“He’s writing a letter, you see? Touch it, take it from him!”
“Is it a love letter?” asked the man in spectacles, drawing near despite himself.
The man in black laughed aloud. “What else? Go on, read it to me. I know full well you can read.”
He snatched the page from the sailor’s hand and gave it to the thin man. The sailor appeared to forget the letter the moment it was taken from him: he merely crossed his arms and looked out of the gunport. On the back of his hand was a tattooed K.
“It may make you blush,” said the man in black.
The other adjusted his spectacles. Dear Kalli, the letter began. He could not make himself read it aloud. There was something wrong about the letter, anyway, for although it began as one thing it soon became something else.
Dear Kalli how are you how’s my one true love? Are there peaches in Etherhorde are you canning some for me? Have you fattened up a bit Kalli sure enough the men are courtin’ you now I’m away. Kalli you had best choose one and marry. Write me off won’t you sweetheart as I can’t see surviving, tell your dad tell your uncles tell the whole blary world what a great crew of monsters is Chathrand’s they seem like men but they’ll kill us like insects the Swarm’s to be set free Rin help us the SWARM—
The man in black grabbed the page and crushed it, then tossed it with a snarl through the open gunport. He looked accusingly at the thin man.
“Satisfied?” he said.
In the galley the morning chill was replaced by smoky warmth. The smells were intoxicating. All sailors dined like kings—the thin man had known that for years. The man in black made him lift the ladle and taste the breakfast gruel. It was glutinous and barely salted. It was manna from the gods.
“And this,” said the man in black, “is the worst you shall ever taste again.”
The thin man emptied the ladle with a slurp. Gruel on his lips, tears in his eyes.
“It’s not fair,” he said.
“But it is,” said his guide. “You help me, I help you.”
They did not knock at the captain’s door: they pushed it open and stepped right in. Captain Rose stood before a dressing mirror, fastening his cuff links. He had combed out his great red beard, and a new dress coat hung on a stand beside him. His steward was in the aftercabin, polishing his shoes by the window.
“So much room!” cried the thin man, spreading his arms and turning in a circle.
The man in black looked contemptuously at Rose. “The fool. He’s loathed in these islands. He won’t be allowed anywhere near the wedding ceremony.”
They looked on as Rose took something from his watch pocket. It was not a watch but the head of a woman, carved from a pale white stone. The captain put the head in his mouth, where it bulged between his cheek and gum.
“A twisted man,” said the visitor in black.
The thin man suddenly found his courage. He bolted across the cabin to the dining table and snatched at Rose’s breakfast with both hands. Orange slices. Kidney pie. Three round raw eggs the size of cherries. A boiled radish. A wedge of soda bread with butter, still warm from the stove.
He ate everything before him, then sucked his fingers, and finally lifted the platter and swabbed it spotless with his tongue. Neither the captain nor the steward turned him a glance. He looked at the man in black with amazement.
“I have just eaten Rose’s breakfast!”
“Next time leave the eggshells. Go on—see what a captain’s bed feels like, while you’re at it.”
The sheets were newly laundered; the pillow beneath his head brought back dim memories of fluff and mother’s warmth. There were books in a shelf built into the headboard. The man in spectacles reached behind his head and took one. He caressed the leather, then drew the volume reverently to his chest.
I cannot give this up, he thought.
“Nor need you,” said the other, as if he had spoken aloud. “Well, then, do we have an agreement?”
“I—You see, sir, there are obligations—”
The man in black crossed the room in four strides.
“Obligations?” he said venomously. “Only to me, henceforth. What obligations can your kind feel, save bestial urges?”
“Please,” rasped the thin man, clutching the book even tighter. “Don’t misunderstand me. That is the horror of my life, being misunderstood.”
“The horror of your life is what you are,” said the other. “You’re a freak, an abomination. I alone can change that. And all I ask in return is that you tell me what goes on in that stateroom. Thasha Isiq’s stateroom, the place I cannot see.”
The thin man pinched his eyes shut and rubbed his hands quickly together, a spastic gesture of nerves. “But I am only dreaming this, dreaming you and these people and that lovely food. None of it is real.”
