The River of Shadows

by Robert V. S. Redick

  The resulting crash was very loud. Outside the room, voices exploded: “Pathkendle! Undrabust? What in the sweet Tree’s shade are you doing?”

  The box had dented the floor, but not pierced it as he’d hoped. He raised it again, and slammed it down once more.

  “Muketch! Stop it, damn you!”

  This time the box gouged a pinhole through the tin. Pazel struck a third time, and the hole became a matchstick-length tear.

  “Blow out the lamp, Neeps,” he said.

  “Now? You’ll be blind as a mole!”

  “Hurry!”

  Neeps blew out the lamp, and darkness swallowed them. Pazel struck out blind, again, and again. His lungs were burning, his mind in a haze. Then the door flew open and someone leaped into the room.

  “Muketch! Undrabust!”

  It was Sergeant Haddismal. The Turach waved his hands before his face, choking on the fumes, and began to thrash among the bread boxes.

  Pazel struck once more. Haddismal spotted them and lunged. He swatted Neeps from his path with one hand. On an impulse Pazel tossed his box aside, leaped in the air and came down hard on both heels.

  The floor split like an awning stabbed by a knife. Pazel scraped through, bloodied, and was running before his feet touched the floor of the deck below.

  Fulbreech glided past the gunports, the dormant cannon, the heaps of rigging struck down for repairs. Not hiding: he was the surgeon’s mate, after all, and this was the way to sickbay. No one would ask where he was bound, at this or any hour. Still, it was a pleasant surprise to find the ship so quiet. Hardly anyone about, save a few tarboys scrubbing pots in the galley, and the night shift on the main deck, shaping crosstrees for the mizzenmast. As if they were going to take her anywhere, he thought with a moment’s unease. But then he reminded himself that it no longer mattered. Once his master heard what was coming he would have no choice but to act.

  I could take it now, he had told Fulbreech. Just as surely as she did, ages past, from that cavern in the Northern ice. But she was weaker than I, weaker by far. The Stone marked her, burned her hand, and from that first tiny incision the great Erithusmé began to die. I have been more careful, Fulbreech—her fate will not be mine. All the same I will wait a little longer, if I can.

  Thus had Arunis spoken at their last clandestine meeting, just hours after Thasha had come to Fulbreech in tears, and said, I told Pazel, Greysan. About us. He didn’t want to believe me, but he did at last. There’s no one between us anymore.

  His master had smiled at that.

  But Fulbreech knew there would be no smiles tonight. His master forbade any visit to his hiding place, his lair, between their scheduled meetings. Had threatened to skewer him alive if he did so, in fact—unless disaster threatened them, or threatened the Nilstone. In that case, you must come to me instantly. Decide nothing for yourself beyond the practical. You understand? While you are in my service you may entertain no philosophy, no questions of motive or end. You could never grasp the answers. Concern yourself with how, not why. You are my puppet, Fulbreech. You are my eyes, ears, hands. That would all change, his master had promised, in the life to come. But for now there was a disaster to avert.

  Fulbreech quickened his pace. Just this once he was tempted to abandon the guise of the young medical apprentice. But could he bypass sickbay altogether? No, that would draw attention; he must walk through the ward at least. There was time. He’d been quick. Twenty minutes ago he’d still been fondling that girl.

  He entered sickbay, with its reek of iodine and sweat, and to his unspeakable rage found Ignus Chadfallow on duty. The man was indefatigable. After midnight, and here he was, bothering patients, kneading their scalps, taking notes on the discharge from their eyeballs, poking that thermometer in whatever orifice was nearest to hand.

  “Fulbreech! I’ve been looking for you, lad. Would you like to observe a nearly flawless vestibular spasm?”

  “Nothing would please me more, Doctor,” said Fulbreech, “but I must beg your indulgence for ten minutes; I haven’t come for my regular rounds, you see.”

  “Quite right,” said Chadfallow. “You’re here for Tarsel, naturally.”

  “Tarsel,” said Fulbreech, eyes darting.

  “You have a surgeon’s passion, Fulbreech. At noon I give you Lognom’s Joints and Their Injuries, and twelve hours later here you are, ready to set a man’s thumb.”

  “As it happens, sir, I’m not entirely ready.”

