Robert Redick - The River of Shadows

He watched her gruffly as she dried his hair. “You lunatic,” she said, her voice shrill with concern. “You’re cold as a blary fish. How did you get soaked like that?”

Pazel closed his eyes.

“Get nearer to the fire. Take off that mucking shirt!”

He obeyed. Neeps made a joke about him needing a bath anyway, but fell silent when he glared. Thasha was looking at him strangely.

“A novice came from the temple,” she said. “He gave me something gorgeous, in a tiny wooden box. He said it came from you.”

Pazel wished she would just stop talking. He was clutching at memories, like fragments of a story heard once in childhood, and never again. A strange woman, a shining globe.

“We’re crossing the lake tonight,” said Thasha, drying him vigorously, “in three boats. If Hercol can make himself understood, that is. You should go and talk to the fisherfolk, Pazel. They’re mizralds, and we just can’t tell what they’re trying to say. I think they’re afraid of the north shore, but Hercol-”

“Ouch!” he snapped. “Not so hard, damn it!”

Thasha lowered the towel. “Baby.”

“Savage.”

Their eyes met. He touched his scalp, brought away a bloody finger. He was quite annoyed with her, and wondered at the months of agony he’d let her cause. Then Thasha reached into his hair, and brought away something small and hard. It gleamed in the firelight: a shard of crystal, which even as he reached out a finger melted like ice and was gone.

8 Modobrin 941

237th day from Etherhorde

When the keel of the fishing-boat dug into the sandy shore, Ibjen was first out: the journey had turned his stomach. And it had been bad, Pazel thought: the open boat with its one spindly mast and weird ribbed sail flapping about like a fin, no lamps on it anywhere, cutting through all that darkness with the wind howling over the peaks, the bright stars wheeling as they pitched and heaved, ice floes looming up suddenly, sometimes even grinding against their sides… He shuddered, and leaped out himself, and winced as his feet sank to the ankles in the watery sand. Freezing, even at midsummer. How did they manage, those fisherfolk, year after icebound year?

At least the moon had sailed above the peaks: a full moon, by which the snowcaps dimly glowed. The second boat drew up beside the first, and the fisherman’s uncle leaped barefoot into the water and pulled it in.

“And to think I’d hoped to sleep a little,” growled Big Skip, wading ashore as the dogs leaped out around him. He cursed as the nearest one shook its wet coat vigorously, then opened the front of his coat. “Are you well, my ladies?” he asked.

“Alive, anyway,” said Ensyl as she and Myett crawled groggily to his shoulders.

The mizralds kept looking at the shore, as though anxious to be gone from it. Hercol counted coins into the fisherman’s hand. The man’s wife took one and studied the strange Arquali designs. “It’s a fake,” she announced. “There’s a tol-chenni on this coin.”

“It’s real gold, I bit one,” said the fisherman’s brother.

“That’s the face of His Supremacy Magad the Fifth you just gnashed,” said Dastu coldly. “You understand? He’s our Emperor, our King.”

The fisherman’s son laughed. “King of the tol-chenni. King of the monkeys, the beasts!” He hooted and beat his chest. His uncle laughed, but his father scowled at him, embarrassed. Pazel looked at the wrinkled, wind-chapped creature. Was he, like Ibjen’s father, just old enough to recall the days before the plague?

Soon all the chilly passengers were ashore. Hercol placed the twentieth coin in the man’s palm, then smiled and added another fistful. “Ask them not to speak of us to strangers, Pazel,” he said. “There is still a chance we might be pursued.”

The family waved goodbye, delight beginning to show on their faces as they realized there was no trick.

“Come,” urged Hercol. “We have gained a few miles on Arunis, I think. Let us gain a few more.”

He started at once up the gray, wind-sculpted beach. As the others straggled after him, Pazel heard a shout from the old fisherman. He turned: the mizrald was splashing up to him.

“You will go down the Ansyndra, and across the burn? What you call Black Tongue?”

“Well, yes,” said Pazel. “There’s no other way, is there?”

The mizrald shook his head. “No other way. No other way except with wings.”

“Wings would be dandy,” said Pazel.

The fisherman nodded solemnly.

“Well,” said Pazel, “goodbye.”

“You go at night, eh? Only at night across the burn. Darkly, quietly: that’s how it’s done. Tell your friends. Because by daylight-no, no.”

“No?”

The mizrald drew his finger across his throat. “No, no and no.”

He stared at Pazel with concern, and looked as though he wished to say more. Then (as his family howled in protest) he pulled the youth down and planted a kiss upon his forehead. Then he turned and pushed his boat offshore.

Stunned, Pazel hurried after the others. They were trudging west along the rim of the lake, toward the spot the mizralds had said was the only way down. Pazel could hear a rushing of water, and the now very familiar slushing roar of a waterfall. He ran, catching up with Neeps and Thasha. Neeps was gazing back across the lake.

“How are we supposed to return?” he said. “The fisherwoman herself said they almost never come down here. And half the time there’s no shore to walk along, just blary cliffs. How are we supposed to get back?”

“There must be trails through the mountains,” said Pazel, trying to sound as though he believed it. “Hercol and Olik must have thought about it, mate. Don’t worry.”

Thasha’s gaze swept darkly over the peaks. “They thought about it, all right,” she said.

Their destination, as it happened, was similar to the Chalice of the Mai: a river outlet above a sharp descent. But then Pazel swayed and stepped back, dizzied by what he saw. Where the Mai had begun as no more than a stream, this was a thrashing watercourse, descending almost vertically within a deep, twisting crack down the mountainside. In many spots the water vanished under boulders; in others it surged forth in a chaos of white spray. There were outright cliffs beneath them too, where the river became falls. And very close to the river, bolted fast to the rock, was a heavy iron ladder. It descended some forty feet and met up with a wet, steep trail that snaked back and forth down the mountain to another ladder, which in turn met another trail, and so on for some distance. Even by moonlight Pazel could see how far and fast the Ansyndra descended, falls beneath falls beneath falls…

“The ladders will take us only so far,” Vadu was explaining. “There, at that widest shelf, you can see where the Black Tongue begins.”

Pazel could not see it, in fact, for the men were all crowding hazardously for a view. Quickly he told the others what the mizrald had said.

“By night alone,” mused Hercol. “Prince Olik too had heard rumors to that effect.”

“Nonsense,” said Vadu. “Day or night makes no difference. Look there: you will see what does.”

This time Pazel managed to catch a glimpse. Far down the black ridge a faint light shone. Something was burning, with flames that danced and guttered in the wind, throwing sparks into the night. Then all at once it was gone. Utter darkness wrapped the slopes again.

“A fumarole,” said Vadu, “a tunnel into the depths, formed as the lava cooled. The gases that erupt from those horrid pipes are flammable, and sudden in their emergence. But something worse dwells in them: the flame-trolls. Idlers who never leave the Upper City will tell you that they are mere legends, but we who carry the Plazic Blades know better. They are real, and deadly. When they emerge, no living thing can cross the Tongue.”