The Rats and the Ruling sea

38

9 Umbrin 941

The humans rushed bleeding from the Abandoned House. Rose was the last one out of the liquor vault, and he personally cut the bonds on the four prisoners, screaming orders at them as he did so. Haddismal carried the half-conscious spymaster, Neeps supported Pazel, and Thasha tried her best to drag Hercol into the passage, as he swung and stabbed and bludgeoned and hacked, and a mound of twitching fur rose about him.

The rats of Chathrand were awake, and mad. They had swollen to the size of hunting dogs, and their voices — mewling, screeching, speaking — were so loud and hideous that the men fell back as much from the force of them as from the creature's tearing nails and bolt-cutter jaws. When Rose at last heaved himself up onto the mercy deck, he found Fiffengurt and twelve men ready to skid a carriage-sized packet of sparwood over the hatch. The captain rolled aside, shouting, 'Do it!' No sooner were the tons of wood in place than they heard the first rats slamming their thick bodies against the door.

'Angel!'

'Kill them!'

'Arqual, Arqual, just and true!'

'Pray before eating! Pray!'

Rose spat a great mouthful of blood. He did not even glance at the wounds on his legs. Seizing Bolutu by the elbow and Neeps by the scruff of the neck, he dragged them at a near run towards the mainmast, as a throng of near-hysterical sailors billowed around him, howling death and disaster. Pazel, Thasha and Hercol had no choice but to follow him.

'Report!' he thundered. 'Who's the deck officer? Bindhammer!'

'Sir, they've gone and turned themselves into Pit-vomited fiends!' cried Bindhammer, waving his short, burly arms.

'I noticed that! Damn it, man, how many rats are we talking about?'

The answer, when accounts were tallied, appeared to be all of them. Not a single normal rat had been spotted; the mutants were bursting from deep recesses in the hold like bees from a broken hive. Two men had perished already. The entire hold had been abandoned.

'What did you drag Neeps and Bolutu here for?' shouted Pazel, when he could get a word in edgewise.

Rose released them both with a flinging motion. 'Because I wanted to be blary sure the rest of you followed me! Shut up! Not a word! Just tell me, true and fast: do you know what's happening?'

The sailors looked at them with fear-maddened eyes. 'There are just two things it could be,' said Thasha. 'Some trick of Arunis', though why he'd turn rats into monsters I can't imagine. Or the Nilstone, working all by itself. I'd bet on the latter.'

'So would I,' said Bolutu. 'Captain Rose, since early summer I have tried to draw your attention to the Chathrand 's fleas. They were always large and bloodthirsty. After you brought the Nilstone aboard, however, they became positively unnatural. And there have been other deformed and aggressive pests. Wasps, moths, flies, beetles. Anything, that is, that might have touched the Nilstone. Their numbers have been greatest at the stern of the orlop, where the Shaggat stands holding his prize.'

'The Stone?' cried Rose. 'I thought the damned thing killed whoever touched it!'

'Whoever touches it with fear in their hearts,' said Hercol. 'Perhaps insects have no fear, at least not as we understand it.'

'The effect on insects was noted centuries ago, when Erithusme showed the Nilstone to my people,' said Bolutu, 'but nothing came of it — the vermin lived only a day or two. We know also that the Waking Spell was cast by one who held the Nilstone. Today I fear something horribly new is occurring: the fleas must have lived long enough to infect the rats with their mutation. And as they change, the rats are also exploding into consciousness — of a sort.'

'There is worse,' said Hercol. 'Master Mugstur is still alive. He fell back, even as his servants rushed me. I did not kill him with that first blow, and I never landed another. He appeared to heal, in fact, as he grew to monstrous size.'

'He's been awake for months — or maybe years,' said Thasha.

Rose glared at her, blood running freely from his mouth. 'And is it months that you've known about him? Damn you all! I know what you think of this mission — Pitfire, I even understand it! But a rat? What could possess you to keep quiet about a blary psychotic woken rat?'

Pazel saw a struggle playing out on Hercol's face. With an inward gasp he realised the man was tempted to answer Rose's question — tempted to say Because you would have killed the rats, and the ixchel with them. Rose still knew nothing about the clan. What had happened to Hercol, to tempt him to betray Diadrelu's people?

The moment was shattered by a blast from Fiffengurt's whistle. They had left him behind near the scuttle; now he and eight or ten sailors came running and skidding up the passage as if demons were at their heels.

'They're on the deck! They're right behind us! Run!'

Men stampeded for the ladderways. Fiffengurt shouted at Rose as they ran: 'They're leaping up from crates, sir, through the stern cargo hatch! They must be clearing ten feet!'

Rose glanced upward: the roof of the mercy deck, where they stood, was eight feet above the floor.

'You, and you!' Rose pulled two long-legged sailors from the crowd. 'Turachs to the orlop! Twenty men at the tonnage hatch, with bows. Another twenty at the stern hatch. And a dozen at each ladderway. Now, d'ye hear me? Run!'

The sailors rushed ahead. Seconds later a many-throated howl erupted from the stern. Men turned in horror. The rats were coming: huge, twisted, loping animals, fur patchy and sparse, inflamed bites the size of walnuts on their skin. They ran shoulder to shoulder, screeching and jabbering about the Promised End. When they spotted Rose they gave another howl and redoubled their speed.

The remaining humans on the mercy deck leaped for the stair. Rose was last again, and the rats were on him as he climbed backwards, swearing and spitting blood at them, his broadsword flashing up and down like a metal wing. Hercol fought beside him, ruthless and wild. Ildraquin was scarlet to the hilt.

On the orlop there was no sign of the Turachs. Rose and Hercol and Thasha held the ladderway, as a squirming, drooling mass of the creatures tried to jam through together. The two men stood on the top steps, blocking the way with their bodies as much as with their swords. Thasha, wielding Ott's white knife (it felt good in her hand, disturbingly good) leaned over the stair from the opposite side and stabbed.

Neeps led Pazel a few yards away. 'Can you manage? I have to find out what's happened to Marila!'

'I can manage,' said Pazel, squeezing his arm in thanks. 'Go on, find her! Be careful!'

'Undrabust!' roared the captain over his shoulder. 'Send down Dr Chadfallow — or Rain, or even Fulbreech. Send the blary tailor if you see him first! Someone's got to stitch up my tongue!'

The orlop deck had a unique defensive advantage: the four great ladderways, which ran from the topdeck straight through the upper part of the ship, ended abruptly here. To descend farther, one had to cross hundreds of feet of the dark orlop, to one of the two narrow ladderways that continued down to the mercy deck. It was a point of congestion, and intentionally so. Through the centuries, pirates and other enemy boarders had often chased the crew from the upper decks, only to become lost and divided here, and ultimately overwhelmed.

But the rats were not confused. While Hercol, Rose and Thasha held one of the two ladderways against the leaping, spitting mass, forty or fifty of the creatures broke and ran for the second stair. Fiffengurt heard them moving beneath him, like a herd of wild boars, and in a flash he understood. There was no one to hold the other stair.

The quartermaster ran as he had not run in decades, to shut the compartment door. But the rats were faster. Before he was halfway to the door they were exploding up the ladderway, spinning about, and galloping back across the orlop to meet him.

One rat was ahead of the pack, a huge yellow-toothed creature, screeching the emperor's name. Fiffengurt saw that it would beat him to the door. He stopped, waiting. Squinting at the beast with his one good eye. The rat was through the doorway, and then it was on him. Leaping for his face.

With a cry of 'Anni!' Fiffengurt jerked to one side, and brought his blackjack down with a crack. The beast fell senseless at his feet. He kicked shut the door and rammed the bolt home.

