Robert Redick - The River of Shadows

Ott sniffed the cup. He had killed too quickly, he had no one to question. He sniffed again, no conscious idea why he did so, and eighty years of immersion in killing schemes saved his life.

He leaped from the pile of crates, smashed headlong across the compartment, hurled himself down the open shaft of the ladderway-and an explosion tore apart the space where he had been standing.

A black-powder trap. The compartment bloomed with flame. Shards of the Isiqs’ antique china flew like deadly spears, silver cutlery embedded itself in walls, a trumpet was forced half through the floorboards into the orlop deck.

Immediately the Chathrand’s fire crew sprang for the hoses, and a team raced to start turning the chain-pumps again-but there was no bilge to pump, and certainly no seawater. The men fought the blaze with fresh water and sand. But even with a hundred men battling the fire, Rose kept up the hunt for the ixchel.

He simply did not find any, then or ever.

They were not in the hold. They had not taken to the rigging. Many had been seen going over the sides, but where to then? Only one staircase led from the floor of the berth up into the city, and not an ixchel was seen upon it all day. Fifty, at most sixty, might have made it into the damnably protected stateroom-but not six hundred. They had not crawled between the inner and outer hulls, or into the forepeak, or the light-shafts, or windscoops, or into the bottom of the cable tiers. They had not burrowed into the rotting hay of the manger, or massed between the floorboards (Rose gassed these hidden spaces with sulphur, one after another, as day turned to night and the dlomu watch changed again and again).

Witchcraft, said somebody, after the fourth fruitless hour of searching. They’re with Arunis, said another. But the sorcerer’s lair also eluded them. Only his laugh came again in the darkness of the hold, just as a nervous Mr. Uskins was watching his lamp go out. He wanted to scream but could not. The mage is here, I feel it, that is his hand on my shoulder. Uskins crouched down, a quivering mass, and begged the darkness to spare him.

For those who had always loathed and feared the “crawlies,” the recapture of the vessel should have brought a feeling of triumph. It did not. They would go to their hammocks that night more afraid than ever of being murdered in their sleep.

The humans had chanted Death, death. Only some forty-three ixchel proved willing to die that day, however-though it might be assumed, thought Lady Oggosk, picking her slow way through the bodies on the topdeck, that they would all remember the sentiment.

1 Modobrin 941

230th day from Etherhorde

Three days passed. The stone oven was dismantled, and the stones carried away. The dlomu delivered much in the way of raw foodstuffs, and several enormous crates of mul. But they brought no more hot meals, and none of the black beer Mr. Bolutu had longed for. Masalym had evidently decided that the ship was intoxicated enough.

Pazel had never felt more disheartened. To think of all the hopes they had placed on Bali Adro! An enlightened Empire, Bolutu had said, a place of just laws, peace among the many races, a wise and decent monarch on the throne. A place where good mages of Ramachni’s sort would be waiting to deal with Arunis, and take away the Stone. Bolutu had not lied to them: he had simply been describing the Bali Adro of two centuries before.

What would they do with their visitors now? The signs were hard to read. From beneath the hull came the noise of saws and hammers: the repairs, at least, were going forward. Soldiers remained plentiful along the rim of the berth, but the ordinary townsfolk were no more to be seen. Teams of dockworkers, using two of the big cargo cranes, raised what were unmistakably gangways, and swung the wooden structures into position between the ship’s rail and the edge of the berth: lowered, they would have formed wide, railed bridges between ship and shore. But they were not lowered. The workers left them dangling, thirty feet above the topdeck, like a promise deferred.

The “birdwatchers”-so someone had named the dlomu in the ash-gray coveralls, with their notebooks and field glasses-came each morning, and left only at sundown. They studied the Chathrand in shifts, whispering together for a while when one man replaced another. Vadu joined them at the end of each day. He read the watchers’ reports, his usual gaping expression often changing to a frown. When he looked at the ship his head bobbed faster.

What had the dlomu really made of the slaughter four days ago? Were they shocked, or was sudden, mindless killing all too familiar to them? In a sense it hardly mattered. They had seen humans at their worst. Any chance of winning the city’s trust had surely disappeared.

So, of course, had some five hundred ixchel.

Early morning, the first day of the last month of the year: in the North, winter would have begun in earnest; here each day felt warmer than the last. Pazel woke with sunlight already hot on his face through the single porthole of the cabin he now shared with Neeps. He groaned. Neeps was snoring. He rolled out of his hammock and groped around on the floor for his clothes.

“Such a racket,” mumbled Neeps into his pillow. “Thought you were Old Jupe, outside my window back home.”

Pazel pulled on his breeches. “Your neighbor?”

“Our sow.”

Pazel tugged at one of the ropes of Neeps’ hammock, untying it, and lowered his friend’s head to the floor. Eyes still shut, Neeps oozed like softening butter from his canvas bed. He came to rest among their boots. “Thanks,” he said, appearing to mean it.

“Get up,” said Pazel, rubbing his eyes. “Fighting practice, remember? If you want to eat before Thasha and Hercol start whacking us, it’s got to be now.”

The scare tactic worked. In short order Neeps too was dressed, after a fashion, and the boys stumbled into the corridor.

“I dreamed of my mother,” said Pazel.

Neeps responded with a yawn.

“She was free. Not a slave or a Mzithrini wife, like Chadfallow’s afraid she’s become. She was doing something on a table-top with jars of colored sand, or smoke maybe, in a little house in a poor quarter of some city-I thought I knew which city, when I dreamed it, but I don’t remember now. And there was a dog looking in at the window. That’s curious, isn’t it?”

Neeps might well have been sleepwalking. “I dreamed you were a sow,” he said.

In the stateroom, Thasha and Marila were finishing a breakfast of Masalym oats, boiled with molasses. Felthrup crouched on the table eating bread and butter, a cloth napkin tied at his neck. The boys looked around carefully for Hercol. The Tholjassan often began their fighting-classes by appearing out of nowhere and swinging hard at them with a practice sword.

“Don’t worry,” said Thasha, “he’s not hiding anywhere.”

“We’re alone, are we?” said Pazel, surly already.

Thasha stared at him. “Isn’t that what I just said? Nobody’s lurking in one of the cabins, if that’s what you mean.”

“Well that’s blary good,” said Neeps, yawning again. “Because you just never know.”

“Come here, you two,” said Marila quickly. “Be quiet. Eat oats.”

At least Fulbreech hasn’t moved in, thought Pazel acidly. Yet.

Then, waking farther, he shook his head. “Hold on. The ixchel. Where are the ixchel?”

“One is behind you,” said Ensyl, leaping onto the back of an armchair, startling both boys. But to Pazel’s shock, the young ixchel woman proceeded to explain that she was the last. The other ten who had sought refuge in the stateroom had departed at sunrise, not planning to return.