The River of Shadows

by Robert V. S. Redick

  “I’ll hurry the doctor along,” said Druffle. “Get old Chadfallow up that wall if you can manage it.”

  But “old Chadfallow,” as Pazel knew, was strapping for his age, and climbed with ease. The trouble came from Uskins, who looked frightened by the whole procedure. As Pazel steadied the rope for Chadfallow, the first mate stared at him, lips a-tremble. “Muketch,” he said at last, “I have no desire to return to the ship.”

  Pazel turned his head, astonished. “Mr. Uskins,” he said, “we don’t know where we’re going yet. The important thing is to get out of here, while we can.”

  Softly, the dog began to whine.

  “Not important to me,” said Uskins. “I’ll follow orders, thank you very much.”

  “Orders? Who ordered you to sit in a blary asylum?”

  “Sir,” corrected Uskins.

  “Sir,” repeated Pazel, increasingly confused. “Listen, you don’t want to stay here. They could lock you up forever, or experiment on you, bury you alive—anything. Don’t you realize who’s in charge in this city? Arunis and his gang, that’s who.”

  At the mention of the sorcerer, Uskins recoiled, as though Pazel had struck him in the face. “You scoundrel!” he exploded. “You’ve had it in for me from the start! I told Rose to put you off the ship back in Etherhorde, that day you tormented the augrongs. And now you’ve provoked the sorcerer!”

  “Mr. Uskins—”

  “You’re insolent and clever, and you won’t stop until we’re dead. This is what Arqual’s coming to—you, you’re the face of the future. I can’t bear it. To think that you’ve served on Chathrand herself. In my grandfather’s day you’d not have been allowed to speak to a gentleman sailor, let alone serve under him.”

  The dog whined louder, and even began to paw at the glass. “A gentleman sailor,” said Pazel, seething now. “Mr. Uskins—Pitfire, that’s not even your real name. You’re Stukey Somebody, or Somebody Stukey, from a guano-scraping village west of Etherhorde, and the only reason I’m trying to save your damned pig-ignorant hide is because I think you’re ill, actually ill, and I feel a bit—Oh credek, never mind, just get up the blary wall, for the love of Rin. Now, sir.”

  Uskins froze, clearly shocked by the tarboy’s vehemence. Pazel thrust the rope into his hand. Slowly a look of understanding crept into Uskins’ eyes, and with it came a new, sharper fear. He put his feet against the wall and began to climb.

  The dog gave an anxious yip. Pazel looked at it: the creature was dancing on its pedestal, turning in circles. On an impulse, Pazel dashed across the courtyard to stand before it. “Hush!” he whispered. The dog glanced down the corridor and cocked its head. Then it looked Pazel in the eye, whining pitifully. Its breath clouded the glass.

  “Shhhh,” said Pazel, “good dog, good dog.”

  Suddenly the dog pressed its nose to the fogged-over glass between them. It moved sideways, dragging its nose, struggling for balance. “Mr. Druffle,” said Pazel aloud, “I think this dog is awake. I mean woken. Because, Gods below, it’s … writing.”

  The dog was writing. With its nose. One scrawled and desperate word.

  RUN.

  Pazel jumped. And then he heard it, soft but certain: the rumble of angry voices. Many voices, shouting, and growing nearer by the second.

  He backed away. The dog wiped out the word with its forehead. Mystified, Pazel raised his hand, a gesture of thanks.

  “Deserters! Faithless deserters!”

  Pazel whirled about again. It was Dr. Rain, in the doorway of the bedchamber. He was staring at the figures on the rooftop, his shouting like crockery hurled at a wall. “Leave your shipmates, leave an old man behind in this human zoo! Villains! Backstabbers! Cold, mean, monstrous—”

  Pazel had to hand it to Mr. Druffle: the freebooter did exactly what was called for. He silenced the doctor with one humane, swift thump to the stomach, then lifted him and ran to where Pazel stood clutching the rope.

  “Under the arms, lad! Tie him quickly!”

  Shouts echoed from somewhere down the corridor—many voices, loud and even menacing. They’re in the north wing! Get that door open! Which of you has the key?

  The dog raced back and forth. “Haul him up!” begged Pazel, and the others complied. Rain kicked and struggled; the poor man simply had no idea what was being done to him.

