'The Vortex,' Pazel said, 'that has to be the Nelluroq Vortex. O Bakru, Bakru! Call off your lions, save the ship.'
He had never meant the prayer more sincerely. For the last strange thing about the topdeck was how empty it was. Bow to stern, there could not have been more than thirty men at the sails. A few dozen more were flying up and down the deck, hauling the sheets, relaying orders. There should have been ten times as many hands on deck.
'Pazel,' said Thasha, her voice gone deadly cold, 'that's the whirlpool from my dream. The one I've been having since Etherhorde.'
'Of course it is,' he said. 'You've been dreaming about the Vortex.'
'But I didn't just imagine it,' said Thasha. 'I saw it, perfectly. It's exactly the same.'
Pazel looked at her with alarm. She had changed before his eyes. Gone was the confident thojmelee fighter. In its place was the haunted Thasha, the one who appeared each time she read the Polylex. The one who looked inexplicably older. 'What happens in this dream?' he asked her.
Thasha closed her eyes. 'I'm striking a bargain,' she said. 'Someone wants me gone from wherever I am. And I say that I'll go, as long as they agree to leave too. Whoever it is always agrees, but at the last minute they add something to the deal. Something that makes leaving much harder. Ramachni's there, looking on — guarding me, maybe, in case there's cheating. But I still have to say yes. As soon as I do, I start moving — very fast, with no effort at all. Straight towards that whirlpool. And I think, This is how it feels, to die and remain alive. And just as I start to fall into the Vortex I wake up.'
She opened her eyes and smiled ruefully at him. 'I'm waiting for you to say, "You're not crazy, Thasha." '
Pazel said nothing. He was trying to think of better, more comforting words. Whether or not he still fully believed in her sanity hardly mattered. Thasha stared, clearly upset by his hesitation.
Then Uskins appeared, barrelling around the starboard longboat. He was hysterical. He did not appear to be wounded, but his eyes had a wild light in them, and his face was red. He skidded to a halt before them and screamed.
'Muketch! Girl! Don't stand there, grab a line! Get forwards, to Lapwing's team on the port halyard! Run, blast you, we need everyone we've got!'
Pazel and Thasha did as they were told, if only to get away from Uskins. As they ran, Pazel became aware of a new sound, distant but immensely powerful. A sound that was neither wind nor waves. It made him think of a titanic millstone: inexorable, grinding. It was the sound of the Vortex.
'You're all right, Thasha,' he huffed as they ran, 'it's the world outside your head that's gone mad.'
Thasha burst out laughing: 'Thanks, I feel much better.'
'Don't mention it.'
She was so perversely amused that he couldn't help joining in her laughter. He wished he could stop right there, kiss her full on the lips.
'There's Neeps!' cried Thasha suddenly, pointing. He was halfway up the mainmast, a good hundred feet above the deck, working alongside a dozen sailors trying to reef the topsail. They were crawling out along the yard, fighting the wayward canvas, not looking down.
'They need more men for that job, don't they?' Thasha asked.
'You're damn right,' said Pazel. 'Twice as many, and hands on the halyards. Come on, let's help. Maybe together we can pull it off.'
They ran to the port rail, swung out to the great mainmast shrouds, and began the ascent. They were both sure-footed climbers: what Thasha lacked in experience she made up for in strength. But as they rose, so did the wind, quite suddenly in fact. Pazel, already exhausted by blows and blood loss, found he had to slow and catch his breath. 'I'm dizzy,' he said.
'What?' she shouted.
'DIZZY.'
How the men on the topsail yard could hear a thing he had no idea. At last Neeps saw them, and his face glowed with relief. He beckoned urgently. Hurry up!
Pazel resumed the climb. They passed the titanic main yard, that vast tree lashed horizontally above the ship, and for a few minutes the broad platform of the fighting top cut off their view of Neeps and the sailors. He could just hear them, though: it sounded as though Neeps was shouting his name. 'I'm coming, mate, I don't have blary wings,' he muttered testily.
They reached the fighting top, and Pazel squeezed up deftly through the climbing hole. The wind was momentarily blocked. Suddenly he could hear Neeps and all the others above him. They were screaming.
'No! No! No! Look out! Turn around!'
Pazel twisted, looking wildly everywhere for the source of their fear. Left, right, out, downDown.
