‘Oppo, m’lady,’ said the Simjan, his voice close to breaking.
By the Gods, thought the admiral, I want this woman in my life.
Then he saw the child on the reef.
It was a boy, and it was sitting on the just-submerged coral, staring at them. When the next swell came it rose to its feet. It stood no taller than a man’s knee. It had arms and legs and eyes and fingers, yet nothing could have been less human. In the moonlight its flesh was the colour of old pewter. Its face, so much like an infant’s, sported a mouth full of pointed teeth. The boy-creature’s limbs flexed in ways no human limbs could, as though they were not jointed but ribbed like snakes.
Suthinia made a small sound of fright.
‘Don’t worry, m’lady,’ said the Simjan, ‘that’s what we were waiting for.’
‘It’s a murth!’ she said.
‘Of course. A sea-murth. They’re in charge here, you know.’
The little creature made a clicking sound in its throat. Isiq thought it looked angry, and then thought that he was a fool even to speculate on its emotions. Suddenly the murth bent at the spine and flipped backwards, otter-like, into the waves.
The bowman pointed. Fifty yards away, two figures sat crouched on the wave-washed deck of the frigate, serpentine arms hugging knees. They were elders, a man and a woman. Just beyond them, Isiq saw delicate hands rise to grasp the timbers. A young murth-girl pulled herself up beside the other two. A strange beauty, Isiq thought, as she stared at the humans with wide green eyes.
‘Put one hand in the water,’ said the Simjan.
Isiq and Suthinia gaped at him. ‘Are you quite cracked?’ said the admiral.
‘No, Uncle, it’s the way,’ said the other, plunging in his hand. ‘Do it quickly, or they won’t let us ashore.’
Suthinia leaned away, terrified. ‘This is what Gregory was teasing me about. Jathod, I hate that man! No wonder he’s not here.’
The two elder murths slipped back into the water and vanished, but the young girl remained, watching them sorrowfully. Isiq muttered a curse, then put his hand in the water. ‘Come, Suthinia,’ he said.
‘You don’t know these creatures,’ she said. ‘You’ve never crossed the Ruling Sea. They’re a race of orphaned spirits. They’re the stepchildren of the Gods.’
‘They’re fussy, too,’ said the Talturin. ‘Put your hand in, lady. We’ve got nowhere else to go, unless we paddle out to sea.’
Isiq leaned forward and touched her shoulder with his free hand. She stiffened but did not pull away. She put her hand in the Gulf.
The four of them sat there, awkwardly balanced, and the canoe bobbed like a cork. Suthinia was trembling. Isiq felt like a fool. What did Emperor Magad have to fear from them, exactly?
Nothing happened for a time: the lone murth-girl stared across the water. Then it came: a touch, cold and otherworldly and electric. Small hands were gripping his own, turning them, feeling his swollen knuckles through the flesh. Suthinia jumped; they had touched her too. She started to shake and Isiq tightened his grip on her shoulder. What in Pitfire happened to her on the Nelluroq?
The murth-hands withdrew. ‘Done!’ said the Simjan, and Suthinia jerked her hand from the water and cringed. ‘No fear, Lady S, that’s all that’s required of us. A bit like signin’ for your pay, says Captain Gregory, or askin’ permission to board a boat. And the beauty of it is that the murths don’t let no one cross their territory but us freebooters. Captain Gregory struck a bargain, the wily old — Uch!’
A murth-man breached like a seal, right beside Suthinia. The witch did not cry out but flung herself away, and came close to overturning the canoe. The murth showed its teeth. It had a snow-white beard and solemn eyes, and shells adorned the raiment on its shoulders.
Suthinia was still flailing. Isiq threw his arms about her. ‘Be still! He’s not attacking!’ But even the smugglers were aghast; this was no part of the routine. The murth placed a glistening hand upon the gunwale, and spoke.
Everyone winced. The voice was part wooden ratchet, part shrieking albatross. The murth watched Suthinia expectantly, but the terrified witch just shook her head. Frowning now, the murth raised a finger to point at the sky.
‘Baaa. .’ The creature’s mouth and neck strained with effort. Now vaguely human, the sounds it produced came from deep in its stomach. ‘. . b-baaaaaa-’
‘Back?’ whispered the Simjan.
