The River of Shadows (45 page)

The mob was not pleased by Rain’s outburst. The one who had spoken before pointed a finger through the glass. “Creatures!” he exclaimed again. “We will defend Masalym from all who come with curses. Think on that before you jest with us again.”

Uskins popped up suddenly from the bushes, pointing at Dr. Rain. “Ignore him! Ignore him! He’s mad!” Then he bit his lips and squatted again.

“We will come back and kill you,” said the dlömu quietly.

They did not kill then and there, however: in fact, a dozen Masalym soldiers appeared moments later and drove them out, more cajoling than threatening. The birdwatchers stood in a nervous group, comparing notes and shaking their heads; then they too filed out, locking the outer door behind them. Only the dog remained.

Thasha was terribly frustrated. If only they would talk—really talk, not just threaten and shout. Old sins? Whose sins, and why should they ask the first woken humans to come along in generations for forgiveness? The mysteries were too many, the answers too few.

But there was one mystery she was not powerless to explore. She called her friends back into the sleeping chamber, and this time brought Hercól as well. Crowded as it was, she made them all sit on the beds. Once again she wished she had a door to close.

“I told you I wanted no more secrets, and I meant it,” she said. “Hercól, you were friends for so long with my father. With the admiral, I mean.”

“Admiral Isiq
is
your father, Thasha,” said Hercól, “and Clorisuela was your mother. Why would we lie about this?”

Thasha considered him for a moment. “I don’t expect Chadfallow to level with me,” she said at last, “but I expect it of you, Hercól. I was born before you came to Etherhorde. I know that. But later, when you and Daddy became friends, did he ever say anything about Clorisuela … not being able to have children?”

Hercól glared at Thasha. He looked tempted to stand and walk out of the room. But slowly his gaze softened, and at last he gave a heavy sigh. “Yes,” he said. “For several years, they tried for children in vain. Clorisuela would lose them quite early, along with a great deal of blood. Your father said it happened four times.”

Thasha closed her eyes. “And then?”

“They stopped trying, stopped daring to live as husband and wife.” Hercól drew a deep breath. “And yes, that was when he … obtained Syrarys.”

“Bought her,” said Thasha.

Hercól shook his head. “She was, as you were told, the Emperor’s gift. But that is not the end of the story, Thasha. Your mother knew nothing of Syrarys. But Clorisuela did come to Isiq once more, strangely hopeful. And even though the midwives had told her it would be dangerous, they tried again. You were the result.”

“After four failures?” said Thasha, her eyes moist. “You believed him, when he told you that?”

“I believe it to this day,” said Hercól.

Everyone was still. Once again, Marila’s round cheeks were streaked with tears. Thasha swallowed.
Finish this
, she thought.
Make him say it, while you can
.

“You told me what happened in the wagon. But there’s another moment I don’t remember. What did I say when we first stepped into that village? When we saw the
tol-chenni
, and learned what had happened to human beings?”

“We were all in shock,” said Hercól quickly, “and we all said foolish things. I expect none of us recalls exactly what came out of your mouth.”

“What does your nose tell you about
that
, Neeps?” said Thasha, smiling ruefully.

Neeps fidgeted. “Sometimes I can’t tell.”

“Well I can,” said Thasha. “You’re lying, Hercól. I think you remember exactly what I said.” She turned to Pazel. “And I’m
certain
you do. The last clear memory I have is how you stared at me. As if I’d just told you I’d killed a baby. I couldn’t very well demand honesty when we were all playing charades with Arunis and Fulbreech. But that’s over, and I want to hear the truth.”

“Thasha—”

“Now.”

The others exchanged glances. They had all discussed it; she could see the awareness in their eyes. At last Hercól cleared his throat.

“Let me,” said Pazel suddenly. He stood up from the bed and rubbed his face with one hand. She thought suddenly how old he looked, how loss and danger had bled the child out of him, out of them all. He was young and old at once. He took her hands.

“You said,
I didn’t mean to. It was never supposed to happen
. And then you asked if I believed you. That was all.”

Thasha felt a coldness settle over her like sudden nightfall. She felt Pazel’s grip tighten, but the sensation was far away.
Air
, they were saying,
give her air, take her to the window
. She stumbled forward and leaned on the sill.

For a moment she felt better—good enough to speak one of her father’s salty naval curses, and to hear them laugh with relief. Then she raised her eyes and looked out through the window.

Masalym shimmered before her in the midday heat. But it was not the same place. The Lower City was bustling with life—humans, dlömu, smaller numbers of other beings she could not identify. Thousands went about their business, and the homes were solid and cheerful, flower boxes in the windows, fruit trees in the yards, carts pulled by dogs or donkeys rattling down the streets. Human children, dlömic children, milled together in a schoolyard. An old dlömic man sat by his old human wife, feeding birds in a square.

Thasha blinked, and the shadows grew longer. Now the humans were pulling the carts: were chained to the carts, chained in work teams, chained to wooden posts in the square where the couple had sat a moment before. The dlömu’s faces were as hard as the leather whips they swung. A few humans were still well dressed: the ones carrying dlömic babies, or holding parasols over dlömic heads.

Another blink, and it was midnight. The city was on fire. The dlömu ranged the streets in rival bands, charging one another, stabbing, slashing, cutting throats. Mobs raced from broken doorways with armfuls of stolen goods, prisoners at sword-point, dlömic girls in nightdresses, wailing. The humans scurried in terror, bent low to the earth. They wore rags, when they wore anything at all.

Once more the scene changed. It was a bleak, ashen dawn. Masalym was a city nearly abandoned. The few dlömu to be seen were rebuilding as best they could. The human faces were gone entirely.

“Never to return,” said Thasha aloud.

“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

P
ROFESSOR
J. L. G
ARAPAT
Odesh Hened Hülai

Entreats Your Participation in a Gathering of
Extraordinary Consequence for the Several Worlds

Guest of Honor:
F
ELTHRUP
S
TARGRAVEN
of Pöl Warren, Noonfirth, NW Alifros

T
OMORROW
N
IGHTFALL

T
HE
O
LD
T
AP
R
OOM
• T
HE
O
RFUIN
C
LUB

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 Pazel 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.