The Ruling Sea

by Robert V. S. Redick

  But from the corner of his eye he could still see the black, vapor-shrouded eguar. He felt ashamed at the extent of his fear. But the same terror shone in the others’ faces, when he glimpsed them. Even Drellarek looked slightly pale.

  They crept forward. The shattered halls and pavilions dropped behind them one by one. Reason told Pazel that the triple arch was less than a mile from the stair where they had begun, yet it seemed impossibly distant. There were no leaves here, and each footfall of the horses rang out terribly distinct. Erthalon Ness appeared to be weeping.

  Then the eguar opened its eyes. They were white, and burned like stars in the dark flesh. Ott stiffened. Someone’s horse neighed and pranced. But still the beast did not move.

  Close at hand now was the first of the water-filled cavities. Ott gave it a wide berth. Pazel saw that the gleam on the water’s surface actually extended faintly to the stone on one side, as if something had been dragged from the cavity and left a trail of silvery ooze behind it. His eyes followed the trail. It meandered away from them across the rooftop, growing brighter the farther it went, until it ended (Don’t look! he screamed inwardly, too late) with the eguar itself.

  Pazel gasped aloud. He’d met its eyes—and a force like a hurricane struck him in that instant. But it was not a physical blow, for the others sat rigid as ever on their steeds, unaware of the power streaming from the eguar.

  Pazel doubled over the saddle horn, pain between his temples, bile on his tongue. Ott’s hand tightened viciously on his arm but he could barely feel it. What was the creature doing to him? And then he glimpsed its moving jaws, and understood. It was speaking.

  Pazel had heard many strange tongues, and learned to speak them, in the five years he had lived with the Gift. Flikkermen croaked and gurgled; nunekkam squeaked; the ixchels’ tongue was full of somber, minor-key music. The augrongs boomed out abstract metaphors, and Klyst and her murth-kin worked charms each time they spoke. But no language he had ever heard prepared him for the eguar’s. It flooded his brain, violent as the waves beating into the sea-cave, and a hundred times more frightening.

  “Have you gone mad?” hissed Sandor Ott. “Be still. The creature is only yawning, or something like.”

  “Run,” gasped Pazel.

  “Pathkendle. Pathkendle. Compose yourself, or I swear on Magad’s life I’ll throw you from this horse.”

  Pazel composed himself. The thing had stopped speaking, but the echoes of its words still washed about in his head. The horses were skittish now, and it grew steadily harder to keep them from breaking into a run. A terrible odor had arisen: a caustic smell, like acid thrown on a fire. Pazel felt his throat begin to itch.

  Far across the plaza, the eguar snapped its jaws. The sound echoed from the turrets beside them. Erthalon Ness sobbed audibly, and Pazel felt Ott’s body tense.

  Then, miraculously, they were at the arch. Beyond it, stairs led down onto the wall, thirty feet below the level of the rooftop. In a matter of seconds they were through; it was over. Pazel released a huge breath, one he had held unconsciously since that first ticklish feeling in his throat. Swift and Saroo looked giddy with relief.

  Ott beckoned them on another hundred yards or so. Then he turned and smiled.

  “At your ease, and well done! Even you, Maggot Ness: I thought for a moment we would have to throttle you to stop those tears.”

  “It didn’t even try to harm us!” said Saroo. “It just watched us go by.”

  “Don’t be too proud to learn something, Doctor,” said Ott. “In my experience it is always better to understand a predator than to fear it.”

  “I’m with you there,” said Chadfallow darkly, looking back at the archway.

  Drellarek shrugged. “The creature had a full belly, perhaps.”

  “No,” said Pazel, “it’s hungry.”

  They looked at him, speechless. “Is that what your Gift made of the thing’s one little bark?” asked Swift.

  “Little bark?” said Pazel.

  Saroo screwed up his face and made a brief, clipped noise, somewhere between a roar and a burp. Swift and Drellarek laughed. But Pazel was dumbfounded. “It was talking,” he said. “It went on and on.”

  “You have something in common with the Ness family,” said Ott. “Madness, in a word. Come, gentlemen! We have gained the highway; now we must ride like highwaymen. Thirty miles lie ahead of us, and we must cover them by nightfall, or take our chances in the dark.”