“You talk like a simpleton,” said the other, “but that is not your fault. Most beings see consciousness as no more than a coin: heads you’re awake and busy, tails you sleep and dream. But reality is not so flat. It is more like a die of many sides. You toss it, and live with whatever it reveals. A mage, however, can read all sides of the die at once. I have shown you this day’s beginning as the men of Chathrand are living it. As you will live it, when you become a man.”
“But in plain fact? Am I not there in Thasha’s chambers, safely asleep?”
The other’s patience was fraying again. “A body lies there. A maimed and vile organism. Your mind is with me—and what is a body without a mind? Which part is really you? And if your very soul longs for a human life, and I offer it to you forever—have I not understood you, Felthrup? Have I not grasped the very dream you live for?”
“Yes, you have,” said the thin man, avoiding his eye.
“Good!” said the man in black. “Then let us shake on it, like men. I will give you this body forever. And you will be my eyes and ears.”
The thin man felt his sweat on Rose’s pillow. Slowly, fearfully, he shook his head. “They are my friends,” he said.
“They are nothing of the sort. They have toyed with you from curiosity, and for their own gain. Men befriend other men, not craven things like you.”
“They have been so kind.”
“What of it? What are their little kindnesses, beside the world I have opened to you?”
“Not opened, sir.” The thin man’s voice shook. “Expanded is perhaps the better word. The world opened to me just once, in a house in Noonfirth, when the dumb brute in me died and I became a woken being, reasoning and aware.”
The man in black stared at him a moment. Then his face contorted with such pure hatred that the other scrambled away from him across the bed.
“Reasoning and aware!” he shouted. “You cesspool filth. Go, then, return to what you were. Run and hide and eat dead things, and be hunted by all creatures. Oh, see!”
He pointed, feigning shock. The thin man looked at his own left arm and gave a wail. From the elbow down it was lifeless, withered, crushed. The man in black reached forward and tore the glasses from the other’s head.
“Gold spectacles,” he hissed derisively. “A scholar, Felthrup, is that how you picture yourself? How fine, how truly noble—but what is this?”
A tail! The thin man had grown a tail, leathery and short and ending in a stump, as if long ago bitten in two.
“Arunis,” he said, “please, I beg—”
The sorcerer struck him across the face, and when the thin man raised his right hand to his aching cheekbone, the hand was a long pink paw.
“Down, vermin!” bellowed the sorcerer. “Crawl and whimper and weep! And pray that Arunis is merciful when he comes again—for I will come, and you will do my bidding, or by the Beast in the Pit I’ll see you broken and mad.”
He was gone. Rose’s cabin was gone. The thin man lay on gritty planks in the bowels of the ship. And when he tried to stand he toppled over onto his three good feet, and was himself again, the black rat with the soul of a scholar, caged in the nightmare that
was his body. There were eyes in the darkness—his rat-brethren come to kill him, under orders from their lunatic chief—and he leaped up and ran.
“Wicked Felthrup!” they hissed, giving chase. “Unnatural rat! Friend to men and crawlies, slave to thought! Let us eat you and end it!”
Such temptation. The deck was endless and foul. Ixchel voices laughed on his right, He only thinks he thinks, and he turned and barely saw the little figures in the shadows before their arrows began to pierce him like needles of glass. He ran on, bleeding. Walls and stores and stanchions flashed by, and there was nowhere safe from his persecutors, and from the crates above him the red cat (deathless like all his demons) purred for his blood, and ahead loomed the shapes of men deadliest of all, and he ran and dodged and prayed but there was no salvation for those cursed by the gods.
3
Procession
7 Teala 941
“You will allow, sir, that the Annuncet is more than noise: it is music, after a fashion. No two Mzithrini elders sing it quite the same, although I’m told the words are simple: This house is open to men and gods; none need fear it save devils and the devilish; come, and find the good you seek. All very pleasant. Still our sfvantskor guests were loath to part with their blades.”
