The River of Shadows
Page 37
Then came a general shout of alarm. Pazel looked up and saw Arunis jump from the mast. He had reached a height where it extended well past the Chathrand’s rail toward the quay. The distance looked impossibly great: Arunis, he thought, was going to fall short of the quay, plummet some 150 feet and strike hard stone, close to where Pazel had crawled out through the hull.
But it did not happen. Arunis cleared the gap with ease. The soldiers caught him, supported him—and then (Pazel felt a sudden, powerful urge to leap himself) stood back from him and raised their weapons in salute.
The mage’s voice came from below, faint but clear: “Bring a horse, and send another rider ahead to announce me. I have business in the Upper City, and I do not wish to be stopped and questioned at the gates.”
Someone darted away through the crowd. Arunis staggered over to one of the broken lampposts and leaned against it while the soldiers milled about him, offering him water, bread, someone’s coat. Arunis touched his leg, and the gaunt hand came away bloody. Then he felt his jaw, and winced. As if remembering, he turned and looked up at the mast where Pazel clung. Youth and sorcerer locked eyes for a moment. Then Arunis smiled, nodded to him almost cordially, and turned his back on the Chathrand.
“Shameless, interfering, cow-headed dullard!”
Lady Oggosk cracked her walking stick over Pazel’s back. Pazel, climbing over the tonnage hatch rail, took the pain as his due. Facing Hercól and Fiffengurt, as he did when he stood upright, hurt considerably more.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
“You sure as five-week fishcakes are,” said the quartermaster. “Why couldn’t you do as you were told, just once?”
“That would not be Pazel Pathkendle, would it?” said Sandor Ott, who was studying his cracked-open pistol with some disappointment.
“He didn’t know what was happening,” said Thasha, climbing over the rail in turn.
“Be silent, you impious girl,” shrieked Oggosk. “Many who played their part did not know what was happening. The captain did not know, Sandor Ott did not know, Fiffengurt remained ignorant as a stump.”
“That’s a tad overstated, Duchess,” said Fiffengurt.
“Shut your mouth, you walking salt-dried carcass of a toad! Arunis escaped death because this boy defied you, and leaped on him before Stanapeth could strike. It’s true, my spell was a weakling’s charm. I held him not with iron but with thread, and I only managed that because I’d been spooling and hoarding my thread for thirteen years. Even so I knew the spell would break the instant anyone touched the mage. If not for this lovesick tarboy Stanapeth would have killed him with ease! We’d be standing around his corpse now, toasting our victory! Oh, damn you, damn your low Ormali blood—”
“Leave him alone,” said Thasha, her voice suddenly dangerous. Oggosk, to general amazement, obeyed.
Hercól turned to Sandor Ott. “I keep my promises,” he said, “even when no good can come of them.” With that he unbuckled Ott’s white knife from his belt and held it out, sheathed, to the spymaster.
Ott’s eyes were locked on Hercól’s. He took the blade without looking down. “You did well to ferret out that snake,” he said. “He was a greater threat than I ever understood. But we’ve learned this much: he still has cause to fear a blade. At least, certain blades.”
“And yet he bested us all,” said Hercól. “Rose had a good grip on his arm, but he lost two fingers when the mage produced a knife of his own. Lady Oggosk herself suffered blows—”
“Pah,” spat the old woman.
“And you, Thasha: let me see what that mace accomplished. Right away, if you please.”
Thasha reluctantly lifted the edge of her shirt. On her ribs were a wide, blackening bruise and two gashes, left by the teeth of the sorcerer’s mace.
“Fool!” said Hercól. “You climbed a spar with that? You might have lost consciousness and fallen to your death!”
“But I didn’t, did I?” said Thasha.
“Go to the surgery at once. Pathkendle, take her there, drag her. Chadfallow is already at work on the captain. Have him examine you, too, when he’s finished with Thasha. You may have a hard head—”
“A gargoyle would envy it!” said Lady Oggosk.
“—but I saw you strike those ceiling-planks. And there’s your fall into the hold as well. Go on.”
“Hercól,” said Thasha, “was Arunis telling the truth? Did my father know Syrarys … years before?”
