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  The River of Shadows

  ( Chathrand voyage - 3 )

  Robert V.S Redick

  Robert V.S Redick

  The River of Shadows

  What can you do against the lunatic who is more intelligent than yourself, who gives your arguments a fair hearing and then simply persists in his lunacy?

  — ORWELL

  The disease has sharpened my senses-not destroyed-not dulled them.

  — POE

  Lost Souls

  21 Ilbrin 941

  220th day from Etherhorde

  It might have been a palace window in Etherhorde: round, red-tinted, firelit from within, but it was a living eye set in a wall of sapphire lunging east through a cobalt sea. Beneath the eye, shattered scales, and a wound that gaped long and raw as the opened belly of a bull. Lower still a mouth like a sea-cave, and from it a hot, salt, rancid wind that took the little skiff in a foul embrace.

  No one moved. The beast had come upon them so quickly that they’d not yet even turned the skiff about. The quartermaster tried to squeeze out a command, but no sound came. On the second try he managed a whisper: “Lie down. Lie down!”

  The others obeyed him, curling down against the deck, and the quartermaster, dropping the helm, did the same. The skiff had been tacking neatly across the inlet, but as the monster closed it began to buck and heave like a wild stallion, and they clung to the thwarts and cleats and oarlocks for dear life. The creature had a serpent’s body but its head was leonine, maned in shell-encrusted hair, the strands thick as old halyards and shedding tons of seawater as it rose.

  Thasha Isiq lifted her eyes. It was close enough to touch with a boathook; she could have leaped from the skiff right into that blue-green mane. She felt someone tugging her arm; she heard the quartermaster, whose name was Fiffengurt, begging her not to stare. But she could not look away. The eye blinked, huge and terrible and desperate and sad. She saw chipped fangs and a black torrent of tongue. She saw an iron collar buried in the mane, and a bit like a rusted tree-trunk cutting into the flesh at the back of the mouth. She saw a chain fused to the bit and whipping up out of the foam. All this in a split second: just before the chain struck the hull and jerked the boat half out of the waves and snapped her head sharply back.

  When the red flash of pain subsided Thasha raised her head again. The waves were smaller, but the boat had sprung a bubbling leak. Frightened curses, desperate looks. Pazel Pathkendle, Thasha’s closest friend in the world, was pointing at a spot some twenty yards off the stern. A huge loop of the serpent was rising there, turning like a section of a gigantic waterwheel, each blue-green scale as large as a soldier’s breastplate. Farther east another loop broke the surface; and beyond it that terrible head rose again, and the wound flexed and twisted like a second mouth. The beast was heading for the cape across the inlet, with its fishing village and a cluster of rocky islets a few miles offshore. Behind the largest of these the Chathrand stood at anchor, waiting for their return. Thasha could just hear the lookouts starting to howl.

  “ ’Ent no blary end to that thing!” said one of the Turachs, his eyes on the oozing body of the serpent.

  “Quiet, marine,” whispered his commander.

  “It is dropping lower,” said the swordsman, Hercol Stanapeth.

  So it was: lower, and lower still, until they could no longer see the horizon beneath the loop of flesh. The farther coil was lowering too, and the creature’s head was gone from sight. Then Fiffengurt hissed through his teeth. The water around the skiff had begun to boil.

  They were in the center of a vast school of sharks, trailing the monster like a ribbon of mercury, packed so tight that they jostled one another, flicking spray into the boat. The sharks were slender, man-sized, their dead eyes round as coins. Thasha could feel the thump of each snout against the hull.

  Their numbers seemed as endless as the monster’s length. But eventually the school was past, and at almost the same time the arch of flesh sank out of sight. Nothing remained of the serpent but a trail of foam.

  Fiffengurt and the soldiers made the sign of the Tree. Mr. Bolutu, the older dlomu, began a prayer of thanks to Lord Rin. But Pazel rose carefully to his feet. Thasha watched as he shielded his eyes, studying the creature’s wake.

  So little to him, she thought suddenly. A boy barely seventeen, the age she’d be in six weeks, dark like any tarboy, and a bit darker yet by blood. Thin arms, fierce eyes. Did he care about her anymore? Did she care about him? Did it mean something, that notion, I care, I love, after yesterday? He might well have despaired. He might hate her casually, as part of hating everything: the new world and the old, the Chathrand and the place she’d anchored, the frightened villagers, the savage Gods.

