Riverkeep (7 page)

Whatever it looked like, inside it ran medicines that could save Pappa. He thought of the first page of the ledgers:
to ackt with dignittie
. Even though Pappa was still the Danék Riverkeep for the next three days, his dignity had been taken by the river—and by the thing inside him.

But he was still there. There was still time. And that meant Wull had no choice to make.

He moved aside the ropes and oilskins and fishing lines that hung in front of the harpoons stacked neatly along the riverside wall. They had never been used in Wull's lifetime; Pappa had often boasted that they were sharp and heavy and made of good iron.

He lifted one free and tried it in his hand. Although well balanced it was immensely heavy, and as he raised it to shoulder height the barb dipped and crashed onto the floor.

“There must be a knack to this, right enough,” he muttered, trying again. His long arm quivered under the weight, and the barb fell once more, the clang stirring Pappa into a cursing sleep-mutter.

Wull lowered the harpoon to the floorboards and freed the three others from the wall. Then he extinguished the fires in the grates, placed salted trout and hard biscuits in a canvas knapsack, and began laboriously dressing Pappa's shouting, struggling body in the seula-gut and fur-lined clothes he would need on their journey to the coast, feeling all the while the torn pages of the encyclopedia burning like hot coals in his pocket.

Bohdan: literally, “skin-changer.” A creature of semi-myth (see also
Greenteeth, Mormorach
,
and
Suire
), so named for its habit of wearing the skins of its victims. Details of reported sightings vary dramatically, but the alleged capture of a live specimen in the Splendic Ocean revealed that the creature is itself largely formless, consisting of little more than a tentacled mass of skull-less head, spinal column, and countless nerve endings. The bohdan achieves form by inhabiting the body and shape of its victims, a process that takes anything from three to seven days (depending on the victim's size and species) and is outwardly symptomized through dramatic weight loss and clouding in the host's eyes. Once the creature takes occupancy of a new body, the skin it has most recently vacated is almost always consumed completely by the bohdan in its new form. This would account for eyewitness reportage that describe the creature as goatlike, houndlike, and humanoid, and perhaps accounts for a great many unexplained disappearances. There is
no known cure for attack by a bohdan, although various magics and mythical treatments are suggested in ancient literature (see
Mormorach
).

—
Encyclopedia Grandalia,
University of Oracco Print House

The bäta sat low in the water, heavy with the blankets and food that Wull had piled wherever he could find space: into the pointed nose of the bow, below the bottom boards, and under the stern thwart. Beneath the bucket of salted trout was a paper-wrapped bag: nearly forty ducats, every penny they had.

Wull felt the bäta sulking like an unwilling dog. It seemed when its eyes sat in the periphery of his vision that they were cast away from him, unwilling or unable to look in his direction.

“Can't go!” Pappa was shouting. “Sleep only!”

“You c'n sleep when we're in the bäta—you jus' need to get yourself in there for me, please,” said Wull. He was alarmed by the support Pappa needed to walk the jetty, but even more so by the ease with which he was able to carry him. Pappa's whole frame was loose, bones knocking together in the absence of muscle and flesh, a few days having shorn off more than half his body weight. With his head pressed against Pappa's shoulder, Wull's ear felt the breath-heat of
muttered insults and protestations, Pappa's mouth rank and rotten with fish, their gleaming scales clumped on his unshaved face like the slobbers of frog spawn that bordered the riverbank in spring.

Wull had tried over and again to wipe Pappa's mouth clean, but had retreated from the biting teeth.

“Sleep now, stinking boy it!” said Pappa, going limp in Wull's arms.

“Come
on
!” said Wull. “It's for your own good we're doing this.”

“No good!” said Pappa, digging his heels into the jetty.

Several minutes of balancing and cajoling and gentle pushing passed, Pappa's anger rising steadily to a shout that was smothered by the river's freezing air. Eventually he was slumped in Wull's old seat on the stern thwart, limp with exhaustion, fresh spit glistening in the corners of his lips.

“Take this blanket,” said Wull. “You'll need it. It's freezing.”

“Heavy,” said Pappa, wriggling away from it.

“You have to take it—you'll freeze to death without it. Come on, please.”

