The River of Shadows (25 page)

His question was met with silence. The dlömu on the walkway shuffled, as though all were hoping someone else would speak. Then Ibjen startled everyone by slipping under the rail. Deaf to the shouts of his countrymen, he scrambled out onto the cornice of the last stone pillar. It was as close as one could get to the ship. In a somewhat lower voice he called to them again.

“His Lordship the Issár of Masalym must decide how to welcome you. Don’t fear, though. We are a kindly city, and won’t leave you long in distress.”

“Just so long as you don’t leave us to
sink
in this blary well,” said Marila.

“Ibjen,” called Neeps, “where’s Prince Olik, and why in the Nine Pits did he jump overboard?”

“His Majesty has gone to the Upper City,” said Ibjen, “to the Palace of the Issár. I am sure he will speak well of you—generally well.”

“Why did
you
abandon us?” shouted the mizzen-man, Mr. Lapwing, somewhat crossly.

“I was never your prisoner, sir,” shot back the youth, “and Olik bade me come ashore with him. As you know, I gave him my promise.”

“Your
worthless
promise,” shouted Alyash.

“People of Masalym,” said Bolutu, raising his voice, “why are your houses unlit?”

“Because we’re all out here staring at
you,
” ventured someone, and the dlömu on the walkway laughed. Thasha felt a prickling of her skin: that was a forced and nervous laugh. A laugh like a curtain drawn over a corpse.

“Ibjen,” she shouted, obeying a sudden impulse, “we’re running out of food.”

The crowds above grew quiet, thoughtful. “I’ve told them, Thashiziq,” said Ibjen. Then all at once he gave her a sly look. “There’s a saying among us, that even after a hundred wealthy generations, the dlömu would never forget the feeling of hunger.
Barren land and empty sea: from out this womb came I and thee
. In my father’s village they still teach us those rhymes. We’re old-fashioned out there, you know.”

A new kind of grumbling came from the crowd above. Thasha saw Bolutu turn away, hiding a smile. “We’ll feed them, stupid boy,” called someone. “What do you take us for?”

There were uneasy nods, but no one moved. The sun-and-leopard flag rippled in the wind. Then a very old dlömic woman cried out in a voice like a shrieking hinge:

“You’re human!”

It was an accusation.

“That’s right, ma’am,” ventured Fiffengurt.

“Humans! Human beings! Why don’t you tell
us
how long?”

Captain Rose, gazing upward with a malevolent frown, echoed her words. “How long?”

“Tell us!” cried the old woman again. “You think we don’t know why you’ve come?”

Now the other dlömu mobbed the woman, hushing her urgently. The woman clung to the rail, shouting, her limp hair tumbling across her face. “You can’t fool us! You’re dead! Every one of you is dead! You’ve come on a ghost-ship out of the Ruling Sea, and you’re here because it’s the end of the world. Go on, tell us how long we have to live!”

Faces in the Glass

26 Ilbrin 941

There are guests and there are prisoners, and, very rarely, persons whose status in a house is so unusual that no one can assign them a category. Among the latter was an aging man with a bald, veined head and broad shoulders on the Island of Simja. For three months he had been a secret resident in the North Tower of Simjalla Palace, in a comfortable round room with translucent glass over the window and a fire always crackling in the hearth.

Making his case even more unusual was the fact that his presence, his very existence, was known to just three people on earth. One was his middle-aged nurse, who was quiet and attentive and rubbed brysorwood oil into his leathery heels. The other was a doctor who commended him for his habit of daily calisthenics. The third was King Oshiram, monarch of Simja. The nurse did not have a name for her silent patient. Only the men were aware that he was Thasha’s father, Admiral Eberzam Isiq.

It was barely a fortnight since he had recovered his name. It had been cooked out of him during his seven weeks underground, along with most of his memory, all of his pride. Like bricksteak, that detested navy product he’d choked down for decades, salt beef dried in the ovens against the weevils and the damp, food you had to attack with a chisel. After a week submerged in brine it might soften, might absorb something again—or it might not. So it was with the admiral. He had literally been pulled from an oven. From a kiln in a forgotten dungeon under Simjalla, where he had barricaded himself against the monster rats.

He was a stout old veteran, well muscled and formidable even in scarlet pajamas, his new uniform, worn as unself-consciously as battle fatigues. He stared for hours at his slippers, or his bed. He had survived not only the rats but the agony of deathsmoke, from which addiction the doctor was trying to help him break free.

Insidious doesn’t begin to describe it
, the physician had told the King.
It’s in his blood, his urine, even his sweat. He should have all the visible signs: nosebleeds, wheezing, numb fingertips. He suffers none of these, though his internal pain is classic deathsmoke. She didn’t want him guessing—not him or anyone else. But the only way to avoid those telltale signs is to increase a victim’s exposure to the drug very slowly—terribly slowly, Your Highness. The one who did this to him had the patience of a fiend
.

For the doctor, Isiq was a return to form: as a medical student he had worked with veterans of the Second Sea War. For years now he had been the King’s own physician, and knew the monarch trusted him. He did not have a relationship of fear with the King, who was almost young enough to be his son. But he had seen the absolute warning in Oshiram’s eyes when the monarch swore him to secrecy.

“Not a whisper, not a glance, not a cough, do you hear me? They will kill him. I’m not telling you to deny that you’re caring for a patient in the North Tower. I’m telling you
never to need to deny it
. These people are masters of their trade. Imperial masters,
Arquali
masters. Beside them our own spies are imbeciles. They had a bunker inside our walls, under the Mirkitj ruins, and we didn’t suspect a thing. You must try not even to think of him, except when you’ve stepped into his chamber and barred the door.”

The doctor frowned and trembled, but he was no less thorough for his fear. The bloodroot tea he prescribed soothed Isiq’s craving for deathsmoke, if only a little. The fresh greens and goat’s milk brought color to his skin.

But memory proved less willing to return. They had given him a mirror; Isiq had turned it to the wall. After he regained his name he had reached for it again, but the moment his fingers touched the frame he felt a warning shock. The face he saw there might be too full of accusation, too aware.

The little tailor bird urged him to be patient. “Months of winter before us yet, friend Isiq. There’s no cause to worry, or to rush. You humans live so blary long.”

He was a woken bird, of course, and small enough to flit through the eye-level hole in the translucent glass of the window. The King had left this tiny aperture so that Isiq might look down upon the palace grounds: the marble amphitheater, the red leaves swirling on the frog pond, the play of shadows in the Ancestors’ Grove. The bird’s mate was not woken, and this weighed on his heart. Three clutches of eggs they’d raised, across three years, and not one of the chicks had sparked into thinking before they had fledged and flown away. “I know the odds, more or less,” he told Isiq, pecking primly at the crumbs of soda bread the admiral saved for him each morning. “But the truth is, Isiq, that I’m scouting the city. And even beyond it, in the pastureland, although the hawks hunt there. She’s very good, my little pale-throat, very quick and devoted. But if a woken bird came along I don’t know what I’d do.”

At that he beat his wings suddenly and hard. “I hate myself! I’m a rogue! But telling you makes it all bearable, somehow. I’d trust you with my life, Isiq.”

The admiral touched the side of the bird’s sleek head. “Secrets,” he mumbled. In his delight the bird scattered all the crumbs to the floor. It was only the third time Isiq had spoken since his arrival at the palace.

Isiq knew that his own debt of gratitude was far larger than the bird’s. The tiny creature did not know it, but he had talked him out of his nightmares, chirped and chattered away the rats. Isiq no longer felt them clawing the edges of his blankets, nor heard them gnawing at the door. He longed with all his heart to talk to the bird, and to the King, when the monarch had time for a visit. But his mind still froze, seizing up in a horrid blankness, and the words, like slabs of ice jamming a river, refused to flow.

So modest, his victories. When he had spoken the previous time only the nurse had been with him. He had stared at her and suddenly barked, “Puppets!” She had almost screamed, then covered her mouth in terror. She too had been warned to draw no attention to the room.

“Puppets, sir?” she whispered, aghast.

Isiq nodded, hands in fists, mouth working, facial muscles tight with strain. “All of you,” he managed to wheeze, “the little people, just puppets, you’ll see.”

It was a measure of her kindness that she took no offense.

That was last week. And the first time he had spoken? That had been when Syrarys came back into his mind. Syrarys, his betrayer, his poisoner—even his property, for a year, when the Emperor forced him to accept her as a slave. Appalling to be one of the few men left in Etherhorde to own another human being. A hideous secret, one he prayed would never become known to the bird. Like the fact that his grandfather had survived being stranded in the Tsördons with a broken leg by eating the bodies of his fallen comrades, ambushed and slaughtered by the Mzithrinis. A little thigh-meat each day for four weeks, until the snows melted and a mountain patrol found him, all but frozen beside his dying cookfire.

How he had worshipped her: Syrarys, his legal consort, more arousing when she yawned or coughed than Thasha’s mother had been at the height of lovemaking; Syrarys, the only woman whose touch had ever made him weep for joy, though from the first night (her kisses a slave’s kisses, her moans of ecstasy indistinguishable from pain) a part of him had suspected that this joy was on loan from devils, and their rate of interest well beyond his means.

She had leaped back into his memory because of a laugh. King Oshiram had taken a new lover, a dancer rescued from some brothel in Ballytween, he’d said. Terribly shy and unearthly beautiful: she was the reason the King now visited him so seldom. The palace was large, and this girl apparently had the run of much of it—though not, of course, the North Tower. Yet one of the king’s favorite chambers was just two floors below, and one day he had brought her there, and Isiq had heard her laugh. It had shocked him from months of silence. He had started to his feet and said one word: “Syrarys.” For it was
her
laughter. How astonishing to hear it again!

Of course it would be anything but wonderful if it were really Syrarys. For despite all the emptiness that remained inside him, despite the lust that accompanied the laugh, Isiq suddenly knew: it was Syrarys who had done it, fed him deathsmoke, conspired with his torturers, wanted him dead.

