The Ruling Sea

by Robert V. S. Redick

  “We should have brought other girls aboard,” said Oggosk, vexed. “Girls your age, I mean. There are a number of women in steerage, however, and some have a look of experience about them. One or two are even attractive.”

  “Goodbye,” Pazel sang out, for that was all he could do short of cursing her aloud. He made quickly for the door. He was appalled; he felt as though she had torn open a secret part of him and defiled it.

  Oggosk’s voice froze him in mid-stride. “This is the only warning you will receive. Where Thasha is concerned I shall not be in the least forgiving. If that girl begins to love you, I will send Sniraga into the Chathrand’s depths, and have her bring back an ixchel body to lay at Rose’s feet. When he learns of the infestation he will slay the whole clan in a matter of hours—and believe me, the captain knows how it is done.”

  Pazel spoke over his shoulder. “You’d kill them all, just to punish me.”

  “I would,” said Oggosk. “I do not shrink from the obligations of history. But they need not die. You may advise them to disembark at our next landfall—provided you do as I say with Thasha. Give her no reason to love you, and your ixchel friends may survive to raid another ship.”

  “As if anyone would trust you to keep a bargain like that,” said Pazel.

  “You have no choice but to trust me,” said Oggosk simply. “But listen: why not tell Thasha about the murth-girl? Say that you’re still fond of her, that she fascinates you, haunts your dreams. You wouldn’t even be lying, would you? But never let Thasha set a finger on you here.” Lady Oggosk indicated her collarbone. “Rin save you if you break the heart of a murth.”

  He was dreaming. Not even Oggosk could be so senselessly cruel. But when she spoke again her voice was in deadly earnest.

  “Removing the admiral from the scene was no pleasure,” she said. “Don’t share his fate, Mr. Pathkendle. What Thasha is to do, she must do alone. You can only get in her way.”

  Once more Pazel met the old woman’s eyes. There was no gloating in them, and no hesitation either.

  “I hate you,” he said. “I hate all of you, to my soul.”

  “Souls are exactly what concern me,” said Oggosk. “Get out.”

  * Sollochstol and Ibithraéd went to war in 828, after four drunken Sollochi teens climbed and desecrated an Ibithraen burial mound. Sollochstol contends that the youths were in fact Arquali provocateurs, sent to stir up a conflict that would weaken both nations, making them easier to conquer. Given the events this book relates it is perhaps time to take their claim more seriously.—EDITOR.

  * In the late Becturian era, Prince Axmal of Dremland persuaded four minor lords, who had taken up arms against one another and Axmal himself, to drop their feuds and attend his son’s tenth birthday party. Each lord had a son or daughter of about the same age, and Axmal hoped to pacify the lords with the sight of their children at blissful play in his courtyard, over which he had hung a sign reading THE GARDEN OF HAPPINESS. The plan worked: the lords were entranced by the children’s innate goodness, and toasted one another, and declared themselves brothers for all time.

  13

  Illusions at Talturi

  29 Teala 941

  108th day from Etherhorde

  The Honorable Captain Theimat Rose

  Northbeck Abbey, Mereldín Isle, South Quezans

  Dear Sir,

  Fond greetings from your only son.* We are making no less than fourteen knots as I write these words, for the gale that carried us from Simja still blows favorably, east by southeast, and the warm Bramian Current works to our advantage as well. Today we passed the islet called Death’s Cap: that lone round rock with its forest of poles, on which for countless years the Arquali navy has displayed the skulls of pirates and mercenaries, and others who dare to live untamed by Magad’s fleets. Our last glimpse of Imperial civilization.

  We are yet some days from the Ruling Sea; by my reckoning the ship is currently due west of the Quezans. I shall drink your health raise a glass in your direction at supper tonight.

  In fact I should like a bit more of a storm. Not only to speed us on our way, but also to keep lesser boats in port. Now that the deed at Talturi is done we must, above all things, remain unseen. And while we have kept to the loneliest stretch of the Nelu Peren, there is always the chance of an encounter. Last Thursday a ship appeared on the northern horizon, but she was too far even to count our masts, let alone identify us. We kept our distance until nightfall, and when the dawn came there was fog to the north, and we saw her no more.

