The River of Shadows

by Robert V. S. Redick

  Pazel’s mouth fell open, but Chadfallow gave a dismissive wave. “It was nonsense, girlish babble. And looking back I think Neda meant only to take her father’s side, to drive the interfering Arquali from your home. Even if she had to lie.”

  Pazel felt hollow inside, and cold. “She didn’t manage to drive you out,” said Pazel. “She drove Gregory away. Oh, Neda.”

  “I told him it was rubbish,” said the doctor, “and he professed to take my word. We shook hands that day, affirmed our friendship. But it was never the same—and two months later, he was gone. Yes, I think he must have believed Neda in his heart. As for Suthinia, I doubt if he ever dared ask her. They are perfectly matched in one way, your parents. They are both quite terribly proud.”

  Pazel slid down against the wall. He dragged a grimy arm across his eyes. “He wanted it to be true that you were sleeping with her. He was looking for an excuse to leave us. That’s what I think.”

  Chadfallow sat down next to him, shaking his head. “I can’t tell you, Pazel. But I hope you won’t torture yourself with what-ifs, as I have done these many years. The past is gone; the future is wailing for its breakfast. That is what my father used to say.”

  Pazel stared at him blankly. “Ignus,” he said, “we can’t go hunting Arunis. We can’t.”

  “I will question you no further about the expedition.”

  “But if we did,” said Pazel, “I’d understand you having to stay here. I’d … be proud of you. For seeing clearly. For knowing how to choose.”

  Chadfallow dropped his eyes. He was struggling for composure, and then the struggle ended, and his shoulders shook. Pazel embraced him, for the first time in more than six years, and the Imperial Surgeon wept and said, “My lad, my excellent boy,” and the sailors passing in the corridor had the grace to look away.

  Thasha entered her father’s cabin with a tin of sweetpine and placed a little in the pocket of each of his coats, to keep the moths at bay. She took down the portrait of some nameless uncle holding a cat and wrapped it in a sheet.11

  “I despise those creatures,” said Felthrup, startling her from behind. “Oggosk’s monster Sniraga has already been sniffing at the hole in the magic wall. Can you not repair it, Thasha?”

  “Don’t you think I’d have done so by now?” answered Thasha. “For some reason I was given the power to decide who passes through the wall, and who doesn’t—but that’s as far as it goes.”

  “Of course, of course.” With a sigh Felthrup leaped onto the bed, where he gazed deeply into Syrarys’ dressing mirror. When he caught Thasha looking at him, he gave a small, embarrassed squeak. “I am not vain,” he said. “There is something odd about that mirror. Whenever I look into it, I see only myself, and yet always—for no reason I can discover—I expect to see someone else.”

  “Someone in particular?” asked Thasha.

  “Yes,” said Felthrup. “Ramachni. I expect to see Ramachni, looking out at me. And I feel his presence in other places, Lady: standing before the magic wall, or napping on the bearskin.”

  Startled anew, Thasha gazed into the mirror herself. She saw nothing strange, except her own face: eyes that were hers, but not quite hers, eyes more wary and knowing than the last time she’d studied herself in a glass. She did not much like that look of hers, and wondered how long she had worn it.

  “My lady,” said Felthrup, “I will go with you to the mountains.”

  Thasha turned to him, overwhelmed. The courage of the little creature, the loyalty. “If we go,” she said, “you must stay behind, darling rat.”

  “No!” Felthrup whirled in a circle. “I don’t want to stay here alone! I can’t face it, this great mean ship, without you and the others beside me!”

  “You wouldn’t be alone,” said Thasha. “You’d have Fiffengurt, and Jorl and Suzyt. And whether we go or stay you’ll have work to do. Someone has to find the ixchel, and make peace. And there’s something else, too: you have to dream for us, Felthrup. That is how you’ll do your traveling, from now on. Who knows? Maybe you’ll find Ramachni that way, and bring him to us.”

  “Ramachni has always done the finding,” said Felthrup.

  “You found Pazel Doldur,” said Thasha.

  A light shone in Felthrup’s black eyes. “It was wonderful there, in the Orfuin Club, among the scholars. I felt at home with them, somehow, even the one who told me to go away and eat cake.”