Fortunately (yes, fortunately; he must keep that clear) Syrarys was the one who had died. But this girl’s laugh! Identical, identical. From that day he had listened for it constantly, moving as little as possible lest by making some slight sound he should miss her. Now and then he would kneel and place his ear against the floor.

On his next visit the King spoke of the girl in a state approaching delirium. He wished he could make her queen, though his eventual bride was already chosen. He remarked on how intelligent she was “in her quiet, listening way.” He was jealous of every man in the castle, he said. Jealous and fearful. Above all he wanted to keep her safe.

One day life changed for the tailor bird. It had befriended a street dog, it told Isiq. A scrappy, short-legged creature, also woken, who slept on a pile of sacks behind the milliner, and begged scraps from the Ulluprid cooks in the tavern across the alley. The dog was sociable and self-assured, though he would not speak to just anyone. Indeed he had a strict policy, or as he put it “a survival plan.” He spoke to humans only in the farthest reaches of the capital, very far from his alley.

“And never in groups. And always at a distance, and with a clear escape path. I don’t fancy slavery, getting nabbed and flogged to some traveling carnival, doing tricks or telling fortunes for the rest of my days. You can’t be too careful, bird. Just be glad you have wings.”

For all that, the dog was a bit of a gossip, and even more of an eavesdropper. When the mutated rats stormed the city, a number of animals had revealed themselves as woken, screaming for help or howling prayers as the monsters attacked. Some had been killed, others befriended; many had counted on the inability of humans to tell them apart from their unwoken kin (one crow or alley cat looking much like another) and later blended back into their old, hidden patterns of life.

“But the dog and I mean to find our woken kin, Isiq,” said the bird. “Who knows how many there are? Twenty? Fifty? We can help one another, learn from one another. The dog has thought it all through.”

“C-care—” Isiq squeezed out, with tremendous effort.

“Careful? Oh, we will be, that I promise. And I’ll never abandon
you
, my friend, nor mention you to a soul, human or animal. Oshiram’s terribly good to you, and he must have his reasons for keeping you hidden, though what they are I can’t begin to guess.”

“Ott.”

“Ought what? Ought to release you? Do you mean he’s holding you a
prisoner
?”

Isiq shook his head. Ott was a
who
, not a
what
. A dangerous, a deadly
who
. Isiq could summon the face (damaged eye, vile grin) though he could recall nothing specific about the man.
He is far away
, thought the admiral suddenly. But that did not mean, somehow, that he could not strike.

Weeks passed. Sometimes the bird was crestfallen: he had sat on a temple roof and dared to shriek out words in the Simjan tongue, then watched the blackbirds and wrens that flitted from district to district, tree to tree, not one showing the least sign of understanding. But the next day he might be overjoyed, and come to the admiral with tales of some new friendship, or dreams of a future life, when animals and humans no longer had anything to fear from one another, and lived in peace.

One day he and the dog had made the acquaintance of a
fenneg
, one of the giant flightless birds of Simja, ridden by couriers and constables throughout the bustling city. The
fenneg
had been aware of them for some time, but it was only now that he summoned the courage to speak. In their first conversation the
fenneg
shared a secret: he had recently made a delivery to the house of a witch.

She was a dark-haired woman from the mainland who lived alone near the East Gate. She had winked at the
fenneg
in a strangely knowing way, and told the rider that his bird looked unusually clever. The rider was taken aback: he knew the
fenneg
was woken, but never spoke of it to a soul for fear that someone might take his steed away.

“The dog and I are going to have a look at this witch,” said the tailor bird said to Isiq. The admiral nodded: that was a fine idea. A few days later the bird had much more to tell.

Her house had a private courtyard and a dilapidated barn. She had spotted the bird watching her from the barn’s upper window, and known him for woken at a glance. When the dog padded casually by the courtyard gate, she had glanced up sharply and laughed: “This is turning into a tavern. Well, come in, you filthy thing, your friend’s already here.”

The dog did not come in that day—his survival plan forbade such a move. But the courtyard had two gates, and the woman began leaving them ajar, and also pointed out a hole at ground level at the back of the crumbling barn: yet a third means of escape. She set out a plate of dry corn for the bird and saved soup bones for the dog. By week’s end they had both concluded that she meant no harm.

“She tells us we’re welcome anytime,” the bird reported to Isiq.

“Happy,” he replied, meaning that for the bird’s sake, he was.

“No,” said the bird, “I don’t believe she’s very happy. She talks frequently of war. She waves a hand over the city and says we should expect to see it burn. Don’t misunderstand: she’s not raving; in fact she’s quite presentable—attractive even, when she combs her hair. And she has a pretty name, too: Suthinia.”

Isiq held the name in his mouth:
Suthinia
. It glimmered ever so slightly, in the darkness where his mind could not go.

“I’d started to doubt she was a witch at all,” the bird continued, “but not after what the dog told me last night. He’d been to see her the day before: I was with my dumb darling, telling stories, weaving twigs. Do you know what he saw that woman do, Isiq? Put her hand through a wall! Right through! Not her fist, not with violence. She simply reached through the solid brick wall beside her mantelpiece and brought out a vial of smoke.”