The Ruling Sea

by Robert V. S. Redick

  As they flowed by within feet of the two humans, the rats suddenly raised their twisted, nasal voices and began to sing:

  Fearless the child of Rin proclaims:

  “Death is the promise that breaks my chains.”

  Cold is the journey, but bright the glade

  Where believers rest in the Milk Tree’s shade

  Faith on fire, blood on the sea,

  Rin’s fair Angel, set me free.

  Eighty or ninety of the monsters passed, staring straight ahead, as Pazel and Thasha watched without moving a muscle. When the last had scurried by, the youths leaned back against the wall, gasping with relief.

  “Arunis must have been barely ahead of them,” whispered Pazel.

  “That chant,” said Thasha. “It’s a hymn. The same one we used to sing at the Lorg, except for that bit about blood. And Pazel—did you see an ixchel walking with them?”

  Pazel started. “No, I didn’t. Listen, Thasha, don’t trust your eyes. That grebel—”

  “I know,” she said. “It started back in sickbay. I saw my father standing behind Fulbreech, terribly angry, reaching for his neck. And then—”

  She was overtaken by a yawn. Aya Rin, thought Pazel, she’s not going to last. Thasha looked at him, frightened, furious, tightening her grip on Ildraquin. “Let’s go,” she said.

  They stepped onto the orlop. They could hear the rats scurrying off to starboard, and a voice—Master Mugstur’s voice—berating them about their souls. Pazel was glad to find the compartment door torn asunder: it let them pass through without a sound.

  They had stepped into a small chamber, a granary for the ship’s livestock. The grain bins had been smashed and plundered. By the far doorway stood a pool of blood.

  “The next room’s the manger, where Rose put the Shaggat,” said Thasha. “Stay behind me, Pazel, and for Rin’s sake don’t try anything brave.”

  At another time he might have made some retort. Now he only nodded. The grebel had turned the pool of blood into a black and steaming pit; he winced as Thasha walked through it, dispelling the illusion.

  He followed her into the manger. Dead ahead they could see the stone form of the Shaggat, chained tight to the stanchion. Clenched in his fist was the Nilstone, darkness made visible, nothingness given form. Bodies lay around the mad Mzithrini king: Turach bodies, and rats. Square bales of hay lay in blood-darkened mounds. But there was no sign of Arunis.

  Thasha smacked herself furiously on the head. “Wrong again! This wasn’t where he was going at all!”

  “But it is where you are going to die, giants,” said a voice behind them.

  They whirled: alone in the doorway, bare feet in the pool of blood, stood Steldak. He had never looked more vicious or depraved. His gaunt lips were stretched wide and grinning, and his pale eyes shone with glee.

  Before Pazel or Thasha could move, he turned and shouted: “Come, Mugstur! I told you it was not Arunis! It is but two humans—the last, maybe, to have escaped our vengeance.”

  A great screech went up behind him, and rats began to pour through the doorway. With a decisiveness that saved both their lives, Thasha grabbed Pazel by the arm and pulled him to the back of the chamber. They clawed their way up a stack of hay bales, then turned and raised their weapons. “Strike first!” Thasha whispered to him. “Every gods-damned time!”

  The rats were on them in seconds. Pazel fought even more desperately than he had on the mainmast, driving Isiq’s sword into one set of snapping jaws after another, struggling for balance on the shifting bales. As scores of rats converged on the youths, Mugstur himself waddled into the chamber. He was astonishingly swollen and ugly. His transformation in the liquor vault seemed to have closed the wound Hercól had given him, leaving only a purple scar on his bone-white chest. But something had changed: Mugstur, and indeed all the rats, had become slick and slimy, as if coated with some viscous substance. Hallucination, thought Pazel, as a rat prepared to spring.

  He killed that one, and the next, by stabbing downward with both hands on the sword-hilt. There were four scrambling to take their place, however, and eight or ten attacking Thasha. And the creatures were still shoving through the door.

  He had stabbed his fifth rat when Steldak let out a piercing cry. At almost the same time a voice shouted, “Hold! Hold, beasts, or your master dies!”