‘Baaaaaad. Baaaaaaad reeepestreeeeee.’ The murth raised his finger higher, still looking at Suthinia.
‘Bad what?’ asked the Talturin.
‘Yoooo…helllp. . weeee. . helllp. . or alllll. . m-m-muhh-’
‘Muh-?’
‘Muh-murrrrrrrrrr.’
‘Murth? Sea-murth?’
‘Murrrrrrd! Muuurrrrrrrrrrrrrrrd!
‘Murdered,’ said Isiq.
The sea-murth pointed at him. Then he turned the pointing finger on himself, the others in the canoe, and finally swept his hand in a wide, encompassing arc.
‘Everyone,’ said Suthinia. ‘Everyone murdered together, by something from the sky.’
The creature nodded. ‘Yoooo helllllp,’ it repeated, and this time the words sounded like a plea. It submerged, and they saw no more of it. But as they paddled off, the young murth-girl still sat watching them upon the wreck, and now Isiq thought her green eyes were sad.
Isiq smacked his forehead, and bloodied his fingers by the deed. The Crab Fens. A mystery hell-hole, unexplored by Arqual’s navy, hidden behind the death-trap of the Haunted Coast. Isiq had imagined a short journey up a tidal stream, then a hidden deep-water vessel with the Empress in the stateroom, surrounded by Tholjassan guards. But as they rode the swell in among the bulrushes and black trees, the Simjan remarked casually that he hoped they’d arrive in time for dinner. ‘No one dines this late, surely?’ said Isiq. The man looked back at him, confused. Then he smiled. ‘I meant dinner tomorrow night, Uncle. And that’s if we hurry, and there’s not a squall.’
Isiq feared it would be a torturous trip. His knee was on fire and he could not straighten it, and the night was frigid, and he had nothing to do with his hands. But things turned out much better than he expected. The canoe had impressed him already among the corals and shipwrecks; here in the Fens it proved a revelation. It cut water like a knife, turned like a damselfish, skimmed through shallows where a rowboat would have run aground. And when the stream narrowed and the insects found them, the two men sprang into action, rearranging their cargo and urging the passengers to lie flat. Blessed relief! His leg was straight at last! He passed the tailor bird to the Simjan; the creature was fond of any man who, like ‘friend Isiq’, had done battle with deathsmoke. Then the young men stretched a kind of cheesecloth over the top of the canoe and secured it at both ends, leaving themselves exposed but protecting Isiq and Suthinia from the insects, or the bulk of them.
To call it undignified was an understatement: Isiq had to rest his face on the canoe’s damp and grimy floor. Suthinia’s back was to him. When he turned over and brushed her foot by accident, she kicked.
‘Stay clear of me, you old mucking lizard!’
‘Madam Suthinia!’
‘Go to sleep! This night’s going to be rotten enough without any of that!’
Isiq almost laughed. Sleep was out of the question. His mind was galloping, intoxicated. They had probably gone ten miles already, and would cover fifty or sixty more at this rate. Sixty miles into the Fens! That meant the Empress wasn’t underestimating the threat posed by Sandor Ott. It meant she had some grasp of what it took to stay alive.
‘He visits whores,’ said Suthinia, apropos of nothing.
Isiq made a sound of polite surprise.
‘These days he scarcely bothers to hide it. Maybe that’s better than expecting me to say nothing, to pretend not to notice what he does. Still, I hate him. I’ve hated him since the day we married.’
Isiq’s heart was hammering. He said, ‘What I saw did not look like hate.’
>
‘He’s a lecher and a pig,’ said Suthinia. ‘But it’s something, you have to admit — making peace with the sea-murths, enjoying their protection, winning free movement through this land.’
‘He made the peace? Gregory, personally?’
‘On behalf of his beloved freebooters, of course. Little by little, year after year. He went about it like a child, but somehow it worked. He would toss sacks of gold among the shipwrecks, and glass jewellery, and beads. He’d put his face close to the water and shout, “Presents for the maneaters! Go ahead, play dress-up! None of us will laugh. And we’re not thieves, or colonists, or even fishermen. We’re just orphans like you.” And he’d walk, Eberzam — walk from Cape Coristel, thirteen days up the beach, and then just sit in the shallows and call out to the murths, sing to them.’
‘Sing?’
