The River of Shadows Page 3

  Skinny boy, genius. Someone she loved. Would it happen to him? In three months, six months, tomorrow? Would she wake up and find an animal looking back at her with those eyes?

  Perhaps he hates me. The thought ambushed her again. She knew that no one else suspected, and that Pazel himself would deny it to his last breath. Hadn’t they been inseparable for weeks? Hadn’t he shivered when she kissed him last?

  Yet sometimes people knew more than they knew. Perhaps in his heart Pazel sensed what Thasha was already certain of: that she deserved it. Deserved not just his hatred, but everyone’s, deserved to be loathed, tortured, dismembered, dead. Why? Thasha could not bring her thoughts to bear on that question: there was a gauze curtain between her and the truth, and though it lurked there like some vulgar actor awaiting his cue, she could not yet tear the curtain down.

  But she knew this much: if Pazel didn’t hate her yet, she would soon be giving him a reason.

  A hand touched Thasha’s foot. It was Hercól, his eyes stern but kind. “Brood no more,” he said, and the command in his voice was made healing by their years of trust. His hand withdrew, and Thasha did her best to obey.

  They fed the fire. At length they found a way to sleep that cut no one off entirely from its warmth. Thasha lay down, her head bumping Ibjen’s knees, her foot on Hercól’s shoulder. If anything was still blessed in this world, it was sleep.

  Night sounds, emptiness, a world without people. She drank it in for what felt like hours. Her mind was alert, but robbed of will and purpose; her heart drifted in a void. She thought that if the wind rose just a little she would float away, a cinder, and nothing in the universe would change.

  And then out of the darkness Mr. Fiffengurt said, “There’s more to tell, ain’t there?”

  Deeper silence, suddenly, as though they were all waiting to breathe. Thasha wondered who would answer first: Hercól, Pazel, she herself? And once they answered, who would be the first to go mad?

  But she did not find out, for the silence held. None of them, it seemed, was ready to admit to being awake.

  Love and Cataclysm

  The world is a little house. If you listen, you will hear your country’s exiles, grumbling. They have been in the next room all along.

  —Winter Meditations, VASPARHAVEN

  21 Ilbrin 941

  Thasha could not recall those moments in the village, but Pazel could. When the tol-chenni stepped into the crumbling square she had turned to him with unfocused eyes, clutched his arm, whispered in terror:

  “I didn’t mean to. It was never supposed to happen. You believe me, don’t you?”

  Now, some thirty hours later beside the fire, he looked at her—directly, at last, for no one was awake to catch him at it. Only the fire itself was in the way. On one side he saw the bedraggled mass of her hair, not at all pretty, like something that had slithered out of the gulf and expired by Ibjen’s knees. On the other side he could see her legs below the makeshift skirt. Bruised, sleek, powerful. He closed his eyes and it made no difference; if anything he saw them more clearly. Think, he told himself. Face yesterday. If he didn’t the fear would come back in his sleep, pounce on him, tear him apart.

  Thasha’s grip had been close to excruciating. “An accident,” she’d said. “I tried to fix it, Pazel, I tried so hard.”

  With difficulty he had pried her hands from his shoulders, then held her as she shook, repeating her confession and her plea for belief. “I’m not the devil,” she’d added helpfully. Pazel was shocked by the coincidence of their thoughts. He had made no guesses, diabolical or otherwise. But he was asking himself just who in Alifros she might be.

  He gave her water, the cold, sweet water Ibjen had just pumped from the well. Drink deep, drink slowly, he urged. It was the only way to make her stop talking.

  For apart from the horror of the mindless humans, there was suddenly the horror of Thasha’s claim that she had made them so. From the other side of the world, apparently. What could one say to that?

  He had decided to say nothing at all. Ibjen and his father, Mr. Isul, were saying enough. They were as excited as children: the visitors were the first “woken” humans the old man had seen in fifty years, Ibjen in his lifetime. Still working the pump handle, he cried to Bolutu: “Did you bring them from Masalym, brother? Is there a cure?”

