The River of Shadows

Farewell to a Dream

27 Ilbrin 941

The rain was gone and the sun had banished the morning chill when Prince Olik returned to the Masalym shipyard. His arrival, like his departure, was sudden and unceremonious: he fairly ran out along the walkway, fifty feet ahead of his attendants and guards. Even before he came abreast of the midship rail, he was calling loudly for permission to board. Captain Rose was duly notified, and without issuing a response of any kind he marched out to face the prince.

“You may not board,” he said, “until you are prepared to inform me when my crew is to be fed, and whether or not the city means to help us save the ship.”

The prince stopped short; evidently he had thought the asking of permission no more than a formal ritual. “I see-well, it doesn’t matter,” he said distractedly. “I’ll just-walk.”

He proceeded to do just that, marching back the way he came, waving his entourage into an about-face even as they closed on him. Dumbfounded, Rose and his crew watched him go. “Mad as a drunkard poet,” was Mr. Fiffengurt’s verdict. Then the watchman relayed an observation from the quarterdeck: the water in the basin had once more started to rise.

It was true: some further sluice-gate must have been closed, for the river was filling the basin (and lifting the Chathrand) at a rate of four inches a minute, as measured against the walkway.

Then the crisscrossed ropes that had kept the ship bobbing in place went slack, and sank under the water. From the north side of the basin, two small rowing craft approached the ship, dragging new cables. These were duly offered by the silent dlomu, who indicated with gestures that they should be attached to the port and starboard catheads. After some hesitation, Rose so ordered.

No sooner were the lines secured than they grew taut, lifting out of the water and turning Chathrand gently in place. Slowly and smoothly, they guided her across the basin.

What followed was surprisingly simple. The towlines, it soon became clear, were guiding the Chathrand toward one of the rectangular berths they had spotted the first night, along a part of the basin’s rim. These were long, squared-off tongues of water, lined with cargo cranes, loading platforms, watchtowers and buildings that might have been warehouses, or army barracks. The Chathrand was moving toward the largest of these berths.

Like a great beast being coaxed into a stable, the ship glided into the enclosure. Now the crew could perceive a pair of enormous capstans revolving on the quay. Dozens of horses, short of stature but muscled like elephants, strained at their harnesses to turn the great devices, while small dogs moved among them with short, precise dashes and darts, yipping, coaxing. The dlomu themselves seemed barely involved. But at the very last, they stepped among the working animals and eased the ship into position with exceeding care. It was a good fit: when she came to rest it was plain that the Chathrand was only some forty feet shorter than the berth itself.

More ropes were tossed to the humans, fore and aft. When these were secured the dlomu nudged the ship’s bow back and forth, checking her alignment against grooves carved into the stone. At last the Chathrand was truly still. Shouts of Squared off, let fall! went up from the dlomu. A deep vibration troubled the basin’s surface. And then the water level began to drop once more.

It fell far more quickly than it had risen. In twenty minutes, the Chathrand descended forty feet. In another twenty, they saw heavy structures of some kind beneath the water. “Merciful heavens, it’s a buildframe!” shouted Mr. Fegin, dangling from the futtock shrouds and suddenly boyish with delight. “Can’t ye see what they’re doing, Captain? They’re lowering us straight into dry dock, by damn!”

The water continued to drop, and beneath them a great V-shaped armature of wood and steel came into view, and the Chathrand settled into it with all the dignity of her six hundred years. The outer hull of rock maple groaned as the supporting water drained away from her sides; the long timbers of m’xingu and cloudcore oak strained and shuddered, but held. On the topdeck the crew gave a great, spontaneous cheer. They were on dry land, or over it. For some it had been more than two hundred days.

The pumps clattered on: no one would dream of stepping away from that lifesaving chore without permission. But already the water jetting from them was splashing down upon bare stone. Mr. Uskins sent word to the captain: barring outside interference, the ship could be pumped empty by midday.

There were staircases cut into the walls of the berth, and the dlomu were already descending, studying the hull, nodding and pointing. But they still said not a word to the humans. They’re under orders, thought Pazel. They must think we’re terribly dangerous. But we’re not, are we?

In the darkness of the bilge well, Myett stood dripping and cold. The air reeked, and the wine was still very strong in her blood. She heard the far-off cheering and thought it cruel. Her death had been stolen. Her lord was gone and her love defiled, but she remained. Though she had come here to die an ugly death she stood unharmed, and the whole ship found this amusing. She was here to amuse. She always had been.

She crawled through the nameless, poisonous muck. Out through crevices, rat-gnawed boards, a long pile of stone ballast, alga-slick. When she reached the hold she heard her people’s voices in the distance. She moved away from them, silent, unsuspected.

It occurred to her dimly that no one would wonder at her absence. They would assume she had gone after him. Whenever she chose to let herself be seen, she could tell them that she had done just that. No dishonor, that way, no confinement, chained at wrist and ankle, like others who tried suicide and failed.

Unless he had denounced her.