  Rougher seas would have made the great charade at Talturi more convincing as well. You know the island: brave mariners along the western coast, especially those from the city-state of Manturl Cove. But the northeast is another world: the men there are witless clam-diggers and reef fishermen, all under the sway of a daft Bishwa who has them forever building seawalls against a tidal wave that never appears. This is where we chose to sink.

  The fog might have ruined everything—for on this one occasion we had to be noticed. Fortunately it did not reach Talturi until well past dusk, and in the end it even worked to our advantage. Just before nightfall we paraded, close and clumsy, along the north shore and the Village of Three Rivers. I made certain they saw us; I even saluted their mean little wharf with one of the forecastle guns. The storm was chasing their fishing-fleet home with tucked tails, though of course we barely felt it on the Great Ship. We ran before the wind with excessive canvas. If any true sailors watched, they must have noted our fouled mizzentop, our wagging rudder, our overall carelessness (it cost me much to force the men to work poorly; it appalled my every instinct, and theirs). Worst of all, we ran due east: straight at Talturi Reef, as though we knew nothing of it and could not hear the clang-clang-clang of the warning buoy. The fisherfolk leaped and gestured, and one or two signaled danger with a scarlet flag. We ignored them and ran on.

  But as soon as night closed in we tacked three points to windward, circumnavigated the reef, and crept back under shortened sail to Octurl Point, the eastern extreme of Talturi Island. The Bishwa keeps a lighthouse there, but its lamp is weak and could not pierce the fog: only the buoy told us our distance from the coral. I need not explain to you that the danger was real: dropping anchor was out of the question, and yet we were not half a league from a submerged wall that would tear the bottom out of Chathrand as surely as any other ship.

  We turned Chathrand into the wind, striking all but the fore topsail in order to keep us pointed true, and to hold our shoreward drift to a minimum. Then I set six hundred men to work.

  All that vital and expensive wreckage had been raised from the hold already: broken spars, shattered mastwood and gunwales, cabin doors with brass nameplates, boxes of engraved cutlery, footlockers, water casks, wine bottles, life preservers, a perfect replica of the Goose-Girl, a fine Arquali cello, first-class children’s toys, a ruined longboat with IMS CHATHRAND emblazoned on her stern. All was genuine; even the tar on the tattered rigging matched our own. At my orders men pried open the crates, slit the burlap, severed the ropes that had secured all this flotsam, and dragged it to the gunwales, port and starboard, bow to stern. It was a weird sight, Father: our untouched Chathrand, draped in artifacts of her own demise.

  Then we distributed the bodies of our slain. Rarely have I seen men look more mutinous, sir. Even that trader in pelts and carcasses Mr. Latzlo (still mooning for the Lapadolma girl, who despised him) roused himself to grumble about the wrongness of tossing our own sailors and soldiers out with the garbage, especially as they had died fighting for the ship. Probably Sandor Ott intended to use the bodies of criminals: the governor of Ormael had some twenty waiting to be executed. But after the violence in which Ott was driven from the palace the governor (too great a fool to be trusted with details of the Plan) was no longer cooperative. In a sense we are indebted to Arunis for killing as many of us as he did: shipwrecks must have bodies. Old Swellows, who served you as a tarboy on the Indomitable, lay among them: bloated and
red-faced, a drunkard even in death.

  Brother Bolutu prayed beside each corpse, and sent their spirits to final rest with the sign of the Tree. His gesture calmed the men. It was the first time he has proved useful since the start of the voyage.

  For two hours I stared into perfect darkness. The clanging buoy grew louder, nearer; all over the ship men listened, barely breathing. We were surely no more than a quarter mile off the reef.