  Suddenly the floor heaved. The Chathrand was tilting over: a slow, scraping list to portside, accompanied by groaning timbers, creaking screws, curses from above and below. Thasha and Felthrup scrambled into the outer stateroom.

  “We’re afloat,” said Neeps, mopping beer from the floor. “Credek, they’ve got a lot of rebalancing to do.”

  “Let’s go up there,” said Marila.

  The three youths left the stateroom. They met Pazel on the Silver Stair, and together they climbed to the topdeck. It was very dark, but even by the dim lamplight they could see how much had changed. The inner wall of the berth had been retracted, and the locks opened wide. The river had been allowed to pour back into the great basin, and the Chathrand, as Neeps said, was at last afloat. The mooring-lines creaked, the gangways rocked on their hinges.

  Suddenly Thasha stifled a cry. Two beings were sweeping toward them from amidships. They were dressed in rags, which they clutched tight against the evening wind; their hands were bone-thin and colorless. One was hooded, and the other wore an ancient Merchant Service cap. But neither figure possessed a face. It was appalling: the fronts of their heads simply blurred to nothingness. She grabbed Pazel by the arm.

  “You don’t see them, do you?”

  “See what, Thasha?”

  She knew quite well that they were ghosts. She had seen them by daylight, these shades of the former captains of the Great Ship. But by daylight they looked human—old, strange, crazed maybe, but human. Only drugged with blanë, close to death herself, had she seen them in this form. A vision she had tried for months to forget.

  The two figures came right for her. Thasha stepped backward, feeling the cold in them from yards away. “Duchess!” sighed the figure in the cap.

  “I’m not,” said Thasha.

  “Blind fool,” hissed the hooded figure to its companion. “The hag is in the cabin with her child. You’re standing before our mistress now, so keep a civil tongue.”

  Her friends were talking, their voices far away. “I’m not your mistress, either,” she said. Then, a bit more bravely: “I don’t want you near me. Go to your rest, or wherever you belong.”

  “We belong in the stomach of the night,” said the hooded spirit, thrusting its non-face closer to hers. “We are the bread of the unborn, the milk they will drink in their first hours. You keep us here, Mistress—you and the Red Beast. How can you order us hence, while you hold our chains in your hand?”

  “Go to him!” cried the figure in the cap. “Go to Rose and help him face his doom! Go now, girl, before it’s too late!”

  The hooded figure turned on its companion, outraged that it had taken such a tone with “our mistress.” They began to bicker, a sound like driving rain. Thasha turned and fled to starboard, dragging her friends with her. Suddenly another ghost rose through a glass plank on their left and began shuffling toward her purposefully. She was not going to be able to ignore them. And perhaps she shouldn’t: Oggosk too had been trying to tell them something about Rose, when she shared that letter.

  “Come with me,” said Thasha to the others, and headed straight for the captain’s door beneath the quarterdeck. But as they neared it Sergeant Haddismal emerged, frowning at some inner thought. At the sight of them he was at once suspicious. He stopped in the doorway, blocking their path.

  “Where d’ye imagine you’re going?” he said. “The captain’s too busy to breathe. He don’t need to hear from four lunatics on top of everything else.”

  “Haven’t you learned how insulting that is?” said Marila, with such vehemence that even he
r friends looked at her in surprise.

  “Insulting?” said Haddismal. “You taking after the fish-eyes, now?”

  “Could be worse folk to take after,” said Neeps. “Right, Marila?”

  “Just be quiet,” she said.

  “Sergeant,” said Thasha with rising impatience, “we were told to see the captain, right now.”

  “Told, eh? By whom?”

  Thasha said nothing, and Haddismal’s mouth curled in anger. “Don’t muck around with me,” he said. “You know what strange fancy’s grabbed hold of him, don’t you? You’re here to take advantage. Do you know that he’s been marked for execution, just because he bled that fishy prince a little? I suppose you want him to go back ashore and walk among them. Throw himself on their mercy. Not likely, girl.”

  “What in Pitfire are you talking about?” said Thasha. “What fancy’s come over him?”

  Before Haddismal could reply they heard Rose himself, bellowing from behind him. “Stand clear, you tinshirt bastard! Let me out before I choke!”

  Haddismal jumped aside, and Rose barreled into the doorway. For the second time in five minutes, Thasha had to contain the urge to cry out. The others did cry out, and even Haddismal made an appalled noise in his throat.

