The Rats and the Ruling sea

25

23 Freala 941

132nd day from Etherhorde

When dawn broke in the tower, Dr Chadfallow at last did Pazel a good turn: he took the youth on his own horse, getting him away from Sandor Ott. When the spymaster noticed the arrangement, he gave the doctor a long, cold appraisal, but did not speak.

It occurred to Pazel that Chadfallow might have just saved his life, but it was almost impossible for him to feel gratitude. For a long time he could think only of his last glimpse of the Shaggat's son, releasing Alyash's hand in a muddy clearing beneath the tower, and being lifted onto the shoulders of the thin, strong, wildly tattooed and altogether deadly Nessarim. He heard again the terrible war cry that had started when they lifted Erthalon Ness: a cry that swept down to the riverbank, leaped across the water, and then like a fuse that has burned its way to the firecracker, exploded from every mouth in the settlement:

From one spark a storm of fire, from one womb a nation!

The Shaggat for us is truth entire, for others a conflagration!

Every foe his wrath shall feel, every liar hear him!

Lesser kings to him shall kneel, and fearless warriors fear him!

So ever nearer heaven's door in prayer and blood annointed,

We follow him, we follow him, unto the hour appointed!

The chant had broken up into a high, fierce caterwauling that raised the hairs on the back of Pazel's neck. Ott had explained that the Nessarim had borrowed this last cry from the Leopard People: it was the sound they made when they attacked the colony in force. The Nessarim actually admired the Leopard People's courage and swiftness, he said, and tried to show their respect through the mimicry. Ott's ultimate goal was conversion of the tribes themselves to the Shaggat cult: unlikely, he admitted, but not inconceivable.

Their second journey along the wall was even more spectacular than the first. A rainbow arched over the northern mountains; palms waved their emerald tresses from the ridgetops; a waterfall gleamed in the morning sun. But the beauty only made Pazel feel more sick at heart. He did not know why he had risked so much for a madman, but he knew quite well that he had failed. The man tried to believe me. Why couldn't he face the truth?

He clenched his fingers in the horse's mane, thoughts sliding from mystery to mystery. At last they settled on one that concerned the man behind him.

'Ignus,' he said. 'Tell me about the prisoner exchange, back in Simja. How do you know they had my mother, and Neda? Did you see them?'

Chadfallow tensed. For several minutes he said nothing at all. Then he said, 'Don't be obtuse, Pazel. When could I have seen them? My counterpart Acheleg swore that they were there, both of them, in Simjalla City.'

'When was the exchange supposed to happen?'

Chadfallow sighed. 'The morning after the wedding. Which as it turned out was also the day the Chathrand and the Jistrolloq almost came to blows. The day you translated Rose's threats.'

'Ah,' said Pazel. 'Well.'

'Yes. Well.'

Pazel was glad the doctor could not see his eyes. He was furious. Did Chadfallow think he'd had a choice? Hadn't the man noticed how he'd twisted Rose's words to make them less insulting to the Mzithrinis? Was it his fault that Arunis had dispatched some kind of demon to murder the Babqri Father?

They rode on in silence a while, watching mice and lizards at the horses' approach. Then Chadfallow began to speak again. 'I negotiated the exchange in private. I worked at it for three years — from the moment I heard of plans for a Great Peace. I obtained a writ of extradition signed by His Supremacy, to be presented to the Warden of Licherog. But all that was before I knew of the Shaggat conspiracy.'

'I don't believe a word you say,' said Pazel, his voice tight as a wire. 'You could have ended the conspiracy at the governor's table in Ormael. Instead you denied that the Shaggat was aboard. You laughed at us, said that Arunis couldn't be the real Arunis, called us a bunch of overexcited children. You kept us from exposing the whole festering lie.'

'I saw the Shaggat hanged!' snapped Chadfallow. 'Of course I didn't believe he'd returned! Besides, I was in shock, like you. In shock at the depth of Ott's betrayal.'

'I don't think you were shocked at all,' said Pazel. 'I think you're still a part of the conspiracy. I think your job from the start has been to make me useful to them — me and my gods-damned Gift.'

Chadfallow's knuckles were white on the reins. He was struggling with himself.

'Did you see the list of Mzithrini names, that day?'

'I saw it,' said Pazel, recalling how he and Neeps had pored over the scraps of parchment.

'How many of them did we have on board?'

Pazel hesitated 'Mzithrinis? None, as far as I-'

'None. Exactly. We never collected them — they rot on Licherog yet, if they are alive at all. Ott lied to me as he did to everyone. Three years of talks, and when the day came, I had no prisoners to give the Mzithrinis. What, then, do you imagine I planned to bargain with?'