King Oshiram II, Lord of Simja, chuckled at his own remark. Walking at the royal elbow, at the center of a vast, ecstatic throng, Eberzam Isiq returned a smile: the most false in his long public life. His heart was pounding, as from battle. He was hot in his wedding regalia—antique woolens, leather epaulettes, otterskin cap with the admiralty star—and the king’s chatter grated in his ears. Still, the old admiral walked with lowered eyes, measured step. He was an ambassador, now, and an ambassador must show the greatest deference to a king, even the petty king of an upstart island.
“Enlightened policy, Sire,” he heard himself say. “Simja has nothing to gain by allowing armed and violent men to walk her streets.”
“Nothing,” laughed Oshiram. “But by that token who can we afford to exclude, hmmm?”
The sun was high over Simja: it was approaching noon. The mob of well-wishers assaulted the king’s retinue with their cheers, their spark-flinging firecrackers, their piercing fishbone whistles. Onlookers filled every window, the young men dangling perilously from the balconies. Flightless messenger birds nine feet tall skirted the crowds, grimy boys clinging to their necks. Monks of the Rinfaith droned in harmony with their bells.
They passed under an arch between the port district and the Street of the Coppersmiths. The king pointed out the workshop from which he’d ordered lamps for the ambassadorial residence. Isiq nodded, in agony. The blary fool. Does he think I wish to speak of lamps?
Before the two men walked a vision. His daughter, Thasha, had been at war with lavish clothing since she was old enough to ruin it. She was not a good Arquali girl but a bruising fighter, with a conscript’s temper and a grip to make a wrestler wince. And yet here she was: gray-gowned, satin-shoed, cheeks dabbed with powdered amethyst, golden hair twisted up in a braid they called a Babqri love-knot. Exquisite, beautiful, an angel in the flesh: the mob breathed the words after her in a sigh no effort could contain.
Thasha looked straight ahead, back rigid, face quiet and resolved. Isiq’s pride in her stabbed him at every glance. You did this. You brought her here. You dared not fight for your child.
A small entourage surrounded Thasha: the personal friends custom allowed her to name. The swordsman, Hercól Stanapeth, her friend and tutor of many years, tall and careworn and matchless in a fight. Mr. Fiffengurt, the Chathrand’s good-hearted quartermaster, whose stiff walk and one-eyed way of looking at the world (“the other just points where it pleases”) reminded the admiral of a fighting cock. And of course the tarboys, Pazel and Neeps.
The two youths, despite vests and silk trousers hastily provided by the king, looked terrible. Ragged, red-eyed, bruised about the face. Pazel Pathkendle, child of vanquished Ormael, gazed out through his straight nut-brown locks with an expression more like a soldier’s than that of a boy of sixteen. A searching look, and a skeptical eye. He had turned that sort of look on Isiq at their first meeting, when the admiral found him with Thasha in her cabin, and Pathkendle declared, in so many words, that her father was a war criminal.
At the time the charge had felt outrageous. By tonight it could well be an understatement.
The other tarboy, Neeps Undrabust, fidgeted as he walked. A head shorter than Pathkendle, he glared at the crowds on both sides of the street as if searching for a hidden enemy. They fear the worst, thought Isiq, but have they lived long enough to withstand it when it comes? For that matter, have I?
They had argued the night away—the tarboys, the admiral, Hercól and Thasha—and yet they’d failed to find a way to save her. Not from a loveless marriage; she would suffer that but briefly. Days, weeks, a fortnight or two. The Mzithrin Kings would need no longer to discover how they had been deceived, and to murder the girl at the deception’s heart.
His cravat was too tight. He had dressed without a mirror, repelled by the thought of the face awaiting him there: the face of an imbecile patriot, a blind blunt tool in the kit of Magad V, Emperor of Arqual, and his spymaster Sandor Ott. By the fiends below, I hate myself more than Ott.
The king touched his elbow. “Are you quite well, Ambassador?”
Isiq drew himself up straight. “Perfectly, Sire. Forgive me, I confess I was lost in thought.”
“As a father must be at such a time. And I know the matter of your musings.”
“Do you?”
“Of course,” said the king. “You’re pondering what last words of wisdom to bestow upon the child of your flesh. Before another man takes your place, as it were. Do not fear: Simjan custom shall be observed today as well as Mzithrini. On this island fathers and daughters enjoy a private leave-taking. I trust you’ve understood? It is of course why we make for the Cactus Gardens.”
