Robert Redick - The River of Shadows

“What?” screamed Macadra, breaking violently away. “Are you joking, mage, or have you taken leave of your senses?”

“Come,” said Arunis. “Don’t pretend it’s not the solution you’ve been hunting for. The South is free of humans already, unless you count the degenerate tol-chenni. This will merely finish the job.”

“It would finish far more than humankind,” she said. “You cannot control such a force!”

“I can,” said Arunis. “Through the Nilstone, and the puppet we call the Shaggat Ness. Help me, Macadra. I know the Ravens wish it done.”

Macadra stared at the parchment. “You speak as though we were devils.”

“That is what you are,” said Orfuin.

He rose, startling them all. “The bar is closed. I will give you two minutes to conclude your business here.”

The four mages gaped at him. “You can’t mean it,” said the black man, smiling uncertainly. “You’re famous for your neutrality, old man.”

“That and my gingerbread,” said Orfuin, “and precious little else. Goodbye, Arunis. Plot your holocaust elsewhere.”

He clapped his hands sharply. At once several dozen tiny figures, shorter even than ixchel, emerged from the vines with brooms and began sweeping the terrace before the arch. The guests within the tavern slammed down their mugs and rose, shuffling for the exits as though obeying some irresistible command. The little yddek scurried across the terrace and flung itself into the night.

“This is unprecedented,” said Arunis, “and if I may say so, unwise.”

Orfuin shrugged. “Neutral or not, the club is my own.”

“But we have nowhere else to meet!” said Macadra.

“Then you have nowhere to meet.”

He entered the bar and began snuffing lights. Stoman, face twisting with fury, stamped dead one of the tiny sweepers; the rest fled back into the vines. One by one, like wary dogs, the tables and chairs slid of their own accord through the archway. The wind grew suddenly louder. The four figures stood alone.

“Devils in this life,” said Arunis, looking only at Macadra, “but in the next something else altogether.”

He held out the parchment. Macadra met his gaze, snarled, and took it from his hand. She placed it inside her dress and raised her arms.

“Do not think us fools, sorcerer. We will send you a crew indeed! And when your work is done the Nilstone will return to the Ravens.”

“When my work is done I shall not need it,” said Arunis.

Somewhere a door slammed shut. Then the archway became a wall, and the vines closed in like scaly curtains, and suddenly there was nothing beneath their feet but the roaring immensity of the darkness, cold and mighty as a vertical river, bearing them away from one another and toward the lee shore of their dreams.

22 Ilbrin 941

221st day from Etherhorde

Introductions were strained. The two younger sfvantskors had some Arquali, learned in preparation for Treaty Day; Cayer Vispek spoke barely a word. Pazel, on the other hand, spoke Mzithrini better than his sister. Vispek and Jalantri listened with open suspicion.

“You say you learned such diction, such grace with our tongue… from books?” the elder sfvantskor demanded.

Pazel glanced uneasily at Neda. “That’s how it started,” he said.

“It’s the truth, Cayer,” said Neda. “Pazel is a natural scholar. He taught himself Arquali by the time he was eight. Other languages, too. But they were mostly just nonsense from his grammar books, until our birth-mother cast the spell.”

“The one that changed him, but not you,” said Jalantri.

Neda shrugged, dropping her eyes. “It gave me white hair for three months.”

Cayer Vispek shook his head in wonder. “And made him able to collect languages as easily as a boy puts marbles in a bag.”

“Not that easily,” Pazel objected.

Neda sat between her brother sfvantskors and looked at Pazel much as they did, with doubt that was nearly accusation. Of course Pazel was shocked to learn that she had become a sfvantskor. But how much greater had her shock been! During the invasion of Ormael she had watched Arquali marines beat him senseless, while their fellow soldiers rampaged through the family house, smashing everything they could not eat or slip in their pockets. Five years later, hidden by a mask, she had seen Pazel with Thasha Isiq: daughter of the very admiral who led the invasion.

Every Mzithrini youth learned to hate Arqualis. There were reasons of history, war stories from uncles and teachers, scars on temple walls. But few of Neda’s age had as many reasons as she.

Nine of those reasons had crowded into a single hour. Nine reasons who had dragged her screaming into a barn.

Now her brother served those same Arqualis-cared for them, loved them maybe. Neda had known about him since the morning of Treaty Day, more than four months ago. But the thought still made her want to scream.

For she too had spoken but part of the truth. Her mother’s spell had done more than change the color of her hair. It was an augmentation hex; it took an innate gift, whatever one was naturally best at, and strengthened it a thousandfold. At first Neda thought that her mother had nearly killed her only to prove that she was plain and stupid: a girl with no gifts to augment. Only years later, in training to be a sfvantskor, had she realized that she did possess one gift: a prodigious memory. And as she aged, and so had more years of life to remember, the spell had come into its own.

Now her memory was vast and merciless. It rarely obeyed her will. She might try for hours to summon a specific fact, and fail. But when she made no effort her memory worked on, like an involuntary organ, pumping, flooding her with knowledge she did not want. As it was doing now. The dust sculpting beams of light through a high window in the barn. The nine voices of those soldiers. The underside of each chin.

Cayer Vispek offered to share the rabbit, but Pazel and the Tholjassan man gently declined; they could see that the others were starved. Neda and her comrades attacked the meal in earnest, and as they chewed the man called Hercol Stanapeth began to speak. His Mzithrini was halting, like something remembered from a distant time, but with Pazel’s help he told his tale.

And what a tale it was: the lie of the Great Peace, the treason plotted in Etherhorde, the riches hidden aboard the Chathrand, the fact that the Shaggat Ness had never died.

At this last confession Cayer Vispek had set down his plate. In the darkest of voices he asked Pazel to repeat Hercol’s words. Then he put out a hand to the two younger sfvantskors.

“Your weapons. Quickly.”

Neda and Jalantri were astounded, but they obeyed, unbuckling their knives and swords and placing them in their leader’s hands. Vispek closed his eyes for a long moment. When he opened them again they were deadly.

“The Ness,” he said to Hercol. “You have harbored the Shaggat Ness, the Blasphemer, stained with the blood of half a million of our people. The one who broke the Mzithrin family, and beggared us all.”

“Arqual has done so, yes,” said Hercol.

“And he is aboard your ship even now?”

“He is enchanted,” said Hercol. “Turned to lifeless stone; but we have reason to fear that the enchantment will be reversed. He is to be returned to his worshippers in Gurishal, to provoke a war inside your country.”

A brief silence; then Jalantri exploded to his feet. “Give him a weapon, Cayer, and give me mine. The Shaggat! This has all been about the Shaggat! They mean to destroy us, to plant their flag on the ruins of Babqri and Surahk and Srag! Don’t you, cannibals? Deny it if you dare!”

“The Father was right,” said Neda, with equal venom. “He warned us that the Chathrand was carrying death in its hold.”