  Mugstur snarled, and his servants froze where they stood. Clinging to Mugstur’s shoulder was Taliktrum. The ixchel twisted the rat’s loose flesh with one hand, while the other reached around the hairless neck to the base of his jaw. There he held a long knife, point upward. One sharp thrust would bury it to the hilt in Mugstur’s brain.

  Four other ixchel—Dawn Soldiers, all—were racing up Mugstur’s hairy sides to stand with their leader, weapons drawn. On the floorboards, Steldak lay with an arrow in his chest.

  “Surrender, vermin,” said Taliktrum.

  Master Mugstur reared suddenly on his hind legs. He had been thrice an ixchel’s size before his transformation; he was thirty times it now. But the five ixchel held fast, and Taliktrum remained poised for the kill.

  Mugstur flexed his claws, one by one, a weirdly human gesture. Then he laughed, deep in his throat.

  “Talag’s son,” he said. “You should have brought that peppermint oil. Now you see what comes of defying a servant of the Most High. Tell us, crawly: when did you fall in love with giants?”

  “I did not come for them,” snapped Taliktrum. “If they had been killed months ago my clan would still be safely hidden from the giants. It is you I am here for.”

  “Yes,” said Mugstur, “for me. But not in the way you imagine. You have come because Rin willed it, and his Angel’s power has brought it to pass. You are here because you are part of my destiny.”

  “Mad creature!” said Taliktrum. “Aren’t you ashamed to peddle that pap—that watery stew of giant beliefs? Order your rats back to their warren, or my knife will decide your destiny once and for all!”

  “Bring him in, my children,” said Mugstur calmly.

  Noises from the granary: then a new clutch of rats entered the chamber. Two of the creatures, walking on their hind legs, carried a wooden staff between them. An ixchel man was bound to that staff, head to toe. He was gagged, and nearly as wasted and filthy as Steldak had been when Pazel first saw him in Rose’s cage. All the same his look was regal. His angular face and haughty eyes resembled Diadrelu’s, and Taliktrum’s own. His gray beard was a wild tangle.

  Taliktrum gasped. “Father!”

  “It’s Talag!” whispered Thasha. “Sniraga didn’t kill him! Oggosk lied to you, Pazel!”

  “Your father has been our guest since Uturphe,” said Mugstur. “The witch gave him to Steldak, in exchange for information. And Steldak wisely brought him to me.”

  “Liar!” spat Taliktrum. “No ixchel, not even mad Steldak, could betray one of his own in this way!”

  “Steldak did not wish to,” Mugstur admitted. “He was tempted by the worship of a false prophet: you, Taliktrum. But I had hope for him always. He was a visionary like me. Weaker, of course, but as his fear left him his visions grew clearer. They gave him the strength to kill Talag’s sister, when the time was right. Above all he was committed to the death of the arch-heretic Rose. It is a pity you murdered him before he could stand in triumph on Rose’s corpse. But my children will not weep for him. True servants of Rin’s Angel fear no death.”

  “Fear no death!” howled all the rats together, as though the words were a slogan.

  “Notice the ropes at Talag’s wrists and ankles,” said Mugstur. “Harm me, little lord, and my children will tear him limb from limb before your eyes.”

  Pazel put a warning hand on Thasha’s arm. This was going to get ugly.

  “It is not I who will surrender, it is you!” roared the white rat suddenly. “Stand aside and let us finish our kill! We are here because Steldak heard the voice of the Angel—and see, the dark Stone burns from within! And the last humans stan
ding, a dark boy and a fierce pale girl, were here awaiting us—a fitting sacrifice, at the end of ends. The other humans fell before we reached them, struck down by the Angel’s wrath—”

  “By us, you fool!” said Taliktrum.

  But Mugstur was no longer listening. “Our wait is over, children! The sky has turned to blood, and a great mouth has opened in the sea! Everything is clear at last! It is the promised hour! The Angel comes!”

  “The Angel! The Angel!” shrieked the rats, twitching with ecstasy.

  Taliktrum clung helplessly to Mugstur’s neck. His eyes swept about the room, as if searching for an exit he might have overlooked. On the wooden staff, his father desperately shook his head. Taliktrum caught his eye, and a look of shame swept over him.

