Robert Redick - The River of Shadows

Insidious doesn’t begin to describe it, the physician had told the King. It’s in his blood, his urine, even his sweat. He should have all the visible signs: nosebleeds, wheezing, numb fingertips. He suffers none of these, though his internal pain is classic deathsmoke. She didn’t want him guessing-not him or anyone else. But the only way to avoid those telltale signs is to increase a victim’s exposure to the drug very slowly-terribly slowly, Your Highness. The one who did this to him had the patience of a fiend.

For the doctor, Isiq was a return to form: as a medical student he had worked with veterans of the Second Sea War. For years now he had been the King’s own physician, and knew the monarch trusted him. He did not have a relationship of fear with the King, who was almost young enough to be his son. But he had seen the absolute warning in Oshiram’s eyes when the monarch swore him to secrecy.

“Not a whisper, not a glance, not a cough, do you hear me? They will kill him. I’m not telling you to deny that you’re caring for a patient in the North Tower. I’m telling you never to need to deny it. These people are masters of their trade. Imperial masters, Arquali masters. Beside them our own spies are imbeciles. They had a bunker inside our walls, under the Mirkitj ruins, and we didn’t suspect a thing. You must try not even to think of him, except when you’ve stepped into his chamber and barred the door.”

The doctor frowned and trembled, but he was no less thorough for his fear. The bloodroot tea he prescribed soothed Isiq’s craving for deathsmoke, if only a little. The fresh greens and goat’s milk brought color to his skin.

But memory proved less willing to return. They had given him a mirror; Isiq had turned it to the wall. After he regained his name he had reached for it again, but the moment his fingers touched the frame he felt a warning shock. The face he saw there might be too full of accusation, too aware.

The little tailor bird urged him to be patient. “Months of winter before us yet, friend Isiq. There’s no cause to worry, or to rush. You humans live so blary long.”

He was a woken bird, of course, and small enough to flit through the eye-level hole in the translucent glass of the window. The King had left this tiny aperture so that Isiq might look down upon the palace grounds: the marble amphitheater, the red leaves swirling on the frog pond, the play of shadows in the Ancestors’ Grove. The bird’s mate was not woken, and this weighed on his heart. Three clutches of eggs they’d raised, across three years, and not one of the chicks had sparked into thinking before they had fledged and flown away. “I know the odds, more or less,” he told Isiq, pecking primly at the crumbs of soda bread the admiral saved for him each morning. “But the truth is, Isiq, that I’m scouting the city. And even beyond it, in the pastureland, although the hawks hunt there. She’s very good, my little pale-throat, very quick and devoted. But if a woken bird came along I don’t know what I’d do.”

At that he beat his wings suddenly and hard. “I hate myself! I’m a rogue! But telling you makes it all bearable, somehow. I’d trust you with my life, Isiq.”

The admiral touched the side of the bird’s sleek head. “Secrets,” he mumbled. In his delight the bird scattered all the crumbs to the floor. It was only the third time Isiq had spoken since his arrival at the palace.

Isiq knew that his own debt of gratitude was far larger than the bird’s. The tiny creature did not know it, but he had talked him out of his nightmares, chirped and chattered away the rats. Isiq no longer felt them clawing the edges of his blankets, nor heard them gnawing at the door. He longed with all his heart to talk to the bird, and to the King, when the monarch had time for a visit. But his mind still froze, seizing up in a horrid blankness, and the words, like slabs of ice jamming a river, refused to flow.

So modest, his victories. When he had spoken the previous time only the nurse had been with him. He had stared at her and suddenly barked, “Puppets!” She had almost screamed, then covered her mouth in terror. She too had been warned to draw no attention to the room.

“Puppets, sir?” she whispered, aghast.

Isiq nodded, hands in fists, mouth working, facial muscles tight with strain. “All of you,” he managed to wheeze, “the little people, just puppets, you’ll see.”

It was a measure of her kindness that she took no offense.

That was last week. And the first time he had spoken? That had been when Syrarys came back into his mind. Syrarys, his betrayer, his poisoner-even his property, for a year, when the Emperor forced him to accept her as a slave. Appalling to be one of the few men left in Etherhorde to own another human being. A hideous secret, one he prayed would never become known to the bird. Like the fact that his grandfather had survived being stranded in the Tsordons with a broken leg by eating the bodies of his fallen comrades, ambushed and slaughtered by the Mzithrinis. A little thigh-meat each day for four weeks, until the snows melted and a mountain patrol found him, all but frozen beside his dying cookfire.

How he had worshipped her: Syrarys, his legal consort, more arousing when she yawned or coughed than Thasha’s mother had been at the height of lovemaking; Syrarys, the only woman whose touch had ever made him weep for joy, though from the first night (her kisses a slave’s kisses, her moans of ecstasy indistinguishable from pain) a part of him had suspected that this joy was on loan from devils, and their rate of interest well beyond his means.

She had leaped back into his memory because of a laugh. King Oshiram had taken a new lover, a dancer rescued from some brothel in Ballytween, he’d said. Terribly shy and unearthly beautiful: she was the reason the King now visited him so seldom. The palace was large, and this girl apparently had the run of much of it-though not, of course, the North Tower. Yet one of the king’s favorite chambers was just two floors below, and one day he had brought her there, and Isiq had heard her laugh. It had shocked him from months of silence. He had started to his feet and said one word: “Syrarys.” For it was her laughter. How astonishing to hear it again!

Of course it would be anything but wonderful if it were really Syrarys. For despite all the emptiness that remained inside him, despite the lust that accompanied the laugh, Isiq suddenly knew: it was Syrarys who had done it, fed him deathsmoke, conspired with his torturers, wanted him dead.

Fortunately (yes, fortunately; he must keep that clear) Syrarys was the one who had died. But this girl’s laugh! Identical, identical. From that day he had listened for it constantly, moving as little as possible lest by making some slight sound he should miss her. Now and then he would kneel and place his ear against the floor.

On his next visit the King spoke of the girl in a state approaching delirium. He wished he could make her queen, though his eventual bride was already chosen. He remarked on how intelligent she was “in her quiet, listening way.” He was jealous of every man in the castle, he said. Jealous and fearful. Above all he wanted to keep her safe.

One day life changed for the tailor bird. It had befriended a street dog, it told Isiq. A scrappy, short-legged creature, also woken, who slept on a pile of sacks behind the milliner, and begged scraps from the Ulluprid cooks in the tavern across the alley. The dog was sociable and self-assured, though he would not speak to just anyone. Indeed he had a strict policy, or as he put it “a survival plan.” He spoke to humans only in the farthest reaches of the capital, very far from his alley.

“And never in groups. And always at a distance, and with a clear escape path. I don’t fancy slavery, getting nabbed and flogged to some traveling carnival, doing tricks or telling fortunes for the rest of my days. You can’t be too careful, bird. Just be glad you have wings.”