Suddenly she could almost hear the letter: Nothing to me. Unsuitable from the start. Could he have gone so far? How should she know? It was useless to pretend that she could guess, now that she understood how little she had ever known him at all.

To be missing, but not missed… it was strangely appealing to be answerable to no one (that is the wine, the wine and the chill you took, do not trust it, do not follow your whim). She had no clan duties, for she had no clan. She had no promise to keep to herself. What self? Only her nose and lips had stayed dry. Everything else had been submerged in death.

The Dremland Spirit! That was what she had become. Myett smiled at the thought of the woman from the children’s tale (stop thinking, stop crying, go somewhere and sleep) whose people, husband included, had let her die out of cowardice. They had been gathering shellfish at low tide; the woman had fallen and broken her leg. And though they could hear her calling to them in the fog they told themselves that it was too late, the tide already turning, and they stole away and left her to drown.

But after midnight, back in the safety of the clan house, the woman’s cries had resumed, ethereal and cold. Here I am! Your clan-sister, your wife! I’ll not be abandoned again!

Myett scaled the inner hull, past the catwalks, seeking the ixchel door that gave entrance to the mercy deck. Taliktrum had admitted to a fondness for ghost stories. He had trusted her that much (only briefly, don’t start lying now, only in those minutes while you waited for his body’s appetite to build). They chill my blood, he’d whispered once, sharing a secret grin. Can you keep that to yourself, my little guardian?

How did the story end? With the moan growing louder and louder, putting all the clan in danger. First the mice and burrowing creatures heard it, then surface animals, the prowling street dogs, the cats. Finally the giants themselves began to hear the ghost. What could be done? Myett’s grandfather would have known the right sort of penance, the act of contrition that a ghost would accept. But in the tale, the foolish clan heaped all the blame on the husband, and threw him into the sea at the place where his wife had perished. Monsters, murdering fools! Couldn’t they see that the woman had actually loved him? That she might love him still? They had earned their final punishment; they had begged for it.

The hidden door-latch opened to her fingers. She crawled into the mercy deck and wandered aft, leaving the secret door ajar. Past the empty rice barrels, the swept-out bread room, the brig where guards stood exclaiming to their prisoners: Them fish-eyes have shipwrights underneath us already! They’re going to fix this old boat after all!

The Mzithrini girl, Neda, looked out through her prison bars and saw her plainly. But that did not matter. All crawlies look the same in the shadows, don’t they? And besides, no one listens to the enemy.

Minutes later she was teasing open another door: above the scrap-metals storeroom. The strongbox lay bolted in place, and wedged beneath it, Taliktrum’s key. She pried it out and laid it on her palm. How it had hurt, with all his weight pressing down. It had always been between them, a witness to his hunger, her addiction; a painful proof that she would never get closer than his skin.

They had driven him away. With their worship, their torturous need. They had exiled him to a city of dark giants, a city without Houses, without safety. He might already have met his death.

He’d been tender with her. More than once. But their worship had made his love impossible.

She opened the box, set the other treasures aside, took out all the remaining antidote. She would give the clan what it had earned. No one could stop her. No law applied to a woman who had ceased to exist.

The dlomu erected a stone oven on the quayside and kindled a fire within. Soon a sweet-smelling woodsmoke drifted over the Chathrand. Then carts began to arrive, some drawn by stout little horses, others by dogs. Crowds of workers assembled around these carts, making it difficult to see what they contained. Then someone scurried up to the fighting top and gave a shout: “Food, food! And loads of it, by the Tree! Bless them fish-eyes, they’re going to feed us at last!”

It began with sausage, seared to bursting on the open flames, and ample servings of thick-skinned tubers. The hot food was placed in baskets like those of the first night, and the baskets were placed on hooks at the end of long poles and swung gingerly over the chasm to the Chathrand’s quarterdeck. Even as they passed out the food, the dlomu kept silent, although the humans and ixchel thanked them with great feeling. Still, as he watched the orderly business unfold, Pazel caught smiles, and even an occasional wink of a silver eye. They were covert, those looks. The dlomu were hiding their kindness, but less from the humans than from one another.

Pazel mentioned the looks to Neeps. “You see? These blokes aren’t unfriendly-at least no more than they were that first night. They’re afraid of us, sure. But this not-talking business: it’s coming from somewhere else. I’d bet my right foot they’ve been ordered not to speak.”

“Maybe,” said Neeps, watching the baskets collect on the quarterdeck. “Or maybe it’s spreading, that old woman’s idea about us bringing the end of the world. Maybe they even think we have a choice about it. ‘Treat us nice, see, or die in storms of fire.’ ”

After the sausage came pies-round, glistening, stuffed with meat and curious vegetables and aromatic herbs. Rose fed his men in reverse order of rank: tarboys and ordinary seamen first, then rated sailors, Turachs, petty officers, lieutenants. The senior officers waited stoically: they had known all along that they would be last. Rose was merely applying the Sailing Code, and most of them knew the wisdom of the old law. Nothing would break a crew’s loyalty faster than injustice with food.

