The Ruling Sea

by Robert V. S. Redick

  “Out, out, out!” Cayerad Hael was screaming, clinging with his good hand to the shattered planks and gesturing frantically with scepter and stump. “The crew’s lost; they know it better than you! We must live for them, sfvantskors! Begone, be-gone!”

  They hesitated. Later Neda would think of that hesitation as a kind of miracle: the lead spike of fearlessness had been driven so deep into their souls that even this horror, this free fall to the Nine Pits, had not yet torn it out completely. But of course Cayerad spoke true: they could not save even a single sailor, and it was sinful to prefer one’s fancies to the cold facts of the world. Arqual had beaten them, and the Father remained un-avenged. Those were the facts. Neda drew a breath (the salt water like a knife in each lung) and plunged toward the breech in the hull.

  Cayer Vispek reached their leader first. He began to shout the Dying Prayer—“I have come to the end of dreams. I bless only what is”—but the sea (blasting in by yet another fissure) caught him full in the face. Still he managed the essential task: he drew the scepter to his lips and kissed the dark crystal. And for the first time outside of trance, Neda saw the Father’s magic at work.

  The transformation took only an instant. A white glow came over Cayer Vispek, and a blurring of his features, and then like a flag snapped open in a storm he was a man no longer but a blue-black whale, a Cazencian, forty feet of writhing muscle and fluke and fine triangular teeth, and with a single twist of his body he was through the hull breach and away.

  Jalantri was next. He tried to speak to their master, the second master to face death in as many months, but Cayerad Hael shook his head and pressed the scepter to his mouth. And then Neda understood—the old man was not surrendering to death. He would change too, and lead them on. All at once Neda was ashamed of her thoughts of despair. They were sfvantskors unto death, but the first duty of a sfvantskor was to stay alive, lest the gods be deprived of a servant.

  When Jalantri changed, he became so huge that his tail-fluke ripped out another dozen feet of hull. Then he too was gone. Neda looked back at Malabron. Why wasn’t he coming forward, and why did he glare in that tortured way? Could he possibly have gone rigid with fear?

  Cayerad Hael was submerged to his neck. “Come, Malabron, Mebhar’s child!” he gasped. “You know what must be done!”

  “Yes!” Malabron shouted back. “Alone of us all!”

  Neda had never heard anyone snap at Cayerad before, but there was no time to wonder. She reached Cayerad Hael, and the old man lowered the scepter. Letting go of the ship, Neda pulled the crystal to her lips and kissed it, that sacred shard of the Black Casket, by whose power they would take the fight once more to the enemy.

  The change was excruciatingly painful. Always before she had undergone the metamorphosis in trance, like all her brethren. In trance, the Father had commanded her to feel no pain, and in trance she had the power to obey. Now every sinew and corpuscle screamed in protest, as if she were being injected with venom at a million points. The burning! There could be no recovery from such pain, neither in the body nor the mind. It was as the Father had always warned them: some changes were forever.

  But the agony vanished as quickly as it had come, leaving only a welt of memory throbbing inside her—and Neda was a whale. Limbless, free of her shreds of clothes, warm in the icy water, and utterly blind except for the green light vanishing below.

  She had changed before—into a sea turtle or a shark, when the Father was still perfecting the enchantment on Simja, in the last days before the wedding—and into this same whale’s body, when they began the hunt for the Great Ship. It was the sort of magic only one as mighty as the Father could work with Sathek’s Scepter. Cayerad Hael, for all his learning, had been as helpless as a toddler when he tried to use the device, but the Father’s spell went on working perfectly, month after month.

  Or almost perfectly. Neda’s defect remained, even when her body changed. In trance she could erase her pain, but not her memory. The others could never afterward remember taking whale-form. Neda could never forget.

  The green light dwindled. How were they to proceed? Were they to follow the Chathrand until the weather cleared, or attempt to board her in the gale? They’d been about to discuss it when the Arquali vessel launched its attack; now they could not discuss it at all. Neda was not even certain that she would be able to hear her brethren’s keening voices over the wind and waves.

