The River of Shadows

by Robert V. S. Redick

  “Ain’t but half a dozen matches left—”

  Another flared: Thasha saw Alyash’s crazed eyes by its light—and then sudden motion, and darkness. “Damn the mucking things!” cried the bosun. “It’s impossible! They dive on the flame!”

  “Strike no more matches,” came Hercól’s voice, suddenly. “We must get farther from their roosting-place; there are simply too many here. Do not run, do not separate! But tell me you’re here! Turachs! Where are you?”

  “Here!” shouted the younger of the soldiers. “Undrabust is with me. We’re all right, we’re just—”

  “Vispek!” shouted Hercól. “Jalantri! Neda Ygraël!”

  Only Neda answered him—and from a surprising distance. Thasha heard Pazel’s frightened gasp. “Neda!” he shouted at the top of his lungs. “Over here! Hurry, hurry!”

  This time there was no answer at all. The bats flowed about them like water. Nothing was visible save the fading glow from the pool.

  Footsteps crashed nearer, and then Neeps and the younger Turach found them, their blind hands groping. From farther off, the dlömic warriors shouted, drawing nearer.

  “But the sfvantskors!” cried Pazel. “I can’t hear their voices anymore!”

  “Forget them,” said Alyash. “They ran the wrong way.”

  Furious, Pazel turned in the direction of Alyash’s voice. “She’s my Gods-damned sister!” he shouted.

  “She’s a fanatic, a monster with a womb!”

  A sword whined from its sheath. “Pathkendle! No!” cried Hercól.

  “You drawing a blade on me, Muketch?” snarled Alyash. “Come on, then, I’ll have your blary head!”

  There was a horrible scream. But it came from neither Pazel nor Alyash. It was the Turach who was screaming, and his voice came from above them, rising by the second.

  “It’s the worms!” Pazel shouted. “I’m fighting the mucking worms!”

  Then there was no order of any kind. Every voice rose to howling; no one could see anyone; bodies smashed in all directions; Hercól’s shouts for order fell on deaf ears. Thasha felt a tentacle graze her hand, then whip around her leg. She was rising; then her sword flashed and cut the tendril and she fell headfirst, and barely missed dying on her own sword. Up she leaped, stumbling, whirling, blind as death. The voices were already fewer, and all farther away. She cried out for Pazel, for Neeps and Hercól, but no one answered. From somewhere a fitful light appeared; she whirled toward it, a strange, pulsing, indistinct sort of light, but there were figures in it, struggling—

  “Oh Gods. Oh sweet Rin.”

  Not struggling. Making love. It was herself and Pazel she saw, naked under their cedar tree, her hands on the branch above them, her legs on either side of his thrusting hips.

  It was Syrarys and Sandor Ott. The concubine looked at her suddenly, over the assassin’s shoulder. “Daughter,” she gasped.

  Thasha fell to her knees. Not real. Not true. But she was weeping; it was a physical attack she was suffering, it was the spores, the darkness, the world that stabbed and stabbed again. She forced herself to her feet and pushed on, toward nothing, and then she heard Alyash and Hercól behind her, and they were fighting, and she turned and floundered toward them with the last of her strength.

  “Idiot! Put it down, put it down!”

  That was Hercól. Thasha tried to quicken her pace—and fell down the slope, back among the leeches, not stopping to fight them, not stopping for anything. There was the dying glow from the pool. And there was Hercól, collapsed against its rim, dragging himself after Alyash, who kept leaping out of his reach, and fumbling with matches, and something else—

  “Fool! You can’t shoot whatever’s up there!”

  “I can mucking well scare the bastards!”

  “Don’t do it, Alyash!”

  A match flared. The bats descended on it immediately, but Alyash was quicker. He forced the tiny flame into the ignition chamber of his pistol, thrust it straight up through the mass of creatures and fired.

  Bats erupted from the clearing in a boundless swarm. Alyash stood unharmed among them, laughing, triumphant—and then came a sound like a great sail ripped in two.

