stops.

  Yes, she had followed him. But not from jealousy—not that alone. She had feared for him, feared the demons in his eyes, the agony his father dismissed as mere fatigue. She had been born to fight those demons, protect those eyes. She had been raised with a ravenous addiction, like the children born to deathsmokers, slaves to something heartless before they even learned to speak. All her life she had searched for it, her deathsmoke, the balm for her wound. In Auxlei City, Emledri, Sorrophran, Besq. And one day her grandfather had opened a service door in the Assembly Hall and said, “Look: that is the young man sent from Etherhorde by his father, seeking crew for an assault on the Great Ship. We will dine with him tonight; so comb your hair, and be pleasant.”

  She had thought him strange and severe, bickering with his elders, stabbing at a hull diagram spread out on a table. “We enter here. We will hold this space.” Then the young lord had glanced up and noticed her, and studied her young body frankly, and she had made herself walk away from the door with her chin high and her face indifferent, as though he were the needy one, as though his gaze had not gone through her like a spear, and three weeks later she was his lover on the Chathrand.

  The water raised her to within a foot of the boards. She drank again, then slid the lanyard of the wineskin over her shoulder and pushed it away. No one had seen her. No one knew that she had not fled with him, had not been invited—had not even been dismissed. He had not thought it necessary to dismiss her, before abandoning the ship; one did not dismiss a toy.

  But this toy had tracked him last night all the same.

  She had tracked him to the secret place, the masterfully hidden door in the ceiling above the scrap-metals storeroom, beyond which the House Treasures were stored in a strongbox bolted to the inner plank. There were ixchel guards within twenty feet, port and starboard, fore and aft, guarding every known approach to this area, but even they did not know precisely where the strongbox stood. And none of them knew about the door.

  She had watched him open the box with the key around his neck, stared in amazement as he set aside the ancient Cyrak Tapestries from the main hall of Ixphir House, the last vials of the blanë sleep-drug, the sacred swallow-bones with which the flying suits could be repaired. He kissed the urn that held the ashes of his great-grandmother Deijanka, the saint. Then he took out the waxed-cotton bundle that held the antidote pills and broke the seal. Myett held her breath as he ex
tracted two of the big white pills, cradling them in his arm as he sealed the bundle anew. He returned everything but these two pills to the strongbox, locked it—and after a moment’s hesitation, slipped the key from around his neck and wedged it securely beneath the box.

  That last act had mystified her. Better than anyone (she hoped it was better than anyone) Myett knew how he refused to be parted from that key. Night after carnal night it had hung between them, crushed against her breast, striking her chin in time with his soft sounds of ecstasy. Only he and Talag and Ludunte, the clan-appointed Treasurer, had keys to the strongbox. Why in the Pits would Taliktrum leave his behind?

  She was bumping the ceiling now. Her nose, her knees. The air that remained was close and stale.

  And in her addict’s haze she had imagined that he was going to meet a lover. She had thought herself that important: that Lord Taliktrum would take pains to deceive her, to spare her feelings when he hungered for another’s touch. But all the same she could not stop following him.

  She had tracked him all the way to the tool room. He had heard her only once, and not bothered to investigate, thinking he heard a mouse or beetle. To be so close to him, alone one final time, and be mistaken for vermin.

  Then Fiffengurt had stomped and blundered into the room, and the horrible words had spilled out. Myett was never suitable. It had been tempting to kill the quartermaster, since she could not kill her lord. Something had to die, of course. After words like that something always did.

  She could no longer float. She was treading water, pressing her lips above the surface, into the last inch of air. Was that the ship’s bell, was it morning? No matter. This was the place that morning never touched.

  She makes a spectacle of her charms.

  No one would find her here.

  Farewell to a Dream