“Nonsense!”
“You weren’t in Etherhorde when I was born,” said Thasha. “You were still in hiding with Empress Maisa. You never saw Clorisuela with child.”
“What of it? Go to surgery, I say, before you collapse.”
“Is Syrarys my mother, Hercól?”
“Thasha Isiq: as your martial tutor, I command you to seek treatment for that wound.”
“Come on,” said Pazel, touching her arm.
Thasha pulled her arm viciously away. She looked at Hercól for a long moment, and then moved slowly toward the hatch.
Pazel walked at her side. They did not speak as they descended to the orlop. Thasha marched aft with hands in fists. Ahead in surgery Rose gave a howl of pain. All at once Thasha stopped and turned to face Pazel, her eyes enraged and wet. A lock of her golden hair was pasted to her shoulder with someone’s blood.
Pazel stammered: “You know, to me—I mean, I don’t care whose daughter you—”
“Shut up.”
He waited. Thasha steadied herself against the wall. It would take hours to spit all the curses from that mouth, and she was not speaking, not saying a word. He wondered how much blood she’d already lost.
“I’ve ruined everything, haven’t I?” said Pazel.
Thasha clamped a hand over his mouth. With that gesture they both grew still. Her hand tightened; she swayed closer to him. Then, not weeping but shaking from head to toe, and sighing with all that she had not said to him in weeks and could find no words for now, she was in his arms.
9. What Fulbreech glimpsed was not Felthrup, who by that time slept only in his closet. In all likelihood it was Bolutu’s veterinary bag. If he had taken it, the youth would have been startled to find inside a notebook with the very words the dlömu and Hercól had just spoken—“a bright day for Alifros,” etc.—written out like a playscript in Bolutu’s hand. —EDITOR.
THE EDITOR
REFLECTS ON THE
CONDUCT OF HIS
HEROES
They are, of course, too young.
You know of what I speak. With the exposure of Greysan Fulbreech there can be no remaining (logical) impediment to a carnal encounter between Lady Thasha and Pazel Pathkendle. In dramatic terms such an encounter is almost obligatory. Neither youth is hormonally defective. Both have considered the possibility for months—and with unseemly specificity, in the case of Mr. Pathkendle. They show no signs of disease or contagion. And they have been supplied with a preposterous array of opportunities: a magic wall, no less, deflects all rival suitors from intruding on their presumably impending bliss.
But I repeat: it cannot happen. Said bliss cannot, and therefore does not, impend. They are too young.
My own status as philosopher and moral paragon is beside the point. Anyone, from the lowliest fishwife to the most venerated saint, can grasp the fundamental wrongness of such a liaison. We need not elaborate. The Great Designer unquestionably decreed that human beings should reach bodily maturity at a certain age precisely that they might refrain from expressing that maturity for another five to ten years. In ancient Senadria the legal age was thirty-three (although we now know that in its declining years the republic collected a third of its income from the sale of special permits to younger citizens); in fair Elynon it was thirty (twice the age at which boys were forced onto the battlefield, and girls into factories to stitch their boots). Truly enlightened cultures, such as the Elari in their frigid fishing townships, aspire to eliminating the behavior completely. A few no doubt succeeded.
Except, of course, in the fugitive territories of their minds. However trivial the latter (it is not their inclination, after all, that concerns us) we should note in passing that neither Mr. P. nor Lady T. views the matter with our own precise and perfect clarity. This is where the moral lesson resides.
You may encounter persons who should not mate. Be ready to explain things. If, as with Pazel, they feel that to do so is no more than the natural expression of a love that is beyond question and well proved, urge them to doubt the very notion of “natural.” If, as with Lady Thasha, they feel the desire to give what is most intimately their own to the one of their choosing, remind them that there is nothing sacred in that choice. Magic may surround them (one may say I love you in twenty-five tongues, another be strong enough to hold death’s orb in her hand) but magic does not inhabit the sordid act of love.
If they protest that an overwhelming mutual tenderness draws them together, observe that virtually all cases of first love end in separation and tears, and that consequently they should do better to skip the experience. If they reply that some love has to be one’s first, unless one would go through life playing come-not-hither, tell them not to split hairs.
