The Ruling Sea (23 page)

Neeps picked up the last of the pieces. “There’s another list here,” he said, “with Mzithrini names, or I’m a dog! Pazel, do you realize what this is?”

Pazel looked at him blankly. Then all at once he went sprinting after Chadfallow.

“Ignus! Ignus!”

He raced across the upper gun deck, past a group of Turachs betting excitedly on an arm-wrestling match. They’d watched the doctor march through the compartment “steaming like a fumerole,” they said. But when Pazel left by the forward door he was nowhere to be seen.

He tried the surgery, the sickbay, and the doctor’s own cabin. He climbed back to the topdeck and walked the length of the ship. No one had seen Chadfallow. Defeated, Pazel started back to the stateroom.

All around him the ship was in a frenzy. The anchors were rising, and yard by yard the green, slippery, thirty-inch-thick cables attached to them were spooling in through the hawse-holes, where teams of sailors wrestled them into coils that rose like battlements above their heads.

The agitation in Pazel’s own heart was even greater, however. Chadfallow had been at work on a prisoner exchange with the Mzithrinis—
and his mother and Neda were on the list
. Clearly the doctor still loved Pazel’s mother. And for the first time since the invasion of Ormael Pazel felt he understood the man. In one respect at least they shared the same loss.

Neeps, to Pazel’s great surprise, was still standing at the center of the crossed passageways, twenty feet from Thasha’s door. He turned to face Pazel, wide-eyed.

“You’re not going to believe this, mate.”

He raised both fists over his head and brought them down, hard. At the precise center of the passage they stopped dead, and soundlessly. He spread and tensed his fingers, as though trying to push a heavy crate. He looked for all the world like a mime.

“It’s Arunis,” he whispered. “He’s found a way to pay us back already.”

Pazel felt his breath grow short. He drew up beside Neeps and cautiously put out his hand.

Nothing. His fingers met no resistance at all. He stepped forward, then looked back accusingly at Neeps. “Will you stop mucking around?” he snapped.

“Mucking around
, is it?” Neeps leaned again—but this time at an impossibly steep angle. He pressed his face forward and squashed a cheek against thin air. It was true: they stood on opposite sides of an invisible wall.

“It runs the whole length of the passage,” said Neeps. “Port to starboard, hull to hull. The whole stateroom’s closed off behind it. So is Pacu’s old cabin, and that cupboard where she stuffed the wedding gifts, and two more cabins at the end of the hall.”

“No wonder Ignus was so angry,” said Pazel. “But why can I pass through?”

Behind Pazel the stateroom door opened a crack, and Thasha peeped out. “What’s wrong with you two clowns?” she hissed. “Get
in
here!”

The instant she spoke Neeps fell to the deck with a crash and a florid Sollochi curse. But when he rose and stretched out a hand there could be no doubt: the wall had disappeared for him as well.

They locked the stateroom door behind them (though to do so suddenly felt unnecessary). Fiffengurt was gone; Felthrup was reading the bits of his letter on the dining table. When the boys told them about the invisible wall, Thasha paled. After a long silence, she said, “I made it possible for you to come in, didn’t I? Just by telling you to.”

“It sure looks that way,” grumbled Neeps, rubbing his kneecaps.

“I
felt
it,” said Thasha. “I mean, I didn’t know the wall existed. But just as I said
Get in here
, I felt something on my palm, right here—” She pointed at the wolf-scar. “—like the scratch of a little nail. I also felt it when you left, both of you.”

“Why didn’t the wall stop me, though?” asked Pazel. “You hadn’t said anything when I stepped back through it.”

“But she had,” said Felthrup, sitting up on his haunches. “Don’t you remember, Pazel? Before you ran after the doctor, Lady Thasha said,
Get back in here as fast as you can.”

Pazel looked at the rat, amazed. “I’ll be blowed, you’re right.” He stood thinking for a moment, then turned back to Thasha excitedly. “What if it’s not a curse? What if something’s
protecting
you, by letting you decide who can enter the stateroom?”

Thasha sank slowly into a chair. “Ramachni,” she said. “Who else could it be? But he was so tired, so drained. Where did he find the strength for this sort of magic? And why me?”

“That last bit’s an easy one,” said Neeps. “These are your rooms, Thasha. And
only
yours, now that the admiral—”

“Neeps!” said Pazel.

Thasha looked at them vacantly. “Now that he’s gone. And Syrarys too. At least we’ll have plenty of space. We can move the furniture and have your fighting-classes right here.”

“There’s still time for him to get here,” said Pazel.

Her face made Pazel wish he hadn’t spoken. Thasha wanted to believe her father was coming back: she must have thought of little else since waking from the
blanë-sleep
. But Pazel knew she didn’t believe it. His letter was on the table, his intentions plain. And even if Fulbreech spoke to him in time, did they really know that Eberzam Isiq would discard all those grand duties and maneuvers for her?

“Maybe it’s for the best,” he heard himself say. “He’s an important man. People will listen to him, and we have to get the truth out somehow. Maybe he’s right to stay.”

Thasha rose and walked into her cabin. Felthrup watched her go, then looked back at the tarboys and shook his head.