  The next two minutes were agonizing, as Thasha tore at the knot around Rain’s chest, and the doctor batted her in confusion. At last she gave up, seized Dastu’s knife and slashed off the rope above the knot. She hurled the shortened rope down to Pazel and Druffle. There were a few awful moments of paralysis, as each begged the other to climb first, and the voices grew louder, nearer. At last Druffle relented, and scurried up the wall like a monkey.

  “Tell them to lie down!” said Pazel, “flat and quiet, and away from the edge. Hurry, Mr. Druffle, please!” He looked back anxiously at the glass wall and the doorway. The dog had vanished; from some distance away he heard it barking. He heard Druffle grunt as he rolled over the edge. Thasha tossed him the end of the rope. Even as he caught hold of it a door smashed open. Pazel climbed, wishing he had Thasha’s strength, as the others hauled him upward. “Faster!” hissed Thasha through her teeth. Pazel gasped, pulling, swaying as feet pounded down the corridor. He hooked a leg over the roof, and Chadfallow seized his shirt and wrenched him up with one great effort. Pazel caught a glimpse of torchlight through the glass. He rolled away from the edge, and those still standing threw themselves down. No one moved.

  Angry voices, men’s and women’s both, sounded from just outside the glass wall. “They’re in the bedchambers! Open the door, open the door!” Keys jangled, hinges gave a rusty shriek, and a mob forced its way in, shouting, raging. “Don’t let them bite you,” a male dlömu cried. “And don’t get their blood on you, either. Turn your faces away before you cut them down.”

  Pazel felt the hair rise on the back of his neck. It was the voice of the man who had led the mob the day before. The one who had promised to come back and kill them.

  The cries changed abruptly: “Not here, Kudan! The place is empty! This brainless dog’s guarding an empty cage!”

  “But I heard something.”

  “They were here, it’s been lived in. Maybe they were moved to the south wing.”

  “Spoons, cups, plates. Earth’s blood, they were treated just like men. And so much food!”

  “Some of it’s mine,” said Rain aloud. Neeps pounced on him, covering his mouth. Fortunately the old doctor was still catching his breath, and his voice did not reach the dlömu.

  “We’ll have to burn all the food,” one of them was saying, “and the mattresses too. Just the same as their bodies. Fire for the cursed, as they say.”

  “Best do it well outside the city. Somewhere too far away for the curse to come back. The Black Tongue, maybe.”

  “The Black Tongue! Surely we don’t need to go that far, Kudan.”

  “We still have to catch the humans,” said their leader. “Come, it’s time to talk with those physicians again.” Some nervous laughter, then: “Get along there, dog! No treat for the likes of you.”

  The voices faded. For several minutes no one moved. Pazel found himself shaking from head to foot. “Don’t move, anybody,” he whispered. “They’re still looking for us, remember.”

  For nearly ten minutes they lay silent; even Dr. Rain seemed to have comprehended the situation at last. Pazel gazed past his own feet: above them rose more mountains, more city, more waterfalls. He had the strange sensation of looking at the same picture through a smaller window: Masalym was still looming above them, as it had from the deck of the Chathrand, but now he was inside the Middle City, peering between its domes and towers and solitary trees, at what was surely the Upper City, the highest level, where the mountains came close to one another, and the river squeezed through to fall over one more cliff, in one more white mass of foam.

  Cautiously, they sat up. “What now?” whispered Thasha.<
br />
  No one appeared to have an answer. Pazel turned his gaze left and right. The Conservatory was a larger complex than he’d realized: eight or nine whitewashed buildings, connected by arches and covered breezeways. There were three other spacious courtyards like the one they had just escaped, and a grand approach with white marble stairs and flowers blazing red and yellow. The whole place might have been mistaken for the mansion of some eccentric lord, except for the walled-in enclosures on the eastern side, where the tol-chenni huddled in frightened packs.

  “We know what we have to do,” said Neeps. He pointed north to the cliff. “Sneak over there, climb that fence, tie off the rope and slip down into the Lower City. Right?”

  “Impossible,” said Dastu. He gestured at a squat stone building half a mile away, constructed right up against the cliff. “That’s a barracks. It’s full of men keeping watch on the Lower City. See, there’s another beyond it. They’re all along the cliff.”