But there was no shortage. Fresh bread followed, and olives cured in wine, and small cuts of fish wrapped in aromatic leaves, and a second round of pies stuffed with sweet orange tubers and sprinkled with a spice that tasted like nutmeg and licorice at once and yet was neither. There was no shortage. They ate and they ate. Mr. Bolutu sat with his back to a hatch comb, using both hands, and Pazel saw tears in his eyes.

Twenty years since he tasted his people’s food, he thought. And suddenly he wondered if he would ever again bite into an Ormali plum.

For a time the Chathrand was a happy ship. The tarboys sang a tarboy shanty, but collapsed in disarray before the obscene punch line (even this was more than they had ever dared in Rose’s presence). The steerage passengers wolfed down everything they were given. The door of the forecastle house was opened just long enough for five baskets to be slid within, and all who stood near heard Lady Oggosk’s delighted cackle. When the dlomu sent over boxes of sticky mul as a final offering, the sailors even managed to finish a few out of politeness, though no one had yet explained what they were.

Hercol brought Felthrup, Jorl and Suzyt to the topdeck, tied the dogs to a steel deadeye and brought them bread and fish. The dogs ate. Felthrup sat snug by Thasha’s knee, and ate. Deep in the ship, someone managed to wake the augrongs; their groans of monstrous satisfaction made the dlomu freeze, and the humans laugh.

Even the ixchel celebrated, in their way. They were in shock over Taliktrum’s disappearance (the rumors had escaped already, and sprouted hydra-heads: He’s a runaway, a coward, some said, and others, He’s off talking with the lord of the dlomu. He and Talag planned it all from the start) but they still had appetites. They ate well, but in shifts, guarding one another as ixchel always did at mealtime. Only Ensyl ate alone, not quite joining the humans but shunned by her people.

Pazel, Neeps and Marila sat in a crowd of tarboys near the spankermast. Marila made little chirping sounds of happiness as she chewed her fish. Neeps dipped morsels of bread in the juice from the meat pies, grinning as he popped each one into his mouth. Overhead, the dlomu watched in fascination, murmuring and occasionally pointing.

“Feeding time at the zoo,” said Marila, glancing up at them.

Neeps frowned at her. “There’s a cheery thought. What put that into your head?”

“The way you eat,” said Marila.

The tarboys laughed, and so did Pazel, for there was nothing mean or cutting in the other boys’ voices: they appeared ready, for the moment anyway, to let Pazel and Neeps back into their fold. About blary time, he thought.

Then he saw Thasha a short distance away, eating olives from Fulbreech’s hand. She was turned away and did not see him-but Fulbreech did, and raised an eyebrow in his direction, a wry salute.

Rage went through Pazel, sudden and murderous. He turned away with the remains of his meal. And found himself facing Ignus Chadfallow.

“Hello,” said Pazel, not very warmly.

Captivity had aged the doctor. His craggy face was stained with soot that no amount of washing had yet been able to remove. His deep-set eyes shone with a new, more desperate fervor. The nose Pazel had broken on Bramian had healed with a subtle clockwise twist.

“I’ve been looking for you since yesterday, Pazel,” he said at last. “Why have you been avoiding me?”

Pazel shrugged. “I’m here now,” he said.

They had crossed paths twice since the doctor gained his freedom. Both times Pazel had hurried by, mumbling about his duties. He had no desire to be cornered and questioned by the man.

“You should eat less sausage, more fish and greens,” said the doctor. Neeps slid a whole sausage into his mouth.

Pazel scowled. “What is it you want, Ignus? Missed trying out drugs on me?”

“May I sit down?”

Neeps and Marila glanced at each other and edged away. Pazel sighed, and Chadfallow lowered himself stiffly to the deck. He was not holding a plate. Instead he cradled a leather pouch in both hands. It appeared to contain some object no larger than a matchbox. Chadfallow held it as one might a fine glass figurine.

“I’m a doctor,” he said. “I took an oath to defend life.”

Pazel gave him a discouraging look. No philosophy, please.

“Would you like to know what I’ve been asking myself this morning?” Chadfallow continued.

“Dying to,” said Pazel.

“What if it were you in there? What would I be thinking now? Would I have even stopped to think?”

“What are you talking about?” asked Pazel. “In where?”

Chadfallow lifted his eyes in the direction of the forecastle house. Pazel grew still.

“Hercol is my oldest friend, after Thasha’s father,” said Chadfallow, “and he loved an ixchel woman, desperately. I honestly don’t know what to do.”

“Ignus,” said Pazel, trying to keep his eyes off the pouch, “what’s going on? What is that you’re carrying?”

“I’ve just told you,” said Chadfallow, “the antidote.”

Pazel gasped. “The permanent antidote? What, another pill?”

“Another ten pills. One for every remaining hostage. At least, that is what the note said. When I reached my desk in the sickbay the pouch was waiting for me.”

“But that’s fantastic! You can set them free!”

“Softly, you fool,” hissed Chadfallow.

