The River of Shadows cv-3

by Robert V. S. Redick

  He started at once up the gray, wind-sculpted beach. As the others straggled after him, Pazel heard a shout from the old fisherman. He turned: the mizrald was splashing up to him.

  “You will go down the Ansyndra, and across the burn? What you call Black Tongue?”

  “Well, yes,” said Pazel. “There’s no other way, is there?”

  The mizrald shook his head. “No other way. No other way except with wings.”

  “Wings would be dandy,” said Pazel.

  The fisherman nodded solemnly.

  “Well,” said Pazel, “goodbye.”

  “You go at night, eh? Only at night across the burn. Darkly, quietly: that’s how it’s done. Tell your friends. Because by daylight-no, no.”

  “No?”

  The mizrald drew his finger across his throat. “No, no and no.”

  He stared at Pazel with concern, and looked as though he wished to say more. Then (as his family howled in protest) he pulled the youth down and planted a kiss upon his forehead. Then he turned and pushed his boat offshore.

  Stunned, Pazel hurried after the others. They were trudging west along the rim of the lake, toward the spot the mizralds had said was the only way down. Pazel could hear a rushing of water, and the now very familiar slushing roar of a waterfall. He ran, catching up with Neeps and Thasha. Neeps was gazing back across the lake.

  “How are we supposed to return?” he said. “The fisherwoman herself said they almost never come down here. And half the time there’s no shore to walk along, just blary cliffs. How are we supposed to get back?”

  “There must be trails through the mountains,” said Pazel, trying to sound as though he believed it. “Hercol and Olik must have thought about it, mate. Don’t worry.”

  Thasha’s gaze swept darkly over the peaks. “They thought about it, all right,” she said.

  Their destination, as it happened, was similar to the Chalice of the Mai: a river outlet above a sharp descent. But then Pazel swayed and stepped back, dizzied by what he saw. Where the Mai had begun as no more than a stream, this was a thrashing watercourse, descending almost vertically within a deep, twisting crack down the mountainside. In many spots the water vanished under boulders; in others it surged forth in a chaos of white spray. There were outright cliffs beneath them too, where the river became falls. And very close to the river, bolted fast to the rock, was a heavy iron ladder. It descended some forty feet and met up with a wet, steep trail that snaked back and forth down the mountain to another ladder, which in turn met another trail, and so on for some distance. Even by moonlight Pazel could see how far and fast the Ansyndra descended, falls beneath falls beneath falls…

  “The ladders will take us only so far,” Vadu was explaining. “There, at that widest shelf, you can see where the Black Tongue begins.”

  Pazel could not see it, in fact, for the men were all crowding hazardously for a view. Quickly he told the others what the mizrald had said.

  “By night alone,” mused Hercol. “Prince Olik too had heard rumors to that effect.”

  “Nonsense,” said Vadu. “Day or night makes no difference. Look there: you will see what does.”

  This time Pazel managed to catch a glimpse. Far down the black ridge a faint light shone. Something was burning, with flames that danced and guttered in the wind, throwing sparks into the night. Then all at once it was gone. Utter darkness wrapped the slopes again.

  “A fumarole,” said Vadu, “a tunnel into the depths, formed as the lava cooled. The gases that erupt from those horrid pipes are flammable, and sudden in their emergence. But something worse dwells in them: the flame-trolls. Idlers who never leave the Upper City will tell you that they are mere legends, but we who carry the Plazic Blades know better. They are real, and deadly. When they emerge, no living thing can cross the Tongue.”

  “And when is that, Counselor?” asked Myett, from Big Skip’s shoulder.

  “When they hear footsteps on their roof,” he said. “Or loud voices, possibly. Many parts of the Tongue are but a hollow crust.”

  “How did ye learn so much about the place?” asked Alyash.

  Vadu gave him a rather hostile glance.

  “The answer to that can wait,” said Cayer Vispek. “The crossing cannot, if we are to go by night as Pathkendle says.”

  “I tell you silence is all that matters,” said Vadu.

