The River of Shadows

by Robert V. S. Redick

  “We might yet,” said Pazel, embracing her. “The ship’s nearly repaired. We might find a way.”

  “Never,” Thasha repeated. “I won’t let her. She had her chance, and look what she did with it. Look at that city, by the Blessed Tree. Are you looking?”

  “We see it,” said Hercól. “We’ve been looking at it for days.”

  “I won’t let her, Pazel,” said Thasha, trying hard to feel his arms around her. “I want you to stay with me. She can try whatever she wants, but this is me, this is my life, and I will never, ever let her come back.”

  Strange Couriers

  5 Modobrin 941

  234th day from Etherhorde

  PROFESSOR J. L. GARAPAT

  Odesh Hened Hülai

  Entreats Your Participation in a Gathering of

  Extraordinary Consequence for the Several Worlds

  Guest of Honor:

  FELTHRUP STARGRAVEN

  of Pöl Warren, Noonfirth, NW Alifros

  TOMORROW NIGHTFALL

  THE OLD TAP ROOM • THE ORFUIN CLUB

  Admission by This Card Only

  Your Absolute Discretion Is Assumed

  The historians passed the card from hand to hand. They were sharp-eyed and earnest, and ready for a confrontation. It was not right for them to have been stopped at the door. “Extraordinary consequence be damned,” muttered the first of them. “How consequential can it be, Garapat, if your guest of honor never bothered to show?”

  “But of course Mr. Stargraven is here!” said Garapat, a tall, frail human with a serious voice and colossally thick glasses in bone frames dangling from his nose. He waved at the round table, which was cluttered with pipe-stands, cakes, gingerbread, mugs of cider and ale, someone’s fiddle, countless books, one black rat. The old leather chairs outnumbered their occupants, but the half dozen seated guests had the look of determined squatters, prepared to resist their eviction.

  “Where?” said the historians, jostling. “That animal, that rat? Felthrup Stargraven is the rat?”

  “Hello,” said Felthrup miserably.

  The historians wanted to squeeze into the room, but could not manage to do so without overtly shoving the old professor from the doorway. Most of the newcomers were humans or dlömu, but there was also a translucent Flikkerman; and the first historian, their leader, had the dusky olive skin and feathered eyes of a selk. It was to the latter that Garapat addressed himself.

  “He’s come with a ghastly dilemma,” whispered the professor, indicating Felthrup. “Night after night he’s braved the River of Shadows. He’s no mage, and has no travel allowance. He’s just leaped in and dreamed his way here, by grit and courage. And he’s up against—” The professor leaned close, and whispered in the first historian’s ear. The listener started, jerking his head back to look the professor in the eye.

  “A little rat,” he said, “has pitted himself against them?”

  “There are worlds at stake,” said Garapat. “Someone has to help him.”

  “And naturally that someone is you,” said another historian, who had blue ink-stains on the hand that gripped the door frame. “What’s the matter with you, Garapat? Why do you spend so much time in this club, picking up strays?”

  “Garapat’s a fool,” said someone at the back of the crowd.

  “He’s from a hell-planet,” said another. “It’s called Argentina. He leaves every chance he gets.”

  “Listen,” said Garapat, unperturbed by their slander, “this was terribly hard for me to arrange, and it’s been a washout, and the poor rat’s spirits are so low. Cibranath couldn’t travel, Ramachni’s nowhere to be found. And Felthrup can’t keep making this journey—indeed he doubts he will ever be able to come here again. Leave us a while longer, won’t you?”

  “You were supposed to vacate an hour ago,” said the first historian. He had managed to wedge his foot into the meeting room. “And you know perfectly well we can’t work in the common chamber. The tables are far too small. Besides, this is the only summoning room in the Orfuin Club. We can’t finish our work without Ziad, and we can only summon him here. Now, if you please—”

  Garapat made one more attempt, reminding them that Alifros was a magnificent world, that a number of their mutual friends called it home, and asking if they were truly willing to contribute to its destruction merely for the sake of a prearranged meeting to discuss the editing of a history text? But the last question doomed his case. Was the study of history some esoteric pastime, rather than a vital tool for understanding the present? The historians bristled at the notion. “I’m going to fetch the innkeeper,” said someone. “Rules are rules.”

