The Rats and the Ruling sea tcv-2

by Robert V. S. Redick

  But all this he saw with but a corner of his mind, for directly before him stood a tall man in a sea-green cloak. The man was perfectly bald, but he had a thick white beard and enormous bottle-brush eyebrows, and beneath them, eyes that were bottomless and dark.

  'It's you, isn't it?' said Felthrup, feeling a lump rise in his throat. 'It's how you really are.'

  'Right in the first count, wrong in the second,' the man replied. 'Indeed I'm surprised one as afflicted with imagination as you still clings to the notion of real. Now step to one side — that's it.'

  The old man turned and walked away, deeper into the stone chamber. When twenty feet separated him from Felthrup he turned again, and then ran, with the ease of a much younger man, straight at the surface of the mirror. At the last instant he leaped, head first-and the black mink, Ramachni Fremken, sailed into the chamber as through an open door. This was the mage as Felthrup knew him: the one who had rescued him from drowning, slain fleshancs, taught Pazel the Master-Word that changed the Shaggat to stone. The one whose very name brought a look of fear into Arunis' eyes, no matter how the sorcerer tried to conceal it. He landed in a cloud of dust on Isiq's bed. Felthrup knelt beside him, sneezed, and burst into tears.

  'Stop that at once,' said Ramachni. 'What on earth is the matter, Felthrup? Surely we meet in better circumstances than before?'

  'Oh no, Master, not at all.'

  Ramachni sprang from the bed and vanished into the stateroom. Felthrup rushed after him, still crying, though he could not have said exactly why. He found the mage on the arm of the divan, looking down at the three sleeping youths.

  'How untroubled they look,' said Ramachni, echoing Felthrup's earlier thought. 'And how fortunate that your dream-life is so splendid. But look what you have done to yourself tonight, my dear rat! Some turn themselves into warriors, angels, kings. You've become a librarian.'

  'Not just tonight, m'lord. This is the form I take in every dream.'

  'Every single dream?' said Ramachni, turning to him with surprise. 'That is something to ponder, when I have a moment. But can't you hold still, Felthrup? Why do you keep starting for the door?'

  Felthrup checked himself, and dropped his head in shame. 'Arunis is calling me. He never stops. He has a terrible power over me, and he is using me against our friends.'

  'We shall see about that,' said Ramachni with a hint of temper.

  'My lord!' said Felthrup, rubbing his chin with both hands in a most ratlike gesture. 'Did you not say that Arunis was the stronger in this world, that when you travel here you leave a great part of your strength behind?'

  'I did,' said Ramachni, 'although when next I come to Alifros it shall be with a strength you have never seen. But tonight, Felthrup, the only traveller is you. When your dream began you departed the Alifros you know and came here, to a dream-Alifros, only a small part of which was created by your mind. Arunis and I were here already, for dreams exist in a territory that the mage never entirely ceases to inhabit.'

  'He is standing just outside your magic wall.'

  Ramachni shook his head. 'That wall is not of my making.'

  'Not of your making!' cried Felthrup. 'Then there is some other mage aboard, who wishes us well?'

  'Perhaps,' said Ramachni, glancing curiously around the stateroom. 'But this I can tell you for certain: the spell that made the magic wall was cast long before the Chathrand left Etherhorde — years before, in fact. How cunningly hidden it must have been, to keep me from detecting it! I wonder if there are more such surprises, and if they will all prove so helpful.'

  Suddenly he turned and sniffed the air. Then he bounded across the room and onto the table, where he peered suspiciously at the pigsfoot casserole.

  'Do not eat this,' he said. 'Someone besides Mr Teggatz had a hand in its preparation. There is a whiff of magic about it — dark magic, you understand. It is only a distant aftertaste, nothing so obvious as a curse or a potion. But we must take no chances.'

  Felthrup clenched his hands in fists, and stared at them as if he had never seen anything more impressive. Then he picked up the casserole, crossed the room to the window and flung the dish overboard.

  No sooner had he closed the window, however, than doubt returned to his face. 'In my first dream Arunis flung Sniraga into the sea,' he said, 'but the cat is still aboard. My dreams change nothing, do they? When I wake that dish will again be on the table. And my waking self remembers nothing of what passes in these dreams. I shall not be able to warn them, Ramachni.'