  “Aya, Captain, you should leave that behind in your chambers! Don’t let the lads see you with it, sir.”

  Rose was clutching the entire carcass of a leopard. It was dry and shriveled and hard as wood, but quite real. Its glass eyes were open; a waxy tongue lay rippling between huge yellow fangs. Rose was holding it against his chest with one arm. Like the Turach, he stopped dead at the sight of Thasha and her companions. His face paled; his eyes moved from one youth to another.

  “You devils,” he said. “I curse the day you came aboard.”

  “Beg your pardon, sir,” said Haddismal. “I was about to send them away.”

  “Not till dawn! Not till dawn!”

  “I meant away from your door, sir.”

  “I’ll do it,” said Rose, but his eyes were drifting, and it seemed he spoke neither to the Turach nor to the youths. “Do you hear me? I’ll do it! What more do you want?”

  “Do what, for Rin’s sake?” asked Pazel. “What’s the matter with you? What’s that leopard for?”

  Rose gave the leopard a convulsive squeeze. Then, noticing that Haddismal too was staring at the creature, he barked: “Get on with your preparations! You’re fifteen hours from launch, and I’m still captain while I walk this ship!”

  Haddismal stalked off, perplexed and affronted. Rose was still looking past them—at the ghosts, of course. He had always been able to see them, those shades of his predecessors. They hounded him, jeered and poked. Thasha wondered how he managed to hold on to the least hint of sanity under such conditions. But had the ghosts’ torments made him crazy, or was he able to sense them because he was already mad? Either way, it chilled her to know that the only other person aboard who saw the figures was herself.

  “I never requested the Chathrand,” he said. “Has the witch not told you? I was running inland when the Flikkermen tracked me down.”

  Like everyone aboard Thasha had heard the rumor, though not from Lady Oggosk. But with Rose it was always better not to tip one’s hand. “Why are you telling us this, Captain?” she asked.

  “Say it!”

  Rose flinched. It was another ghost, just above them on the quarterdeck. Thasha recognized the figure as Captain Kurlstaf: no other commander of the Great Ship dabbed pink paint on his fingernails. Thasha and Rose both looked at Kurlstaf: his tattered dress, his ancient pearls. He pointed a long white finger-bone at Rose.

  “Say it!” hissed the shade again. “Raise your sleeve and swear!”

  Rose professed to despise Kurlstaf, called him pansy and tarboy-tickler, among uglier names. But Thasha knew he also put more stock in Kurlstaf’s opinions than those of any of the other spirits.

  “I am responsible for the well-being of this ship,” said Rose.

  “Swear, you hairy red dog!” cried Kurlstaf.

  Most reluctantly, Rose tugged his right sleeve up above the wrist. They all knew he bore the wolf-scar there: a burn identical to those carried by Pazel, Neeps, Thasha, Hercól, Bolutu—and Diadrelu, though hers they had only seen after her death. Rose held his arm up like a talisman.

  “I didn’t ask for this either, by the Night Gods,” he said, “but it’s burned too deep ever to heal. I’m stuck with it, stuck with you, to the last tack and beyond.” He was still looking at Kurlstaf. “If a hopeless quest is to be the fate of Nilus Rose—why not? I’ll swear. You’ll see and be amazed, for I’ll give the oath, live by it, and die by it if necessary. And it will be necessary—just look at these circus clowns. But I’ll swear. You don’t believe me, do you?”

  “What’s the leopard for?” asked Neeps.

  “Shut up about the leopard! I hate the leopard!” Rose lunged forward and swung the animal like a club. The youths jumped back. Rose dropped to his knees and smashed the leopard against the deck so violently that one of the glass eyes popped out and rolled away. “I hate it! I hate it! And you ghouls also, you dead swindlers, transvestites, whoremongers, cheats! Why should I swear anything to you? After tonight I’ll never see you again, unless we meet in the Pits!”

  From within his cabin, Lady Oggosk gave a peremptory shriek: “Nilus! That is undignified! Come here, I haven’t finished with your shirt.”

  The captain grew still. He hugged the leopard once more to his chest, staring at the astonished youths. “Don’t you dare be late,” he said.