  Garapat sighed and looked back toward the table. Felthrup had overheard the debate.

  “Let them in!” he squeaked, waving his paws. “You’ve done everything I could have hoped for, dear professor. The failure is mine. Enter, sirs, the room is yours of course. Do not trouble Master Orfuin. We will vacate now, and I will return to the ship in disgrace.”

  With a shake of his head, Garapat stepped aside, and the crowded room grew quickly more so. The professor’s invited guests—a hypnotist from Cbalu, the high priestess of Rappopolni, a world-skipping baron who had misplaced his physical body decades ago only to become far more contented as a shade, a radical Mzithrini philosopher—cursed and grumbled, and looked at Felthrup shamefaced. “We have done you no service,” said the priestess. “We have wasted your time.”

  “And ours,” said the historian with the ink-stains, dropping his own stack of books onto the table.

  “You are worse off than before,” the baron agreed sadly. “I felt certain more people would come tonight, Garapat. Mr. Stargraven’s cause is the best you’ve ever championed.”

  “They may still be trying to get here,” said the Mzithrini. “The astral paths are dark tonight, and the River turbulent.”

  “We managed, somehow,” said the first historian.

  “No squabbling!” Felthrup turned in circles on the table. “Scholars, friends. If I reduced you noble souls to fractiousness I should never forgive myself. I will go. I am beaten. I must serve my friends in this small rat’s body, since my mind has done them no good.”

  “Now he tries to play on our sympathies,” said the ink-stained man. “Very good: you have them, like the Kidnapped Souls’ Collective that was in here last month. Tragic, but the room’s still ours. Ask Orfuin to send a boy to clean the table, will you?”

  “That’s enough, Rusar,” said the selk. “Mr. Stargraven, if it is not safe for you to linger in the common room—”

  “It is not safe,” broke in Garapat. “The Raven Society sends members here almost nightly.”

  “—then you must trust these new friends of yours to carry on with the effort.”

  “Just so, kind stranger.” Felthrup sniffed as Garapat prepared to lift him from the table. “And may I say in passing that it is an honor to meet with members of the Tribe of Odesh, however briefly.”

  “You know something of Odesh, do you?” said the Flikkerman dubiously, as he settled into his chair.

  “I know you are pledged to defend knowledge above all else,” said Felthrup, “and that you have paid a great price for that dedication, through the centuries—not least when the Emerald King burned the archive at Valkenreed, and threw the librarians into the flames. I know how heroically you have labored since then—labored against forgetting, as your motto proclaims. It is a mission to which I aspire in my dreams, though I know full well that I am unsuitable. Why, I cannot even grasp a pen.”

  The bustling scholars had grown still as Felthrup spoke. Now all eyes were on him. “You’ve been telling him about us, then, Garapat?” said the selk.

  “Not a word,” said the professor.

  “Then where, Mr. Stargraven, did you learn about the Tribe of Odesh?”

  “By reading, sir,” said Felthrup. “I have no library of my own, but in the course of my journey I have read certain small selections from a book by Paze
l Doldur.”

  “Pazel Doldur!” shouted all the scholars at once.

  Suddenly the lamplight flickered. Paintings on the walls rattled in their frames, and a number of the items on the table danced in place for an instant.

  “There, now we’ve gone and summoned him by accident!” said the first historian. “Welcome to an increasingly chaotic evening, Doldur. No, we didn’t mean to bring you here. We’re with Ziad, if you care to know. We’re your competition.”

  “Felthrup,” said Professor Garapat, “are we to understand that when you spoke of the Merchant’s Polylex you meant the thirteenth edition? Are you really in possession of a copy?”

  “Of course,” said Felthrup. “But who were you speaking to?”

  All at once he squealed, and jumped three feet straight up from the table. Something had stroked his back, though no one in the chamber had moved.

  “They were speaking to the editor-in-chief of your Polylex, Felthrup,” said Garapat, “and a man whose second great work, Dafvniana: A Critical History, is, dare I say, nearing completion?”