'I don't know, Ignus. Gold?'

'The Shaggat Ness. The Shaggat, author of eighty thousand deaths in the Pentarchy. Think, Pazel: any Mzithrini old enough to recall that face would give me the keys to the five kingdoms to be allowed to put a knife in his heart! Your mother and Neda — they would have been nothing, no price at all. By now they'd be free, Suthinia would be-'

A spasm shook his body. He dropped the reins from one hand and grabbed Pazel by the jaw.

'But a statue? What in Rin's firebolts could I do with a statue of the Shaggat Ness? You ruined everything when you turned him to stone. You took away the only chance they had.'

The worst of the day's heat lay behind them. This time no rain or wind squalls slowed their progress. When five hours had passed they climbed a crooked ridge and saw the fortress-city looming ahead.

'We'll be back in your caves by nightfall, won't we, Mr Ott?' asked Saroo.

'Unless you prefer to spend the night on Droth'ulad,' said the spymaster. 'It's all downhill after the fortress: that should help us stay ahead of the savages. And with any luck the eguar will remain sated as before.'

'He wasn't sated,' muttered Pazel, still burning with the unfairness of the doctor's accusations.

'Hush!' whispered Swift, glancing nervously at Ott. 'Pazel, you're a hazard to your own blary health. And another thing — you ride like a sack of spuds. Why in the Pits did Ott bring you along?'

'Why'd he bring you?' Pazel shot back.

'Because Saroo and I are great riders, obviously. And because we're small, and that let the horses carry more gemstones. There, now what's your answer?'

Pazel looked away. His Gift was the answer, of course, but what had he done with it except overhear a few shouts from the Leopard People? Probably Ott was wishing even now that he'd left Pazel behind on the ship. Maybe, he thought bitterly, Ignus will offer to force something really strong down my throat, next time…

Perhaps two miles from the city they came to a low saddle in the hill, and Ott called for rest. Pazel could just make out the triple arch they had passed through the day before. He shuddered at the memory of the eguar's voice.

They dismounted, and the boys watered the horses from a feedbag. Alyash tore chunks from a dark loaf of bread and handed them around. It was a gift from the Nessarim, along with two sausages and a clay flagon of wine: as if the forty-year journey of Erthalon Ness back into the fold had been reduced to a barter for foodstuffs.

'Vicious bastards, those Nessarim!' said Drellarek approvingly. 'Scrawny, but bloody-minded; I could see it plain in their faces. They'd fight like wildcats even against my Turachs, I dare say.'

'They have only their faith to live for,' said Ott. 'And if you still wish to know, Doctor, we made this journey in support of their faith. To bring them a sign, a swallow of magic to carry with them into war.'

'A war they can only lose,' said Chadfallow.

Grinning, the spymaster inclined his head.

'A diversion,' said Saroo. 'You built that whole town full of crazies as a diversion.'

Pazel was aghast to hear a note of admiration in the tarboy's voice. His brother Swift was more guarded, however: 'The Shaggat's son would be an old man, now,' he said, 'if he hadn't spent half his life asleep. How do they know it's really him?'

'They knew instantly,' said Alyash. 'He's the son of their god, after all. They knew the birthmark on his elbow, and his tattoos — master-pieces, they were, the artist was blinded when he finished the boys.'

'Will the Secret Fist tell those poor fools when to sail?' asked Drellarek.

Ott shook his head. 'They are their own masters. We shall merely be sure it happens before the Shaggat himself reaches Gurishal. And when they do sail we shall raise the alarm in every corner of Alifros. "The Nessarim! The Nessarim reborn, and howling that their Shaggat is coming back as well!" The world shall hear it loudly. And then we shall help the poor, ineffectual White Fleet to destroy them.'

'Destroy them!' cried Pazel, his voice cracking. ' You're going to destroy them?'

'The Mzithrinis will do the bulk of the work,' said Ott, 'but we shall sink a ship or two — visibly, of course — and chase them into the line of fire. They'll have their moment. They'll take a bite out of the Sizzy fleet. But that will be trivial. The real wound to the Black Rags will be the humiliation. Forty years after the war, men will say, and they still can't eliminate the Shaggat cult! Best of all, the Five Kings will believe it themselves. As our other dogs begin to nip and bite, rumours of the Shaggat's return will spring up throughout the Crownless Lands. The Sizzies will be looking everywhere for the source of the rumour — and meanwhile they'll redouble the blockade between Gurishal and the eastern lands. But they will not be able to stamp the rumour out. And each time a dog sinks its teeth into that bear it will respond with greater desperation.'

