The River of Shadows (48 page)

“No,” said the Tholjassan firmly.

“What exactly are you looking for?” said Pazel to Hercól. “A way out of the city? And just for us, or for the whole crew?”

“If we don’t go now,” said Hercól, “it won’t matter
what
I’m looking for.”

“You’re lying,” said Neeps.

Pazel heard the ring of conviction in his voice, and something inside him clicked. Neeps wasn’t always right when he thought he smelled a fib, but he was better at it than anyone else Pazel knew.

“The Stone,” he said, looking at Hercól. “You’re going to try to sneak aboard, and take the Nilstone yourselves, tonight. Break it out of the Shaggat’s hand before someone else does. Hide it somewhere. Take it … take it—”

“Beyond the reach of evil,” said Thasha, looking at her mentor. “He’s right, isn’t he? That’s what all this is about.”

Hercól stared hard at Pazel. “Of all the
irksome, interfering
tarboys,” he whispered at last. “Yes, I mean to fulfill the oath I took upon the wolf-scar, and that means taking the Nilstone. But I had never meant to do so tonight. First I meant to scout the Lower City, and especially the quay: a failed attempt would only signal to Counselor Vadu that the Stone is worth guarding to the hilt. Of course he may already be doing so, but Fulbreech’s slip of the tongue suggests that Arunis has lied about the Stone, convinced Vadu that it is no more than a trifle. In such tiny errors lies our hope. We must pray that there is more jealousy among our foes: between Arunis and the sorceress, Macadra; among those who call themselves Ravens; among any of the warlords who appear to rule this once-great land.”

“So what do you mean to do now?” asked Neeps.

“Throttle you to start with, Undrabust, if you can’t lower your voice! Be silent, let me think!” Hercól shut his eyes, frowning with concentration. “In light of this … message,” he said at last, “I
will
seek the Stone tonight. But you, Thasha, will not be going anywhere near the ship. You are to do exactly as we discussed: locate the safest, surest exit from Masalym. If we must run with the Stone to fulfill our oath, so be it.”

“What sort of rubbishy plan is that?” hissed Pazel. “You’re going to send her off into this blary city
alone
? And try to storm the manger, unarmed, steal the Nilstone and make off with it by yourself?”

“I will not be unarmed for long,” said Hercól. “Ildraquin lies just inside the magic wall, waiting for me. And neither of us will be going alone. Vadu’s seizure of the
Chathrand
did not catch quite everyone unprepared. It did not, for example, catch me. Or those with my training.”

“What are you talking about?” asked Thasha.

Hercól looked up sharply. Pazel followed his gaze: twenty feet above them, on the roof of the main building, a figure crouched, one arm held out straight before him. A large, powerful bird was just lifting from his arm.

“Oh, Pazel!” said Thasha. “That’s him! That’s Niriviel!”

So it was: Niriviel, the beautiful, woken moon falcon, who had disappeared on the eve of the
Chathrand
’s plunge into the Nelluroq. A miracle, Pazel thought: that the bird had survived, and that it had found them. For a moment he did not care that the bird was a fanatical Arquali, and had always called them traitors.

The falcon was gone in an instant. On the roof, the figure moved with cat-like silence to the corner. Suddenly its arm snapped toward them, and Hercól, standing straight, caught the end of a rope.

“Time to kill,” whispered Sandor Ott from above.

Stealing the Nilstone

5 Modobrin 941

Ensyl leaned back against the scabbard of Ildraquin, winded. The dust was going to make her sneeze. With a bit of string she’d found under Thasha’s bed she had just hoisted the weapon to the top of the cupboard in the stateroom. Not much of a hiding place, but it would be out of sight from the floor, and as long as the ship was on dry land there was no danger of it shifting. In any case it was better than leaving it inside the straw mattress in Bolutu’s cabin, where she had stashed it three nights ago, in desperate haste, just to keep Vadu from fishing it through the tiny hole he’d cut in Thasha’s wall.