  “All in good time, Jorge Luis,” said an old man’s rasping voice. The rat’s fur stood on end: the voice was coming from an empty chair. Felthrup backed away in instinctive terror, until he stepped onto a fork and scared himself anew.

  Garapat nodded at the chair. “Mr. Doldur has not gone to his final rest. He is a dweller in Agaroth, death’s twilight borderland, while he waits for his own subeditors to finish their work.”

  “I want to have a look at the last book that will ever bear my name,” said the voice. “Is that so very odd?”

  “Most understandable, I should say,” continued Garapat, “especially as A Critical History will serve as the cornerstone of Dafvni studies for decades to come.”

  The other scholars hissed: “Not true! Our book will do so. Ours will be finished first.”

  “These gentlemen are writing a similar book,” said Garapat, “but both teams were hobbled, tragically, by the early deaths of their editors. The difference is that Ziad would happily retire to his grave, and leave these worthies to complete the book alone. But they still long for, indeed demand, his help. Consequently they have … delayed the natural course of things.”

  “What is ‘natural’?” scoffed one historian. “ ‘Natural’ is an abstraction, a will-o’-the-wisp. Besides, he signed a contract.”

  “I will be off,” said the voice from the chair. “My compliments to Ziad. And I will thank you to be more careful what you chant in Orfuin’s summoning room, henceforth. Next time you bring me here in error I shall scatter your documents, and your ale.”

  “But Doldur!” said the time-skipping baron, who appeared to be the only one who could see him, “you simply must meet Stargraven before you go.”

  “I am dead, sir. And a full professor, too. I must do very little.”

  “He knows your protégée’s son, your namesake.”

  The chair squeaked, and a pile of books slid sideways. Felthrup had the impression that someone was leaning toward him over the table. “You know Pathkendle? Pazel Pathkendle, Suthinia’s boy?”

  “Of course,” said Felthrup. “We are allies, and fond friends. Shipmates, too—or so we have been.” Felthrup’s cheek began to twitch. “But Arunis and Macadra are going to steal our ship, steal it and sail away. What they will do with the human beings I cannot imagine. But the Nilstone! It will pass into their hands, and that will bring disaster on us all. Macadra’s Ravens are already the power behind the Bali Adro throne; I heard that much in this club, before Prince Olik said a word. Her dream is to bind all Alifros within that Empire, with her at its ugly center. And that plan is sweet—tender, modest, benevolently restrained—compared with Arunis’ own. He would use the Stone not to rule Alifros, but to destroy it. He told Macadra how it was to be done, and it even shocked her. Orfuin heard them and closed the club!”

  “He didn’t,” said Doldur.

  “He did, in fact,” said Garapat, as heads nodded around the table.

  “He did! Oh, he did!” Felthrup was rubbing his paws together before his face. “I was hiding under the stool in the form of a small wriggly thing, an yddek, and Orfuin called them devils and announced that the bar was closing, that they could not plot holocausts here, and Macadra’s servants were so angry that one of them stomped a little sweeper to death, and would have done the same to me if I had moved from hiding, and then vines closed over the doors and the terrace vanished, and the River of Shadows took us all. But Master Doldur! I cannot warn my friends! Arunis has placed a lock on my dream-memories! I thought someone here might carry the message for me, but all these nights of asking, pleading, have been in vain. No one goes to Masalym, or comes from there.”

  “It is a dark place on dreamers’ maps,” said the baron. “No roads lead there. One could take to the River, of course. There was an entrance under the pool in the Temple of Vasparhaven, but no one speaks of it anymore. I think it has been sealed.”

  “I beg your pardon,” said the selk historian, “but the very source of the River of Shadows in Alifros is not far from Masalym.”

  “And it’s our research site, not theirs,” grumbled the ink-stained man.

  “Not far on the scale of the world,” said the baron, nodding. “The River does indeed surface deep in the Efaroc Peninsula. But it would be no swift journey after that: out of the Infernal Forest, up the winding river, across the lava fields with their horrid guardians, over the glacier lake. Then down again, by a long path to the city of waterfalls. Many days it would take, even if no storms impede the passage of the mountains.”

