Unfettered III

by Shawn Speakman (ed)

  “Why are you doing this?” Magha asked, stalling. He already knew why. The political struggle over the aeries of Riat had turned deadly. The Juza—the Rasaal—were making a power play. Sweet Avar . . . What harm will they do?

  This was no time for defensive postures. “Shuja—go!”

  Shuja launched into the Torchbearer as Qorru raised his sword and charged. Magha grabbed the pot of beans off the flames. The handle seared his palm with a sizzle. He screamed but held on, used the side of his boot like a shovel to sweep the cookfire at his attacker—sticks, coals, and all. Most of it bounced off Qorru’s shins and knees, but a cloud of smoke and ash enveloped his head. Embers clung to his jerkin. He slowed for a brief moment, stung and blinded by sparks and cinders. Magha swung. Qorru parried blindly, but the pot of beans struck his chin. Rocked his head back. Thick, boiling soup splashed onto his neck and face. He howled and staggered away.

  Before Magha could rush him for another strike, Qorru cleared his eyes with an angry swipe and leveled his sword again.

  Orange glare erupted to his right. Shuja screamed in pain and outrage. Fire bloomed on his chest and left wing, in splashes and runnels of a viscous flaming liquid. It burned in puddles on the ground. A blazing drool dangled from the Torchbearer’s lip. Shuja pressed her against the trees, off balance, raking viciously despite the fire, fighting to keep her head turned away.

  Qorru acted in that instant of distraction. Magha dodged, but the fighter sank his blade to the hilt through his side, out his back in a gout of blood. He grabbed Qorru’s wrist, held it tight. Don’t let him withdraw the blade. He dropped the empty pot and grabbed a fistful of Qorru’s jerkin, yanked him in for a head butt. Shattered the man’s nose in a splash of blood and bubbling soup. Qorru reeled for an instant, then lurched upright again. With a snarl, he wrenched the blade sideways in the wound and shoved Magha back several steps, pinning him to a boulder.

  Magha cried out in agony as the warrior twisted his grip, the blade sawing and lurching in his side. He held fast, battling with his other hand to gouge an eye, mash his nose, prevent him from doing the same. Over the man’s shoulder, he saw the Torchbearer convulse again. Shuja lunged for the creature’s throat. Took hold. Shook his head, ripped cord and muscle with his teeth. When she screamed and gurgled, Qorru turned to look, horrified. The Torchbearer vomited up her last torrent of fire. Flames erupted from her neck, out the sides of Shuja’s mouth, splashed on his shoulders, poured into a pool at their feet. She slumped down to lay in its inferno.

  Shuja turned toward Magha and Qorru, his chest and mouth ablaze.

  With an angry cry, Qorru wrested the blade, pushing downward. Magha groaned and lost his grip. The Juza assassin ripped the sword free and stabbed him again, through his forearm and into his ribs. As Qorru drew back to stab one more time, Shuja’s blazing maw dropped over his head and shoulders with a crunch, lifted him off the ground, shook him. His muffled shriek ended with a snap. Then the dragon spat him out, flames dripping from his lips.

  Magha slid off the boulder into darkness.

  ROBERT V. S. REDICK

  RESPONSES TO THE LAST PAGES OF THE CHATHRAND VOYAGE QUARTET might best be described as volcanic. Some readers praised it as beautiful, transcendent, a cause for joy. Others wanted to roast me on a bed of coals by the seaside. A good number embraced both positions. If anyone had a moderate response, I should love to be informed.

  The plea I would enter here is that I, too, am eager to learn what happens next in the lives of the Chathrand alums. This story begins that new journey. I think of it as a bridge I very much needed to build: not just between the past and future of my protagonists, but between heaven and hell.

  If you haven’t read the Quartet, which opens with The Red Wolf Conspiracy, what follows may feel like meeting your in-laws for the first time in the middle of a tense (not to say homicidal) family reunion. It also, perforce, contains spoilers.

  Robert V. S. Redick

  Thasha's Cure for Cabin Fever

  Robert V. S. Redick

  “Shipwreck,” said Felthrup.

  “Landscape,” said Hercól.

  “Monsters,” said the young woman seated across from them, elbow on table, chin on a battle-scarred fist. “I mean it:, you’re monsters. I could be dying here and you’d take no notice. I could be dead.”

  “You could be a touch less dramatic,” said Hercól.

