The River of Shadows (56 page)

He stopped a few feet from the wall.

“It’s not the best time, Ignus,” he said.

The doctor rose to his feet, watching Pazel gravely. “It is the only time,” he said.

Pazel drew a deep breath, summoning all his reserves of patience. Then he stepped through the wall. “Make it quick, will you?” he said. “I’m blary exhausted.”

Chadfallow nodded and turned, beckoning Pazel to follow. They descended the Silver Stair to the lower gun deck and set off briskly toward the bows. Even at this late hour the deck was swarming with men. Some were inspecting the gun carriages; others were guiding freight down the tonnage shaft or muscling crates across the floor. There were a few dlömu working among them, and Pazel saw with amazement that they were in uniform—Arquali uniform.
Olik’s found dlömu willing to sail with us. To run away with the humans, to be hunted by their own people. Rin’s eyes, some of them must still love that prince
.

Chadfallow begged a lamp from one of the work crews and led Pazel down a side passage into forward first-class: a ravaged corner of the ship, burned in the rat-battle, and unoccupied since their landfall at Ormael. The once-luxurious cabins gaped in a line, like five missing teeth. Rose had ordered the doors removed, to prevent the ship’s deathsmokers from creeping in and lighting cigarettes—one fire per voyage was more than enough.

Chadfallow sniffed. “The drug is still in the air,” he said. “Bring an addict here and he will go feverish before your eyes.” Then he froze. “Look, there it is.”

Across from the first of the gutted cabins was a waist-high green door. Pazel was startled: he had seen that door before, but not on the lower gun deck. They approached it. The door was untouched by fire, although the wall around it was black with soot. Yet the portal was clearly ancient: warped and cracked, with peeling paint and an iron handle that had rusted to an irregular lump.

“It’s exactly like the door on the berth deck,” said Pazel. “The one Thasha showed me, the night she fell into a trance.”

“Where on the berth deck?” asked Chadfallow.

“Starboard aft, I think,” said Pazel. “The odd thing is that I never could find it again.”

“Then it
is
the same,” said Chadfallow. He pointed down the corridor. Twenty feet from where they stood, someone had drawn a rectangle in chalk upon a bare stretch of wall. The shape was roughly the same size as the little green door.

“I drew that not an hour ago,” he said, “around this very door. It moves, Pazel. It slides, and melts away, and reappears on other decks.”

“A vanishing compartment?”

Chadfallow nodded. “They are quite real. And they lead to other places, other
Chathrand
s, lost in both space and time. Some are reached through doors like this one, others merely by walking passages in a prescribed order. Some flare to life when a mage is near, or a powerful spell troubles the firmament. Others flicker in and out of existence like an erratic flame, as though the well of their enchantment is running dry.”

Pazel looked again at the door. Suddenly it felt menacing, like a trap waiting to break the leg of an unlucky dog. “How do you know all this?” he asked.

“I made it my business to know,” said Chadfallow, “and I would have told you myself ere now, if you had not tried so hard to avoid me. There are benefits to a life spent in diplomatic circles. One is the chance to collect on favors. I have a friend inside the Trading Company—a record keeper, and a man obsessed with the magical architecture of this ship. Not long after I received my orders to report to
Chathrand
I paid him a visit.”

Chadfallow looked at the green door. “He told me about that one. It is unlike any other magical portal on this ship. It is part of a relic spell, I think, laid down even before Erithusmé’s time, by the mage-shipwrights who built this ship for war.”

“Ramachni warned Thasha not to open that door,” said Pazel.

“Hercól informed me,” said Chadfallow, “but I am not Thasha, am I?”

He put his hand on the corroded knob. And Pazel was suddenly flooded with apprehension, with outright fear. “Don’t do it!” he shouted, seizing the doctor’s arm.

Chadfallow gave him an unpleasant smile. “What awful thing do you imagine lying in wait?”

“Pitfire, Ignus, do we have to find out? If Ramachni said to avoid it that’s blary well good enough!”

“Normally, yes,” said Chadfallow, “but I have an equally valid reason to want to proceed. I was told that finding this door might prove the key to our success. To ridding the world of the Nilstone, that is, and perhaps Arunis as well.”

“Told, were you? By whom?”

“By Ramachni,” said Chadfallow. When Pazel gaped at him, he added, “It was a dream, some months back, as we drew close to Bramian.”

