The River of Shadows

Love and Cataclysm

21 Ilbrin 941

Thasha could not recall those moments in the village, but Pazel could. When the tol-chenni stepped into the crumbling square she had turned to him with unfocused eyes, clutched his arm, whispered in terror:

“I didn’t mean to. It was never supposed to happen. You believe me, don’t you?”

Now, some thirty hours later beside the fire, he looked at her-directly, at last, for no one was awake to catch him at it. Only the fire itself was in the way. On one side he saw the bedraggled mass of her hair, not at all pretty, like something that had slithered out of the gulf and expired by Ibjen’s knees. On the other side he could see her legs below the makeshift skirt. Bruised, sleek, powerful. He closed his eyes and it made no difference; if anything he saw them more clearly. Think, he told himself. Face yesterday. If he didn’t the fear would come back in his sleep, pounce on him, tear him apart.

Thasha’s grip had been close to excruciating. “An accident,” she’d said. “I tried to fix it, Pazel, I tried so hard.”

With difficulty he had pried her hands from his shoulders, then held her as she shook, repeating her confession and her plea for belief. “I’m not the devil,” she’d added helpfully. Pazel was shocked by the coincidence of their thoughts. He had made no guesses, diabolical or otherwise. But he was asking himself just who in Alifros she might be.

He gave her water, the cold, sweet water Ibjen had just pumped from the well. Drink deep, drink slowly, he urged. It was the only way to make her stop talking.

For apart from the horror of the mindless humans, there was suddenly the horror of Thasha’s claim that she had made them so. From the other side of the world, apparently. What could one say to that?

He had decided to say nothing at all. Ibjen and his father, Mr. Isul, were saying enough. They were as excited as children: the visitors were the first “woken” humans the old man had seen in fifty years, Ibjen in his lifetime. Still working the pump handle, he cried to Bolutu: “Did you bring them from Masalym, brother? Is there a cure?”

Bolutu just stared at the tol-chenni. His tongue had been mutilated by Arunis the sorcerer, and he had only recently regained its use (dlomu, like newts and starfish, could regenerate lost parts of themselves). Now it was as though the tongue had never grown back.

Hercol recovered first. With an oath he sprinted into the gatehouse at the edge of the square, just in time to keep the rest of the Chathrand’s landing party from barreling through. For the rest of his life, Pazel would remember the man’s swiftness, his absolute resolve. Hercol was in mourning: just weeks ago the woman he loved had been murdered before his eyes. He had as much right as anyone to paralysis, to shock. In the gatehouse the Turachs raised their spears; Mr. Alyash, a trained assassin, sidled toward him with intent. Hercol did not even draw his sword. They could not enter, he said again. They must go back to the ship.

Thasha’s mentor was the deadliest fighting man on the Chathrand, with the possible exception of his old mentor, Sandor Ott. But Alyash had also trained with Ott. And the Turachs were lethal: commandos trained to fight and kill the sfvantskor warrior-priests of the enemy, and to guard the Arquali Emperor himself. How could Hercol have known they would not attack? The answer was obvious: he hadn’t.

And yet there was no bloodshed. The landing party, cursing, retreated to the shore road outside the wall. As soon as they left the gatehouse Hercol turned and shouted to Pazel in his birth-tongue: “Keep them all inside! The dlomu and… those others. Keep them out of sight! And bring fresh water: as much as you three can handle alone. Quickly, lad! Without water no one will go back to that ship!”

Pazel obeyed; at that moment he would have obeyed an order to eat sand or jump into the well; anything to break through the drumbeat inside him. All of them animals. An epidemic, a plague. By that point several more dlomu had crept into the square, and Bolutu had recovered enough to beg water for the ship. Good-natured, his fellow dlomu had run for casks, but the vessels they returned with were small indeed: not above thirty gallons apiece. Pazel and Bolutu rolled these out to the waiting men, and at the sight of the tiny barrels even Fiffengurt lost his temper.

“That won’t come to half a draught per man! We need ten times that just for starters! And the men are hungry, too. What’s Teggatz supposed to cook with, bilge?”

