Now her memory was vast and merciless. It rarely obeyed her will. She might try for hours to summon a specific fact, and fail. But when she made no effort her memory worked on, like an involuntary organ, pumping, flooding her with knowledge she did not want. As it was doing now. The dust sculpting beams of light through a high window in the barn. The nine voices of those soldiers. The underside of each chin.
Cayer Vispek offered to share the rabbit, but Pazel and the Tholjassan man gently declined; they could see that the others were starved. Neda and her comrades attacked the meal in earnest, and as they chewed the man called Hercol Stanapeth began to speak. His Mzithrini was halting, like something remembered from a distant time, but with Pazel’s help he told his tale.
And what a tale it was: the lie of the Great Peace, the treason plotted in Etherhorde, the riches hidden aboard the Chathrand, the fact that the Shaggat Ness had never died.
At this last confession Cayer Vispek had set down his plate. In the darkest of voices he asked Pazel to repeat Hercol’s words. Then he put out a hand to the two younger sfvantskors.
“Your weapons. Quickly.”
Neda and Jalantri were astounded, but they obeyed, unbuckling their knives and swords and placing them in their leader’s hands. Vispek closed his eyes for a long moment. When he opened them again they were deadly.
“The Ness,” he said to Hercol. “You have harbored the Shaggat Ness, the Blasphemer, stained with the blood of half a million of our people. The one who broke the Mzithrin family, and beggared us all.”
“Arqual has done so, yes,” said Hercol.
“And he is aboard your ship even now?”
“He is enchanted,” said Hercol. “Turned to lifeless stone; but we have reason to fear that the enchantment will be reversed. He is to be returned to his worshippers in Gurishal, to provoke a war inside your country.”
A brief silence; then Jalantri exploded to his feet. “Give him a weapon, Cayer, and give me mine. The Shaggat! This has all been about the Shaggat! They mean to destroy us, to plant their flag on the ruins of Babqri and Surahk and Srag! Don’t you, cannibals? Deny it if you dare!”
“The Father was right,” said Neda, with equal venom. “He warned us that the Chathrand was carrying death in its hold.”
“Death in the guise of peace!” shouted Jalantri. “Monsters! Cannibals!” He pointed contemptuously at Hercol. “I need no weapon! Stand and fight me, stooge of Arqual!”
Hercol’s eyes flashed at the insult, but he made no move to rise. “Jalantri Reha,” hissed Cayer Vispek. “Sit down ere you disgrace us all.”
The young sfvantskor’s mouth twisted in fury. He obeyed his master at last, but famished as he was he did not take another bite of his meal.
“We will not harm you,” said Vispek. “But know this, men of the Chathrand: the Shaggat razed twenty townships along the banks of the Nimga, where Jalantri’s people lived. Sailors in the delta said the river was like a vein gushing blood into the sea. Jalantri’s parents met as refugees in the Babqri slums, orphans in a swarm of orphans, a generation without hope. And the Shaggat ordered many such massacres. You would be wise to tell us the simple truth of this business, and not a word less.”
“The truth is not simple, Cayer,” said Hercol. “But it is true that Emperor Magad and his servants seek the ruin of the Mzithrin, and the expansion of Arqual across the whole world-the whole Northern world, I mean, which is all they comprehend of Alifros. They are meticulous deceivers. They held the Shaggat forty years, after all, before springing this trap. But there is a subtler enemy than Arqual, and a greater threat.”
Then Hercol told them of Arunis, the Shaggat’s mage, hiding even now somewhere aboard the Chathrand; and of a certain object that Arunis wished desperately to control. “It is there in plain sight in the Shaggat’s hand,” he said. “And Arunis has meant all along for the Shaggat to have it, for by its power the mad king might not just weaken your Empire but conquer it-and Arqual as well. He has turned the conspiracy back upon its authors. But neither Arunis nor the Shaggat has yet mastered this thing, for it is an abomination. Indeed, no more deadly thing exists on either side of the Ruling Sea. It has many names, but the most common is the Nilstone.”