  Bolutu just stared at the tol-chenni. His tongue had been mutilated by Arunis the sorcerer, and he had only recently regained its use (dlömu, like newts and starfish, could regenerate lost parts of themselves). Now it was as though the tongue had never grown back.

  Hercól recovered first. With an oath he sprinted into the gatehouse at the edge of the square, just in time to keep the rest of the Chathrand’s landing party from barreling through. For the rest of his life, Pazel would remember the man’s swiftness, his absolute resolve. Hercól was in mourning: just weeks ago the woman he loved had been murdered before his eyes. He had as much right as anyone to paralysis, to shock. In the gatehouse the Turachs raised their spears; Mr. Alyash, a trained assassin, sidled toward him with intent. Hercól did not even draw his sword. They could not enter, he said again. They must go back to the ship.

  Thasha’s mentor was the deadliest fighting man on the Chathrand, with the possible exception of his old mentor, Sandor Ott. But Alyash had also trained with Ott. And the Turachs were lethal: commandos trained to fight and kill the sfvantskor warrior-priests of the enemy, and to guard the Arquali Emperor himself. How could Hercól have known they would not attack? The answer was obvious: he hadn’t.

  And yet there was no bloodshed. The landing party, cursing, retreated to the shore road outside the wall. As soon as they left the gatehouse Hercól turned and shouted to Pazel in his birth-tongue: “Keep them all inside! The dlömu and … those others. Keep them out of sight! And bring fresh water: as much as you three can handle alone. Quickly, lad! Without water no one will go back to that ship!”

  Pazel obeyed; at that moment he would have obeyed an order to eat sand or jump into the well; anything to break through the drumbeat inside him. All of them animals. An epidemic, a plague. By that point several more dlömu had crept into the square, and Bolutu had recovered enough to beg water for the ship. Good-natured, his fellow dlömu had run for casks, but the vessels they returned with were small indeed: not above thirty gallons apiece. Pazel and Bolutu rolled these out to the waiting men, and at the sight of the tiny barrels even Fiffengurt lost his temper.

  “That won’t come to half a draught per man! We need ten times that just for starters! And the men are hungry, too. What’s Teggatz supposed to cook with, bilge?”

  “We will bring more when you return for us,” said Hercól. “Go now, and ask no further questions. Don’t you think I would answer if I could?”

  “No,” said Alyash. “Ott’s made you as tight-fisted with secrets as I am.”

  “Sandor Ott’s first lesson was survival,” said Hercól, “and survival is all I am thinking of. Go, Alyash! We are plunged in drifts of gunpowder, and you berate me for not striking a match.”

  They followed (almost chased) the men back to the pilot boat, and watched them row for the Chathrand, where men thronged like beggars to the gunwale. Elkstem had tucked the ship in behind the largest island, out of sight from the gulf. It was a sensible precaution, for they had not been an hour in the vicinity of Cape Lasung when a trio of unknown ships had passed: slender vessels, running east by southeast with all the canvas they could bear. They were battle-scarred, and too small in any event to threaten Chathrand, but who could say what followed in their wake?

  The answer to that question, when it came, had brought with it the second terrible shock of this new world. It had occurred shortly after the standoff at the gatehouse. Pazel and Thasha were searching the village for Bolutu, who had blundered off into the streets, like a dazed survivor of a massacre. Ibjen’s father had said something about food and hobbled away. Pazel and Thasha were sweating: there was no breeze inside the wall. From sandy lanes
and unglazed windows, the dlömu peeked out at them in awe. Once a boy of five or six burst laughing from a doorway and collided with Pazel’s legs.

  He saw the human hands first, then looked up in terror at Pazel’s pale, brown-eyed human face, and screamed. “Don’t worry, we’re friends,” Pazel ventured. But the boy fled back into the house, wailing, and the word on his lips was, “Monsters!”

  The village was small, and in short order they reached a second gate, the chains of its rusty portcullis snapped, the gate itself propped open with timbers. Passing beneath it, they found themselves west of the village, on a footpath that led by way of grass-covered dunes into the stunted forest. Near the edge of the trees, his back to a small, wind-tortured oak, sat Bolutu. His face was grim and distracted. They were about to hail him when voices from inside the gate began to shout in alarm:

  “Hide! Fires out! Wagons in! An armada comes!”