  “Good!” replied Chadfallow. “Overconfidence is a plague in our line of work. And such manipulations cause agony, nearly every time.”

  Fulbreech gave a deferential nod. He had not even glanced at Joints and Their Injuries. “I hope you won’t hold this against me, sir.”

  “Not at all, my boy.” Chadfallow stood and led him down the row. “Why, I too needed help restraining the patient, the first time I wrenched a thumb.”

  The man in question, Tarsel the blacksmith, lay with his right hand floating in a tub of some aromatic broth of Chadfallow’s. The thumb, pointing backward, was swollen up like the thumb of a drowned man. Tarsel lay shaking. His good hand was clamped on the edge of his cot.

  “Doctor,” he said, “I can’t wait no more.”

  Chadfallow put his own hand in the tub. “Still warm,” he said. “The ligaments should be pliant enough. Go ahead, Mr. Fulbreech.”

  “What, him?” cried Tarsel, raising himself in the bed. “Nay, Doctor, nay!”

  “Silence!” said Chadfallow. “You’ve no cause for alarm. This is a simple procedure.”

  “Simple for you,” said the blacksmith, “but this lad here, he’s just a clerk. And he’s nervous as a maid on her wedding day!”

  Fulbreech was staring at the hideous thumb. How hard, he asked himself, could it be?

  “Mr. Tarsel,” said Chadfallow, “you will kindly lower your voice. Men are sleeping. Besides, you risk distracting the surgeon, to your own inconvenience.”

  “My inconvenience!” screamed Tarsel. “Look at him, he’s set to soil his breeches! Keep him away from me!”

  “Shall we proceed, Mr. Fulbreech?” said the doctor.

  Fulbreech never knew how he got through that wrestling match with the blacksmith, whose arm was muscled like the haunch of a bull, and whose screams must have woken men far beyond sickbay. He was not really aware, or much interested, in his own efforts to wrench the thumb. His mind was on the story he would have to tell to escape the doctor’s clutches. He finished piecing it together just as the blacksmith fainted dead away.

  “Low pain tolerance,” said Chadfallow, placing two fingers on the man’s neck. “Ah well, finish up. You’ll have no trouble now.”

  Somehow, brutally, Fulbreech snapped the thumb back into place, with a pop that made him fear he might be ill. Chadfallow’s praise was restrained: he might be blind to other matters, but in medicine little escaped him. Then Fulbreech explained that he would have to forgo the pleasure of the vestibular spasm, as he had actually been sent for headache tablets. “The captain’s own request, sir: he’s lying in the dark, quite unable to sleep.”

  It was a perfect fib: even if the captain later denied asking for the pills, Chadfallow would attribute the contradiction to Rose’s lunacy. Chadfallow took a small vial out of a cabinet and tossed it to Fulbreech. Then he looked the youth squarely in the eye.

  “You may wish to consult Lognom again,” he said.

  “Before I sleep, sir,” promised Fulbreech, and slipped out.

  All this time Ensyl had waited in the ceiling of the darkened passage. Her people had once had a spy-hole beneath a cot in sickbay, but it had been deemed too risky: Chadfallow liked to rearrange the furniture, and to inspect the walls for fungus with a magnifying glass. She kept watch now above a spring-loaded trapdoor. Fortunately there was no other entrance to sickbay.

  What were they doing stalking Greysan Fulbreech? A fool’s watch, a fool’s errand—or the most vital task on Alifros? Ensyl had no way of knowing which of th
ese she had undertaken. But Dri had died believing in Hercól as well as loving him. And who was she, Ensyl, if not the guardian of her mistress’ beliefs?

  It had grown harder, though. Hercól explained so little. Worse, he had become morbidly obsessed with Thasha: her moods, fancies, above all her romance with the surgeon’s mate. Was he another Dastu, another spy for Sandor Ott? Ensyl had demanded. Hercól had begged her not to ask, and more strangely, not even to think overmuch about what they were doing.

  It weighed on her, that last request. Don’t think? Blind obedience? That was part of what Dri called “the madness of Ixphir House,” the disorder she feared would ruin the clan. And what if Hercól was wrong about Fulbreech? What if he was no more than he seemed? A fuse was burning, Dri had whispered once: a fuse that will end in a blast to set the world on fire. The Nilstone, she’d believed, was the explosive at the fuse’s end, only waiting for its spark. How much time did they have? How many more mistakes could they survive?

