The River of Shadows Read online

  “What’s wrong with you?” said Thasha sharply. “What are you trying to tell us?”

  “If Mr. Isul is correct—”

  “You don’t believe me, go ahead, ask anyone,” said the old man.

  “—we have rather misjudged our time on the Nelluroq. By your calendar, it is Western Solar Year Eleven Forty-four, and we have been two centuries at sea.”

  In the silence that followed Pazel heard the drums of the armada, still echoing faintly from the gulf. He heard the breakers on the north beach, the wind in the forest, the cry of a hawk as it circled the abandoned tower. Then another sound, a faint flapping, close at hand. Mr. Isul lifted his sack and gave the contents a poke.

  “Wood hens for dinner,” he said.

  Now, lying awake in the darkness by his shipmates, Pazel almost wished the armada had borne down on the village, landed some undreamed-of army, slain them all. Eleven forty-four. His mind still screamed with laughter at the notion—absurd, preposterous, tell me another—but his heart, his body, his nerves were not so sure.

  There was the Red Storm. A band of scarlet light, stretching east to west across the Nelluroq. They had sailed right into it; the light within was liquid, blinding; it had filled their clothes, their lungs, eventually their minds, until they swam in the light like fish in a red aquarium, and then it was gone.

  And later, when he and Thasha and the others began to discuss it: hadn’t they all asked much the same question? How long was I in there? Why can’t I account for the time?

  His friends Neeps and Marila thought it had lasted days. But Hercól felt it had blown past them in six or eight hours, and Ensyl, the ixchel woman who had become their friend and ally, spoke of “that blind red morning.” Pazel himself had not dared to guess, and when he had asked Thasha how long she thought they had spent in the storm, she had looked at him with fear. “Not so long,” she’d said. But her voice brought him no comfort.

  Two hundred years. How could he toy with believing that? If it were true, then everyone he’d left behind was dead. No more searching for his mother and sister. No more hope that one day his father, Captain Gregory Pathkendle, would return and beg forgiveness of his abandoned son.

  Angry now, Pazel opened his eyes. Rin, how he wished he could talk to Neeps. Pazel felt astonishingly lost without the smaller tarboy, his first friend on the Chathrand. Neeps was clever and fiercely protective of his friends, but he was also a hothead with a knack for getting in trouble. Look at him now: trapped with Marila and Captain Rose and a dozen others, held hostage in a cabin filled with a poisoned vapor that would kill them if they stopped breathing it. What would happen to them? Would they ever leave that room alive? Every thought of his friends was black and terrifying, like that plunge into the sea.

  He studied Thasha again: smooth apple of a shoulder, yellow lock of hair across her lips. Day by day the way he looked at her was changing. He wanted to be with her all the time. The fascination shamed him, somehow. Thasha was one of just a handful of women on the Chathrand, and if Pazel could not stop himself from thinking of her in this way, could not sleep with those smooth limbs in view, could not banish the thought that when the world was ending they could do as they liked in the final hours—then what about the rest of the men?

  But you love her, Pazel. It’s different with you.

  That wasn’t the point. Order on the Chathrand was breaking down. Arunis was still aboard her, in deep hiding; they could feel the sorcerer’s presence like a whiff of something explosive in the musty air. The hostage standoff, meanwhile, was in its sixth week, with no end in sight. The captain could hardly lead from inside a cage, yet the sailors trusted no one as much as savage, greedy, unbalanced Nilus Rose. He terrorized them, but he kept them working for their own survival. Now they were fighting among themselves: a thing Rose had brutally suppressed. Could even the Turachs keep the peace? When the ghastly news escaped, would they try? It was awful to reflect that their safety hinged on these men, elite killers all, and part of the same Imperial army that had sacked his city and beaten him into a coma. If they despaired it meant anarchy, a doomsday carnival. And who would protect the women in that case? Who would stop men who wished to die from taking their last, low pleasures with Thasha Isiq?

  He heard their muttering, vile and explicit (how often they forgot about his horde of languages). What they needed, how exactly they wanted her to touch them, who they imagined she already was—

  “Pathkendle.”

  Pazel jumped. It was Hercól who had whispered. The Tholjassan lay with his eyes open, looking at him intently, and Pazel blushed, wondering how much Hercól had guessed of his thoughts.

