The River of Shadows

by Robert V. S. Redick

“To expose his crimes,” said Felthrup.

  “His crimes, and all the crimes, lies, venality of Arqual. In pursuit of that end I was a driven soul, a maniac. But only a mortal maniac, and an impoverished one at that. I needed help, and in good time I found help, from the one being in Alifros who could make my impossible dream a reality. I mean, of course, the wizardess Erithusmé.”

  “Aha!” said the rival historians. “Magical help from the start! That’s cheating!”

  “I earned my reputation as a historian with no aid from any charm,” Doldur continued, “but Erithusmé saw the kernel of a mage within me, too. She warned me of the consequences if it should germinate—no normal existence, no wife or family, no rest—and I accepted them, dreaming only of my book, my book of revenge. So it was with her help that the Polylex came to be. I poured all the spellcraft I learned into research, research. I plucked secrets from the Empire like grapes from the vine, and gave them in bushel-baskets to my assistants. The book grew like a vine as well: mad, unruly, heavy with forbidden fruit.

  “One warning, however, Erithusmé never gave me—that Magad would tear all Alifros apart in his desire to find and punish me. I became the most wanted man north of the Nelluroq. The wizardess could protect me only so well: she had other, grander fights than mine, and was breaking under the strain. Nor was there anyplace to hide me in the North. Arqual was impossible; the Crownless Lands were thick with Magad’s forces and spies; the Mzithrin was closed to nonbelievers. So the wizardess did what she could: she smuggled me away, to a distant time and place.

  “It was a fair city called Istolym, part of the Empire of Bali Adro. A gentle and a wisely governed land, then. In time I learned that I was on the far side of the Nelluroq, living in the century previous to my own. Why she chose that place, I suppose I’ll never know. But I think now that she sent me back in time in case I should ever make the journey home—in the rough hope that the Red Storm would bring me forward about as far as I’d been sent back, so that I might return to an Arqual I recognized.

  “I never heard from the wizardess again. But I dwelled in Istolym happily enough, growing as a mage, though lonely for my own time and country, and anxious about the fate of my book. Nine good years I spent there, until the day when another mage, Ramachni Fremken, came to me and said that Erithusmé was lost and feared dead. He told me also that a foul sorcerer had gone north to steal the Nilstone, and that an expedition was being launched to track him down.”

  “Mr. Bolutu’s expedition?” said Felthrup.

  “Yes, Belesar came with us,” said Doldur. “And so did a student of mine, a human woman of no great magical promise, truth be told—but such intensity, such a will to work for others! She had studied with me for one year, and we did not yet know if she would ever develop the powers of a mage. But she would not give up. She’d come from a hard, cold place in the Fastness of Ihaban, lost her family to an avalanche; she was as ready as anyone could be to leave the world she knew behind. Her name was Suthinia Sadralin. In time she would marry a Northerner, one Captain Gregory Pathkendle, and give up magecraft for years.”

  “Pazel’s mother! Then she was not from the Chereste Highlands at all?”

  “No, Felthrup. She was a Bali Adro citizen, and proud of it. She went north like a volunteer soldier, to fight a threat to her homeland.”

  “And when you sailed north, the Red Storm caught you,” said Felthrup, “and propelled you forward again in time.”

  “Yes,” said Doldur, “but we had ill luck with the Storm, and it hurled us two centuries forward. Arunis had decades to himself in the North—and when we arrived he was waiting for us. An ambush. We were massacred. The survivors scattered, lived for years in hiding, wanting to fulfill our mission but reduced to the effort to stay alive. Suthinia and Bolutu were the only ones who managed it, in the end. And all that protected them, truth be told, was their failure to blossom into mages. We learned later that Arunis could follow the scent of our Southern magic, like a hound follows blood.”

  “But Suthinia did at last become a mage, didn’t she?” said Garapat.

  “Years later. When the scent had grown cold. And when Captain Gregory abandoned her. She knew, you see, that she could not have both a family and a mage’s calling. The two simply cannot be combined. I think she was torn for years. When he ran away it must have become easier for her—though not necessarily for her children.”

  “And see here, Doldur, wasn’t she rather good with dreams herself?”