Neda glanced sharply at Cayer Vispek; her master’s face was guarded and still. The Nilstone! Their own legends spoke of it: an object like a small glass sphere, made of the compressed ash of all the devils burned in the sacred Black Casket, until the Great Devil in his agonies split the Casket asunder. Neda had never known whether or not the Stone was real; if it was, she had supposed it would lie among the other treasures of Mzithrini antiquity, in the Citadel of Hing, protected by arms and spells.
“You stole it, then?” she demanded.
“No, Neda,” said Cayer Vispek. “That is one crime for which Arqual bears no guilt. The Shaggat himself took the Nilstone from us, in his last, suicidal raid on Babqri.” Vispek hesitated a moment, then added: “We rarely speak of that theft. It does no honor to the Pentarchy to have lost the Nilstone, though in fact we wished to be rid of it for centuries. The Father spoke of it to me-just once.”
Neda closed her eyes, feeling a cold stab of loss. The Father. He was a great Mzithrini mage-priest, and her rescuer, her patron. He had taken her from the hands of a lecherous diplomat and made her a sfvantskor: the only non-Mzithrini ever admitted to the fold.
“What did he say, Master?” asked Jalantri.
“That the Nilstone is more dangerous than all the ships and legions of Arqual put together,” said the older sfvantskor. “ ‘We could not use it, Vispek,’ he told me, ‘and we dared not cast it away. Nor could any power in Alifros destroy it-one cannot destroy an absence, the idea of zero, the cold of the stellar void. In the end we guarded it merely to keep it from the hands of our enemies. And even in that we failed.’ ”
“Not your people alone,” said Hercol. “The very world has failed in the matter of the Nilstone. We have never fully grasped its nature. Your legends describe a thing of demonic ash. Others call it the eyeball of a murth-lord, or a tumor cut from the Tree of Heaven, or even a keyhole in an unseen door, leading to a place no mortal thought can penetrate. Our own leader, the mage Ramachni, tells us it is a splinter of rock from the land of the dead-and death is what it brings to any who touch it with fear in their hearts.”
“We’ve seen that with our own eyes,” added Pazel.
Neda turned him a bitter look. “You’ve seen many things,” she said, “but a few you’ve chosen to forget.”
Pazel looked at her, startled. “What are you talking about?”
“So many fine friends you’ve made,” she said. “Such worthy pursuits. To return the Shaggat to Gurishal, armed with such a weapon! How could you, Pazel? What have you become?”
Pazel’s mouth worked fitfully; he was biting back a retort. But Hercol spoke first. “Your brother has become what the world so sorely needs-a man without blind loyalties. Those who would restore the Shaggat to power are no comrades of ours. Pazel knew nothing of the conspiracy or the Nilstone when he was brought aboard the Chathrand, but he has taken an oath to fight these men, and Arunis as well, until we find a way to place the Stone beyond the reach of them all. That is our charge. None of us knows how it is to be done, but we would have failed already without your brother. Several times already the fight has turned on his courage.”
Pazel flushed, more from Hercol’s praise than the sfvantskors’ dubious looks. “We have some damn good allies,” he murmured.
“Like Thasha Isiq?” asked Neda with contempt.
“Yes,” said Pazel. “Haven’t you been listening, Neda? Thasha was fooled along with the rest of us.”
“And her father too, no doubt,” said Jalantri. “Tricked into leading fleets against the Mzithrin, all those years.”
“No,” Pazel admitted reluctantly.
But Hercol said, “Yes, tricked. Eberzam Isiq loved Arqual and believed everything its Emperor proclaimed. The very Emperor who sent a woman t
o his bed, to become his consort and confidante, and to slowly poison him through his tea. She would have killed him as soon as Thasha married your prince. When we left Simja, Eberzam remained, determined to expose Arqual’s plot to the world.”
“Nonsense!” said Vispek. “We remained in port for five days after you sailed. I myself was often in the court of King Oshiram. There was no sign of Isiq about the castle, nor any mention of a plot.”
Hercol and Pazel looked at each other in dismay. “They got him,” said Pazel. “Oh Pitfire, Hercol. Someone got Isiq after all. What are we going to tell Thasha?”