  Obeying a sudden impulse, she jackknifed down into the darkness, pursuing the falling ship. Perhaps the others would gather in its dim light, and together they could set off after the enemy. She swam fast into the darkness, glad she was a creature made for diving, for black depths as much as bright surface waters. The strength in her new body was intoxicating.

  There was Cayerad Hael, totally submerged, seconds from drowning; and there kissing the glowing scepter was Malabron—tortured, doubting Malabron, changing before her eyes into a Cazencian like herself. Now their master would do the same—but would his wounds follow him into whale-form? And if they did, could he possibly survive?

  Cayerad Hael raised the scepter toward his lips. And the whale that had been Malabron surged forward and closed his predator’s teeth over the scepter, and their master’s arm, and bit down, and the world went completely black.

  32

  The Mutineers

  8 Umbrin 941

  178th day from Etherhorde

  The war between Plapp’s Pier and Burnscove Boys took a novel twist when Kruno Burnscove awoke one morning in his bed (his gang had built him the little bed out of pilfered lumber, stuffed a mattress with hay stolen from the cows; he was too important to sleep in a hammock; besides, Darius Plapp had a bed) to find a severed hand dangling six inches above his forehead. It was black and withered and seemed to beckon him with the crook of one mortis-curled finger. On another finger the Burnscove Boys ring. Kruno let out an undignified squeal, and across the berth deck the Plapps replied with hoots and catcalls.

  There was no mystery about the provenance of the hand. One of the Burnscovers killed in the storm had been mutilated in the surgical annex before his body could be given to the sea. The crime was in retaliation for the looting of the three Plapp’s Pier dead. The only lingering question was where the hand had spent the previous twenty-five days.

  This was the Chathrand’s sixth week on the Nelluroq: the longest stretch between landfalls that many sailors had ever seen, and yet by Elkstem’s calculus they had more than half of the crossing yet before them. After the severed-hand incident, Rose asked for volunteers to mediate a truce. Fiffengurt and Dr. Chadfallow stepped forward, and the next morning they brought the most influential Plapps and Burnscovers together in the wardroom. Mr. Teggatz provided scones.

  Chadfallow came last to the wardroom, and he cut an impressive figure in the silk coat and dark purple cape of an Imperial envoy. He wore the ruby pendant of the Order of the Orb, and the bright gold fish-and-dagger medallion of a Defender of the Realm. The latter pendant, as most of them knew, was possessed by only half a dozen living men, and was pinned to a man’s chest by the Emperor alone, never a surrogate.

  The adversaries sat at opposite ends of the wardroom table. Kruno Burnscove had just fired a particularly creative and personal epithet at his rival, and the doctor’s appearance had made Darius Plapp lose his train of thought as he struggled to reply. He glared at Chadfallow while the other gang members looked away in confusion, wondering what power if any remained to this friend of His Supremacy.

  Chadfallow approached the furious gang leader. He rested one long-fingered hand upon the table before him, and let the silence grow.

  “You are the eponymous Plapp?” he said at last.

  Darius Plapp’s face went rigid. He pushed back his chair and stood up. He spoke through gritted teeth.

  “Who’s eponymous? Yer mother’s eponymous.”

  The meeting went downhill from there. Rather than brokering peace, the doctor and the quartermaster were treated to comprehensi
ve accounts of the murders, abductions, broken cease-fires, insults to virtuous gang mothers, slop buckets emptied on wedding parties, insinuations in mixed company that this or that leader’s manhood was not as it should be, libelous publications and stolen pets. Fiffengurt walked out in disgust. Chadfallow labored on straight through the afternoon and the dinner shift, but when the session finally collapsed at midnight the only agreement he had managed to wring from Plapp and Burnscove was that he himself was stubborn enough to join either gang.

  Chadfallow’s report to the captain noted that mental instability was a growing threat to the safety of the ship.

  Two nights later, as evening fell, the now-familiar noise of the twenty-five-foot seas was shattered by the cries of the lookout: On the bow! Hard on the bow! Great gods, what is it!