If, finally, they live in fear that at any day it may be too late: that the death stalking fleets, cities, empires must surely catch up with them; or that some morning soon they will wake up and find themselves asleep—that is, mindless, insensate tol-chenni with no possibility of experiencing love—well, that changes nothing. Virtue is virtue, and no one should face death without its comforts. Tell them this, if ever you have the chance.
A Broken Blade
2 Modobrin 941
231st day from Etherhorde
She swayed, and he steadied them both. When he kissed her, Pazel realized how hard she was laboring simply to breathe. Her embrace began as something hungry and sorrowful, and in seconds was reduced to an effort not to collapse upon the deck.
“Let’s go, Thasha,” he said.
She shook her head. Tears were crowding out the fury. He told her he understood what she’d been doing, using Fulbreech to get to Arunis, shielding her thoughts to keep everyone safe. He said he loved her for it, that she hadn’t done anything to him that she could have avoided. The words just made her weep. So in desperation he lifted her chin and kissed her once more, fiercely.
“You care what I think?”
Thasha nodded through her tears.
“Then don’t fight me, for Rin’s sake. You’re bleeding into your boots.”
In the surgery, they found Captain Rose kneeling before one of the heavy slate tables, head tipped back, drinking deeply from a flask. His left arm was strapped down firmly on the table’s surface, the hand swaddled tightly in bandages. Chadfallow was laying out instruments behind him.
“The fiend returns,” said Rose, looking at Pazel.
“I’m sorry, Captain,” said Pazel. “I was trying to help. I didn’t know about Oggosk’s spell.”
“Go rot in the Pits,” said Rose, and drank again. Smacking his lips, he added, “I’ll find a way to collect on what you owe me, Pathkendle. At a time and place of my choosing. Better keep one eye peeled, lad. The Rose family always settles accounts.”
Chadfallow ordered Pazel to wash Thasha’s wound, and to hold clean cotton gauze over the incision. Pazel did as he was told, thinking of his dream about her wooden heart. Thasha did not speak or even look at him.
The door opened, and Swift rushed in with a small, smoking cauldron. “Hot coals from the galley, sir,” he piped, “just as you wanted.”
“Our new surgeon’s mate,” said Chadfallow, nestling an odd tool like a blunt iron spike into the cauldron. “A waste of my efforts, training Fulbreech. Is he in custody, then?”
“Excellent custody,” said Rose, and laughed. Despite himself, Pazel shuddered. He could guess who had taken charge of the Simjan youth.
“I am glad to hear it,” said Chadfallow, bustling over to Thasha in turn. “I will have some words for that boy myself. He very nearly cost Tarsel the use of his thumb.”
He moved Pazel aside, began to scissor away part of Thasha’s bloodied shirt.
“Was my mother barren?” asked Thasha suddenly.
Chadfallow’s hand stopped cutting, but only briefly. “A nonsensical question,” he replied. “She could not very well have been your mother if she was, now could she?”
“Are you going to tell me, Doctor?”
Chadfallow frowned and fixed his eyes on the wound, as though her head were an unwelcome intruder on the scene. Watching him stitch up Thasha’s skin with deft, swift draws of his needle, Pazel could almost forgive him the evasiveness. But as he tied off the stitches, Chadfallow said, “This is most inappropriate, Thasha Isiq. I have a difficult operation to perform on the captain. And not even for Magad the Fifth would I disregard the privacy of my patients.”
“She was my mother,” said Thasha.
“Well, ain’t that the question?” put in Rose, and cackled.
Chadfallow looked at him with loathing. He walked to the cauldron, donned a padded glove and lifted the spike. The last inch glowed cherry-red.
“Fresh cotton over the wound, Pazel,” he said, “then a wide wrap about her torso, to secure it. Come here, Swift, and restrain his other arm.”
