The wind tore at its burial wraps. The rain passed through it, however: a sign of one whose years of death do not yet outnumber those of his life, if you believe the Polylex.
'Captain Levirac,' I guessed aloud, pretending I did not feel its icy hand on my heart.
'No more!' hissed the faceless thing. 'I am forbidden that name, any name, they took my names from me as they shall take yours from you.'
All the same it was Levirac. His wheezing voice had not changed in forty years: from the time when he commanded the Chathrand, and I the young purser waited on his orders. I fancied I could still smell his rotten teeth: in life he chewed sugar cane day and night.
'Go to your rest, and pay me no further visits,' I said (one must never show weakness before a ghost).
The thing slipped behind me. I heard its voice at my shoulder. 'Beware. You insult the dead. When all else is robbed of a man in death, he has yet dignity. This you stripped from your fallen sailors, using their bodies to gild your lie.'
'The Emperor's lie,' I protested, but the spirit clawed at me, annoyed by the contradiction. ' This false wreck you have authored, Rose: it is a prelude. A rehearsal for the death awaiting Chathrand, a ship that was mine and many others', in a proud fellowship over centuries. Never once was that fellowship broken except by death or honourable retirement, until you in disgrace were relieved of command.'
'Damn your crooked tongue! I was reinstated!' 'For a little while,' said the ghost. 'Her next pilot is already aboard.' His insolence astonished me. 'Her next pilot? Get hence, you old vapour, or I'll have my witch root you out of these boards with a cleansing spell!'
That frightened Levirac: I felt him withdraw a step or two behind me. His voice was softer now: 'One other will stand at Chathrand's helm — and that one briefly, briefly. You are this vessel 's doom.'
'And you're a lying, man-shaped stench. Prove you know something, Levirac. Give me a name.'
The spirit only tittered behind me. I started away, and then under his breath I heard him slander you and Mother, sir, with a lie too noxious to repeat. I turned on him in wrath.
What a shock! In his place stood Thasha Isiq, alive, solid as the hand that writes these words. Her mastiffs were beside her; they held me in their gaze and growled. I said nothing; I was waiting for her to thin and vanish like any ghost. But those blue-black dogs were real — and so, I knew in a moment, was the girl.
Pathkendle and Undrabust came up the ladderway and stood beside her, and all three glared at me with hatred. Then I knew who the real deceivers were.
' You sent Pacu Lapadolma to her grave,' I told them.
'We didn't,' said Pathkendle. 'You did. You and Ott and your Emperor and your whole bloody gang.'
Then Firecracker Frix saw the girl and squealed like a pig. The commotion was immense: first terror, then wonder, at last elated cheers. ' Thasha Isiq! Thasha Isiq! The longest of lives to Thasha Isiq!'
If I had been quicker I might have moved against them: killed the mastiffs, tossed the girl overboard, declared her a risen corpse and an abomination. I know this is what you would have done in my place, Father, and you need not chastise me for the missed opportunity. I am not perfect. This we both know, and I humbly suggest we cease pretending otherwise.
Now in any case it is too late: the men are quite aware that she is flesh and blood. They were only too happy to learn that the former Treaty Bride had been hiding from them, behind the spell-wall that keeps us from the stateroom. The only gloomy faces were those of the youths themselves. They saw how well our 'sinking' went, and knew that for all their tricks, the Plan marched forward, unstoppable, with war and ruin (and riches, for some) its only conclusion.
Fiffengurt meanwhile has gone from bad to worse. He is often red-eyed, as if from crying, and goes on about a 'wife' back in Etherhorde who will soon be reading of our deaths at sea. He may have a sweetheart or two, but I know for a fact that he has no wife. Man's capacity for self-deception is a wonder, is it not?
This morning we found ourselves in a pod of Cazencian whales. I had thought the great toothed things all but extinct, for the folk of Urnsfich like nothing so much as the taste of 'sweet whale,' as they name them. On another voyage I should have put down a boat or two and given chase. But Cazencians are fierce fighters, though small for whales, and I should have trusted no one but myself to take them on. Above all our time is short. Each day we linger the Vortex grows, and with it the danger of the crossing.