  The flood lifted Thasha like a matchstick. The light was gone, the clearing gone; she flailed, helpless, borne away by the onslaught of water. Disarmed, nearly drowning, rolled head over heels through the fungi and leeches and drowning bats, grabbing at the larger growths only to find them ripped away, smashing through trees, tearing at roots with her fingernails. And still the water thundered down, as if a suspended lake were emptying into the forest.

  A bladder-fungus, dangling over them, a monster of a growth. The trap had been sprung.

  Her strong limbs were useless; her body struck tree after rock-hard tree. A part of her had always wondered what it could possibly feel like, to go down with a ship in storm. This was the answer. Pain and blindness and sharp blows in the dark. She thought of Pazel and wished they’d made love long before.

  Just let me see something (she was begging Rin like a schoolgirl). I can die, we can fail, but let me see something, anything. So many ways they might have died before, but not this way, in this pit of a forest, this unspeakable, dark hole—

  A thought burst inside her. She stopped fighting, stilled by wonder. An insane, a delirious idea.

  Look for me—

  But hope was like that, wasn’t it? A delirium that clouded your mind. A mist that protected you from the truth you couldn’t bear to look at. Until something solid parted the mist: a cannonball, a reef, the words of a traitor with just minutes to live.

  —when a darkness comes beyond today’s imagining.

  It was at that very moment that her hand caught something solid, and held. It was one of the worm-like tendrils, and though it strained terribly to pull free, to lift her up into the canopy and another sort of death, the rushing water was far stronger, and it became Thasha’s lifeline, minute after blind, precious minute. And then her blindness came to an end.

  Logic told her that she was hallucinating yet again, but her heart knew otherwise. At a great distance away through the flooded forest, a haze of light began to shine. It was wide and dispersed, like the stars on a cloudless night, except that these stars were blue, and moving, and as they neared her they lit up the forest as no starlight could. They were fireflies, and they broke over her in a blue wave, a second flood above the water, and before them flew a great dark owl. It circled Thasha once, then swept away into the darkness, and the storm of fireflies went with it. But some of the insects stayed, whirling above Thasha, showing her the great complexity of vines and upper branches of the trees, and the underside of the bottommost leaf-layer, three hundred feet over her head.

  When the water fell, it did so quickly, draining out through the root-mat beneath her feet. Fungi opened pores like puffy lips, spat out water and mud. When the water dropped below her waist Thasha released the tendril, watched it curl into a slender orifice high in the joint of an overhead branch. Trees with mouths. In some of those mouths were dlömic soldiers. In another, a young Turach marine, sent by his Emperor to the far side of the world on a secret mission, to fight (he was surely told) the enemies of the Crown.

  Dark or bright, I hate this place, she thought.

  Then the fireflies drew closer together and dropped nearer to the ground. As she watched, dumbfounded, they illuminated a path: one that began just over her head, and stretched away into the forest. Thasha couldn’t help but smile. As in a dream, she set out walking, and the path vanished behind her as the little insects followed on her heels.

  Some ten minutes had passed when she saw the owl again. It was perched atop a high quartz rock that glittered in the light of the fireflies.

  “You’ve lost your ship, I see,” said the owl. “And it is yours, you know, regardless of the paperwork back in Etherhorde.”

  Thasha stared at it a moment. “I’m not imagining you,” she said, and raised her arms.

  The owl dived
straight at her, and Thasha did not flinch. Right before her face it suddenly fanned its wings dramatically, came to a near halt, and fell into her arms: a black mink.

  A cry from deep in her chest escaped her, and she lifted the creature and hid her face in its fur. “Ramachni. Ramachni. Aya Rin, it’s been so long.”

  “Oh dearest, that is such a charmingly human way to reckon time. I was just thinking that this has been the shortest night’s sleep I could remember. But an eventful night, to be sure. Come, dry your eyes. There will be time for tears, and much else, when the fight is done.”

  “Don’t leave us again!”

  The mage sat back in her hands. His fixed his immense black eyes on her, and there was a thousand times the depth and mystery in them as in the forest, and yet they were, as they ever had been, kind.

  “You and I cannot be parted,” he said. “Even if we leave the world of the living behind—minutes from now, or years—we shall do so together. Now walk, Thasha. Or better still, run, if your wounds will bear it. Many are suffering for your sake.”