  “The Middle City’s on guard against the Lower?” said Neeps.

  “Don’t you understand?” said Dastu. “The Middle City is for richer sorts. The ones down there are nearly starving. These people don’t want them swarming up here, making life difficult, begging for work or food. Anyway, we don’t stand a chance of slipping down the cliff by daylight. Besides, the rope is too short. Even dangling from the end of it we’d have a forty-foot drop.”

  “How did you and Thasha get down?” asked Pazel.

  “We ran a mile nearer the mountain, where the cliff’s not so high,” Thasha answered. “But Dastu’s right, we’d never get away with it by daylight.”

  Mr. Druffle, who had moved nearer to the street, crawled back to them on his belly, scowling. “It’s even worse than you think,” he said. “Those ruffians are all over the streets, looking for us. And there’s more of them than before. A few hundred, I’d say.”

  “Well, that decides it,” said Pazel. “We’re not going anywhere soon. Maybe they’ll give up by nightfall.”

  “Nightfall,” scoffed Uskins. “We will never make it to nightfall! All those towers. Someone is going to notice us, and then we’ll die. You were a fool to bring us up here, Muketch.”

  “Call him a fool,” said Marila. “We’d be dead already if we’d stayed down there, like you wanted to. And the only tower near us is that giant thing straight ahead, and it looks abandoned to me.”

  The first mate sniffed. “Twenty minutes, at the very outside. That’s how long I give us. Assuming that quack can keep from howling again.”

  They lay down, as far from the edges of the roof as they could, as the Middle City went about its bustling, grumbling, early-morning routine. Now and then they heard dlömic men in the street, asking about them, sometimes with open suspicion. Once a nearby voice erupted in rage: “Harmless? Harmless? Sister, they’re devils! Haven’t you heard what went on at the port? They’ve brought the nuhzat back among us! They’re reviving old curses, inventing new ones. We went to them humbly, we asked how we could make amends. They wouldn’t answer.”

  “Maybe they couldn’t,” replied a dlömic woman, “because they didn’t know what you were asking.”

  “They knew!” shouted the man. “It’s not justice they want, sister, it’s revenge! This day was foreseen!”

  After the two dlömu moved on, the angry voices sounded less frequently, and with more discouragement. But when the humans peeked down from the roof they saw that the streets were still crowded. There was no means of escape.

  Twenty minutes passed, then twenty more. Pazel, Thasha, Neeps and Marila lay on their backs, a bit apart from the others, with their heads close together and their legs sticking out like the spokes of a wheel. Pazel realized, almost with shock, that he was comfortable. The sun was bright, the roof warm against his back. He looked at Thasha and thought he had never seen a more beautiful face, but what he said was, “You could use a good scrub.”

  Thasha gave him a pained sort of grin. She needed to laugh, he thought, but how could she, after those terrible hints and guesses about where she came from? Hercól might believe what Admiral Isiq had claimed: that his wife Clorisuela had finally succeeded in bearing a child, after four miscarriages. But Thasha didn’t. And Pazel could find little reason why she should.

  It was not that he believed a word Arunis had spoken. But Neeps’ ideas were another matter. Thasha had done some extraordinary things, in the Red Storm, and in the battle with the rats. She controlled the invisible wall. She’d been watched over her whole life by Ramachni. And who else could Thasha have meant when she said, I’ll never let her come back?

  But old Isiq, making secret love to a mage? That was unthinkable. Pazel had witnessed the admiral’s shock at everything that had happened to Thasha. No, Isiq was no insider, with a hand in these intrigues. He was just another tool.

  Pazel smiled back at her, to hide the blackness of his thoughts. Even a tool could father a girl on his concubine, and then feel shame, and invent a lie about his wife’s miraculous pregnancy. She really might be the child of Syrarys. Aya Rin, don’t let that be true.

  Thasha returned her gaze to the sky. “What do you three want to do when this is over?” she whispered. “I mean, when it’s all over, and we’re back in the North, safe and sound?”

  She wasn’t fooling herself; Pazel could tell she knew just how unlikely it was that they’d ever face such a choice. No one answered at first. Then Marila said, “I want to go to school. And then, when I know something, I want to start one. A school for deaf people. Half the sponge-divers in Tholjassa lose their hearing sooner or later.”