Glancing about, Pazel quickly understood. There were ixchel all over the deck. And men who had been taught to hate ixchel all their lives. Thasha, he noticed suddenly, was now seated alone; Fulbreech had moved off to starboard. Perhaps they’re fighting, thought Pazel, with a vague sense of hope.

“Why can’t it always be this way?” said Chadfallow suddenly, his eyes sweeping the deck. “Peace and cooperation, sanity. There’s enough room on this ship for men and ixchel. And Rin knows there’s enough room in Alifros. Why do we fight? Why don’t we get on with living, while we’re alive?”

Now that the doctor pointed it out, the scene did look more harmonious than ever before. Men and ixchel milled about together, not exactly with warmth, but with a sated sort of tolerance, as if the feasting had crowded their mutual animosities to one side. At the starboard rail a Turach was holding an ixchel sword in the palm of his hand, squinting at it, while its owner chattered on about the workmanship. Beyond the circle of tarboys, several topmen actually seemed to be trading jokes with the little people.

Diadrelu, Pazel thought. You should be here. I’m looking at your dream.

But of course he wasn’t, really. The jokes had a bitter edge. Each side had too many deaths to blame on the other. Rose was an infamous crawly-killer, and others-Uskins, Alyash, Haddismal-were almost as bad.

“Tell me about the note, Ignus,” said Pazel quietly.

“It was vile and sarcastic,” said Chadfallow. “Play God, it said. Hand out life and death like sweets to children. The ones who die first may be the luckiest. It was written by an ixchel hand, I’m certain of that. And the ink was not yet dry.”

Pazel looked away, and for several minutes he and the doctor just studied the deck. No, it was not all good. Taliktrum’s Dawn Soldiers were eating in a huddle apart, scowling at those of their brethren who mingled most freely with the humans. A Turach glanced from a pie to a group of ixchel and back again; he frowned, as though concluding that they had touched it.

“You can’t just let them out,” whispered Pazel.

“No,” said Chadfallow, “not yet.”

“You should hide the pills.”

After a moment the doctor nodded. “Hide them, and negotiate. Once we are certain who speaks for the little people. Is it Talag, now that his son has fled? Or Taliktrum’s security chief, the one called Saturyk? In either case, if we are intelligent we may prevent bloodshed altogether.”

Their eyes met. To his own surprise Pazel actually smiled. “Diplomacy, Ignus?” he said.

The doctor inclined his head. “My specialty.”

They both laughed-and it hurt to share a laugh with Chadfallow, after so much betrayal and deceit. But it felt good, too. Ignus had once been like a second father. He had even saved Pazel from slavery. After Pazel’s real father, Captain Gregory, abandoned them, Chadfallow had protected the family, and at last revealed his consuming love for Pazel’s mother. But halfway across the Nelluroq, Mr. Druffle (who had also known Gregory) had told Pazel that the doctor’s love for Suthinia had begun years earlier-that it was, in fact, the very thing that had driven Gregory away. Pazel had begged Chadfallow to deny it. The doctor had only replied that things were more complicated than they appeared.

Pazel doubted he could ever forgive Chadfallow for breaking up his family. Still, in the midst of so much waste and ruin and killing, that sort of sin, loving another man’s wife, suddenly appeared very small. Of course, Chadfallow had done other things, darker and more suspicious, things that love could not explain.

“You let Arunis board the ship, Ignus,” he said. “That day in the Straits of Simja. Why in the Pits did you do that?”

“He was about to kill Thasha with that necklace. Wouldn’t you have done the same?”

Pazel scowled. He’d asked himself the same question, many times. No answer he could come up with made him feel good.

“You would have done so out of love for the girl,” said the doctor. “I might have wished to do so out of love for her father, but I would not have. No, I would have let her die, if I had not felt-”

“What?”

Chadfallow drew a slow breath. “A hunch, nothing more,” he said at last. “An instinct, that her death would bring a greater disaster than any of us could foresee. I feel it still. In the way Hercol speaks of her; the way Ramachni called her ‘my champion.’ They have never trusted me with the whole story of Thasha Isiq. Nor have any of you.”

Pazel averted his eyes. He thinks I know more than I do. But he’s right, I haven’t trusted him. How could I, how could I, after “Ignus,” he heard himself say, “why didn’t you warn us of the invasion? You could have saved us then and there. We could have escaped.”

It was the question he had never dared ask, the question that had burned inside him for almost six years. Chadfallow looked as though he had expected it.

“Escape?” he said. “Do you think Suthinia Sadralin Pathkendle would have been content to escape, to run off into the Highlands with her children? Or”-he hesitated, swallowed; his face was suddenly vulnerable and young-“with me?”

“Definitely not with you,” said Pazel. “Oh, damn it-that’s not what I meant-”

“She would have raised the alarm. She would have stormed out into the city and told everyone the Arqualis were coming.”

“They’d never have listened. They all thought she was crazy.”