  The swordsman, her fighting tutor, spoke without looking up. She scowled at him through unwashed golden hair.

  “You are both wise and cultured, Master Hercól,” said Felthrup, “but in the arena of the jigsaw, you are a foundling. This puzzle depicts a shipwreck, I tell you.”

  “Landscape,” insisted Hercól. “A blue mountain glimpsed from a window. As I shall prove when I find that bit, that single missing—”

  The young woman’s eyes slid to the black walnut table. In its whorls she saw figures in agony, torn by ghost panthers, drowning in pitch.

  “I’m going to kick this table over,” she said.

  “Will you, Lady Thasha?” said Felthrup, not lifting his eyes. “I should think even your prodigious muscles—is that the word, prodigious?—would be thwarted by a table nailed so firmly to the deck. Besides, you are a convalescent. Dr. Chadfallow is still worried about your shortness of breath.”

  Thasha surged to her feet. I’ll show you shortness of breath. Leaning forward, she blew at the thousand bits of puzzle with all her might.

  Nothing moved. Hercól chuckled and rapped on the tin sheet before him.

  “Magnetized, m’lady,” added Felthrup. “Have you forgotten we’re at sea?”

  Felthrup was a woken rat—brave, bookish, gifted, impeccably clean. Hercól was a Thojmélée fighter and one of the deadliest men alive. Thasha would have given her life for either of them in an instant, and had never doubted that the feeling was reciprocated. Until, perhaps, today. She could not quite manage to laugh at the thought.

  “I took your sword once, Hercól,” she said.

  “Did you? That was cheeky.”

  “It was desperate. You were crushed beneath a stone. And I killed that man, the one who was torturing us. Are you listening? I killed him, I beheaded him, with your sword Ildraquin. You remember, don’t you?”

  She could hear the accusation in her voice, but what she truly felt was closer to terror. For she knew Hercól would not reply: on the I.M.S. Chathrand, no one ever spoke about the past.

  She closed her eyes, willed herself to remember. A forest clearing, a ruined tower, a mage working a death-spell. An instant of perfect clarity as she swung the blade.

  Where, when, why? Her memories were sharp and bright and shattered, a mirror caught in a cyclone. She could pluck them one by one from that gritty whirlwind, but even as she did so, a voice insisted that she was lying to herself. Let go all that, said the voice, the stern voice of an aunt or priestess, Let go, rest easy, that is not memory but mirage.

  “It happened,” she said aloud.

  “We believe you, Thasha,” murmured Hercól.

  But of course he didn’t. No one believed those tales that poured from her, those phantom memories that had grown like a riot of weeds during her illness. A circumnavigation of the world in this very ship. Battles with mercenaries, flame trolls, sorcerers, mutant rats. Lost empires in the south, cities of crystal, black forests of carnivorous trees. Storms of red light enveloping the Chathrand. A valley swallowed by a wave.

  All so real. But so were dreams, weren’t they, until shattered by birdsong, morning clatter in the kitchen, the drop of a spoon?

  What if the voice was right? What if her illness had blown shards of her dream life into her waking mind, like sea birds carried inland by a storm?

  She lifted her eyes to a painting on the stateroom wall. The River Ool in springtime, not far from the Isiq family mansion, a barge stacked high with cargo for the seaport, morning mist, a fieldstone wall, two boys climbing a tree.

  Utter sap. Why not add a rai
nbow.

  Then Thasha frowned. Across the river, on a hilltop hazy with distance: tombstones, cracked and fallen. Gaunt figures crouched among them, digging with their hands, tugging, eating what they found. Tall, bone-white beings. Ghouls.

  “What in the Nine Pits—”

  She shook herself. Man and rat ignored her. There were no ghouls in the painting, no tombstones, nothing but shadows on the hill.

  She closed her eyes. Don’t panic. Recite the certainties, the precious mundane.

  You’re seventeen. You dropped out of school. You live in Etherhorde in wealth and boredom with your father and a nurse and two slobbering dogs. Your mother’s long dead, barely a memory. Your father’s important, the emperor’s fleet admiral, and sometimes he plays the diplomat. This is one of those times. But you, you’re just an ornament, a dependent, along for the ride. We’re sailing west to the island of Simja; the wind is steady but the seas are flat. Nothing happens. The days are endless, soundless, quiet as winter, quiet as a tomb.