He tucked the blanket around and under Pappa's spindle legs, checked the bonds on his hands and the knot of his scarf.

In the bäta for the first time since he'd been taken into the river, Pappa looked even smaller, and Wull realized just how much of him had been shrunk and whittled away.

The river was closing in front of Wull, the untamed ice reaching remorselessly inward to the boat-width channel that still flowed in its center.

“We need to be going, Pappa,” he said. “I'm sorry the river's like this. . . . I tried, honest. There's no lighting the lanterns—they wouldn't take the flame. But we need to get you proper help. That's all that really matters.”

He took a quick drink from his elkskin water pouch, then sat in the Riverkeep's seat and hefted the oars, palms burning under tender skin as he rowed steadily away. In a silence filled only by the sound of the oars' blades and the bäta nudging chunks of ice, he watched the unlit lump of the boathouse shrink, the closed eyes of its black windows reflecting a threatening sky from which daylight was rapidly ebbing, cloud cover speeding the approach of night.

A grandfather (Wull was unsure how many
greats
were involved) named Wilcy had explored the river as a boy, and kept a journal, all the way to its mouth and the beginnings of the wider sea. There was an inn at the hamlet of Lauston that had a jetty and cheap rooms where Wilcy had spent the night and
enjoyd fyne ales in such qwantittys as put me in a plais of fair disposytion
.

Ale tasted like old dishwater to Wull, but
fair disposytion
sounded good, he had to admit. From Wilcy's meandering descriptions and the maps, he reckoned Lauston was close—two hours rowing, all with the current, away from the keep's
domain and toward the rest of the world. He rowed lightly, the water urging the bäta forward.

Pappa would have known where Lauston was, would have known the names of the townsfolk, the traders, and the guards. He always knew the world of the river. Wull watched Pappa's face as he sculled into the current's center, willing him to lean forward and laugh with him, chide him and breathe lakoris at him for fun.

“Are you comfortable, Pappa?” he said after he had rowed far beyond the sight of the boathouse, past twenty burned-out lanterns: silent sentinels in the full grip of winter.

Pappa said nothing—merely glowered through the grime of his hair and chewed on his lips.

“I couldn't tame the ice,” Wull carried on. “You never had time to show me how to get the wicks lit; the flames jus' bounced off. But I broke a big floe with a rod an' found that face. My first recovery, an' it put me onto this mormorach thing that's down in Canna Bay.”

Night had fallen. They were passing close to lantern twenty-one, and Wull shuddered at the shadowed berg it had become. With the fire of the lanterns dead, the river's darkness was breathtaking, lit by just the thin moonlight that struggled through the clouds.

He looked over his shoulder, corrected his course, and carried on rowing as steadily as he could without his shoulders screaming their resistance.

Lantern twenty-two—frontier of the Riverkeep's world and near to where Pappa had been taken—slid into view. Wull's chest skipped as he saw that, alone of all the lanterns, it remained lit, a tiny, wobbling flame dancing on the tip of its wick casting a fragile glow into the black.

He had never been past this point. The Riverkeep's domain was a blockage in the artery of the river, a clutch of islands and whirls of current that slowed the water and made it solid and immovable.

Beyond it the river widened and quickened, a clear strip of it flowing all winter without a keep's hand. Even unlanterned, the ice reached barely halfway into the center, leaving a channel through which to pass.

A storm had been raging the first time he'd come out here in the bäta, and he'd trembled, huddling close to Pappa's bulk as thunder rolled across the sky, so far from home and with the pull of the river so close to his feet. But when an ocean barge puttered past and Pappa waved to the captain, Wull's chest had swelled—proud of Pappa's being known, recognized.

“What's past here?” he'd asked.

Pappa had chuckled. “In the Danék Wilds? Ev'rythin'. All the noise an' danger ye'd never wish for. An' beyond that, war.”

“Isn't there magic?” Wull had asked, thinking of his bedside stories.

“Oh, aye, if ye can find it.”

“Then why don't we use magic to keep the river?”

Pappa had lifted him onto the center thwart, onto the keep's seat, held him in under his big arm, and pointed to the vein-bursts of pink lightning flashing on the horizon.