The rats had broken out onto the topdeck. The space around the mainmast was thick with their squirming bodies. And a dozen or more were clawing straight up the wooden pillar towards them, salivating. 'Mine!' they screeched. 'Angel! Heaven! Kill!'
Pitfire, thought Pazel, they were five decks below!
Everything happened quickly. Pazel and Thasha could not descend, and to climb higher would have been sheer madness. The only possible choice was to make a stand on the fighting top. 'Don't slash,' Thasha shouted in his ear. 'Lunge. Thrust. If you let 'em get in close they'll tear you to bits.'
Scarcely had the words left her mouth when the first rats came boiling up from the hole. Pazel was starkly terrified. He had fought them one-on-one with the crowbar, but now there were three on him at once, and a pitching mast, and sixty feet between him and the deck. He stabbed, kicked at their faces and bellies, managing only to stay alive as Thasha killed and killed. More than once she skewered a rat through the neck or chest just as it drove its four-inch teeth past his defences. She was protecting them both, he knew, and the thought enraged him. Focus. He groped for an edge, for the speed required to know what those teeth and claws were doing before the creature he fought knew the same about his sword. It was possible, with fury it was possible. There, and there.
Neeps and the sailors climbed down to join the battle. With them, Pazel realised, was one other tarboy: Jervik. As he dropped onto the platform he caught Pazel's eye. 'Yaarh, Muketch! Now yer fightin' like a man!'
He dived into the fray, brandishing the knife he considered 'rusty trash,' throwing the rats' curses back at them. He had none of Thasha's finesse, but he did have speed and muscle, and a furious instinct for battle. Yet even with the reinforcements the fight seemed endless. The rats kept coming, in a foul geyser of teeth and claws and fur. Everything was red: their eyes, Pazel's arms, the light from the soundless storm. What was happening below Pazel didn't dare imagine.
But a moment came at last when he killed a rat and no creature took its place. Thasha stabbed a grizzle-jawed beast on his right; Jervik kicked a third to its death. And then there were no more.
They looked down. Turachs and sailors once more held the deck, which from where he stood resembled the floor of a slaughterhouse. Big Skip was hurriedly climbing the shrouds.
'The bastards wormed their way up a light-shaft, got round behind us!' he boomed. 'Come down, lads, the fighting's nearly done. Just the hold to take back now.'
There were muttered thanks to Rin. 'We still have to set that muckin' sail,' said Jervik, glancing hastily at the Vortex.
Pazel sighed. 'Right. Let's do it, then.'
'I never found Marila,' said Neeps. 'Uskins nabbed me the minute I came outside.'
'She's dead, I reckon,' said Jervik bluntly. 'I saw what them rats-Eh! Crawly! Crawly!'
He was shouting, pointing at a spot in the topmast shrouds, about eight feet from them. There in his swallow-suit, looking very small and harried in the wind, clung Taliktrum.
They hushed Jervik with some difficulty. The ixchel man watched, clearly impatient. 'You should get down from the rigging,' he said at last, bending his voice so they all could hear.
'We've got a job to do,' said Neeps. 'What do you want?'
'Do the job later,' said Taliktrum. 'Right now you must all get down. We don't mean to kill you.'
'Kill us, is it?' growled Jervik. 'Like to see him try, the little lous
e!'
'Diadrelu revealed our presence to so many of you, you understand?' said Taliktrum. 'She left me no choice. I had to act before Rose killed us. And I was right, wasn't I? Even now he's getting ready to poison the hold.'
'What are you saying?' Pazel demanded. 'What do you have to do?'
'Seize the ship,' said Taliktrum.
At that very moment a man above them gave a shrill cry. The crowd on the fighting top jumped and cried out: a body had snagged in the rigging, five feet from them. It was one of the sailors who had not helped with the fight. The arm that had caught in the rigging was wrenched at an unnatural angle.
Thasha was closest, and carefully edged nearer. 'He's still breathing,' she said. 'He's… asleep!'
Pazel looked down again. His eyes landed first on Big Skip: the carpenter's mate was dangling, arms and legs through the shrouds, head lolled to one side. On the deck, a Turach was slapping a fellow soldier hard in the face. Beside them Mr Uskins was pumping his fist, screaming at a midshipman. But even as Pazel watched, the sailor stumbled, raised a hand to his forehead, and slid languidly to the boards.