Seconds later the rest of the creatures hurled themselves against it. The old oak shuddered, but held. Fiffengurt howled filth back at them, hoping to enrage them into thoughtlessness — for there were other ways into the compartment. 'Screw yer Angel!' he shouted, waving desperately at the men behind him, and pointing at the other doors. 'Screw the Emperor too! Magad's a worm! Rin hates you! Mugstur's a wart on the world's backside!'

Big Skip saw his gestures and understood. He flew to the other doors, slamming them one after another. Pazel and Druffle chased after him. 'We're not out of the saucepot yet,' said the freebooter, wild-eyed.

Pazel knew he was right. They had closed the doors, but the deck's central passage, which was also the widest, had no doors to shut.

'Come on, we'll block it with crates!' he said.

'Forget that — they're all bolted down,' said Big Skip. 'And who's going to hold them in place, once there's fifty rats pushing from the other side?'

Druffle looked over his shoulder, counting heads. 'Thirteen of us. And that third door looks as flimsy as the blary floorboards in the liquor vault. We're going to lose this deck, my hearts.'

Right again, Pazel thought. Armed, Hercol, Thasha and Rose were barely managing to hold a narrow staircase. The rest of them didn't have a single weapon, except for Fiffengurt's blackjack, and a crowbar Druffle had picked up somewhere. Weapons, he thought, we have to put our hands on some weapons.

He stared into the open passage, thinking furiously. The surgery lay behind them — would a doctor's blade or a bone saw be any use against such monsters? There were shepherd's hooks in racks outside the cable tiers, for guiding the great ropes into coils. Useless, useless. They wanted to kill the rats, not herd them.

Suddenly a woman's voice echoed up the passage: 'What's happening? Let us out, let us out!' And Pazel remembered: the steerage passengers were still locked in their miserable compartment, dead ahead, in the zone that any minute would be overrun by rats.

Big Skip turned white as sailcloth. 'There's more than forty people in that room. And if the rats break through their door-'

Other voices joined the woman's. Hands thumped urgently at a wall or door.

'They'll draw the rats right to them!' said Pazel. 'And blast it, Marila's still got our master key!'

'Stay here,' said Big Skip. 'I'll see if Rose has a key.'

He dashed towards the melee at the stair. Druffle fidgeted and snarled. 'They're just about ready to blary hang us, and here we are fighting alongside 'em again! There's not a stale crumb of justice in this world. And I still say Arunis is behind it all.'

'Not likely,' said Pazel. 'The rats can't sail the ship for him. And he doesn't want men dying until he gets the Nilstone out of the Shaggat's hand. No, it's got to be the Stone itself.'

'Then why don't he come out of his damned cabin and do something useful for once?' Druffle fumed. 'Why don't he call up more demons from the Pits, to fight these carbuncular bastards? Or was all that talk back in Simja a barrel of hogwash?'

'It happened,' said Pazel, remembering Dri's account of the summoning.

Druffle looked at him sharply. 'Hogwash! That's it! Ain't there pitchforks with the live animals, just round the corner?'

'Yes!' said Pazel, starting. 'There's two pitchforks, in a cabinet across from the cattle pens! They'd be blary useful, Mr Druffle!'

'I'll fetch 'em right now!' Druffle thrust the crowbar into Pazel's hands. 'Keep your eye on that passage, lad.'

He was gone — so quickly that Pazel couldn't help feeling suspicious. Did he really mean to come back, or were the pitchforks just a handy excuse to run away? Druffle had shown intense, almost ludicrous bravery in the past, when under Arunis' mind-control spell. But after Druffle's behaviour in the liquour vault, Pazel had begun to think Marila was right.

And yet the one who had betrayed him was Dastu. The one nobody thought twice about, the one they all adored. Pazel's feelings remained almost too painful to face. Ramachni, he thought, how could you tell us to trust?

The voices from the darkness pleaded, wailed. Pazel looked back towards the ladderway: Big Skip was still trying to get Rose's attention. No time, no time: surely the rats were just seconds away. There were old folks back there, and children. Whole families who'd paid dearly for the passage, believing that by now they'd be almost to Etherhorde, a great city at the start of a Great Peace, a new life for them all.

And to think Ott had wanted them aboard just to keep up appearances. They were about to die, for appearances. Pazel swore, and dashed headlong down the corridor.

Forty feet, past the abandoned third-class berths, the delousing chamber, the empty nursery. On his left, down a side passage, he heard the screams, howls, prayers of the rats, still crashing against Fiffengurt's door.

A ghastly smell of human waste: he was running between racks of tight-lidded chamber pots, which no one had emptied in days. Then he was at the steerage door. The men and women were thumping, screaming. 'Villains! Assassins! You can't leave us here to die!'

'Quiet!' said Pazel, as loudly as he dared. 'Listen to me! I can't open the door-'

'Can't, or won't?' they shot back. 'What in the Nine Pits is going on out there? Who's killing who?'

'Shut up and listen,' snapped Pazel, 'or you will be killed, and there won't be a blary thing I can do about it.'

Some of the prisoners tried to silence the rest. Pazel didn't dare tell them about the rats; it would start a panic no one could restrain. Instead he told them they had to break through the ceiling, and escape into the berth deck above. 'I don't know how,' he said, 'but you've got to do it, and fast. Believe me, nobody's going to punish you for destroying Company property! I'll try to get men to help you from up there.'

There were sounds of shoving and pushing, contending cries of 'Liar!' and 'Do as he says!' Then a fist smashed hard against the door, and a man bellowed at the top of his lungs, 'Let us out! Let us out!'

Others took up the chant; the calmer voices were lost in the din. Pazel whirled around — just in time to see a gigantic, blood-smeared rat scurry into the corridor from the side passage. It spotted him, and screeched, and from behind it came an answering howl.

Terror and ecstasy: Pazel saw the rat charge, felt the solid weight of the crowbar in his hand, felt above all the slowing of time that Hercol said came to many before combat was joined. In that instant so much of what the swordsman or Thasha achieved in battle-dance no longer seemed unthinkable. He could not do it, maybe, but he saw that it could be done. He had time to gauge the rat's strength and its madness, the momentum of its charge. Time to consider twenty steps and stances. Time to imagine it tearing him apart.

He turned sideways, giving himself room to swing. The rat was shouting Heretic! Looking him in the eye, and in its own gaze was hate and torment and an intelligence unhinged. But it was not all mad: as Pazel swung it saw the danger, and spun away, so that the blow that would have cracked its skull connected instead with its shoulder — wounding instead of killing. The rat whirled completely around and came at him again. Pazel's backswing barely kept its teeth from his face. He lashed out hard with his left foot, and struck the creature full in the flank. But the rat twisted with astonishing flexibility, and sank its shovel-like teeth into his thigh. Screaming with pain, Pazel brought down the crowbar again.

Crack. The rat shuddered, but did not let go. Pazel struck again, roaring. Again. Again. On the fifth blow the rat's jaw loosened; on the sixth it fell to the floor.

Pazel turned and sprinted for the main compartment. As he raced by a second rat entered from the side passage. He swung the crowbar, never slowing, and knocked the creature from his path. But from the corner of his eye he saw scores of the beasts flooding around the corner. Another few seconds and he'd have been trapped.

'Here they come!' he shouted, racing back into the main compartment.

For the first time in his life Pazel was overjoyed by the sight of Turachs. Eight archers stood in a gauntlet, with Haddismal beside them, looking as though he was at last in his element. 'Drop, Muketch!' he commanded. Pazel saw eight longbows levelled at him, bending, and threw himself flat on the deck.

The bows sang. Yards behind him, the rats gurgled and screamed, and the deck shook as bodies crashed to the ground. Pazel dragged himself aside, not daring to raise his head. The bows twanged again, and the sounds of agony redoubled. At last Pazel realised he was out of range, and turned over just in time to see the remaining rats fleeing back down the corridor. Ten or twelve lay dying.

