The River of Shadows

by Robert V. S. Redick

  They knew what was under his shirt, and were trying to stick their knives through it without actually killing him. “Give ’em up, give ’em up, Muketch, or you’ll bleed!” He lashed out with his legs, but the men caught them too. Thasha, ten feet away, had been reduced to shielding her ixchel from Alyash’s nonstop blows.

  It all changed with a sound. Or rather, two sounds: the enraged and murderous howls of the mastiffs. Pazel’s foes saw them before he did, and dropped him like a red-hot skillet. From the corner of his eye Pazel saw Alyash’s face freeze, and then he broke and ran for the nearest rigging. Jorl thundered after him, a dark blue boulder of a dog, while Suzyt leaped over Pazel and scattered his tormentors.

  Pazel felt Thasha hauling him to his feet.

  “Go!”

  She practically threw him down the Silver Stair. Hercól had cleared a path; Thasha, fighting a rearguard, tumbled behind him, shouting to her dogs. Then she was beside him, studying him, terrified (he knew from one look into her eyes) that he might be bleeding, hiding some wound.

  “I’m all right,” he said.

  She wanted to speak: he could have sworn to that. But she did not speak; she only turned and dragged him on. Two flights down they ran, stepping on the bodies of the wounded and the stunned, trying not to stare at the ixchel dead. When one of them stumbled, the other’s hand was there. Then Jorl and Suzyt caught up with them and led the way.

  They reached the upper gun deck, the landing, the Money Gate. They passed Hercól still fighting in a side passage: “On, on!” he roared. Thasha whistled, pointed: the dogs sprang to help Hercól, a friend they’d known as long as Thasha herself. But as soon as the dogs were gone half a dozen Turachs rounded the corner, and the chase was on again. They raced down the long passage toward the stateroom, the marines hurling weapons and curses, and then they reached the intersection with the painted red line on the floor, and they were safe. One of the Turachs shouted to their comrades: “Look out—that’s the mucking magic—”

  Blunt sounds of collisions, groans. Pazel and Thasha ran on, bearing their few survivors. They threw open the elegant carved door and tumbled into the stateroom.

  Fulbreech was here already, along with Marila and Neeps and Fiffengurt. All four ran to give their aid. The quartermaster took Felthrup and the wounded ixchel woman from Pazel’s bloody shirt; Neeps caught his arm, saying, “Steady, mate, you did blary good work.” Marila unclenched Thasha’s arm, and the battered ixchel let themselves be lifted onto the dining table. Fulbreech ran to Thasha and seized her by the arms. “Darling!” he said.

  Thasha looked up at Fulbreech. She was gasping, red-faced, a terror to behold. She knows, Pazel thought, she must have seen what he did, seen him grin at me, seen him slip the antidote through that door. She’s going to kill you, Fulbreech. Right here, right now.

  Thasha lowered her face to his chest.

  All told, eleven ixchel had passed through the magic wall—and become hostages themselves, although in better quarters than the forecastle house. As often before, Pazel watched in amazement at the speed with which they began to function as a unit, the strongest tending to the wounded, the designated guard keeping a sharp eye on the humans and the dogs (because who knew, who really knew?) and one more carrying their water bag from mouth to thirsty mouth.

  If he had been among the men ordered (and mostly eager) to kill “the little brutes,” he might have been even more impressed. For the carnage of the topdeck—twenty-nine ixchel and four humans slain—was by far the worst that occurred. True, Sandor Ott killed five more ixchel in as many minutes, and Ludunte in an act of madness jumped onto the head of the whaling captain, Magritte, and plunged twin daggers into his eyes. True, eight of the little people were kicked and clubbed to death on the Silver Stair, and another three on the berth deck, and an Uturphan topman was found in a cow stall with the veins in his ankles slit. But the casualties ended there. When Ott raced ahead of everyone down the No. 1 ladderway, he was executing a plan. Slight clues, chance remarks by the ixchel to their captives, observations brought to him by Alyash and Haddismal and others—above all, endless hours of maniacally focused thought—had brought him to a certainty. The mercy deck. The ixchel had their stronghold there. Probably forward of the ladderway, in that massive barricade of boxes and crates that were never unloaded in Simja, locked down still by bolts and rings and iron-tight straps, the furnishings for the Isiq household that was never to be (that he, Ott, had made sure would never be).

  Ott was quite correct; and with his usual ruthlessness he slashed the straps and shouldered over crates and axed his way into the heart of the barricade. But when at last he had torn open the hive-like fortress of the ixchel he found not one of them there to interrogate or kill. They had gone. Some spare clothes remained. A thimble-small teacup was still vaguely warm.

  Ott sniffed the cup. He had killed too quickly, he had no one to question. He sniffed again, no conscious idea why he did so, and eighty years of immersion in killing schemes saved his life.

  He leaped from the pile of crates, smashed headlong across the compartment, hurled himself down the open shaft of the ladderway—and an explosion tore apart the space where he had been standing.

  A black-powder trap. The compartment bloomed with flame. Shards of the Isiqs’ antique china flew like deadly spears, silver cutlery embedded itself in walls, a trumpet was forced half through the floorboards into the orlop deck.

  Immediately the Chathrand’s fire crew sprang for the hoses, and a team raced to start turning the chain-pumps again—but there was no bilge to pump, and certainly no seawater. The men fought the blaze with fresh water and sand. But even with a hundred men battling the fire, Rose kept up the hunt for the ixchel.

  He simply did not find any, then or ever.

  They were not in the hold. They had not taken to the rigging. Many had been seen going over the sides, but where to then? Only one staircase led from the floor of the berth up into the city, and not an ixchel was seen upon it all day. Fifty, at most sixty, might have made it into the damnably protected stateroom—but not six hundred. They had not crawled between the inner and outer hulls, or into the forepeak, or the light-shafts, or windscoops, or into the bottom of the cable tiers. They had not burrowed into the rotting hay of the manger, or massed between the floorboards (Rose gassed these hidden spaces with sulphur, one after another, as day turned to night and the dlömu watch changed again and again).

  Witchcraft, said somebody, after the fourth fruitless hour of searching. They’re with Arunis, said another. But the sorcerer’s lair also eluded them. Only his laugh came again in the darkness of the hold, just as a nervous Mr. Uskins was watching his lamp go out. He wanted to scream but could not. The mage is here, I feel it, that is his hand on my shoulder. Uskins crouched down, a quivering mass, and begged the darkness to spare him.

  For those who had always loathed and feared the “crawlies,” the recapture of the vessel should have brought a feeling of triumph. It did not. They would go to their hammocks that night more afraid than ever of being murdered in their sleep.

  The humans had chanted Death, death. Only some forty-three ixchel proved willing to die that day, however—though it might be assumed, thought Lady Oggosk, picking her slow way through the bodies on the topdeck, that they would all remember the sentiment.

  Time Regained

  1 Modobrin 941

  230th day from Etherhorde

  A warlord pauses on the field

  Newly silent, newly taken by his men

  There among many corpses shines a face he knows:

  They were friends as children

  A time like a dream

  The heart, once shattered, is open at last.

  —SULIDARAM BECTUR, circa 2147

  Three days passed. The stone oven was dismantled, and the stones carried away. The dlömu delivered much in the way of raw foodstuffs, and several enormous crates of mül. But they brought no more hot meals, and none of the black beer Mr. Bolutu had lon
ged for. Masalym had evidently decided that the ship was intoxicated enough.

  Pazel had never felt more disheartened. To think of all the hopes they had placed on Bali Adro! An enlightened Empire, Bolutu had said, a place of just laws, peace among the many races, a wise and decent monarch on the throne. A place where good mages of Ramachni’s sort would be waiting to deal with Arunis, and take away the Stone. Bolutu had not lied to them: he had simply been describing the Bali Adro of two centuries before.

  What would they do with their visitors now? The signs were hard to read. From beneath the hull came the noise of saws and hammers: the repairs, at least, were going forward. Soldiers remained plentiful along the rim of the berth, but the ordinary townsfolk were no more to be seen. Teams of dockworkers, using two of the big cargo cranes, raised what were unmistakably gangways, and swung the wooden structures into position between the ship’s rail and the edge of the berth: lowered, they would have formed wide, railed bridges between ship and shore. But they were not lowered. The workers left them dangling, thirty feet above the topdeck, like a promise deferred.