Once again we have spotted a ship to the north: the same vessel, I think, and a little closer than before. There is still no danger of being recognised, but I must end this letter and adjust our course.
Enclosed is a diamond wristlet. Mr Druffle the freebooter gave it to me in exchange for a midshipman's berth. How Druffle, threadbare slave of the sorcerer that he was, came by such a priceless thing I cannot guess. But maybe it will bring a smile to Mother's eye.
As ever I remain your obedient son,
Nilus R. Rose
P.S. If you are, in fact, dead, may I trouble you to state as much in your next communication?
14
Among the Statues
Lightless. The cage was lightless, and his mind was already succumbing. Not a cage; why had he called it a cage? That was for animals. This was a dungeon made for ordinary people. Bakers, shopkeepers, farmers on the fertile slopes above Simjalla. A carpenter. A schoolboy or — girl with her books still under her arm. His arm? What did it matter, when arm and books and heart were locked in clay?
He walked carefully, heel to toe, from the carpenter to the dancer, arms outstretched in the blackness. He was far from the door, which smelled vaguely of food and was therefore a place of danger. Rested his hand on a gritty clay elbow. They are safer than I. The beasts will attack me first, each other second. Last of all these bodies in their stony sheaths.
He had done as Ott knew he would. He had touched them, explored their features, wondered at the attention to detail. Noses, eyebrows, lips. He would not give them names, though: that was a game for madmen, and Admiral Eberzam Isiq was not yet mad.
Ott himself came no more. The spymaster had stood outside the door on two occasions, issuing hushed, clipped commands to someone who called him 'Master.' Had he hoped Isiq would cry out, beg for deliverance or deathsmoke, weep? The admiral would not give him that satisfaction. When you lose your sword you have your hands. When your hands are tied there remain your teeth. When you are gagged and bound you may still fight them with your gaze. Isiq clung to the litany, an old War College saw from forty years ago, and tried to keep his mind from mocking it.
The want of deathsmoke. He huddled often with his back to the door, sweat-drenched in the hollow cold, heart racing, mind prey to ghoulish fixations. The eyes of the statues. The last thoughts baked into their brains.
Syrarys had kept him from feeling these pangs, by mixing an extract from the deathsmoke vine with the other poisons she passed him in sweet teas and brandies. Just enough to ease him along, believing himself sick but not envenomed, slowly forgetting what it meant to be well.
The detail, the ludicrous detail. Nearest the door stood a woman (do not recall how you learned it was a woman) clutching her throat with her left hand and reaching down it with her right. Choked on a shard of bone, a bit of gristle or hard bread. She was his height. He would not name her. She seemed to be aware of the door. As if dreaming that some bright angel would yet appear there, melt her agonies with a waking touch, lead her by the arm into paradise.
They slid his dinner plate halfway to this woman at every meal, with an insolent shove that left part of the contents behind on the floor. Isiq had to pounce on it, kicking at the rats that hurled themselves on the food the instant it appeared, stumbling quickly behind the choking woman with his prize. A metal plate with three sections; he had licked it clean after every squalid meal, saying 'fourteen', 'fifteen'; struggling thus to keep count of the days he had lain in Queen Mirkitj's private hell. But what if they did not come at reg
ular times? What if they fed him twice in one day and skipped the next altogether? He had only the cycles of his body to judge by, and they were becoming erratic. To breathe on one's hand and be unable to see it. To rest one's chin on a stone shoulder and have no idea of the face.
Someone's name engraved on the back of the plate. Isiq had caught himself licking the signature, over and over, for his tongue was more sensitive than his fingertips, though not sensitive enough to feel out the tiny letters. Had an earlier prisoner used this plate, etched his name in it somehow, declaring, I still exist, you have not reduced me to perfect nothingness for I remember myself, you have not erased me, you have not won.
More likely it was the name of the manufacturer. Do not believe it. Believe it was defiance, stubborn will, blazing on like a mad candle in the dark.