“We will bring more when you return for us,” said Hercol. “Go now, and ask no further questions. Don’t you think I would answer if I could?”

“No,” said Alyash. “Ott’s made you as tight-fisted with secrets as I am.”

“Sandor Ott’s first lesson was survival,” said Hercol, “and survival is all I am thinking of. Go, Alyash! We are plunged in drifts of gunpowder, and you berate me for not striking a match.”

They followed (almost chased) the men back to the pilot boat, and watched them row for the Chathrand, where men thronged like beggars to the gunwale. Elkstem had tucked the ship in behind the largest island, out of sight from the gulf. It was a sensible precaution, for they had not been an hour in the vicinity of Cape Lasung when a trio of unknown ships had passed: slender vessels, running east by southeast with all the canvas they could bear. They were battle-scarred, and too small in any event to threaten Chathrand, but who could say what followed in their wake?

The answer to that question, when it came, had brought with it the second terrible shock of this new world. It had occurred shortly after the standoff at the gatehouse. Pazel and Thasha were searching the village for Bolutu, who had blundered off into the streets, like a dazed survivor of a massacre. Ibjen’s father had said something about food and hobbled away. Pazel and Thasha were sweating: there was no breeze inside the wall. From sandy lanes and unglazed windows, the dlomu peeked out at them in awe. Once a boy of five or six burst laughing from a doorway and collided with Pazel’s legs.

He saw the human hands first, then looked up in terror at Pazel’s pale, brown-eyed human face, and screamed. “Don’t worry, we’re friends,” Pazel ventured. But the boy fled back into the house, wailing, and the word on his lips was, “Monsters!”

The village was small, and in short order they reached a second gate, the chains of its rusty portcullis snapped, the gate itself propped open with timbers. Passing beneath it, they found themselves west of the village, on a footpath that led by way of grass-covered dunes into the stunted forest. Near the edge of the trees, his back to a small, wind-tortured oak, sat Bolutu. His face was grim and distracted. They were about to hail him when voices from inside the gate began to shout in alarm:

“Hide! Fires out! Wagons in! An armada comes!”

They ducked back inside the wall. No one gaped at them now. Children were running, weeping; a woman swept two children into her arms and dashed for cover. Dlomic boys were crouching behind the parapet atop the wall, raising their heads just high enough to peer at the gulf. After a quick scramble, Pazel and Thasha found a staircase and joined them.

It was like a vision of the damned. Four or five hundred ships of unthinkable size and ferocity, rushing east to a blasting of horns and a thundering of drums. Ships that dwarfed their own great Chathrand, ships hauled by those horrific serpents, or pulled by kite-like sails that strained before them like tethered birds. Ships crudely built, dubiously repaired: fitted with blackened timbers, clad in scorched armor, heaped with cannon and ballistas and strange, bone-white devices Pazel could not identify. A bright haze surrounded the armada, of a sort that Pazel felt obscurely convinced he had seen before, though he could not say where. The haze was brighter in the spots where the vessels seemed most nearly ruined: so bright in places that he could not stand to look at all. Fire belched from cauldron-like devices on the decks, and swarms of figures tended the fires, goaded by whips and spears.

The villagers were as frightened as the humans: they had seen many terrible things, they whispered, but this armada was on another scale altogether. Some looked at the newcomers with renewed fright, as if the vessels flowing endlessly past the cape must have something to do with their arrival.

“They’re making for Karysk,” said Ibjen, who was among the boys. “They’re going to destroy it, aren’t they?”

The boys pointed at Bolutu, shaking their heads in despair. He had not moved from his tree by the dunes, and they had no doubt that the armada’s leaders would spot him, and send a force to investigate.

But the horrid fleet showed no interest in the village-which was fortunate, because a slight shoreward turn by any part of it would have revealed the Chathrand, still as death behind her island. Hours passed; the line of nightmarish ships stretched on, and so did the silence. It was only toward evening, when a breeze off the Nelluroq began to cool the village, that the last of the vessels swept by, and the drums and horns began to fade.