“But they did not think I was,” said Chadfallow. “Suthinia would have named me as her source immediately. And I could not afford to lie. I was doing everything I could to negotiate Ormael’s peaceful surrender, with guarantees that the city would not be looted, the people enslaved or slaughtered, the women raped.”

Pazel shut his eyes. Neda, he thought.

“Admiral Isiq agreed,” said Chadfallow, “although it meant disobeying his Emperor. We had it all arranged, Pazel. Not a shot was to be fired, not a woman touched. The Turachs hated the plan, but we had them under control. Tenuous control, boy. Any friction and we knew they’d riot. It was your own lord, the Suzain of Ormael, who provided that friction. He dug in his heels and swore Ormael would fight to the last man.”

Pazel’s head felt rather light. “Against all those Turach battalions? Against that whole mucking fleet?”

“Why do you think the palace was so badly damaged? They had to pry him out like an oyster from a shell. Your fool of a leader could not accept the simple truth, that his days of courtesans and clotted cream were over. He preferred to bask in glory-in the bonfire Arqual made of your city.”

“But for Rin’s sake, Ignus! Why didn’t Thasha’s father just tell me all this? Did he think I wouldn’t believe him?”

“You had just called him a mass murderer, as I recall,” said Chadfallow.

Pazel squeezed his eyes shut in pure frustration. A peaceful surrender. It wouldn’t have been justice, but it wouldn’t have been that, either: the burning and looting, the blood and death and rape. The terrible words of the eguar rang in his ears: Acceptance is agony, denial is death.

Suddenly he realized that he was once more staring at the leather pouch with the antidote inside. He started. “Pitfire, Ignus, you shouldn’t be walking around with that thing!”

“I don’t know where to hide it,” said Chadfallow. “Someone is still doing Ott’s work, you know. I find small items moved in my cabin, and in the surgery too.”

“Well put it in your pocket, for Rin’s sake. Are you daft?”

Chadfallow glared at him, then sighed and looked down at the pouch.

“Listen,” said Pazel, “why don’t you let me hide them in the stateroom? There’s no safer place. Thasha hasn’t shut me out, yet, and even if she does, Neeps or Marila could-”

“Hello there, Doctor.”

The voice, loud and abrasively cheerful, belonged to Alyash. He had sidled up to them without a sound. Above the grotesque scars on his throat and chin he was smiling, and his eyes were bright and merry. His hands dangled empty at his sides.

Chadfallow started to get to his feet, but Alyash put a restraining hand on his shoulder. “Didn’t you blary eat? You’ve got to get your strength back, after all those weeks locked in a cage.”

“Don’t answer, he’s up to something,” said Pazel in Ormali. Alyash just went on smiling.

Chadfallow looked nervously at the bosun’s hand. “I ate my fill,” he said.

“No discomfort, then? Mr. Elkstem had a little discomfort.”

“Of course he did,” said Chadfallow, sounding a bit like a cross professor. “He ate sausage. He spurned my advice. When one has been confined to a small space for weeks with little to eat, the gut contracts and heavy foods become the enemy, for a while.”

“Ignus,” said Pazel.

“Elkstem should have concentrated on the vegetables,” Chadfallow went on. “That is what I did. Naturally my stomach is at peace.”

Alyash’s grin widened. “The vegetables, you say?”

“And for my circulation, an ounce of fish.”

“An ounce of fish! Well, that’s blary fine.”

Alyash dealt him a vicious backhand blow. The doctor fell sprawling, and Alyash scooped up the leather pouch and ran.

Pazel exploded to his feet. “Stop him!” he cried, frantically giving chase. “Oh credek, stop him, someone!”

Alyash was making for the bows. To Pazel’s great relief he saw Thasha take in the scene and rise with the quickness of her training to join the pursuit. For a moment they ran side by side, leaping over amazed parties of men and ixchel still sprawled upon the deck. Then Thasha, always the stronger, pulled ahead.

Neeps and Marila and even Fulbreech were pounding after the bosun as well, but no one could match Thasha’s speed. She was within an arm’s length of Alyash when a wall of Turach muscle seemed to rise out of nowhere. Thasha slammed into them, fighting for all she was worth. She actually threw two of the soldiers to the deck as the others piled on-they knew from hard experience what a fighter she was. But Thasha’s fall had opened a path. Rolling and sliding, Pazel suddenly found himself beyond the Turachs, and raced on with all his might.

Alyash was past the mainmast now, holding up his prize, shouting to Sandor Ott. From the corner of his eye Pazel saw Fulbreech, sprinting-he too had somehow eluded the Turachs. The youths flailed forward. Alyash rounded the tonnage hatch, the forward guns, the jiggermast. Pazel saw Ott’s face at the window. No, he thought, no! From somewhere he found the strength to run even faster.

And then Alyash tripped.

He rolled almost instantly to his feet-he had his own training with the Secret Fist to draw on-but the stumble made all the difference. Pazel closed the space between them. It was his one chance. He leaped.