Haddismal beckoned to his men. 'Advance! Advance with me! Viper stance, blades and bows! Onward, in Magad's name!'

In tight formation, the soldiers ran into the darkness. Pazel hurried back towards the stair. But halfway across the main compartment he saw Hercol, no longer needed at the ladderway, cutting across his path at a run, Ildraquin still naked in his hand. Thasha ran close behind him. She gave Pazel a look of grim apprehension, a look that begged him to follow. Hercol's face was darker than ever.

Pazel rushed to catch up with them, and even before he did so, he realised where they must be bound: the surgery. It was just a few yards off the main compartment. But why were they running in such a panic? Had Hercol taken some new injury? He wasn't bleeding, except a bit around his bandaged fingers. Someone else, then, Pazel thought, someone wounded before he came down to the hold.

He and Thasha caught up with Hercol just as he reached the surgery door. There, for one breath, Hercol paused; and squeezed his eyes shut. Then he flung the door wide.

Wreckage, everywhere: the floor was strewn with broken glass, scattered surgical tools. Fluids dripped from the screwed-down tables. The single patient, Old Gangrune the purser, was squatting atop Chadfallow's desk in the corner. His forehead was bandaged; his lips trembled in fear. Then Pazel's eyes swept right, to the far end of the chamber, and he gasped.

Ignus Chadfallow stood backed against a cabinet. With his left hand he gripped a jagged staff, part of a broomhandle, maybe. With his right, he held a small, bloody bundle to his chest.

Ranged before him on the tables stood some fifty ixchel. All were tensed for battle. About a dozen had their backs to Chadfallow, in a protective semicircle; the rest surrounded this smaller group, menacing it with all manner of arms.

When the door flew open the ixchel scattered, like chess pieces swept from a board. At the same time Old Gangrune scrambled off the desk and bolted for the door. 'Crawlies! Crawlies!' he howled, barrelling past them into the corridor.

The ixchel, to Pazel's amazement, simply let him go. After their first startled movements, they snapped back into positions that were almost unchanged. The larger group merely angled to one side, keeping the newcomers in view.

Hercol made straight for the doctor and his unexpected guard. 'Chadfallow, have they-'

'Stay where you are, monster!' shouted a familiar voice. It was Taliktrum.

The young lord stood among his shaved-headed guard. His swallow-suit draped on his shoulders like a holy raiment. Steldak stood just behind him, whispering something. A slim, catlike girl clutched at his arm.

Hercol took another step. Taliktrum shouted something, and ten archers fitted arrows to bows.

'We will drop you with the same poison you used on Lady Thasha,' said Taliktrum.

'I will kill half of you before I fall,' said Hercol.

'Gods below, man!' shouted Chadfallow suddenly. 'Are you out of your head? Why did you have me guard this body? What is her importance to you? I have seen them, that's enough. Rose will know what to do.'

'Hear the giant!' cried the ixchel with loathing.

'Who are you talking about? It's Dri, isn't it?' Thasha pushed past Hercol, as if daring Taliktrum to make good on his threat. Hercol gripped her shoulder.

'If I shoot you with pure blane this time, you'll never wake up, stupid girl,' said Taliktrum. 'Not without the antidote. And I can promise you none will provide it.' He turned to the dozen ixchel between him and the doctor. 'Ensyl, stand aside. You know the rites must be observed.'

'I know what my mistress believes in,' said a young ixchel woman at the head of the group, 'and how you betrayed her.'

'You will quit this room, my lord,' said Hercol softly, 'or by the infernal fires, I'll end your reign here and now.'

Steldak looked up with fear at Ildraquin. 'My lord,' he said in ixchel-speech, 'this man felled Ott in seconds, alone. Do not fight him. We can come back later, when they sleep.'

Despite himself, Pazel laughed aloud. 'Sleep! When's that going to be, you mad dog? Have you seen what's going on out there? Do you know what's happened to your friends the rats?'

Taliktrum frowned sharply. 'Friends?' he said. 'Steldak, you know what I think of those vermin. Have you been consorting with them again?'

Steldak looked suddenly exposed, and frightened. 'My lord, the boy speaks rubbish. Like any of us, I bump into rats, they can hardly be avoided-'

'Especially,' said Pazel, 'when you're squeezed into a space the size of a shoebox with one of them, waiting to attack the captain.'

Taliktrum's face tightened. His lips curled back from his teeth in a grimace of fury. 'Again. You dare defy us again — defy my father's last order, when your first breaking of it put him in the jaws of that cat.'

'Don't take his word-'

'Should I take yours, rather? No: it is your head I should take. Get out of my sight before I do so.'

Steldak backed away, sputtering with indignation. From outside the room, Pazel heard screeches and cries. The rats were getting closer.

Hercol flexed his bloody fingers on Ildraquin. His face astonished Pazel. This was what he used to be, he thought. A man without kindness, a man of use to Sandor Ott and his order. A man capable of anything.

'Quit this chamber, Lord Taliktrum. Now.'

The young leader's nerves were clearly frayed. All the same he bristled at Hercol.

'What I do matters little. Steldak is right in one thing: we can come back when we please. You've lost more than her, you know. Wait a bit longer, and-'

'Now!' Hercol exploded.

Taliktrum fled the table, and his people fled with him, leaping, whirling, so many copper leaves in a gale. But with that uncanny ixchel coordination, they came together again a heartbeat later, schooling, sprinting as one body out the surgery door. The dozen ixchel standing guard in front of Chadfallow did not move.

Thasha rushed towards the doctor. Pazel followed, although a part of him wanted to run the other way, close his eyes, stop his ears. Anything rather than see what he was about to see.

The young ixchel woman brandished her sword at them. 'You are not to touch her, either,' she said.

'Peace, Ensyl,' said Hercol, his voice close to breaking. 'They will use only their eyes.'

'Pazel,' said Chadfallow, looking at him sternly, 'how long have you known they were aboard?'

Pazel ignored the question. He stared at the bundle the doctor held against his chest. He could not move. He felt Hercol standing close behind him, frozen like himself. At last, trembling, Thasha put out her hand — careful not to touch the bloodstained cloths — and gently tugged the doctor's sleeve. Chadfallow lowered his arm.

Diadrelu lay there, pale and beautiful and dead, her neck wrapped in a crimson bandage. Chadfallow had washed the blood from her shoulders and her hands, which were folded across her breast. She had never looked more calm, more full of vision, although her eyes were closed. Pazel didn't know just when he started to cry, but he knew he had never cried like this in his lifetime. Louder, sure, for his lost family, for Ormael, but not with this despair, this sense of something that was both part of him and too good to be part of him, and at the same time something he'd built — trust, love, language — torn away and trampled, gone. He was pathetic. Sobbing in front of Chadfallow. But so was Thasha, her head on Pazel's shoulder; and so was Hercol, leaning upon the table, his sword cast aside. The three stood there, weeping, stripped naked by their grief. Chadfallow looked at Pazel with shock. It was as if he had just realised that the boy had stepped onto some other ship, swiftly departing, leaving him behind. The ixchel too stared, as the humans cried for their queen; and one of them, Pazel never learned which, spoke under his breath.

'She knew. She insisted. They are not all the same. We used to talk as if we owned them, owned their debt to us, their sins. We were fools, because she knew them alone.'

It was a strange party that ascended the ladderway. Hercol held Diadrelu to his chest, where she passed for a thick bandage, hiding some wound. Ensyl and two other ixchel rode in the folds of his bloody shirt, and Thasha, Pazel and Chadfallow carried six more in similar fashion. Ensyl sent the remaining four off on foot, to contact whatever members of the clan remained loyal to Dri, and tell them who had slain her. How many will believe it? Pazel thought. A giant named Hercol was the only witness.