Pazel felt vile. He thought of his own father, Captain Gregory, sailing away when he was six, with never a word or letter sent back to Ormael. Nothing at all, until the previous week. Then Gregory and his freebooter friends had suddenly joined the battle against Arunis: for the sorcerer had raided their territory on the Haunted Coast. Pazel had nearly drowned in that battle; his mind-fit had struck at its peak. Thasha had met his father, spoken to him. But she had failed to convince him to scribble so much as a note to Pazel, let alone wait for him to recover. Urgent smuggling duties, no doubt.

Get used to it, girl
, he thought with sudden bitterness.
Fathers don’t give us time to grow up and leave. They leave us. Some of them can hardly wait
.

The main anchors weighed eighteen tons apiece. Legend held that
Chathrand’s
first launch, six centuries ago, was delayed because no horses could be found strong enough to haul the iron monsters from the foundry to the docks. Tonight, after a four-hour struggle, one was lashed up on the cathead. The second was rising like a black leviathan from the bay.

Mr. Uskins felt he was making it happen. Every two seconds precisely, standing before the mighty capstan, he bellowed,
“Heave!”
Fifty men answered,
“On!”
and threw their bodies at the capstan bars, making the device turn a reluctant few inches. One deck below another thirty men heaved in synchrony, and with them labored the augrongs, Refeg and Rer. They were survivors of an ancient race: hunched-over giants with yellowish hide, enormous chipped fangs, eyes like bloodshot goose eggs, and limbs heaped with muscle almost to deformity. They mumbled words in their own strange tongue, a noise like grinding stones.

The new recruits had almost wept with fear when Uskins placed them beside the creatures (the first mate himself kept a safe distance). But long before the miserable work ended they were thanking the gods for Refeg and Rer. Tarboys mopped the sweat from their faces and threw sawdust at their feet, but the augrongs did the work of a hundred men. By the time Uskins at last yelled
“Stand down!”
they loved the beasts like brothers, dropped beside them on the deck, gasping, moaning, dizzy, united in exhaustion.

The
Chathrand
floated free. It was nearing midnight: a cool, cloudless night of many stars: the great Tree looming west, the Wild Dogs chasing Paldreth the Nomad, and in the distant south the Lost Mariner shining blue and forlorn. Beneath the stars another net of light was spread: the farewell lamps on the docks and temples and towers of Simjalla, and the red and green running-lamps of the departing ships.

A stiff west wind, nearly perfect for getting under way. Mr. Elkstem, the
Chathrand’s
austere sailmaster, pulled hard on the wheel, and beneath his feet great chains and counterweights rattled in their shafts. Lieutenants shouted, watch-captains roared, men swarmed like ants up the rigging. The vast ship turned; the huge triangular staysails filled; the prayer to Bakru the Wind-God flowed through the decks in hundreds of earnest whispers. Rose watched the winking lighthouse on Nautilus Point and moved the carving of the woman’s head back and forth in his mouth.

“Fore and aft topsails, Mr. Frix,” he said softly.

The second mate howled out the order, and the lieutenants flung it forward like a ball. When the cry reached Hercól it snapped him out of his fixation on the shore. Thasha had told him to remain aboard, and he thought her decision wise. Still the urge to leap was powerful: Eberzam Isiq was dear to him, although the old man served an Emperor whom Hercól was sworn to depose. For hours he had stared at the wharf, hoping more than believing that Isiq might yet appear. Now at last that hope was gone.

Behind him a man cleared his throat. He turned. There by the hatch combing stood Arunis, his little white dog beside him. The sorcerer grinned and made a mocking bow, spreading his arms as if to say,
Look, we depart, the wheels are turning and you cannot stop them
.

He brushed past the mage and descended. In the stateroom he found no lamps burning: Thasha had asked the boys to blow them out. She was seated by the gallery windows with Felthrup beside her on the bench. Hercól touched her chin; she glanced up, eyes bright, but said not a word. They sat a long time in the dark, listening to the wind grow into the first true squall of autumn and thinking of her father, his imperious moods and strange choices, until the lights of Simja could no longer be seen.

11
Perils of a Perambulator

R
ATS.
One of creation’s great failures. The term encompasses a variety of deplorable rodents, unwelcome colonizers of the basements and back alleys of mankind, ranging in size from the four-ounce abalour “pocket-rat” to the hulking twenty-pound ghastlies of
GRIIB.
Science tasks us to suspend our instinctive judgments, but on this point the merchant traveler may take our word: the creatures have nothing to recommend them. Rats are vectors of disease; the
WAX-EYE BLINDNESS
itself is now known to have spread with the aid of these unclean detritivores
(Chadfallow, Annals of Imperial Physic 2: 936
). Rats kill infants and newborn animals, destroy food stocks, rampage in the henhouse, foul the common well.

But it is the rat’s mind, not his habits, that reveals nature’s condemnation. Alone of beasts, the rat lives trapped in a state of pseudo-intelligence: too smart to be excused of his wrongdoing, too dull to resist the filthy orders of his gut. If (as the best minds in Arqual assure us) the
WAKING PHENOMENON
is an expression of the gods’ great scheme for Alifros, what must we make of the fact that
not one
of the teeming millions of rats has ever woken? Only one conclusion may rationally be drawn …

… Dr. Belesar Bolutu has championed an odd alternative, namely that rats (and human beings, for good measure!) are in fact transplants from another world, grafted like exotic fruits onto Alifros’ tree of life. This alone, he argues, can explain why the minds of both are so unlike those of any other creatures of our world. We hardly need add that the good doctor has this conviction all to himself.

—The Merchant’s Polylex,
18th Edition (959)
,
page 4186
.