  Men stampeded to the rail and at once began to shout with wonder, and not a little fear. Stretched across the southern horizon, as far as the eye could see, was a ribbon of pale red light. It was not quite the color of sunset, nor of fire; but there was something about it that reminded one of fire: a trembling, flickering quality. A volcano? No, there was no ash, and no telltale rumble. The ribbon reached as high as the lid of clouds on the horizon, so that it looked a bit like a glowing sword, held between the blue-gray tongs of sea and sky. How far away it might have been was difficult to tell. What was certain was that it lay directly across their path.

  The ribbon burned on through the night. When morning broke, it swiftly faded, and by the time the sun was fully risen it was no more to be seen. But all through the night the watch-captains had observed how Arunis stood on the forecastle, gazing steadily southward, face bathed in the glow, eyes ravenous with expectation.

  “I’ve imagined seeing you dead,” said Diadrelu. “Or more likely, hearing that you had died, and never seeing for myself. As it was with Talag. I’ve imagined my own death, likelier still. But never did I think to see you locked in the brig.”

  Diadrelu stepped through the iron bars. Hercól watched her from the darkness, sitting back against the wall, smiling through his seven-week beard. It was hours past midnight; except for the pair of Turachs outside the compartment door, the mercy deck was deserted. Two cells away, the captain of the whaler, Magritte, was talking in his sleep, a low, despairing babble. He had boiled over during his first interview with Rose after the sinking of the Sanguine, calling him murderer, pirate, Pit-fiend, devil-swine, and when he paused for breath Rose informed him that he would serve a week in the brig for each insult, plus a fortnight for his behavior in Rose’s quarters, where he had displayed “verbal incontinence” and a tendency to gulp his food.

  Hercól for his part never seemed but half asleep. The ixchel woman had come to see him with increasing frequency, not quite certain what she was looking for, and often enough forced to depart without speaking to him if Magritte proved restless or the Turachs left the door ajar. And though she moved silent as dust on a puff of wind, each time she reached his cell she found his eyes open, and that slight smile of expectation on his haggard face.

  And yet with each visit her worry grew. Hercól’s mouth was dry; he was using a good part of his water ration to clean a wound on the chest. There were bloodstains on his shirt near the collar; when he moved a cloud of flies lifted briefly from the spot. Does he know about ixchel eyes? she wondered. Does he know that I can see him, better than any human could?

  “I have a little water,” she said. “And meat. And an herb you can rub into your skin, to keep those flies away.”

  “You take too great a risk with these visits,” said Hercól.

  “Not especially,” said Diadrelu. “You’re a deadly fighter. Your people wouldn’t dare approach this cell without lamps and noise.”

  “But yours might.”

  “Well, then!” she said, trying to sound lighthearted. “If I’m not wanted—”

  “Need I respond to that, my lady?”

  She put down her pack, leaped in one bound to his knee, and sat, folding her long legs beneath her.

  “Need I stick a pin through your lip to stop you calling me lady?”

  Hercól laughed softly. “Thirty years of service to the noble-born have made some habits unbreakable,” he said. “Very well, just-plain-Dri: how goes the journey? Is there anything to see but the empty horizon?”

  “I told you of the sky-ribbon.”

  “That was days ago. Has it returned?”

  “Yes. Men are calling it the Red Storm, a name out of some old tale of the Ruling Sea. They say Rose glimpsed it decades ago, that he sailed this far, and then turned back to safety in the north.”

  “Curious,” said Hercól. “But that is not what concerns you most, I think.”

  She was surprised that her voice had given away so much. Disappointed, too: why worry him with things he could not change?

  “The Vortex is in sight again,” she said. “A little nearer, this time. The First Watch saw it pull a thunderhead down from the sky and devour it, lightning and all, and this has put the fear of death in the men. Before today we were fairly flying southward. But now Rose has us beating west, away from that monster.”

  Hercól’s smile was gone. His eyes slid once around the cell block, professionally.

  “You truly think you can break out of here?” she asked.

  “It has been arranged,” he said, matter-of-fact, and glanced briefly at the ceiling. “But the harder question is, whom can I help by escaping? When I break out, I shall have only a short time to accomplish something before I’m put back in again. I could run to the stateroom, and perhaps find refuge there, but I do not wish to do so while Rose is leaving our friends in relative peace. They would merely place ten Turachs on the doorstep, and we should all be prisoners together.”

  “You would be safe, at least,” said Diadrelu.