The sfvantskors made sounds of amazement. Tell her! thought Neda. She’s alive, then! They lied about her death on top of everything!
Hercol looked deeply shaken by Vispek’s words. He steepled his fingers for a moment, then pressed on: “Honored Cayer, you can see that Pazel and I speak in good faith. That we come to you defenseless, when we might simply have waited for rescue from the Chathrand, and left you here, marooned as you clearly are. I do not ask for trust-”
“That is well,” said Cayer Vispek.
“-but I pray that you will see one thing for yourselves. The world has changed beneath our feet. And none of us will survive unless we also change. Into what? I cannot imagine. But whatever is to come will try us all, and terribly. We need strength, Cayer-strength of mind and heart and hand. The kind of strength your order teaches.”
Jalantri laughed aloud. “What would you know of our order, stooge?”
“I know it forbids you to challenge another to a duel,” said Hercol, “unless your master commands it. To do otherwise”-he closed his eyes, remembering-“is to place pride above holy destiny, and anger over service to the Faith.”
Jalantri stared at him, abashed and furious. Cayer Vispek was surprised as well. “How is it that you quote so confidently from our scripture?” he demanded.
“Every member of the Secret Fist reads the Book of the Old Faith,” said Hercol. “My copy remained with me when I forsook Ott’s guild of spies. You see, Cayer, I know something of change. So does Neda’s brother, incidentally.”
Vispek’s eyes moved slowly from Hercol to Pazel and back again. He took a long breath, then pointed at the stack of crates across the basin.
“The one on top is full of clothing,” he said. “Go and dress. Then I will tell you of a kind of change you know nothing about.”
They had numbered seven once. Seven: the Mzithrin lucky number, the standard complement of sfvantskors dispatched as a team to a particular Mzithrin King, or an army brigade, or a warship of the White Fleet. The latter had been Vispek’s assignment: he was made votary to an elder aboard the Jistrolloq, deadliest ship in the Northern world, as famous for her speed and weaponry as the Chathrand was for size and age. Neda and Jalantri and several others came aboard after the murder of their teacher in Simja, and had been assigned to Vispek’s care. They were still aspirants, barely out of training; by rights they should have been returned to the Mzithrin to do just that. But their teacher had planned otherwise.
That teacher, the great Babqri Father, had long suspected a trap behind the Arqualis’ offer of peace. He had lived through more than a century of war and duplicity; but his knowledge was not merely that of years. He was the keeper of Sathek’s Scepter, an artifact older than the Mzithrin Empire itself, and one the Shaggat had not managed to steal. Crowning this golden rod was a crystal, and in the heart of the crystal lay a shard of the Black Casket, the broken centerpiece of the Old Faith.
Through the power of the scepter the Father had come to sense the evil approaching in the belly of the Chathrand. Weeks before Treaty Day, he had come to Simja with his aspirants, and taken up residence in the Mzithrini shrine outside the city walls. There he had held council with Mzithrini lords, merchants, soothsayers, spies, as they congregated ahead of the wedding meant to seal the Peace. And there, night after night, he put his disciples in a trance and sent them into the sea, and by the power of the scepter they cast off their human bodies and took the forms of whales.
“Whales?” said Pazel.
“Whales,” said Vispek. “The better to observe your approach, and your doings aboard the Chathrand.”
“Your crew spotted us,” said Jalantri. “We were a rare sort of whale, blue-black and small.”
“Cazencians,” said Pazel. “Yes, I saw you-but it was here, on this side of the Ruling Sea. Neda, was that you?”
She gave a curt nod. “We trailed you along the Sandwall.”
“Until attacked by sharks,” said Vispek. “They were vicious and innumerable; we escaped them only by hurling ourselves upon this shore.”
“And these possessions?”
Vispek gestured with a turn of his head. “Shipwreck. Three or four miles west, along the inner beach. A grim discovery, that. The bark itself was weird and slender, and partly burned; we thought it a derelict. But inside it was full of murdered creatures, like black men except for their hands, hair and eyes. Their throats were slit, all of them. On the deck where we found the bodies a word was scrawled in blood: PLATAZCRA. Can you tell us the meaning of that word, boy?”