  His words were like a jolt out of a dream. She ran, with the mage in her arms, beneath the firefly-lit path, and in another five minutes she came to a small rise, above which the fireflies danced in a net of brilliance. Atop the rise, seated among seashell-like fungi, were some half a dozen of their party. She dashed among them, heart in her mouth. Ibjen. Neda. Bolutu. Big Skip. Lunja. And Neeps.

  “Thasha!” he cried, jumping up to embrace her.

  “But where—where are—”

  Neeps pointed down the far side of the hill. There were two other firefly-paths snaking off into the forest. One of them was shrinking toward them, and upon it they could see the older Turach, Dastu and Cayer Vispek, running with one hand folded to his chest. When he saw Neda on the hillside Vispek did something Thasha never would have believed of him: he sobbed. Hiding the reaction almost at once, he held out his arm, and Myett leaped to the ground. The humans and the ixchel gazed with wonder at Ramachni.

  “The weasel-mage,” gasped the Turach. “By the Blessed Tree, I thought Arunis had finished you off.”

  “Not yet,” said Ramachni, baring his teeth.

  “Hercól spoke of you,” said Cayer Vispek, “a woken mink with the powers of a wizard. I did not believe him, but now—”

  “I am a mink only in this world, Cayer,” said Ramachni, “and even here I can take other forms, now and then. I know you believe that that can be done—you who crossed the Nelluroq as whales.”

  “And died as humans, some of us,” said Vispek. “Jalantri fell to the leeches, Neda Ygraël. He was gone before the water came.”

  Now it was Neda’s turn to fight back tears. Thasha reached to console her, but Neeps caught her arm, gently shaking his head. The two of them descended the hill, toward the last remaining path of fireflies. At first glance it appeared quite empty. Wordlessly, they started to run along its course, back into the forest. They could see where the light ended, just beyond that next tree, and then—

  Hercól and Pazel, limping arm in arm, rounded the tree, and clinging to Hercól’s shoulder was Ensyl. Seeing Neeps and Thasha, the ixchel woman pointed and cried out with joy. They rushed together, and Thasha for one made no attempt to hide her tears.

  When she told them that Ramachni had come at last, Thasha thought her friends were close to tears themselves. “He’ll be stronger than ever,” said Pazel. “He said he would be, when he came back.”

  “The rest of us aren’t so lucky, though,” said Neeps. “Lunja is still alive, but the other dlömic soldiers are gone, and so’s the younger Turach. And Alyash too, I suppose.”

  “I’m not sorry for that,” said Pazel.

  “Be sorry for the day he was truly lost,” said Hercól, “though it was decades before your birth, and perhaps not so long after his own.”

  “Lost to evil, you mean,” said Pazel. “I understand. I saw into his master’s mind, Ott’s mind, you know.” He stopped a moment, his voice suddenly tight. “I understand, but I can’t forgive. Is that wrong of me, Hercól?”

  “You are wrong only in being certain of what you can and cannot do,” said the swordsman. “For now clear your minds, of rage and fear alike. Our work is not done. And here is one tool that remains to help us do it.” He touched the leather band across his shoulder. Ildraquin was still strapped to his back.

  “Cayer Vispek kept his sword as well,” said Neeps, “and Neda still has her dagger. That’s all the weaponry left to us.”

  “Then be glad I made you train with staves,” said Hercól, “and find some, quickly. Put Big Skip on the task; he is a fine judge of anything resembling a club.”

  It was then that they noticed the moaning sound overhead. It was the wind: something they had not heard once in the Infernal Forest.

  “That change came quickly,” said Ensyl.

  “Yes,” said Hercól, “suspiciously so.”

  The wind picked up speed. Leaning into it, they hurried back to the glowing hill. Even before they arrived Thasha could see what was happening: the fireflies were being carried off, dispersed, and the great darkness of the forest was returning.

  But atop the hill Ramachni stood straight and calm, and the fireflies about him danced on unperturbed. As Thasha and the others drew near they stepped abruptly into quiet, windless air, as though they had passed through the wall of an inverted fish-bowl, with Ramachni at the center. But it was a tiny space in the darkness. Once again Thasha felt as though she were standing on the floor of the sea.