‘Love songs and praise songs, drinking songs, and he’d say how much more he respected them than human beings. He didn’t even see one for the first four years. And if they heard him they surely didn’t understand. They didn’t speak a mucking word of any human tongue.’
‘But they do now?’
‘Gregory taught them. He taught Arquali to the mucking sea-murths, that man.’
She fell briefly silent, then added, ‘I never believed him, until tonight. I thought this sea-murth business was another lie, one he invented because he knows I fear them. It kept me out of his hair, kept me away from his real family here in the Fens.’
‘But why such extraordinary fear?’ asked Isiq. ‘Courage blazes from you like heat from a bonfire.’
‘Very pretty. I’ll tell you why. It was during our crossing of the Nelluroq, twenty years ago. One freezing night we lay becalmed, and they surrounded us and swept aboard, and all our lamps went out together. They moved among us silently, inspecting us, touching our clothes and faces, and no one on deck breathed a word. And there was a lord among them, a very ancient murth. When the moon sailed out from behind the clouds I found him staring at me. He hobbled near and touched my hand, and it burned. Then all of them slipped back into the sea.’
‘A bad burn, was it?’
‘Not at all,’ said Suthinia. ‘But when we had the lamps burning again I saw that there were faint lines on my palm. Symbols. They were already fading, so I copied them out on paper before they disappeared. And years later Gregory showed them to these murths, here at the Haunted Coast.’
To Isiq’s almost unbearable joy, Suthinia reached back and took his hand tight in her own. ‘I’d garbled the words a bit,’ she said, ‘but the murths took a guess at their meaning. It seems they meant, “This one will descend among us and remain.” ’
‘Oh, rubbish,’ said Isiq.
‘Yes, well. That’s what most everyone says about their blary existence. And Gregory, he grinned when he brought me the translation. Like I said, I thought he was lying, just trying to scare me. He loves my weaknesses, the cur.’
‘Do you truly hate him?’
‘I hate most men, most of the time. When I dream of a better world it has no room for you. The horrid mess you make of everything, the wars.’
‘I was born into war,’ said Isiq. ‘I could have walked away from the Service, pretended that Arqual was not threatened with annihilation. But that would not have made the threat disappear.’
For the first time he heard amusement in her voice. ‘Walked away like me? Gregory told you, didn’t he? How he charmed me right into his bedroom? How I quit magecraft to be with him?’
‘He hinted,’ said Isiq.
‘Well it’s true: you can have magic, or a life and family. Not both, never both. But it’s also true that if I hadn’t walked away from magecraft, Arunis would have found me, and killed me, as he did almost all of us. So I burned my spell-scrolls, poured my potions into the sea. And I managed to be a mother and a wife. Until a certain doctor came to Ormael, that is.’
Isiq had wondered if she would ever mention the doctor. ‘Chadfallow reveres you above all women in Alifros,’ he heard himself say.
‘We were lovers for years,’ she said. ‘Pazel always talks about the day Gregory introduced us. But that only happened because Ignus had finally struck up a friendship with Gregory, down on the waterfront. By then, credek, I’d been with him almost seven years. I was trying to leave him, not for the first time. I could have killed him for approaching Gregory like that.’
‘Why did he?’
‘Why do you think? So that he could cross my threshold. I’d never brought Ignus around the Orch’dury. I didn’t want the children to know about him, although Neda suspected I had someone. A lot of sailors’ wives do, you know.’
‘You can’t mean it.’
‘Go ahead and laugh, but Neda was furious; she wanted me dead.’ Suthinia paused. ‘And then there was Pazel. He idolised Gregory, the man who tossed him in the air when he came home, who tossed gold around like a sultan; the man who captained a ship. Of course Gregory forgot about him as soon as he walked out the door, but I couldn’t tell Pazel that. Any more than I could tell him who his real father was.’
‘Chadfallow.’
‘What if he’d known?’ asked Suthinia defiantly. ‘He’d only have begun to doubt Gregory’s love for him, and Rin knows there was reason to doubt. He’d have learned that Neda was only his half-sister. And Ignus — he could have been recalled to Etherhorde at any time. He threatened to go often enough. To wash his hands of the whole “sordid Ormali chapter in my life”, as he put it. To go back to something familiar and safe.’
