The Rats and the Ruling sea tcv-2

by Robert V. S. Redick

  The smoke is produced by burning the dry berries of this plant, together with some coal to keep the fire going. The crawlies bring only a few berries at a time, hidden in their pockets, and none of my crew has had the slightest luck in determining where on the ship they keep them. If we are rowdy, or the crew disobedient, they simply withhold the berries, and we are soon screaming. But their craftiness goes even further. They possess a little pill that, if dissolved on the tongue, effects an immediate and total cure. This they demonstrated on the tarboy Swift: just hours after we awoke, a crawly presented him with the pill and told him he might go. He now walks the ship a free lad, although his brother Saroo remains with us. In this way the crawlies buy our submission, as much by hope as by punishment. And of course by their choice of hostages, they have put the whole ship into a state of fear. Everyone counts at least someone among us as too important to lose.

  Little Lord Unpronounceable has issued no orders, yet. Kruno Burnscove has concluded that they wish us no mortal harm: he rivals Uskins in idiocy, and that is an achievement. One only need consider the shifty cleverness of the trap to realise that they planned this assault years ago. Besides, I know crawlies. How could I not, being your son?11 Like Ott, they have patience. And like Ott, or a wolverine for that matter, once they sink their teeth into something they simply do not let go.

  The crawly messiah does not pretend to understand the mechanics of the ship. And yet he forbids me to issue orders to the crew. The hour-by-hour decisions, therefore, have fallen to Uskins, and in this emergency the man has proven himself an irredeemable fool.

  Fate [illegible] our family [illegible]12

  By rights we should have perished shortly after waking — not by crawly poison, but in the Vortex. We were already in its grip before they drugged us, in fact. Just before the nightmare with the rats, I had to leave the topdeck for a time, in order to crush Pathkendle's mutiny. It was while I was below that Elkstem issued the warning: we had entered the whirlpool's outer spiral. I left Uskins in command (he shall never again command so much as a garbage scow), having reviewed with him exactly how one escapes such a predicament. The buffoon assured me he understood, and at the time he appeared to. But his mental frailty has worsened. I trusted him to keep watch on Arunis, and something about the task has left him distracted and easily confused, and afraid of his own shadow.

  I hardly need tell you, sir, that an aggressive tack away from the eye of a whirpool must fail, unless the wind is fierce and perfectly abeam (it was neither). But that is exactly what Uskins called for. The result was disaster: at each change of tack, the line of the ship fell hard athwart the centrifuge of the Vortex. This rolled us nearly onto our beam-ends, and built up such a force that we slingshotted deeper into the spiral as we completed the turn.

  The first failure was difficult to prove: we were still too far from the heart of the Vortex to be sure just how quickly we were sliding into it. But Uskins repeated the order twice, trying to make the tack sharper, and failing more spectacularly each time. All the while Elkstem and Alyash begged him to desist, and repeated the sane alternative: to run with the spiral, using its strength and any cooperative wind to help the ship cut slowly, steadily outwards. Had we done that within the first few hours of Elkstem's warning, all would have been well. Uskins, however, brought us at least five miles closer to the eye.

  After the third failed tack Elkstem was contemplating a mutiny of his own. But at that point the giant rats began their siege. Elkstem remained at the wheel throughout the fighting, but he could not find enough men with their wits about them to brace the mains. Working two topsails alone, he and some thirty stout lads kept us from sliding any deeper into the Vortex, but they could not break free. And then the crawly sleeping-poison felled us, and we became a cork adrift.

  By the time I awoke, imprisoned, matters had gone from bad to critical. It was midmorning. We were caught now in the lungs as well as the arms of the Vortex: the wind was cycloning towards the eye, six miles off. There were stormclouds; from the chamber's single window I saw a grey sheet of rain bend away from us as it descended, and twist into a miles-long whipcord that vanished into the maw. The port side of every object was taking on a scarlet glow. The Red Storm, whatever it was, looked set to overtake us as surely as the Vortex itself. Do you remember that mad dog on Mereldin, that ran in circles continually, all over the island, until one circle took him over a cliff? That was how we moved: around and around the Vortex, even as the Vortex itself drifted towards the storm. Which would claim us first? There was simply no way to know.

