Shallows of Night - 02 (6 page)

The wind shrilled in the rigging like the screams at the gates of the damned and Ronin went to reef the storm sail.

“No!” bellowed Borros, the gale causing his voice to sound muffled. “Leave it up! We must make all speed no matter the risk!”

Ronin looked to the sky. The racing purple-black clouds, thick now and lowering menacingly from the west, were gathering themselves. Within them, the storm.

“We may turn over if it does not come down!” He yelled into the wind, the words blown from his mouth like crisp leaves.

Borros’ face was mottled in fear.

“I have seen the sister ship again! She is closer! Ronin, she stalks us!” His eyes bulged. “I will not be caught!”

Ronin began to reef the storm sail.

“You have only seen what you want to see; no one is following us. I want to survive this storm!”

Moments later, slender fingers grasped his arm, tugging feebly. He turned and looked into Borros’ rolling eyes, saw the line of sweat freezing along the Magic Man’s forehead.

“Please. Please. The ship comes after us. If we slow, it will surely overtake us.” Borros’ voice came out in puffs of steam on the chill, dense air. “Do you see? I cannot go back. I can take no more. Freidal has done what—”

Ronin touched him gently. “Return to the wheel and guide us,” he said softly. “The storm sail will stay up.”

Gratefully Borros went again aft and Ronin retied the knots, vowing to reef the storm sail at the first sign of the gale’s full force.

So they raced onward, riding before the gathering wind.

H
E HAS TURNED FROM
the west, away from the murder of the sun at the grasping hands of the ice plateaus. Frightened now, he flees before the turmoil of the vast sky. He feels, just behind him, the intense excitation of the storm as it bursts open and he is engulfed now by the fierce bite of the high winds, the pressure of the roiling banks of dark cloud, the kinetic scrape of leaping lightning.

Of these elements he is not afraid as he soars upward in a futile attempt to fly above the storm. He has ridden out many a gale, safe on the shifting wind currents, the whirling flurries of snow, the hard pellets of ice affecting him not at all.

The fear is of another kind and he is frantic to escape. His silver plumage a blur, he dips now, the air this high too thin for even his avian lungs, and desperately he tries to find a swift current to take him away from the feel of the living thing behind him, its frozen breath on his spread tail feathers, a pulsing caress of death. For it rolls on at his back, alive and malignant and indefatigable; something beyond life, beneath life. Coming.

He flies like a bolt into lurid purple cloud, out again, his flesh alive with crawling sensation. He tries to call out in his terror, cannot. Down and down he plummets until he sees the surface of the ice sea, dull and flat and comforting. It rushes by beneath him.

It was useless, and worse than that, suicidal. Through the curtains of blinding snow, dense and dark and turbulent, blotting out all else from sight and hearing, Ronin went aft, mindful of the slick layer of ice already forming on the deck.

It had hit with an electric jolt, one moment behind them, the next surrounding them in a frenetic shroud, dancing, swirling, driving. The gale was far too strong; even with both of them gripping the wheel, the ship was being hurled about as if it had abruptly lost all weight. Better by far for them to be belowdecks. He was especially concerned that Borros could be blown overboard.

He skidded once as the ship lurched to port, tilted, trembling in the howling winds, and righted itself. Slowly he unwound his freezing fingers from the rigging and moved now as a mountaineer would, using handholds at every step.

Borros, obsessed now by the thought of the pursuing ship, clung maniacally to the wheel, his blanched face a frozen mask, lips pulled back in a grimace of fear. And Ronin, coming alongside him, was reminded of the visage of the newly dead. Clawlike, Borros’ fingers were white bones against the wood. Ronin yelled at him, but his voice was drowned in the mounting shriek of the gale. He seized the Magic Man, chopping at his frail wrists to force him to let go of the wheel, and dragged him, lurching and sliding, to the cabin, thrusting him down the companionway. Then he turned and lashed the wheel firmly in place, went forward and slid along the icy deck, fetching up against the starboard sheer-strake. On hands and knees against the fury of the storm, he crawled to the mast and pulling himself to his feet, reefed the flapping storm sail. He choked in the crush of whipping hail and frozen snow as it beat at his face and shoulders. He secured it to the yard, doubling the knots.

