These thoughts all but crushed me. 'We have no hope, do we, lass? They've been planning this for decades.'
'So has Ramachni,' she said.
'Was he planning for Arunis to whack him so hard he could barely crawl home?'
My tongue had got ahead of me; I didn't mean to speak such words of despair to this brave young thing. Marila took it calmly, however.
'I don't know,' she said, 'but I bet you'll get a chance to ask him.'
Wednesday, 27 Norn, 941. The sorcerer has murdered Peytr Bourjon. Old Gangrune saw it happen, in the passage outside his cabin. Seems the daft tarboy never had quite left off serving Arunis. Gangrune watched them through a crack in his cabin door: they met, talked, the boy pleaded for something on his knees. Arunis held out his hand amp; Peytr took it. Then the monster reached out and snapped his neck. One-handed. Gangrune slammed his door and started howling murder murder murder. Arunis merely walked away.
No clue from any quarter as to how Bourjon had angered the mage. Perhaps he never did. Perhaps Arunis merely wanted to attract our attention, lest anyone imagine his powers or his wickedness decreased.
How sick I am of death, of walking, living, sleeping among killers. Of serving as their quartermaster, their fool. There's little I wouldn't hazard to put an end to them. Forgive me, my Anni, my heart.
31
Metamorphoses
24 Freala 941
The White Reaper, pride of the Pentarchy, holy avenger of the Mzithrin, spun beneath the killing waves in a state of chaos no seafarer had ever lived to describe. Up was down, falling was rising, solid rails became splinters; the very air one tried to gulp was seawater that stabbed one to the heart with cold, and the blackness of the depths was over and under and within her. She was vanquished, and her four hundred men were perishing in the imploding coffin of her hull.
Neda Ygrael felt her body whirl in the blind cyclone, heard her people's screams extinguished chamber by chamber as the sea advanced, felt the ship's armoured bulk cleaving down into the permanent night of the Nelluroq. She was on the berth deck, somewhere; footlockers were smashing about like boulders; shreds of hammocks caught at her limbs. Her brother sfvantskors had been near her when the Jistrolloq rolled, and she could still hear them, crying to one another, only a shade less mad than the rest. Nurin was closest, and when the lamps went out he cried her name. There was an instant when she felt his hand, a clawing thing as violent as the sea, groping at her with broken fingers before the water tore him away. Then another hand seized her, Cayer Vispek's this time, and wrenched her up (or down?) through a hatch and onto a deck where air remained, where it was possible if agonizing to thrust the debris and bodies aside and raise one's head above the flood, where a pale green glow illuminated the horrors around her. The glow came from Sathek's Sceptre, wielded in desperation by Cayerad Hael.
The elder sfvantskor was bleeding from the scalp. As the ship rolled over and over he was thrashed about like a rag doll. But he held on to the sceptre, and Neda groped towards him, to what purpose she could not say, and when she and Cayer Vispek were within ten feet the old man screeched one intelligible word:
'Soglorigatre!'
With the word came a red light, a searing light, and a blast of steam that made her plunge again beneath the water. At once the dead face of Cayerad Hael's steward rose before her, the boy's mouth open wide as a well. Then something else burst in the ship and the body was sucked instantly away. Down, down they were plummeting, her ears all but bleeding from the pressure, and not knowing if she were fighting to live or to hasten a merciful death, Neda thrust her head above the surface again.
Cayerad Hael had called the red flame from the sceptre, just as he had on Sandplume, but now he had used it to burn a ragged hole in the side of the ship. He himself was scalded terribly, his hand a black stump fused for ever to the magic artefact, though for ever would be brief enough. But he lived yet, and commanded them yet; and most amazing of all, four of his sfvantskors remained alive to be commanded. Neda and Cayer Vispek, bobbing and thrashing towards him; and huge Jalantri close behind; and last of all, clear-eyed and furious, Malabron.
'Out, out, out!' Cayerad Hael was screaming, clinging with his good hand to the shattered planks and gesturing frantically with sceptre and stump. 'The crew's lost; they know it better than you! We must live for them, sfvantskors! Begone, begone!'