But another secret was out at last. Old Gangrune had seen to that. On every deck Pazel heard the gossip flying: It's not just the rats, it's crawlies too, they must be behind all this, they fed the rats something to make monsters of 'em all.

The men rushing to join the battle looked at the three climbing upward with contempt. 'Running off,' Pazel heard one sailor growl, 'just as we're getting the upper hand.'

It did appear that the humans were winning. The rats had not yet been driven from the orlop deck, but all those forwards of the main compartment were slain, and the Turachs were holding both cargo hatches. There was talk of a second outbreak at the stern of the orlop: rats in great numbers erupting from the manger, where the Shaggat Ness stood clutching the Nilstone. Sailors and Turachs were dying still, but the rats were dying faster. Doors slowed them down, and for all their ferocity they could not advance through a hail of Turach arrows, or a wall of spears.

If the crew could win back the orlop, Pazel mused, they could do the same with the mercy deck beneath it. But the hold? That was where the rats had lived all along. There were few doors and endless hiding places. Cable tiers, pump shafts, wing spaces, vents. Tunnels in the sand ballast, gaps between casks and crates. Rose would surely resort to smoking them out, or using sulphur gas. And he had crawlies to kill as well now.

The middle decks were all but deserted. Outside the stateroom, even the lone Turach had been called off to join the battle. Thasha was startled to find herself momentarily stopped by the invisible wall; then she silently gave permission to the ixchel she carried (and the other six, and Dr Chadfallow) to pass through. Moments later the party was inside.

They laid Diadrelu on the bench under the windows, exactly where she had woken Thasha all those months ago. 'Taliktrum spoke the truth in one way,' said Ensyl. 'The rites must be observed. My mistress must be parcelled, and the parcels given to the sea. No peace will come to her if this is not done.'

'Is that why the nine of you are here?' said Pazel.

'To see it done, yes. But not to do it ourselves. That privilege belongs to her kin, and it is a mortal offence to deny them the same.'

'Even if they're the ones who killed her?' asked Thasha bitterly.

'Not in that case, no,' said Ensyl.

'I thank you with all my heart,' said Hercol, 'for keeping her safe. And you as well, Doctor. And I must thank Felthrup, last of all: he rose from his deathlike trance mere seconds after that beast Steldak killed my lady, as if a part of him sensed the crime. And perhaps it did at that. In any case, he flew at them in such a rage that they blundered towards my cell. It was only because of Felthrup that I was able to take her body from them.'

'Ensyl,' said Pazel, 'you realise the whole ship knows about your clan, now?'

'I do,' she said grimly.

'They'll have to come here too, won't they?' said Thasha. 'All six hundred. They won't be safe anywhere else.'

'Do not let them!' cried several ixchel at once. Ensyl agreed. 'You must not, m'lady. They do not deserve your protection.'

'Nor do they need it,' blurted a round-faced ixchel youth. Ensyl gave him a sharp look.

'No?' said Chadfallow, peering at him. 'How is that? What defences have the ixchel against giant rats and sulphur?'

'We are not permitted to speak of it,' said Ensyl quietly.

Hercol sighed. 'That phrase I have heard before. Very well, keep your secrets. It is time to return to battle.'

'You must not, Hercol,' said Ensyl with a strange urgency. 'The parcelling-'

'We will decide all that when the fighting's done,' said Chadfallow.

Ensyl shook her head. 'You don't understand, there's nothing to decide. And by the time the fighting ends it may be too late. You are her kin, Hercol Stanapeth. She chose you, and you her, and none of us who loved her dispute your right. The parcelling of her body must be done by your hand, and no other. The last one to touch her must be you.'

Thasha closed the makeshift curtain over the washroom doorway, leaving Hercol, Chadfallow and Ensyl alone with Diadrelu's body. Pazel turned away with a shudder. Chadfallow had just handed Hercol a scalpel: probably the one blade in Alifros he didn't know how to use.

Thasha went into her cabin, and emerged a moment later wearing her sword. Then she went straight to her father's crossed blades, mounted on the wall above his reading chair, and took one of them down. She thrust the scabbard awkwardly through Pazel's belt. 'We'll fix you a proper baldric later on,' she said. 'Right now I want to get out of here.'

They left the stateroom and made for the Silver Stair. Pazel tried not to think of what was happening in the washroom. Twenty-seven pieces.

'It's blary cruel,' he said as they climbed the ladderway. 'To lose someone, and then have to do that to her. I couldn't do it.'

Thasha spoke without turning. 'You could if you had to. If your honour depended on it. And… the other's.'

Yours? Pazel couldn't help thinking. If we were ixchel, and you died, would they expect me…? For a moment he thought he would be ill.

On the main deck she turned to face him suddenly. 'What is it?' he said.

'Draw,' said Thasha, and whipped out her sword.

He drew. Thasha was already lunging. He blocked her strike and another followed. She chided him — 'Faster, faster!' with every cut and thrust. It was a one-minute drill, his first with a real sword, and he was afraid to go on the attack. What if he actually stabbed her? He found himself driven in circles, barely able to parry her blows. I'm hopeless, he thought, as the force of their clashing blades wrenched his arm.

'Stop!' said Thasha abruptly. 'Good! You've learned something. Those were fine parries.'

'Thanks,' said Pazel, amazed.

'Fine, but useless. Blocking won't stop these rats. You stab, or they bite you. Stab them first, Pazel. Every time.'

They took to the stairs again. 'And don't let your blade swing loose in your hand,' Thasha added. 'I made that mistake once with Hercol, and broke my thumb in the knuckle guard.'

'Ouch,' he said.

'Yes. Ouch. But it sure as Pitfire taught me to-Oh!'

She caught his arm. They were emerging onto the topdeck, for the first time in many hours. And everything around them was strange.

It was past sunset; the world should have been dark. Instead it glowed a fiery orange-red. They stepped into the chilly wind. Straight ahead of the Chathrand, the Red Storm blazed across the sky, an unbroken wall of silent, softly boiling light. It was hard to tell just how big it was, and thus how far away — sixty miles, eighty? Whatever the distance, it was much closer than when the tarboys and Fegin had watched it at dawn.

But the storm was not the only wonder, or the worst. Roughly the same distance off the port beam, there was a lowering and twisting of clouds — and, Pazel realised with a sickening jolt, of the sea itself. A great, round expanse of ocean had become vaguely, but undeniably, concave, as if an invisible finger were pressing down on the dark blanket of the sea. The centre of the depression was beneath their line of sight. Above it, the clouds churned in a descending spiral.

'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 louse!'

'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 by 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.'

Everyone stared at her. It was another of those mystifying certainties Pazel had begun to expect from Thasha. But was she right? He shuddered, remembering the clock.

'Delay it,' said Thasha. 'Is that possible? Even if there's no antidote, couldn't we take something to hold off the sleep? Long enough to build those hatch covers, anyway?'

'A counteragent?' mused the doctor. 'Theoretically, yes. But I know nothing of this blane! To find the right compound would take days of testing.' He glanced at Rose, and something in the captain's face made him add, 'Unless I got very lucky.'

Rose seized the doctor's arm and turned him bodily towards the ladderway. 'Get lucky doctor,' he said, 'that's an order.'

He needed help, Chadfallow said, and Pazel and Thasha promised to give it. Hercol, however, lifted Neeps and tossed the small boy over his shoulder. 'I will bear him to the stateroom, and meet you three at sickbay,' he said, and was gone.

It was sickbay and not the surgery that housed the Great Ship's medicines. Chadfallow and the youths raced upward again, taking three steps at a time. The middle decks were now completely silent. On the ladderway they passed just one conscious man — a Turach, stumbling on his feet, eyes half-closed. As Thasha passed he embraced her suddenly.