Only then did he go below.

Borros sat on the cabin’s deck shivering in a small pool of water. Ronin sank wordlessly to his berth and thought that perhaps it was after all too much. Too many new situations arising each minute and neither of them yet fully acclimated to the surface. For Ronin, it was not so bad; he was young and strong, with a warrior’s body and adaptability. But just as importantly his mind was open and flexible. He could accept. He knew that from his journey to the City of Ten Thousand Paths.

But for Borros, huddled pathetically upon the wooden deck, more concerned with an imaginary ship carrying his all too real tormentor than he was with the realities of the storm hurling itself at their craft, it could not be the same.

The howling outside increased and the ship shuddered and swayed dangerously as it sped within the storm. We live or we die and that is the sum of it, Ronin thought. But, Chill take it, I will not die!

Borros had gotten up and was making his way drunkenly up the companionway to the secured hatch. Ronin caught him.

“What are you doing?”

“The sail,” said the Magic Man, his voice almost a whine. “I must be sure—that it is up.”

“It is up.”

He squirmed in Ronin’s grasp. “I must see for myself. Freidal comes behind us. We must make all speed. If he catches us, he will destroy us.”

Ronin whipped him around so that he could look into the tired eyes. They were clouded with panic and shock. It is too much for him, Ronin thought for the second time.

“Borros, forget Freidal, forget the sister ship. Even if it is following us, the storm will protect us. He cannot find us in this.” The eyes looked blankly back at him, then they turned toward the hatch. Ronin shook him, finally out of patience.

“Fool! The storm is our enemy! There is death out there. It is the sail which will destroy us in this wind!”

“Then you have taken it down!” It was the irrational wail of a disillusioned child.

“Yes, Chill take you, I had no other choice! If I had not, we would be on our side now breaking up.”

Frantically Borros clawed at Ronin. “Let me go! I must put it up! He will overtake us if I do not!”

Ronin hit him then, a swift blow at the side of the neck, breaking the nerve synapses and blood flow for just an instant, and the Magic Man collapsed, eyes rolling up, his body folding onto the companionway. Ronin put him on his berth and turned away disgusted.

The ship groaned under the onslaught and the hanging lamp swung crazily on its short chain, splashing the bulkheads with bursts of sullen light and geometric shadows.

After a time Ronin reached up and extinguished the flame.

He lay listening to the howling darkness, feeling the felucca shudder and lurch under him, smelling the thin trail of smoke from the doused lamp. The gale tore through the rigging, moaning as if alive, spattering hail against the hull in furious bursts.

The darkness deepened and the sounds modulated subtly downward in pitch, becoming muffled as if heard through layers of viscous fluid. Yet other aspects of the sounds, unnoticed until now, were supraclear. Then the volume altered, increasing and decreasing in a slow rhythm that was comforting. The sounds lengthened, as if stretched out of their original shape by the swell.

He was deep, deep, and the towers of the world rose above him in cyclopean grandeur, steep walls of hard volcanic rock with thick-knuckled ridges of darkly gleaming stone as obdurate as obsidian. Pale fronds and spreading algae partially obscured their faces. The foundations, hewn and sculpted during an age so ancient that Time was but an abstract concept and Law was unknown. An age of great upheaval and movement, when the world was forming and crying out like an infant; when red and yellow molten rock spewed forth in sizzling rivers from the innards of the earth, crawling down new rock edifices, boiling into the violent seas; when land masses arose, glistening and foamy, in the middle of the oceans; when cliffs slid like cataracts into churning waters white with slate and pumice. In an age when all was beginning.

A shadow; he is not alone.

In the awesome canyons of the foundations of the world he feels a presence, diffuse and elemental.

Large it is; unutterably immense so that he does not know whether it moves or is at rest. Perhaps it has features; perhaps it is acephalous or again quite shapeless. There is no way of discerning. Its sides pulse with energy, the source it seems to him of the oceans’ very tides. He glides silently over the slippery mountains of its body, a metonymical terrain without end. And he wonders. But in the absolute silence no answers are forthcoming.