Pazel quickly averted his gaze. “You can’t trust dreams,” he said.

“Ah, but can we afford to ignore them?”

“You’re absolutely cracked,” Pazel heard himself say. “That dream could have come from Arunis. We know he’s been getting inside people’s minds.”

“The minds of the weak and the ill,” said Chadfallow, “or do you count me one of those?”

Pazel turned away, a string of florid Ormali curses on the tip of his tongue. “Damn it all, I don’t feel like arguing,” he said at last. “Just stay away from that door, wherever it turns up. Ramachni didn’t warn Thasha through any blary dream.”

“True,” said Chadfallow thoughtfully, “it was a message in an onion-skin, wasn’t it?”

Not waiting for an answer, he walked on. After a minute Pazel hurried after him. Soon they reached the entrance to sickbay. Pazel could hear someone groaning within.

The doctor opened the door but did not enter. Pazel looked in and saw that the beds were almost full. Men and tarboys glanced up miserably, holding their stomachs, leaning over buckets and pans. Two or three called out to Chadfallow.

“I will attend you presently,” said the doctor to the room at large. Then he closed the door and looked at Pazel. “Thirty patients,” he said. “The water at the Tournament Grounds was unclean. Some sort of parasite, I expect.”

“I’m sorry to hear that,” said Pazel, wondering if they were finished.

Chadfallow leaned against the passage wall. He looked at Pazel with great melancholy. “I am still a hostage, you see: this time to the well-being of the ship. Rain is no use. I am the only reliable doctor this side of the Ruling Sea. The only
human
doctor, I mean.”

“And you sure are reliable,” said Pazel, looking away.

Chadfallow’s voice grew hard. “I know what you’re thinking: that unless Arunis is stopped and the Nilstone recovered it will not make any difference whether or not these people live or die. That is true. But my own choice is not between defeating Arunis and saving these souls. It is between the certainty of saving lives here, and the small chance that I will be of decisive use on the expedition.”

“Glad to know how carefully you’ve weighed all this.”

A spasm of irritation passed over Chadfallow’s face; then his look became resigned. “You will believe what you wish of me,” he said. “I could change your mind, perhaps—but I would prefer you reached your own conclusions. That has always been my aim: to give you the freedom to think for yourself, and all the tools I could to make that thinking fine.”

“Ignus,” said Pazel. “We’re not going on that expedition, either.”

The doctor stared at him, taken aback. “None of you?”

“How could we, damn it?” said Pazel. “We cause a panic everywhere we go. It will be a hundred times better if the dlömu go by themselves.”

“You were chosen by the Red Wolf.”

“So was Diadrelu,” said Pazel, “and look where that got her. And
credek
, you just finished talking about choosing for oneself. Did you mean a single word? Because it seems to me I do just fine when I make choices alone. The trouble is when all of you try to choose for me. If it’s not the Wolf it’s Ramachni, or Ott, or Captain Rose. Or you.” Then Pazel added wildly, “Neeps and Thasha feel the same way I do. We’re humans. We belong on this ship. It’s not as if we brought the Nilstone into this world.”

“What does Hercól say to this?”

“You’d better ask him.”

Chadfallow straightened his back. He looked down at Pazel and nodded. “I understand your reasoning perfectly,” he said. “Your decision mirrors my own, after all.”

No words could have been less welcome to Pazel’s ear. “I think I’ll go back to the stateroom now,” he said.

“May I walk with you?” asked the doctor.

Pazel shrugged. He set off, retracing their steps, and Chadfallow walked at his side. Pazel had the grating feeling that he’d just been outmaneuvered once more by a man who’d made a lifetime game of needling him. Had someone told the doctor about his own dream of Suthinia? Was this his way of gloating over how wrong Pazel had been?

“Ignus,” he said through his teeth, “I’m going to ask you a question. And if you answer with anything but
yes
or
no
, I’m not sure I’ll ever speak to you again.”

“Mercy me,” said Chadfallow.

“Are you the reason my father abandoned us?”

Chadfallow stopped in his tracks. He looked like a man who has suddenly been hurled a great distance, and is surprised to find himself on his feet. He opened his mouth and closed it again, never breaking eye contact with Pazel.

Then he said, “Yes, I am.”