The jump did not carry him as far as he hoped, but as he fell, Pazel reached out and caught Alyash by the leg. The bosun crashed to the deck. The leather pouch shot out of his hand and slid forward. It struck the wall of the forecastle house, just beside the door.

Alyash was kicking Pazel in the head, but he would not let go. “Fulbreech!” he managed to cry. The youth shot past them, and Pazel heard a door creak open and slam shut. Then Alyash’s boot struck him hard in the temple, and for a moment his eyes went dim.

Only seconds had passed. He had let go of Alyash’s leg, but the bosun just lay there, gasping-laughing, by Rin, a ragged, evil sound. Pazel raised his head: Fulbreech was slumped by the door, utterly winded. There was nothing in his hands.

“Where is it?” Pazel cried through his throbbing pain. “What have you done with it, Fulbreech?”

“Done with what?” said Fulbreech, and flashed Pazel a grin.

Turachs hauled Pazel and Fulbreech to their feet. Uskins was there, Rose’s daft enforcer, screaming, “What is happening, Bosun? Did these boys assault you?”

Fulbreech hid his smile away, and glanced expectantly at the door. Alyash turned on his side to look as well. Soon everyone was looking at the door, though few could have said quite why.

The reason soon appeared. Muffled cries came from within, and the sound of a brief struggle. Then the door sprang open and Sandor Ott raced onto the deck, battering sailors out of his path. After some forty feet he stopped dead, closed his eyes, and inhaled.

No collapse. No writhing pain. Slowly, the chief assassin of Arqual turned about where he stood. His cruel, bright eyes took in the crowd, the ship, the dlomu watching from the quay. Then he laughed aloud, raced five steps forward, sprang into a dizzying roll-and uncurled with his hand around an ixchel. The ixchel drew his knife, but Ott was faster. He dashed the tiny man against the deck so hard it sounded as though he were wielding a club. Then he tossed the limp body over the side.

Horrified, Pazel jumped to his feet. Everywhere he looked, ixchel were running, vanishing. Some over the sides. Many down the ladderways, deeper into the ship.

Ott had now seized a rigging-axe, one of the heavy tools kept on deck for cutting away fallen sheets and canvas in a storm. He lifted the axe above his head and turned to face aft. “I am free!” he shouted at the top of his lungs. “Captain Rose! All of us are free!”

With that he turned and raced for the Silver Stair, yards behind a clump of ixchel. Pazel could just see Rose, still as a chess piece on the quarterdeck. Ott did not appear to be the focus of his attention. Pazel followed his gaze back to the forecastle house and saw Lady Oggosk framed in the doorway, leaning heavily on her walking stick, gold rings gleaming on her ancient hands. She gave Rose an irascible wave: Yes, Nilus, here I am.

“Now we’ll see something,” said Alyash, delighted.

The captain howled an order. It was a brief command, just one word in fact, but the crew understood it perfectly. From all parts of the ship men took up the word, repeated it, made it their battle cry, and the word was Death.

A waking nightmare: that was how Pazel thought of the next few minutes. As if three-quarters of the crew had been seized by devils. How they ran to their task! Alyash organized the watch-captains to take their men to various points belowdecks, saying, “Kill on the way, kill when you get there, kill as you come back to report!” Haddismal sent his men to secure the gun decks. Mr. Bindhammer sent a team to fetch the sulphur barrels, to be used to smoke the ixchel from their hiding places. Uskins climbed to the mainmast fife rail and bellowed encouragement (“Exterminate! Exterminate all the little lice!”). This was revenge: an insane, wildfire revenge, carried out by men who just minutes ago had been savoring the fullness of their stomachs and the warmth of the sun. From hundreds of mouths came the throbbing refrain: Death! Death! Death!

Pazel ran blindly along the topdeck. Ixchel bodies, some horribly mangled, littered his path. The men who had refused the order were faring badly: there was Big Skip Sunderling, being shoved and pummeled by several men. And humans had fallen too: with horror Pazel stumbled over Mr. Lapwing, open-eyed beside the tonnage hatch, one hand clutching at his bloody throat. Off to his left, a midshipman was limping, dragging one foot as though the tendon had been slashed. The ixchel would not go down without a fight.

“Stop this lunacy!” someone was shouting. Pazel whirled and saw to his amazement that it was Prince Olik. Alone of all his people he had leaped into the melee. Waving his hands, pleading. “Listen to me! We can broker a peace between your people! A just peace, an honorable-”

No one harmed him, but they did not listen, either. On the quayside, the dlomic citizens cried out to their prince. “Sire! Sire! Get out of that snake pit! Come back!”

Then Pazel saw Thasha, surrounded by a mob of advancing men. She was just holding them off, slashing the air with her knife. Rin above, she’s wounded, she’s holding her chest. No, not wounded, burdened: there were four living ixchel beneath her arm.

Pazel drew his skipper’s knife and flew toward her. Whatever had changed inside her, she was still Thasha, still the one he could not live without. He had almost reached her when a terribly familiar voice cut through him like a blade.