He awoke with an enormous thirst and a need to urinate. He ventured on deck. The storm was still raging but the sky appeared somewhat lighter. Dawn, he thought, or just after; impossible to tell in this weather. He relieved himself, then bent and stuffed snow into his mouth, returning to the cabin, shivering.

Borros was still asleep, which was just as well, Ronin thought, since he would wake with a headache.

Ronin crossed to his berth and, leaning across it, ran his hand experimentally along the outer bulkhead. The craft was obviously built as well as it was designed. He could detect no sign of weakening and, satisfied that it was withstanding the gale’s fury, he sat and ate a spare breakfast.

Borros groaned and rolled over but did not wake up. Ronin saw the blue bruise along his neck. He crossed the cabin and bent over the frail figure. He saw then that the Magic Man was shivering.

Quickly he turned Borros onto his back. He was hot and the skin had a dry, taut look about it. The eyes came open slowly. They were enlarged and abnormally bright.

Ronin reached under the berth and pulled out a woven blanket. He stripped the spare frame of its suit and found that the material was dry but the flesh underneath was damp from the residues of melted snow and fever sweat. The suit was superbly designed to keep out the cold and the damp but conversely, if the body was wet, the material would not allow it to dry.

The body shook with the force of the fever and Ronin, covering Borros with the blanket, cursed himself for a fool. He should have realized sooner that their enormous differences in physical stamina and mental adaptability would result in the Magic Man’s eventual collapse. Because he had been the one to continually urge them onward, Ronin had ignored the signs of utter exhaustion on the other’s face. How much did Freidal’s terrible probings take out of him? Ronin wondered.

Outside the storm smote the ship in monotonous abandon. From time to time Ronin attempted to cool the Magic Man’s face with water. The bare skull, gleaming waxily in the diffuse light of the waning day, seemed a constant reminder of his vulnerability. At sunset the fever appeared stronger. Borros had slept fitfully, eating not at all. Now he was delirious and Ronin felt certain that if it did not break soon Borros would die.

There was nothing he could do and his helplessness vexed him. He had searched the cabin in an attempt to find medicine, but he soon realized that there was no way of knowing what the potions and powders he found were meant for. The wrong choice could kill the Magic Man more effectively man any fever could. So he had left what he had found in the cupboard below the berth, unused, unknown. Borros moaned and the gale shrieked in the rigging.

Abruptly he heard a sharp grinding noise and was sent tumbling as the ship lurched. The motion has changed, he thought as he regained his feet. And then: Chill take it, we have hit something!

It was true. He felt now the slender felucca sliding over the ice at a precarious, oblique angle. If I do not right the ship, our momentum combined with its mass will topple us.

Pulling on his hood, he raced up the companionway, through the hatch, and out into the blinding storm. Needles of ice struck at him and the high winds tore at his torso. Over the screech of the gale he heard a rhythmic heavy flapping and, shading his eyes, peered across the deck. A long strip of rigging had worked loose and was whipping itself against the hull. There was no visibility.

He went aft with the ship trembling as it sped on its oblique and unnatural course. Slowly, he felt the felucca turning broadside into the gale. We shall break up for certain then, he thought. Hand over hand he continued aft, stepping cautiously through the calf-high mixture of ice and snow covering the deck.

A gust of wind tilted the ship and his grip loosened in the slippery iced rigging. He stumbled and skidded along the ice and as his momentum built he knew that he was going over the side. He struggled to regain his balance on the heaving deck, could not, and desperately reached out for the gunwale with his gauntleted hand. He saw with intense clarity the scales of the Makkon hide slide, frictionless, along the slickly iced wood. He tightened his grip, feeling the might of the wind against his body slamming him against the sheer-strake, and he was tossed upward as if weightless over the side, into the howling storm, almost gone, the dark and featureless ice unraveling in a blur below him so close now. His breath caught in his throat and his mouth clogged with flying ice dust. A fire running along his arm and into his chest as the wind pulled at him, moaning and crying, and he twisted in its fierce grip. And through a haze he thought, Now, now or it will surely claim me.

Calm at the core.

Momentum, he thought. And used it. With the gale tearing at him, he used the last of his strength, concentrating it into his gauntleted hand, exerting the pressure, the scales now biting through the ice, gripping finally. And still the wind battered him.