  And the point of the journey? We’re to witness a marriage, to cheer the signing of a treaty, the end of a war. Which war? Whose marriage? Thasha’s nails bit into her palm. The answers darted like minnows, needle-bright, impossible to touch.

  “I think I’ll visit the topdeck,” she told the chamber. “I need fresh air.”

  “Whatever for, Lady Thasha?” squeaked Felthrup, suddenly attentive. “You are in the stateroom of the finest ship afloat. And as you well know, it is the genius of the Chathrand’s design that her wealthy passengers never want for fresh air, never breathe the miasma of the lower decks.” He raised his eyes to the brass orifices in the ceiling, the mouths of the windscoop pipes. “You are enjoying the breeze off the Nelu Peren at this very moment, fresh as any sailor aloft.”

  “I’ve had enough of privacy,” she said. “Come with me, Felthrup. You could do with a bit of sun.”

  “But there is no sun,” said her father.

  She whirled. The old admiral was seated with his feet up in the window seat of the portside galleries, a book across his lap. The windows were heavily curtained, as they always seemed to be of late—for warmth, they assured her. Admiral Isiq lifted a corner, barely an inch, and frowned out on a world Thasha could not see.

  “Mist,” he said. “Thick and cold. You don’t want to step out there today, my morning star. Pneumonia is the worst sort of lodger: destructive on arrival, difficult to evict. I’ve seen more sailors perish by a relapse of that disease than by cannon fire.”

  Thasha stood at bay. The sight of her father had deeply unsettled her. It was unlike him to crawl into window seats: the old man was stout and stiff. But there was more to her unease. His voice? His very presence?

  Her heart thumped wildly, a sparrow in a cage.

  Get ahold of yourself, Thasha. Of course your father’s here. Where else would he be?

  She glanced about the stateroom, determined not to be startled again. Besides the two men and Felthrup, there was Marila, her pearl-diver friend, brushing her hair in the washroom doorway. There was Nama, her old nurse, seated in a corner and rather furiously knitting a scarf. There were Jorl and Syzyt, her mastiffs, dozing and drooling beneath the table. There were the muffled cries of birds and sailors, the thump of boots overhead.

  “I’m not ill,” she said at last, wishing someone would make eye contact. “And there’s always a mist, isn’t there? I can scarcely remember the sun.”

  “Then you’re definitely not recovered,” called Marila from the washroom.

  “Heed your friends and be patient,” said the admiral. “You still have one foot in the grave.”

  In the corner, Nama’s knitting needles were a cart horse on cobbles: tick-nick, tick-nick. Thasha moved toward her father. At the very least she could look out at the mist. But the admiral, irritatingly enough, settled his shoulder firmly against the curtain and opened his book.

  Fine, starboard: no one seated there.

  “Lady Thasha, please!” cried Felthrup. “Master Hercól’s pursuit of a landscape will drive me to outright verbosity! And you promised to help.”

  Thasha stifled a growl. Why in the Nine Pits did the puzzle mean so much to them? And why did they never make any progress?

  “Give me ten minutes with that stupid thing. Alone.”

  Man and rat left the table. She sat down and studied the chaos on the metal sheet. Hercól’s mountain, she saw at once, was no mountain at all. It was living tissue, blue scales on a limb or a neck. Reptilian. She turned the pieces, glaring. Every one of them was fighting her, refusing to mate. Just when she seemed to have the pattern, it melted into clashing colors, divergent lines.

  “It’s a boat,” she said aloud.

  “Look again,” said Hercól.

  She blinked—and the pieces blurred. Was that deck planking or tree trunk? An oarlock or a knocker on a cottage door?

  “You see our plight, m’lady?” said Felthrup. “It could keep us occupied for weeks.”

  “Only if we let it,” she snapped.

  But he was right: the puzzle was fighting her. Second by second, the pattern retreated, no image, no story, a primordial chaos that would claim her too—

  Her knuckles went white on the arm of the chair. You won’t win, damn you. Every puzzle has a solution if you dare to see it.

  “I read here that the Simjans believe their dead return as insects,” said Admiral Isiq, squinting at his book. “That if you gaze long and deep into the eyes of dragonflies, you will see the faces of departed friends, and catch their voices in the droning of bees.”

  Snap. Two pieces locked.

  Every head turned Thasha’s way.

  “Definitely a boat,” she said.