  “I wasn’t—”

  Hercól put a finger to his lips. Then, after a long, listening moment, he rose to his feet, beckoning Pazel to do the same. Pazel stood, balancing carefully among the sleepers. Hercól moved swiftly down the beach toward the gulf. Pazel followed reluctantly. Two steps away from the fire and he was cold.

  The moon suddenly brightened, and looking back Pazel saw it emerging from behind the twisted snag of Narybir Tower. Hercól walked in the foam, through the rainbow threads of surf. “Do as I do,” he whispered. “Stay deep enough to hide your tracks. I don’t want them waking and following us.”

  He started west, and Pazel splashed along behind. “You’re taking me to read that memorial, aren’t you?” he asked.

  “No need,” said Hercól. “I told a lie back there, lad. I could read the inscription well enough. It is in their Imperial Common, and even in written form it resembles Arquali. But the message is somewhat terrible.”

  “What does it say?”

  Hercól paused in his march. He spoke without looking back at Pazel. Here two hundred traitors were thrown chained into the sea. Here the Chaldryl Resistance met its demise. We are Bali Adro, the Limitless; in time we will conquer the sun.

  Pazel felt the words like a blow to the chest. “Oh Rin,” was all he could say.

  “I thought it best to spare the others,” said Hercól. “They have heard enough bad news tonight. Come on, then, lad.”

  With that he stepped out of the surf and began to climb the beach again.

  “But where are we going?” asked Pazel, hurrying after him. “Did you find a village, like the one across the inlet?”

  “Nothing of the kind. Ibjen spoke the truth: this place is abandoned.”

  “Then what are we doing out here?”

  “Spying,” said Hercól. “Now hold your tongue.”

  They crossed the beach and mounted to the dunes, which were tall and crowned with brush and cast black shadows. It was perhaps the strangest walk of Pazel’s life: naked, freezing, the enormous crabs darting suddenly across their path, lifting armored claws. Spying on whom? Bolutu had claimed that there were still other peoples, neither dlömic nor human, in his beloved South. Was that what lay ahead?

  They threaded a path through the dunes, Hercól now and then bending to pluck some small twig or shell from the ground, which he would examine and then toss aside. In this way they slogged a mile or more. It was hard going, but the exertion lessened the cold.

  “Hercól,” Pazel asked, “what’s the matter with Thasha? Do you know?”

  Hercól stopped long enough to take a single breath. “I cannot say,” he answered at last, “nor have I ever known just what ails her, since the day Empress Maisa sent me to Etherhorde, to keep watch over her family. But I think we must expect her condition to grow worse before it improves. Worse, or at the very least more intense. Ramachni, Oggosk, Arunis himself—every practitioner of magic she has ever encountered—has taken an interest in Thasha, and that cannot be coincidental. And now, when we face a deluge of magic, Thasha herself has begun to change.”

  “She’s changing, all right. But into what?”

  “I will not voice my guesses until I can trust them further,” said Hercól. “Yet of one thing I am certain: Thasha faces a trial that will demand all her strength. And as her friend, Pazel—her
irreplaceable friend—it may demand just as much from you.”

  He marched on, and Pazel, brooding grimly on his words, struggled to keep up. At last they came to a point where they could hear the Nelluroq booming distantly on their right. Before them stood the tallest dune they had yet seen, a great hill of sand crowned with sea oats and brush.

  “When we reach the summit you must move only as I do,” said Hercól. “Flat as snakes we must crawl, and slowly, slowly through the underbrush.”

  It was a long, awkward climb. Halfway to the top, Hercól stopped for a moment and pointed silently to the south. Pazel turned, and felt a thrill of wonder: low on the horizon hung a pale blue light, smaller than the moon, but larger than any star.

  “What is it?” he whispered.

  “A legend of the South proved true,” said Hercól. “The Polar Candle, the Little Moon of Alifros. North of the Ruling Sea it cannot be glimpsed, not ever. Bolutu tells me that many in the South think it has power over their lives and fates. Come, we are almost there.”

  At the dune’s flat summit, the roots of shrubs and sea oats bound the sand into a fibrous mat. Hercól wriggled forward, keeping his head well below the height of the grass. Pazel imitated him, cursing inwardly as burrs and thorns began to pierce his skin. There were crawling, biting insects too, and many small burrows from which came scurrying sounds. He would have been miserable, Pazel thought, even fully clothed.