  From the window I looked on as the crew struggled to replace the burned rigging, without dropping a mast into the Nelluroq, or being swept away themselves. In Etherhorde the shipwrights would take a month for such a job, in a calm port, with scaffolding and cranes. The men were trying to do it in mere hours, after bloody mayhem, at thirty knots and growing.

  I will say this for Fiffengurt: the man has strength. Six hours I'd kept him tied and hooded. Then came the battle with the rats, the crawlies' poison — and immediately thereafter, the battle to save a ship without sails or rigging from the greatest calamity in all the seas. He marched first to Uskins, a broken-off Turach spear in his hand, and set the point against his chest.

  ' Your badges or your blood, Stukey. I'll give you five seconds to decide.' Uskins saw he meant it, and took the gold bars from his uniform. Fiffengurt took his hat too, lest there be any confusion, and sent him away to work the pumps.

  The quartermaster himself summarily took charge, assigning a team to each mast, with orders to give a test-haul to every line that remained. 'If you don't like the feel of it, cut it down! Don't wait for my say-so! We can afford the rope, but not another bad tack! And no scrap over the sides, boys — toss it from the stern! If we foul the rudder we can all start singing Bakru's lullaby.'

  The Chathrand was running smooth now — but only because the Vortex had churned the waves down to a swirling cream. The ship was settling into a glide, listing ten or fifteen degrees to port, and though I could not see the Vortex from the window, I noted how men tried not to look in that direction, and what came over their features when they did. Never did a crew attack a rig so quickly, or so well. But with every minute that passed they had to cling tighter to the ropes and rails — not against the angle of the ship, but against the surging, screaming wind. It had grown prodigiously in the last quarter-hour. Rain from farther off was cracking against the deck like drumsticks. The seal on the tonnage hatch was flapping loose. The lifeboats danced airborne in their chains.

  The noise, Father. No storm you or I ever braved had a tenth the voice of that gods' monstrosity of noise. In the forecastle house, the wind blasting under the door and through a dozen cracks and crevices began to disperse the vapour; we felt stabbed in the chest, and plugged the gaps with shirts and rags and straw from the henhouse. We crowded around the little fire-pot to shield it with our bodies. Some prayed; Sandor Ott sat brooding apart; Lady Oggosk chanted the Prayer of Last Parting, which I have not heard her speak since I was a boy on Littlecatch, that time we feared you and mother had died. Chadfallow folded his hands before his face, like one preparing to accept the worst. 'Men are still bleeding out there, still dying,' he said helplessly to Marila. Then he added: 'My family is out there. Why am I always kept apart?'

  When I could stand it no longer, I gulped a chestful of poison, held my breath, and stepped out through the door again, slamming it fast behind me. The wind like a mule kick, the spray like a whetted lash. I climbed the forecastle ladder, half blinded by the glow of the Red Storm, and turned at the top rung to look at the abyss.

  There was no hope, none at all. I was gazing into the mouth of a demon, and the mouth was a mile wide and deep as thought. Were I not your son I should have released my breath then and there. But I would not be swept from the ship, I would perish aboard her as befits her captain. I struggled back to the forecastle house.

  Faint screams above the cacophony: I raised
my eyes to the window and saw two men at topgallant-height, clinging to a forestay. The rope was straining towards the Vortex, and when it snapped an instant later the men did not so much fall as fly, like two weird, ungainly birds, grey on one side and glowing red on the other.

  'Well, Ott,' I said, catching the spymaster's eye, 'you can keep the bonus pay we discussed. But then a third of Magad 's treasury's going into that damned hole, along with the Nilstone and the Shaggat and the lot of us.'

  'Is that all you wish to say, at the end of a life?' said Ott, smiling acidly.

  I shook my head. 'One thing more. I piss on your Emperor.'

  He uncrossed his legs and stood, and would have done something painful to me had I not placed my hand on the doorknob. For once I had a way to kill faster than Ott, and more democratically.

  Then, to my astonishment, the door was wrenched open from the outside, and who should fly in under my hand but Neeps Undrabust. We all reeled from the burst of fresh air, and I, closest to the door, nearly collapsed with the pain. When I recovered I saw Undrabust struggling with the stowaway girl. He was trying to embrace her; she was striking and shoving him back towards the door. 'What are you doing!' she shrieked. 'Get out of here! Don't breathe! You'll be trapped like the rest of us!'