'Lady Thasha,' he slurred. 'Love you, love you. Goin' t'inherit a farm, see? Make you happy. Lots of kids-'

'Oh good gods.' Thasha pushed him away.

They reached the lower gun deck, and dashed along the short passage to sickbay. There to Chadfallow's delight (and Thasha's, Pazel noted) they found Greysan Fulbreech, wide awake, tending a ward full of sleeping men.

'Doctor!' he cried, 'I have lost three patients! The rats came down the Holy Stair from the main deck. They broke the latch on the door. If the Turachs had not come, everyone here would have been killed.'

'Including you,' Pazel heard himself say. Fulbreech did not even look at him. But Thasha did, reproachfully.

'Clear a table!' shouted Chadfallow, storming in. 'Listen, all of you. We are going to behave like potion-peddlars on the streets of Sorhn. I will hand you something; you will go out and find men on the verge of sleep — not uttterly lost, but failing. Make them take what I give. Tell them whatever you like. Watch them, see if they grow more alert. Then rush back and tell me. And meanwhile send anyone else you can find to me directly. Ah, sheepsgaul! Put this in some water, Greysan.'

Moments later they were out the door. Thasha had a vial of white chilli oil, Pazel a yellow pill the doctor called Moonglow. They ran straight to the topdeck; it was closer than the mercy, and the only other place they knew of where men were still awake in any numbers.

Or had been. Pazel gazed over the deck and felt his heart sink. He had hoped that he would find men still battling the sails, keeping the Chathrand from gliding faster towards the Vortex. But there were simply not enough of them. From where he stood, Pazel counted nineteen — make that eighteen, there went another to his knees — largely unoccupied sailors, wandering among the sleepers, shouting out prayers, making the sign of the Tree. Some kicked their shipmates in despair, begging them to wake. Pazel squeezed the pill in his hand. 'This had better work,' he said.

Not two minutes later he had convinced a blinking, frightened man to swallow the pill. 'It's from Chadfallow, it'll keep you awake,' he declared shamelessly. The man gulped it eagerly, then gave him a triumphant smile. He raised both fists above his head. "I feel it!' he said, and collapsed.

The others fared no better: Thasha's victim cried himself to sleep, having swallowed enough chilli oil to make a fire-eater beg for drink. The man Fulbreech approached vomited on the deck.

None of these fiascos dissuaded the remaining men from following the youths back to sickbay. They had lost hope. Chadfallow was offering a last straw to clutch at, and clutch they did. They waved to their shipmates, this way, this way! The doctor's workin' on a cure!

Of the fourteen men who set off for sickbay, just eight reached it. Among them were Mr Fegin, Byrd the gunner — and, Pazel saw with outrage, Dastu. The elder tarboy's feet dragged; he was fast succumbing. But as the others shuffled into sickbay he held back, wary eyes on Pazel and Thasha.

'Come on, mate,' jeered Pazel savagely. 'Don't be shy. For you we'll find something extra strong.'

Dastu gave Pazel a heavy-lidded stare. 'Think you're better than me, don't you, Muketch? After all the Empire's done for peasants like you. All the doors its opened, all the helping hands.'

Something inside Pazel came apart. He crossed the floor to Dastu and with a cunning he never knew he possessed, made as if to draw Isiq's sword. But as Dastu's eyes snapped to his sword-hand, he struck the older boy's chin as hard as he could with the other. Dastu's head jerked sideways. Then he fell.

'How courageous,' said Fulbreech. 'You've just knocked out a sleepwalker. And taken someone from us who could have tried a remedy.'

Pazel shut his eyes. Bastard. Cretin. When he opened his eyes he saw Thasha watching him, shaking her head.

'Next!' shouted Chadfallow, pounding his fist on a table. 'Who's nearest to sleep? Raise your heads, look me in the eye!'

An assortment of oddities lay spread before him. Pills, potions, creams, a jar of blue seeds, a dry and blackened lungfish. The men raised weary hands. One man swallowed seeds, and dropped in mid-chew. Another bit off part of the lungfish, chewed with great concentration, and dropped to the floor. Fegin drank something from a green flask. He groaned and turned rather green himself, then lowered himself to the wall. 'I'd like to… apologise,' he said, as his head lolled forwards.

Chadfallow's speed increased. He popped items into waiting mouths. 'Swamp myrtle,' he said. 'Bodendel marshfly. Endolithic spore.' But the men continued to drop. In frustration Chadfallow swept all the failed substances to the floor. He tore at his hair. 'All right, damn it: Thermopile Red — that should keep a man working for a week! Drink it, Byrd! Drain the cup! Don't shut your blary eyes!'

When Byrd fell, unrevived by Thermopile Red, the doctor let himself sink into a chair. Only he, Thasha, Pazel and Fulbreech remained. He looked at them and sighed. But before the sigh ended it had become a yawn.

That yawn frightened Pazel immensely. At the same time he felt a cloudiness descend on his brain, and a weight in his limbs, and knew his time was close.

He staggered forwards and shook the doctor. 'Fight it, Ignus! Think! We're counting on you!'

'Don't,' muttered Chadfallow.

'None of these are strong enough,' said Thasha. 'What have you got that's stronger?'

'Nothing,' said the doctor, shaking his head. 'No use… too late.'

'The Chadfallow I know would never talk that way, while life remained in him,' said a voice from the passage.

It was Hercol, supporting himself with a hand on the doorframe. He lurched into sickbay, jaw clenched and eyes heavy, as though staving off the blane through sheer force of will. 'What's left?' he said. 'No — don't answer. What is dangerous, ludicrously dangerous? What is against your ethics to try?'

At the sight of his old friend the doctor opened his eyes a little wider. He looked sceptically at the items before him, understanding Hercol's challenge, and appalled by it. He fumbled through the items, knocking several irritably aside. Suddenly he stopped, and looked at Pazel in wonder.

'A cocktail,' he said. 'A blary three-part heathen cocktail. Fulbreech! The key, my desk, the black bottle. Hurry, run!'

Fulbreech ran across the ward. The doctor, meanwhile, lifted a tiny, round metal box, with a painting of a blue dragon on the lid. 'Break the seal,' he said, passing it to Pazel. 'My hand shakes too much; I will spill it, and there is precious little.'

'What is it?' asked Hercol.

'Thundersnuff. A stimulant, putrid, exceptional. Part of a mad Quezan cocktail, they use it as punishment for sloth. If only I can remember the third ingredient. Something very common, it was… cloves, or horseradish…'

Fulbreech returned with a bottle, black and unmarked. 'There's some mistake, sir, this is grebel.'

Grebel! Pazel nearly dropped the little box. It was the nightmare liquor, the madness drink. He'd had it forced on him as punishment, by certain sadistic men on other ships. Fear, panic, hallucinations — these were all he recalled of the experiences. Except'I didn't sleep,' he said. 'I didn't sleep for days! But that was just because of the fear, wasn't it?'

'Salt!' said the doctor, ignoring him and surging to his feet. 'The third ingredient is salt! I have gypsum salt, it will do, we can chew it — here!'

He snatched a leather pouch from the floor, ripped at the drawstring, and took a large pinch of gravel-like salt. Without preamble he gulped it, crunched it audibly in his teeth, and grabbed the bottle from Fulbreech. He favoured the grebel with a look of loathing and respect. Then he tilted the bottle and drank.

'Glah! Horrid! Quick!'

He gestured at the little box. Pazel unscrewed the lid, breaking the seal. Inside was a teaspoon's worth of fine red dust. The doctor bent until his nose was directly over the box. He covered one nostril and sniffed. Then he began to scream.

'OH DEVILS! OH GODS OF FLAMING DEATH!'

He straightened, spasmodically, as Pazel had seen men do when stunned by a Flikkerman. He gave an incoherent roar.