  Nonetheless they began the descent without delay. It was not the longest leg of their journey but certainly the most terrifying. Some of the ladders shifted on the rusted iron pins that held them to the cliffs; one had been reduced to a single bolt and three wooden splints. The rungs were corroded, and bit into their hands. But to Pazel the spaces between the ladders were worse: slick ledges, barely flat enough to balance on even when motionless, too narrow for crawling (which would have been far safer than walking upright) and devoid of any handholds whatsoever.

  Only the ixchel were at ease, and even they crouched low when the wind surged suddenly. Pazel, at home on masts and rigging, had to fight down panic at every turn. They crept down the cliffs, barely speaking. The four hunting dogs, slung in harnesses on the backs of the Masalym soldiers, held absolutely still. One particularly long ladder spanned a pair of rocks jutting well out from the cliff, so that for a good seventy feet there was no cliff to see or touch, just rung after iron rung, lost in the clawing wind.

  How many more? thought Pazel desperately, after the eighth or ninth descent. He glimpsed his sister in the moonlight and was amazed at her poise. The other sfvantskors were the same, and so was Hercol: masterfully aware. Did such awareness free one from terror or increase it, he wondered, when each step might be your last?

  At last, after fourteen ladders, they reached a broad, rocky shelf. Pazel was shaking, and feared he might be sick. But the air was warm: they had dropped right out of the icy wastes of Ilvaspar, and into a gentler place. But there was also a strange, biting smell that for some reason made Pazel think of rats.

  It was very dark. He moved away from the ladders and at once bumped into Neda-and Neeps. The small boy was holding his sister, rigid with indignation, in a tight embrace.

  “Is all right,” said Neda, squirming, her Arquali rougher than usual. “Let go now! You do same for me, same situation.”

  Neeps did not seem able to let go. Pazel touched his shoulder; he started, and abruptly dropped his arms. There was mud on his face but he did not seem aware of it.

  “I should be dead,” he whispered, staring at Pazel. “I mucking fell, mate. On that path with the ice underfoot, that terrible spot. Your sister caught me by the belt and dragged me back. She could have fallen herself. I should be dead.”

  Neda looked at Pazel. Switching tongues, she said, “Your friend is in shock. But when he’s able to listen, tell him I’ll break his arms if he tries to grab me again.”

  “I don’t think it’s likely,” said Pazel. “He’s a married man.”

  Neda’s face was blank. She looked the small tarboy up and down, and when her eye flicked back to Pazel she began suddenly to laugh. She turned away, fighting it, but Neeps’ baffled look made matters worse, and she spun back helplessly to Pazel and pressed her face hard against his shoulder. Reckless, wondering if she would break his arms, Pazel held her a moment and gave way to silent laughter. That old, choked guffaw. She still existed, she was still Neda somewhere inside. He could have held her for an hour, but when she lurched away he let her go.

  Cayer Vispek looked stern, and Jalantri glared at him with something like fury. But Pazel found he no longer cared what they thought. Something had changed in Vasparhaven. He was older; he knew something that they did not. Rin’s eyes, he thought, sometimes even a blary sfvantskor needs to let go.

  As if he’d just given the idea to the mountain, there came a deafening clang that reverberated in the rocks, and for the first time ever a yelp from one of the dogs. An entire ladder had parted from the cliff, fallen soundless, and shattered just inches from the animal. The stone cracked; bits
of iron flew among them; the bulk of the ladder pinwheeled over a big boulder and lay still.

  The dog crept whimpering among them, pleading innocence with its eyes. Hercol glanced up at the cliff. “One bolt,” he said, “and three wooden splints.”

  For a time the night grew even brighter: the old moon still shone down on them, and the Polar Candle, its small blue sister, joined it in the sky. By this double illumination they saw the strange new place they had reached.

  The shelf was the size of an ample courtyard. On the right-hand side the Ansyndra poured into a kind of natural funnel in the rock and disappeared, bubbling and gurgling. Behind them and to their left rose the high cliff wall, up which they would never climb again. Straight ahead, growing from cliff to cliff, there rose a stand of willows, straight and lovely, and utterly startling after so much barren rock. Ferns grew among them, and streamers of moss dangled from their limbs. A long-disused trail led away through the trees.