Thasha and Pazel left the village by the same gate as before. There sat Bolutu, as he had for five hours, digging his black fingers into the sand. When they approached him, he did not look up.

His voice, however, was soft and reasonable. “The pennants are ours,” he said.

“The pennants?” said Thasha. “On those ships, you mean?”

“The pennants on those ships. The leopard, leaping the red Bali Adro sun. It is the Imperial standard. And the armada came from the west, out of the Bali Adro heartland.”

Pazel felt sickened-and betrayed. “These are your friends?” he demanded. “The good wizards who sent you north to fight Arunis, the ones who can see through your eyes? The ones you said would come running to our aid, as soon as we made landfall?”

“Oh, Pazel, of course not,” said Thasha. “They’re impostors, aren’t they, Bolutu? Flying Bali Adro colors in order to fool someone?”

Now Bolutu did raise his eyes. “I do not know who they are-madmen, I would guess. Madmen can fly any flag, usurp any legacy, squat on any throne. But listen to me, both of you: this is not my world. This wreckage, these illiterate peasants, this plague on the minds of humans. It is not mine, I tell you.”

“You’ve been gone twenty years,” said Pazel.

“Two decades could never work such a change,” said Bolutu. “Bali Adro was a just Empire, an enlightened one. The years of famine were behind us. The maukslar, the arch-demons, were all dead or defeated; the Circle of the Scorm was broken. Our neighbors posed no threat, and our internal enemies, the Ravens I spoke of-they were imprisoned, or scattered to distant lands. We were safe here, safe and at peace.”

“Sometimes things do happen fast,” said Pazel. “Six years ago Ormael was still a country. Now it’s just another territory of Arqual.”

“Pazel,” said Bolutu, “it is not remotely the same. This world is ancient beyond anything that survives in the North. The Codex of the dlomu, from which our laws derive-it was written before the first tree was felled on your Chereste Peninsula. And though your rulers were unseated and your city torched, your people did not devolve into beasts.”

“Well it’s blary plain that we will, if we stay around here,” said Pazel. “It may be too late already. We all drank from that well.”

Bolutu shook his head. “The disease is not contagious. It was the first question I put to Ibjen’s father. There he is now, by the way.”

The old dlomu, Mr. Isul, was creeping toward them along the road from the forest, carrying a bundle of sticks and a woolen sack. Age had dulled his silver hair, but not his eyes. They were troubled, however, and not just by the hunt for footing on the rutted track.

“How does he know it’s not contagious?” asked Thasha.

Bolutu kept his eyes on the old man. “There were experiments, he says. When it was clear the plague was out of control. They locked unaffected humans and tol-chenni together, forced them to share food, water, latrines. But those humans corralled with the tol-chenni degenerated no faster than those who had no contact at all.”

“I thought every human south of the Ruling Sea had caught the disease,” said Thasha.

“They have. But not from one another.”

Pazel was losing patience. “I don’t care if they caught it from earthworms,” he said. “Something in this land of yours gave it to human beings, and made it spread like wildfire.”

The old man was just reaching them; he nodded cordially, but with obvious unease. He put down his bundle of sticks but kept the sack in his hands. “Not like wildfire,” he said. “More like a snowfall. Everywhere at once, but softly, quietly. We took no notice at first. Who minds a few snowflakes on the wind?” He looked up at them, and his eyes were far away. “Until they turn into a blizzard, that is.”

“The plague has to do with woken animals,” said Thasha. The others looked at her, amazed. “Well doesn’t it stand to reason? Animals bursting suddenly into human intelligence, humans turning suddenly into beasts?”

The phenomenon of waking animals had been a strange part of life in Alifros for centuries. Strange and exceedingly rare, at least in the North: so rare indeed that most people had never seen such a creature. But in the last several years the number of wakings had exploded.

“Are there woken animals in the South, Mr. Isul?” asked Bolutu.

The old man’s look of worry intensified. “Thinkers, you mean? Beasts with reason, and human speech? No, no more. They were wicked creatures, maukslarets, little demons.” He looked down, suddenly abashed. “Or so we were told.”

“What happened to them?” asked Pazel, dreading the answer.