  “Daughter,” said the admiral, “leave off there and come to me. Read me a page or two; my old eyes are—”

  Snap.

  Snap.

  The others froze as though she’d drawn a knife. The sailors aloft fell silent. Only Nama knitted on, tick-nick, tick-nick.

  “It’s one of the landing craft,” said Thasha. “Hercól! Look here, it’s our boat, the one we tried to take ashore in Bali Adro. The boat the sea-serpent crushed, that day we nearly drowned.”

  Marila drifted from the washroom and looked over Thasha’s shoulder.

  “All right,” she conceded, “a boat. Are you happy? But it can’t be yours, Thasha. Don’t get carried away.”

  “Why can’t it?”

  “Because no one paints you into a jigsaw puzzle unless you’re famous.”

  “Well of course I’m famous,” said Thasha. “We all are. I mean, I’d rather we weren’t, it was terrible—”

  “What are we famous for, exactly?”

  Thasha looked at her old friend, begged with her eyes. In a whisper, she said, “Saving the world.”

  Marila put her head back and laughed.

  Thasha dropped her eyes, jabbed furiously at the puzzle. The voice was Marila’s but the laugh was not: Marila was incapable of cruelty, but that sound was like a fistful of glass. Saving the world! she thought. Where did that howler spring from? You’re a rich girl from Etherhorde, you’ve never done a bold thing in your sheltered, fleeting, ridiculous little—

  Snap.

  Another piece. She had the horizon, now, and the stern of the boat.

  “I’m famished, suddenly,” said the admiral. “What’s keeping old Fiffengurt? Thasha, just go and pull the lunch-bell, will you?”

  Snap. Snap. The puzzle was losing, the image taking shape. There were the boiling blue-green waves, the sand-spit islands, the frail open boat. There the gargantuan serpent, rising above it, a mountain with fangs.

  “You must be hungry too, Thasha,” said Hercól. “Healing requires focus, but also fuel. Let us put that puzzle away for now and lay the table.”

  Snap. Snap. Snap.

  And suddenly she saw him: the brown boy, the figure she had not known she was seeking. An utter stranger. A friend.

  Find him.

  She h
ad only a fragment: his left hand and wrist, and a bare bit of forearm. The others muttered in a growing chorus—food, lunch, clear the table—but now another voice was rising, drowning them out.

  Find him, find all of him, hands shoulders shirt rib cage brown cheeks warm welcoming lips—

  “LUNCH IS SERVED!”

  The stateroom’s double doors crashed open, and Mr. Fiffengurt swept in with a great sizzling tray.

  He was the Chathrand’s quartermaster, a kindly ruffian with a limp and a lazy eye. “See what old Teggatz cooked up for you, Miss Thasha!” he boomed. “Ruby prawns caught this morning, broiled in coconut milk, and red Sorrophran taters—”

  “Almost finished,” said Thasha. The boy, the boy—

  “—and Ulsprit watercress, and deviled grouse eggs, and plum wine to wash it down. And bowls of salted whatsit for you and the dogs, Master Felthrup. You can’t say we don’t spoil our guests.”

  All lethargy vanished; her friends rushed the tray like wolves. Thasha was trembling: where was he? Why could she not find one more piece the color of his skin?

  Felthrup hopped on the table: “I adore salted whatsit!”

  Marila whisked the magnetic puzzle from the table; Thasha stifled a cry. Bowls and cutlery appeared. Fiffengurt took a seat with all the rest.

  “Come, Nama: won’t you join us?” said the admiral, filling his plate.

  “Presently,” said the nurse. Tick-nick, tick-nick.

  “And you, Thasha? You have always loved prawns.”

  “No thank you,” said Thasha.

  “But it’s hours since breakfast,” said Fiffengurt, shoveling potatoes onto his dish.

  “You will grow pleuritic without food,” said Felthrup. “Is that the word I require, m’lady, pleuritic? Perhaps the connotation is not quite—ah, mmm, gah.”

  He buried his face in his bowl. Dogs, rat, humans: all were jolly and ravenous. Now and then they beckoned to her empty chair. The mounds of prawn shells grew, but the food in the serving dishes never seemed to decline.

  “Every puzzle has a solution,” said Thasha.

  “Yes, but you were right about that blasted jigsaw,” said Hercól. “Not worth the effort. I suggest we stow it away.”