  'Do not be so certain, lad. Your dreams certainly change you. I hear the exhaustion in your voice: you've been fighting for your very soul. In any case, you must try. Whatever is in that food was put there with malice of the blackest sort.'

  Felthrup jumped, remembering. 'Neeps took a bite!' he said. 'And a short time later he went mad and tried to kill Lady Thasha. He almost succeeded.'

  Ramachni looked up from the table. Now the anger in his eyes was terrible to behold. 'It is time, Felthrup. You called out for help, and I am here to give it. Let us go and see the sorcerer.'

  Felthrup swallowed, and pushed his spectacles up his nose. Ramachni jumped to the floor, crossed once more to the divan, and crawled up beside Thasha's shoulder. His pink tongue dabbed once at her forehead; then he turned and studied the chamber again. His eyes settled on the bearskin rug. A look of satisfaction crept over his face.

  'How dare you keep me waiting.'

  The sorcerer waited just beyond the red stripe, his mouth twisted with anger. The four Turachs leaned against the walls. Arunis watched the thin, bespectacled man leave the stateroom without closing the door.

  'So you can fight my summons now? Well after tonight you'll wish you'd never tried, you mangled, three-legged misery of a rat. Get out here!'

  The thin man took his time, but at last he reached the magic wall. He did not immediately step through it, however. Instead he paused with his face just inches from the sorcerer's own.

  'After tonight,' he said quietly, 'you will wish you'd never invaded his dreams.'

  'Whose dreams?'

  'Felthrup's, you fool.'

  With that the man in spectacles reached through the wall and seized Arunis by his scarf. At his touch the mage gasped aloud and tried to pull away. But the thin man held him fast, and began to chant:

  Light is the purse that brimmed with deceit

  Fierce are the hunters, and swift their feet

  And the night so late and lonely.

  Bribe them you might, but what can you offer?

  A curse, and a kick, and a black barren coffer,

  And the taste of treason only.

  Dear have you cost us, but never so dear

  That we'll tender our souls to a peddler of fear.

  Pride may be costly, but pain is free:

  For thee, old deceiver, it comes for thee.

  On the last word he let go of the scarf, dropped to the deck, and became once more a mink. Arunis leaped back in terror. But the mink did not attack him. It fled.

  'What's this?' roared Arunis. 'The great Ramachni, turning tail? Have you nothing but rhymes to fight with?'

  A deafening roar filled the passage behind him.

  Arunis whirled, and for one second he gaped at the bear, a huge brown boulder of an creature, looming over him, so tall its shoulder touched the roof of the passage.

  'Stop, Felthrup!' he shrieked. 'I order you-'

  Then its weight was upon him, and its claws like mallet-driven spikes, and its teeth that ripped his dream-flesh like so much tissue paper, like the wrapping on a box that held no gift, nothing but emptiness and a voice that cursed and was gone.

  27

  The Ambush

  24 Freala 941

  133rd day from Etherhorde

  By the time they reached the hill overlooking the Chathrand, Diadrelu was winded, and the man beside her was panting like a hound. Even at nine in the morning the heat was fierce — particularly at eight inches above the barren ground. Seabirds
whirled over them, innumerable: the dry side of Sandplume was one great eyrie, where gull and plover and albatross and tern vied for every available inch of nesting space. The birds had no real stomach for fighting creatures who could take off one of their wings with the swipe of a blade, but their pecking and diving made it hard to attend to other matters. Their noises — outraged wails, honks, brays, screeches — made Diadrelu think of the torments of the damned.

  'A fool's errand,' grunted the man, whose name was Steldak.

  Diadrelu shaded her eyes. Three hundred feet below them, the Chathrand and Sandor Ott's single-masted ship lay at anchor, hidden on three sides by the horseshoe-shaped isle.

  'Look there.'

  She pointed. From behind the cutter the Chathrand 's skiff was gliding into view. Her sail was down already. Aboard the Great Ship men were running out the davit-chains to receive the little craft.

  Diadrelu took a short monocular telescope from her pocket and raised it to her eye. There was Pazel. She heaved a great sigh of relief. The boy had survived another misadventure ashore. Rin only knew what they had done to him this time.

  'Erthalon Ness is not aboard,' she said aloud.