  They ducked back inside the wall. No one gaped at them now. Children were running, weeping; a woman swept two children into her arms and dashed for cover. Dlömic boys were crouching behind the parapet atop the wall, raising their heads just high enough to peer at the gulf. After a quick scramble, Pazel and Thasha found a staircase and joined them.

  It was like a vision of the damned. Four or five hundred ships of unthinkable size and ferocity, rushing east to a blasting of horns and a thundering of drums. Ships that dwarfed their own great Chathrand, ships hauled by those horrific serpents, or pulled by kite-like sails that strained before them like tethered birds. Ships crudely built, dubiously repaired: fitted with blackened timbers, clad in scorched armor, heaped with cannon and ballistas and strange, bone-white devices Pazel could not identify. A bright haze surrounded the armada, of a sort that Pazel felt obscurely convinced he had seen before, though he could not say where. The haze was brighter in the spots where the vessels seemed most nearly ruined: so bright in places that he could not stand to look at all. Fire belched from cauldron-like devices on the decks, and swarms of figures tended the fires, goaded by whips and spears.

  The villagers were as frightened as the humans: they had seen many terrible things, they whispered, but this armada was on another scale altogether. Some looked at the newcomers with renewed fright, as if the vessels flowing endlessly past the cape must have something to do with their arrival.

  “They’re making for Karysk,” said Ibjen, who was among the boys. “They’re going to destroy it, aren’t they?”

  The boys pointed at Bolutu, shaking their heads in despair. He had not moved from his tree by the dunes, and they had no doubt that the armada’s leaders would spot him, and send a force to investigate.

  But the horrid fleet showed no interest in the village—which was fortunate, because a slight shoreward turn by any part of it would have revealed the Chathrand, still as death behind her island. Hours passed; the line of nightmarish ships stretched on, and so did the silence. It was only toward evening, when a breeze off the Nelluroq began to cool the village, that the last of the vessels swept by, and the drums and horns began to fade.

  Thasha and Pazel left the village by the same gate as before. There sat Bolutu, as he had for five hours, digging his black fingers into the sand. When they approached him, he did not look up.

  His voice, however, was soft and reasonable. “The pennants are ours,” he said.

  “The pennants?” said Thasha. “On those ships, you mean?”

  “The pennants on those ships. The leopard, leaping the red Bali Adro sun. It is the Imperial standard. And the armada came from the west, out of the Bali Adro heartland.”

  Pazel felt sickened—and betrayed. “These are your friends?” he demanded. “The good wizards who sent you north to fight Arunis, the ones who can see through your eyes? The ones you said would come running to our aid, as soon as we made landfall?”

  “Oh, Pazel, of course not,” said Thasha. “They’re impostors, aren’t they, Bolutu? Flying Bali Adro colors in order to fool someone?”

  Now Bolutu did raise his eyes. “I do not know who they are—madmen, I would guess. Madmen can fly any flag, usurp any legacy, squat on any throne. But listen to me, both of you: this is not my world. This wreckage, these illiterate peasants, this plague on the minds of humans. It is not mine, I tell you.”

  “You’ve been gone twenty years,” said Pazel.

  “Two decades could never work such a change,” said Bolutu. “Bali Adro was a just Empire, an enlightened one. The years of famine were behind us. The maukslar, the arch-demons, were all dead or defeated; the Circle of the Scorm was broken. Our neighbors posed no threat, and our internal enemies, the Ravens I spoke of—they were imprisoned, or scattered to distant lands. We were safe here, safe and at peace.”

  “Sometimes things do happen fast,” said Pazel. “Six years ago Ormael was still a country. Now it’s just another territory of Arqual.”

  “Pazel,” said Bolutu, “it is not remotely the same. This world is ancient beyond anything that survives in the North. The Codex of the dlömu, from which our laws derive—it was written before the first tree was felled on your Chereste Peninsula. And though your rulers were unseated and your city torched, your people did not devolve into beasts.”

  “Well it’s blary plain that we will, if we stay around here,” said Pazel. “It may be too late already. We all drank from that well.”