Pazel whirled on Taliktrum. 'You vicious little fool. It's blane, isn't it? You shot them with blane.'
'We shot no one,' said Taliktrum. 'You drank it yourselves. All of you. In your water, over the last many days. A slow-acting variety; we had to make sure everyone aboard got a taste, before you saw what was happening.'
'Abandon masts! Abandon masts, you fools! Climb down before it hits you!'
It was Fiffengurt, hobbling aft at a near-run, and leaving a bloody footprint at every other step. His voice snapped the men out of their shock; they began to swarm downwards towards the deck.
Thasha was still looking at Taliktrum. 'You blary idiot. We're sliding into the Vortex.'
'Get down,' said Taliktrum once again, 'we can't talk if you fall to your deaths.'
'What's there to talk about?' Neeps shouted. 'You've got to use your antidote, that's all. Otherwise we all go down together.'
'Damn you, giants! There is no more antidote! Dri stole the last of it for your little caper in Simja! But we're not butchering you, as you planned to do with us! It's a dilute formula. You'll all wake naturally, perfectly unharmed.'
'How soon?' asked Pazel.
Taliktrum was staring at the Vortex. 'Not very soon,' he said.
He let go of the rigging, teetering a moment in the wind. 'You can't judge me,' he said. 'This is war. I'm a general, and more than a general. I've been selected — yes, selected, chosen, to lead my people home. Don't deceive yourselves. If it was your family you'd have done exactly the same.'
The three friends were wide awake when they reached the topdeck, but scores of others were not so lucky. A man from Tressek Tarn had dropped from the mizzenmast and struck the rail; the fall killed him instantly. Fiffengurt was organizing men with safety lines to climb up and rescue those tangled in the rigging. Even as he did so another man vanished from the bowsprit into the sea.
Taliktrum had vanished; several Turach archers had fired arrows in his direction. What had he wanted to tell them? Pazel wondered desperately. Could it have been some clue as to how to beat the drug?
'I'm not sleepy,' said Neeps. 'Maybe they didn't manage to get it in everyone's water.'
'He sounded sure that they had,' said Pazel. 'Come to think of it, that was the only thing he sounded sure of.'
'They had this in mind all along, didn't they?' said Thasha. 'Ensyl and her friends knew about it — why else would they say the ixchel didn't need our protection? Which means Dri must have known too. Oh, how could she keep it from us? How could she?'
Pazel had no answer. All he felt certain of was that Taliktrum had unleashed forces beyond his control.
Fiffengurt came stumbling back their way, his wounded foot making a squilch each time it touched the deck. 'Lord Rin, children, what now?' he cried. 'Sleeping sickness?'
'Not quite,' said Pazel. They told the quartermaster about the ixchel's drug. Fiffengurt pulled miserably at his whiskers.
'It's not too late,' he said. 'We're still thirty miles from the eye of the Vortex. Elkstem worked miracles with the lads he could muster, but the best they could do was hold us steady. To break out we need hands on deck now. We can work the sails with safety lines, bring the lads down when they pass out, send others up in their places, but-Lo, there, midshipman! Don't lean over that blary shaft!'
A young man swayed away from the gunner's-pole hatch. The salute he tried to give Fiffengurt dissolved into a half-hearted wave. And when Pazel looked back at the quartermaster, he found to his shock that the man had sunk to his knees.
'Not too late,' he repeated, and collapsed.
Over the next quarter-hour, most of the ship's company joined him. The topdeck looked like a battlefield without victors, just a few shocked refugees wandering among the dead. Uskins snored upon a mound of dead rats. Bolutu lay curled by the No. 3 hatch, as if he had just managed to crawl into the open air before the sleep took hold. Elkstem dropped on the quarterdeck, hands clenched on a rope. He had apparently intended to lash the wheel (and hence the rudder) in a fixed position, but no one knew just what position, or what spread of sail might have accompanied it.
Neeps had begun to stumble and blink. 'Marila,' he said, again and again.
Supporting him, they ran down the No. 4 ladderway. There were bodies spread-eagled on the stairs; one man lay sleeping with a biscuit clenched in his teeth. The gun decks lay silent as a morgue. Lonely cries of Help! and Wake up! echoed from the darkness.
