Robert Redick - The Rats and the Ruling sea

Pazel heard a creak. 'It's open,' whispered Dastu. But not the least glimmer of light came from the vault. Dastu whispered urgently: 'Say there, Bolutu! I've brought them. Pathkendle, and Thasha both. Where are you?'

No reply but the splash of the bilge. 'He had a lamp,' whispered Dastu, moving forwards. Then he stopped abruptly, as if he had stubbed a toe. 'Oh Pitfire,' he said. 'Come in, quick. Tell me when the blary door's shut.'

Still holding the elder tarboy's hand, Pazel stopped, making Thasha pause as well. Something was different about the room now. Was it the smell, the temperature? He couldn't be sure. But he knew he did not want to go into the room. He started to let go of Dastu — but the older boy's hand tightened sharply.

'Didn't you hear?' he said, voice sharp with anger. 'I said tell me when the door is shut!'

Dastu gave a savage tug. As Pazel crashed forwards, a knee struck him so hard in the stomach that he could not even cry out. Another blow landed on the back of his head, and he fell. When he regained his senses a moment later someone was lighting a lamp, and a heavy boot was on his chest. He began to rise, but the boot stomped with terrible violence, and at the same time a cold blade touched his throat. It was a broadsword, old, weather-stained, sharp as a razor. At the other end of it was Captain Rose.

'The door is shut,' said a second voice.

Pazel moaned with rage and frustration. The voice was Sandor Ott's. He turned his head and saw the spymaster holding Thasha from behind, one hand pulling her hair, making her arch her back and thrust her chin at the ceiling; the other holding his long white knife against her side.

9 Umbrin 941

Diadrelu felt like weeping, though she could not have said if it was with grief or joy. How they commingle, those pure extremes, whenever one feels them fully.

Two yards from her, Felthrup sat with his head on his forepaws, his throat still puffy with Dr Chadfallow's water injection, the blood from whatever battles he had survived stiff and dry in his black fur. His eyes had opened very slowly a moment ago, and were open still. But Dri knew they did not see her.

'I thought he was gone,' she said. 'I feared Mugstur had killed him at last.'

Hercol reached through the bars. She turned and leaned into his palm with a sigh. 'We are all of us exiles,' she said. 'That is what binds us: our not-belonging, our homelessness. The way our natural kin have turned on us, or turned us out, or become so strange to us that we no longer fit. But none of us are so exiled as he. Back on the Nelu Peren he begged us, begged us to accept him as a friend. My brother responded by locking him in a pipe.'

'You responded differently,' said Hercol. 'If he dies now, he at least will have known what it is to be cared for.'

Dri raised her arms in his direction. Hercol lifted her through the bars and kissed her forehead, ever so gently. When he withdrew she bent double, placed her palms flat on his open hand, and there before his worshipful eyes pressed up into a handstand, perfectly balanced and still. She smiled, crossed her legs. Hercol breathed a sigh.

'Diadrelu Tammariken,' he said, 'you're the marriage of all the dreams of women my heart has entertained.'

She laughed, gazing down at his palm. 'You yourself are not quite as perfect as all that,' she said. 'Just perfect enough for me to believe that you're real, and that you might stay with me awhile.'

'Awhile?' he said. 'After I leave this cell, I hope never to know another morning when I wake and do not find you beside me.'

'And the incomprehension of your people? And mine?'

'You spoke the answer,' he said. 'We're exiles already. We're a new people. Mongrels now, later the creators of a race.'

'The warrior becomes a visionary.' Dri lowered her legs with the same perfect control, and reclined as before on his forearm, head pillowed on his hand. 'I hope your Empress Maisa has room for such a people. Giants who yearn for crawlies, crawlies whose love their touch. Magad the Fifth would lock you in a madhouse, and feed me to the snappers in his reflecting pool.'

'Maisa, on the other hand, will receive you as one queen to another, or I never knew the woman,' said Hercol. 'She is the visionary, not I. But her visions are of solid things, things that may come to be. She is not always evoking Rin or Heaven's Tree or the promise of a paradise to come, like her stepchild the usurper. "The only paradise that concerns us, Asprodel," she told me once, "is the one we can build for all people, here in this world where we live." '

'I like that,' said Diadrelu. 'We ixchel are raised on a diet of paradise, you know. Stath Balfyr, Sanctuary-Beyond-the-Sea. A place that was stolen, a dream of an island that was ours, where perhaps our brothers dwell yet. Talag was the only one who ever thought to seek it in anything but poetry or song. But we all loved it. Sanctuary, the dream of it, made sense of our lives. It was the paradise we clung to.'

She caressed his palm. 'I don't need it anymore. Strange: two days ago I still did. Now there's something else, something closer and more real. I can let that vision go.'

A sudden noise made them both freeze: a little whimper or cough, barely audible. It seemed to come from the direction of Felthrup's cell. A moment later it came again.

'He's in pain!' said Dri, sliding to the floor. She ran towards the iron bars that separated the two cells. Hercol started to his feet.

'Keep your distance!' he said. 'Felthrup himself warned me not to reach through the bars. He gave Chadfallow a savage bite.'

'I won't get too close.'

Diadrelu slipped into Felthrup's cell. As Hercol hissed objections, she peered at the dark shape in the middle of the floor.

'He is not moving at all, Hercol.'

'Dri-!'

She took a cautious step closer, then another. 'I cannot see him breathing,' she said.

'Stay away! Lover, I beg you again! If you wish to save him, find Bolutu. Felthrup cannot even tell you what he needs.'

Diadrelu hesitated, then turned around and started back to Hercol. 'You're right,' she said, 'I will go to Bolutu at once.'

'And trust another giant not to betray us?' said Taliktrum's voice from the passage. 'How startling of you, Aunt.'

Diadrelu was airborne on his first word, springing away like a grasshopper, and drawing her sword in mid-air. But before her leap reached its zenith, something covered her, something entangling and strong. Her people had dropped a net from above. Its weights bore her crashing to the floor.

Hercol lunged forwards. Ixchel were hurling themselves from the cell bars, ten or more shaved-headed men and women, landing with spear and sword around the struggling Dri. Hercol shot his arm through to the shoulder, and ixchel blades began to stab it. The net was just beyond his reach. Within it, Dri stabbed and slashed, but a ring of spears already encircled her, and Steldak and Myett were struggling to catch hold of her weapon-hand.

'Diadrelu!' shouted Hercol.

Taliktrum himself had leaped into the fray. He spun to face Hercol. 'Shout!' he hissed, mocking. 'Shout aloud, wake the man in the next cage, bring your people running. Begin the extermination — and doom your lover with the rest of us.'

Hercol did not shout. Instead he threw himself with terrible force against the bars, stretching every muscle in his arm. Taliktrum danced out of reach just in time, but Hercol caught the nearest of his men between two fingers. He closed the ixchel within his fist, and squeezed.

'Let her go,' he growled, holding the figure up for them to see.

Steldak had taken Dri's sword. She retained her short knife, and had cut through the meshes with it in several places, freeing her head and one arm. But the spears jabbed her on all sides. There was no fighting her way out of that ring. Dri lowered her arms.