  They gathered their belongings and followed it. For a gentle mile it ran, only gradually descending. The gorge did not widen much, and they were never more than a stone’s throw from one cliff or the other. Then, like something lopped off with an axe, the forest ended, and they saw the Black Tongue.

  It was old lava: a deep, smooth expanse of it, like a hardened river of mud. It began at their feet and swept down a long, gradual decline, widening ever, for several miles or more. Nothing grew upon its surface; nothing could. There were smooth, mouth-like holes in the lava, some no bigger than peaches, others wide as caves. There were cracks and fissures, and small puffs of fire like the one they had seen from atop the mountain.

  “Not a troll to be had,” said Alyash. “Pity.”

  “Keep your voices low,” replied Hercol.

  The smell Pazel had noticed before was far stronger here, and now he recognized it: sulphur.

  “That’s why I thought of rats,” he said to Thasha. “We almost used sulphur on the rats, to smoke them out of the hold, remember? And we used it all the time back on the Anju.”

  “It must work like a charm,” she said, grimacing.

  “Oh, it does,” said Myett suddenly, “and on crawlies as well.”

  “Blary right it does,” said Alyash.

  “Enough of that!” said Hercol, who had not taken his eyes from the scene before them. Then he growled low in his throat. “The descent took longer than I hoped. There is not enough darkness left for us to make it safely across that dismal field. We shall retreat into the forest until this evening.”

  “That is sheer folly!” said Vadu. “Weren’t you listening to me above?”

  “I listened to you,” said Hercol, “but also to what Pazel heard from the fisherman, and to what Olik knew, and to my own counsel above all. You may be sure that I am making no light choices. We have abandoned our ship for this cause. And our people.”

  “Then let it be worth your sacrifice!” said Vadu, his head starting to bob. “You are said to be a warrior, but this tactic is more suited to a counting-clerk. Show some courage. Let us go now, and quickly-and if we must run the last mile, so be it. Come, our goal is the same.”

  “It is,” said Hercol, “but we are not agreed on how to reach it. For I am thinking like a counting-clerk. I am counting every person in this expedition, and intending to send none of them heedlessly to their deaths.”

  “Heedless?” The counselor’s voice rose in anger. “You claim that death awaits all of us, if Arunis masters the Nilstone. Do you not understand where he is going? The River of Shadows, the River of Shadows enters Alifros just downstream from the Tongue, in the heart of the Infernal Forest. Throughout the ages of this world it has been a pilgrimage site for wizards good and evil. Whatever advantage Arunis thinks to find is surely there. He does not have far to go, Stanapeth, and neither do we.”

  “I have heard you out,” said Hercol, “and you, Vadu, have sworn to abide by my decisions. I gave you a warning then, and I repeat it now.”

  “I am no child, and need no warnings,” said Vadu.

  “No?” said Hercol. “Did you place your hand on the knife-hilt, Counselor? Or did the knife call it there, as it has called the tune before?”

  Vadu started, and jerked his hand away from the Plazic Blade, wincing as he did so as if the gesture caused him pain. He was breathing hard, and his men backed a little away from him. “Do as you will, then,” he said, “but I am not responsible.”

  “Only for yourself,” said Hercol, watching him steadily.

  The party retreated into the trees and found a level spot to rest. “I think we must light no fire,” said Jalantri.

  “How about a candle?” said Big Skip. “The ixchel are cold and wet.”

  Ensyl and Myett protested, but Hercol at once gathered stones into a ring and thrust four candles into the ground within them. Pazel looked at the two women, warming themselves amply by the little flames, shaking their short hair dry. We’re finally in the same boat, he thought, cut off from our own kind, in a world that knows nothing about us. But it wasn’t the same, not really. The humans numbered thirteen, not two; and they had not been raised in a clan that honored the whole above the parts, the House above the self. And they were not eight inches tall.

  The humans and the dogs settled down to wait out the day, posting watches on the Black Tongue. Pazel fell asleep almost instantly, and dreamed of Chadfallow. He was lecturing Pazel in his old professorial way, but the subject, oddly, was how to trim a foresail brace-line. “Up, in, down to the pin!” Chadfallow kept repeating, watching Pazel struggle with rope and cleat. And as his frustration grew, Pazel realized that Chadfallow wore a captain’s uniform. “No good, boy, no good,” he said. “It’s that hand of yours. Too fishy by far.” Pazel looked at his left hand and saw nothing unusual, just the leathery scar he’d borne for months. “Not that one,” said Ignus crossly, and raised Pazel’s other hand by force. It was black and half webbed.