  “I can’t obey, Father,” he said. “I can’t let you die. Withdraw, soldiers! Your next commands will come from Lord Talag. Release him, Mugstur, and take me instead.”

  “No!” shouted Thasha suddenly. “Do not move, any of you! I forbid it!”

  Rats and ixchel alike looked up in shock. Pazel gaped as well: her voice was astonishingly changed. This was Thasha speaking, and at the same time it was not: just as a fiddle becomes something utterly new when passed from a novice to a master.

  There was a strange, bright light in her eye. She lowered Ildraquin until it pointed at Mugstur’s heart. “You read the signs correctly,” she said, confident and commanding. “All but the last one, that is. Your wait is over. I have come.”

  Such a cacophony of squeals and howls and perplexed roars followed that not even Mugstur could make himself heard. Some of the rats had dropped on their bellies, cowering. Pazel was frightened half to death. What was happening to her? Where could she take this bluff?

  “Back!” Thasha shouted with a sweep of Hercól’s sword. The rats who had been attacking her and Pazel leaped away. Then in one bound Thasha jumped to the floor, landing just beside the Shaggat Ness.

  Mugstur dropped to all fours and backed away. His eyes shone with doubt and wonder. “You … you are the Angel? The Blessed One, the spirit who woke me, when I was a common rat?”

  By way of an answer, Thasha spread her arms wide, and in that strange, powerful voice, began to sing:

  I come as a shadow o’er the sea

  Swift and certain, my decree:

  None who would with Rin abide

  May from his chosen servant hide.

  Neither from his justice cower:

  For in that final earthly hour,

  Earth and ocean are as glass;

  Through them my burning gaze shall pass

  And scour all beasts from haunt or lair,

  Their souls to free upon the air.

  It was a liturgy of the Rinfaith—Pazel had heard bits of it before, chanted by devout sailors or traveling monks. But in Thasha’s voice the words were frightful. Mugstur crouched low, tucking his tail and holding his head with his paws. Taliktrum and his warriors still clung to him, too shocked to do anything but watch.

  “Angel,” whimpered Mugstur. “How can I know you? How can I be sure?”

  “If you do not know me, then you were never my true servant,” said Thasha.

  “That girl … she was always aboard!” squeaked one of the rats. “She’s Thasha Isiq, the Treaty Bride!”

  Thasha looked at the deformed rats. She was in a trance, Pazel thought. Then—before he could do more than scream a despairing No!—she reached out and touched the Nilstone, between the dead stone fingers of the Shaggat Ness.

  Pazel thought he was seeing her die. Something like that withering flame that had consumed the Shaggat’s hand raced from the Nilstone down Thasha’s arm. But it did not kill her. It swept over her body like a cold flame. All color went out of the room, but Thasha’s skin took on an unearthly glow. The black radiance of the Nilstone flowed through her fingers, brighter and brighter.

  “Do you believe?” Thasha demanded.

  “We believe, great Angel,” said Mugstur, squirming and groveling at her feet.

  “We believe you! We believe!” squealed the rats.

  Thasha frowned. “I do not trust in words. We shall see if you stand ready to prove your faith in deeds.”

  With that she wrenched her hand away from the Nilstone. She cringed, cradling the hand, as a peal of thunder rolled through the ship. Pazel slid from the hay bales and caught her before she could fall. Then the room was still.

  Mugstur leaped to his feet.

  “Yes!” he cried. “I am ready! We are all ready! It is time for deeds! We will show you, Mistress of Heaven! After me, rats, the hour is come!”

  He turned and flew from the chamber. Their foes forgotten, the other rats pursued him. Their cries were taken up by the horde in the outer compartment: “The hour is come! The hour is come!”

  Thasha put her arms over Pazel’s shoulders. “Well,” she said, leaning into him.

  It was her old voice; he could have wept with relief. He looked her over, head to foot. She had touched the Nilstone; she should have been dead. And yet she was not even visibly wounded, although he was rather sure she would collapse if he released her. “What … what did you do?” he whispered.

  Thasha looked up at the Nilstone in the Shaggat’s hand. “It was nothing I’d planned, believe me. I just thought it was the only chance we had.”

  Beside them, Lord Talag (dropped by the rats in their haste) began to moan and twist with great urgency. Taliktrum bent and slashed at his father’s bonds.

