Robert Redick - The Rats and the Ruling sea

A scrap of parchment was nailed to the topdeck door. It was a 'cordial notice,' explaining that anyone who left the cabin would die. It was signed by this selfsame messiah, whose name is absurdly unpronounceable. Below his name ran the words COMMANDER OF THE EX–IMPERIAL SHIP CHATHRAND AND HER LIBERATED CREW.

At this provocation I flung open the door, and seeing only my own startled men on the topdeck, going about the business of hacking the burned rigging down from the masts, I stormed out, shouting for Uskins. But no sound escaped my lips. I collapsed in agony, my lungs simply aflame. Nearly senseless, I dragged myself back into the forecastle house, and felt relief at my first breath of the scented air. Only the fresh breeze through the door brought back the pain; naturally I slammed it fast.

The crawly lordling soon made his appearance, through a clever bolt-hole they have carved into the ceiling, directly above the little fire. 'Ixchel keep their promises, Captain — Mr Rose,' he said. 'If we say that this or that action means death, it means death.'

The girl Marila startled us by shouting at him. ' You double-crosser! I want to see Neeps, or Pazel or Thasha. And what have you done with your aunt? Let me speak to her!' When they told Marila that the 'aunt' she wanted had been executed, the girl wept, as though they were speaking of a member of her own family.

The lordling went on to describe the trap we were caught in, with such swaggering pride that I felt at once he was claiming another's invention as his own. The mechanism is diabolical. If the little fire goes out, we die. If our lungs are deprived of the vapour for even a minute, we die. In our drugged sleep we were all made addicts, simply by breathing the stuff for a few hours. Most staggering of all, this poison was created (they allege) by none other than the Secret Fist, by crossing the deathsmoke vine with a kind of desert nightshade. But unlike deathsmoke, the poison does not weaken and wither the body, in fact it does no harm at all until one is deprived of it. At which point it kills faster than any rattlesnake.

The smoke is produced by burning the dry berries of this plant, together with some coal to keep the fire going. The crawlies bring only a few berries at a time, hidden in their pockets, and none of my crew has had the slightest luck in determining where on the ship they keep them. If we are rowdy, or the crew disobedient, they simply withhold the berries, and we are soon screaming. But their craftiness goes even further. They possess a little pill that, if dissolved on the tongue, effects an immediate and total cure. This they demonstrated on the tarboy Swift: just hours after we awoke, a crawly presented him with the pill and told him he might go. He now walks the ship a free lad, although his brother Saroo remains with us. In this way the crawlies buy our submission, as much by hope as by punishment. And of course by their choice of hostages, they have put the whole ship into a state of fear. Everyone counts at least someone among us as too important to lose.

Little Lord Unpronounceable has issued no orders, yet. Kruno Burnscove has concluded that they wish us no mortal harm: he rivals Uskins in idiocy, and that is an achievement. One only need consider the shifty cleverness of the trap to realise that they planned this assault years ago. Besides, I know crawlies. How could I not, being your son?11 Like Ott, they have patience. And like Ott, or a wolverine for that matter, once they sink their teeth into something they simply do not let go.

The crawly messiah does not pretend to understand the mechanics of the ship. And yet he forbids me to issue orders to the crew. The hour-by-hour decisions, therefore, have fallen to Uskins, and in this emergency the man has proven himself an irredeemable fool.

Fate [illegible] our family [illegible]12

By rights we should have perished shortly after waking — not by crawly poison, but in the Vortex. We were already in its grip before they drugged us, in fact. Just before the nightmare with the rats, I had to leave the topdeck for a time, in order to crush Pathkendle's mutiny. It was while I was below that Elkstem issued the warning: we had entered the whirlpool's outer spiral. I left Uskins in command (he shall never again command so much as a garbage scow), having reviewed with him exactly how one escapes such a predicament. The buffoon assured me he understood, and at the time he appeared to. But his mental frailty has worsened. I trusted him to keep watch on Arunis, and something about the task has left him distracted and easily confused, and afraid of his own shadow.

I hardly need tell you, sir, that an aggressive tack away from the eye of a whirpool must fail, unless the wind is fierce and perfectly abeam (it was neither). But that is exactly what Uskins called for. The result was disaster: at each change of tack, the line of the ship fell hard athwart the centrifuge of the Vortex. This rolled us nearly onto our beam-ends, and built up such a force that we slingshotted deeper into the spiral as we completed the turn.

The first failure was difficult to prove: we were still too far from the heart of the Vortex to be sure just how quickly we were sliding into it. But Uskins repeated the order twice, trying to make the tack sharper, and failing more spectacularly each time. All the while Elkstem and Alyash begged him to desist, and repeated the sane alternative: to run with the spiral, using its strength and any cooperative wind to help the ship cut slowly, steadily outwards. Had we done that within the first few hours of Elkstem's warning, all would have been well. Uskins, however, brought us at least five miles closer to the eye.

After the third failed tack Elkstem was contemplating a mutiny of his own. But at that point the giant rats began their siege. Elkstem remained at the wheel throughout the fighting, but he could not find enough men with their wits about them to brace the mains. Working two topsails alone, he and some thirty stout lads kept us from sliding any deeper into the Vortex, but they could not break free. And then the crawly sleeping-poison felled us, and we became a cork adrift.

By the time I awoke, imprisoned, matters had gone from bad to critical. It was midmorning. We were caught now in the lungs as well as the arms of the Vortex: the wind was cycloning towards the eye, six miles off. There were stormclouds; from the chamber's single window I saw a grey sheet of rain bend away from us as it descended, and twist into a miles-long whipcord that vanished into the maw. The port side of every object was taking on a scarlet glow. The Red Storm, whatever it was, looked set to overtake us as surely as the Vortex itself. Do you remember that mad dog on Mereldin, that ran in circles continually, all over the island, until one circle took him over a cliff? That was how we moved: around and around the Vortex, even as the Vortex itself drifted towards the storm. Which would claim us first? There was simply no way to know.

From the window I looked on as the crew struggled to replace the burned rigging, without dropping a mast into the Nelluroq, or being swept away themselves. In Etherhorde the shipwrights would take a month for such a job, in a calm port, with scaffolding and cranes. The men were trying to do it in mere hours, after bloody mayhem, at thirty knots and growing.

I will say this for Fiffengurt: the man has strength. Six hours I'd kept him tied and hooded. Then came the battle with the rats, the crawlies' poison — and immediately thereafter, the battle to save a ship without sails or rigging from the greatest calamity in all the seas. He marched first to Uskins, a broken-off Turach spear in his hand, and set the point against his chest.

' Your badges or your blood, Stukey. I'll give you five seconds to decide.' Uskins saw he meant it, and took the gold bars from his uniform. Fiffengurt took his hat too, lest there be any confusion, and sent him away to work the pumps.