The River of Shadows cv-3

by Robert V. S. Redick

  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 w
as 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?