  “A fair hand, yes,” said Doldur.

  “And if I recall, her favorite experimental subjects were her children?”

  “That’s rather a brutal way to put it,” said the ghost. “What are you driving at, Professor?”

  “Well, it’s plain as day,” said Garapat. “Felthrup can’t warn anyone back in Masalym, because he forgets everything the moment he wakes. But he’s told you, here and now. And you might just be able to tell Suthinia—”

  “Ah!” said Doldur. “You startle me sometimes, Jorge Luis. Yes, yes, I could do that.”

  Felthrup ran to the edge of the table. “Could you? Could you truly?”

  “I don’t see why not. I did it once before, after the Arquali invasion. She heard me perfectly—though I was not able to offer her much comfort. She had just lost her children. This time, perhaps, I’ll be able to do more than wish her well.”

  “O splendid man!” squealed Felthrup. “Greatest of dead scholars! Oh, brilliance, brilliance, joy and song!”

  “Least I can do for someone who’s dared to read the thirteenth Polylex.” The ghost chuckled. “Of course, we don’t know if our efforts will go any further than that. It would be far better if I could visit young Pathkendle directly—but it is far harder for the dead to visit one they never knew in life. I would spend weeks merely trying to claw my way to Masalym in the darkness: your light is our darkness, you know, and the Little Moon in Southern Alifros is particularly hostile to the restless dead. I say, rat-friend: whatever’s the matter?”

  Felthrup had gone suddenly rigid, head to toe. “The hatbox,” he said, through clamped teeth.

  “Hatbox! What hatbox?”

  “I am asleep within a hatbox. And I have become aware of it. My head is pressed against the wall of the box; I can feel the pressure. I am waking, waking. I cannot fight it much longer.”

  The inky man stared at Felthrup as though tempted to poke him.

  “Don’t you dare,” said Pazel Doldur. “Listen to me, Felthrup, my boy. I think it’s high time I paid my old apprentice a call. So tell me quickly: is there anything else you would like me to say to her, besides the fact that forces are coming from Bali Adro’s capital to seize your ship?”

  “And the Nilstone, Master Doldur,” said Felthrup, not moving a whisker.

  “Of course, of course.”

  “And tell her that her son, your namesake—please, could you tell her that he is brave and kindhearted, and that the tongues he speaks number twenty-five at least? Oh, and that Dr. Chadfallow is aboard as well. Oh! And this is desperately important—that the destination of the ship is Gurishal, the island of Gurishal, is this too much to remember, sir?”

  “My dear boy, I’m a historian. Come, what else?”

  “Wise, quick-witted, mentally capacious ghost! Nothing else, unless … yes, oh yes!”

  Felthrup forgot himself, turned his head, knocked it against something no one else in the room could see. It was done: the black rat faded like a mirage. His last words seemed to hang in the air when he himself was gone:

  “Tell her that Pazel is in love.”

  One hour later, at an unthinkable distance from the cluttered room in the lively tavern, Suthinia Pathkendle awoke with a start, in her hard bed in the rented cottage on the poor side of Simjalla City. The voice that had begun in her dream was still speaking, though she knew she was awake. It was a beloved voice, her old master’s; it filled her with the near-irresistible urge to put her hand out and grasp his own. But she could see no
hand. And the message, when she fully woke and understood it, terrified her with the certainty that she had waited too long.

  That remains to be seen, I think.

  “Master?”

  He was gone. A normal person would already be deciding that he’d never been there, that the voice was only the wind’s, moaning under the eaves, sighing through the cracks she’d never bothered to fill. But Suthinia would never again be normal. She’d become herself at last, a true mage, and she knew a specter’s voice when she heard it.

  After midnight the fire always died; the house grew bitterly cold. Suthinia lit a candle, pulled her tattered coat over her nightgown. She crossed the freezing floor into the main room. Yes, the curtains were drawn; the night patrols, the tramps and prostitutes, would see nothing. She took the vials of dream-essence from their hiding place within the brick wall. She studied them, red smoke, blue smoke, cherished links to two souls. Then she held them to her cheeks. The blue vial was cold. It usually was. Neda’s training as a sfvantskor had raised walls inside her; only in the deepest sleep did they come down.