  The dune was wide, but they crossed it at last. And suddenly they were lying, side by side, looking down upon a wide sand basin. It was about the size of the village square across the inlet, and ringed on all sides by dunes, except for a narrow gap on the north side leading down to the sea.

  In the center of the basin a fire was crackling, somewhat larger and brighter than their own. And beside the fire three figures crouched.

  “They’re human!” Pazel whispered.

  “Yes,” said Hercól.

  “Not, not the—”

  “Not tol-chenni, no. Be very still, Pazel, and watch.”

  They were roasting a small animal on a spit. They wore tattered clothes—but they were clothes, not scraps and rags like the tol-chenni. Indeed the three figures had an encampment of sorts: crates stacked up like building blocks, a makeshift tent of rough fabric, jugs and amphorae squatting in the sand. And the figures were armed: swords, daggers, some kind of club. All three looked strong and capable.

  Two were men. The figure on the left, turning the spit, might have been forty: he had a severe face and black hair streaked with gray that fell in curls to his shoulders. Across from him crouched a younger and much larger man, big as any Turach. His eyes were shut and his hands folded before him; he might well have been speaking a prayer. The third figure, whose back was to them, was a young woman.

  “Then it’s not true,” Pazel hissed. “The mind-plague, it hasn’t wiped everyone out! Hercól, maybe it never struck anywhere but the village. And if they’re wrong about the plague, they could be wrong about the two hundred years!”

  “Gently, lad,” said Hercól.

  But Pazel, clutching suddenly at hope, was not to be calmed. “Maybe the village was quarantined—way off the mainland, see?—because everyone there went mad together, dlömu and humans alike.”

  “Come,” said Hercól. “The humans become idiots, and the dlömu at the same time fall victim to a shared delusion about the cause?”

  “Why not? It’s more likely than what they claim, isn’t it?”

  “Watch the girl, Pazel.”

  Pazel looked: she was lifting a blackened kettle from the embers. Turning, she filled three cups beside her with steaming drink. Pazel saw her silhouette against the fire, and thought his heart would stop.

  “Neda,” he said.

  “Ah,” said Hercól.

  “Aya Rin,” said Pazel. “Hercól, she looks exactly like my sister Neda.”

  “Perhaps she is.”

  Pazel gazed helplessly at the swordsman. He could not speak for fear. It wasn’t the villagers, or Thasha, or half the human race who had gone mad. It was just him, Pazel. Actually mad: he would shut his eyes for a moment, and when he opened them again he’d be in sickbay, feverish, his tenth day without water; or still tied up in that cave on Bramian. That was the only explanation.

  “When one of the men turns away,” said Hercól, “try to catch a glimpse of his neck.”

  “You never met my sister. You couldn’t know what she looks like. I think I’m crazy, Hercól.”

  “Enough of that. I’ve looked at her portrait a hundred times. It hung for years in Dr. Chadfallow’s study in Etherhorde, alongside your mother’s and your own. It hangs in his cabin now. But that portrait must be ten years old. I could not be sure it was her, until you saw for yourself.”

  “But how in the blary howling Pits could she be here?”

  “Look! There’s an answer for you, or the beginning of one.”

  The older man was reaching for something on his right. He leaned forward, and his long hair fell away from his neck. The firelight showed a black tattoo, a pattern of strokes and diamonds.

  “Lord Rin above,” said Pazel. “They’re Mzithrinis.”

  So they were: three citizens of the Mzithrin Pentarchy, the enemy state, the rival power that had fought the Empire of Arqual to one blood-soaked draw after another, for centuries. Dr. Chadfallow had always claimed that he’d placed Neda in the hands of a Mzithrini diplomat, to save her from becoming a slave or concubine of the invading Arqualis. It could have happened, Pazel thought: she might have taken on their customs, their beliefs. In five years she might have become almost anyone.

  “What should we do?” he whispered.

  “I brought you here that you might help me decide,” said Hercól. “They are Mzithrini, to be sure. Which means that they, like us, have somehow crossed the Ruling Sea. But they are not common sailors. Those tattoos declare holy orders. They are sfvantskors, warrior-priests. And if they choose to attack us, they will win.”