He looked expectantly at Pazel, who nodded reluctantly, knowing his face had given him away. He knitted his eyebrows. “Something like ‘victory’-no, ‘conquest’ is closer. ‘Infinite conquest,’ that’s it.”
They all looked at him, shaken. “The boat was maimed,” said Cayer Vispek at last, “but only partly looted. We found fine goods-fabrics, dyes, leather boots of excellent workmanship, even gold coins, scattered underfoot. It was as if the attackers had struck in haste, or fury, intent on nothing but the death of everyone aboard.”
“They took the food, though,” said Jalantri, frowning at the memory.
“Why didn’t you return to the sea, once the sharks departed?” asked Pazel.
“We could not,” said Vispek. “The Father tried to give us the power to change ourselves back and forth at will, but he never succeeded. Once we returned to human form, only the scepter in a Master’s hand could make us again into whales.”
“And the scepter went down with the Jistrolloq?” said Hercol.
“I told you that we came here with nothing,” said Cayer Vispek. “Our elder changed us a final time, even as the sea flooded the decks. That is the only reason we survived.”
Neda glanced sidelong at the Tholjassan warrior. What a sly one. He knows the Cayer avoided his question. She busied herself with the gnawing of flesh from a bone, thinking how cautiously their leader was handling this moment, how attentive they would have to be to his signals. Above all we must say nothing of Malabron.
Inside her the memory blazed, hideously clear. The collapsing hull, the grotesque speed of the inrushing sea, the old Cayerad bringing the scepter down against her chest and the instant agony of the transformation, no pain-trance to deaden it. Squeezing from the wreckage, the whirling disorientation before she spotted the glowing scepter again, in the aperture where the old man was working the change on a last sfvantskor: Malabron. She had watched his body swell like a blister. Confused and zealous Malabron; desperate, damned forevermore. He had believed in the utterances of mystics, believed they were nearing a time of cataclysm and the breaking of faiths. And with the enemy victorious and their mission a failure, Malabron the whale had done the unthinkable: bitten off the arm of the old Cayerad, swallowing it and the scepter whole, and vanishing into the sudden blackness of the sea.
They had never seen him again, and Cayer Vispek had not speculated as to what had driven Malabron to such treason. Jalantri merely cursed his name. Neda, however, recalled his furious, quiet chatter, his ravings. In the last weeks they were almost continuous, in the hours when talking was allowed, and so much of it was outlandish nonsense that the others took no heed. But Neda heard it all, her manic memory sorting the drivel into categories and ranks. And in one category, by no means the largest, were his mutterings about “the path our fathers missed” and “those who fear to be purified.”<
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Neda chewed savagely. You should have spoken. You could have warned Cayer Vispek before it was too late. For Malabron’s words had carried a sinister echo. They resembled the heresy once preached by the Shaggat Ness.
She cringed, feigning some bone or gristle in her mouth. I couldn’t do it. Not to any of them. It had taken them five years to trust her, the foreign-born sfvantskor, almost a heresy in herself. Five years, and all the wrath and wisdom of the Father, taking her side. How could she have admitted that she did not trust them back-even just one of them? How could she have reported a brother?
“Neda?”
Pazel was staring at her. Devils, I must take care with him! For her birth-brother’s glance was piercing. Even now he could read her better than Vispek or Jalantri.
She was struggling for calm. With an uncertain movement Pazel reached for her elbow.
“Do not touch her,” said Cayer Vispek.
Pazel jumped and shot him a look. “I was just-”
“Coddling a sfvantskor,” said Jalantri, regarding Pazel with a mixture of amusement and contempt. “Now I see why the Father did not wish the two of you to meet, sister. He knew no good could come of it.”
“Listen to me,” said Cayer Vispek to Pazel. “The one before you is no longer an Ormali, no longer Neda Pathkendle. I do not expect this to be easy for you to grasp, but know that every parent, brother or sister of a sfvantskor has faced the same kind of loss.”
“The same, is it?” said Pazel, his eyes flashing. “I haven’t blary clapped eyes on my family in nearly six years.”
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