  In another minute I would have given the order to abort and run. Then a dim glow swept over the Chathrand. It was the lighthouse: the fog was thinning at last. “Over the side!” I declared. “Over the side with everything, the whole confabulation! They can see our lights too, make haste, make haste!” I did not shout, for the wind was behind us and my voice might have carried to the lighthouse keepers. But the lieutenants took up the command, and at once the men began to heave and hurl the wreckage into the sea. Ott’s attention to detail was flawless, not to say maniacal: he had lain away bags of straw, silage, chicken feathers and other debris that would toss on the wave-tops, and casks of walrus oil and turpentine to stain the Talturi shore.

  The corpses proved most difficult: even after Bolutu’s blessing we had to tear some of them from the arms of their shipmates, who sobbed like children. I let them. If those voices reached Talturi, so much the better.

  Next we extinguished every light aboard, save the running-lights facing the island, and a few handheld lamps. There are five of these running-lights: big fengas contraptions designed to self-extinguish if their glass hoods so much as crack. With great care my men detached them from the rigging and lowered them, still burning, toward the sea. Those of us holding lamps rushed and staggered, dipped and bobbed: I think Mr. Uskins was quite enjoying himself.

  By now I could hear voices hailing us from Octurl Point. We answered with screams, distress-whistles, frantic peals of the ship’s bell. Teggatz beat a cauldron with an iron spoon. Alyash, the new bosun, lit a flare and hurled it in a blazing arc into the sea. Of the officers, Fiffengurt alone stood silent, arms crossed, as if the scene was highly offensive to him. I know what you will say, Father: that I have not punished him sufficiently, taught him to fear my every glance, my least displeasure. Better a dead man than a disobedient one, etc. But I cannot do without Fiffengurt yet. Although he suspects nothing, he is going to betray his friends to me. He is a man with too much to lose.

  The storm had us rolling, and one of the running-lights smashed against our hull. But the others we managed to drown in the waves—one after another, as though our keel had shattered on the reef and we were flooding fast. I sent the men with the deck lamps a short way up the masts: they were the lone survivors, now, trying to keep their heads above water. One by one we snuffed the lamps. I dangled the last one from the quarterdeck, waved it fitfully and blew it out. And in deep darkness the men set mainsails, and we tacked sharp into the wind and bore away.

  “Congratulations, Nilus,” said Lady Oggosk, who had come out into the rain to watch the show. “Once more you prove that you were born to deceive. By mid-autumn all Etherhorde will know that the Great Ship went down off Talturi. Lady Lapadolma will die of heartache. Come to think of it, she’ll learn of her niece’s death at about the same time.”

  “She took the Chathrand from me once,” I said. “Now I have taken the ship from her and her damnable Company, forever.”

  It was then that the ghost intervened. Oggosk’s lips kept moving, she was cackling and delighted, but instead of her voice I heard another, cold as a tomb, and saw the walking shadow approaching me from the jiggermast. “Forever!” it hissed. “That is but one of the black immensities! You know nothing of them, but I do. I know them, Nilus Rose. They gape at me like cavern mouths. One of them shall claim and devour me.”

  The wind tore at its burial wraps. The rain passed through it, however: a sign of one whose years of death do not yet outnumber those of his life, if you believe the Polylex.

  “Captain Levirac,” I guessed aloud, pretending I did not feel its icy hand on my heart.

  “No more!” hissed the faceless thing. “I am forbidden that name, any name, they took my names from me as they shall take yours from you.”

  All the same it was Levirac. His wheezing voice had not changed in forty years: from the time when he commanded the Chathrand, and I the young purser waited on his orders. I fancied I could still smell his rotten teeth: in life he chewed sugarcane day and night.

  “Go to your rest, and pay me no further visits,” I said (one must never show weakness before a ghost).

  The thing slipped behind me. I heard its voice at my shoulder. “Beware. You insult the dead. When all else is robbed of a man in death, he has yet dignity. This you stripped from your fallen sailors, using their bodies to gild your lie.”

  “The Emperor’s lie,” I protested, but the spirit clawed at me, annoyed by the contradiction. “This false wreck you have authored, Rose: it is a prelude. A rehearsal for the death awaiting Chathrand, a ship that was mine and many others’, in a proud fellowship over centuries. Never once was that fellowship broken except by death or honorable retirement, until you in disgrace were relieved of command.”

  “Damn your crooked tongue! I was reinstated!”

  “For a little while,” said the ghost. “Her next pilot is already aboard.”

  His insolence astonished me. “Her next pilot? Get hence, you old vapor, or I’ll have my witch root you out of these boards with a cleansing spell!”

  That frightened Levirac: I felt him withdraw a step or two behind me. His voice was softer now: “One other will stand at Chathrand’s helm—and that one briefly, briefly. You are this vessel’s doom.”

  “And you’re a lying, man-shaped stench. Prove you know something, Levirac. Give me a name.”

  The spirit only tittered behind me. I started away, and then under his breath I heard him slander you and Mother, sir, with a lie too noxious to repeat. I turned on him in wrath.

  What a shock! In his place stood Thasha Isiq, alive, solid as the hand that writes these words. Her mastiffs were beside her; they held me in their gaze and growled. I said nothing; I was waiting for her to thin and vanish like any ghost. But those blue-black dogs were real—and so, I knew in a moment, was the girl.

  Pathkendle and Undrabust came up the ladderway and stood beside her, and all three glared at me with hatred. Then I knew who the real deceivers were.

  “You sent Pacu Lapadolma to her grave,” I told them.

  “We didn’t,” said Pathkendle. “You did. You and Ott and your Emperor and your whole bloody gang.”

  Then Firecracker Frix saw the girl and squealed like a pig. The commotion was immense: first terror, then wonder, at last elated cheers. “Thasha Isiq! Thasha Isiq! The longest of lives to Thasha Isiq!”

  If I had been quicker I might have moved against them: killed the mastiffs, tossed the girl overboard, declared her a risen corpse and an abomination. I know this is what you would have done in my place, Father, and you need not chastise me for the missed opportunity. I am not perfect. This we both know, and I humbly suggest we cease pretending otherwise.

  Now in any case it is too late: the men are quite aware that she is flesh and blood. They were only too happy to learn that the former Treaty Bride had been hiding from them, behind the spell-wall that keeps us from the stateroom. The only gloomy faces were those of the youths themselves. They saw how well our “sinking” went, and knew that for all their tricks, the Plan marched forward, unstoppable, with war and ruin (and riches, for some) its only conclusion.

  Fiffengurt meanwhile has gone from bad to worse. He is often red-eyed, as if from crying, and goes on about a “wife” back in Etherhorde who will soon be reading of our deaths at sea. He may have a sweetheart or two, but I know for a fact that he has no wife. Man’s capacity for self-deception is a wonder, is it not?

  This morning we found ourselves in a pod of Cazencian whales. I had thought the great toothed things all but extinct, for the folk of Urn
sfich like nothing so much as the taste of “sweet whale,” as they name them. On another voyage I should have put down a boat or two and given chase. But Cazencians are fierce fighters, though small for whales, and I should have trusted no one but myself to take them on. Above all our time is short. Each day we linger the Vortex grows, and with it the danger of the crossing.

  Once again we have spotted a ship to the north: the same vessel, I think, and a little closer than before. There is still no danger of being recognized, but I must end this letter and adjust our course.

  Enclosed is a diamond wristlet. Mr. Druffle the freebooter gave it to me in exchange for a midshipman’s berth. How Druffle, threadbare slave of the sorcerer that he was, came by such a priceless thing I cannot guess. But maybe it will bring a smile to Mother’s eye.

  As ever I remain your obedient son,

  Nilus R. Rose

  P.S. If you are, in fact, dead, may I trouble you to state as much in your next communication?

  * Rose began this letter several times. A draft recovered from his personal effects contains a variety of first sentences, all discarded: “I trust this finds you well,” “Rest assured that [unfinished],” and most curious of all, “Ghosts and sorcerers lie, but from you, Father, I expect no less than perfect truth.”—EDITOR.