  “Neda won’t attack me.”

  “Pazel, if she has taken the Last Oath and become a true sfvantskor, she will do whatever her leader commands. In some parts of the Mzithrin the newly sworn are told to leap one by one into a covered pit. Most find the bottom filled with rose petals, but one lands on razor-sharp stakes. The rest honor his sacrifice with prayers, and taste his blood for discipline.”

  “That’s horrible!”

  “No worse than what a Turach endures. Those three, however, may have a special reason to detest us: the loss of their ship. The men were aboard the Jistrolloq when it drew alongside us in Simja. I dare say your sister was as well.”

  “She spoke to me,” said Pazel suddenly. “A sfvantskor girl in a mask whispered to me in the shrine—she told me to turn away from evil, as if one could—Hercól, how can they be alive? We sank the Jistrolloq months ago, in the middle of the Ruling Sea.”

  “Months,” said Hercól, “or two hundred years?”

  Pazel froze, then lowered his face, grinding his forehead into the sand.

  “If we decide to speak to them,” said Hercól, “let us take care not to speak of that. So far it has been a secret among the two of us, Thasha and Bolutu. Let it remain so, for now.”

  “It’s not true, anyway,” said Pazel. “That part can’t be true.”

  “Why not?” said Hercól.

  “Because if two hundred years have passed, then the whole conspiracy’s failed. And the war must be long over, if it ever came to war.”

  “Certainly,” said Hercól.

  “And your Empress Maisa is dead, and everyone we cared about, everyone who knew our mucking names.”

  “Catastrophes are only unthinkable until they occur. You Ormalis should know that.”

  “I’ll tell you why, then,” said Pazel. “Because if it’s true then I really will go mad. Barking blary mad.”

  Hercól’s hand slipped under his jaw. Gently, but with an iron strength, he lifted Pazel’s chin. His eyes were sharp
and wary in the moonlight.

  “Please,” he said, “don’t.”

  The Mzithrinis could smell the rabbit crackling on the spit. It was all they could do not to pluck the carcass from the fire and devour it, raw though it surely was on the inside. They had come ashore ravenous, and found only crabs. They had lived for four days now on crabs—to be precise, on the legs and eyestalks of crabs: the bodies of the creatures had proven so toxic that their leader, Cayer Vispek, had nearly died, his throat swollen until he battled to breathe. When he recovered he cited the Old Faith proverb about the glutton who choked on the wishbone of a stolen goose, and the younger sfvantskor laughed.

  They had laughed again when he showed them the rabbit, and asked if they would not rather wait for morning. Then it was Jalantri’s turn to quote the scripture, as he scrambled from the tent: “And should the morning never come, how now, my soul?”

  Their master smiled, but only faintly: one did not make light of the soul. It was man’s claim on eternity, his gift from the omnipotence that some called Rin or God or the Gods, but which Mzithrinis would never presume to shackle with a name.

  Jalantri had scurried like a boy to build the fire. Neda had skinned and gutted the rabbit, while Cayer Vispek walked out to the beach to touch the Nelluroq, and whisper quietly to the five hundred brethren who had perished there.

  By the time he had returned the rabbit was sizzling. Now, sipping their brackish tea, they felt as though the smell were already nourishing them, the appetizer to the feast.

  Jalantri saw the intruder first. A youth, standing in the brush on the high eastern dune, looking down with the moonlight behind him. “Vrutch,” he swore. “I thought we’d driven them off.”

  Cayer Vispek stopped turning the spit. “He’s the first one to come upon us from the east,” he said. “How peculiar. The land ends in just a few miles that way. Perhaps he smelled the rabbit.”

  Neda glanced up at the boy and shrugged. “He can’t have any of mine,” she said.

  Jalantri’s big chest rumbled with laughter. But their leader stilled him with a hand. The youth had started toward them, slide-stepping down the dune. They rose, tensing. Not one of the witless humans had ever tried to approach them, even in stealth. This one had to know he was being observed, yet on he came. The shadow of the dune hid his features. But there could be no doubt: he was deliberately approaching. They scanned the basin on every side: no companions. Neda drew her dagger. Jalantri pulled a burning stick from the fire and strode forward, waving it.