She had watched that deed from the inside, watched him slide his arm toward Hercól’s blade. She had charged, ready to hack the fingers from that hand, but then the wall itself had attacked Vadu, burned him, and she had danced sidelong into the shadows again, still unseen. When Vadu retreated she had dragged the sword to Bolutu’s chamber, then raced back by the ixchel’s secret paths to a vantage point on the quarterdeck.

Like so many heads of cattle, the humans were being herded ashore. Far down the lightless avenue she could see them trudging in the chilly rain, soldiers on
sicuñas
pacing among them, dogs to either side watching for strays. Where were the tarboys, the young women, Hercól? She had not caught sight of any of her friends since well before the dlömic charge.

But then Fiffengurt had appeared across the quay, supporting Lady Oggosk as he might his own mother. His true eye glanced back at his beloved
Chathrand
, searching for any sign of hope. Ensyl wanted to go to him, show herself, prove that the fight was not lost.
If only
, she thought,
I had a swallow-suit
. Pointless yearning. She would never again be trusted anywhere near such a treasure of the clan.

Now, dust-coated, she sat atop the cupboard, elbows on knees, looking down at the chamber of her allies. Vast, safe, deserted. Alone at last. She didn’t dare laugh at the thought; laughter could too easily slide into tears.

What had she just accomplished, wrestling his sword up here? What would she do next, clean the windows? The thought pounced on her suddenly: they were defeated, utterly crushed, stripped of their vessel and their freedom and any chance to determine their own fates.

They? Who do you mean by
they,
Ensyl?

I don’t mean they. I mean us.

Your clan despised you, abandoned you—

Not the clan, forget the clan, count me out of it, that broken thing, that lie.

You just mean her
.

And what if she did? What if it had all been for Dri—for her beautiful, murdered mistress? Dri, who understood the life inside the ritual, who knew what
clan
could mean, ought to mean, the deeper
us
, the source in the heart, that chance of kinship no matter the bodies or the histories involved.

Dri, killed because she loved out of turn.

You hate Hercól Stanapeth, don’t you? The noblest soul on this ship, maybe, and you hate him. You think of them together and you could stab him through the heart
.

Ensyl tried desperately to still her mind. The guilty conscience exaggerates: that was something Dri herself used to say.
When guilt would claim you, be cold. Accept the whole truth, but no more than that, or you will wander among phantoms alone
.

But wasn’t that exactly what she was doing? Her mistress had died. Her clan-brethren had fled, and not trusted her with the secret of where they had gone. Her human allies had been marched off down a dark road through the Lower City. All her pride in her choice of loyalties, and what was she left with for company? A bearskin rug. A black, stained sword.

Then a door creaked, and Ensyl was herself again. Flat against the cabinet-top, hidden, one hand reaching for her knife.

A slight scrabbling from below, and then a shrill, worried voice called out timidly, “Thasha? Hercól? Where is everyone?”

Ensyl shouted with joy. “Felthrup, why, Felthrup, you—rat!”

She was down to the floor in seconds, embracing the startled beast. He was glad to see her, too, but frightened and disoriented, and very thirsty. He knew nothing of the fight with Arunis or the seizure of the ship. He had been asleep, as they both soon realized, for three days.

“Three days! How did you manage that?”

“It was hard work,” he said, “but worth it. Oh, I
pray
it was worth it. Somehow I feel as though I’ve accomplished a great deed, only I cannot remember anything about it. But where are the others, Ensyl? Why is the ship so still?”

Ensyl told him about the events he had slept through, and Felthrup ran in circles about her, in a paroxysm of remorse. “Fulbreech! I hate him! I will give him the sort of bite he can’t recover from! I knew it, I
always
knew—and yet when Lady Thasha needed me most I lay asleep in a closet, not twenty feet from that—that
—androsuccubus
, is that the word?”

“I’m sure it is,” said Ensyl. “But you could not have helped her then. Let us go to work now, and perhaps we will find our revenge.”

Then they both heard it: a faint cry, from beyond the doorway. “That’s an ixchel voice!” said Ensyl, and flew to the door. Reaching the knob was an easy leap; turning it, a whole-body effort. But she managed, and Felthrup nosed open the door, and both of them tumbled through.