Isul drew a finger across his throat. “Condemned, all condemned,” he said. “Back when I was a child. And it’s still the law of the land: you’re obliged to kill a Thinker on sight, before he works black magic against your family, your neighbors, the Crown. You can get away with harboring tol-chenni, if you’re careful-in Masalym there’s even a place that breeds ’em-but get caught with a thinking mouse or bird under your roof, and it’s the axe. They’re all dead and gone, is what I reckon. And if there are any left you can be sure they won’t let you know they can think. You could be looking right at one, a stray dog, a dune tortoise, and be none the wiser.”

Now it was Thasha’s turn to look at Bolutu with rage. “We should never have trusted you,” she said. “They started killing woken animals when he was a child? That was a lot more than twenty years ago! Why didn’t you warn us? Do you realize what we might have done?”

Aboard the Chathrand was a woken rat, their dear friend Felthrup Stargraven. Despite his suspicion that something terrible awaited them ashore he had wanted to join the landing party-to share in any danger, he’d said. They had almost agreed.

The old man put a hand on the side of his woolen sack, probing something within. He glanced uncertainly at Bolutu. “Twenty?” he said.

Bolutu rose to his feet and dusted off his trousers. “Mr. Isul,” he said, “be so good as to tell us the date.”

“You know I can’t,” said the other, a bit testily.

“The year will suffice.”

It was then that Pazel noticed the tremor in Bolutu’s voice. The old man, however, was put at ease. “That much I know,” he said. “We haven’t lost our bearings altogether out here. It’s the year thirty fifty-seven, His Majesty’s ninth on the throne.”

Thasha looked at Bolutu. “You use a different calendar in the South. You told us that weeks ago.”

Bolutu nodded, his face working strangely. He bent and plucked a stick from the old man’s bundle. He squinted at it, picked at the bark.

“Of course, after all those years in Arqual, you’d know both calendars,” said Pazel.

Another nod. Bolutu raised the stick and considered it lengthwise, as though studying its straightness. It was not very straight.

“What’s wrong with you?” said Thasha sharply. “What are you trying to tell us?”

“If Mr. Isul is correct-”

“You don’t believe me, go ahead, ask anyone,” said the old man.

“-we have rather misjudged our time on the Nelluroq. By your calendar, it is Western Solar Year Eleven Forty-four, and we have been two centuries at sea.”

In the silence that followed Pazel heard the drums of the armada, still echoing faintly from the gulf. He heard the breakers on the north beach, the wind in the forest, the cry of a hawk as it circled the abandoned tower. Then another sound, a faint flapping, close at hand. Mr. Isul lifted his sack and gave the contents a poke.

“Wood hens for dinner,” he said.

Now, lying awake in the darkness by his shipmates, Pazel almost wished the armada had borne down on the village, landed some undreamed-of army, slain them all. Eleven forty-four. His mind still screamed with laughter at the notion-absurd, preposterous, tell me another-but his heart, his body, his nerves were not so sure.

There was the Red Storm. A band of scarlet light, stretching east to west across the Nelluroq. They had sailed right into it; the light within was liquid, blinding; it had filled their clothes, their lungs, eventually their minds, until they swam in the light like fish in a red aquarium, and then it was gone.

And later, when he and Thasha and the others began to discuss it: hadn’t they all asked much the same question? How long was I in there? Why can’t I account for the time?

His friends Neeps and Marila thought it had lasted days. But Hercol felt it had blown past them in six or eight hours, and Ensyl, the ixchel woman who had become their friend and ally, spoke of “that blind red morning.” Pazel himself had not dared to guess, and when he had asked Thasha how long she thought they had spent in the storm, she had looked at him with fear. “Not so long,” she’d said. But her voice brought him no comfort.

Two hundred years. How could he toy with believing that? If it were true, then everyone he’d left behind was dead. No more searching for his mother and sister. No more hope that one day his father, Captain Gregory Pathkendle, would return and beg forgiveness of his abandoned son.