  Bolutu shook his head. “The disease is not contagious. It was the first question I put to Ibjen’s father. There he is now, by the way.”

  The old dlömu, Mr. Isul, was creeping toward them along the road from the forest, carrying a bundle of sticks and a woolen sack. Age had dulled his silver hair, but not his eyes. They were troubled, however, and not just by the hunt for footing on the rutted track.

  “How does he know it’s not contagious?” asked Thasha.

  Bolutu kept his eyes on the old man. “There were experiments, he says. When it was clear the plague was out of control. They locked unaffected humans and tol-chenni together, forced them to share food, water, latrines. But those humans corralled with the tol-chenni degenerated no faster than those who had no contact at all.”

  “I thought every human south of the Ruling Sea had caught the disease,” said Thasha.

  “They have. But not from one another.”

  Pazel was losing patience. “I don’t care if they caught it from earthworms,” he said. “Something in this land of yours gave it to human beings, and made it spread like wildfire.”

  The old man was just reaching them; he nodded cordially, but with obvious unease. He put down his bundle of sticks but kept the sack in his hands. “Not like wildfire,” he said. “More like a snowfall. Everywhere at once, but softly, quietly. We took no notice at first. Who minds a few snowflakes on the wind?” He looked up at them, and his eyes were far away. “Until they turn into a blizzard, that is.”

  “The plague has to do with woken animals,” said Thasha. The others looked at her, amazed. “Well doesn’t it stand to reason? Animals bursting suddenly into human intelligence, humans turning suddenly into beasts?”

  The phenomenon of waking animals had been a strange part of life in Alifros for centuries. Strange and exceedingly rare, at least in the North: so rare indeed that most people had never seen such a creature. But in the last several years the number of wakings had exploded.

  “Are there woken animals in the South, Mr. Isul?” asked Bolutu.

  The old man’s look of worry intensified. “Thinkers, you mean? Beasts with reason, and human speech? No, no more. They were wicked creatures, maukslarets, little demons.” He looked down, suddenly abashed. “Or so we were told.”

  “What happened to them?” asked Pazel, dreading the answer.

  Isul drew a finger across his throat. “Condemned, all condemned,” he said. “Back when I was a child. And it’s still the law of the land: you’re obliged to kill a Thinker on sight, before he works black magic against your family, your neighbors, the Crown. You can get away with harboring tol-chenni,
if you’re careful—in Masalym there’s even a place that breeds ’em—but get caught with a thinking mouse or bird under your roof, and it’s the axe. They’re all dead and gone, is what I reckon. And if there are any left you can be sure they won’t let you know they can think. You could be looking right at one, a stray dog, a dune tortoise, and be none the wiser.”

  Now it was Thasha’s turn to look at Bolutu with rage. “We should never have trusted you,” she said. “They started killing woken animals when he was a child? That was a lot more than twenty years ago! Why didn’t you warn us? Do you realize what we might have done?”

  Aboard the Chathrand was a woken rat, their dear friend Felthrup Stargraven. Despite his suspicion that something terrible awaited them ashore he had wanted to join the landing party—to share in any danger, he’d said. They had almost agreed.

  The old man put a hand on the side of his woolen sack, probing something within. He glanced uncertainly at Bolutu. “Twenty?” he said.

  Bolutu rose to his feet and dusted off his trousers. “Mr. Isul,” he said, “be so good as to tell us the date.”

  “You know I can’t,” said the other, a bit testily.

  “The year will suffice.”

  It was then that Pazel noticed the tremor in Bolutu’s voice. The old man, however, was put at ease. “That much I know,” he said. “We haven’t lost our bearings altogether out here. It’s the year thirty fifty-seven, His Majesty’s ninth on the throne.”

  Thasha looked at Bolutu. “You use a different calendar in the South. You told us that weeks ago.”

  Bolutu nodded, his face working strangely. He bent and plucked a stick from the old man’s bundle. He squinted at it, picked at the bark.

  “Of course, after all those years in Arqual, you’d know both calendars,” said Pazel.

  Another nod. Bolutu raised the stick and considered it lengthwise, as though studying its straightness. It was not very straight.