The Ruling Sea

by Robert V. S. Redick

  14

  Among the Statues

  Lightless. The cage was lightless, and his mind was already succumbing. Not a cage; why had he called it a cage? That was for animals. This was a dungeon made for ordinary people. Bakers, shopkeepers, farmers on the fertile slopes above Simjalla. A carpenter. A schoolboy or-girl with her books still under her arm. His arm? What did it matter, when arm and books and heart were locked in clay?

  He walked carefully, heel to toe, from the carpenter to the dancer, arms outstretched in the blackness. He was far from the door, which smelled vaguely of food and was therefore a place of danger. Rested his hand on a gritty clay elbow. They are safer than I. The beasts will attack me first, one another second. Last of all these bodies in their stony sheaths.

  He had done as Ott knew he would. He had touched them, explored their features, wondered at the attention to detail. Noses, eyebrows, lips. He would not give them names, though: that was a game for madmen, and Admiral Eberzam Isiq was not yet mad.

  Ott himself came no more. The spymaster had stood outside the door on two occasions, issuing hushed, clipped commands to someone who called him Master. Had he hoped Isiq would cry out, beg for deliverance or deathsmoke, weep? The admiral would not give him that satisfaction. When you lose your sword you have your hands. When your hands are tied there remain your teeth. When you are gagged and bound you may still fight them with your gaze. Isiq clung to the litany, an old War College saw from forty years ago, and tried to keep his mind from mocking it.

  The want of deathsmoke. He huddled often with his back to the door, sweat-drenched in the hollow cold, heart racing, mind prey to ghoulish fixations. The eyes of the statues. The last thoughts baked into their brains.

  Syrarys had kept him from feeling these pangs, by mixing an extract from the deathsmoke vine with the other poisons she passed him in sweet teas and brandies. Just enough to ease him along, believing himself sick but not envenomed, slowly forgetting what it meant to be well.

  The detail, the ludicrous detail. Nearest the door stood a woman (do not recall how you learned it was a woman) clutching her throat with her left hand and reaching down it with her right. Choked on a shard of bone, a bit of gristle or hard bread. She was his height. He would not name her. She seemed to be aware of the door. As if dreaming that some bright angel would yet appear there, melt her agonies with a waking touch, lead her by the arm into paradise.

  They slid his dinner plate halfway to this woman at every meal, with an insolent shove that left part of the contents behind on the floor. Isiq had to pounce on it, kicking at the rats that hurled themselves on the food the instant it appeared, stumbling quickly behind the choking woman with his prize. A metal plate with three sections; he had licked it clean after every squalid meal, saying “fourteen,” “fifteen”; struggling thus to keep count of the days he had lain in Queen Mirkitj’s private hell. But what if they did not come at regular times? What if they fed him twice in one day and skipped the next altogether? He had only the cycles of his body to judge by, and they were becoming erratic. To breathe on one’s hand and be unable to see it. To rest one’s chin on a stone shoulder and have no idea of the face.

  Someone’s name engraved on the back of the plate. Isiq had caught himself licking the signature, over and over, for his tongue was more sensitive than his fingertips, though not sensitive enough to feel out the tiny letters. Had an earlier prisoner used this plate, etched his name in it somehow, declaring, I still exist, you have not reduced me to perfect nothingness for I remember myself, you have not erased me, you have not won.

  More likely it was the name of the manufacturer. Do not believe it. Believe it was defiance, stubborn will, blazing on like a mad candle in the dark.

  Such were the orders he gave himself. He who had commanded fleets, abolished nations with a word, shaped the lives of thousands with a sharp decision, was now reduced to praying for obedience from an army of one.

  He succeeded for a time. With the edge of the plate he was able to scrape a thin groove in the floor, a barely perceptible scratch, from the doorway to the choking woman, from the woman to the room’s central pillar, from the pillar to the pit. When Isiq got lost, when the smothered feeling rose in his chest and threatened obliteration, he dropped to hands and knees and sought out the groove, and followed it like an ant from one marker to the next, until he returned to the door. And with his forehead pressed to the crack between door and frame he could actually detect a light, the palest imaginable gloaming, a microscopic flaw in this perfection of darkness, this black stomach in which he was being digested.