'A diversion,' said Alyash, 'You're right, Saroo my lad. But what a diversion! The first bay, the first howl from the hunting pack. The Five Kings will hear it and tremble.'

'And those other dogs?' said Chadfallow, with quiet rage. 'Who are they, and where are they hidden? Are they to be sacrificed as coldly as the men in that settlement?'

Ott shook his head, smiling. 'Would you deprive me of all my surprises, Doctor?'

'I would deprive you of more than that.'

'Ha!' laughed Sandor Ott. 'My woman, for example? And my liberty? You have attempted both of these, and failed. And even if you had persuaded that useless Ormali governor to clap me in irons, how long do you think I would have been held?'

'Two days,' said Chadfallow. 'After that I would have seen you locked in the brig of a packet boat making for Etherhorde — with an ample guard. I paid them in advance: the guards, and the owners of that boat. I had a letter prepared for His Supremacy, with all I knew of your betrayals. Particularly how you and that-' Chadfallow bit off the word, '-viper, spent the last year poisoning his good friend Eberzam Isiq.'

Pazel was suddenly afraid for Chadfallow. His fury had hardly vanished — Chadfallow was one to talk of betrayals! — but in spite of everything Pazel somehow felt he would be lost without the man. Can't you see what you're risking, fool? he wanted to shout. Ott's probably killed more people with his bare hands than you've saved in surgery.

For the moment, however, Ott just looked amused. 'His Supremacy would have consigned your letter to the fire. He knows quite well the necessities of this campaign to perfect his dominion. You, for starters, are certainly expendable. As for his friendship with Isiq-' He looked at Alyash and Drellarek, and suddenly the three of them began to laugh, low and hard. Pazel watched them, recalling how Niriviel had taunted Thasha. The Pit fiends. They have done something to the admiral.

Chadfallow's face was darkening with rage. 'What of future "necessities?" ' he asked. 'How many leeches will you affix to the body of the Empire? Will you have the territorial governors assassinated? The lord admiral, perhaps? Will you decide that Magad's sons are unworthy to inherit the crown, and kill them as you did Empress Maisa's?'

The men's laughter redoubled. 'Oh Doctor, stop,' said Alyash, wiping tears from his eyes.

'Yes, Ignus, stop,' said Pazel. 'They're not worth it.'

The doctor turned him a tortured look. And suddenly Pazel recalled something Chadfallow had told him years ago, about the oath Arquali doctors took before their titles were conferred: Life in all its loveliness shall I defend, even at the cost of my own. Did Chadfallow think he had broken that oath too many times?

'Ott kill Maisa's brats!' said Drellarek. 'That's priceless! Why don't you tell 'im the truth, Master Ott?'

Ott shook his head again. 'There are things I won't discuss with a man who'd try to brand me a traitor.'

'You are a traitor,' said Chadfallow, his control slipping further. 'You are a weak, grasping, small-minded man. You have perverted all that I lived for and held most dear. I will name your dog, Sandor Ott: it is Arqual itself. You have trained it with cruelty and fear. You have made it vicious, ready to bite anyone who crosses its path.'

The spymaster's laughter was abruptly gone. Drellarek and Alyash fell silent. Ott rose to his feet, eyes locked on Chadfallow.

'Not just anyone,' he said.

Pazel leaped up and grabbed Chadfallow by the arm. 'Please,' he hissed, 'don't say any more.'

'We're going to need him, Ott,' said Alyash, still smiling.

'There is a field surgeon here at Bramian Station,' said Sandor Ott. 'He can serve the Great Ship, in a pinch. Chadfallow, you have twice defamed me with the one insult I swore never to bear. Call me a traitor again, and you will see if I am weak.'

'You're a tr-'

Pazel struck Chadfallow as hard as he could. There was a sound like a snapped branch, and blood gushed from the doctor's nose as he stumbled to the ground. He stared at Pazel, amazed, not even trying to staunch the flow.

'Shut your damned mouth!' screamed Pazel at the doctor. 'Wait, Mr Ott, he'll take it back, please, please, I'll make him-'

Sandor Ott drew his long white knife. Pazel stood between them, arms thrown wide, pleading with the assassin. There was a dream-like quality to his voice; it sounded soft and far away, like an echo. Behind him, Chadfallow rose and tugged out his sword.

'Put it down, Doctor!' laughed Drellarek. 'That's blary suicide, and you know it. Come to your senses and apologise, if you want to live.'

'Will one of you,' said the spymaster, 'kindly take Mr Pathkendle aside?'

Alyash started to rise, but Drellarek waved him off. 'Rest that leg while you can. I'll get him.'