Angry now, Pazel opened his eyes. Rin, how he wished he could talk to Neeps. Pazel felt astonishingly lost without the smaller tarboy, his first friend on the Chathrand. Neeps was clever and fiercely protective of his friends, but he was also a hothead with a knack for getting in trouble. Look at him now: trapped with Marila and Captain Rose and a dozen others, held hostage in a cabin filled with a poisoned vapor that would kill them if they stopped breathing it. What would happen to them? Would they ever leave that room alive? Every thought of his friends was black and terrifying, like that plunge into the sea.

He studied Thasha again: smooth apple of a shoulder, yellow lock of hair across her lips. Day by day the way he looked at her was changing. He wanted to be with her all the time. The fascination shamed him, somehow. Thasha was one of just a handful of women on the Chathrand, and if Pazel could not stop himself from thinking of her in this way, could not sleep with those smooth limbs in view, could not banish the thought that when the world was ending they could do as they liked in the final hours-then what about the rest of the men?

But you love her, Pazel. It’s different with you.

That wasn’t the point. Order on the Chathrand was breaking down. Arunis was still aboard her, in deep hiding; they could feel the sorcerer’s presence like a whiff of something explosive in the musty air. The hostage standoff, meanwhile, was in its sixth week, with no end in sight. The captain could hardly lead from inside a cage, yet the sailors trusted no one as much as savage, greedy, unbalanced Nilus Rose. He terrorized them, but he kept them working for their own survival. Now they were fighting among themselves: a thing Rose had brutally suppressed. Could even the Turachs keep the peace? When the ghastly news escaped, would they try? It was awful to reflect that their safety hinged on these men, elite killers all, and part of the same Imperial army that had sacked his city and beaten him into a coma. If they despaired it meant anarchy, a doomsday carnival. And who would protect the women in that case? Who would stop men who wished to die from taking their last, low pleasures with Thasha Isiq?

He heard their muttering, vile and explicit (how often they forgot about his horde of languages). What they needed, how exactly they wanted her to touch them, who they imagined she already was “Pathkendle.”

Pazel jumped. It was Hercol who had whispered. The Tholjassan lay with his eyes open, looking at him intently, and Pazel blushed, wondering how much Hercol had guessed of his thoughts.

“I wasn’t-”

Hercol put a finger to his lips. Then, after a long, listening moment, he rose to his feet, beckoning Pazel to do the same. Pazel stood, balancing carefully among the sleepers. Hercol moved swiftly down the beach toward the gulf. Pazel followed reluctantly. Two steps away from the fire and he was cold.

The moon suddenly brightened, and looking back Pazel saw it emerging from behind the twisted snag of Narybir Tower. Hercol walked in the foam, through the rainbow threads of surf. “Do as I do,” he whispered. “Stay deep enough to hide your tracks. I don’t want them waking and following us.”

He started west, and Pazel splashed along behind. “You’re taking me to read that memorial, aren’t you?” he asked.

“No need,” said Hercol. “I told a lie back there, lad. I could read the inscription well enough. It is in their Imperial Common, and even in written form it resembles Arquali. But the message is somewhat terrible.”

“What does it say?”

Hercol paused in his march. He spoke without looking back at Pazel. Here two hundred traitors were thrown chained into the sea. Here the Chaldryl Resistance met its demise. We are Bali Adro, the Limitless; in time we will conquer the sun.

Pazel felt the words like a blow to the chest. “Oh Rin,” was all he could say.

“I thought it best to spare the others,” said Hercol. “They have heard enough bad news tonight. Come on, then, lad.”

With that he stepped out of the surf and began to climb the beach again.

“But where are we going?” asked Pazel, hurrying after him. “Did you find a village, like the one across the inlet?”

“Nothing of the kind. Ibjen spoke the truth: this place is abandoned.”

“Then what are we doing out here?”

“Spying,” said Hercol. “Now hold your tongue.”

They crossed the beach and mounted to the dunes, which were tall and crowned with brush and cast black shadows. It was perhaps the strangest walk of Pazel’s life: naked, freezing, the enormous crabs darting suddenly across their path, lifting armored claws. Spying on whom? Bolutu had claimed that there were still other peoples, neither dlomic nor human, in his beloved South. Was that what lay ahead?