But farther down there were signs of life. On the orlop, men shouted and lanterns blazed. Turachs were dragging sleepers into cabins with sturdy doors. Far below, Pazel could still make out the howling of the rats.
They descended the narrow ladderway to the mercy deck, and hurried to the central compartment. Just inside the doorway they met Hercol and Chadfallow. The doctor spoke with quiet urgency. 'Get to the stateroom, you three! The fight here is lost!'
Lost? Pazel looked past the doctor. Sailors and Turachs filled the deck; the only rats in sight were dead ones. But of the hundreds of men, only a few dozen remained on their feet, and most of these were clustered about the tonnage hatch, staring into the hold, weapons in hand. The voices of the rats issued up from this darkness, cursing and insulting the men.
Even as Pazel looked, one of the men on guard began to sway. At once another sailor came forwards and and took his spear, pushing him away from the hatch.
'Rose and Haddismal are doing their best to keep up appearances,' said Hercol. 'The rats do not yet suspect what is happening. They are not affected: the ixchel did not bother to poison whatever slime or sludge they find to drink.'
'How many rats are left alive?' said Thasha.
'Too many,' said Hercol. 'A hundred, perhaps more. They are thick about both hatches, and both ladderways, yet hiding from our archers. We can kill no more without an assault on the hold, and there are not enough of us for that. I doubt, in fact, that we could stop the creatures, if they attack in force. Only their ignorance protects us now.'
Captain Rose walked the perimeter of the compartment, issuing calm orders as though nothing were amiss. Haddismal was peering down side passages, signalling his Turachs, pulling in every last man.
'There is another threat,' said Chadfallow. He leaned closer to the youths, and sniffed. 'Oil,' he whispered. 'Can you smell it? The ship's lamp oil is stored in the hold, and it has been spilt. Maybe the rats simply ruptured a barrel or two by accident. But we have seen them running with mouthfuls of rags and straw. And caught glimpses of firelight as well.'
'What's happening?' said Pazel. 'When they attacked in the hold they were like a pack of mad dogs. No plan, no clear thinking, except for Mugstur.'
'That has changed,' said Hercol. 'You can hear that they are screeching less. Bolutu thinks that Master Mugstur is calming them, giving them a way to understand the terror of their altered minds. If so they will become more dangerous b
y the hour.'
'Breathe not a word of this,' added Chadfallow. 'The men's spirits are low enough already.'
At the hatch, another man staggered away from his post. Seething, Captain Rose watched him fall. Then he turned and stumped towards the group at the doorway. His eyes were fixed on the youths.
'This is crawly work? You admit as much?'
A pause. Then Hercol said, 'Yes captain, it was done by ixchel.'
For a moment Pazel thought Rose would strike him. But just then Mr Alyash ran up to them, bearing a bright fengas lamp.
'The barricades are ready, Captain,' he said. 'They'll not be able to swarm up the ladderways again. Provided we have men left to seal them, after our retreat.'
Rose nodded. 'That is something. But not much. We must poison them, by the Night Gods, we must drop sulphur into the hold. You have found no way to seal the hatches against them?'
Alyash huffed. 'Without men to stand guard? There is no way, sir. They've shown us how fast they can chew through sailcloth and oil skins. We could cannibalise planks from the upper decks and nail 'em across the hatches, but that job would take half a day — even if we lost no more men.'
Pazel felt Neeps' hand squeeze his arm. The small boy was just barely awake.
'A drug,' he murmured.
'Yes, Neeps, it's a drug,' said Pazel.
Neeps gave his head a drunkard's shake. 'Find… another drug.'
'An antidote, you mean? No chance, didn't you hear Taliktrum? They never had very much, and it's all gone now. And even if he's lying, we'd never find-'
Neeps slapped a clumsy hand over Pazel's mouth. 'Another drug,' he said heavily. 'Something else. Delay it. Delay.'
With that he was gone. Pazel caught him and lowered him to the deck.
Chadfallow was looking at him with wonder. 'This drug they use, this blane,' he said. 'Is it magical?'
'Who knows?' said Pazel.
'I do,' said Thasha, 'and it's not. Blane is just brilliant medicine. In fact the ixchel know more about human bodies than we know ourselves. They've experimented on us, over the years, just as we have on them.'
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