He whirled. A few yards to his left, two massive Burnscove Boys were squatting beside the sixteen-foot skiff, raising it and striking (with cries of glee) at something underneath. They had caulking hammers. Pazel swore under his breath and ran at them.

Under the lifeboat he saw Felthrup, backed into a corner, snapping, biting, dodging. Beside him an ixchel woman crawled in a pool of blood.

Pazel attacked so quickly the men never knew what hit them. As the nearer sailor raised his hammer for a killing blow, Pazel snatched it, brought it down sidelong against the face that turned by instinct, threw his body hard against the wounded man and bashed him into the other. With his knife he slashed the far man’s ear, then his cheek right at the bone, and atop the two of them he struck with head and hammer and knees and knife-hilt, until he realized that they were not fighting, they were curling into balls.

He scooped up Felthrup, unharmed it seemed, and the ixchel with the bloody scalp. Adept at the move by now, he tucked his shirt firmly under his belt and thrust rat and woman in through his open collar. They clung there, awkward but safe, and Pazel raced to Thasha’s side.

The madness of the fight engulfed him. Once again he found everything he had learned from Thasha and Hercol ablaze in his mind. The forward-seeing, the awareness of the blow and its consequences before he landed it, the balance and velocity of his limbs. He was not stabbing, not fighting to kill. He was using the knife to ward and to scratch, its hilt and both fists and his elbows and knees to wound and stun. All the same there was a blade in his hand. One small mistake and he was a killer. Of his own kind. A killer of someone I don’t hate, in defense of those I don’t know…

With her back to Pazel’s, Thasha fought like a tigress. She did not say a word; she could not spare him the attention. But when the opportunity came, with the nudge of her sweaty shoulder, the bump of her hip, she moved him in the direction of her goal: the Silver Stair.

Of course. She was trying to bring them to the stateroom.

From the ladderway came crashes and thumps and howls of pain. Out of the corner of his eye Pazel saw Hercol, fighting his way down through a great mob of sailors. They were armed with all manner of swords, knives, hammers, cudgels; Hercol fought bare-handed, disarming one man after another, clearing a path.

Thasha crouched, whirling with one leg extended, and sent the gunner’s mate crashing to the deck. Pazel brandished his knife, holding off a Plapp’s Pier man and a midshipman. He leaped, and just cleared a capstan bar aimed at his kneecaps. To his dismay he saw that the one who held it was the tarboy Swift. His brother Saroo had been among the final captives. Swift looked at him with rage, and utter incomprehension. He swung a second time, and once more Pazel leaped. Again he and Thasha shuffled closer to the stairs.

Then Alyash himself appeared and charged right at Thasha. His first blow nearly caught her, and she was forced back from the ladderway, dancing just out of his reach, barely escaping one blow after another.

“Hercol!” Pazel cried. But the swordsman was out of sight. Pazel glanced again at Thasha-and this time Swift’s blow caught him in the ankles.

He had just enough presence of mind to pivot as he fell, so that Felthrup and Ensyl would not be crushed. He rolled, and Swift struck him across the back. Pazel snarled with pain but still, somehow, managed to gain his feet. He rose, strangely weightless, only to realize that the sensation was due to the fact that four men were lifting him by the arms.

They knew what was under his shirt, and were trying to stick their knives through it without actually killing him. “Give ’em up, give ’em up, Muketch, or you’ll bleed!” He lashed out with his legs, but the men caught them too. Thasha, ten feet away, had been reduced to shielding her ixchel from Alyash’s nonstop blows.

It all changed with a sound. Or rather, two sounds: the enraged and murderous howls of the mastiffs. Pazel’s foes saw them before he did, and dropped him like a red-hot skillet. From the corner of his eye Pazel saw Alyash’s face freeze, and then he broke and ran for the nearest rigging. Jorl thundered after him, a dark blue boulder of a dog, while Suzyt leaped over Pazel and scattered his tormentors.

Pazel felt Thasha hauling him to his feet.

“Go!”

She practically threw him down the Silver Stair. Hercol had cleared a path; Thasha, fighting a rearguard, tumbled behind him, shouting to her dogs. Then she was beside him, studying him, terrified (he knew from one look into her eyes) that he might be bleeding, hiding some wound.

“I’m all right,” he said.

She wanted to speak: he could have sworn to that. But she did not speak; she only turned and dragged him on. Two flights down they ran, stepping on the bodies of the wounded and the stunned, trying not to stare at the ixchel dead. When one of them stumbled, the other’s hand was there. Then Jorl and Suzyt caught up with them and led the way.

They reached the upper gun deck, the landing, the Money Gate. They passed Hercol still fighting in a side passage: “On, on!” he roared. Thasha whistled, pointed: the dogs sprang to help Hercol, a friend they’d known as long as Thasha herself. But as soon as the dogs were gone half a dozen Turachs rounded the corner, and the chase was on again. They raced down the long passage toward the stateroom, the marines hurling weapons and curses, and then they reached the intersection with the painted red line on the floor, and they were safe. One of the Turachs shouted to their comrades: “Look out-that’s the mucking magic-”

Blunt sounds of collisions, groans. Pazel and Thasha ran on, bearing their few survivors. They threw open the elegant carved door and tumbled into the stateroom.