  Steldak hissed through his teeth. 'It's as I foretold, then,' he said. 'They have given him to someone on Bramian, someone who will put him to evil use. How I wish you had stabbed them both!'

  The rejoinder flashed through Dri's mind: How I wish I'd stabbed you. She closed her eyes, deeply shamed by the thought. Steldak was gaunt, despite the food and nursing lavished on him these past two months. He had spent years in a cage in Rose's desk, lifted out only at mealtimes, to test the captain's food for poison. His rescue had been a triumph of cunning on her brother's part. But Steldak's disobedience — he had tried to assassinate Rose on the spot — had cost Lord Talag his life.

  He was delirious, Dri reminded herself. He'd believed for years that he would die in that cage. And he has done his penance, and sworn an oath to the clan.

  Still she was glad she'd remembered the little scope, if only to give her something besides Steldak to focus on. The very sound of his breathing set her teeth on edge. Hate (so her people's adage went) was the place where death entered the living, the blind mote in the eye of the soul. Dri had always liked the adage, although she could not remember the last time she heard it on any tongue but her own. It was wrong to hate Steldak. But she did.

  'There was a death ashore — a military death.' She pointed at a black ribbon of canvas snapping in the breeze from the masthead. 'I do not see Drellarek, the Turach commander. I wonder if it was he who fell.'

  Steldak shrugged. 'It was not Rose, more's the pity. Beyond that I am not much interested.' He lunged at a gull, which sheered away with a ravenous wail. 'Let us go, Diadrelu. There is nothing more to be learned here.'

  'What of the winds?' she asked. Steldak, who claimed to have been born at sea, had also declared himself a fine judge of weather.

  'A storm from the north-east,' he said, glancing vaguely at the sky. 'These westerlies are not half what they were twelve hours ago. Some gale is sucking all the force from them. Soon they will turn back on themselves, and then we shall see.'

  'How soon?'

  Steldak's eyes travelled the horizon. 'After midday, if you force me to guess. But Bakru's lions answer to no one but Bakru, and sometimes not even to him. Lady Dri, I would return to our commander's side. He may have need of us.'

  'Lord Taliktrum knows where we are.'

  Nonetheless she relented, and the two ixchel started back down the hill. The footing was treacherous, and the birds, excited by movement, redoubled their attack. By the time they reached the island's highest shrubs they were winded again.

  They groped beneath a stand of spiny, wind-tortured thorbal trees, their legs sinking to the knees in a powder of dead moss and lichen, and then began an easier descent, under greener growth. The Black Shoulder Ott had chosen as the Great Ship's final harbour in the northern world had two faces: the parched east, scoured by the rising sun, and the lush west, doused by the fogs that drifted almost daily from the Bramian landmass. They had crossed from one side to the other, and soon were able to slake their thirst on beads of water clinging to leaf-tips. From below the sound of pipes grew stronger.

  'There they are,' said Diadrelu.

  Just ahead, the land fell away in a cleft, like a jagged pie-slice cut from the island, all the way to the sea. At the edge of the precipice stood Taliktrum and two other ixchel, gazing down at the bright rock walls. The cliffs, like the hilltop, were alive with nesting birds; but here the birds were shore-swallows: cousins to the common birds that dwelled in barns and outbuildings. They screeched and bickered; you could hardly call it song. Their nests dappled the cliffs, grass-woven, mud-mortared, dried to the harness of stone. Thousands of the birds came and went on wings like dark flames, bringing grubs and insects to their fledglings.

  It was, thought Dri, like a scene out of legend: the wall of sacred birds (swallows alone were sacred to her people), the crashing surf, and above them the young master of a noble House, resplendent in a swallow-suit of his own. The suit was one of but two such feathered coats in the possession of the clan. They were treasures, cared for and mended over centuries. But their value was more than ceremonial: with hands thrust into the cloak's wingbone gauntlets, any reasonably strong ixchel could fly.

  Beside her nephew stood Ghali, the old Pachet seer; and his granddaughter, Myett, a wary, wide-eyed thing of twenty, whose first glance always seemed to anticipate a threat. Sensing their approach before the others, Myett recoiled into catlike fighting stance, and relaxed but slowly as Dri and Steldak emerged from the trees.

  'How do we fare, my lord?' asked Steldak, hurrying to Taliktrum's side.