'Decent of you,' said Alyash.

The Turach stood and lumbered towards Pazel. He did not bother to draw a blade. When he saw Pazel's fighting stance, he pointed and grinned. 'Look at this one, Master Ott. I'm done for!'

Pazel blocked his first blow with an upraised arm, but the strength behind the Turach's fist was crushing. The second blow found his stomach; the third, to the back of his head, came close to knocking him out. As Ott sidled towards the doctor, turning the knife casually in his hand, Drellarek grabbed Pazel by the shirt and lifted him clear of the ground. Pazel lashed out with his legs and caught the man in the stomach. Drellarek winced and struck him again.

Chadfallow was backing away from Ott, sword up, body rigid, boots shuffling awkwardly on the stones. His face was frozen, like an actor's mask: the kind depicting some elemental sin, like folly or despair. Ott, however, looked like a man who had shed every worry. He was by far the older, but as he drove Chadfallow before him he was returned astonishingly to his youth. Relaxed and graceful, he took a dancing side-step, and lunged.

Something terrible and bloody occurred, but it was not what anyone foresaw. Drellarek, Ott and Chadfallow simply disappeared. Where the party had stood an instant before there was only darkness and a blast of heat. Pazel felt himself thrown backwards with terrible force. When he landed his upper body was dangling over the rimless edge of the wall, and a screaming horse lay sprawled across his legs. The animal surged to its feet, and Pazel, blind with pain and sliding towards death, flailed out with his hands and caught a stirrup. The horse spun on its hindquarters, eyes mad with terror, wrenching him back from the precipice even as the animal's own forefeet slipped over the edge. Pazel could only let go the stirrup as the horse crashed into the trees below. Then he felt heat on the back of his neck, and turned.

The eguar stood over him. Its white-hot eyes blazed in the dark crocodilian head. Pazel clawed at his throat, choking, and his eyes streamed with tears. He was inside its cocoon of vapours, and the smell was like acid thrown on hot coals; he was amazed not to have died already.

But Drellarek was dead. The Turach's body dangled from the creature's mouth, and it was shrivelling like an old squash roasted over a flame. The saliva of the eguar sizzled on Drellarek's skin, and around its teeth the man's very armour was in flames. Then the creature raised its head skywards, and swallowed the Turach with three snaps of its jaws.

Pazel felt his gorge rise. He could not turn his back on the eguar, so he dragged himself away with his arms, expecting death, that death, with every scraping inch. He saw Swift and Saroo on the wall beyond the creature, running for the fortress roof. Then he looked down. Ott and Chadfallow lay motionless beneath the eguar's feet.

Oh no. Ignus.

Pazel had crawled free of the vapours and lay retching on his side. The eguar's eyes were still fixed on him, burning his mind even as the vapours had burned his lungs. And then the creature spoke.

This time Pazel was expecting the hurricane — and the eguar, perhaps, was aware of Pazel's limits. He was not faced with the same flood of meaning as before, and yet it still seemed that the eguar put whole speeches into single words, and to hear them gave Pazel the grotesque sensation of gulping a meal in large, unmasticated chunks.

'I, Ma'tathgryl-eguar-child-of-the-south nameless-desireless-pitiless-all-these-are-prisons forward-and-backward perceive their plan, their venom, their cleverness-madness-debauchery-faith, perceive you, lidless-unarmoured-unskinned child-man, mind thrown open, with them, apart.'

That was one word, one maddeningly complicated growl. Reeling from it, Pazel managed to climb to his feet and back a few more steps away. He knew his Gift would tell him how to answer, and struggled desperately against the urge to try. Hearing the eguar's language with human ears was bad enough; thinking in it might drive him mad.

He tried something far simpler: he used the language of the Leopard People. 'Why did you help me?' he said.

'Shackles of certainty in cage of desire in dead spindrift isle of self.'

Pazel understood. He must not assume the eguar meant him well. And as if to underscore the point the creature opened its mouth wide and breathed in his direction, and Pazel felt the vapour cloud billow over him again, but now mixed with some new bile or potion from the gullet of the beast. The vapour weakened him, and his knees gave out. He fell forward, staring up at the creature, trapped by those white-hot eyes. Then the eguar spoke again, and Pazel began to scream as never before in his life.

He was not in pain, but he was horribly violated. The eguar had peeled open his mind like an orange, and was examining all it contained. Pazel did not just feel naked; he felt as though someone had cut away his skin, and shone a bright light on his muscles and veins, and told him to dance.