'It's working!' said Fulbreech.

Looks of terror and wild mirth chased themselves across the doctor's face. He reeled, clutching at the air. Grebel sloshed from the bottle in his hand.

Hercol caught the doctor's arms. 'Hold on man! It will pass!'

Chadfallow thrust the swordsman aside and bent over the table. He put his forehead down, moaning. In his grip the table began to vibrate. Then, shaking violently, he raised his head to look at them, and spoke through chattering teeth:

'Twice… the… grebel… half… the… snuff.'

Those were his last coherent words. Fortunately they were the right ones. When the others had chewed the salt, swallowed the grebel and inhaled the tiniest whiff of thundersnuff, they felt weird and sick, but not deranged. Chadfallow for his part sat grinning, hugging himself, occasionally letting out a strangled scream.

'Well, we're awake,' said Thasha, twitching. 'But there's no more grebel — Chadfallow spilled half of it on the floor. We're not going to be able to give this treatment to anyone.'

'And a hundred monsters in the hold, waiting for their chance,' said Fulbreech.

'Or more,' said Hercol. 'And there is no way to know how much time we have gained. No matter — we shall fight the fight we are given. But be careful! You are not yourselves. Above all, beware your courage. It may be heightened beyond all reason, and lead swiftly to your death. Pazel, are you quite all right?'

'Yeah,' said Pazel, sniffing. 'Just hot. I feel like I'm standing next to a fire.'

'The grebel came around to you last,' said Hercol. 'I wonder if you had enough?'

'I left him half of what came to me,' said Fulbreech quickly.

'I'm all right,' Pazel insisted. 'But listen. We can't do this alone. It's blary impossible. We're going to need-'

'Prayer,' said a voice from the doorway, 'though what mongrel god might answer you I cannot guess.'

It was Arunis. Pazel, who had not seen him since Bramian, was shocked by the change in his appearance. He had lost all the round plumpness of Mr Ket. His face was pale, almost spectral, and a deathly light shone in his eyes. He gripped his cruel iron mace in one hand, and in the other the neck of a large and bulging sack. He looked amused at the sight of the doctor.

'The Imperial Surgeon,' he jeered. 'Prince of Arquali intellectuals. Whatever you have done to him is an improvement.'

To Pazel's surprise it was Fulbreech who spoke first. 'Get away, sorcerer! You don't deserve to breathe the same air as this man! And if you have any powers at all, use them to reverse what you did to the rats.'

'I?' laughed Arunis. 'You witless dog! I have done nothing to the rats! You humans left the Nilstone in a compartment overrun with fleas. You humans failed to notice an ixchel clan in your midsts, or a woken rat possessed by holy lunacy. Yes, I work for your destruction as a race, noble cause that that is. But how little you force me to do! My only fear is that the Chathrand 's crew of savages will destroy itself, before it carries us to Gurishal.'

'A noble cause was laid before you, long ago,' said Hercol. 'But you chose another path, and have cleaved to it ever since. It has made you very strong, and very empty. Will you not abandon it, Arunis? There is still time to choose a new purpose — a higher purpose, beyond your poisoned dreams.'

'Spare me the sermon,' jeered Arunis. 'Delusion is not to my taste. Was ever a life more empty than your own, Hercol Stanapeth? Where has your higher purpose led? You could have been Ott's successor — the brain behind the Ametrine Throne. You could have been the most powerful man in your Empire. But instead you chose fantasy — a mist of promises and hopes. And so did the rest of you. Where is Ramachni? Where is your father, girl? A safer place than the Chathrand, that is where! And the crawlies! For months you denied their true nature. You couldn't admit that they were simply beasts, born rabid, ready to kill. You wanted them to be your tiny brothers. You wished to befriend them, or-' He looked at Hercol with disgust. '-to train them to perform… other services.'

Hercol moved before anyone could stop him. He vaulted over the table and flew at the sorcerer, his black sword raised to strike. Arunis took a step back, lifting his mace, and shouted a word in a strange, harsh language. There was a flash of white light, and Pazel felt himself hurled backwards, as by the slap of some giant's invisible fist. Thasha and Fulbreech were thrown as well. But Hercol did not falter; he only slowed his step, as though fighting upwind in a gale. Ildraquin glowed faintly in his hand, and he shouted a challenge in his native tongue.

Six feet from Arunis he slashed suddenly at the air. Now it was Arunis who felt an unseen blow. He stumbled backwards into the passage, amazed and furious. Once more he cried out in the harsh language. There was a second flash. Again Hercol swung at nothing; again the mage fell back. As the swordsman came at him a third time, Arunis hurled the mace with all his strength, and ran.

Hercol might have dodged the mace — but not without endangering those behind him. He caught it full on his shield, which cracked in two. With a snarl of pain he cast the two pieces to the ground. Then he groped for a wall. He was badly shaken.

'After him!' he gasped. 'He is about to commit some atrocity, I felt it as we fought! Do not let him get away!'

'You're hurt!' cried Thasha.

Hercol shook his head. 'Leave me with Fulbreech! Stop the sorcerer, girl.' With sudden decision he stood and thrust Ildraquin into her hand. 'Go!' he bellowed, pushing her out.

Thasha ran, and Pazel with her. They could hear the sorcerer's feet pounding across the deck. They entered the main compartment, and there he was, fifty yards ahead, running for the Silver Stair.

He was exhausted, they were gaining on him swiftly. As he reached the stair he looked back and saw Ildraquin in Thasha's hand, and fear shone in his eyes.

Pazel and Thasha gained the stair and hurled themselves down. Pazel could feel the grebel starting to work on his mind: that bad-dream feeling, the way dark and wriggling shapes clustered at the edge of his sight, only to vanish when he looked at them directly. He would have to warn Thasha. You're not mad, it's the drink, it's the snuff, it's every blary thing but you.

The berth deck passed in a whirl; then they heard Arunis exit onto the orlop. 'I know where he's going!' said Thasha. 'To the Nilstone! To the Nilstone and the Shaggat Ness!'

They reached the foot of the stair — and backed away in horror, not daring to breathe.

A swarm of giant rats was crossing the orlop, port to starboard, flowing around the foot of the Silver Stair. They were eerily quiet: no more screeching, though soft cries of "Kill!" still boiled from a few bloody mouths. Their stench was alarming: not only the rat-reek the youths had suffered for hours, but a new, oily, heady smell that made them cover their mouths, lest they cough.

As they flowed by within feet of the two humans, the rats suddenly raised their twisted, nasal voices and began to sing:

Fearless the child of Rin proclaims:

'Death is the promise that breaks my chains.'

Cold is the journey, but bright the glade

Where believers rest in the Milk Tree's shade

Faith on fire, blood on the sea,

Rin's fair Angel, set me free.

Eighty or ninety of the monsters passed, staring straight ahead, as Pazel and Thasha watched without moving a muscle. When the last had scurried by the youths leaned back against the wall, gasping with relief.

'Arunis must have been barely ahead of them,' whispered Pazel.

'That chant,' said Thasha, 'it's a hymn. The same one we used to sing at the Lorg, except for that bit about blood. And Pazel — did you see an ixchel walking with them?'

Pazel started. 'No, I didn't. Listen, Thasha, don't trust your eyes. That grebel-'

'I know,' she said. 'It started back in sickbay. I saw my father standing behind Fulbreech, terribly angry, reaching for his neck. And then-'

She was overtaken by a yawn. Aya Rin, thought Pazel, she's not going to last. Thasha looked at him, frightened, furious, tightening her grip on Ildraquin. 'Let's go,' she said.

They stepped onto the orlop. They could hear the rats scurrying off to starboard, and a voice — Master Mugstur's voice — berating them about their souls. Pazel was glad to find the compartment door torn asunder: it let them pass through without a sound.