  Pazel looked out through the doorway. “Where in Pitfire did they go? What did you tell them?”

  “Nothing!” Thasha protested. “I just said obey me, didn’t you hear? I don’t know what command they think they’re obeying.”

  Talag retched and shouted, tearing at his gag. Taliktrum wept openly as he cut him free. “You lived,” he managed to say. “The rat taunted me, said he had something I wanted more than life itself. I never dreamed it could be you.”

  The gag parted, and Talag spat it out. He made a raw and painful sound.

  “Don’t try to speak too soon, m’lord,” said one of the Dawn Soldiers.

  Talag shoved him away. He bolted upright, even though his legs were still tied to the staff. “The rats!” he croaked, his voice a husk. “They go to die! Stop them, girl, stop them! Bring them back!”

  “Father, you’re ill!” cried Taliktrum. “They’re our enemies, even though they kept you alive!”

  “Ill, am I?” snapped Talag. He drew his hand roughly over Taliktrum’s chest, then rubbed his thumb and finger together. “Lamp oil, you fool! Every rat aboard has bathed in it! They’re killing themselves! They’re going to free their souls upon the air! They’re going to heaven on a plume of smoke!”

  The horror of what he was saying struck Pazel like a club. Thasha gasped and sprinted from the room. Pazel chased after her, amazed that she had found yet another reserve of strength. “Mugstur!” she shouted. “Stop! I command you!”

  But the power had left her voice, and the rats were far away. As they neared the Silver Stair, Pazel realized he did not even know if they had run up or down. They skidded to a halt, listening.

  “They’re beneath us!” said Pazel, starting to plunge downward. But Thasha caught his arm, and he listened again.

  He cursed. “And above us! Mugstur could have gone either way, and—Oh, damn it all! Look!”

  Three hundred feet away cross the central compartment, flames leaped suddenly in the gloom. They were rats, burning like living torches, and they were running this way and that, biting one another, setting each other alight. Those not yet on fire screamed at those that were: “This way! Bless me, cleanse me, brother!” Then twenty or more rat voices rose in song:

  Faith on fire, smoke on high,

  Rin’s first Angel, see me die.

  Rise in ash to heaven’s nest,

  Rin’s Rat-Angel, love me best!

  Pazel would have found it hard to imagine things getting much worse. But they did, considerably. Th
asha was still holding his arm, and when he looked at her he saw tears of frustrated rage.

  “No good,” she said, nearly sobbing. “I’m no good, I wreck everything, you’re about to die, do you love me?”

  “What?”

  Thasha fell asleep in his arms.

  He shed her father’s sword and thrust Ildraquin through his belt in its place. He caught her under the arms. What could he do, and what did it matter, now? It didn’t, he thought. The fog was in his brain again; he felt stupid and slow. But he would not abandon her. He would not let her burn among the rats.

  The first climb was easy. He kept her body high, and bore much of her weight against his chest. But after the berth deck he slipped in blood or oil, and fell painfully, and when he lifted her again she felt heavier, somehow. At the lower gun deck he had to put her down and clear dead rats from the ladderway. The upper gun deck was bright with flames.

  When he emerged into the open air the scene was infernal. The sky throbbed red in the south; lightning crackled over the still-closer Vortex. At least fifty rats had clearly made straight for the topdeck, and set themselves aflame when they reached it. Many had not stopped there, but had pulled themselves burning up the masts and shrouds. The tarred rigging snatched at the flame; already the mizzen topsail was alight.

  Hallucination? thought Pazel hopefully. Then he gave a sobbing laugh. The stench of burned fur, the wafting heat, the swollen, blazing animals leaping crazed from the yardarms: it was all too abominably real. And so was blanë. He stumbled, rose with effort, dragged Thasha a few more yards. Then he sat down and propped her head on his lap, brushed her dirty hair from her eyes, and kissed her the way he’d wanted to for so long.

  This is where it ends, Thasha.

  The flame was widespread, fore and aft. Somewhere ixchel were shouting, cursing, muttering their ambiguous prayers. He thought, My mind is the ship. Three hundred cabins full of smoke, full of fog. Nothing stirring much longer. No more fighting to be done.