  Then Fulbreech stepped back into the passage, and Ensyl forgot her doubts. The youth’s eyes were desperate, his mouth tight and strained. Those were not the eyes of one whose work was done. He slid to the left of the door and stood there, back to the wall, like a hunted thing. Seeing no one in the corridor, he suddenly darted across it and threw open the door opposite sickbay.

  Ensyl swore. Hercól was right all along. For the place Fulbreech had entered was a tiny pump room, a service cabin for the machinery that lifted water from the bilge or the open sea, for dousing shipboard fires. It was probably the least-visited cabin on the deck. No other door led into the chamber. Nothing stored there was used in sickbay.

  She pulled the trapdoor open wide. The passage was deserted all the way to the bend at the foremast. But just around that bend, she knew, waited her accomplice. Dangling upside down, she spread her lips, tightened the muscles in her throat and produced a high, soft cheeet: very much like a cricket’s song. An answering shadow flickered at the bend in the passage. Ensyl nodded to herself, jerked her head back inside and sealed the door.

  On soundless feet she ran to the space above the pump room. Four large bilge-pipes rose through the ceiling and continued to the upper gun deck. Like all handiwork on the Chathrand they were tight-fitted, built to allow no seepage of wind or moisture from one deck to another. But what luck—there had been damage here as well: a seam between board and pipe had opened, by warping or trauma to the ship. It was no more than the width of two fingers—two ixchel fingers—but it allowed Ensyl a view of half the chamber.

  Fulbreech had struck a match and now was lighting a candle stub. Ensyl watched as he glued it with its own wax to the top of a cabinet. Then he pulled something else from his pocket: a brass jar, very small, no larger than a cherry. Lifting the lid, Fulbreech inserted a finger and scooped out a tiny amount of white cream. This he proceeded to rub into his palm. He rubbed thoroughly, entirely focused on his task. Then he put the jar back in his pocket and turned to face the door.

  That’s it? thought Ensyl, for already Fulbreech was reaching out (with the cream-coated hand) for the knob. But no, he wasn’t exactly. The hand was aiming for a space above the doorknob. He moved slowly, and with trepidation, as though reaching into a darkened burrow. Then suddenly the hand stopped. The fingers probed, gripped, tightened. Fulbreech inhaled sharply. He stood as though holding a second doorknob, mounted above the first, but Ensyl could see plainly that he was holding only air.

  Until, suddenly, he wasn’t. She gasped, and thanked Mother Sky that her voice was an ixchel’s and could not be overheard. Fulbreech was holding a second doorknob. She had seen no flash or puff of smoke. The knob was simply, suddenly there.

  Fulbreech was shaking with fright. His free hand seized a pipe and held it rigidly, like a backstay in a gale. Slowly, with his eyes tightly closed, he turned the knob.

  Something terrible happened. The door flew wide, Fulbreech stumbled, Ensyl drew back her head. The candle was extinguished—and strangely, no light at all came from the passage beyond. But in the last instant of light, Ensyl thought she had seen through the open door—but not into the passageway. Instead she had glimpsed a strange, dark space, not framed with wood but carved from solid rock. Ensyl had sensed some great bulky shape lunging forward, but then the light had died.

  Mother Sky, what’s happening?

  A low sound, half slither, half shuffle, rose from darkness. Ensyl felt like running; she felt like a child in a darkened bedroom in the clan house, frightened by the echo of human footfalls. But there was nothing human about the sound coming from the darkness beyond the door.

  Fulbreech’s voice came out hoarse and aghast. “M-master?” he said.

  He was answered, if answer it was, by an assortment of foul vocalizations. They were mouth-sounds, maybe, but they formed no words. The sounds were sucking, gurgling, the licking of foul slobbery lips. Suddenly Fulbreech moaned, as though he had touched something unspeakably loathsome, or been touched by it. He stumbled backward; she heard his body collide with the pipes. The door creaked shut again, and clicked.

  For almost a full minute there was silence. Then a voice said, “Have you brought another match?”

  The voice belonged to Arunis.

  “Y-y—”

  “Relight the candle, Fulbreech, and tell me why you have disturbed my rest.”