They had stepped into a small chamber, a granary for the ship's livestock. The grain bins had been smashed and plundered. By the far doorway stood a pool of blood.

'The next room's the manger, where Rose put the Shaggat,' said Thasha. 'Stay behind me, Pazel, and for Rin's sake don't try anything brave.'

At another time he might have made some retort. Now he only nodded. The grebel had turned the pool of blood into a black and steaming pit; he winced as Thasha walked through it, dispelling the illusion.

He followed her into the manger. Dead ahead they could see the stone form of the Shaggat, chained tight to the stanchion. Clenched in his fist was the Nilstone, darkness made visible, nothingness given form. Bodies lay around the mad Mzithrini king: Turach bodies, and rats. Square bales of hay lay in blood-darkened mounds. But there was no sign of Arunis.

Thasha smacked herself furiously on the head. 'Wrong again! This wasn't where he was going at all!'

'But it is where you are going to die, giants,' said a voice behind them.

They whirled: alone in the doorway, bare feet in the pool of blood, stood Steldak. He had never looked more vicious or depraved. His gaunt lips were stretched wide and grinning, and his pale eyes shone with glee. Before Pazel or Thasha could move, he turned and shouted:

'Come, Mugstur! I told you it was not Arunis! It is but two humans — the last, maybe, to have escaped our vengeance.'

A great screech went up behind him, and rats began to pour through the doorway. With a decisiveness that saved both their lives, Thasha grabbed Pazel by the arm and pulled him to the back of the chamber. They clawed their way up a stack of hay bales, then turned and raised their weapons. 'Strike first!' Thasha whispered to him. 'Every gods-damned time!'

The rats were on them in seconds. Pazel fought even more desperately than he had on the mainmast, driving Isiq's sword into one set of snapping jaws after another, struggling for balance on the shifting bales. As scores of rats converged on the youths, Mugstur himself waddled into the chamber. He was astonishingly swollen and ugly. His transformation in the liquor vault seemed to have closed the wound Hercol had given him, leaving only a purple scar on his bone-white chest. But something had changed: Mugstur, and indeed all the rats, had become slick and slimy, as if coated with some viscous substance. Hallucination, thought Pazel, as a rat prepared to spring.

He killed that one, and the next, by stabbing downwards with both hands on the sword hilt. There were four scrambling to take their place, however, and eight or ten attacking Thasha. And the creatures were still shoving through the door.

He had stabbed his fifth rat when Steldak let out a piercing cry. At almost the same time a voice shouted, 'Hold! Hold, beasts, or your master dies!'

Mugstur snarled, and his servants froze where they stood. Clinging to Mugstur's shoulder was Taliktrum. The ixchel twisted the rat's loose flesh with one hand, while the other reached around the hairless neck, to the base of his jaw. There he held a long knife, point upwards. One sharp thrust would bury it to the hilt in Mugstur's brain.

Four other ixchel — Dawn Soldiers, all — were racing up Mugstur's hairy sides to stand with their leader, weapons drawn. On the floorboards, Steldak lay with an arrow in his chest.

'Surrender, vermin,' said Taliktrum.

Master Mugstur reared suddenly on his hind legs. He had been thrice an ixchel's size before his transformation; he was thirty times it now. But the five ixchel held fast, and Taliktrum remained poised for the kill.

Mugstur flexed his claws, one by one, a weirdly human gesture. Then he laughed, deep in his throat.

'Talag's son,' he said. 'You should have brought that peppermint oil. Now you see what comes of defying a servant of the Most High. Tell us, crawly: when did you fall in love with giants?'

'I did not come for them,' snapped Taliktrum. 'If they had been killed months ago my clan would still be safely hidden from the giants. It is you I am here for.'

'Yes,' said Mugstur, 'for me. But not in the way you imagine. You have come because Rin willed it, and his Angel's power has brought it to pass. You are here because you are part of my destiny.'

'Mad creature!' said Taliktrum. 'Aren't you ashamed to peddle that pap — that watery stew of giant beliefs? Order your rats back to their warren, or my knife will decide your destiny once and for all!'

'Bring him in, my children,' said Mugstur calmly.

Noises from the granary: then a new clutch of rats entered the chamber. Two of the creatures, walking on their hind legs, carried a wooden staff between them. An ixchel man was bound to that staff, head to toe. He was gagged, and nearly as wasted and filthy as Steldak had been when Pazel first saw him in Rose's cage. All the same his look was regal. His angular face and haughty eyes resembled Diadrelu's, and Taliktrum's own. His grey beard was a wild tangle.

Taliktrum gasped. 'Father!'

'It's Talag!' whispered Thasha. 'Sniraga didn't kill him! Oggosk lied to you, Pazel!'

'Your father has been our guest since Uturphe,' said Mugstur, 'The witch gave him to Steldak, in exchange for information. And Steldak wisely brought him to me.'

'Liar!' spat Taliktrum. 'No ixchel, not even mad Steldak, could betray one of his own in this way!'

'Steldak did not wish to,' Mugstur admitted. 'He was tempted by the worship of a false prophet: you, Taliktrum. But I had hope for him always. He was a visionary like me. Weaker, of course, but as his fear left him his visions grew clearer. They gave him the strength to kill Talag's sister, when the time was right. Above all he was committed to the death of the arch-heretic Rose. It is a pity you murdered him before he could stand in triumph on Rose's corpse. But my children will not weep for him. True servants of Rin's Angel fear no death.'

'Fear no death!' howled all the rats together, as though the words were a slogan.

'Notice the ropes at Talag's wrists and ankles,' said Mugstur. 'Harm me, little lord, and my children will tear him limb from limb before your eyes.'

Pazel put a warning hand on Thasha's arm. This was going to get ugly.

'It is not I who will surrender, it is you!' roared the white rat suddenly. 'Stand aside and let us finish our kill! We are here because Steldak heard the voice of the Angel. And the last humans standing, a dark boy and a fierce pale girl, were here awaiting us — a fitting sacrifice, at the end of ends. The other humans fell before we reached them, struck down by the Angel's wrath-'

'By us, you fool!' said Taliktrum.

But Mugstur was no longer listening. 'Our wait is over, children! The sky has turned to blood, and a great mouth has opened in the sea! Everything is clear at last! It is the promised hour! The Angel comes!'

'The Angel! The Angel!' shrieked the rats, twitching with ecstasy.

Talag clung helplessly to Mugstur's neck. His eyes swept about the room, as if searching for an exit he might have overlooked. On the wooden staff, his father desperately shook his head. Taliktrum caught his eye, and a look of shame swept over him.

'I can't obey, Father,' he said. 'I can't let you die. Withdraw, soldiers! Your next commands will come from Lord Talag. Release him, Mugstur, and take me instead.'

'No!' shouted Thasha suddenly. 'Do not move, any of you! I forbid it!'

Rats and ixchel alike looked up in shock. Pazel gaped as well: her voice was astonishingly changed. This was Thasha speaking, and at the same time it was not: just as a fiddle becomes something utterly new when passed from a novice to a master.

There was a strange, bright light in her eye. She lowered Ildraquin until it pointed at Mugstur's heart. 'You read the signs correctly,' she said, confident and commanding. 'All but the last one, that is. Your wait is over. I have come.'

Such a cacophany of squeals and howls and perplexed roars followed that not even Mugstur could make himself heard. Some of the rats had dropped on their bellies, cowering. Pazel was frightened half to death. What was happening to her? Where could she take this bluff?

'Back!' Thasha shouted with a sweep of Hercol's sword. The rats who had been attacking her and Pazel leaped away. Then in one bound Thasha jumped to the floor, landing just beside the Shaggat Ness.

