The River of Shadows

Myett Alone

27 Ilbrin 941

226th day from Etherhorde

You’d probably even accuse her of the crime, although you did it yourself… you’d make love to her one day and destroy her the next.

She lay in a darkness so deep not even ixchel eyes could pierce it. Somewhere in the bilge well, under the ancient floorboards of the hold. On her back, floating in the filth. It had taken determination even for an ixchel to reach this place.

She is unstable. She took to following me…

The water, like the ship, was still: there were no tides or waves in the basin to make it slosh about. Yet it was rising quickly. When her ears slipped underwater she could actually hear the bubbling of displaced air. The water should have been even fouler, here in the rank bottom of the boat, the place all slop and slime washed down to. But so much of the water was new, fresh from the crystalline gulf and the cold, gushing river that flowed through Masalym.

Had she lost the wineskin? No, here it was about her neck. She turned her head to the side and drank an ample throatful. An entertainment. A prophet’s plaything.

Already she could touch the boards above her, when she raised her hand. She imagined the wound in the hull. Poor Chathrand, stabbed in the darkness by a fellow ship. Wound a body and it bleeds. Wound a ship and it turns to drink, and never stops.

Yes, she had followed him. But not from jealousy-not that alone. She had feared for him, feared the demons in his eyes, the agony his father dismissed as mere fatigue. She had been born to fight those demons, protect those eyes. She had been raised with a ravenous addiction, like the children born to deathsmokers, slaves to something heartless before they even learned to speak. All her life she had searched for it, her deathsmoke, the balm for her wound. In Auxlei City, Emledri, Sorrophran, Besq. And one day her grandfather had opened a service door in the Assembly Hall and said, “Look: that is the young man sent from Etherhorde by his father, seeking crew for an assault on the Great Ship. We will dine with him tonight; so comb your hair, and be pleasant.”

She had thought him strange and severe, bickering with his elders, stabbing at a hull diagram spread out on a table. “We enter here. We will hold this space.” Then the young lord had glanced up and noticed her, and studied her young body frankly, and she had made herself walk away from the door with her chin high and her face indifferent, as though he were the needy one, as though his gaze had not gone through her like a spear, and three weeks later she was his lover on the Chathrand.

The water raised her to within a foot of the boards. She drank again, then slid the lanyard of the wineskin over her shoulder and pushed it away. No one had seen her. No one knew that she had not fled with him, had not been invited-had not even been dismissed. He had not thought it necessary to dismiss her, before abandoning the ship; one did not dismiss a toy.

But this toy had tracked him last night all the same.

She had tracked him to the secret place, the masterfully hidden door in the ceiling above the scrap-metals storeroom, beyond which the House Treasures were stored in a strongbox bolted to the inner plank. There were ixchel guards within twenty feet, port and starboard, fore and aft, guarding every known approach to this area, but even they did not know precisely where the strongbox stood. And none of them knew about the door.

She had watched him open the box with the key around his neck, stared in amazement as he set aside the ancient Cyrak Tapestries from the main hall of Ixphir House, the last vials of the blane sleep-drug, the sacred swallow-bones with which the flying suits could be repaired. He kissed the urn that held the ashes of his great-grandmother Deijanka, the saint. Then he took out the waxed-cotton bundle that held the antidote pills and broke the seal. Myett held her breath as he extracted two of the big white pills, cradling them in his arm as he sealed the bundle anew. He returned everything but these two pills to the strongbox, locked it-and after a moment’s hesitation, slipped the key from around his neck and wedged it securely beneath the box.

That last act had mystified her. Better than anyone (she hoped it was better than anyone) Myett knew how he refused to be parted from that key. Night after carnal night it had hung between them, crushed against her breast, striking her chin in time with his soft sounds of ecstasy. Only he and Talag and Ludunte, the clan-appointed Treasurer, had keys to the strongbox. Why in the Pits would Taliktrum leave his behind?

She was bumping the ceiling now. Her nose, her knees. The air that remained was close and stale.

And in her addict’s haze she had imagined that he was going to meet a lover. She had thought herself that important: that Lord Taliktrum would take pains to deceive her, to spare her feelings when he hungered for another’s touch. But all the same she could not stop following him.

She had tracked him all the way to the tool room. He had heard her only once, and not bothered to investigate, thinking he heard a mouse or beetle. To be so close to him, alone one final time, and be mistaken for vermin.

Then Fiffengurt had stomped and blundered into the room, and the horrible words had spilled out. Myett was never suitable. It had been tempting to kill the quartermaster, since she could not kill her lord. Something had to die, of course. After words like that something always did.

She could no longer float. She was treading water, pressing her lips above the surface, into the last inch of air. Was that the ship’s bell, was it morning? No matter. This was the place that morning never touched.

She makes a spectacle of her charms.

No one would find her here.