  The “birdwatchers”—so someone had named the dlömu in the ash-gray coveralls, with their notebooks and field glasses—came each morning, and left only at sundown. They studied the Chathrand in shifts, whispering together for a while when one man replaced another. Vadu joined them at the end of each day. He read the watchers’ reports, his usual gaping expression often changing to a frown. When he looked at the ship his head bobbed faster.

  What had the dlömu really made of the slaughter four days ago? Were they shocked, or was sudden, mindless killing all too familiar to them? In a sense it hardly mattered. They had seen humans at their worst. Any chance of winning the city’s trust had surely disappeared.

  So, of course, had some five hundred ixchel.

  Early morning, the first day of the last month of the year: in the North, winter would have begun in earnest; here each day felt warmer than the last. Pazel woke with sunlight already hot on his face through the single porthole of the cabin he now shared with Neeps. He groaned. Neeps was snoring. He rolled out of his hammock and groped around on the floor for his clothes.

  “Such a racket,” mumbled Neeps into his pillow. “Thought you were Old Jupe, outside my window back home.”

  Pazel pulled on his breeches. “Your neighbor?”

  “Our sow.”

  Pazel tugged at one of the ropes of Neeps’ hammock, untying it, and lowered his friend’s head to the floor. Eyes still shut, Neeps oozed like softening butter from his canvas bed. He came to rest among their boots. “Thanks,” he said, appearing to mean it.

  “Get up,” said Pazel, rubbing his eyes. “Fighting practice, remember? If you want to eat before Thasha and Hercól start whacking us, it’s got to be now.”

  The scare tactic worked. In short order Neeps too was dressed, after a fashion, and the boys stumbled into the corridor.

  “I dreamed of my mother,” said Pazel.

  Neeps responded with a yawn.

  “She was free. Not a slave or a Mzithrini wife, like Chadfallow’s afraid she’s become. She was doing something on a table-top with jars of colored sand, or smoke maybe, in a little house in a poor quarter of some city—I thought I knew which city, when I dreamed it, but I don’t remember now. And there was a dog looking in at the window. That’s curious, isn’t it?”

  Neeps might well have been sleepwalking. “I dreamed you were a sow,” he said.

  In the stateroom, Thasha and Marila were finishing a breakfast of Masalym oats, boiled with molasses. Felthrup crouched on the table eating bread and butter, a cloth napkin tied at his neck. The boys looked around carefully for Hercól. The Tholjassan often began their fighting-classes by appearing out of nowhere and swinging hard at them with a practice sword.

  “Don’t worry,” said Thasha, “he’s not hiding anywhere.”

  “We’re alone, are we?” said Pazel, surly already.

  Thasha stared at him. “Isn’t that what I just said? Nobody’s lurking in one of the cabins, if that’s what you mean.”

  “Well that’s blary good,” said Neeps, yawning again. “Because you just never know.”

  “Come here, you two,” said Marila quickly. “Be quiet. Eat oats.”

  At least Fulbreech hasn’t moved in, thought Pazel acidly. Yet.

  Then, waking farther, he shook his head. “Hold on. The ixchel. Where are the ixchel?”

  “One is behind you,” said Ensyl, leaping onto the back of an armchair, startling both boys. But to Pazel’s shock, the young ixchel woman proceeded to explain that she was the last. The other ten who had sought refuge in the stateroom had departed at sunrise, not planning to return.

  “They asked me to thank you,” she said, “and to say that you may always count on their help, should your paths cross again. Those are not idle words, either: ixchel do not make promises of aid unless they mean to keep them.”

  “But where in blazes did they go?” Neeps demanded. “The same place as all the others?”

  “So I imagine,” said Ensyl. “They asked if I would hinder their departure, and I said they were guests, not prisoners. Then they offered to take me with them. ‘Your final chance to stand with your people,’ they grandly declared. ‘I might do that, if my people stood for anything,’ I replied. Then they spat on the backs of their hands and called me a traitor, and left.”

