The Ruling Sea

by Robert V. S. Redick

  That night Pazel went to visit his friends in the forecastle house, carrying a candle in a little glass. The window was gray with ash and salt scum. When he tapped, sullen faces glanced up through the smoky air. They had been prisoners for forty days, and had long since given up hope that a visitor might be bringing them their freedom. Even Neeps and Marila looked defeated, Pazel thought, as they tiptoed through the sprawled bodies to the window.

  They expect to die, thought Pazel suddenly, and with the thought came a sharp bite of guilt. He was out here, free and relatively safe; Neeps and Marila and Chadfallow were locked in there with lunatics, nothing but a little fire between them and death. It was hard not to hate Taliktrum. The accusation still rang in his ears, however: If it was your family, you’d have done exactly the same.

  Pazel struggled not to show his anguish. His friends’ eyes were red and crusty. Neeps’ skin had paled to the color of driftwood. Marila’s thick black hair had lost its shine.

  “No inlet yet,” Pazel managed to say. “But it can’t be far off now. Fiffengurt says we’ll keep on till daybreak, just like yesterday.”

  “Only slower,” said Marila.

  Pazel nodded; they could not crack on at full speed in the dark. “When … when was the last time—”

  “We had anything to drink?” said Neeps, completing the question. “Depends who you’re talking about. Old Plapp and Burnscove, now, they just drank their fill. Blanë-laced water, compliments of the ixchel. They gulped a quart apiece, and so did Saroo and Byrd and a few others. They’ll sleep for ten days, and wake up drier than they started. Of course, by then—”

  “Don’t say it,” Marila interrupted.

  She was right, Pazel thought: the situation was all too clear. Ten days from now they would either have found water or died for want of it.

  “You should drink the blanë-water too,” said Pazel. “Go to sleep, and wake up with a nice, safe jug at your side.”

  Neeps gave a half glance over his shoulder, then shook his head. “Not until they do, mate.”

  Pazel looked: Sandor Ott was lounging against the wall, arms crossed. His chisel-point eyes were fixed on Pazel.

  “He’s listening,” said Marila. “One of them’s always listening—Ott, or Dastu, or Rose.”

  “He doesn’t speak Sollochi, does he?” asked Pazel, switching to Neeps’ birth-tongue.

  Neeps shrugged. “With Ott you can never be sure.”

  I could have been, thought Pazel, if I’d let the eguar show me the rest of his life. I’d have known about Dastu as well, maybe—and Thasha’s father, if there’s anything to know. Was it trying to help me, after all?

  He looked once more into the assassin’s eyes. Would I have learned everything he knows? Could I have stood it if I did? He thought again of the eguar’s strangest phrase of all: the world my brethren made. It still worried him that Bolutu had no idea what the creature could have meant.

  He shook himself; this was doing his friends no good. “We’re not so bad off,” he said. “Bolutu thinks the Red Storm may have wiped out any ugly spells Arunis was brewing. He figures it acts like ‘scouring powder for magic.’ I was afraid it might have knocked out the magic wall around the stateroom, but no fear; it’s as strong as ever. And we’ve found all seven of our allies, all seven carrying the wolf-scar—even if it is blary strange that Rose is one of them.”

  “Pazel,” said Neeps, his voice abruptly flat, “we’re not seven anymore. Dri is dead. Whatever we were meant to do together isn’t going to happen.”

  “Don’t talk like that,” said Pazel fiercely. “Nothing’s gone as planned for them, either. We’ll find another way, even if we can’t do what the Red Wolf had in mind when it burned us. I told you what Ramachni said.”

  Neeps’ eyes flashed, and Pazel feared he might be spoiling for a fight. Then the small boy took a deep breath and nodded. “You told me. Sorry, mate.”

  “Right,” said Pazel, relieved but shaken. “One of us will visit you every hour or so. Thasha’s next, at four bells.”

  “How is our Angel of Rin, anyway?”

  “Back to normal,” said Pazel with a quick smile.

  “You’re lying,” said Marila.

  Pazel blinked at her. Marila did not speak Sollochi; she was merely listening to his tone. Neeps’ talent was rubbing off on her.