They hesitated. Later Neda would think of that hesitation as a kind of miracle: the lead spike of fearlessness had been driven so deep into their souls that even this horror, this free-fall to the Nine Pits, had not yet torn it out completely. But of course the Cayerad spoke true: they could not save even a single sailor, and it was sinful to prefer one's fancies to the cold facts of the world. Arqual had beaten them, and the Father remained unavenged. Those were the facts. Neda drew a breath (the saltwater like a knife in each lung) and plunged towards the breech in the hull.
Cayer Vispek reached their leader first. He began to shout the Dying Prayer — 'I have come to the end of dreams. I bless only what is-' but the sea (blasting in by yet another fissure) caught him full in the face. Still he managed the essential task: he drew the sceptre to his lips and kissed the dark crystal. And for the first time outside of trance, Neda saw the Father's magic at work.
The transformation took only an instant. A white glow came over Cayer Vispek, and a blurring of his features, and then like a flag snapped open in a storm he was a man no longer but a blue-black whale, a Cazencian, forty feet of writhing muscle and fluke and fine triangular teeth, and with a single twist of his body he was through the hull breach and away.
Jalantri was next. He tried to speak to their master, the second master to face death in as many months, but Cayerad Hael shook his head and pressed the sceptre to his mouth. And then Neda understood — the old man was not surrendering to death. He would change too, and lead them on. All at once Neda was ashamed of her thoughts of despair. They were sfvantskors unto death, but the first duty of a sfvantskor was to stay alive, lest the gods be deprived of a servant.
When Jalantri changed, he became so huge that his tail-fluke ripped out another dozen feet of hull. Then he too was gone. Neda looked back at Malabron. Why wasn't he coming forwards, and why did he glare in that tortured way? Could he possibly have gone rigid with fear?
Cayerad Hael was submerged to his neck. 'Come, Malabron, Mebhar's child!' he gasped. 'You know what must be done!'
'Yes!' Malabron shouted back. 'Alone of us all!'
Neda had never heard anyone snap at Cayerad before, but there was no time to wonder. She reached Cayerad Hael, and the old man lowered the sceptre. Letting go of the ship, Neda pulled the crystal to her lips and kissed it, that sacred shard of the Black Casket, by whose power they would take the fight once more to the enemy.
The change was excruciatingly painful. Always before she had undergone the metamorphosis in trance, like all her brethren. In trance, the Father had commanded her to feel no pain, and in trance she had the power to obey. Now every sinew and corpuscle screamed in protest, as if she were being injected with venom at a million points. The burning! There could be no recovery from such pain, neither in the body nor the mind. It was as the Father had always warned them: some changes were for ever.
But the agony vanished as quickly as it had come, leaving only a welt of memory throbbing inside her — and Neda was a whale. Limbless, free of her shreds of clothes, warm in the icy water, and utterly blind except for the green light vanishing below.
She had changed before — into a sea turtle or a shark, when the Father was still perfecting the enchantment on Simja, in the last days before the wedding — and into this same whale's body, when they began the hunt for the Great Ship. It was the sort of magic only one as mighty as the Father could work with Sathek's Sceptre. Cayerad Hael, for all his learning, had been as helpless as a toddler when he tried to use the device, but the Father's spell went on working perfectly, month after month.
Or almost perfectly. Neda's def
ect remained, even when her body changed. In trance she could erase her pain, but not her memory. The others could never afterwards remember taking whale-form. Neda could never forget.
The green light dwindled. How were they to proceed? Were they to follow the Chathrand until the weather cleared, or attempt to board her in the gale? They'd been about to discuss it when the Arquali vessel launched its attack; now they could not discuss it at all. Neda was not even certain that she would be able to hear her brethren's keening voices over the wind and waves.
Obeying a sudden impulse, she jackknifed down into the darkness, pursuing the falling ship. Perhaps the others would gather in its dim light, and together they could set off after the enemy. She swam fast into the darkness, glad she was a creature made for diving, for black depths as much as bright surface waters. The strength in her new body was intoxicating.