  There came a thump at the door — but this time I held the knob fast. Pathkendle and Thasha Isiq were out there, shouting much the same thing as Marila. But Undrabust stood his ground, trying to calm and hold her, telling her he had nowhere else to be. 'Stop it, Marila. There's just minutes left, you hear me? Keep still. You don't have to fight any more.'

  I pressed my face to the window, and saw a gruesome sight: the watery horizon was higher than the rail. We were below the rim, descending, speeding up. We had entered the demon's mouth. Pathkendle and the girl were the only figures anywhere close to the forecastle. They must have been pursuing Undrabust, guessing what he meant to do. The lad was right, of course: it no longer mattered. I watched Pathkendle draw the girl down beside him in the biting spray. They crouched with their backs to the door, holding each other, like a pair of orphans in a picture book, and the outlandish notion came to me that perhaps these four youths were the sanest of us all, for in the midst of insanity they were caring for one another, which I might assert, Father, is an aspect of the healthy mind.

  Suddenly Thasha Isiq raised her head, tensing like a deer. Pathkendle was staring at her, mouthing some question. Very firmly and quickly, she freed herself from his arms. She stood. He tried to grab hold of her again, but she fended him off with great force, her eyes still looking skyward. Then like a woman in a trance she stepped forwards, oblivious to the death she was courting, and stretched her arms high above her head. The wind surged, lifting her like a doll. Pathkendle threw himself on her legs; she did not know he was there. And then the Red Storm swept over the deck.

  It was like the glow from some unthinkably colossal fire, but there was no heat. The rain and spray turned to red gold, the deck red amber; the rigging was like wire heated nearly to melting. We had completed another circuit of the Vortex, and ploughed into the red cloud at last. Cloud, I say — but it was neither cloud nor aurora, neither rainbow nor reflection. It was just what the Bolutu-thing called it: a storm of light. Liquid light, and vaporous, and edged like whirling snowflakes. It snagged on the gunnels and dripped from the spars. It burned through the outstretched fingers of Thasha Isiq.

  As we plunged deeper, several things happened. The first was the cessation of all noise. The grinding of the Vortex faded swiftly, like the noise of a foundry when you walk away from it, shutting door after door behind you. That led me to a second, absolutely wondrous and blessed discovery: the Vortex itself was gone.

  Not dispersed, not disrupted. Gone, as if it had been no more than a soap bubble on the waves. Men crept from the hatches, stark wonder in their eyes. We were no longer heeled over, no longer caught in a death spiral on a butter-smooth sea. There were waves again, and we were pitching on them, the wind from starboard abeam.

  Then I saw that the clouds too had vanished: I mean the thunderheads beyond the Red Storm. The sky was swept clean of them, and in their place I could glimpse only shreds of cloud burning like embers in the south. The whole sky beyond the storm was new — and though I could not be sure from within that bright madness, it seemed to me that the sun itself had changed position.

  Thasha Isiq was staggering towards the forecastle, red light splashing about her ankles. Pazel was still kneeling on the deck where he had held her. In the sudden quiet, he shouted: 'What in the Nine Pits is happening to you, Thasha? What did you do?'

  She turned unsteadily. 'I didn't do anything. It was the storm.'

  'The storm destroyed the Vortex?'

  The girl shook her head. 'Nothing happened to the Vortex. The storm did something to us. Can't you feel it?'

  She walked up to the window, so that we stood face to face. Light was actually dripping from her chin, from her eyelashes. She shook her head: light sprayed in droplets against the glass. 'Would you really have strangled him?' she asked me.

  She was speaking of Pathkendle, naturally. But before I found words to answer her the duchess gave a scream. I whirled — and beheld a creature where Bolutu had stood a moment ago. The thing wore the veterinarian's clothes, and his smile, but it was not a human being. At the same time it was more like a human than any flikker or nunekkam, or even the sedge-men one sees in the Etherhorde Natural History Museum. This thing before me had a human body and face. It was svelte, and cinder-black, with silver hair and eyelashes, and large silver eyes. Those eyes were its strangest aspect. They had catlike slits instead of pupils, and a double set of lids. The inner lids were clear as glass; I do not know what purpose they can serve.

