Robert Redick - The River of Shadows

He scooped up Felthrup, unharmed it seemed, and the ixchel with the bloody scalp. Adept at the move by now, he tucked his shirt firmly under his belt and thrust rat and woman in through his open collar. They clung there, awkward but safe, and Pazel raced to Thasha’s side.

The madness of the fight engulfed him. Once again he found everything he had learned from Thasha and Hercol ablaze in his mind. The forward-seeing, the awareness of the blow and its consequences before he landed it, the balance and velocity of his limbs. He was not stabbing, not fighting to kill. He was using the knife to ward and to scratch, its hilt and both fists and his elbows and knees to wound and stun. All the same there was a blade in his hand. One small mistake and he was a killer. Of his own kind. A killer of someone I don’t hate, in defense of those I don’t know…

With her back to Pazel’s, Thasha fought like a tigress. She did not say a word; she could not spare him the attention. But when the opportunity came, with the nudge of her sweaty shoulder, the bump of her hip, she moved him in the direction of her goal: the Silver Stair.

Of course. She was trying to bring them to the stateroom.

From the ladderway came crashes and thumps and howls of pain. Out of the corner of his eye Pazel saw Hercol, fighting his way down through a great mob of sailors. They were armed with all manner of swords, knives, hammers, cudgels; Hercol fought bare-handed, disarming one man after another, clearing a path.

Thasha crouched, whirling with one leg extended, and sent the gunner’s mate crashing to the deck. Pazel brandished his knife, holding off a Plapp’s Pier man and a midshipman. He leaped, and just cleared a capstan bar aimed at his kneecaps. To his dismay he saw that the one who held it was the tarboy Swift. His brother Saroo had been among the final captives. Swift looked at him with rage, and utter incomprehension. He swung a second time, and once more Pazel leaped. Again he and Thasha shuffled closer to the stairs.

Then Alyash himself appeared and charged right at Thasha. His first blow nearly caught her, and she was forced back from the ladderway, dancing just out of his reach, barely escaping one blow after another.

“Hercol!” Pazel cried. But the swordsman was out of sight. Pazel glanced again at Thasha-and this time Swift’s blow caught him in the ankles.

He had just enough presence of mind to pivot as he fell, so that Felthrup and Ensyl would not be crushed. He rolled, and Swift struck him across the back. Pazel snarled with pain but still, somehow, managed to gain his feet. He rose, strangely weightless, only to realize that the sensation was due to the fact that four men were lifting him by the arms.

They knew what was under his shirt, and were trying to stick their knives through it without actually killing him. “Give ’em up, give ’em up, Muketch, or you’ll bleed!” He lashed out with his legs, but the men caught them too. Thasha, ten feet away, had been reduced to shielding her ixchel from Alyash’s nonstop blows.

It all changed with a sound. Or rather, two sounds: the enraged and murderous howls of the mastiffs. Pazel’s foes saw them before he did, and dropped him like a red-hot skillet. From the corner of his eye Pazel saw Alyash’s face freeze, and then he broke and ran for the nearest rigging. Jorl thundered after him, a dark blue boulder of a dog, while Suzyt leaped over Pazel and scattered his tormentors.

Pazel felt Thasha hauling him to his feet.

“Go!”

She practically threw him down the Silver Stair. Hercol had cleared a path; Thasha, fighting a rearguard, tumbled behind him, shouting to her dogs. Then she was beside him, studying him, terrified (he knew from one look into her eyes) that he might be bleeding, hiding some wound.

“I’m all right,” he said.

She wanted to speak: he could have sworn to that. But she did not speak; she only turned and dragged him on. Two flights down they ran, stepping on the bodies of the wounded and the stunned, trying not to stare at the ixchel dead. When one of them stumbled, the other’s hand was there. Then Jorl and Suzyt caught up with them and led the way.

They reached the upper gun deck, the landing, the Money Gate. They passed Hercol still fighting in a side passage: “On, on!” he roared. Thasha whistled, pointed: the dogs sprang to help Hercol, a friend they’d known as long as Thasha herself. But as soon as the dogs were gone half a dozen Turachs rounded the corner, and the chase was on again. They raced down the long passage toward the stateroom, the marines hurling weapons and curses, and then they reached the intersection with the painted red line on the floor, and they were safe. One of the Turachs shouted to their comrades: “Look out-that’s the mucking magic-”

Blunt sounds of collisions, groans. Pazel and Thasha ran on, bearing their few survivors. They threw open the elegant carved door and tumbled into the stateroom.

Fulbreech was here already, along with Marila and Neeps and Fiffengurt. All four ran to give their aid. The quartermaster took Felthrup and the wounded ixchel woman from Pazel’s bloody shirt; Neeps caught his arm, saying, “Steady, mate, you did blary good work.” Marila unclenched Thasha’s arm, and the battered ixchel let themselves be lifted onto the dining table. Fulbreech ran to Thasha and seized her by the arms. “Darling!” he said.

Thasha looked up at Fulbreech. She was gasping, red-faced, a terror to behold. She knows, Pazel thought, she must have seen what he did, seen him grin at me, seen him slip the antidote through that door. She’s going to kill you, Fulbreech. Right here, right now.

Thasha lowered her face to his chest.

All told, eleven ixchel had passed through the magic wall-and become hostages themselves, although in better quarters than the forecastle house. As often before, Pazel watched in amazement at the speed with which they began to function as a unit, the strongest tending to the wounded, the designated guard keeping a sharp eye on the humans and the dogs (because who knew, who really knew?) and one more carrying their water bag from mouth to thirsty mouth.

If he had been among the men ordered (and mostly eager) to kill “the little brutes,” he might have been even more impressed. For the carnage of the topdeck-twenty-nine ixchel and four humans slain-was by far the worst that occurred. True, Sandor Ott killed five more ixchel in as many minutes, and Ludunte in an act of madness jumped onto the head of the whaling captain, Magritte, and plunged twin daggers into his eyes. True, eight of the little people were kicked and clubbed to death on the Silver Stair, and another three on the berth deck, and an Uturphan topman was found in a cow stall with the veins in his ankles slit. But the casualties ended there. When Ott raced ahead of everyone down the No. 1 ladderway, he was executing a plan. Slight clues, chance remarks by the ixchel to their captives, observations brought to him by Alyash and Haddismal and others-above all, endless hours of maniacally focused thought-had brought him to a certainty. The mercy deck. The ixchel had their stronghold there. Probably forward of the ladderway, in that massive barricade of boxes and crates that were never unloaded in Simja, locked down still by bolts and rings and iron-tight straps, the furnishings for the Isiq household that was never to be (that he, Ott, had made sure would never be).

Ott was quite correct; and with his usual ruthlessness he slashed the straps and shouldered over crates and axed his way into the heart of the barricade. But when at last he had torn open the hive-like fortress of the ixchel he found not one of them there to interrogate or kill. They had gone. Some spare clothes remained. A thimble-small teacup was still vaguely warm.