“I’m aware of your tradition, Majesty, and glad of it.”
“Splendid, splendid. You’ll have eleven minutes alone with her. But do wave to my people, won’t you, Isiq? They’ve had no small bother about all this, and see! They’ve laid down flowers for the Treaty Bride.”
A whole street of flowers, in fact: the last approach to the gardens was buried in blossoms, a thousand yards of yellow scallop-shell blossoms with a honeyed scent, poured two inches deep and bordered with rosewood. Children from the mob had been allowed past the guards and stood with eager handfuls, presumably to toss at the Bride. It seemed a crime to walk on the flowers, but that was clearly the idea.
“Isporelli blossoms, Excellency,” said the king’s chamberlain from behind them.
“Are they? Pitfire!”
His little outburst turned heads. Isiq had not seen isporelli in fifteen years, nor wanted to. They were his late wife’s favorite.
“You may thank Pacu Lapadolma for this intelligence,” said the king as they trampled beauty flat. “She has exchanged letters with our Mistress of Ceremonies for the better part of a year, now, and helped out in many particulars.”
The girl in question walked just behind Thasha’s entourage, on the arm of Dr. Ignus Chadfallow. Isiq could hardly bear to look at Chadfallow, a favorite of the Emperor and, until yesterday, Isiq’s best friend. Better to look at Pacu, lovely Pacu, daughter of a general and niece of the Chathrand’s owner. She was sixteen, like Thasha and the tarboys, and already a widow. She was also Thasha’s maid-in-waiting. Thasha had once remarked that the girl could as easily have done her “waiting” back in Etherhorde and spared them months of misery: she and Pacu did not get along.
“She has generosity of spirit,” Isiq had retorted. “She loves Arqual as passionately as any man in uniform. And she believes in the Great Peace. I heard her say as much to her aunt.”
The Great Peace. He had believed in it too. Desperately, although in secret, for a soldier of Arqual was not expected to waste his energies imagining peace with the enemy he had b
een trained to destroy. Isiq had been born into a world of chaos and fear. He could not remember a time when the specter of war, and annihilation should the war go badly, had not hung over his family. Defending Arqual against the Mzithrin, and the numberless small foes and revolutionaries that boiled up from the marshy edges of the Empire, was the noblest life he could have chosen. The only life, by damn. The only choice you could have lived with, once you knew you had it in you. He was a soldier of Arqual, and even if he sat out the rest of his days in the court of this foppish King Oshiram he would never truly be anything else.
Half a century in the service. Half a century of struggle and bloodshed, maimed friends, fatherless children: he saw now that they had all built to this moment. Treaty Day. The Great Peace. Millions were waiting for it to begin.
And it was all a monstrous sham. Peace was the furthest thing from the mind of his Emperor, as Thasha and her friends had grasped before anyone. For chained in the bowels of the Chathrand was a deposed king of the Mzithrin, the Shaggat Ness, a madman who thought himself a god. His twisted version of the Old Faith had seduced a quarter of the Mzithrini people and inspired a doomed but hideously bloody uprising. When the Mzithrin Kings at last crushed the rebellion, the Shaggat had fled in a ship called the Lythra—right into the jaws of Arqual’s own navy.
The Lythra had been blown to matchsticks. But the Shaggat, and his two boys, and his sorcerer: they had been plucked from the waves alive and whisked off to a secret prison in the heart of Arqual.
He was the most dangerous lunatic in history, east or west. For forty years now the world had thought him safely drowned. And for forty years Arqual’s guild of assassins, the Secret Fist, had been infiltrating the Shaggat’s worshippers. On Gurishal, the fanatics’ war-blighted island of exile, the Secret Fist had stoked their faith, encouraged their martyrdom, assassinated the moderates among them. And above all, it had spread a false prophecy of the Shaggat’s return. Those gods-forsaken wretches! They might have abandoned their cult and rejoined the Mzithrin by now, if only we’d let them be!
The Ruling Sea Page 3