  Neeps turned over and planted an awkward kiss on her cheek.

  “You can’t come,” Marila told him.

  “What do you want to do, Neeps?” Pazel asked quickly, before they could start to argue.

  Neeps shook his head. “Get away from the blary ocean, that’s what. I know we islanders are supposed to love it, and sometimes I do. But credek, enough is enough. I’ve been at sea since I was nine. I’m tired of imagining all the ways I could drown.”

  After a brief pause, he added, “I’ve never been atop a mountain in my life. Not one. And I’ve never touched snow. I want to pick up a handful, and learn what that feels like. Maybe it’s foolish, but I dream about these things.”

  Thasha touched Pazel’s leg. “Your turn.”

  Pazel hesitated. Why was it such an unsettling question? Thasha was not even looking at him, and yet he felt as though she had backed him into a corner. He tried to picture the two of them, married, settled in the Orch’dury or her mansion in Etherhorde. Thirty years from now. Fifty. He recalled the vision he’d had at Bramian, he and Thasha joining some forest tribe, retreating from the world into the heart of that giant island. What was he thinking? What did fantasies, or love for that matter, have to do with saving this world from a beast like Arunis? He touched the shell that Klyst had placed beneath his skin at the collarbone. It used to burn him when Klyst was jealous; now it was just an ordinary shell. The thought left him briefly desolate.

  “Well?” said Neeps.

  Pazel groped for a truthful answer. He thought, I don’t want to want anything. I couldn’t stand it, if Ormael was dead, or dying, or two hundred years older. To go there, dreaming of something that will never come back …

  “I can’t seem to decide,” he said, pathetically.

  Suddenly there was a great commotion from the others. Pazel thought for a moment that they’d been eavesdropping, and were leaping up to vent their disgust at his indecision. But then he saw something that made him forget all that: Ibjen and Prince Olik, walking across the roof toward them, both smiling broadly. And emerging last from the trapdoor that none of them had seen beneath the leaf-litter, Hercól. He was smiling broadly.

  “Eight lizards, basking in the sun,” he said. “Come down before you burn.”

  “So that is how things stand,” said the prince, stalking almost at a run down the corridor. “He has the Stone, and we must get it back be
fore that ship arrives—and more important, before he manages to do something hideous, irreparable.”

  The humans were bunched around him, keeping pace. “How do we know he hasn’t mastered the Stone already, Sire?” asked Neeps.

  “By the fact that we yet breathe, Mr. Undrabust,” said the prince.

  He reached the end of the corridor. Without stopping, he leaned into a pair of big double-doors, spreading them wide, and charged into the main entrance hall of the Conservatory. His personal servants and guards were waiting there, along with most of the birdwatchers, who seemed caught between relief and disappointment at the sight of the departing humans. One tried to hand a sheet of parchment to Mr. Druffle.

  “A simple questionnaire, it will take just a minute—”

  “It’ll take less than that,” snarled Druffle, crushing the sheet in his fist.

  They passed through the outer doors and found themselves in dazzling sunshine. They were on the portico, facing the marble stairs and wide gardens that fronted the Conservatory. Thasha gave a cry of joy: Jorl and Suzyt were waiting there, untethered. They leaped on her, ecstatic and squealing. “They are clever dogs,” said the prince. “You have trained them almost to dlömic standards, and that is high praise.”

  “How did you get them to obey you?” said Thasha, hugging both mastiffs at once.

  “They did nothing of the kind,” laughed the prince. “But they listened to Felthrup, right enough. And he convinced them I was a friend. Hurry, now, let’s be gone from here.”

  “Yes!” shouted Dr. Rain, shuffling quickly down the stairs. “Out, out, out!”

  “The doctor disapproves of our facility,” said Olik, “but in fact you were lucky to have been locked up here. There are not many flat-roofed buildings in the Middle City, although there are plenty of flat heads. One or the other kept your would-be executioners from seeking you in the most obvious of hiding places.”

  “How did you get rid of them?” asked Uskins, who was having a lucid moment.

  “I left that to Vadu,” said the prince. “He was rather startled to find me alive, and rather terrified to imagine how many people might already have learned what he put me through last night. Suffice it to say that our relations are off to a fresh start.”