  Not a flicker of response showed on Hercól’s face. “What news of our friends?” he asked.

  Diadrelu sighed. “Neeps and Marila have become somewhat more than friends; Pazel and Thasha, somewhat less. They are cold to each other. Pazel simply will not remain in her presence, and Thasha is too proud to ask him why. In any case, they have all been busy recruiting people to our cause—and debating how much to tell them.”

  “They are going ahead with the council meeting, then?” asked Hercól.

  “It begins just minutes from now,” said Diadrelu. “That’s why I’ve woken you at such an hour, I—well, it was an impulse, I was passing near—”

  “You’re not going to show yourself to six strangers!”

  “Hercól,” said Diadrelu, “I am an outcast, not an imbecile. My sophisters and I will keep watch from the ceiling.”

  Hercól nodded, realizing he had overstepped. “What of your quarrel with the clan?”

  “It is not a quarrel,” she said. “It is death, if they should lay hands on me. And not because my people are hot for my blood. No, if it came to that, I think a good number would rather die defending me than obey Taliktrum’s order to kill. I should have to help them do it, and swiftly.”

  Hercól leaned nearer, blinking in the darkness. “Help them? What are you saying?”

  “That I would take my own life, rather than watch my clan torn to pieces by a blood feud. That is our way. Surely by now you understand?”

  Suddenly Hercól cupped his hands beneath her and lifted, as though she were an injured bird that might start into flight. Diadrelu froze, her breath caught in her throat. It was all she could do to keep her mind from battle-patterns, the twenty ways she had learned to slash and bite and twist out of such hands. The swordsman brought her close to his face.

  “I do not understand,” he said. “How can you think the clan would be well served by your death? Surely your nephew’s rule will tear it apart anyway?”

  “Not surely, my friend. Only probably. That is beside the point, however. Of all my people’s maxims, the most sacred is clan before self. None of us quite lives up to that maxim, but all of us aspire to. When we abandon the
effort, we die. It has happened countless times in our history, as we learn when the survivors of massacred Houses share their tales. Almost always the death of a clan can be traced back to selfishness. A leader who has lost the people’s love tries to stay in power through fear. An ixchel chased by humans runs toward the clan house instead of away. Two ixchel duel over a lover, and one dies—or two.”

  “Or even three, if the lover is too heartbroken to live on,” said Hercól. “So at least it happens in our fables.”

  “I think you do understand me, Hercól,” she said. “The sort of questions you people face only in wartime or feuds of passion, we face endlessly, throughout our lives. What deed of mine will protect the clan? What will endanger them? What will keep death at bay until tomorrow?”

  Hercól’s hands trembled slightly beneath her. “I have been thinking of that day,” he said. “The day you asked us to kill Master Mugstur.”

  “I had no right to address you thus,” said Diadrelu.

  “You had every right. How were you to know that we were not your equals in honesty?”

  “Honesty?” Dri frowned. “Speak plainly, man. I must go soon.”

  “Of course I am a killer,” whispered Hercól. “Did I not say that I was Ott’s right-hand man? That I worked his will, pursued his mad notion of Arquali ‘interests,’ until the day he went too far?”

  “The day he ordered you to slay the Empress and her sons,” said Diadrelu. “You told us.”

  “I failed the sons,” said Hercól. “They were the age of Pazel and Neeps—indeed I look at those two and am reminded of Maisa’s children. Like the tarboys, they grew up with danger and loss, and yet somehow their hearts remained open. They would be grown men by now, if I had saved them. Ott keeps their bodies packed in ice, in a cave under Mol Etheg. Shall I tell you why he goes to such trouble?”

  “If you wish to,” she said.

  “When a spy has completed all his other training, he must pass one final test. He must go with Ott to that cave and look at Maisa’s sons, lying there gray and wrinkled with their throats slit. Princes of Arqual, he tells the trainee, but also enemies of Magad the Fifth—and therefore of all the people. Ott asks for the trainee’s opinion. If the young man objects, or questions the idea that blind loyalty is what Arqual needs; if he so much as looks troubled, then he never joins the Secret Fist. Instead he joins the host of the disappeared, one more sacrifice on the altar of the State.”