  If a more spectacular thirty miles of riding were possible in Alifros, Pazel could not have imagined where. Like a great tawny serpent, the wall climbed peak after rolling peak, and they thundered over them with the steaming valleys arrayed below and a sky full of bright sun and racing clouds overhead. Flocks of bowerbirds and finches and emerald macaws swept before them; the white monkeys scattered and hid; and once they stampeded a herd of pink-snouted peccaries, rooting by the hundreds along the wall’s southern flank. Twice they passed through watchtowers, where countless gray bats slept under the darkened roofs, reminding Pazel of the stowed hammocks on the Chathrand.

  There were more furious downpours, and moments when the wind grew very fierce; at such times they walked the horses and kept far from the edges of the wall. But for the most part the wall served exactly as Ott had claimed it would: as a swift, straight road above the jungle.

  Several hours passed. The sun sank low over the western mountains. Then at last came a moment when Ott said, “Here we are,” and pointed away to the south. Pazel turned and saw the coast in the distance: a deep unquiet blue, scratched with the white lines of breakers. Gazing farther, he saw a wide delta, where rocks and sand and threads of some great river all mingled with the surf.

  “The sea route is closed indeed,” Drellarek admitted. “You’d tear a boat to pieces in all that. But surely there are calmer days?”

  “Not more than one in twenty,” said Sandor Ott. “Many weeks my men have had to wait in the Black Shoulders, with a hold full of arms or mail or medicines, listening for a break in the wind. The work is hazardous and slow—and now it will be slower still, for we must abandon the land route until—”

  “Right,” Drellarek finished for him, nodding grimly.

  Ott won’t even consider fighting the eguar, thought Pazel, not with all his men. He knows how deadly that creature is.

  Another mile, and Pazel could see the river itself, a dark, twisting waterway that burrowed into Bramian, and quickly vanished there. The river looked placid enough, but it had clearly proved mightier than the will of the Amber Kings, for just above the valley the wall came to its end. There was a last tower, and no more: beyond the river the jungle stretched unbroken over the rounded mountaintops.

  They rode forward into the tower. It was larger than the others, with many dark and chilly rooms. Ott announced that they were spending the night. For a few minutes they busied themselves with the horses, which were both famished and thirsty. Then Ott unbuckled one of the large saddlebags and drew out four sacks tied with rawhide.

  “You will want to see this,” he told them all. Placing one of the sacks before him, he loosened the cord and tugged it open.

  Green jewels blazed in the evening sun. “Emeralds,” said Sandor Ott. He sank his hand to the wrist, raised it, let a shower of the precious stones fall back into the mound. Pazel could scarcely breathe. All the gold he had ever seen changing hands would not buy the contents of that sack.

  Ott touched another. “Blue Sollochi pearls,” he said. “And the last two hold bloodstone—choice eastern rubies, cut by nunekkam jewelers.”

  “They’re all for me, aren’t they?” asked Erthalon Ness, rubbing his hands together in delight.

  Sandor Ott laughed. “In a sense, maggot. Others will guard them on your behalf—and spend them, at need.”

  “Spend them?” asked Saroo. “Where? You could leave them untended for a year in this place.”

  “No you couldn’t,” said Ott. He glanced at the Shaggat’s son, then pointed back out
the door of the tower, along the wall. “Take our friend to see the monkeys, Saroo. He overlooked them when we entered, I think.”

  “I didn’t see any monkeys, Mr. Ott.”

  “Do as I say, lad.”

  Bewildered, Saroo led a happy Erthalon Ness through the eastern archway. Ott beckoned the others to follow. He walked in the opposite direction, through several dismal rooms, and at last into a chamber with a broad window facing west. Reaching it, he gazed down with satisfaction on whatever lay below.

  Chadfallow reached the window next, and visibly recoiled from what he saw. “By the gods,” he huffed, leaning heavily on the stone.

  Pazel came up beside him. Far below the tower, the river made an especially sharp bend, almost an oxbow. The teardrop of land within its curve was about the size of the city of Ormael. It was teeming with life. Men, cattle, chickens, dogs. There were barracks and stockades, wooden halls, tents of sewn hide, grain silos, mills where waterwheels slowly revolved.

  “Our allies,” said Sandor Ott.