  “But everyone knew where to run, that first day,” said Pazel, dropping into an armchair.

  Ensyl nodded. “Every clan has its disaster protocol. They change often, but they are always remembered. If the signal came we were all to fly to different rendezvous points deep in the ship. Elders were to meet us there, and take us to a place of safety.”

  “Safe from Rose?” said Thasha, incredulous.

  “We doubted that ourselves,” said Ensyl. “But this plan came from Lord Talag, and it was followed without question. I heard the ten who took shelter here discussing it—though they fell silent at my approach. All the rendezvous points were on the orlop deck, between the steerage compartment and the augrongs’ den. If they had not been trapped on the upper decks, that is where they would have gone.”

  “Orlop, portside, amidships,” said Neeps. “That’s a lonely spot, all right. Especially now that the animals are—” He stopped, looking from one face to another. “The animals. The live animal compartment. It’s right smack there, isn’t it, forward of the augrongs?”

  “Yes,” said Thasha, with a glance at Marila. “And that’s where the … strangest things have happened, to some of us.”

  Marila’s round face looked troubled, and Pazel knew why: several months ago, Thasha and Marila had one day found themselves on a very different Chathrand. A Chathrand sailing a frigid winter sea, a Chathrand crewed by pirates. They had barely escaped with their lives.

  Of course men passed through those chambers every day, and met with nothing strange. Pazel himself had spent more hours than he cared to recall filling buckets with manure and spoiled hay. Still, it was an odd coincidence. If the ixchel had gone where Thasha and Marila went, they couldn’t be much better off. But perhaps the magic didn’t work that way. Perhaps one never went to the same place twice.

  Suddenly Thasha gasped. She placed a hand on her chest, then started to her feet.

  “Someone’s just stepped through the wall! It’s not Hercól, nor Fiffengurt or Bolutu or Greysan. I didn’t let them pass through; they just came. Get your weapons! Quick!”

  She and the two boys raced for their swords. Marila grabbed Felthrup and backed away. Jorl and Suzyt crouched low, silenced by a warning finger from their mistress, every muscle tensed to spring. Pazel gripped the sword that had been Eberzam Isiq’s, wishing he could use it half as well as Thasha used her own. Hercól was right. He always said the worst thing we could do was to depend on the magic wall.

  Thasha flattened herself against the wall near the door, sword raised to strike whoever entered. Then they heard the footsteps: a single
, heavy figure, walking with long strides to the door. When they reached the threshold, someone knocked.

  Thasha looked at Pazel: a tender look, gone in half a heartbeat. Then she set her teeth and snarled: “If that’s you, Arunis, come. Ildraquin is waiting for you. It’s here in my hand.”

  She was lying; she had only her own fine sword, not Hercól’s Curse-Cleaver. Then a voice spoke from beyond the passageway: “Your pardon, Lady Thasha. It is only me.”

  They stared at one another. The voice belonged to Prince Olik. The door opened a few inches, and the man’s bright silver eyes and beak-like nose appeared in the gap.

  “A splendid morning to you all,” he said.

  Thasha opened the door wide. She lowered the sword but did not sheathe it. “Your Highness,” she said. “How did you get in here? No one has ever been able to pass through the wall without my permission.”

  “Then you must have given it, my lady,” said Olik.

  “I did no such thing,” said Thasha.

  All at once she leaped back into fighting stance and pointed her sword at Olik’s breast. “Stay where you are!” she shouted. “We haven’t seen Prince Olik in four days—and suddenly here you appear out of nowhere, alone? How do I know you’re not Arunis in disguise? Prove that you’re you!”

  Olik smiled. “That is just what the Karyskans said. Mistaken identity appears to be my fate. Alas, I’m not sure how to prove myself—but as it happens, I’ve not come alone.”

  “Thasha Isiq!”

  Captain Rose’s bellow carried down the passage. Olik stepped aside, and they could all see him, toes to the painted line, fists pounding empty air. Behind him, pressing as close as they dared, were four well-armed dlömic warriors.

  “Let me pass!” bellowed Rose. “This is a royal visit, I’m escorting His Majesty on a tour of my ship!”

  “Your guards I won’t allow,” said Thasha to the prince.