Mugstur dropped to all fours and backed away. His eyes shone with doubt and wonder. 'You… you are the Angel? The Blessed One, the spirit who woke me, when I was a common rat?'

By way of an answer, Thasha spread her arms wide, and in that strange, powerful voice, began to sing:

I come as a shadow o'er the sea

Swift and certain, my decree:

None who would with Rin abide

May from his chosen servant hide.

Neither from his justice cower:

For in that final earthly hour,

Earth and ocean are as glass;

Through them my burning gaze shall pass

And scour all beasts from haunt or lair,

Their souls to free upon the air.

It was a liturgy of the Rinfaith — Pazel had heard bits of it before, chanted by devout sailors or travelling monks. But in Thasha's voice the words were frightful. Mugstur crouched low, tucking his tail and holding his head with his paws. Taliktrum and his warriors still clung to him, too shocked to do anything but watch.

'Angel,' whimpered Mugstur. 'How can I know you? How can I be sure?'

'If you do not know me, then you were never my true servant,' said Thasha.

'That girl… she was always aboard!' squeaked one of the rats. 'She's Thasha Isiq, the Treaty Bride!'

Thasha looked at the deformed rats. She was in a trance, Pazel thought. Then — before he could do more than scream a despairing No! — she reached out and touched the Nilstone, between the dead stone fingers of the Shaggat Ness.

Pazel thought he was seeing her die. Something like that withering flame that had consumed the Shaggat's hand raced from the Nilstone down Thasha's arm. But it did not kill her. It swept over her body like a cold flame. All colour went out of the room, but Thasha's skin took on an unearthly glow. The black radiance of the Nilstone flowed through her fingers, brighter and brighter.

'Do you believe?' Thasha demanded.

'We believe, great Angel,' said Mugstur, squirming and grovelling at her feet.

'We believe you! We believe!' squealed the rats.

Thasha frowned. 'I do not trust in words. We shall see if you stand ready to prove your faith in deeds.'

With that she wrenched her hand away from the Nilstone. She cringed, cradling the hand, as a peal of thunder rolled through the ship. Pazel slid from the hay bales and caught her before she could fall. Then the room was still.

Mugstur leaped to his feet.

'Yes!' he cried. 'I am ready! We are all ready! It is time for deeds! We will show you, Mistress of Heaven! After me, rats, the hour is come!'

He turned and flew from the chamber. Their foes forgotten, the other rats pursued him. Their cries were taken up by the horde in the outer compartment: 'The hour is come! The hour is come!'

Thasha put her arms over Pazel's shoulders. 'Well,' she said, leaning into him.

It was her old voice; he could have wept with relief. He looked her over, head to foot. She had touched the Nilstone; she should have been dead. And yet she was not even visibly wounded, although he was rather sure she would collapse if he released her. 'What… what did you do?' he whispered.

Thasha looked up at the Nilstone in the Shaggat's hand. 'It was nothing I'd planned, believe me. I just thought it was the only chance we had.'

Beside them, Lord Talag (dropped by the rats in their haste) began to moan and twist with great urgency. Taliktrum bent and slashed at his father's bonds.

Pazel looked out through the doorway. 'Where in Pitfire did they go? What did you tell them?'

'Nothing!' Thasha protested. 'I just said obey me, didn't you hear? I don't know what command they think they're obeying.'

Talag retched and shouted, tearing at his gag. Taliktrum wept openly as he cut him free. 'You lived,' he managed to say. 'The rat taunted me, said he had something I wanted more than life itself. I never dreamed it could be you.'

The gag parted, and Talag spat it out. He made a raw and painful sound.

'Don't try to speak too soon, m'lord,' said one of the Dawn Soldiers.

Talag shoved him away. He bolted upright, even though his legs were still tied to the staff. 'The rats!' he croaked, his voice a husk. 'They go to die! Stop them, girl, stop them! Bring them back!'

'Father, you're ill!' cried Taliktrum. 'They're our enemies, even though they kept you alive!'

'Ill, am I?' snapped Talag. He drew his hand roughly over Taliktrum's chest, then rubbed his thumb and finger together. 'Lamp oil, you fool! Every rat aboard has bathed in it! They're killing themselves! They're going to free their souls upon the air! They're going to heaven on a plume of smoke!'

The horror of what he was saying struck Pazel like a club. Thasha gasped and sprinted from the room. Pazel chased after her, amazed that she had found yet another reserve of strength. 'Mugstur!' she shouted. 'Stop! I command you!'

But the power had left her voice, and the rats were far away. As they neared the Silver Stair Pazel realised he did not even know if they had run up or down. They skidded to a halt, listening.

'They're beneath us!' said Pazel, starting to plunge downwards. But Thasha caught his arm, and he listened again.

He cursed. 'And above us! Mugstur could have gone either way, and-Oh, damn it all! Look!'

Three hundred feet away cross the central compartment, flames leaped suddenly in the gloom. They were rats, burning like living torches, and they were running this way and that, biting one another, setting each other alight. Those not yet on fire screamed at those that were: 'This way! Bless me, cleanse me, brother!' Then twenty or more rat voices rose in song:

Faith on fire, smoke on high,

Rin's first Angel, see me die.

Rise in ash to heaven's nest,

Rin's Rat-Angel, love me best!

Pazel would have found it hard to imagine things getting much worse. But they did, considerably. Thasha was still holding his arm, and when he looked at her he saw tears of frustrated rage.

'No good,' she said, nearly sobbing. 'I'm no good, I wreck everything, you're about to die, do you love me?'

'What?'

Thasha fell asleep in his arms.

He shed her father's sword, and thrust Ildraquin through his belt in its place. He caught her under the arms. What could he do, and what did it matter, now? It didn't, he thought. The fog was in his brain again; he felt stupid and slow. But he would not abandon her. He would not let her burn among the rats.

The first climb was easy. He kept her body high, and bore much of her weight against his chest. But after the berth deck he slipped in blood or oil, and fell painfully, and when he lifted her again she felt heavier, somehow. At the lower gun deck he had to put her down and clear dead rats from the ladderway. The upper gun deck was bright with flames.

When he emerged into the open air the scene was infernal. The sky throbbed red in the south; lightning crackled over the still-closer Vortex. At least fifty rats had clearly made straight for the topdeck, and set themselves aflame when they reached it. Many had not stopped there, but had pulled themselves burning up the masts and shrouds. The tarred rigging snatched at the flame; already the mizzen topsail was alight.

Hallucination? thought Pazel hopefully. Then he gave a sobbing laugh. The stench of burned fur, the wafting heat, the swollen, blazing animals leaping crazed from the yardarms: it was all too abominably real. And so was blane. He stumbled, rose with effort, dragged Thasha a few more yards. Then he sat down and propped her head on his lap, brushed her dirty hair from her eyes, and kissed her the way he'd wanted to for so long.

This is where it ends, Thasha.

The flame was widespread, fore and aft. Somewhere ixchel were shouting, cursing, muttering their ambiguous prayers. He thought, My mind is the ship. Three hundred cabins full of smoke, full of fog. Nothing stirring much longer. No more fighting to be done.

A rat lumbered towards them in flames, shrieking. Pazel watched it, too sleepy even to move his hand to Ildraquin. The creature stopped a few yards from their feet and bowed its head, and Pazel realised he was looking at Master Mugstur. The white rat settled on to his thick stomach and lay burning like a hideous beacon in the wind. Most of the others were already dead.

Pazel bent and kissed her once more. He closed his eyes, shutting out the world, shutting out everything but Thasha's lips, her gentle breathing. They should have done more of this. What exactly had they been waiting for?

The fog crept into the last chamber of his brain. He rested his forehead on her shoulder, and was still.

And then he raised his head, mouth agape, and blinked at the raging fire. And very much as a question he spoke the Master-Word.