  Where the river bent closest to itself, a stout wall of timber leaped from shore to shore, with a pair of mighty wooden doors at the center. A lesser wall ran the whole length of the river-bank, broken only by the mills and some sort of massive lumber operation at the farthest point from the observers. Towers rose at intervals, each with a stout guard compliment. The fort was protected by water, wood, and men-at-arms.

  “What are they building, Ott?” asked Drellarek.

  “Ships,” said Pazel.

  The sergeant blinked at him. “You need glasses, if you can’t see that much,” said Pazel. “Those are framing timbers. And cutwaters. And keels.”

  “Right you are, Pathkendle. Fifty ships, to be precise. There is no shortage of wood on Bramian. And we have no shortage of funds to pay for what they cannot manufacture here—sailcloth, cannon, the finer metalwork. Here they sit in the wilderness, gentlemen, unknown to anyone in the world but us, and a few dozen of my men. And yet thousands across Alifros have labored unwittingly on their behalf. Flikkermen tracked down and kidnapped shipwrights. The slave-school on Nurth provides the wives. And Volpeks, those exquisitely useful outlaws, bring everything to the hidden anchorage at Sandplume, where my men meet them on a flagless ship. The Volpeks have no idea who their customers are, or where in Alifros their shipments go next. Bramian itself would be the last place to cross their minds! No one trades with these savages. We had the devil’s own job building that wall, with their arrows raining down on us day and night.”

  “But who’s the wall protecting?” asked Swift. “Who’s down there, Mr. Ott?”

  A note of pride entered the spymaster’s voice. “They were castaways when we found them: war refugees, hiding in mangroves in the Baerrids, a few inches above sea level, surviving on gulls’ eggs and rats. The Black Rags were unforgivably careless not to have killed them. Every year those men spent tortured by insect and typhoon, sleeping in burrows that filled with seawater, dying of scurvy or light wounds turned gangrenous, added to their hatred of the Mzithrin. They had spent a decade that way, since the Shaggat’s rebellion was crushed at the end of the war.”

  Chadfallow turned to the spymaster. His face was ashen. “They’re … his people?”

  “Nessarim warriors,” said the spymaster, nodding. “True believers, to a soul. As the Shaggat was fleeing east into our navy’s gunsights, these poor bastards were running south, packed into one groaning vessel, just hours ahead of the White Fleet. Somewhere east of Serpent’s Head they foundered on a reef, and half their number drowned. But that reef was good fortune, for otherwise the Sizzies would have caught them on the open sea. They were no longer taking prisoners by that point in the war.

  “We took them first to a camp on Opalt, where the sick perished and the strong fought their way back to health. But on Opalt they could do little more than hide, and worship their mad king in secret. That is why, five years ago, we brought them shipload by shipload to this place. Now they number over three thousand.”

  “And fifty ships under construction,” said Drellarek. “That’s impressive. But hardly a threat to the White Fleet.”

  “Of course not,” said Sandor Ott. “The contest will be as lopsided as pitting a dog against a bear, as Captain Rose put it once. You’re a hunting man yourself, Sergeant.”

  Drellarek smiled. “How did you know?”

  “I’d be a poor spymaster if I didn’t know that much about the Turach commander. And I’m sure you’ll agree that dogs have a role in any bear hunt?”

  “That’s a certainty,” said Drellarek. “A good pack can corner a bear, bleed it with nips, exhaust it, until at last it can only watch as the hunter raises his spear for the kill.”

  “Of course you must bring enough dogs,” said Ott. “The colony below is just one in our hunting-pack.”

  “And what of the dogs themselves?” asked Chadfallow quietly.

  “What of them?” said Ott.

  Grinning suddenly, he turned to Alyash with a gesture and a nod. The bosun hobbled forward, and Pazel saw that he too had extracted something from the saddlebags. It was a hunting-horn, stout and well used, more powerful than lovely. Alyash faced the window, planted his feet and drew an enormous breath. Raising the horn, he sounded one long, keening blast. The high note shook the chamber, and carried far over the valley below.

  When it ended, the sounds of labor from the settlement had ceased. Men were coming out of the buildings to gaze in the tower’s direction. After a moment there came the sound of an answering horn.

