Robert Redick - The River of Shadows

Taliktrum nodded slowly. I tossed him a copper whelk: we were matched again. Then he said, “We have seen the mage-name him not; he has sharp ears for the sound of his own name! — walking of late on the mercy deck. He appears without warning, and slips quickly away. We have been unable to follow him to his lair-but he has killed five of our guards.”

“You little bastard,” I hissed, furious now. “You mucking swore he wasn’t in your part of the ship.”

“Nor is he!” said Taliktrum. “There is not a chamber, not a crevice or a crate, that we have not explored. He has not made his lair in the lower decks, I say. He has merely passed through them like a shadow, gazing upward, as though to pierce the floorboards with his eyes.”

“Up at the Nilstone,” I ventured.

“Of course,” he said, amp; tossed his golden coin my way. “Your turn again.”

I took a deep breath. “Hercol’s sword-”

“Is called Ildraquin, Earthblood, Breaker of Curses,” he said. “Put in his hand by Maisa, the deposed Empress of Arqual, whose children Hercol murdered when still in the pay of Sandor Ott.”

His bad news was beginning to feel like a hammer striking my skull. “Stanapeth?” I said dumbly. “Hercol Stanapeth killed Maisa’s children? Personally?”

“Impersonally, I would imagine. Go on, you must find a better secret.”

“It’s not my blary fault,” I said. “You’ve spied out everything I know.”

“If that were true we would not be playing,” said Taliktrum.

My stomach was in knots. What was I doing? I could betray them all with my urgency to help. Then in a flash it came to me. “Sniraga’s alive,” I said. “Undrabust and Marila both swear they saw her on the upper gun deck.”

He didn’t take the news well. The cat was particularly hated by the ixchel; apparently she had eaten a few. “We should have fed that creature poison the day Oggosk brought it aboard,” he said. “My father wanted to. My aunt disagreed. She argued the witch would guess that ixchel had done it. But in truth it was just her softness, again. Dri always blinked when the moment came to kill.”

“If she argued against poisoning a pussycat, it was for a good reason,” I said. “Your aunt never cared for anything, not even Hercol, as much as she did your clan.”

He snorted: “What rubbish is that? She chose him-chose all of you, and turned her back on her people.”

“She was ready to kill herself, Taliktrum. She told Stanapeth she’d rather die than see the clan break into factions, some with you, others with her.”

“Anyone can make such a boast,” he replied.

“You’ll believe what you want to,” I said, amp; tossed him my gold coin. “All the same, it’s your turn.”

He set the pearl on the floor amp; turned his back, hands in fists. This talk of Diadrelu had rattled him. Still burning with guilt, I imagined, as well he should be. When he looked at me again his face was a mask.

He set his foot on the pearl. “If you take this and depart, sharing nothing, I will be your enemy forever.”

“I’m no cheat, Taliktrum.”

He kicked the pearl in my direction. Then he said, “I am leaving.”

“What?”

“Leaving the ship. My people, the clan, everyone. I am going ashore, tonight. I… I cannot wait.”

“You don’t mean that.”

“After I leave this room, I will return to my people’s stronghold one last time. I will write a letter telling them that I have gone ahead of them, to the land we are destined to repossess, and that they must follow Lord Talag once more, until we are all reunited”-he laughed miserably-“in paradise. Then I’ll slip ashore. The cables around the ship are many. I’ll have no difficulty there.”

“Taliktrum, stop. You’re their commander.”

“I am their demigod,” he said, with acid on his tongue. “My soldiers are carving little statues of me, and carrying them about like idols. Two brothers fought yesterday over which of them I favored more, and one stabbed the other in the leg. A woman came to me tonight and said that our ancestors had told her she was to have my child. They are insatiable, Fiffengurt. And I am the one who made them that way.” He put his hands in his hair. “This cult of He-Who-Sees. It should be He-Who-Is-Seen-seen, followed, imitated, aped. I live in a prison, a prison of their adoring eyes. You cannot imagine what it took to elude them long enough to come here.”

“But you’ll be all alone, man! You don’t even know if crawlies-if ixchel exist in this part of the world.”

“Unless they have gone the way of human beings, they exist. We came from this side of the Nelluroq, you fool.”

“Ixchel came… from the South?”

“Centuries ago. In human ships, human cages.” He paused, suddenly struck. “Do you mean that Diadrelu did not even tell you why our people boarded Chathrand?”

I shook my head. “There were things she never would talk about. She wasn’t a traitor, I tell you.”

He was shocked. It was a long time before he found his voice. “There is a traitor in our midst today, however,” he said at last. “The person who switched the antidote pills.”

“Do you have an idea who that person is?” I asked.

“I know who he is with a certainty,” said Taliktrum, “because that person is me.”

I gaped at him. Taliktrum smiled, but it was a smile of self-loathing. “Once a person takes the antidote,” he said, “the least whiff of the poison vapor warns them off. The captain, Undrabust, and Marila would have balked at the door of the forecastle house, even if Rose had not guessed that they were cured. I did not release them as a humanitarian act. Hercol’s suggestion merely gave me an excuse to thin the ranks of the hostages, thus buying us a few more days. But I was clumsy. I should have foreseen that Oggosk might give her pill to the captain. He and Sandor Ott were never, under any circumstances, to be freed.”

That didn’t surprise me. “So, you’ve made some mistakes,” I said, “and now you’re running away from them.”

“Now I am accepting the consequences,” he said. “There is no other path for me. We are the rose that prunes itself: so states a motto of my people. And it is the simple truth. When an ixchel knows that his presence in a clan is irredeemably harmful, he must choose exile, or death. But I wanted someone to know the truth about me-that I did this not for the clan, but for myself. I cannot tell anyone of Ixphir House, for like divided leadership, the truth would destroy them.”

“Are you so sure of that?”

He ignored my question. “My father promised to take them to paradise,” he said, “to Sanctuary-Beyond-the-Sea. I do not believe they will ever arrive.”

“Not on this boat,” I agreed.

“But if that day should somehow dawn, when the swallows come for my people, tell Lord Talag before he departs. Tell him he was wrong to break my flute across his knee. Can you remember that?”

I nodded slowly. “I’ll remember. But you should tell him that yourself, you coward. Running away’s no good.”

“Neither is talking. Some problems can’t be solved.”

“What about your woman?”

“Who, Myett?” He looked genuinely surprised. “That girl was… an entertainment. A prophet’s plaything, though my father thinks all prophets should be like those of old, chaste and ragged.”

“She’s lovely,” I ventured.

At that he glared, as if to say, Not you as well. “She makes a spectacle of her charms-such charms as she possesses. No, Myett was never a suitable match. She is unstable. She took to following me, picking fights with any woman I chanced to look at. My father even thought she might have been the one who switched the antidotes.”