There was Cayerad Hael, totally submerged, seconds from drowning; and there kissing the glowing sceptre was Malabron — tortured, doubting Malabron, changing before her eyes into a Cazencian like herself. Now their master would do the same — but would his wounds follow him into whale-form? And if they did, could he possibly survive?
Cayerad Hael raised the sceptre towards his lips. And the whale that had been Malabron surged forwards and closed his predator's teeth over the sceptre, and their master's arm, and bit down, and the world went completely black.
32
The Mutineers
8 Umbrin 941
178th day from Etherhorde
The war between Plapp's Pier and Burnscove Boys took a novel twist when Kruno Burnscove awoke one morning in his bed (his gang had built him the little bed out of pilfered lumber, stuffed a mattress with hay stolen from the cows; he was too important to sleep in a hammock; besides, Darius Plapp had a bed) to find a severed hand dangling six inches above his forehead. It was black and withered and seemed to beckon him with the crook of one mortis-curled finger. On another finger the Burnscove Boys ring. Kruno let out an undignified squeal, and across the berth deck the Plapps replied with hoots and catcalls.
There was no mystery about the provenance of the hand. One of the Burnscovers killed in the storm had been mutilated in the surgical annex, before his body could be given to the sea. The crime was in retaliation for the looting of the three Plapps Pier dead. The only lingering question was where the hand had spent the previous twenty-five days.
This was the Chathrand 's sixth week on the Nelluroq: the longest stretch between landfalls that many sailors had ever seen, and yet by Elkstem's calculus they had more than half of the crossing yet before them. After the severed-hand incident, Rose asked for volunteers to mediate a truce. Fiffengurt and Dr Chadfallow stepped forwards, and the next morning they brought the most influential Plapps and Burnscovers together in the wardroom. Mr Teggatz provided scones.
Chadfallow came last to the wardroom, and he cut an impressive figure in the silk coat and dark purple cape of an Imperial envoy. He wore the ruby pendant of the Order of the Orb, and the bright gold fish-and-dagger medallion of a Defender of the Realm. The latter pendant, as most of them knew, was possessed by only a half-dozen living men, and was pinned to a man's chest by the Emperor alone, never a surrogate.
The adversaries sat at opposite ends of the wardroom table. Kruno Burnscove had just fired a particularly creative and personal epithet at his rival, and the doctor's appearance had made Darius Plapp lose his train of thought as he struggled to reply. He glared at Chadfallow, while the other gang members looked away in confusion, wondering what power if any remained to this friend of His Supremacy.
Chadfallow approached the furious gang leader. He rested one long-fingered hand upon the table before him, and let the silence grow.
'You are the eponymous Plapp?' he said at last.
Darius Plapp's face went rigid. He pushed back his chair and stood up. He spoke through gritted teeth.
'Who's eponymous? Yer mother's eponymous.'
The meeting went downhill from there. Rather than brokering peace, the doctor and the quartermaster were treated to comprehensive accounts of the murders, abductions, broken cease-fires, insults to virtuous gang mothers, slop buckets emptied on wedding parties, insinuations in mixed company that this or that leader's manhood was not as it should be, libellous publications and stolen pets. Fiffengurt walked out in disgust. Chadfallow laboured on straight through the afternoon and the dinner shift, but when the session finally collapsed at midnight the only agreement he had managed to wring from Plapp and Burnscove was that he himself was stubborn enough to join either gang.
Chadfallow's report to the captain noted that mental instability was a growing threat to the safety of the ship.
Two nights later, as evening fell, the now-familiar noise of the 25-foot seas was shattered by the cries of the lookout: On the bow! Hard on the bow! Great gods, what is it?
Men stampeded to the rail, and at once began to shout with wonder, and not a little fear. Stretched across the southern horizon, as far as the eye could see, was a ribbon of pale red light. It was not quite the colour of sunset, nor of fire; but there was something about it that reminded one of fire: a trembling, flickering quality. A volcano? No, there was no ash, and no telltale rumble. The ribbon reached as high as the lid of clouds on the horizon, so that it looked a bit like a glowing sword, held between the blue-grey tongs of sea and sky. How far away it might have been was difficult to tell. What was certain was that it lay directly across their path.