They threaded a path through the dunes, Hercol now and then bending to pluck some small twig or shell from the ground, which he would examine and then toss aside. In this way they slogged a mile or more. It was hard going, but the exertion lessened the cold.

“Hercol,” Pazel asked, “what’s the matter with Thasha? Do you know?”

Hercol stopped long enough to take a single breath. “I cannot say,” he answered at last, “nor have I ever known just what ails her, since the day Empress Maisa sent me to Etherhorde, to keep watch over her family. But I think we must expect her condition to grow worse before it improves. Worse, or at the very least more intense. Ramachni, Oggosk, Arunis himself-every practitioner of magic she has ever encountered-has taken an interest in Thasha, and that cannot be coincidental. And now, when we face a deluge of magic, Thasha herself has begun to change.”

“She’s changing, all right. But into what?”

“I will not voice my guesses until I can trust them further,” said Hercol. “Yet of one thing I am certain: Thasha faces a trial that will demand all her strength. And as her friend, Pazel-her irreplaceable friend-it may demand just as much from you.”

He marched on, and Pazel, brooding grimly on his words, struggled to keep up. At last they came to a point where they could hear the Nelluroq booming distantly on their right. Before them stood the tallest dune they had yet seen, a great hill of sand crowned with sea oats and brush.

“When we reach the summit you must move only as I do,” said Hercol. “Flat as snakes we must crawl, and slowly, slowly through the underbrush.”

It was a long, awkward climb. Halfway to the top, Hercol stopped for a moment and pointed silently to the south. Pazel turned, and felt a thrill of wonder: low on the horizon hung a pale blue light, smaller than the moon, but larger than any star.

“What is it?” he whispered.

“A legend of the South proved true,” said Hercol. “The Polar Candle, the Little Moon of Alifros. North of the Ruling Sea it cannot be glimpsed, not ever. Bolutu tells me that many in the South think it has power over their lives and fates. Come, we are almost there.”

At the dune’s flat summit, the roots of shrubs and sea oats bound the sand into a fibrous mat. Hercol wriggled forward, keeping his head well below the height of the grass. Pazel imitated him, cursing inwardly as burrs and thorns began to pierce his skin. There were crawling, biting insects too, and many small burrows from which came scurrying sounds. He would have been miserable, Pazel thought, even fully clothed.

The dune was wide, but they crossed it at last. And suddenly they were lying, side by side, looking down upon a wide sand basin. It was about the size of the village square across the inlet, and ringed on all sides by dunes, except for a narrow gap on the north side leading down to the sea.

In the center of the basin a fire was crackling, somewhat larger and brighter than their own. And beside the fire three figures crouched.

“They’re human!” Pazel whispered.

“Yes,” said Hercol.

“Not, not the-”

“Not tol-chenni, no. Be very still, Pazel, and watch.”

They were roasting a small animal on a spit. They wore tattered clothes-but they were clothes, not scraps and rags like the tol-chenni. Indeed the three figures had an encampment of sorts: crates stacked up like building blocks, a makeshift tent of rough fabric, jugs and amphorae squatting in the sand. And the figures were armed: swords, daggers, some kind of club. All three looked strong and capable.

Two were men. The figure on the left, turning the spit, might have been forty: he had a severe face and black hair streaked with gray that fell in curls to his shoulders. Across from him crouched a younger and much larger man, big as any Turach. His eyes were shut and his hands folded before him; he might well have been speaking a prayer. The third figure, whose back was to them, was a young woman.

“Then it’s not true,” Pazel hissed. “The mind-plague, it hasn’t wiped everyone out! Hercol, maybe it never struck anywhere but the village. And if they’re wrong about the plague, they could be wrong about the two hundred years!”

“Gently, lad,” said Hercol.

But Pazel, clutching suddenly at hope, was not to be calmed. “Maybe the village was quarantined-way off the mainland, see? — because everyone there went mad together, dlomu and humans alike.”