Something exploded in Pazel at those words. He flew at the doctor, aiming for the nose he had broken once before. Chadfallow jerked back his head just in time.

“Son of a whore!” Pazel shouted, lunging again. “He never mucking
spoke
to me again! Did you do it in his Gods-damned bed? Did he think I was your brat, your bastard child? Did he? Am I?”

“No.”

“No to
what
, you blary pig?”

“No, you’re not my son.”

Pazel stood frozen, his hands still in fists. He had seen Chadfallow enraged, pompous, indignant, even suicidal. But he had never heard such sadness in his voice.

“You’re sure?” he said. “How can you be sure?”

Chadfallow blinked at him slowly. “Your father,” he said, “is Captain Gregory Pathkendle.”

Men were staring. Pazel looked at them until they turned back to their work. Chadfallow stepped forward and placed a nervous hand on his shoulder.

“Captain Gregory doesn’t give a damn about me,” said Pazel.

Words he’d never meant to speak. Words too plain and factual, a truth too obvious to bear.

“Some men are not born to be fathers,” said Chadfallow. “Very few rise to all the challenges of the task.”

“Some men try.”

Pazel felt hot tears on his face. Now that they had started what could ever make them stop?

“Why … do you say you’re the reason he left?”

Chadfallow gazed into their sputtering lamp. “Because I shamed him, once. Before your mother, whom he revered even more than he loved. You know what your mother is, now, Pazel: a warrior in the fight for the soul of Alifros. That is what made me fall in love with her, by the way—not her beauty, not at first. I was swept off my feet by her goodness, the mission that had brought her over the sea. It was all I could think about. It exposed my diplomatic charades for the petty game they were. And there she was, giving it up for a commoner, a sailing captain! What was worse, she
wanted
Gregory, and he her. So I shamed him, purposefully. It was the lowest act of my life.”

“Tell me,” said Pazel, nails biting into his palms.

The doctor’s hand trembled on his shoulder. “I thought the three of us were alone. You were at school. Gregory was perhaps a little tipsy—he was not above a glass of wine at midday, when he was home in Ormael. And on that day he told his wife that he wished her to have no more to do with Ramachni or Bolutu, or the other survivors of the expedition, the ones Arunis had not yet killed. That he would shred their letters if they came, and stop her from attending their clandestine meetings. He was merely letting off steam, I think—and voicing a most reasonable fear for her safety. Suthinia just laughed at him. No man alive ever ordered her about, or ever will.

“But I chose to take his words seriously. Out of spite and jealousy. I said he was a fool to stand in her way. That his wife had been chosen for the greatest task imaginable and should not be thwarted by a man whose highest ambition was to corner the barley trade with Sorhn. He rose in a fury, and soon we were shouting at each other like Plapps and Burnscovers. I called him a small-minded smuggler. He answered that it was high time I stopped sticking my great Etherhorde nose into his family’s affairs.”

Chadfallow drew a sharp breath. “Things might have gone differently if Neda had not been listening at the top of the stairs. She chose that moment to remark that my nose wasn’t all I was sticking in.”

Pazel’s mouth fell open, but Chadfallow gave a dismissive wave. “It was nonsense, girlish babble. And looking back I think Neda meant only to take her father’s side, to drive the interfering Arquali from your home. Even if she had to lie.”

Pazel felt hollow inside, and cold. “She didn’t manage to drive
you
out,” said Pazel. “She drove Gregory away. Oh, Neda.”

“I told him it was rubbish,” said the doctor, “and he professed to take my word. We shook hands that day, affirmed our friendship. But it was never the same—and two months later, he was gone. Yes, I think he must have believed Neda in his heart. As for Suthinia, I doubt if he ever dared ask her. They are perfectly matched in one way, your parents. They are both quite terribly proud.”

Pazel slid down against the wall. He dragged a grimy arm across his eyes. “He
wanted
it to be true that you were sleeping with her. He was looking for an excuse to leave us. That’s what I think.”

Chadfallow sat down next to him, shaking his head. “I can’t tell you, Pazel. But I hope you won’t torture yourself with
what-if
s, as I have done these many years. The past is gone; the future is wailing for its breakfast. That is what
my
father used to say.”

Pazel stared at him blankly. “Ignus,” he said, “we can’t go hunting Arunis. We can’t.”