  “Thasha isn’t normal,” he admitted. “In fact she has me worried sick.”

  Since the Red Storm, he said, Thasha had been increasingly moody and distracted. Her hand, the one she had used to touch the Nilstone, seemed to fascinate her. Pazel had caught her staring at it, and picking at the old scar. And she was reading the Polylex, more and more of it, sometimes with Felthrup’s assistance, sometimes alone. It still frightened her, but she couldn’t seem to tear herself away. Pazel would wake in the night to the sound of her soft screams. He would sit beside her, holding her, feeling her tremble as she scanned the pages.

  “Once she slammed the book and shouted at me: ‘What was she thinking, how could she do it to them? How could a mage be so cruel?’ When I asked who she meant, she snapped, ‘Erithusmé, who else? She wasn’t good at all, she was a monster.’ I told her that wasn’t what Ramachni said, and she just snarled at me. ‘How would you like to go through a Waking, like Felthrup, like Niriviel and Mugstur? Do you think you’d still be sane, Pazel? Do you think you’d still be you?’”

  An even worse incident had occurred two nights ago. It had been a beautiful, warm evening. The two of them had spent a quiet hour seated against the twenty-foot skiff, watching a pod of whales cross and recross a yellow ribbon of moonlight. Thasha had seemed happy and relaxed. In time they had fallen asleep, and when Pazel awoke an hour later she was gone. He did not find her in the stateroom, and alerted Hercól. Together with Big Skip and a few other volunteers they had searched for her, deck by deck, compartment by compartment. It was Pazel who had found her at last: crossing the berth deck, walking like a dreamer among hundreds of sleeping men.

  He had run to her and taken her hand. “You shouldn’t be in here,” he had whispered. “Let’s go before they wake up.”

  Thasha had looked at the sleepers, shaking her head. “They can’t,” she’d said.

  She led him out of the compartment and down a side passage. It was a spot he’d passed a hundred times, but this time, to his great surprise, he saw that there was a little green door, only waist-high, right at the end of the passage, where he thought the hull should have been. The door looked older and shabbier than the rest of the compartment; its handle was an ancient, corroded lump of iron. Thasha had put out her hand to open the door—but slowly, as though fighting herself. When she touched the knob, Pazel had reached to help her—he was curious about the door; he’d never noticed it—and Thasha had suddenly pulled him away, screaming.

  “We’re running out, we’re running out!”

  “Don’t worry,” Pazel had begged. “We’ll find water, Thasha, I swear.”

  “Not water!” she’d howled, clawing at him. “Not water! Thoughts! We’re running out of thoughts and we won’t have any left!” And she had wept all the way back to the stateroom.

  “And later on, Neeps,” Pazel concluded, “she couldn’t remember being on the berth deck at all. I’m scared, I tell you. She’s just so different, since the storm.”

  Neeps looked at him, awestruck. “Everything is different,” he said at last. “Don’t you sense it, mate? I can’t put my finger on it, but I feel as if … I don’t know, as if the whole world we come from, back there across the Nelluroq, had just—”

  “Neeparvasi Undrabust!” rasped Lady Oggosk suddenly. “Get away from the window, you atrocious boy! I can’t sleep through your chatter!”

  Quickly, Pazel put his hand on the glass. “We’ll free you,” he said in Arquali. “I promise we’ll free you both. You just have to hang on until we find a way.”

  “’Course we will,” said Neeps, raising his fingers briefly to the pane. Leaning slightly against
him, Marila nodded and made herself smile.

  Their courage made Pazel feel even worse. He glanced again at Ott and lowered his voice to a hoarse whisper.

  “Remember what Bolutu said, after you left. The part I told you the next morning.”

  “About the ones who’ll be waiting for him?” Neeps whispered back. “His masters, the ones who see through his eyes?”

  “That’s right,” whispered Pazel. “But don’t say another word! Just hold on to that thought, will you? They’re going to find us, and help. And Ramachni’s coming back as well—stronger than ever, he said. So save your strength. You’ll see, this is all going to work out.”