Such were the orders he gave himself. He who had commanded fleets, abolished nations with a word, shaped the lives of thousands with a sharp decision, was now reduced to praying for obedience from an army of one.
He succeeded for a time. With the edge of the plate he was able to scrape a thin groove in the floor, a barely perceptible scratch, from the doorway to the choking woman, from the woman to the room's central pillar, from the pillar to the pit. When Isiq got lost, when the smothered feeling rose in his chest and threatened obliteration, he dropped to hands and knees and sought out the groove, and followed it like an ant from one marker to the next, until he returned to the door. And with his forehead pressed to the crack between door and frame he could actually detect a light, the palest imaginable gloaming, a microscopic flaw in this perfection of darkness, this black stomach in which he was being digested.
That is why they wear stone. It makes them harder to digest.
Madness. He took deep breaths, forcing the air from his lungs over and over, as if pumping bilge from a hold. What if the light is imaginary? The light is not imaginary. And he did not need a speck of light, a name on a food plate, a companion in agony. I am a soldier, I solve problems, I will go about my tasks.
Leaving the plate near the door he had set off on a tour of hell, groping left along the wall. It was a slow and frightful business. He had not gone forty squatting, creeping paces when he nearly died. A pit, yawning beneath his outstretched foot. He had teetered, then let himself fall sidelong, landing on the edge of the pit and just managing to twist back onto the floor. He had lain there, petrified. Cold air flowed from the pit like some fiend's long and rapturous sigh. At last he had risen to hands and knees and groped on.
The pit was shaped like a tongue. At the point where it curved furthest from the wall his fingers had brushed a knobby protrusion. A foothold. He had extended his arm and found another below. One could climb down, deeper into hell. He had lain on his side and reached farther. And then screamed with pain and rage.
The rat's bite was deep; its jaws had locked onto his flesh with a starved thing's ferocity. 'Damn you! Damn you! ' Isiq had rolled away from the pit with the creature still attached to his hand, swung it writhing and squealing over his head, slammed it down on the stone floor beside him. Again. And again. Only on the fourth blow had it released his finger, slashed to the bone by the rodent's teeth. Even then it had refused to die, but had leaped on his stomach and thence back into the pit, splattering him with his own blood.
For two days he had urinated on the wound: Dr Chadfallow's field trick for avoiding infection. Miraculously it had worked; the cut was painful but clean. Gangrene in this festering hole would be certain death.
That night as he pawed at his food, a flaky substance met his fingers. Ashes? Not quite. A herb, sprinkled on his half-raw potato? He touched it with his tongue. And dropped the plate in a panic. And squatted, and scraped together what food he could. And flung it down again, howling in rage and hunger. They were the beasts, his jailkeepers. They had dusted his meal with deathsmoke.
A time came when he knew he must enter the pit. He realised that Ott could not have left such an obvious means of escape; he knew also that the rats came from the pit, and that he risked being gnawed alive. Somehow none of that mattered. A sense of the physical space around him was one of his few holds on sanity, and the pit was a blank spot on the map.
He swept each foothold with his boot. There was a great smell of dung. He eased himself down and felt the air grow fouler; a mould-heavy dampness bathed the walls. Far-off noises, drips and splashes. After twenty footholds his boot met the ground.
An ovoid pit; a low-roofed passage; a shattered door. And then rubble. He knelt and groped. Big rocks, sand, masonry, utterly filling the corridor. A large part of the ceiling must have collapsed.
He felt every inch of the rubble-mound before him, and met with no rats at all. Near the top of the mound, however, he located the fist-sized tunnel by which they surely came and went. He plugged the hole with the largest stone he could lift, but the earth was soft around it, and he knew it would not slow even a single animal very long.
But for many days the rats did not come.
He flexed his finger: it was almost healed. He had an idea that this was his twentieth day among the statues. He had a pair of weapons, now: an iron bar and a vaguely axe-shaped stone, both of which he had pulled from the detritus at the bottom of the pit. The bar had not been worth the trouble: it was too heavy to swing, too thick to pry into cracks. Since heaving it up from the pit he had found no use for it at all.