  Hercól knelt down before Ramachni. “Beloved friend,” he said. “Now I know that what I professed to others is the very truth: that despair alone brings ruin. Even with the Nilstone in hand, Arunis could not prevent your return.”

  “On the contrary,” said Ramachni, “I was able to return only because he had the Nilstone in hand—or rather because his idiot does. They are delving very deep into the River of Shadows, calling out to the Swarm, the force that would end all life on Alifros. But when you open a window you cannot always be sure who or what may blow through it. I was waiting outside that window. Arunis was not happy to see me.”

  Big Skip, as it turned out, was already on the club-seeking task. He, Bolutu and Ibjen had scoured the area and managed to gather a number of heavy limbs. Soon everyone who lacked another weapon had a solid piece of wood in their hands.

  “Arunis is experimenting now,” said Ramachni, “but we are not too late. Remember that no matter what fell powers he has gained, his body is still that of a man. He will try to stop us from closing on him. But close we shall, and strike we shall, or die together in the attempt.”

  Pazel walked to the edge of the sphere of becalmed air. He stretched out his hand until he felt the raging wind. “It’s still growing,” he called over his shoulder.

  “My own strength has increased as well,” said Ramachni. “There is nothing left but to test it. You have one march left ahead of you, travelers, but at least it will not be in the dark. Thasha, my champion, carry me; we must have words as we go.”

  The survivors started down the hill, in the direction Ramachni indicated, and the globe of still air with its multitude of fireflies moved with it. Thasha walked in the lead, but off to one side, and the others kept their distance, knowing that words meant words in private. She tried to catch Pazel’s eye, but only caught him wincing as he raised his wounded leg.

  “Arunis knew just where to take the Stone,” said Ramachni. “For many miles the River of Shadows flows under the skin of Alifros: first beneath the lake you crossed, then deep under the Ansyndra, one stream hidden by another. Only here in this forest does it churn to the surface. And it was at that very point that the Auru, the first fair tenders of life in this world, raised a watchtower after the Dawn War, lest evil things return to Alifros. It is only a ruin now, for evil did return, and triumphed for a time, and nearly all the great towers fell. But their ruins still mark the places where the River of Shadows touches Alifros. Much of the stra
ngeness of this world has trickled in through such gaps. The spores that grew into the Infernal Forest are but one example.”

  “And the Nilstone entered the same way, didn’t it?”

  “Yes, dearest,” said Ramachni.

  Thasha smiled. “I think you must be desperate,” she said. “That was a straight answer, by Rin.”

  “Wicked girl,” said Ramachni, pleased.

  “Are you going to give me any more?” asked Thasha.

  “It is not out of the question,” said the mage, “but we are on the cusp of battle, and must speak of what may keep us alive. There is power in you, Thasha Isiq: we both know this. And Arunis knows it, too, and fears it.”

  “But it isn’t mine, is it?”

  “Of course it is yours. Who else’s?”

  “Erithusmé’s,” said Thasha. “What are you pretending for, Ramachni? I don’t know if she’s my mother or something else to me entirely. But she’s trying to use me, get into my head. Just like Arunis does to others, except that she would use me to do good. Although she’s never managed to do much good in the past, as far as I can tell.”

  Thasha knew how bitter she sounded. They marched on through the dripping forest, and for a time Ramachni made no answer. Deny it, deny it! Thasha wanted to scream.

  But all Ramachni said was, “It is you he fears most, ever since he first understood whom he faced, in that chamber on Dhola’s Rib. Your power, your magic, far more than my own.”

  “What are you talking about?” cried Thasha, no longer caring who heard them. “I hardly know a thing about magic, and everything I do know I learned from you.”

  “No, Thasha. Everything I know, I learned from you.”

  She stared at him, appalled.

  “Erithusmé is not your mother,” said Ramachni, “and she is not trying to possess you, to force her way inside. For she has never been elsewhere, since your birth—since your conception. Thasha dearest, you are Erithusmé. I have no time to explain, but know this: you can draw on her power if you want it. Only if. No one can force you to do so, no one can demand it of you. Do you understand?”