Robert Redick - The River of Shadows

The soldiers dragged him to a corner. “His blary knee again,” said Boone. “Look, he’s hurting something awful!”

A Turach poked Latzlo’s knee. The animal-seller howled in agony: “Get it off, Thyne! Cut it off! It’s burning straight through my leg!”

“That snakeskin belt’s all in knots,” said a Turach.

“Cut it away, there, something’s wrong!” shouted Thyne. “Hurry, you louts! It’s killing him!”

“Nothing to cut with,” said the Turach in command. “No blades allowed in the same room with the Nilstone, after-!”

“I have one! Take mine!” said Boone, unfolding his stockman’s knife.

Latzlo twisted, screaming louder than ever. “Just cut the mucking trousers!” shouted Thyne.

Boone leaned in and slashed. The knife was sharp; the cloth parted, and a soldier ripped the trouser leg open to Latzlo’s hip.

There was no visible wound. But there was something. Words, in fact, scrawled in ink above the knee. Thyne leaned closer, morbidly curious, and read aloud:

“All…of… you… in… time.”

Latzlo stopped screaming. The chilling words hung in the air. Then came a dull thump: an object falling to the deck from a height of some six feet. It was the midshipman’s knife.

Boone himself was nowhere to be seen. Once again, however, there was a small incision in the canvas hiding the Nilstone. And beneath the Shaggat’s upraised arm, several buttons, a gold earring and a few withered ounces of mortal remains.

“It’s almost as though he planned it that way,” said Neeps.

“Arunis, you mean?” said Pazel, blowing the sawdust from his sanding-stone.

Neeps shook his head. “Olik. As though he’d warned us that he was with Arunis, and then had to prove it by nudging him to kill again.”

They were on a scaffold over the tonnage hatch, along with Thasha, Marila and Hercol. They were sanding a part of the enormous pine trunk that would replace the makeshift foremast. The pine was their one spare mast-trunk, the other having been lost to fire. It was propped at a diagonal, one end jutting out over the quay, the other six decks below, where men were still ripping away the bark with drawknives, tackling knots with chisels and planes. The dlomu had taken charge of the Chathrand’s exterior-their own scaffolding rose on either side of her damaged hull-but they had so far left all other repairs to the crew.

“He didn’t quite say he was with Arunis,” said Thasha. “I mean, yes, he said Arunis was with the Ravens, and he called them a ‘noble Society.’ But he never claimed to be part of that Society himself. And even when he stopped pretending to like us-stopped saying ‘my friends’ and all that, and told us how reckless we’d been-even then he never praised Arunis. It would have been easy to say ‘the Great Mage’ or ‘my master’ or anything of that kind. But he wasn’t gloating, the way Arunis does himself. He really did seem to be warning us.”

“To judge by Bolutu’s despair,” said Hercol, “all such warnings must be in vain, if the Ravens have truly seized control of Bali Adro. They were, you recall, the very ‘gang of criminals’ who opposed the old, just regime he so proudly served-the gang who sent Arunis to the North in the first place, to seek the Nilstone.”

“If Olik is with the Ravens,” said Neeps, “then we can’t trust what he said about the Red Storm, either. He may just have wanted to keep us off-balance, by giving us hope that we might return to our own time one day, or something close to it. So that we’d spend our time pondering that, instead of ways to fight him.”

Hercol shook his head. “I think he spoke the truth about the Red Storm, at least. Think of Arunis. If we cannot return to the North without leaping centuries into the future, what sense is there in his plans? Either he has always been ignorant of the Storm’s nature, or he is counting on the Shaggat cult remaining powerful enough to trigger open warfare hundreds of years after his first rise to power. Neither is likely. Therefore Arunis, too, must be counting on a weakened Storm.”

Neeps gave them a stubborn look. “I still say Olik’s lying big about something,” he said. “You know I can tell when people lie.”

“Oh please,” said Marila.

“There was something wrong about his whole visit,” said Pazel. “Neeps is right, it doesn’t add up. And every other time a mystery like this has surfaced, we’ve eventually traced it back to Arunis. Credek, we may have just let one of his servants walk around in the stateroom.”

“Why is Arunis doing all this killing lately, anyway?” said Thasha. “Obviously he’s not afraid anymore of what will happen if he kills the spell-keeper, and the Shaggat comes back to life.”

“Or rather,” said Hercol, “he is no longer constrained by the fear of chancing upon the spell-keeper, when he kills. And that can only mean that he has found a way to rule certain people out. And that can only be because he has learned who the spell-keeper is. Either that, or he has despaired of the Shaggat altogether, and no longer minds the risk. He had his own copy of the thirteenth Polylex for a short time, before Pazel destroyed it. Perhaps in that time he glimpsed some other method of using the Nilstone. Some more remote chance, but one that he never forgot. Maybe he is groping toward it even now.”

“You think he’s doing some kind of experiment?” said Neeps. “Sending one person after another to touch the Nilstone, and watching what happens?”

“But the same thing happens with each of them,” said Pazel. “They shrivel up and die. And anyway he’s not there watching, unless he’s turned into an ant or a flea.”

“Maybe he’s watching their minds, not their bodies,” said Thasha.

They worked in silence for several minutes, and then Pazel spoke again. “I’m going to have a fit.”

All the others stopped work and looked at him. They knew what “a fit” meant in Pazel’s case. Thasha reached out as if to touch his arm, but hesitated. “Soon?” she said.

Pazel shrugged, applying his sanding-stone with force. “Maybe two days from now. Four at the most. The taste in my mouth started this morning. And the purring sound.”

“No fear, mate,” said Neeps. “We know what to do. You just run for the stateroom, bury your head in pillows. You won’t hear much in-well, in the admiral’s old room.”

The last time Pazel’s fits had come, he had fled to the reading cabin-that tiny, beautiful, glassed-in chamber off the stateroom. But the reading cabin was adjacent to Thasha’s own. For days now she and Fulbreech had passed an hour or two each evening in her cabin, laughing and murmuring. They kept their voices low, but it pierced the walls nonetheless. During his fits any voices at all were a torture to Pazel. Thasha and Fulbreech’s would be unbearable.

“Those signs, the purring and the evil taste,” said Hercol, “mean that your Gift is at work even now?”

“This very minute,” said Pazel, “for all the good that does us.”

“And your hearing’s sharper too?” asked Marila.

“I don’t know yet,” said Pazel. “It used to work only with translated voices-as if my mind was reaching for them, you understand? But the last time, when Chadfallow gave me that drug, I could hear almost everything. Birds, breathing, whispers fifty feet away. That was on Bramian. A lot of things changed on Bramian.”

Thasha was looking at him, pensive. “That thing you spoke with. The eguar.”

Pazel’s encounter with the deadly, magic-steeped eguar was one of the worst moments of his life. “What about it?” he said.

“It mentioned the South, didn’t it?”

“Yes,” said Pazel. “I told you. It called the South the world my brethren made.”