“Come,” said Hercol. “The humans become idiots, and the dlomu at the same time fall victim to a shared delusion about the cause?”

“Why not? It’s more likely than what they claim, isn’t it?”

“Watch the girl, Pazel.”

Pazel looked: she was lifting a blackened kettle from the embers. Turning, she filled three cups beside her with steaming drink. Pazel saw her silhouette against the fire, and thought his heart would stop.

“Neda,” he said.

“Ah,” said Hercol.

“Aya Rin,” said Pazel. “Hercol, she looks exactly like my sister Neda.”

“Perhaps she is.”

Pazel gazed helplessly at the swordsman. He could not speak for fear. It wasn’t the villagers, or Thasha, or half the human race who had gone mad. It was just him, Pazel. Actually mad: he would shut his eyes for a moment, and when he opened them again he’d be in sickbay, feverish, his tenth day without water; or still tied up in that cave on Bramian. That was the only explanation.

“When one of the men turns away,” said Hercol, “try to catch a glimpse of his neck.”

“You never met my sister. You couldn’t know what she looks like. I think I’m crazy, Hercol.”

“Enough of that. I’ve looked at her portrait a hundred times. It hung for years in Dr. Chadfallow’s study in Etherhorde, alongside your mother’s and your own. It hangs in his cabin now. But that portrait must be ten years old. I could not be sure it was her, until you saw for yourself.”

“But how in the blary howling Pits could she be here?”

“Look! There’s an answer for you, or the beginning of one.”

The older man was reaching for something on his right. He leaned forward, and his long hair fell away from his neck. The firelight showed a black tattoo, a pattern of strokes and diamonds.

“Lord Rin above,” said Pazel. “They’re Mzithrinis.”

So they were: three citizens of the Mzithrin Pentarchy, the enemy state, the rival power that had fought the Empire of Arqual to one blood-soaked draw after another, for centuries. Dr. Chadfallow had always claimed that he’d placed Neda in the hands of a Mzithrini diplomat, to save her from becoming a slave or concubine of the invading Arqualis. It could have happened, Pazel thought: she might have taken on their customs, their beliefs. In five years she might have become almost anyone.

“What should we do?” he whispered.

“I brought you here that you might help me decide,” said Hercol. “They are Mzithrini, to be sure. Which means that they, like us, have somehow crossed the Ruling Sea. But they are not common sailors. Those tattoos declare holy orders. They are sfvantskors, warrior-priests. And if they choose to attack us, they will win.”

“Neda won’t attack me.”

“Pazel, if she has taken the Last Oath and become a true sfvantskor, she will do whatever her leader commands. In some parts of the Mzithrin the newly sworn are told to leap one by one into a covered pit. Most find the bottom filled with rose petals, but one lands on razor-sharp stakes. The rest honor his sacrifice with prayers, and taste his blood for discipline.”

“That’s horrible!”

“No worse than what a Turach endures. Those three, however, may have a special reason to detest us: the loss of their ship. The men were aboard the Jistrolloq when it drew alongside us in Simja. I dare say your sister was as well.”

“She spoke to me,” said Pazel suddenly. “A sfvantskor girl in a mask whispered to me in the shrine-she told me to turn away from evil, as if one could-Hercol, how can they be alive? We sank the Jistrolloq months ago, in the middle of the Ruling Sea.”

“Months,” said Hercol, “or two hundred years?”

Pazel froze, then lowered his face, grinding his forehead into the sand.

“If we decide to speak to them,” said Hercol, “let us take care not to speak of that. So far it has been a secret among the two of us, Thasha and Bolutu. Let it remain so, for now.”

“It’s not true, anyway,” said Pazel. “That part can’t be true.”

“Why not?” said Hercol.

“Because if two hundred years have passed, then the whole conspiracy’s failed. And the war must be long over, if it ever came to war.”

“Certainly,” said Hercol.

“And your Empress Maisa is dead, and everyone we cared about, everyone who knew our mucking names.”

“Catastrophes are only unthinkable until they occur. You Ormalis should know that.”

“I’ll tell you why, then,” said Pazel. “Because if it’s true then I really will go mad. Barking blary mad.”