  When the prayer ended, Sergeant Haddismal, a hugely muscled Turach with skin like boot leather, twisted around to glare at Mr. Fiffengurt.

  “Couldn’t believe these eyes,” he said, pointing, as though they might have been confused with some other pair. “You dropped the tiller, man! What kind of mucking pilot are you?”

  “The kind that brought us safe out of the Nelluroq,” said Hercol.

  “Didn’t ask you, Stanapeth, did I?” snapped the Turach. “But what I will ask, once more, is what in the nine putrid Pits we’re doing out here? What did you lot find yesterday that’s got you too scared to let the men set foot on land? It has to be something worse than a few more of these fish-eyed abominids.”

  The pair of dlomu just looked at him, silver eyes shining against the black, black skin. Their indifference to his abuse only fueled Haddismal’s rage. He shouted at Pazel to sit down, and at Mr. Fiffengurt to bail, although the quartermaster was doing so already. Looking again at Hercol, the sergeant gestured at the mighty ship that was their destination.

  “Just tell me the Gods-damned truth. Eight hundred men goin’ mad with thirst, and you come back from the village with two little parlor-casks of fresh water, and say that’s it, lads, make do till further notice. What do we get by way of explanation? Nothing. Soon my men are on riot duty, though they’re so dry themselves they’d lick sweat off a pig. What can I tell ’em? Nothing. And then, just to prove that you’re mad as moon dogs, you announce that we’re going to take a jaunt over to the empty side of the inlet, so that you can run about in the dunes. What d’ye find there? Nothing.”

  “We’ll be back on the Chathrand by sunset,” said Thasha.

  “Sooner,” said Fiffengurt, “if we get back to rowing, that is.”

  Haddismal scowled over his shoulder at the western shore, already a mile behind them. “Pointless,” he said. “Why, it’s just a spit of sand! Any fool can see-Eh, Muketch! Sit your arse down!”

  But Pazel, as if he had forgotten the hated nickname, remained standing in the bows. He was looking at the waves around the skiff, and Thasha noticed that they were ragged and oddly churned.

  “Sergeant Haddismal?” said Pazel.

  “Sit down! What is it?” barked the Turach.

  “Take off your armor.”

  The soldier’s mouth fell open. He raised a hand broad as a shovel to strike the youth. But the hand stopped in midair, and his lip curled as if with an unwelcome thought. He glanced at the other soldier, who was already unbuckling his hauberk, and it occurred to Thasha that the previous Turach commander had died in the very act of beating Pazel about the head, and then the boat shot skyward like a rock from a sling, and split across the keel, and Thasha was flying, spinning, shards of hull and mast about her as the tail of the diving serpent snapped like a whip and was gone.

  She caught a glimpse of Pazel, arms crossed to protect his face, crashing back into the sea as through a sheet of glass; then Thasha herself struck, headfirst. She barely
slowed: the monster’s descent had created a suction that dragged her down, and the cold and terror of sudden darkness nearly made her gasp. But she did not gasp: Thasha was an admiral’s daughter, a thojmele fighter, a survivor of the Nelluroq crossing. She held her breath and tore at her boots.

  They were large and came off easily. The woolen coat took longer to escape; by the time she succeeded the water was black and leaden. Somehow she had the clarity of mind to swim sidelong to the downward current. Eight, ten, a dozen aching strokes. Then the current slackened and she aimed for what was left of the sunlight.

  Dark flames, overhead. The sharks were returning. She pushed through them, heedless; all she wanted was air. When at last she broke the surface, the dorsal fins were flowing by her like small gray sails.

  Her lungs made an ugly croak. There was barely room to tread water among the sharks. She waited for the first bite, cold and angry. But the sharks were dispersing, their collective mind on the serpent and the greater pickings it provided, and not one of them harmed her. On the crest of a wave she saw Pazel, naked to the chest, and Mr. Fiffengurt clinging to a broken plank. She heard Hercol shout for Haddismal but saw neither man.

