The Rats and the Ruling sea

31

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 defect 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.