Hercol’s hand slipped under his jaw. Gently, but with an iron strength, he lifted Pazel’s chin. His eyes were sharp and wary in the moonlight.

“Please,” he said, “don’t.”

The Mzithrinis could smell the rabbit crackling on the spit. It was all they could do not to pluck the carcass from the fire and devour it, raw though it surely was on the inside. They had come ashore ravenous, and found only crabs. They had lived for four days now on crabs-to be precise, on the legs and eyestalks of crabs: the bodies of the creatures had proven so toxic that their leader, Cayer Vispek, had nearly died, his throat swollen until he battled to breathe. When he recovered he cited the Old Faith proverb about the glutton who choked on the wishbone of a stolen goose, and the younger sfvantskor laughed.

They had laughed again when he showed them the rabbit, and asked if they would not rather wait for morning. Then it was Jalantri’s turn to quote the scripture, as he scrambled from the tent: “And should the morning never come, how now, my soul?”

Their master smiled, but only faintly: one did not make light of the soul. It was man’s claim on eternity, his gift from the omnipotence that some called Rin or God or the Gods, but which Mzithrinis would never presume to shackle with a name.

Jalantri had scurried like a boy to build the fire. Neda had skinned and gutted the rabbit, while Cayer Vispek walked out to the beach to touch the Nelluroq, and whisper quietly to the five hundred brethren who had perished there.

By the time he had returned the rabbit was sizzling. Now, sipping their brackish tea, they felt as though the smell were already nourishing them, the appetizer to the feast.

Jalantri saw the intruder first. A youth, standing in the brush on the high eastern dune, looking down with the moonlight behind him. “Vrutch,” he swore. “I thought we’d driven them off.”

Cayer Vispek stopped turning the spit. “He’s the first one to come upon us from the east,” he said. “How peculiar. The land ends in just a few miles that way. Perhaps he smelled the rabbit.”

Neda glanced up at the boy and shrugged. “He can’t have any of mine,” she said.

Jalantri’s big chest rumbled with laughter. But their leader stilled him with a hand. The youth had started toward them, slide-stepping down the dune. They rose, tensing. Not one of the witless humans had ever tried to approach them, even in stealth. This one had to know he was being observed, yet on he came. The shadow of the dune hid his features. But there could be no doubt: he was deliberately approaching. They scanned the basin on every side: no companions. Neda drew her dagger. Jalantri pulled a burning stick from the fire and strode forward, waving it.

“Ya! Away!” he shouted, in a voice for scaring dogs. The youth paused. Then he took a deep breath and continued toward them.

Cayer Vispek bent and picked up a fist-sized stone from the fire ring. “I am going to kill this one,” he informed them rather sadly. “If they lose their fear they will give us no peace. Don’t help; it will be easier if he doesn’t run.”

Neda squinted at the figure, intuition gathering inside her like a storm. Then the Cayer walked past Jalantri and waited, turned slightly away from the youth, the stone loose in his hand. He was a deadly shot. The rabbit might have been no closer when he crushed its skull.

The youth reached the foot of the dune. He stepped from its shadow, and Cayer Vispek whirled and threw the stone with all his might. And Neda screamed.

Sound flies faster than any arm-and Pazel lived because the Cayer’s mind was faster yet. He skewed the stone with his fingertips as he released it, and the shot went wide. As the youth flinched and ducked Neda ran forward, crying his name.

“Stop!” roared a voice from the dune-top. A second figure, a grown man, was flying down its shadowed face. “Harm that boy and I swear I’ll send you to meet your faceless Gods! Damn you, Pazel, I should never have agreed-”

The youth looked at Neda. He was more ashamed than afraid, standing before her without a stitch of clothing. A different body, but the same fierce, awkward frown. She had seen that look ten years ago, him standing in a tiled basin, and Neda, the older sister, approaching with a sponge.

The hug she gave him was pure instinct, as were the tears she shed in a single, toothy sob. But before he could return the embrace she released him and stepped back, glaring through her tears. A sfvantskor could not put her arms around him. A sister could not do otherwise.