  “We have no time for such adventures,” said Felthrup. “Oh why, why does he want to do it? Ramachni says that Arunis is a native of Alifros, that he belongs there. Where does he mean to live when it is gone?”

  “You mustn’t grow hysterical,” said Doldur.

  “I mustn’t,” Felthrup agreed, dropping violently into a squat.

  “They may hear you in the common room,” said Garapat.

  “Worse,” said Felthrup. “If I grow hysterical I shall wake, and it will be over, finished. I am alone on the Chathrand already! The dlömu have evacuated the ship, and a new crew is coming. I fear I will soon wake no matter how I behave. It is not easy to sleep so long. My stomach is empty and growling like a wildcat.”

  “Eat some cake,” said the ink-stained scholar.

  “It won’t help, he’s a dreamer, you’re not listening!” hissed the others.

  “Do you mean,” said the voice of Pazel Doldur, now hushed and astonished, “that the Nilstone, Droth’s Eye, the Scourge of Erithusmé, is back aboard the Chathrand?”

  “Back?” said Felthrup.

  “Of course, back. The great wizardess herself conveyed the Stone through Alifros upon that ship, in her quest to banish it from the world. She had a hidden safe built right into the wall of her cabin, lined with all the spell-dampening materials she could lay her hands on, and yet the Nilstone still caused terrible things to happen aboard the Chathrand—altered it, too, by drawing ghosts and spell-shards and residue of old charms into that vessel like iron filings to the lodestone. Felthrup, sir: you must tell me more of this. I am very fond of Suthinia, you know. She named her son after me.”

  Then the scholars, and Professor Garapat, and his five invited guests, began to talk in great excitement, spouting names, grabbing books, completing one another’s sentences. Felthrup twisted and turned, his stumpy tail knocking against the tankards and plates. Then the Flikkerman raised his arms and flashed so brightly that everyone was briefly dazzled.

  “We’re going to wake him ourselves at this rate,” he said.

  “Quite right,” said Doldur. “Now do tell your story, Felthrup—but briefly and calmly, pray.”

  Felthrup did not manage to respect either condition. His nerves were all but destroyed, and the gleam of hope in this eleventh hour had gone straight to his heart. But with the aid of Garapat and the other invited guests, who had
heard it once already, he got the essence of the tale across. “I can’t imagine what will happen to the human crew,” he said in closing. “Will they be killed, or taken away as curiosities to Bali Adro City? Will they be enslaved?”

  “It will not long matter what becomes of them if you lose the Nilstone,” said Doldur. “No, this is truly frightful. To think that my book has done so little good! That it has even come close to informing Arunis how to master the Nilstone! And this travesty involving the Shaggat! It seems that Arqual has only sunk deeper into corruption since my death.”

  “There is hope for Arqual,” said Felthrup, “if Empress Maisa should somehow regain her throne. As for your book, it had little chance to do good, for the Magad dynasty has sought out and destroyed nearly every copy—along with their owners. When mere possession of a book can see one burned at the stake or tossed into the sea, the natural inclination is surely to get rid of it.

  “But Master Doldur, there is something I do not understand at all. The thirteenth Polylex was written a century before my time. How is it possible that you know Suthinia Pathkendle? Is she ancient? Did she marry Captain Gregory and give birth to Pazel as an old, old witch?”

  “Nothing of the kind,” laughed Doldur. “Indeed, I believe in your time she is barely fifty. It is a long story, Felthrup. The creation of the thirteenth Polylex was an adventure in its own right. But here is an answer to your question, in brief: I was orphaned by Magad the Second. His wars of greed and conquest took my father and my elder brother—soldiers, both of them. And his royal cousins, flatterers, bootlicks—they took the life of my mother. Not with a spear but with a disease of the bedchamber. She’d given herself into their foul hands for years, in exchange for my school money. Right there in Etherhorde, right under my nose. Astonishing what a love of books can blind one to. You know the revenge I sought, don’t you?”