  Her head slipped under again. Her remaining clothes were going to kill her. She clawed at the knot that secured her sailor’s breeches, but only managed to tighten it hopelessly. Giving up, she shed her blouse, then tugged off the breeches with brute force. Rising again, she found the shore at a glance and knew she would not drown.

  There was Ibjen: supporting the younger Turach, who was limp. Thasha kicked toward them, doubting that the boy could swim a mile through swells and breakers with a dying marine. But before she had taken three strokes the other dlomic man, Bolutu, surfaced on the other side of the Turach and caught his arm. Together they bore the soldier away.

  Thasha’s own battle to reach the land was much harder than she expected. She grew light-headed, and her limbs began to seize with cold. The back-swell fought her, urging her away from the beach like an overbearing host. Blackness, death, come and see, come and see.

  When at last her foot grazed bottom she thought suddenly of her father, signing his letters with the word Unvanquished, and dragged herself up from the waves with a growl.

  The sand was warm. A mallet smashed at her eardrums with each beat of her heart. She raised her eyes: there were large black animals, walrus-like, lurching fearfully into the waves a hundred yards from where she stood. She fell down and rose unsteadily and fell again. Then she remained on hands and knees and watched a trickle of blood run down her bare arm. A cut on her shoulder, nothing dangerous really. Unless you were swimming, tiring, needed all your strength.

  Footsteps, staggering nearer. Someone dropped to his knees beside her and made a choking sound. Pazel. He put his hands on her back and shoulder, inspecting.

  “You hurt?” she said.

  More choking. Then: “No… only the Turach… he’ll live.”

  She turned her head. Pazel was naked and shivering and bleeding from the scalp. His whole body caked with sand. Up the beach she saw the others, crawling or rising shakily to their feet. Her vision blurring, she counted them. A miracle, she thought.

  “Find… some clothes.”

  A fit of retching took her, but she smiled through it. The nearest clothes were six miles off on the Chathrand. She dropped on her side, facing away from him, then reached for the hand that had not left her shoulder and kissed it, and got a mouthful of sand for her trouble.

  “No one died, Thasha.”

  “I know.”

  Then she rolled over, facing him. No one died. She began to laugh, and Pazel caught her eye and did the same, and then with a shared impulse they turned their backs to each other, no longer laughing exactly, in fact what was it, weeping, fits of pain? Whatever they were about they did it quietly, convulsed but voicing nothing, showing nothing, least of all faces that might have acknowledged, inflicted, the truth.

  The dlomu, astonishing swimmers both, had not needed to shed their clothes. They brought their shirts to Thasha to cover herself, and with an arm over her breasts she thanked them, then looked at each in turn, and lastly at Pazel, until all three turned away.

  Ibjen had struggled not to stare. Even now he made as if to glance back at her over his shoulder, but checked himself. Thasha watched him as she ripped his shirt open at the seams. Whatever else they are, they’re men.

  But then Ibjen had been staring at the humans since their arrival the day before. He still jumped occasionally when one of them spoke. The way humans did, Thasha mused, when faced with a woken animal, a creature who used words when they expected brays or screeches.

  For in his lifetime Ibjen had never met a human capable of more than that. They were animals, dumb animals: every last human known to exist in this hemisphere. They had, he admitted when pressed, rather less sense than dogs. Perhaps as much as cows or sheep. Thasha, Pazel and Hercol had met a few of these damaged humans yesterday, naked, drooling, clustered about Ibjen’s father, gazing at the newcomers in thoughtless fear. He had tamed them, the old man said. He had given them names.

  She tied the torn shirt about her waist and pulled the other, wet and chilly, over her head. The sun was low in the west; in an hour it would be dark, and they would be cold indeed if the wind kept up.

  Fifty yards along the beach, stranded by some long-ago storm, lay the bleached trunk of a mighty tree. It was a good five feet thick, and Thasha saw that the men had withdrawn to the far side, peering over it timidly as she approached. On another day she might have laughed. Arquali sailors, for all their crassness and carnal appetite, would rather be hanged than spied naked by a woman.

  But as she neared the trunk she realized that something had changed. Ibjen was talking, and he looked like a messenger with so much bad news to impart that he expects to be chased off or stabbed before he finishes. Fiffengurt and the Turachs stood motionless, pale. Hercol had decided to tell them the truth.