  But there was an answering warmth from the red vial. She moved it from her cheek to her neck, wrapped her coat over it, and her arms over the coat. As the vial warmed she could sense his nearness, the soft sound of his breathing, the beat of his heart. For the thousandth time in the last six years she found herself aching with the need to touch him, hold him as she was holding this hard thing of glass. She felt a violent tearing, a rending inside her and she knew the feeling was guilt. Son of mine, son of mine. How did my fight become yours?

  “It wasn’t your fault,” said Pazel to the woman who walked at his side. “It was Chadfallow’s, wasn’t it?”

  They were in the tall grass over the headlands in Ormael. Below stretched the Nelu Peren, sparkling at midday, threshing against the rocks. Gulls cried, and curlews. The sea-wind moved over the grass like the bellies of invisible ships, racing one after another into the plum orchard beyond. The woman was holding his hand.

  “The more I learn of what has happened,” she said, “the less I dare to speak of fault. Except my own, that is. I know well enough what I might have done, had I thought more of you and Neda, and less of myself.”

  The plum trees were suddenly all around them. The white blossoms had opened; bees moved from branch to branch, pollen-dusted. It was spring.

  “Yourself?” said Pazel. “Come on, Mother. You thought of yourself even less.”

  She looked at him sharply.

  “I always knew you had something on your mind,” Pazel went on, “but I never for a minute thought it was anything selfish. Neither did Neda. We could tell, you know. You had awful tasks, awful secrets you didn’t want to burden us with. But you should have told us. We were jealous of those secrets. That’s why Neda was angry all those years. Because she missed you so badly, wanted you back.”

  They were leaving the orchard for the ragged woods beyond, looking up at the Highlands, the land he had always thought she came from. He knew better now. His mother had come from the South; he himself was but half Ormali; he had cousins in Istolym—tol-chenni cousins, if any were still alive. She hadn’t told him in words, exactly; she had simply decided it was time he knew.

  “I could have handled the truth,” he said.

  “Yes,” she said, “you could have. You always had idrolos, that special courage that let you look at things squarely. Neda had far less of it, and so did I. Don’t you understand, Pazel? I couldn’t tell you the truth without facing it myself. And the truth was that I’d failed everyone—Doldur, Ramachni, my murdered friends. I’d failed Bali Adro, failed Alifros itself.”

  “The fight wasn’t over, Mother. Arunis still didn’t have the Nilstone.”

  “It was over for me. I gave it up the day I married Gregory. My friends from the expedition had all been found and slain, by Arunis or the men he hired for the job. One was poisoned at a meal I was late for. I’d have died that evening if I hadn’t gotten lost in the back streets of Ormael. Another was killed in Eberzam Isiq’s garden. He traveled all the way from the Mzithrin to the heart of Arqual, a miracle, and only managed to croak a few words of warning to Isiq’s daughter. She’s the one, isn’t she? The one your rat-friend believes you care for.”

  Pazel looked down, suddenly shy. “Why did he mention that?” he asked.

  “I wonder if he knew why himself,” said his mother. “The rat is not a mage, by any chance?”

  “No,” said Pazel, worried now. His mother looked so grave. “You’re upset because she’s Admiral Isiq’s daughter, aren’t you?”

  Suthinia shook her head. “That sort of thing doesn’t matter now. Pazel, does she love you too?”

  “Yes. I mean, Rin’s eyes, I think so. She’s … alluded to it. Mother, why do you look so blary morbid?”

  “I wish you happiness,” said Suthinia. “You know I always have.”

  “Well,” he said uncertainly, “thanks.”

  “We should not love,” she said with sudden fierceness. “The dlömu do a better job of it, or used to. Ask them about dlömic love, if you find someone who remembers the old days. But our own kind, human love: we never can make that work. It’s like the milk I used to send you for, from the Brickpath Dairy. Always souring, sometimes even before you reached home. Souring into fear, or dumb greed, or shame. It was shame that kept me silent, Pazel. I wanted to live, to love Gregory, sail with him maybe, raise children at his side. What could I have said to you? ‘I come from a proud, fine kingdom. They sent me here to fight a monster, but I stopped fighting him, I fled.’ How could I have looked you in the eye? People always say that our children want our approval, but what about the reverse?”

