Robert Redick - The Rats and the Ruling sea

Ott raked them with a final glance. 'No more talking,' he said.

At the top of the stair the sun met them full in the face. Pazel shielded his eyes — and saw the eguar instantly, even before his mind took in his surroundings. Fear washed over him, irrational and huge. The beast was perhaps a thousand feet away, coal black, facing them. It resembled nothing so much as a great burned crocodile with its legs tucked under its body, and a spiny fan like that of a sailfish running down its back. A vapour surrounded it — a quaking of the air, as if the creature were a living bonfire. Pazel could not see its eyes. Was it sleeping?

Ott pinched his arm savagely. Pazel wrenched his gaze from the creature and faced forwards. One by one the horses stepped onto the roof.

What he saw before him would have stolen Pazel's breath, had he any to spare. It was as if they had climbed not just onto the roof of a fortress but that of the very world, and found it hot and blinding as a desert. The courtyard was vast and severe. Towers rose at its vertices, some intact, others shattered. Clusters of rooftop halls, like minor towns unto themselves, were scattered across its expanse. There were broken domes and standing colonnades, shattered fountains, pedestals with statues of men whose features, like those of the creatures at the ruined gate, had melted over centuries of wind and rain. There was a great amphitheatre, and a bulbous cistern on stubby legs, and round shafts built straight down through the fortress-city, with staircases carved into their sides.

There were also many smooth, pondlike cavities in the stone. All were filled with black water that glistened in a way that somehow turned Pazel's stomach.

Beyond the fortress, the jungle-clad mountains swept west into the heart of Bramian; a second row of peaks marched north. The structure, Pazel saw now, stood on a bend in the range. And along both arms of the range the mighty wall raced away. It was broad as a city boulevard, and he could not see the end of it in either direction.

But from the corner of his eye he could still see the black, vapour-shrouded eguar. He felt ashamed at the extent of his fear. But the same terror shone in the others' faces, when he glimpsed them. Even Drellarek looked slightly pale.

They crept forwards. The shattered halls and pavillions dropped behind them one by one. Reason told Pazel that the triple arch was less than a mile from the stair where they had begun, yet it seemed impossibly distant. There were no leaves here, and each footfall of the horses rang out terribly distinct. Erthalon Ness appeared to be weeping.

Then the eguar opened its eyes. They were white, and burned like stars in the dark flesh. Ott stiffened. Someone's horse neighed and pranced. But still the beast did not move.

Close at hand now was the first of the water-filled cavities. Ott gave it a wide berth. Pazel saw that the gleam on the water's surface actually extended faintly to the stone on one side, as if something had been dragged from the cavity and left a trail of silvery ooze behind it. His eyes followed the trail. It meandered away from them across the rooftop, growing brighter the farther it went, until it ended (Don't look! he screamed inwardly, too late) with the eguar itself.

Pazel gasped aloud. He'd met its eyes — and a force like a hurricane struck him in that instant. But it was not a physical blow, for the others sat rigid as ever on their steeds, unaware of the power streaming from the eguar.

Pazel doubled over the saddlehorn, pain between his temples, bile on his tongue. Ott's hand tightened viciously on his arm but he could barely feel it. What was the creature doing to him? And then he glimpsed its moving jaws, and understood. It was speaking.

Pazel had heard many strange tongues, and learned to speak them, in the five years he had lived with the Gift. Flikkermen croaked and gurgled; nunekkam squeaked; the ixchels' tongue was full of sombre, minor-key music. The augrongs boomed out abstract metaphors, and Klyst and her murth-kin worked charms each time they spoke. But no language he had ever heard prepared him for the eguar's. It flooded his brain, violent as the waves beating into the sea-cave, and a hundred times more frightening.

'Have you gone mad?' hissed Sandor Ott. 'Be still. The creature is only yawning, or something like.'

'Run,' gasped Pazel.

'Pathkendle. Pathkendle. Compose yourself, or I swear on Magad's life I'll throw you from this horse.'

Pazel composed himself. The thing had stopped speaking, but the echoes of its words still washed about in his head. The horses were skittish now, and it grew steadily harder to keep them from breaking into a run. A terrible odour had arisen, too: a caustic smell, like acid thrown on a fire. Pazel felt his throat begin to itch.

Far across the plaza, the eguar snapped its jaws. The sound echoed from the turrets beside them. Erthalon Ness sobbed audibly, and Pazel felt Ott's body tense.

Then, miraculously, they were at the arch. Beyond it, stairs led down onto the wall, thirty feet below the level of the rooftop. In a matter of seconds they were through; it was over. Pazel released a huge breath, one he had held unconsciously since that first ticklish feeling in his throat. Swift and Saroo looked giddy with relief.

Ott beckoned them on another hundred yards or so. Then he turned and smiled.

'At your ease, and well done! Even you, Maggot Ness: I thought for a moment we would have to throttle you to stop those tears.'

'It didn't even try to harm us!' said Saroo. 'It just watched us go by.'

'Don't be too proud to learn something, Doctor,' said Ott. 'In my experience it is always better to understand a predator than to fear it.'

'I'm with you there,' said Chadfallow darkly, looking back at the archway.

Drellarek shrugged. 'The creature had a full belly, perhaps.'

'No,' said Pazel, 'it's hungry.'

They looked at him, speechless. 'Is that what your Gift made of the thing's one little bark?' asked Swift.

'Little bark?' said Pazel.

Saroo screwed up his face and made a brief, clipped noise, somewhere between a roar and a burp. Swift and Drellarek laughed. But Pazel was dumbfounded. 'It was talking,' he said. 'It went on and on.'

'You have something in common with the Ness family,' said Ott. 'Madness, in a word. Come, gentlemen! We have gained the highway; now we must ride like highwaymen. Thirty miles lie ahead of us, and we must cover them by nightfall, or take our chances in the dark.'

If a more spectacular thirty miles of riding were possible in Alifros, Pazel could not have imagined where. Like a great tawny serpent, the wall climbed peak after rolling peak, and they thundered over them with the steaming valleys arrayed below and a sky full of bright sun and racing clouds overhead. Flocks of bowerbirds and finches and emerald macaws swept before them; the white monkeys scattered and hid; and once they stampeded a herd of pink-snouted peccaries, rooting by the hundreds along the wall's southern flank. Twice they passed through watchtowers, where countless grey bats slept under the darkened roofs, reminding Pazel of the stowed hammocks on the Chathrand.

There were more furious downpours, and moments when the wind grew very fierce; at such times they walked the horses and kept far from the edges of the wall. But for the most part the wall served exactly as Ott had claimed it would: as a swift, straight road above the jungle.

Several hours passed. The sun sank low over the western mountains. Then at last came a moment when Ott said, 'Here we are,' and pointed away to the south. Pazel turned and saw the coast in the distance: a deep unquiet blue, scratched with the white lines of breakers. Gazing farther, he saw a wide delta, where rocks and sand and threads of some great river all mingled with the surf.