  He left them, feeling a fraud. Who was he to say that things would work out? What made his promises any better than those Taliktrum gave to his people—or for that matter, Mugstur to his rats? Had things worked out for Diadrelu? Would anything prevent their dying here, one by one, with three miles of the Ruling Sea left to cross?

  He found Thasha seated on the flag locker at the back of the quarterdeck, her shoulders resting on the taffrail. “You’re seventeen,” she said, her voice flat and distant.

  “By Rin,” said Pazel, for it was true: his birthday had come and gone on the Nelluroq, and he had never once thought of it. “How did you know?”

  Thasha gave no answer. Her eyes were on Taliktrum and Elkstem, standing at the wheel, arguing over safe running speeds and distances from shore. Myett stood close to Taliktrum, whispering and touching him frequently. Lord Talag, who had so far refused to discuss any return to leadership of the clan, watched his son in brooding silence from the wreckage of the wheelhouse.

  On Thasha’s lap lay a chipped ceramic jug from the stateroom. Pazel tipped it: bone-dry.

  “You’ll just get thirstier, sitting out in this wind,” he said.

  Thasha smiled and put out her hand. “Come and get thirsty with me.”

  He climbed onto the flag locker and settled beside her. As always when they were close, he tensed himself against the onset of pain from Klyst’s shell. But it did not come—had not come, he realized, since they passed through the Red Storm. He glanced north. What had happened to the murth-girl? Was she lost in the heart of the Ruling Sea? Had she followed them (he crushed his eyes shut on the thought) into the Vortex, and perished there? Or had the Storm freed her from her own love-ripestry at last?

  “The whales are back,” said Thasha pointing.

  “I think they’re watching us,” he said, trying for a joke.

  Thasha’s strong arm went around his waist. He smiled, remembering his childish vision of the two of them running away into the jungle, Lord and Lady of Bramian. It was time to tell her, although he’d blush, and she’d tease him, and demand to hear it all.

  But before he could open his mouth Thasha hid her face against his shoulder. “Diadrelu,” she whispered, clinging to him. And that was enough; he was engulfed in anguish and had to look away.

  That night in the stateroom, while Hercól and Fiffengurt sat at table, speaking of the recent dead and the soon-to-be-born, and Bolutu sketched a drawing of his beloved Empire, pointing out its forests and castles and mountain ranges to a transported Felthrup, Pazel rummaged in his sea chest, among heaps of grimy clothes and knickknacks. When at last he found what he wanted he rose and went into Thasha’s cabin without knocking. She was sprawled across the bed, reading the Polylex with no apparent discomfort—before his startling entrance, at least. He closed the door and went to her, and held the blue silk ribbon up for her to read.

  YE DEPART FOR A WORLD UNKNOWN,

  AND LOVE ALONE SHALL KEEP THEE.

  “I was supposed to tie this to your wrist,” he said, and did.

  42

  The Kindness of the King

  On sunny mornings the man liked to sit by the window and watch the tailor birds repairing their nests. They never stopped or seemed to tire, these little red birds, even when the winter storms lashed the city and pulled their patchwork homes apart like old woolen hats. One of the birds came now and then to talk to him. The man had bribed him with a scrap of silk, torn from the lining of his pocket. Now with a telescope borrowed from the king he could see the silk woven into the nest. The bird had thanked him in Simjan and, when the man did not answer, tried several other tongues. The man just nodded, or tilted his head to one side. He had lost the gift of speech and the bird had gained it. The situation was awkward for them both.

  Long winter nights the man would lie on the rug, staring at the firelight dancing on the ceiling and worrying about the bird. It was always good-humored but he knew it was in pain. I’m alone in the world except for you, sir. My mate hasn’t woken and I fear she never will.

  When he closed his eyes the rats came looking for him. First he would hear them scuffling below in the depths of the castle, and he would have to get up and check the lock on the door. Later he would hear them sniffing and scrabbling just outside the room. Sometimes they spoke to him in their familiar, horrid way. Penny for a colonel’s widow? Often he heard them gnawing at the base of the door.

  The man had no weapon, and no kiln in which to hide. He knew his only chance was to lie still and make no sound.