  “You told Captain Gregory.”

  “And lost him. Forget what they said in Ormael, Pazel. Gregory was never a traitor.”

  “I know that,” he said. “I’ve always known that. He was honorable.”

  The woman laughed. “So honorable he couldn’t bear to stand in my way. I swore that he was doing nothing of the kind, that I’d made my choice freely, with no regrets. But he was too clever. He listened close, the few times Doldur or Machal or one of the other survivors stayed under our roof. He put the pieces together. ‘You’ve shaped your life around this, Suthee,’ he said at last. ‘You studied magic, crossed the blary Ruling Sea, tossed away your world. Not to keep house for a sailing man. To fight for your people. All people. And we both know why you’re not doing it.’

  “That was the last real talk we ever had. He was outbound the next morning, on a voyage of less than a month. The voyage he never returned from.”

  They had reached the black oaks beyond the orchard. Pazel looked at his mother. Deep sadness in her eyes. But something was missing; she was leaving the best part out. It was a familiar tactic. This time he wouldn’t stand for it.

  “Go on,” he said, “tell me the rest.”

  When he upset her the landscape shimmered, quaked. It was quaking now. “I’ll tell you this,” she said. “I’ve guarded your dream-essence all these years, and haven’t dared use it, because I knew it would hurt you when I did. You’ve changed, you know. You’ve developed an oversensitive mind.”

  “I can’t imagine why,” he said.

  “The language-spell made it harder, yes,” she said. “But tell me the truth, will you, please? Hasn’t it been worth it, after all? Worth the fits, the pain, even the danger?”

  No hiding here: whether he said it or not she was going to know. Which meant he too had to face the question, choose an answer, once and for all.

  “Yes,” he said at last, “barely. I don’t know who I’d have been without the Gift. Happier, maybe, or just as likely dead. It’s all right. I like who I am.”

  Suthinia touched his cheek. “My son,” she said, “who has sparred with eguar and Leopard People, and chatted with the murths of the sea.”

  Her smile contained a hint of triumph. He did not much care for it. “What else?” he demanded, for he could
sense that a great deal remained to be said.

  “I’ve been taking out the dream-vials for two months now,” she said, “and I’ve looked a little into your dreams. Not because I wanted to spy on you. It was simply the only way to make contact.”

  So that was how she knew about Thasha. “What else?” he said again, impatient.

  “You … react, each time I look,” she told him. “That’s probably why your fits have come more often. And now that I’ve finally stepped into your dream I expect it will be even worse. You might have another fit anytime.”

  Pazel took a deep breath. “All right,” he forced himself to say. “I understand, and I’m not angry. But you have to stop. Maybe I could put up with more fits, to be able to talk with you now and then, even in this strange way—but not until all this is over. It’s too mucking dangerous. The last fit I had is part of why they locked us up. The dlömu are weird about madness; it scares them silly. Promise, Mother. Promise you won’t look into my dreams anymore, unless it’s a matter of life and death.”

  Suthinia tossed her hair, resentful. “Fine,” she said. “I promise. Of course.”

  She was angry, biting something back. He took her hand, hoping to soothe her, and they walked on for a time. He tried to find a way out of the silence, but every path seemed choked with thorns.

  “So that’s why Papa left us?” he said at last. “So that you’d be less bound to Ormael? To help you return to the fight you came for?”

  “Yes,” she said, “that’s why.”

  “Then it wasn’t about Chadfallow?”

  Suthinia jerked her hand away. Suddenly the world was fluid, a blur. The sunlight lanced through the oak limbs, blinding; down was up, and though his mother remained close by he somehow could not look at her directly.

  “Ignus?” she said. “Ignus. Yes, he may have had something to do with it.”

  “You weren’t going to tell me, were you?”

  “I’ve tried to respect his wishes,” she said.

  “Whose wishes? My father’s? Chadfallow’s? Rin’s eyes, Mother, why are you still hiding things? What did Papa carve in that tree?”