  Dawn came, and with it Pazel’s watch. He was paired with Ibjen; they lay low at the edge of the trees, listening to the chatter of unseen birds, and watching the flames spout and sputter on the Tongue. The nearest fumarole was only about a hundred yards from where they lay, but the big ones-wide enough for something man-sized to crawl from them-were much farther down the lava flow. Sounds issued from them: soft piping like stone flutes, low surging moans. With every noise Pazel half expected to see a troll crawl out into the daylight. Ibjen, however, seemed more worried about Vadu and his Plazic Blade. Hercol, he said, should have driven the man off while he could.

  “I thought so too,” Pazel admitted. “But Hercol’s thought carefully about it, and I trust him.”

  “He hardly sleeps,” said Ibjen. “That cannot continue, you know. Unless he too draws his strength from some unnatural source.”

  “Ildraquin isn’t cursed,” said Pazel, “and Hercol is strong without help from any blade.”

  “Pazel,” said Ibjen, “is it true that you can cast spells?”

  “What?” said Pazel, startled. “No, it isn’t. Or… just one. And Ramachni says it’s not even right to call it a spell. It’s a Master-Word. He gave me three of them, but I’ve spoken the other two, used them, and that erases them from my mind.”

  “How are they different from spells?”

  Pazel thought back. “He said that a Master-Word is like black powder-gunpowder, you understand? — without the cannon to control the explosion. He said the key thing about spells is that control. Otherwise you can’t stop them from doing what you don’t want to do.”

  “Like turning men into dumb animals,” said Ibjen, “when your goal is to make animals think like men.”

  Pazel sighed. “I suppose Erithusme didn’t have much control either, when she cast the Waking Spell. But that spell drew its power from the Nilstone, and it ruins everything it touches, I think. And I wonder, Ibjen: what’s going to happen to woken animals, if we succeed? I’m afraid for Felthrup. For all of them, really.”

  He gazed out at the Tongue,
the sudden plumes of flame that came and went like harbor-signals. Ibjen was quiet so long that Pazel glanced at him, wondering if he’d nodded off. But the silver eyes were wide, and staring at him with concern.

  “I must add to your fears, Pazel,” he said. “I’m sorry. It’s Neeps.”

  Pazel gave a violent start. “Neeps? What about him? What’s the blary fool done this time?”

  “I wasn’t sure at first, because the stench from the Black Tongue was so strong. But it’s there, all right.”

  “What’s there?”

  “The smell of lemons. I know that smell, Pazel: my father tamed tol-chenni on the Sandwall, you know. Once you’re used to it there’s no mistaking it for anything else.”

  When he finally understood, Pazel felt as though his own death had just been handed to him, as if he’d thrown back a drink only to learn it was poison. “No,” he muttered, shaking his head, looking away from the dlomic boy.

  “Father always claimed it was the sure sign,” said Ibjen gently, “back in the days when humans were changing.”

  “It isn’t true, Ibjen, it’s not happening, you’re crazy.”

  But even as he spoke Pazel remembered Olik’s words in the stateroom. Rage was one warning sign, he’d told them, along with a sharp smell of lemon in one’s sweat. And what had Neeps said, when they were sitting beside the signal-fire? There are times when my mind just seems to vanish. Panic, deep terror, welled up inside him. Ibjen’s hand was on his arm. “How long does it take?” Pazel heard himself ask.

  “Five or six weeks,” said Ibjen. “I think that’s what Father used to say. Pazel, are you crying?”

  Pazel pinched his eyes shut. Images from the Conservatory assaulted him. The mindlessness, the filth. He would not let Neeps become a tol-chenni. He turned to Ibjen and gripped his hand in turn. “Don’t say a word about this,” he begged. “The plague doesn’t spread from person to person anyway. Your father told us that.”

  “I know,” said Ibjen, “and I won’t tell anyone. You’re right, it would only make things worse. The others might drive him away.”