  Pazel knew the Turachs were on his heels. Their pounding boots sounded right above him; they could probably hear his own progress through the sleepy ship almost as well as he heard theirs. But they would never catch him. The ship’s four great ladderways all ended on the orlop deck: there were of course other staircases, but you had to know where to find them. It kept pirates from racing straight to the hold—and a few weeks ago, mutant rats from swarming straight to the topdeck. The Turachs would have to run all the way to the tonnage hatch, where they could swing down, if catching Pazel was worth such acrobatics. Otherwise they would press on to the midship scuttle. Pazel was running for that narrow stair himself: it was the fastest way up from the mercy deck as well.

  But already his heart was sinking. He had escaped the bread room, but the Turachs knew the layout of the ship as well as he did, and they were larger and faster. They’d be waiting for him at the scuttle. They’d be waiting on every Gods-damned stair.

  He stopped. It was hopeless. A weird alliance of his friends and enemies was determined to keep him from getting anywhere near Thasha. And maybe that was sign enough that he ought to sit still, just as Marila had told Neeps to do. Something that could make Fiffengurt and Haddismal work together was surely a matter of life and death.

  Unless …

  He laughed at a sudden, ridiculous idea. Could Rose be marrying them? Could that be how Thasha meant to “end it”? Were they keeping him away out of pity, for fear he’d attack Fulbreech on the spot?

  Impossible. A ship’s captain could marry anyone, it was true … but Thasha couldn’t be that far gone. Could she?

  He thought suddenly of Neda and Cayer Vispek, and his unsettling dream about the burial at sea. The Isiq girl wants to be rid of him. He felt ill. Maybe his mind-fit was coming early. Or maybe Thasha wanted to be married before the dlömu came to take them off for their visit to the Issár.

  But hold on: the dlömu. Perhaps there was another way off this deck. He turned on his heel and ran straight back the way he had come. When he passed by the wreckage of the ixchel’s fortress he saw lamplight shining down through the hole in the bread room floor. Fiffengurt’s voice sounded hoarsely, calling his name. He didn’t answer. Straight on he ran, and minutes later reached the forward scuttle: a tiny, neglected laundry-chute of a staircase dropping sharply down to the hold.

  He descended. Rin’s eyes, the smell. The flooding had washed out some of the cinders, blood and rat-filth, but what remained was exposed to the air now, and rotting … he shut his mind to such thoughts and groped into the darkness ahead. He had one chance, and if it came he would have to seize it instantly.

&nb
sp; The scuttleway let onto a flying catwalk: a kind of bridge some twenty inches wide and eighty feet long, spanning the cavernous hold. No rail, and no way of telling if the boards were intact. Pazel set out across it, utterly blind, restraining a suicidal urge to run. The catwalk felt sound. He walked with arms stretched before him, but in fact he had no idea of his distance from the hull. And what then? How on earth would he get down to—

  The catwalk ended. His foot met with empty space. He fell like a stone, and almost before he had time to be afraid struck the curving wall of the hull, and rolled and spun and crashed to the bottom of the hold.

  First, a moment of stunned stillness; then the pain rushed in, and he cursed in a cascade of languages. But he was not dead, so he’d keep moving. He could still make everything all right. He crawled through a blackness of soaked and stinking wreckage. Bags of spoiled grain, ends of cables, shards of broken amphorae and scraps of wood. At times he was almost swimming in it. He doubted that he was moving in a straight line, but when he could touch the solid hull he corrected his path.

  And suddenly there it was: moonlight. Not from any window above him, of course, but from below, reflected in a puddle on the stone quay beneath the Chathrand, through the hole in her flank. The shipwrights had not yet closed the wound: two enormous planks, or wales, remained to be fitted in place. Pazel dragged himself through the sawdust (fresh sweet smells) and looked out through the belly of the Chathrand. He was at the very bottom of her, just yards from the keel, and about fifteen feet off the ground.

  Thasha. Love and fury blended hopelessly inside him. He had been too timid in protecting her, too selfish and slow. Aya Rin, let me get there in time.

  He dangled from the bottommost wale, and let go. Pain shot up his legs where they struck the stone, but he managed a clumsy take on the straight-drop-and-roll maneuver Thasha herself had tried so hard to teach him. Landfall at last, he thought absurdly, struggling to his feet. Then he ducked under the keel, dashed to the opposite scaffold and began to climb.