  When the door closed the others drifted forward along the portside rail, through the mad scramble of departure-less-fifteen-hours. The ghosts were still visible to Thasha but they kept a respectful distance. If she faced one of them directly, it bowed.

  “Do you realize what he was telling us?” said Neeps. “He wants to come along! Rose! And he didn’t even stop to ask whether or not we’re going through with it.”

  “He should have asked,” said Pazel, “because there’s no mucking way we can. We’d never see the ship again. We’d never see other humans again. Besides, we’d draw all sorts of attention on that highway, just as we’ve done here. I’ll bet Arunis has paid someone to keep watch for anything outlandish coming his way—human beings, for instance.”

  Pazel’s argument was met with silence. He was trying to convince himself as much as anyone, Thasha mused. They walked on toward the bow, dodging the busiest work areas. Neeps tried to take Marila’s hand but she would not let him. Then out of nowhere, Bolutu rushed up and pointed excitedly at the quay.

  “A snow heron! A snow heron has flown right into the city! It is a sacred bird, a blessing that comes in times of change. Look there to starboard; you will see it.”

  A play of shadows in the lanternlight: then a huge, long-legged bird swept over the quay, its eight-foot wings beating slow and fragile. It was pure white, and by the lanterns’ soft glow its unruly feathers were ghostly. With a raucous croak it alighted on the Chathrand’s forecastle, a few yards from the Goose-Girl figurehead. On the quay the dlömu stood staring, their work forgotten. The heron folded its wings and stood motionless, its back to the ship, as though it knew somehow that the eight hundred humans would do it no harm.

  The bird’s stillness was monumental. Thasha wanted to ask why the dlömu revered it so, but a part of her seemed to understand already. If it was an omen of change, then its stillness was the perfect opposite of what was to come. Cherish this, it might have said, for when you move again it will be gone, you will have lost it forever.

  “I have seen but one other snow heron in my life,” said Bolutu. “It stood on the harbor wall as I sailed out of Masalym to cross the Nelluroq. They were rare even then, two centuries ago. Now I understand that years go by without a single sighting anywhere in the South.”

  Thasha closed her eyes. An image had burst into her mind, sudden and unsought. A sky above a marsh, full of blowing confetti, living snow.
Thousands, she thought, as the image sharpened, and the roar of their mingled calls echoed inside her. I’ve walked among these birds in their thousands.

  Pazel’s hand on her elbow brought her back. She opened her eyes, the vision gone. She gave him a frightened smile.

  Pazel turned to Bolutu. “Someone gave Rose a stuffed cat,” he said.

  “A leopard,” said Bolutu, smiling. “Of course. It was a gift from the Naval Commander of Masalym—an old fellow with a ceremonial post; he commands a fleet of sixteen hulks and derelicts. But it was a grand gesture all the same. By tradition a departing captain must hold the leopard until the last mooring-line is cast off. Then he throws it ashore, and the well-wishers catch it, being most careful not to let it touch the earth. Good luck follows any who observe the rite; but if the creature so much as brushes the cobbles—disaster. And if the captain lets it be held for even an instant by another man aboard—well, that man will be his death.” He shrugged. “Dlömic seafarers are as superstitious as any.”

  “No wonder he barked at Haddismal,” said Neeps. “But why is he so upset about the leopard?”

  “I guess you haven’t noticed,” said Marila, “that he’s terrified of cats.”

  “All his life,” said Bolutu, nodding. “That much I have gleaned from his exchanges with Lady Oggosk. It goes beyond Sniraga; he cannot abide cats of any sort. The sicuñas must have struck him as horrors from the Pits.”

  Thasha glanced at Bolutu. “You’ve lost your monk’s hat,” she observed.

  “It is only put away,” said Bolutu, a bit sadly. “One day I may wear it again, if we indeed sail north together. But there is no Rinfaith here, Lady Thasha. Not south of the Ruling Sea, and not in my heart.”

  A few sailors stopped their work and looked at him. “That’s a funny sort of faith, Brother Bolutu,” said Mr. Fegin.

  “I don’t disagree,” said Bolutu, “and yet I am bound to respect the Ninety Rules, and the second of these is the call to honesty. For twenty years my body was human. Now it has reverted to its old form, and I find my old, ancestral faith contending with my adopted one.”