  The young commander of Ixphir House did not alter his gaze in the slightest, nor was his answer, when it came, directed at Steldak.

  'It will not do,' he said. 'No, Pachet, it will not do at all. Where does the problem lie, can you fathom that at least? With the pipes? With the swallows? With your playing, if you'll pardon the question?'

  The old man turned. He was stern and very dignified, with his combed grey beard and eyebrows thick as foxtails. In his hands was a splendid instrument: a set of black wooden pan pipes, joined with hoops of gold that sparkled in the sun.

  'All three, to be sure,' said the Pachet. 'Every colony of swallows has its own music, its own signature and key. The pipes, too, have not seen use in a generation.' He lowered his eyes. 'And I, perhaps, cannot call on-'

  'The skill you once were known for?'

  The old man looked up sharply. 'The lungs of my youth,' he said calmly. 'That is all I meant to say.'

  'Very honest of you, Pachet. But don't forget my title.'

  'Your pardon, Lord Taliktrum.'

  Once again Dri felt scalded by shame — this time for the conduct of her nephew. In front of the Pachet's granddaughter! That man played at your birth-feast, you little tyrant, not to mention your father's, and my own.

  'Master Ghali,' she said, stepping forwards, 'do you have it in you to play once more?'

  'It is no use,' said Taliktrum. 'The birds are deaf to him. We must think about our return to the ship.'

  'You're quite right, my lord,' said Steldak. 'The weather is changing, and if thunderheads roll out of Bramian we shall not gain the ship at all.'

  Dri took a step nearer, pointing. 'If we but walk a little along the southern cliff, there is an outcropping. The sound may carry better there.'

  An awkward silence followed. Dri had been sprung from her house arrest and brought ashore precisely because she knew something of the old lore of the swallow-pipes. But Taliktrum did not want it forgotten for an instant that she was no longer in command. She had only made a suggestion, but to accept it — that was to play the younger nephew, not the lord.

  'Come, Grandfather,' said the young woman, casting a distrustful eye on Dri. 'Let us put your instrument away.'

  But Taliktrum raised a staying han
d. 'We will do as my aunt recommends. Take the Pachet's arm, Myett, and guide him carefully.'

  They made their way single-file along the cliff's edge. He's learning, thought Diadrelu. As am I.

  When they reached the rock outcropping the plain sense of her suggestion was clear to all. The rock was nearer to the nests, and the wind did not gust back in the Pachet's face. Taliktrum grew animated. He beckoned to the old man, waved Dri and Myett impatiently away. 'You'll startle the birds, blast you, fall back!' Then he spread his hands wide, froze there for an instant, and swept them towards the old musician. He was, Dri realised with sudden heartache, mimicking her brother's gesture: that pompous double-wave that told a singer or a poet that he might proceed. She had never imagined it was something she could miss.

  Pachet Ghali knelt, and filled his lungs, and played. The music was like nothing else in ixchel tradition. It was not a melody as such, and yet there was a loud and lilting refrain. It was no attempt at birdsong, and yet it was a summons to the creatures. It was spellcraft: one of the last shards of magic in the collective memory of her people. Among the ixchel, only artists retained any link to the ancient disciplines whereby (it was said) miracles had once been performed. It was part of her brother's genius and audacity that he had planned to wed ixchel magic, for the first time in centuries, to a practical use.

  But her brother was dead, and the Pachet was old, and the birds did not seem to hear him.

  They all stood listening, hoping. The sound contended with the wind, the surf, the noise of the swallows themselves. At last Taliktrum sliced the air with a despairing hand.

  'Enough,' he said. 'Save your breath, old man.'

  The Pachet did not cease playing, however. Instead he rose slowly to his feet. His eyes were wide. Taliktrum looked from the player to the cliffs and back again. And then Dri realised that the birds had fallen silent.

  The others stood as tense as she, watching the cliffs. Pachet Ghali played on. Suddenly a dark shadow flitted past his shoulder. Two more followed in the wink of an eye. Then it was as if the whole colony of birds had become of one mind. They flowed over the rim of the crevasse in a dark torrent and swept among the ixchel, so close that Dri felt the caress of wingtips on her shoulders. The Pachet turned, chasing the swallows with his eyes. All at once his music changed, and from a summons it became an order, a sharp and definite command.