  Saroo and Erthalon Ness returned, the latter wearing an ethereal smile. He had seen his monkeys, or believed he had. Alyash passed the horn to Ott and addressed the Shaggat’s son in Mzithrini.

  “Forget your monkeys,” he said. “Don’t you understand where we’ve brought you?”

  The language-switch had an immediate effect on Erthalon Ness. His glance grew sharper, his face more stern. “No, Warden, I don’t. You tell me nothing. Where are you hiding my brother?”

  Alyash swept his hand over the settlement. “Those are the Nessarim, your father’s worshippers. Keepers of your holy faith.”

  “Not my faith,” said Erthalon Ness. “The common faith of all mankind, only some have yet to see it. Some are afraid to cast the demons from their hearts, to burn unto purity, become new men. They will not always be afraid, however. Is not my father a god?”

  “Assuredly, sir, and these men know it better than any. They have waited long for this day. Waited for you to appear, to take your father’s place as they sail forth to join him. Come, let us greet them at the river’s edge.” He gestured dismissively at the others. “These people are of no more consequence.”

  Alyash put out his hand. Erthalon Ness looked at it, hesitating. A clash of emotions shone in his face: suspicion, temptation, fear—and some darker, wilder gleam.

  “Men are casting off from the docks in rowing boats,” said Saroo, looking down from the window. “And in barges, and canoes.”

  Then Pazel did something that surprised them all. He ran forward and stood between Alyash and the Shaggat’s son.

  “Don’t go with him,” he said in Mzithrini.

  “Pathkendle,” said Ott, his voice an open threat. But Alyash smiled and raised a hand to calm the spymaster.

  “They’re using you,” said Pazel. “They laugh at you and your faith. They’re sending you down to die among those people.”

  “Lies,” said Alyash. “You’ve said it yourself, Erthalon. The time of your death has not yet arrived.”

  “I will know the hour,” said Erthalon Ness, looking at Pazel uncertainly, “and before it strikes I will be with my father again.”

  “No you won’t,” said Pazel. “He’s a blary statue in the hold of the Chathrand.”

  Soundlessly, Ott drew his sword. Chadfallow took a step forward, as if he would intervene. But once more Alyash waved them off.

  “Whose touch was it that turned your great father to stone?” he a
sked. “You were there when it happened.”

  “I was there,” echoed the other, turning accusingly to Pazel. “I had almost forgotten. It was you!”

  From the river below came the sound of singing. Erthalon Ness raised his head.

  “They are calling you, child of the Divine,” said Alyash. “And have no doubt: your father will live again, and just as the old tales promise, you shall sail out to meet him as he claims his kingdom.”

  “You’ll sail out and be killed!” shouted Pazel.

  Alyash shook his head. “Now who is laughing at the faith?”

  Pazel was desperate. With every word he spoke he grew more certain that Ott or Drellarek would kill him. But he simply had to fight. If he didn’t, these men would take everything—take Alifros itself—to say nothing of the life of this broken man.

  “Listen to me,” he begged, taking the other’s arm. “You must know that they hate you. Didn’t they lock you up all these years?”

  “I think he is referring to your palace on Licherog, Excellency,” said the bosun. “As for your father’s people, how could any sane man think we wished them harm? After all, we rescued them from starvation, and built them this place of safety and hiding, when the false kings were slaughtering any man pledged to your father who strayed a league from Gurishal. Enough of this nonsense, Excellency. Your people are waiting.”

  The Shaggat’s son looked once more at Pazel. A scowl of hatred twisted his face, and he wrenched his arm away. But as soon as he had done so the hatred vanished, and the man looked simply lost. His lips trembled, and his eyes drifted miserably over the stones.

  “My people,” he said, and there was more loneliness in those two words than Pazel had ever heard a voice express.

  The man permitted Alyash to take his elbow, and together they descended the stair.

  * But Greysan Fulbreech learned of them on a plundering foray into Pathkendle’s foot-locker. Among other thefts, Fulbreech helped himself to a few loose pages titled simply “In Case You Live to Remember.” After recounting the conversation of the birds, Pathkendle writes: Lady Oggosk must be wrong. How could the Waking Spell be a curse if it made those owls, and Felthrup, and so many other wonderful creatures? The pages went to the Secret Fist, and so, in good time, to me.—EDITOR.