The ribbon burned on through the night. When morning broke, it swiftly faded, and by the time the sun was fully risen it was no more to be seen. But all through the night the watch-captains had observed how Arunis stood on the forecastle, gazing steadily southward, face bathed in the glow, eyes ravenous with expectation.
'I've imagined seeing you dead,' said Diadrelu. 'Or more likely, hearing that you had died, and never seeing for myself. As it was with Talag. I've imagined my own death, likelier still. But never did I think to see you locked in the brig.'
Diadrelu stepped through the iron bars. Hercol watched her from the darkness, sitting back against the wall, smiling through his seven-week beard. It was hours past midnight; except for the pair of Turachs outside the compartment door, the mercy deck was deserted. Two cells away, the captain of the whaler, Magritte, was talking in his sleep, a low, despairing babble. He had boiled over during his first interview with Rose after the sinking of the Sanguine, calling him murderer, pirate, Pit-fiend, devil-swine, and when he paused for breath Rose informed him that he would serve a week in the brig for each insult, plus a fortnight for his behaviour in Rose's quarters, where he had displayed 'verbal incontinence' and a tendency to gulp his food.
Hercol for his part never seemed but half asleep. The ixchel woman had come to see him with increasing frequency, not quite certain what she was looking for, and often enough forced to depart without speaking to him, if Magritte proved restless, or the Turachs left the door ajar. And though she moved silent as dust on a puff of wind, each time she reached his cell she found his eyes open, and that slight smile of expectation on his haggard face.
And yet with each visit her worry grew. Hercol's mouth was dry; he was using a good part of his water ration to clean a wound on his chest. There were bloodstains on his shirt near the collar; when he moved a cloud of flies lifted briefly from the spot. Does he know about ixchel eyes? she wondered. Does he know that I can see him, better than any human could?
'I have a little water,' she said. 'And meat. And an herb you can rub into your skin, to keep those flies away.'
'You take too great a risk with these visits,' said Hercol.
'Not especially,' said Diadrelu. 'You're a deadly fighter. Your people wouldn't dare approach this cell without lamps and noise.'
'But yours might.'
'Well, then!' she said, trying to sound lighthearted. 'If I'm not wanted-'
'Need I respond to that, my lady?'
She put down her pack, leaped in one bound to his kne
e, and sat, folding her long legs beneath her.
'Need I stick a pin through your lip to stop you calling me lady?'
Hercol laughed softly. 'Thirty years of service to the noble-born have made some habits unbreakable,' he said. 'Very well, just-plain-Dri: how goes the journey? Is there anything to see but the empty horizon?'
'I told you of the sky-ribbon.'
'That was days ago. Has it returned?'
'Yes. Men are calling it the Red Storm, a name out of some old tale of the Ruling Sea. They say Rose glimpsed it decades ago, that he sailed this far, and then turned back to safety to the north.'
'Curious,' said Hercol. 'But that is not what concerns you most, I think.'
She was surprised that her voice had given away so much. Disappointed, too: why worry him with things he could not change?
'The Vortex is in sight again,' she said. 'A little nearer, this time. The first watch saw it pull a thunderhead down from the sky and devour it, lightning and all, and this has put the fear of death in the men. Before today we were fairly flying southward. But now Rose has us beating west, away from that monster.'
Hercol's smile was gone. His eyes slid once around the cell block, professionally.
'You truly think you can break out of here?' she asked.
'It has been arranged,' he said, matter-of-fact, and glanced briefly at the ceiling. 'But the harder question is, whom can I help by escaping? When I break out, I shall have only a short time to accomplish something before I'm put back in again. I could run to the stateroom, and perhaps find refuge there, but I do not wish to do so while Rose is leaving our friends in relative peace. They would merely place ten Turachs on the doorstep, and we should all be prisoners together.'
'You would be safe, at least,' said Diadrelu.
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