  “You are-” Ibjen stammered, embarrassed. “They are dying out in the wild, I understand. Winter kills so many. They get sick, they can’t find food, and people-dlomu, I mean-aren’t allowed to set up feeding stations like they used to. The war shortages, you see.”

  Feeding stations. Human beings who scavenged along the edges of woods, the outskirts of towns. Humans who ran like deer when the dlomu approached, or waited, blinking and terrified, for a handout. Humans without human minds.

  “We call them tol-chenni. That’s a foreign word, I forget what it means-”

  “It means ‘sleepwalkers,’ ” said Pazel.

  “In Nemmocian,” added Bolutu. “How very… evocative.”

  “We’re breaking Imperial law by feeding them,” said Ibjen. “The Grain Edict, dlomic labor for dlomic mouths. Some of the men want to drive the tol-chenni off into the woods, but they won’t cross my father. Besides, there aren’t any laws these days. Not really. Not out here.”

  Thasha sat down with her back to the tree. Out here was the Northern Sandwall: a ribbon of dunes stretching east to west, horizon to horizon. On one side, the Nelluroq: the vast, vindictive Ruling Sea. On the other, this Gulf of Masal: warmer, infinitely calmer, and such a brilliant blue that it was like the sea a child paints who has never beheld one. Yesterday, quite literally dying of thirst, they had limped into this gulf around a sandy knob six miles to the east, a place that Mr. Bolutu had recognized with cries of joy as Cape Lasung.

  They had reached the very margins of his homeland, he declared: Bali Adro, an empire greater by far than the Empire of Arqual, which was Thasha’s own country, and one of the two great powers of the Northern world. Bolutu had lived for twenty years in Arqual. Twenty years magically disguised as a human; twenty years with no hope of returning, until he joined the crew of the Chathrand. Still it was not surprising that he knew Lasung at a glance, for a singular landmark stood upon the cape: Narybir, the Guardian Tower, a weird, wax-like spire of red stone. The tower graced coins, he said; it appeared in murals
and paintings and books of architecture. No citizen of his beloved Empire could fail to recognize Narybir, even if, like Bolutu, he had never come near it.

  But once ashore they had found the tower abandoned, its doors barred and padlocked, its great stair plunged beneath a drift of sand. A few minutes later they had met the dlomu villagers: coal-black figures like Mr. Bolutu, skin slick as eels, fingers webbed to the first knuckle, hair of a metallic sheen and those hypnotic eyes in which it was difficult to spot the pupil. Ten or twelve families in all: refugees, gaunt and fearful, hiding from the war. By day they scanned the gulf for danger, tended their meager gardens, snared birds and rodents in the stunted forest of the cape. By night they huddled in the old stone houses, plugging holes against the wind.

  Sergeant Haddismal was shouting: “-ask us to believe that? I don’t believe it! And why not? Because it’s monstrous and impossible. You’re trying to play us for fools.”

  “Rubbish, Sergeant!” said Fiffengurt, shouting rapidly and with unnatural excitement. “There’s no bad faith here. A mistake is what it is. Humankind wiped out? It doesn’t square. We saw a group of men just yesterday, soon as we landed.”

  “But we saw them up close,” said Pazel. “Hercol and Thasha and I, and Bolutu as well. It’s true, Mr. Fiffengurt. They’re… animals.”

  “They are tol-chenni,” said Ibjen.

  “Come come.” said Fiffengurt. “Yesterday a whole devilish armada passed by in the gulf-you can’t have forgotten that, Mr. Hercol.”

  “I fear I never shall,” said Hercol.

  “Right,” said Haddismal, turning on Ibjen. “We’re done playin’ this little game. Or are you going to tell us those ships were crewed by your kind alone-dlomu to the lowliest swab? That there were no humans aboard?”

  Ibjen was at a loss. “In cages, you mean?”

  “Gentlemen!” said Fiffengurt. “This is a mix-up, I tell you. A tiz-woz, a garble-box, you follow, Ibjen my lad? Maybe you don’t. Or maybe I’m still not following you. Don’t take it unkindly, but you’re not exactly speaking proper Arquali. Your words start all wrong. Puh is puh and buh is buh, and they ain’t the same thing-”