  The creature raised a hand to calm us, then thought better of it and hid the hand in his pocket. But we had all seen it, the black batskin stretched between his fingers as high as the middle joint. Then he laughed, a little nervously, and brought out his hands for all to see.

  'I play the flute, you know. In the past twenty years I grew quite good at the human sort. I will have to go back to dlomic flutes now — the holes are farther apart, to accommodate our webbing.'

  It was still Bolutu: his voice was unchanged, and his taste for odd little confessions. 'Dastu has already told you about me,' he went on. ' You see now that I spoke the simple truth. The truth about myself, and also, incidentally, about this blizzard of light. For it is the same manifestation that struck us twenty years ago, heading north. Clearly it has magic-cancelling properties. It nullified the flesh-disguises of some of my comrades; now it has erased my own.'

  ' You look a bit like a giant crawly,' said Haddismal. 'Are you in league with them?'

  Bolutu stared at the Turach in disbelief. 'No,' said Dastu. 'More likely he's with the Mzithrinis. Right, Master Ott? I'll bet he signalled the Jistrolloq somehow, as we neared Bramian.'

  The lad took a step towards Bolutu, as if he intended some violence, but was unsure of the creature's abilities. Bolutu backed towards the door. From his corner, Ott shook his head. 'If the Black Rags had creatures from distant countries working for them, I'd have heard about it. My guess is that we are looking at Arunis' lieutenant. Where has he gone, creature? Did he double-cross you, leave you here among your enemies when the rats attacked?'

  Oggosk caught my eye and cackled, and for once I felt I understood the source of her mirth. Just minutes ago we had escaped a horrible death, and yet like performing monkeys these three had snapped back into their routines, to suspicion and intrigue and lies.

  Bolutu looked from face to face. 'Incredible,' he said. ' You haven't listened to a word I've said. Why do you bother to spy on us, when your own theories are so much more attractive? For what it's worth I have but one enemy on this ship: Arunis himself. You people, you humans of the north, should have been my natural allies, but most of you have lacked the sense to see it. And now I think I shall go. I have known twenty years of interrogations by a
ngry, frowning persons like yourselves. I find the questions as sad and stunted as the questioners. Goodbye.'

  And with that he threw open the door and walked out, breathing freely. Like the others I held my breath against the outdoor air, feeling it bite at the edge of my nostrils. But Bolutu was obviously, utterly immune. A result of his transformation, I presume. He strolled away through the Red Storm, past men and crawlies alike. When he caught up with Pathkendle and Thasha Isiq (she looked spent and fragile, now, and the Ormali held her tight in his arms) the creature greeted them like old friends.

  You will be wondering how I can speak of pride, when still caged by crawlies? I shall tell you briefly, and then let Oggosk do her witching best to deliver this letter. She assures me she can do so even here, locked out of her cabin, provided we wait until dark.

  Like a soundless, strengthening gale, the Red Storm grew brighter and brighter. Men deserted the topdeck — I could not even see a man at the wheel, though I could not be sure: looking down the length of the glowing ship was like staring into the heart of a bonfire. The other prisoners urged me to cover the window, and there was no good reason to refuse. We tacked up another shirt, but the light crept in somehow: through the crawlies' bolt-hole, maybe, or the seams in the walls. All I know is that within a quarter-hour we were shielding our eyes from each other, and from the room itself. Another five minutes, and it was penetrating our eyelids. Sometime after that — how else can I put this? — it had filled our brains. We stood shivering, as if our eyes had been skinned and our heads surrounded by row upon row of scarlet lamps. We did not move or speak or moan. There was no pain, but there was no place to hide.

  And then it was gone. Normal vision returned. And when I dared look out again, I saw the red light in pools upon the deck, running here and there as the Great Ship rolled, and pouring like rain through the scuppers. We were on a natural sea, among stout forty-foot swells. When the crawlies came to rebuild the fire they ventured to inform us that the storm was visible behind us — to the north — still stretching from horizon to horizon. To this day I do no know how long we spent in that scouring light. Minutes, hours? The better part of a day?