Suthinia drew a long breath. ‘I was fighting for a normal life, too. For Pazel, Neda, myself. I should have known it would come apart in my hands.’
‘Because of me,’ said Isiq gruly. Then, correcting himself: ‘Because of the invasion.’
‘And because the choice was never truly before me. I was still a mage in my heart.’
‘And now?’
‘Now it’s not just my heart. It’s everything. I’ll never be much of a mage, probably. But while this fight continues I can’t be anything else. I was saying goodbye to Gregory, tonight on the Dancer. It was the first time I had touched him in years. And the last.’
She withdrew her hand, and they both lay still and silent. There was, finally, perfect understanding between them. He could not argue with her, could not tell her she was killing him with her beauty, with her flood of simple trust. He would not chatter, would not remark on her honesty, or his amazement (face to face with honesty now) that he could have failed to notice the honesty’s absence during all his years with Syrarys. They would never be lovers, that dream was gone. But as he lay there he sensed with awe that a new being had appeared beside him, a sister maybe, even though she came from the far side of the world.
‘Our children,’ he said at last, ‘my daughter, your son-’
‘Yes,’ said the witch, ‘isn’t that the strangest thing?’
Twenty hours later the Simjan toed him gently in the ribs. ‘Wake up, Uncle,’ he said.
He rose stiffly, blinking. The sun was once more going down, but now it was setting over a vast lake, dotted with hummocks of greenery and flocks of waterbirds, and bordered on all sides by the Fens.
In the centre of the lake was an enormous building made entirely of logs. At first Isiq thought that it stood on giant stilts. But no, it was afloat, built atop a number of conjoined barges. It was square and plain and four stories tall, with rows of windows on the two upper floors. It reminded Isiq of a warehouse in Etherhorde, complete with the look-out towers at the corners by which the bosses could keep an eye on the stevedores. A number of vessels — sailboats, rowboats, pole barges, canoes — milled about it; others were scattered over the lake.
Suthinia was kneeling; the wind tossed her sable hair. ‘The Hermitage,’ she said. ‘It’s been two years for me.’
‘How did you manage to visit, without ever laying eyes on a murth?’ asked Isiq.
She smiled at him. ‘There are many paths to this lake,’ she said, ‘thoug
h none is easy to find. I used to come here from the Trothe of Chereste, before my children were born.’
‘Was there a. . hermit in residence, even then?’
Suthinia raised an eyebrow. ‘We brought the Hermit here, Gregory and I. Fourteen years ago, that was.’
As they drew nearer, Isiq caught the sparkle of glass from one of the towers. A telescope lens. Someone’s taking a good look at us.
They rounded a corner. On the western side of the great structure a wide gate stood raised, its iron teeth catching the last of the evening sun. ‘I hear music!’ said the tailor bird. ‘It is coming from that arch!’
The structure was open at the centre, Isiq saw now: the barges formed a great floating square, like a villa with a watery courtyard. They neared the arch. Festive noises, a piano banging drunkenly, the scent of onion and frying fish. They passed under the iron gate, and the Talturin said, ‘We’re home.’
Sweet Tree of Heaven.
It was like stepping into a bustling town on market day. The inner walls were entirely made up of balconies: four unbroken balconies running around the structure, and crowded with people of all kinds. There were many rough-looking freebooter men and women, to be sure, but also children, mothers with babies on their hips, toothless elders leaning over the rails. The crowd spilled out onto docks and tethered boats. There were streamers of laundry, buckets raised and lowered for water; tankards lifted in welcome as the paddlers were recognised. Everyone was poor, that was certain: the children’s clothes were made of neatly stitched rags. But winter was ending, and the day had been fair, and there appeared to be plenty to eat.
‘Where’d you find the fish-head?’ shouted a portly man nibbling a sausage, looking down on Isiq.
‘He’s a friend of Captain Gregory,’ shouted the Talturin. ‘Be civil, you! He’s here for some peace and relaxation.’
‘So naturally Gregory sends his witch along,’ quipped another.
Suthinia’s glance cut the laughter short, but even in her eyes there was a flicker of amusement. ‘Nobody sends me anywhere, as you people know well,’ she said, ‘but if Old Lumpy has any crab cakes left, tell him to send them to our chambers, with some bread and ale.’
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