“'Cause magic's like that. Jus' as pretty an' jus' as dangerous, an' it comes to us the way lightnin' strikes the ground. So once ye can bottle up lightnin', wee man o' mine, ye let me know an' we'll use it for the keep. All right?”

Wull had laughed, thinking of a bottle of lightning, and they'd turned back home.

Now, the oars in
his
hands, he looked at Pappa's face, gaunt and loose, eyes once more closed in sleep. Fighting it, Wull knew—fighting for his own skin.

There was a small bottle of whale oil in the bow, packed out of grim duty; taking the bäta on the river without it would have made the abandonment of his keep seem even more cowardly. Wull dropped the oars in their locks and pulled close to the lantern, feeling the warmth of the fire in the iron rod, and, removing his gloves for a second to loose the cork, tipped the whole, stinking bottle into the reservoir. He shut the cap and watched as the oil soaked into the supple wick, swelling the flame to a bold finger of white against its globe. In the absence of the other lanterns, its light was impossibly bright: a beacon at the edge of the world.

Holding his hand on the warm iron a moment longer, Wull looked back into the dark cave of the Riverkeep's world,
then sat and rowed on, past that final barrier of light into new, unknown waters.

Scribbled in the margins of Wilcy's journal were the details of currents and whirlpools, along with the names of towns and villages speckling the boundaries of Oracco, the great city, through which spilled people in numbers Wull could not imagine.

And between these outposts of bustling civilization were miles and miles of inhospitable wilderness and threatening badlands—the banks of which heaved with all manner of animal and human danger.

“There's meanin' in this when you think about it,” he said after another silent time. “There's got to be a reason for the one recognizable bit o' that Blummells man to land on our doorstep, an' for it to be the thing that brings this animal to us. If we get ahold o' this mormorach, we'll be rich forever, Pappa, but first we'll be able to make you better.”

Pappa, who Wull had thought asleep, gurgled loudly—a wet, bubbling croak. Thinking he was choking, Wull went to thump his back, when he realized that the gurgling sound was laughter.

“Better . . .” said Pappa, leering horribly. “No
better
 . . . all fine. Strong. Fine.”

“What do you mean?” said Wull. “You're ill. You're not well.” He jumped as a seula popped up beside the boat,
nosing at the smell of fish heads. It blinked its glassy blue eyes at him, then flicked its whiskers and slid beneath the surface once again.

“Am fine, it that speaks,” said Pappa, looking directly, properly at Wull for the first time since he disappeared. “Failure boy, stinking
failure
boy . . .”

“Why are you saying that?” said Wull. His hands began to slow on the oars as the needle of pain in his guts pushed vomit into the back of his throat. The light of the final lantern was a speck in the distance now.

“Ice river,” said Pappa. “Ice, ice, ice, all the river.”

“I tried!” said Wull, rowing again, harder. “I did my best, but it can't be done—not without you to show me how! This winter's worse than any I c'n remember. I can't keep it back on my own!”

Pappa shrugged, a one-shouldered hunch that nearly toppled him on his side. “Failure, it that speaks,” he said. “Eat now.”

“Don't say that about me,” said Wull, raising his voice. “I've done my best! An' I'll make you better when we get there, you'll see!”

“Eat! Now!”

“No! We're hardly even away—there's days to go an' there's not many fish heads left as it is. You c'n eat once we get to the inn. They've a jetty we can tie up to for the night.”

“Eat! Now!” shouted Pappa, straining against his bonds.

Wull's head throbbed, a little speck of pain deep in the center of his skull.

“No!” he shouted back. “I've told you, we're goin' to . . .”

His words stopped in his throat: the figure of a man, shoulders bristling with the fronds of a bank fern, was silhouetted against the lantern's pinprick of light.

“Oh gods,” said Wull. “Bradai.”

The figure dropped out of sight. Wull saw the dot of the low black bandit craft racing toward them—a little dart in the water, the shoulders of its occupants just visible, wafting with feathers and plants.

“Eat! Now! Now!” said Pappa.

“Not now—we're in trouble!” said Wull, digging into the river as hard as he could, lifting himself off the seat with the weight of the water. The bäta leaped forward, but it was nowhere near enough, he could see: already the bradai's skiff had closed a boat length or more on them, and he could see the thin shadows of their black-painted oars working rapidly in the locks.