Counselor Vadu had made his men paint around the hole he had cut in the magic wall. Now a splotch of white enamel hung in the air at the center of the crossed passages, outlining the jagged rectangle. And beneath the hole, cradling her hand, stood Myett.

They raced toward her; she watched them come. “The edges are sharp, like broken glass,” she said, displaying a long cut on her hand.

“You dare not try to pass through it,” said Ensyl. “Counselor Vadu was branded by it, like a mule. What are you doing here, Myett? Did you not go after Taliktrum, as the clan supposed?”

Myett just looked at her, wary and mistrustful, and Ensyl wished she hadn’t spoken.

“Is there food in the stateroom?” asked Myett.

Ensyl told her to wait in Bolutu’s chamber while she ran and gathered bread and biscuit crumbs and the last dlömic peach into a bundle. Then she ran back to where Felthrup waited, and the two of them stepped out through the wall and went to the veterinarian’s cabin. Myett ate and ate; Ensyl had rarely seen one of her people so famished. “The humans are gone,” she said between mouthfuls. “They’re being treated like kings, though—captive kings. Fattened up, in a great pavilion across the city. And given new clothes, and baths, and nurses to scrub them and kill their fleas.”

“You went there?”

“I rode there, in a wagon with the invalids who could not walk. And back upon a dog-drawn coach. I could see them eating through a window in the pavilion, but I couldn’t get a bite. The dlömic giants don’t waste food like humans; they don’t drop it and throw it about. They’re giving heaps of it to their prisoners, but all the same—” She looked up, puzzled, at Ensyl and the rat. “I don’t think they have that much.”

“We’re trapped, then,” said Felthrup, eating alongside Myett. “Unless they bring the crew back, and set us afloat upon the gulf.”

“We’re trapped,” Ensyl agreed. “There are a hundred dlömu on the topdeck, at least five times that number surrounding the port. And by day there are the shipwrights, the dockworkers, inspectors going through every compartment and cabin. There will be no fighting our way out of the Jaws of Masalym, even if all the humans fought at our side. I doubt we could master the river-machines, the gates and shafts and spillways, without destroying the ship in our trial and error. No, there’s no escape by sea. If we leave this city, we do so without the
Chathrand
.”

Myett did not look at her. Sullenly, she asked, “What does Lord Talag say?”

Ensyl hesitated, and then Myett did look at her, with a certain gleam of understanding. “You missed the rendezvous on the orlop,” she said. “You were in the stateroom with your true friends. Of course.”

“I was fighting the sorcerer,” said Ensyl. “Do you know where they went?”

She nodded. “A safe place indeed. Even the dogs will not sniff them out. But Ensyl: I will not go there with you, nor tell you how to find it.”

Ensyl was taken aback. “Sister,” she said, “everything has changed now. Perhaps you did not see them? Arunis is allied with the rulers of the city. They do his bidding, or much of it. We cannot quarrel among ourselves. Your lover accused me of treason, and it is true that I disobeyed him. But that is all beside the point. Doom is coming for us like a great wave, Myett. We must help one another to higher ground or be washed away.”

“Everything has changed,” said Myett, nodding, “and I have changed with it. Your treason is nothing to me, nor is your standing, or mine, or all the old stale points of honor. Let our fellow crawlies help one another to escape the wave, if they can find the will to do so. I want no part of that struggle. I am alone.”

For an ixchel, the last statement was close to heresy. Ensyl struggled to keep her voice even and low. “Sanctuary awaits us, sister,” she said.

“We will never reach it,” said Myett, “and
they—
they do not deserve it.”

Her look was adamant, and Ensyl’s heart sank. Myett the worshipful had become Myett the indifferent. She had not run off, like Taliktrum, but she had exiled herself all the same. The clan was crumbling; foolishness and self-deceit would be their epitaph.

“But, sister—”

“I am no one’s sister anymore.”

Ensyl could not summon the strength to argue. But Felthrup, who had been gaping at Myett, shook himself and stood up from his meal. “Now see here,” he squeaked. “You owe your life to Ixphir House.”

“Don’t lecture me, rodent,” said Myett with a caustic laugh. “I know my debts, all right.”

