Robert Redick - The River of Shadows

“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 Hercol, standing straight, caught the end of a rope.

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

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 Hercol’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 sicunas pacing among them, dogs to either side watching for strays. Where were the tarboys, the young women, Hercol? She had not caught sight of any of her friends since well before the dlomic 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 Hercol 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? Hercol? 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 dlomic 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 dlomic 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.”