But he would not dance (the eguar knew this, knew it before Pazel did, knew every twitch and motive of his soul). The beast was looking for something very specific, and Pazel somehow knew he must not give it up. His rage at the intrusion was searing; he would have tried to kill any human who invaded him in this way, he was thinking like a lunatic, like an assassin, like Ott.

The eguar might have been amused. With another battering-ram of a word it told Pazel that it had already looked into Sandor Ott's mind, and that Pazel's rage bore little resemblance to the spymaster's. Then he offered to show the killer's mind to Pazel. And before Pazel could refuse the eguar gave him a foretaste.

Like floodwater released from a dam, Sandor Ott's life history washed over him. Pazel could barely stand what he saw. Dark infant years in a slum; women's hands feeding, then gouging him, twisting his limbs; other children screaming, horrible men always enraged. Slammed doors, broken windows, a barnyard stench in the crowded bedrooms, the dead wrapped in threadbare sheets. Alleys full of muttering men, victims of the talking fever; they seized at his ankles and he barely escaped. Epidemic, someone said. A cart heaped with paupers fleeing the city by night.

Then exile, a mud-wattle village on the side of a gritty, treeless hill. Threats from the cattlemen and gentry, the owners of that useless knob. Torched roofs, tortured parents, an elder staked and writhing on the ground. More years of road-wandering, sores on his shoeless feet, a beggar's bowl tied to a string at his waist. Cold riverbanks, hard streetcorners, kicks. The taste of spoiled meat, fermented cabbage, potato skins scraped from the cobbles with a knife.

Pazel was tearing at his own face with his fingernails. 'Make it stop! Make it stop!' he begged. The memories had spanned less than Ott's first decade of life.

The eguar took its claw from Ott's chest, and the flood ceased instantly. The spymaster began to moan and stir. The creature prepared once more to delve into Pazel's mind. And all at once Pazel knew what it wanted, and knew the weapon he could use against the thing before him. The Master-Words.

He had two of them left, Ramachni's gifts, a word to tame fire and a word that would 'blind to give new sight.' He had no idea what the latter would do, but he knew that the fire-word might save him, might even destroy this beast and its blazing power.

No sooner had he formed the thought than the eguar knew it too. With the speed of a rattlesnake it coiled its body and leaped. A great wind threw Pazel flat. Then the eguar and its cloud of dark vapours were gone, and the weakness in his limbs disappeared.

He got to his hands and knees. The wall was slick with silvery ooze. Ott and Chadfallow lay moaning a few yards away. Pazel crawled towards the doctor and shook him. Chadfallow's eyes were open but did not seem to see.

'Wake up,' said Pazel, his voice raw and burned.

From the jungle on the wall's north side came a loud crack. Pazel turned, punch-drunk. Some hundred yards away, great trees were shuddering and bending. Then he saw the eguar slide its bulk onto a huge limb. Once more the white eyes gleamed — but this time Pazel looked away before it was too late.

'Child of Ormael,' said the eguar.

'Damn you to the Pits!' cried Pazel, weeping with rage. 'You could speak like a human all this time?'

'The Pits have no place for me,' said the eguar. 'Listen, Smythidor: I know where you are bound, and what awaits you there, and what you will need to face it.'

Pazel covered his ears. He would not speak with the creature, not when it had just eaten'Your enemy,' said the eguar, as if Pazel had spoken aloud. 'A man hoping for the chance to kill you. But I do not think you should die yet, not while the Stone moves over the waters. Not while a war is struggling to be hatched — kicking, writhing in blood and fire from its shell. Not before you see the wondrous South, the world my brethren made. Rejoice, human, rejoice in your skinlessness, your immolation, the nakedness of nerves. Rejoice above all in your fellowship, ere you turn and find it a memory, a dry shell without warmth. But you must never again refuse knowledge, Smythidor. I would have shown you the doctor's mind next.'

'I don't want to see — and what I saw of Ott's mind was hideous. Stay away, stay away, or I swear I'll use that word.' He shook Chadfallow again. 'Wake up, damn you, I need your help.'

Then the eguar hissed a final word in its own language, making Pazel wince — although it was, compared to earlier utterances, remarkably brief:

'Acceptance is agony denial is death.'

With that the creature departed, thrashing and tearing through the trees. Pazel got shakily to his feet and put his hands over his ears. He could see Alyash running towards them along the wall. When he turned around Chadfallow was sitting up, filthy with slime and blood. His nose was bent sharply to the right.

'Get up,' said Pazel, smouldering. 'What happens next is your problem.'

'I have no idea what you're talking about,' said Chadfallow.

Pazel looked the doctor in the eye, and waited. One breath, two. And then he dropped to a crouch and squeezed his eyes shut as the mind-fit erupted in his skull.