“Be quiet, you know very little,” said Felthrup, his mouth twitching so hard that crumbs flew from his whiskers. “You have a grievance with Taliktrum. That is plain as a bruise on your face. Be quiet, be quiet! You have
no
grievance with Ensyl, who has only shown you kindness. And you have no right to destroy the clan that raised you. No right by your people’s laws, nor by the moral constant that unites all woken souls.”

“You read too much,” said Myett.

“A clan, a crew, a colony of rats: they are neither blessed nor damned, neither chosen nor cast out. But they are your family. Some have mistreated you. What of it? The rest need your strength, and more wisdom than you’ve shown.”

What had happened to Felthrup in his sleep? Ensyl wondered. He was shaking and nervous as ever, but at the same time he was speaking in a rapture of certainty, not breaking eye contact with Myett.

“They need you,” he said, “and that matters more than your damage and pain. You must
let
it matter more.”

“They despise me,” said Myett. “They have taken decades of my life and given back only scorn.”

“And did they take nothing from me?” Felthrup displayed his mangled forepaw. “They sealed me in a bilge-pipe to suffocate. But they rescued me, too—from
my
family, my diseased and mutant kin, the ones who bit three inches off my tail. I gnawed at that stump, Myett—gnawed it back to bleeding, each time it started to heal. Oh, how I pitied myself! I dreamed of drowning, and I did not care who drowned with me.”

At the word
drowning
, Myett’s face changed. “That was you, scrabbling in the dark!” she cried. “You little vermin. You followed me, you watched. You watched me and said nothing!”

“I watched you rush into the hold as the water rose,” said Felthrup, “and wondered what you sought there. I never dreamed it was death.”

Ensyl turned her back, so as not to shame the young woman before her.
Aya Rin, Myett. Was it love of Taliktrum that drove you to this?

“I will not tell you again,” said Myett, breathing hard, “to leave me in peace.”

“That is what I mean to do,” said Felthrup. “I will go to the manger, to have a look at the Nilstone. And you, friend Myett: you will do the right thing, and be strong. Take Ensyl to warn your people. The water spared you for a reason, as that pipe spared me. It is up to us to discover those reasons, I think—and if we cannot, then to find reasons, create them if necessary. Yes, I mean it. Sometimes we must fabricate reasons to live.”

Ensyl looked at Myett once more, and saw a broken agony in her face, a desperation. Myett lifted a hand toward her knife, and Ensyl froze.
Don’t make me fight you, Myett. Don’t make one of us die. We’re both victims of our love for that family
.

Myett’s hand hovered over the knife. Then it rose, slowly, as though she would touch Felthrup on the muzzle. She did not complete the gesture, but something in her own face changed, and she turned swiftly to the wall. She could not face them, maybe, but Ensyl thought she stood a little straighter than before.

“Damn you, Stanapeth! We’re not ready to tackle the ship!”

Alyash was fuming. Neither Sandor Ott nor Hercól responded to his whispered outburst. They were moving as only trained assassins could, shadow to shadow, crouch to crouch. Alert to the tiniest noises, wearing dark clothes swapped with or stripped from other crew members, faces and hands and bare feet blackened from a pouch of soot. Boots would have been safer: glass and splinters and rusty nails littered the streets. But they had no proper, soft-soled footwear, and one accidental thump could make the difference between life and death.

“Do you hear me? Nabbing the Stone tonight is blary impossible! We’ll be lucky to get aboard her at all.”

Ott did not like sudden changes to careful plans anymore than Alyash. But Hercól’s reasoning was sound.
Take the Nilstone tonight or lose it to enemies tomorrow. Lose it to enemies, and you will never defeat them
.

But Alyash had a point as well. The ship was under heavy guard, and they had not yet cased her fully. Blind terrain! How he hated it! Ott himself had already been attacked: a dozen creatures, like small monkeys but for their hairlessness and fangs, had exploded from the window of a gutted house. All on him, coordinated as a wolf pack, and Ott wondered if they had somehow decided that he was the weakest of the three. He had responded with a frenzy of killing, and sent the few survivors screeching into the night.