  They gave him a cat, but it harassed the bird and he told the nurse with gestures to take it away. They gave him books, all the books written in Arquali that the king could readily obtain, and these were his great comfort. When they hung a mirror above the dressing-table, the man stood in front of it for a long time, studying himself. A bald, veined head, deep-set eyes, chin held high out of habit, not feeling. Then the man turned the mirror’s face to the wall.

  The king’s physician gave him bloodroot tea. He was not surprised that the man had lost both speech and memory. He had treated many battle survivors, and knew the caves into which the mind, like a wounded animal, withdrew in defeat.

  “Traumatic semi-catatonia,” he told King Oshiram. “He’s made a pact with the gods, Your Majesty: Torture me no further and I’ll sit here quietly, you’ll see, I won’t make a sound.”

  “Admiral Isiq is a war hero,” said the king.

  “Yes, Sire. And also, unfortunately, a man.”

  Daytime was pleasant enough. The room in the tower overlooked the Ancestors’ Grove, a stand of gnarled beeches surrounding a rush-fringed pool where, as King Oshiram had explained, the frogs were said to sing with the voices of the royal dead. It was a small, ancient, walled-in wood. Beyond it lay the rose gardens, dormant now and dead looking, and farther on the sprawling Cactus Gardens, where the man’s last conversation with a loved one had taken place.

  The king had installed a sheet of translucent glass over the whole of the window, with only a tiny aperture to look through. “For your safety,” the king had told him, very serious and grim. “The ones who put you in that black pit are still among us, I’d bet my mother’s jewels on that. The rat creatures did not kill them all. That is why we can’t let your face be seen, and why you must never, ever shout. Use the bell pull; someone will always be listening. Do you understand me, Isiq?”

  The king’s eyes always told him when to nod.

  King Oshiram was intelligent and kind. He did not talk down to his guest or presume that what he said was forgotten. Quite the contrary, he spoke to the man seriously, as to a peer, about the intractable problems of the Isle of Simja, and darker matters in the outer world. He often called him Ambassador or Admiral. He even brought an Arquali fish-and-dagger flag and set it up on a pole in the corner, but after the king left the man had folded it sadly and left it by the door.

  One day the king told him with great anxiety of the death of Pacu Lapadolma. “An accident, they said, an allergic reaction to her food, isn’t that a preposterous claim!” It was, said the king, a sign of much worse things to come. It meant the Great Peace was unraveling. Then he shrugged, and glowered, and scratched the back of his neck, and murmured almost inaudibly that perhaps it was never meant to succeed.

  After that each visit brought more awful news. The M
zithrinis were in a state of panic and suspicion. They had canceled their goodwill missions to Arqual, and were preventing visits—all visits, commercial, scholarly and diplomatic—to their own country, just as in the worst years after the war. The Permanent Blockade by the White Fleet, which just that autumn they had talked of abolishing, was now tighter than ever. Ships that strayed too close to the Mzithrini line of control were met with warning shots across their bows.

  The doctor advised the king to spare his guest these stories—“if you ever want to see him recover, that is.” The king frowned, but obeyed. For almost a week. Then came a day when, after struggling through an amusing tale about his nephew’s habit of putting trousers on dogs, he fell silent, until the man stopped glancing out the window and looked at the monarch with concern.

  The king met his eye. “The Shaggat Ness,” he said quietly. “Do you remember who he was, Admiral, even if you’ve forgotten yourself?”

  The man nodded, for he did.

  “All this ferocity and paranoia, this self-quarantine they’ve imposed, this blasting of guns and practicing for war. It’s all about the Shaggat. Word’s leaked out. The whole Pentarchy is ablaze with rumors that the Shaggat Ness is coming back. From the grave! From the bottom of the Gulf of Thól! His old minions on Gurishal have some daft prophecy—connected I gather with the Great Peace itself—and now they’re delirious with the prospect of his return. And the Five Kings, damn them, are as superstitious as the blary Nessarim. So they’re turning away every possible ship that might be trying to smuggle the madman back to Gurishal. Even though he’s forty years dead and gone!”