Fulbreech was here already, along with Marila and Neeps and Fiffengurt. All four ran to give their aid. The quartermaster took Felthrup and the wounded ixchel woman from Pazel’s bloody shirt; Neeps caught his arm, saying, “Steady, mate, you did blary good work.” Marila unclenched Thasha’s arm, and the battered ixchel let themselves be lifted onto the dining table. Fulbreech ran to Thasha and seized her by the arms. “Darling!” he said.

Thasha looked up at Fulbreech. She was gasping, red-faced, a terror to behold. She knows, Pazel thought, she must have seen what he did, seen him grin at me, seen him slip the antidote through that door. She’s going to kill you, Fulbreech. Right here, right now.

Thasha lowered her face to his chest.

All told, eleven ixchel had passed through the magic wall-and become hostages themselves, although in better quarters than the forecastle house. As often before, Pazel watched in amazement at the speed with which they began to function as a unit, the strongest tending to the wounded, the designated guard keeping a sharp eye on the humans and the dogs (because who knew, who really knew?) and one more carrying their water bag from mouth to thirsty mouth.

If he had been among the men ordered (and mostly eager) to kill “the little brutes,” he might have been even more impressed. For the carnage of the topdeck-twenty-nine ixchel and four humans slain-was by far the worst that occurred. True, Sandor Ott killed five more ixchel in as many minutes, and Ludunte in an act of madness jumped onto the head of the whaling captain, Magritte, and plunged twin daggers into his eyes. True, eight of the little people were kicked and clubbed to death on the Silver Stair, and another three on the berth deck, and an Uturphan topman was found in a cow stall with the veins in his ankles slit. But the casualties ended there. When Ott raced ahead of everyone down the No. 1 ladderway, he was executing a plan. Slight clues, chance remarks by the ixchel to their captives, observations brought to him by Alyash and Haddismal and others-above all, endless hours of maniacally focused thought-had brought him to a certainty. The mercy deck. The ixchel had their stronghold there. Probably forward of the ladderway, in that massive barricade of boxes and crates that were never unloaded in Simja, locked down still by bolts and rings and iron-tight straps, the furnishings for the Isiq household that was never to be (that he, Ott, had made sure would never be).

Ott was quite correct; and with his usual ruthlessness he slashed the straps and shouldered over crates and axed his way into the heart of the barricade. But when at last he had torn open the hive-like fortress of the ixchel he found not one of them there to interrogate or kill. They had gone. Some spare clothes remained. A thimble-small teacup was still vaguely warm.

Ott sniffed the cup. He had killed too quickly, he had no one to question. He sniffed again, no conscious idea why he did so, and eighty years of immersion in killing schemes saved his life.

He leaped from the pile of crates, smashed headlong across the compartment, hurled himself down the open shaft of the ladderway-and an explosion tore apart the space where he had been standing.

A black-powder trap. The compartment bloomed with flame. Shards of the Isiqs’ antique china flew like deadly spears, silver cutlery embedded itself in walls, a trumpet was forced half through the floorboards into the orlop deck.

Immediately the Chathrand’s fire crew sprang for the hoses, and a team raced to start turning the chain-pumps again-but there was no bilge to pump, and certainly no seawater. The men fought the blaze with fresh water and sand. But even with a hundred men battling the fire, Rose kept up the hunt for the ixchel.

He simply did not find any, then or ever.

They were not in the hold. They had not taken to the rigging. Many had been seen going over the sides, but where to then? Only one staircase led from the floor of the berth up into the city, and not an ixchel was seen upon it all day. Fifty, at most sixty, might have made it into the damnably protected stateroom-but not six hundred. They had not crawled between the inner and outer hulls, or into the forepeak, or the light-shafts, or windscoops, or into the bottom of the cable tiers. They had not burrowed into the rotting hay of the manger, or massed between the floorboards (Rose gassed these hidden spaces with sulphur, one after another, as day turned to night and the dlomu watch changed again and again).

Witchcraft, said somebody, after the fourth fruitless hour of searching. They’re with Arunis, said another. But the sorcerer’s lair also eluded them. Only his laugh came again in the darkness of the hold, just as a nervous Mr. Uskins was watching his lamp go out. He wanted to scream but could not. The mage is here, I feel it, that is his hand on my shoulder. Uskins crouched down, a quivering mass, and begged the darkness to spare him.

For those who had always loathed and feared the “crawlies,” the recapture of the vessel should have brought a feeling of triumph. It did not. They would go to their hammocks that night more afraid than ever of being murdered in their sleep.

The humans had chanted Death, death. Only some forty-three ixchel proved willing to die that day, however-though it might be assumed, thought Lady Oggosk, picking her slow way through the bodies on the topdeck, that they would all remember the sentiment.