  That is why they wear stone. It makes them harder to digest.

  Madness. He took deep breaths, forcing the air from his lungs over and over, as if pumping bilge from a hold. What if the light is imaginary? The light is not imaginary. And he did not need a speck of light, a name on a food plate, a companion in agony. I am a soldier, I solve problems, I will go about my tasks.

  Leaving the plate near the door he had set off on a tour of hell, groping left along the wall. It was a slow and frightful business. He had not gone forty squatting, creeping paces when he nearly died. A pit, yawning beneath his outstretched foot. He had teetered, then let himself fall sidelong, landing on the edge of the pit and just managing to twist back onto the floor. He had lain there, petrified. Cold air flowed from the pit like some fiend’s long and rapturous sigh. At last he had risen to hands and knees and groped on.

  The pit was shaped like a tongue. At the point where it curved farthest from the wall his fingers had brushed a knobby protrusion. A foothold. He had extended his arm and found another below. One could climb down, deeper into hell. He had lain on his side and reached farther. And then screamed with pain and rage.

  The rat’s bite was deep; its jaws had locked on to his flesh with a starved thing’s ferocity. “Damn you! Damn you!” Isiq had rolled away from the pit with the creature still attached to his hand, swung it writhing and squealing over his head, slammed it down on the stone floor beside him. Again. And again. Only on the fourth blow had it released his finger, slashed to the bone by the rodent’s teeth. Even then it had refused to die, but had leaped on his stomach and thence back into the pit, splattering him with his own blood.

  For two days he had urinated on the wound: Dr. Chadfallow’s field trick for avoiding infection. Miraculously it had worked; the cut was painful but clean. Gangrene in this festering hole would be certain death.

  That night as he pawed at his food a flaky substance met his fingers. Ashes? Not quite. An herb, sprinkled on his half-raw potato? He touched it with his tongue. And dropped the plate in a panic. And squatted, and scraped together what food he could. And flung it down again, howling in rage and hunger. They were the beasts, his jailkeepers. They had dusted his meal with deathsmoke.

  A time came when he knew he must enter the pit. He realized that Ott could not have left such an obvious means of escape; he knew also that the rats came from the pit, and that he risked being gnawed alive. Somehow none of that mattered. A sense of the physical space around him was one of his few holds on sanity, and the pit was a blank spot on the map.

  He swept each foothold with his boot. There was a great smell of dung. He eased himself down and felt the air grow fouler; a mold-heavy dampness bathed the walls. Far-off noises, drips and splashes. After twenty footholds his boot met the ground.

  An ovoid pit; a low-roofed passage; a shattered door. And then rubble. He knelt and groped. Big rocks, sand, masonry, utterly filling the corridor. A large part of the ceiling must have collapsed.

  He felt every inch of the rubble-mound before him, and met with no rats at all. Near the top of the mound, however, he located the fist-sized tunnel by which they surely came and went. He plugged the hole with the largest stone he could lift, but the earth was soft around it, and he knew it would not slow even a single animal very long.

  But for many days the rats did not come.

  He flexed his finger: it was almost healed. H
e had an idea that this was his twentieth day among the statues. He had a pair of weapons, now: an iron bar and a vaguely axe-shaped stone, both of which he had pulled from the detritus at the bottom of the pit. The bar had not been worth the trouble: it was too heavy to swing, too thick to pry into cracks. Since heaving it up from the pit he had found no use for it at all.

  But the stone was another matter. He swung it experimentally, thinking again of the blow he had not landed on Ott’s face when the arrogant old killer sat beside him. Maybe what Ott said was true, and the attack could only have failed. Or maybe that was pride: perhaps there had been a window between his inspiration and Ott’s awareness of the danger, when he might have struck. Why do we wait? thought the admiral, suddenly on the point of tears. For his daughter’s face had risen before his eyes.

  What had they done with her body? They were not going to Etherhorde, so Thasha would never lie beside her mother in the family plot on Maj Hill. The best he could hope for was that she had been buried at sea, with honors, like the soldier another world might have let her become.