But the stone was another matter. He swung it experimentally, thinking again of the blow he had not landed on Ott's face, when the arrogant old killer sat beside him. Maybe what Ott said was true, and the attack could only have failed. Or maybe that was pride: perhaps there had been a window between his inspiration and Ott's awareness of the danger, when he might have struck. Why do we wait? thought the admiral, suddenly on the point of tears. For his daughter's face had risen before his eyes.
What had they done with her body? They were not going to Etherhorde, so Thasha would never lie beside her mother in the family plot on Maj Hill. The best he could hope for was that she had been buried at sea, with honours, like the soldier another world might have let her become.
Sudden noise from the middle of the chamber. Clanging, rasping — the same horrid mix. Isiq left the dancer and shuffled towards the central pillar, taking his time. He did not much want to see what awaited him there.
The pillar was six or eight feet in diameter. It was made of heavy brick, not soft stone like the rest of the chamber. Gaps the size of half-bricks had been left intentionally, and from them crept a smell of ancient coal. The pillar also had a great iron door.
It was unmistakably a fire-door, of the kind installed on furnaces. It had a small square window that must once have been glazed. The door was rusted shut, the heavy bolt and staple fused with age into a solid thing, but there was no lock his fingers could detect. For several days he had struggled to open the door, to no avail. Then, on the third day after the rat bite, the noises had begun.
Isiq bent his ear to the window. Crashing, hissing, scraping. All from below — the pillar must have contained a shaft of some kind — and blurred by echoes and distance, but soul-chilling nonetheless. He was hearing the rage-stoked violence of living creatures, battering and biting whatever they could find. And speaking. That was the true horror of it. Most of the voices (he had noted at least a dozen) spoke only gibberish, a snarling, whining, moaning, murderous barrage of nonsense sounds. They suggested some horrible perversion of babies trying out their vocal cords for the first time — but the throats that made those sounds must have been larger than a grown man's.
And some were using words. Simjan words; he caught no more than the odd interjection. Mine! Stop! Egg! Isiq was cross with himself for not following the meaning — he was ambassador to Simja; he had been tutored in the tongue — until he realised that the words were not arranged in sentences. At most, two or three were strung together and repeated endlessly, with a kind of agonised inflection. Hagan reb. Hagan reb. Hagan hagan hagan REB! Reb reb reb r
eb reb-' The words broke off in screeches of lunacy.
All save one. A nattering, sorrowful, sharp-edged voice. Penny for a colonel 's widow? Just those words, gabbled and blurted and wept. Penny for a colonel 's widow? The voice appeared never to tire.
'Rin's mercy, what do you mean?' groaned Isiq.
At once he clapped a hand over his mouth, silently cursing. He had never uttered a sound near the pillar. The creatures fell absolutely silent. Then they all began screaming at once.
'Hraaaar!'
'Egg!'
'Penny for a-'
'Mine!'
Sounds of spittle and claws. The thrashing grew so crazed that the pillar actually shook. Then, beneath the pandemonium, his ears detected a tiny squeak. Putting out his hand, he found that the great bolt had at last broken free of the rust. It would move. With a bit of a struggle he could slide it free.
But why open the door? What if they could climb? Nothing but this slab of iron would stand between him and them. Fortunately the door was mighty, the bolt despite its rust still massive and intact. This was where they stoked the fires, Isiq realised suddenly, this is what turned the prison into a kiln.
Futile to fight on. Damn it, that was the truth. Already the things were scratching open the little tunnel at the base of the pit.
He was sweating again. Those things must have devoured the rats. How is it that they speak? What will they do when they find me? Where is my suit of stone?
He stumbled away from the pillar, holding his forehead, trying not to moan aloud. Almost at once he collided with a statue, his faithful sentry, the woman choking on the dark. She toppled; he tried to catch her but her weight defeated him; she struck the floor with a muffled boom.
'Oh my dear madam, forgive me-'
He found pieces of her in the blackness. Various digits. Her forehead, shattered on the stone. He felt the sting of other eyes, the focused hate of all the statues, that frozen family, that congregation of the damned.
The Rats and the Ruling sea tcv-2 Page 21