Robert Redick - The Rats and the Ruling sea

Saroo and Erthalon Ness returned, the latter wearing an ethereal smile. He had seen his monkeys, or believed he had. Alyash passed the horn to Ott and addressed the Shaggat's son in Mzithrini.

'Forget your monkeys,' he said. 'Don't you understand where we've brought you?'

The language-switch had an immediate effect on Erthalon Ness. His glance grew sharper, his face more stern. 'No, Warden, I don't. You tell me nothing. Where are you hiding my brother?'

Alyash swept his hand over the settlement. 'Those are the Nessarim, your father's worshippers. Keepers of your holy faith.'

'Not my faith,' said Erthalon Ness. 'The common faith of all mankind, only some have yet to see it. Some are afraid to cast the demons from their hearts, to burn unto purity, become new men. They will not always be afraid, however. Is not my father a god?'

'Assuredly, sir, and these men know it better than any. They have waited long for this day. Waited for you to appear, to take your father's place as they sail forth to join him. Come, let us greet them at the river's edge.' He gestured dismissively at the others. 'These people are of no more consequence.'

Alyash put out his hand. Erthalon Ness looked at it, hesitating. A clash of emotions shone in his face: suspicion, temptation, fear — and some darker, wilder gleam.

'Men are casting off from the docks in rowing boats,' said Saroo, looking down from the window. 'And in barges, and canoes.'

Then Pazel did something that surprised them all. He ran forwards and stood between Alyash and the Shaggat's son.

'Don't go with him,' he said in Mzithrini.

'Pathkendle,' said Ott, his voice an open threat. But Alyash smiled, and raised a hand to calm the spymaster.

'They're using you,' said Pazel. 'They laugh at you and your faith. They're sending you down to die among those people.'

'Lies,' said Alyash. 'You've said it yourself, Erthalon. The time of your death has not yet arrived.'

'I will know the hour,' said Erthalon Ness, looking at Pazel uncertainly, 'and before it strikes I will be with my father again.'

'No you won't,' said Pazel. 'He's a blary statue in the hold of the Chathrand.'

Soundlessly, Ott drew his sword. Chadfallow took a step forwards, as if he would intervene. But once more Alyash waved them off.

'Whose touch was it that turned your great father to stone?' he asked. 'You were there when it happened.'

'I was there,' echoed the other, turning accusingly to Pazel. 'I had almost forgotten. It was you!'

From the river below came the sound of singing. Erthalon Ness raised his head.

'They are calling you, child of the Divine,' said Alyash. 'And have no doubt: your father will live again, and just as the old tales promise, you shall sail out to meet him as he claims his kingdom.'

'You'll sail out and be killed!' shouted Pazel.

Alyash shook his head. 'Now who is laughing at the faith?'

Pazel was desperate. With every word he spoke he grew more certain that Ott or Drellarek would kill him. But he simply had to fight. If he didn't, these men would take everything — take Alifros itself — to say nothing of the life of this broken man.

'Listen to me,' he begged, taking the other's arm. 'You must know that they hate you. Didn't they lock you up all these years?'

'I think he is referring to your palace on Licherog, Excellency,' said the bosun. 'As for your father's people, how could any sane man think we wished them harm? After all, we rescued them from starvation, and built them this place of safety and hiding, when the five false Kings were slaughtering any man pledged to your father who strayed a league from Gurishal. Enough of this nonsense, Excellency. Your people are waiting.'

The Shaggat's son looked once more at Pazel. A scowl of hatred twisted his face, and he wrenched his arm away. But as soon as he had done so the hatred vanished, and the man looked simply lost. His lips trembled, and his eyes drifted miserably over the stones.

'My people,' he said, and there was more loneliness in those two words than Pazel had ever heard a voice express.

The man permitted Alyash to take his elbow, and together they descended the stair.

One by one they died. All of them, the vicious and the virtuous, the Drellareks and the Diadrelus, their lovers, their foes. The nations they bled for, killed for: those perished too. Some in extraordinary style, a conflagration of prejudice and greed, coupled to war machinery. Others were simply buried as the vast, unsound palaces they dwelt in collapsed, those houses of quarried contradiction.

They died, you see. What else could have happened? I witnessed a number of deaths, heard others related by those who were present; I even contributed some names to the tally — your editor is a murderer; it's not as rare as you think. Until quite recently I had comrades from that time, fellow survivors, people in whose eyes a certain light kindled when I said Chathrand or Nilstone or the honour of the clan. Never many. Today, none at all.

It was all so long ago, an age. How many of the young scholars around me today, in my incontinent dotage, believe that the world of Pazel and Thasha ever existed — that it was ever as cruel or as blessed or as ignorant as we found it? No one in this place even looks like a Pazel or a Thasha. Why should they believe in them? So long as I live I am proof of a sort — but I, who sailed on Chathrand to her last hour, resemble myself less and less each passing year. And when I die there will be those who pause on the library stair to gaze at my portrait, wondering if the artist were mad.

What's left of those people? The ones I loved, the ones I detested? Not their faces (you must give them those yourself), nor their bones (though I keep Ott's skull on the parlour table, and talk to it sometimes; he's the only one whose looks have improved), nor their skins, shoes, teeth, voices, graves. Even the museums that collected artefacts from that time have crumbled, and the stone markers that read Here stood the museum. What's left? Their ideas. Still today — when the world is utterly changed, when men of learning begin to argue that human beings never had a time of glory, never built great cities, never tamed the Nelluroq or tasted the magic that moves the stars — still today, we need those ideas about the dignity of consciousness, the brotherhood of the fearless and the sceptical, the efficacy of love.

I hear your laughter. The young scholars laugh too, and whisper: That old spook upstairs has gone sentimental, mixing up his memories and his dreams. Laugh, then. May your mirth last longer than a thunderclap, and your ironies, and your youth. In the end you'll be left with ideas — nothing else — and one or two of you will have spent your lives working honestly to help the best ideas flourish and grow. My friends on the Chathrand were such people. That is why I must record their story before I go.

We are not blood and gristle and hair and spit. We are ideas, if we are anything at all. That part of us that was never truly living is the only part of us that cannot die. Now then, back to Bramian.

23 Freala 941

132nd day from Etherhorde

When dawn broke in the tower, Dr Chadfallow at last did Pazel a good turn: he took the youth on his own horse, getting him away from Sandor Ott. When the spymaster noticed the arrangement, he gave the doctor a long, cold appraisal, but did not speak.

It occurred to Pazel that Chadfallow might have just saved his life, but it was almost impossible for him to feel gratitude. For a long time he could think only of his last glimpse of the Shaggat's son, releasing Alyash's hand in a muddy clearing beneath the tower, and being lifted onto the shoulders of the thin, strong, wildly tattooed and altogether deadly Nessarim. He heard again the terrible war cry that had started when they lifted Erthalon Ness: a cry that swept down to the riverbank, leaped across the water, and then like a fuse that has burned its way to the firecracker, exploded from every mouth in the settlement: