Robert Redick - The Rats and the Ruling sea

But Drellarek was dead. The Turach's body dangled from the creature's mouth, and it was shrivelling like an old squash roasted over a flame. The saliva of the eguar sizzled on Drellarek's skin, and around its teeth the man's very armour was in flames. Then the creature raised its head skywards, and swallowed the Turach with three snaps of its jaws.

Pazel felt his gorge rise. He could not turn his back on the eguar, so he dragged himself away with his arms, expecting death, that death, with every scraping inch. He saw Swift and Saroo on the wall beyond the creature, running for the fortress roof. Then he looked down. Ott and Chadfallow lay motionless beneath the eguar's feet.

Oh no. Ignus.

Pazel had crawled free of the vapours and lay retching on his side. The eguar's eyes were still fixed on him, burning his mind even as the vapours had burned his lungs. And then the creature spoke.

This time Pazel was expecting the hurricane — and the eguar, perhaps, was aware of Pazel's limits. He was not faced with the same flood of meaning as before, and yet it still seemed that the eguar put whole speeches into single words, and to hear them gave Pazel the grotesque sensation of gulping a meal in large, unmasticated chunks.

'I, Ma'tathgryl-eguar-child-of-the-south nameless-desireless-pitiless-all-these-are-prisons forward-and-backward perceive their plan, their venom, their cleverness-madness-debauchery-faith, perceive you, lidless-unarmoured-unskinned child-man, mind thrown open, with them, apart.'

That was one word, one maddeningly complicated growl. Reeling from it, Pazel managed to climb to his feet and back a few more steps away. He knew his Gift would tell him how to answer, and struggled desperately against the urge to try. Hearing the eguar's language with human ears was bad enough; thinking in it might drive him mad.

He tried something far simpler: he used the language of the Leopard People. 'Why did you help me?' he said.

'Shackles of certainty in cage of desire in dead spindrift isle of self.'

Pazel understood. He must not assume the eguar meant him well. And as if to underscore the point the creature opened its mouth wide and breathed in his direction, and Pazel felt the vapour cloud billow over him again, but now mixed with some new bile or potion from the gullet of the beast. The vapour weakened him, and his knees gave out. He fell forward, staring up at the creature, trapped by those white-hot eyes. Then the eguar spoke again, and Pazel began to scream as never before in his life.

He was not in pain, but he was horribly violated. The eguar had peeled open his mind like an orange, and was examining all it contained. Pazel did not just feel naked; he felt as though someone had cut away his skin, and shone a bright light on his muscles and veins, and told him to dance.

But he would not dance (the eguar knew this, knew it before Pazel did, knew every twitch and motive of his soul). The beast was looking for something very specific, and Pazel somehow knew he must not give it up. His rage at the intrusion was searing; he would have tried to kill any human who invaded him in this way, he was thinking like a lunatic, like an assassin, like Ott.

The eguar might have been amused. With another battering-ram of a word it told Pazel that it had already looked into Sandor Ott's mind, and that Pazel's rage bore little resemblance to the spymaster's. Then he offered to show the killer's mind to Pazel. And before Pazel could refuse the eguar gave him a foretaste.

Like floodwater released from a dam, Sandor Ott's life history washed over him. Pazel could barely stand what he saw. Dark infant years in a slum; women's hands feeding, then gouging him, twisting his limbs; other children screaming, horrible men always enraged. Slammed doors, broken windows, a barnyard stench in the crowded bedrooms, the dead wrapped in threadbare sheets. Alleys full of muttering men, victims of the talking fever; they seized at his ankles and he barely escaped. Epidemic, someone said. A cart heaped with paupers fleeing the city by night.

Then exile, a mud-wattle village on the side of a gritty, treeless hill. Threats from the cattlemen and gentry, the owners of that useless knob. Torched roofs, tortured parents, an elder staked and writhing on the ground. More years of road-wandering, sores on his shoeless feet, a beggar's bowl tied to a string at his waist. Cold riverbanks, hard streetcorners, kicks. The taste of spoiled meat, fermented cabbage, potato skins scraped from the cobbles with a knife.

Pazel was tearing at his own face with his fingernails. 'Make it stop! Make it stop!' he begged. The memories had spanned less than Ott's first decade of life.

The eguar took its claw from Ott's chest, and the flood ceased instantly. The spymaster began to moan and stir. The creature prepared once more to delve into Pazel's mind. And all at once Pazel knew what it wanted, and knew the weapon he could use against the thing before him. The Master-Words.

He had two of them left, Ramachni's gifts, a word to tame fire and a word that would 'blind to give new sight.' He had no idea what the latter would do, but he knew that the fire-word might save him, might even destroy this beast and its blazing power.

No sooner had he formed the thought than the eguar knew it too. With the speed of a rattlesnake it coiled its body and leaped. A great wind threw Pazel flat. Then the eguar and its cloud of dark vapours were gone, and the weakness in his limbs disappeared.

He got to his hands and knees. The wall was slick with silvery ooze. Ott and Chadfallow lay moaning a few yards away. Pazel crawled towards the doctor and shook him. Chadfallow's eyes were open but did not seem to see.

'Wake up,' said Pazel, his voice raw and burned.

From the jungle on the wall's north side came a loud crack. Pazel turned, punch-drunk. Some hundred yards away, great trees were shuddering and bending. Then he saw the eguar slide its bulk onto a huge limb. Once more the white eyes gleamed — but this time Pazel looked away before it was too late.

'Child of Ormael,' said the eguar.

'Damn you to the Pits!' cried Pazel, weeping with rage. 'You could speak like a human all this time?'

'The Pits have no place for me,' said the eguar. 'Listen, Smythidor: I know where you are bound, and what awaits you there, and what you will need to face it.'

Pazel covered his ears. He would not speak with the creature, not when it had just eaten'Your enemy,' said the eguar, as if Pazel had spoken aloud. 'A man hoping for the chance to kill you. But I do not think you should die yet, not while the Stone moves over the waters. Not while a war is struggling to be hatched — kicking, writhing in blood and fire from its shell. Not before you see the wondrous South, the world my brethren made. Rejoice, human, rejoice in your skinlessness, your immolation, the nakedness of nerves. Rejoice above all in your fellowship, ere you turn and find it a memory, a dry shell without warmth. But you must never again refuse knowledge, Smythidor. I would have shown you the doctor's mind next.'

'I don't want to see — and what I saw of Ott's mind was hideous. Stay away, stay away, or I swear I'll use that word.' He shook Chadfallow again. 'Wake up, damn you, I need your help.'

Then the eguar hissed a final word in its own language, making Pazel wince — although it was, compared to earlier utterances, remarkably brief:

'Acceptance is agony denial is death.'

With that the creature departed, thrashing and tearing through the trees. Pazel got shakily to his feet and put his hands over his ears. He could see Alyash running towards them along the wall. When he turned around Chadfallow was sitting up, filthy with slime and blood. His nose was bent sharply to the right.

'Get up,' said Pazel, smouldering. 'What happens next is your problem.'