  Sudden noise from the middle of the chamber. Clanging, rasping—the same horrid mix. Isiq left the dancer and shuffled toward the central pillar, taking his time. He did not much want to see what awaited him there.

  The pillar was six or eight feet in diameter. It was made of heavy brick, not soft stone like the rest of the chamber. Gaps the size of half-bricks had been left intentionally, and from them crept a smell of ancient coal. The pillar also had a great iron door.

  It was unmistakably a fire-door, of the kind installed on furnaces. It had a small square window that must once have been glazed. The door was rusted shut, the heavy bolt and staple fused with age into a solid thing, but there was no lock his fingers could detect. For several days he had struggled to open the door, to no avail. Then, on the third day after the rat bite, the noises had begun.

  Isiq bent his ear to the window. Crashing, hissing, scraping. All from below—the pillar must have contained a shaft of some kind—and blurred by echoes and distance, but soul chilling nonetheless. He was hearing the rage-stoked violence of living creatures, battering and biting whatever they could find. And speaking. That was the true horror of it. Most of the voices (he had noted at least a dozen) spoke only gibberish, a snarling, whining, moaning, murderous barrage of nonsense sounds. They suggested some horrible perversion of babies trying out their vocal cords for the first time—but the throats that made those sounds must have been larger than a grown man’s.

  And some were using words. Simjan words; he caught no more than the odd interjection. Mine! Stop! Egg! Isiq was cross with himself for not following the meaning—he was ambassador to Simja; he had been tutored in the tongue—until he realized that the words were not arranged in sentences. At most, two or three were strung together and repeated endlessly, with a kind of agonized inflection. Hagan reb. Hagan reb. Hagan hagan hagan REB! Reb reb reb reb reb—The words broke off in screeches of lunacy.

  All save one. A nattering, sorrowful, sharp-edged voice. Penny for a colonel’s widow? Just those words, gabbled and blurted and wept. Penny for a colonel’s widow? The voice appeared never to tire.

  “Rin’s mercy, what do you mean?” groaned Isiq.

  At once he clapped a hand over his mouth, silently cursing. He had never uttered a sound near the pillar. The creatures fell absolutely silent. Then they all began screaming at once.

  “Hraaaar!”

  “Egg!”

  “Penny for a—”

  “Mine!”

  Sounds of spittle and claws. The thrashing grew so crazed that the pillar actually shook. Then, beneath the pandemonium, his ears detected a tiny squeak. Putting out his hand, he found that the great bolt had at last broken free of the rust. It would move. With a bit of a struggle he could slide it free.

  But why open the door? What if they could climb? Nothing but this slab of iron would stand between him and them. Fortunately the door was mighty, the bolt despite its rust still massive and intact. This was where they stoked the fires, Isiq realized suddenly, this is what turned the prison into a kiln.

  Futile to fight on. Damn it, that was the truth. Already the things were scratching open the little tunnel at the base of the pit.

  He was sweating again. Those things must have devoured the rats. How is it that they speak? What will they do when they find me? Where is my suit of stone?

  He stumbled away from the pillar, holding his forehead, trying not to moan aloud. Almost at once he collided with a statue, his faithful sentry, the woman choking on the dark. She toppled; he tried to catch her but her weight defeated him; she struck the floor with a muffled boom.

  “Oh my dear madam, forgive me—”

  He found pieces of her in the blackness. Various digits. Her forehead, shattered on the stone. He felt the sting of other eyes, the focused hate of all the statues, that frozen family, that congregation of the damned.

  He would have to watch himself.

  15

  The Voice of a Friend

  4 Freala 941

  113th day from Etherhorde

  In a way unimagined by even the most superstitious crew members, the Great Ship had become a ghost-ship, living but presumed deceased. The effect this had on those aboard her is difficult to pinpoint. At first there was bravado, and much talk of the cleverness of Rose and their Emperor. The gang leaders, Darius Plapp and Kruno Burnscove, led the cheering: they were competitors in patriotism (or what passed for it) as in every other sphere. “We’ve a right to be proud,” Burnscove declared. “Arqual’s going to remake the world. A world without the Black Rags, a world of straight talk, straight deeds, and Rin’s Ninety Rules taught to every wee baby with his mother’s milk. And don’t we know that means a better world?”