Pazel did as he was told. He tried to resist the weird temptation to steal a glance at Rose and Chadfallow, but eventually succumbed: just as the doctor was applying the tip of the red-hot spike to the captain’s mutilated hand. Rose’s screams were like nothing Pazel had ever heard. He looked away, hoping Thasha would show better sense than he had. The reek of cauterized flesh made him think of a pig roast he’d attended as a boy.
Rose became hysterical. “Dog! Hatchet-man! Mutilator! I’ll cut out your stomach, Chadfallow! Do you hear me, you pitch-forker, you barb-wielding devil? I’ll have your stomach, your stomach and your license too!”
“Keep him still, Mr. Swift!”
“He’s too strong, sir! He’s pulled the blary screws from the floor!”
“Pazel,” said Thasha, “you look awful. You had better lie down.”
“I’m fine,” he said.
“Stop looking at Rose. Was it your head that struck the ceiling?”
A moment later they had traded places: Thasha was on her feet, making him sit on the table, raising his legs. When he lay flat on his back Pazel felt the chamber start to spin. Rose had begun to rave about his father, and Lady Oggosk, and her cat. Thasha told him to close his eyes, and when he hesitated, bent down to kiss them shut.
“You should have done as Ignus wanted,” she said.
“About your bandages?”
“About jumping ship back in Etherhorde. You poor dear fool.”
He really had taken some blows. Thasha pressed a cool wet cloth to his forehead, and his eyes. The noises in the chamber began to recede.
When her hand touched him again he caught it, drew it to his lips. There was a grunt of surprise. From under the cloth Pazel saw that the hand was black, and webbed to the first knuckle. He pulled the cloth away and looked into the startled eyes of Counselor Vadu. The pale dlömu’s head bobbed up and down.
“Jathod, I thought he was a corpse! What were you doing, boy, trying to kiss my ring?”
The surgery was full of armed dlömu. Thasha, Swift and Chadfallow were surrounded; Captain Rose stood gagged with surgical gauze, spears pointed at his neck. The hand with the missing fingers was in a bucket of water; the other still held his open flask. Pazel tried to spring to his feet, but Vadu’s hand clamped roughly on his shoulder.
“Calm yourself. No one is going to do you harm. We heard screaming from this deck, but it was only a veterinary—That is, a medical procedure. Are you Undrabust?”
“Pathkendle,” said Pazel. “What’s happening, why are you here?”
Vadu turned
his perpetually amazed face in Thasha’s direction. “And that is the girl called Thashiziq. Very good, very good.”
“See here, Counselor,” said Chadfallow, “you may have good intentions, though gagging the captain is an outrage. But whatever you’re about, this is a surgery, and these are my patients.”
“I was hoping you would admit as much,” said Vadu, his head bobbing faster. “Do you consider yourself qualified to describe their condition? And would you be willing to do so in the presence of witnesses?”
“Of course I’m qualified,” said Chadfallow, “but medical knowledge is private, sir, at least in our culture—”
“His culture, did you hear?” laughed one of the dlömic troops.
“—but you must all leave the surgery at once, Counselor. You’re disturbing the wounded.”
“They are already disturbed,” said Vadu. “And so are you … Doctor. That is the verdict of the best minds of Masalym, who have watched you from shore these many days.”
Chadfallow was incensed. He pushed forward through the crowd until stopped firmly by Vadu’s guards. “Counselor Vadu, I am Imperial Surgeon to His Supremacy Magad the Fifth of Arqual. You have nothing to teach me about derangement.”
“No,” said Vadu, almost with regret, “it did not occur to me that you could be taught.” He made an abrupt little wave. “All of them but the captain. You know what to do with him.”
“We’re not insane,” said Thasha. “Your people have simply made a mistake.”
Vadu turned to her, impatience showing in his staring eyes. “When I came into this room, your captain looked up at me and screamed, ‘My mother is a cat.’ ”
Rose snarled.
“Damn it, man, I just cauterized the stumps of his fingers!” cried Chadfallow. “I dare say you might rave a bit yourself, if I held a red-hot iron to your open wounds.”
“You don’t have the right to judge our sanity anyway,” said Pazel. “This ship is sovereign territory, and we’re all citizens of Arqual.” That was not entirely true, but at that moment subtleties hardly seemed called for.