  Darius Plapp had less to say on the matter, trusting his sonorous voice and deep-set eyes to carry the message. “We’re sailing into history,” he would announce, with a grave, portentous nod.

  Sergeant Drellarek played his part as well. Amazingly, he had managed to portray the execution of one-seventh of his men as a victory for the rest. The price of greatness, he said, had always been far higher than ordinary men could understand. But Turachs were different: they were Magad’s warrior-angels, they were the fine edge of the knife with which the Emperor was pruning the tree called Alifros. “In the end this world will be a fair reflection of the Tree above us,” he told them. “Most men would shrink from such a challenge. But not us. When Turachs pass through fire, they emerge with the hardness of steel.”

  These three men—Burnscove, Plapp and Drellarek—also began to talk about the enemy. This was done rather quietly, and often late at night, after one or more of them appeared unexpectedly to pitch in with a bit of labor, or to top off the men’s grog with a flask produced from none-knew-where. Talk of the Mzithrinis invariably meant talk of war crimes, atrocities committed by whole legions or a bloodthirsty few.

  “Little Orin Isle, now,” said Drellarek with a sigh, at one such gathering. “That little speck of a place off the side of Fulne, with no more than three thousand men. You wouldn’t think it would be worth much bloodshed to take her, now would you? Ah, but you’re not thinking like a Black Rag! Orin had a fortified jetty, and strong memories of what them butchers did to their grandfathers. So they fought like tigers, and kept the Sizzies from landing for a week. The Sizzies took ’em at last, of course. And when the brave men of Orin knew they were beat, they lay down their weapons, and their leaders came forward and gave their word of honor that they’d fight no more, and asked for mercy.

  “Do you know what sort of mercy they got? The Sizzies marched every man who could still walk out to a lead mine in the hills. They sent ’em underground, all chained together. And then they knocked out the roofing timbers and the tunnel collapsed.”

  Drellarek paused, looking grimly at the shadow-etched faces about him.

  “Their women and children dug with picks and spades, with their blary fingernails. For da
ys on end. They could hear the tap-tap-tapping, the cries from under the earth, the calls for water. But each day the voices were fainter, until one by one they stopped. Can you imagine what that silence was like, gentlemen? For the little children? For the wives?

  “That’s the Black Rags’ idea of honor. And that’s why His Supremacy launched this ship. Not for some make-believe Peace. Oh we played along with their charade, all right. But just like those brave men on Orin, some of us remember. The Black Rags kill, mates. And if the Shaggat Ness gets them killing each other again—so be it. We can watch them kill each other, or wait for them to kill us. Which do you prefer?”

  Soldiers and sailors alike did their best to look satisfied with this reasoning, and to a certain extent they were. None had ever dreamed of being part of such a grand effort—the triumph of Arqual, the remaking of the very order of the world! Part of the crew breathed easier, thinking of Mzithrini atrocities. Most at least felt they understood what the journey was all about.

  But not all were comforted. Many recalled what Captain Rose had said the day Peytr Bourjon ate his gumfruit. Strip that rind away, he’d said. Go on without dreaming of hope. On slow watches, over breakfast biscuit, or high on the topgallant yards, they began to murmur, to frown. In their hammocks, blind to one another in the dark, they whispered: We don’t exist, boys. We wiped the slate clean at Talturi. Our girls will cry, but not too long. Don’t kid yourselves. They’ll dry their eyes and paint ’em pretty, women are faithless useless calculating gossipy gone-with-a-sob-and-a-hankie. And what about us, eh, what about us on this ship? Memories. Names mumbled by an old aunt, a quick prayer in the Temple, a list on page ten of the Mariner, used to wrap someone’s pound of halibut. That’s all we are, by Rin.

  For the three youths it was a time of anxiety. Thasha could tell that Pazel was struggling with some new fear: he walked about as though under a storm cloud, waiting for lightning to strike. But she never could find a chance to ask him about it, for he seemed to go out of his way not to be caught with her alone.