The River of Shadows (32 page)

Alyash was kicking Pazel in the head, but he would not let go. “Fulbreech!” he managed to cry. The youth shot past them, and Pazel heard a door creak open and slam shut. Then Alyash’s boot struck him hard in the temple, and for a moment his eyes went dim.

Only seconds had passed. He had let go of Alyash’s leg, but the bosun just lay there, gasping—laughing, by Rin, a ragged, evil sound. Pazel raised his head: Fulbreech was slumped by the door, utterly winded. There was nothing in his hands.

“Where is it?” Pazel cried through his throbbing pain. “What have you done with it, Fulbreech?”

“Done with what?” said Fulbreech, and flashed Pazel a grin.

Turachs hauled Pazel and Fulbreech to their feet. Uskins was there, Rose’s daft enforcer, screaming, “What is happening, Bosun? Did these boys assault you?”

Fulbreech hid his smile away, and glanced expectantly at the door. Alyash turned on his side to look as well. Soon everyone was looking at the door, though few could have said quite why.

The reason soon appeared. Muffled cries came from within, and the sound of a brief struggle. Then the door sprang open and Sandor Ott raced onto the deck, battering sailors out of his path. After some forty feet he stopped dead, closed his eyes, and inhaled.

No collapse. No writhing pain. Slowly, the chief assassin of Arqual turned about where he stood. His cruel, bright eyes took in the crowd, the ship, the dlömu watching from the quay. Then he laughed aloud, raced five steps forward, sprang into a dizzying roll—and uncurled with his hand around an ixchel. The ixchel drew his knife, but Ott was faster. He dashed the tiny man against the deck so hard it sounded as though he were wielding a club. Then he tossed the limp body over the side.

Horrified, Pazel jumped to his feet. Everywhere he looked, ixchel were running, vanishing. Some over the sides. Many down the ladderways, deeper into the ship.

Ott had now seized a rigging-axe, one of the heavy tools kept on deck for cutting away fallen sheets and canvas in a storm. He lifted the axe above his head and turned to face aft. “I am free!” he shouted at the top of his lungs. “Captain Rose!
All of us are free!
”

With that he turned and raced for the Silver Stair, yards behind a clump of ixchel. Pazel could just see Rose, still as a chess piece on the quarterdeck. Ott did not appear to be the focus of his attention. Pazel followed his gaze back to the forecastle house and saw Lady Oggosk framed in the doorway, leaning heavily on her walking stick, gold rings gleaming on her ancient hands. She gave Rose an irascible wave:
Yes, Nilus, here I am
.

“Now we’ll see something,” said Alyash, delighted.

The captain howled an order. It was a brief command, just one word in fact, but the crew understood it perfectly. From all parts of the ship men took up the word, repeated it, made it their battle cry, and the word was
Death
.

A waking nightmare: that was how Pazel thought of the next few minutes. As if three-quarters of the crew had been seized by devils. How they ran to their task! Alyash organized the watch-captains to take their men to various points belowdecks, saying, “Kill on the way, kill when you get there, kill as you come back to report!” Haddismal sent his men to secure the gun decks. Mr. Bindhammer sent a team to fetch the sulphur barrels, to be used to smoke the ixchel from their hiding places. Uskins climbed to the mainmast fife rail and bellowed encouragement (“Exterminate! Exterminate all the little lice!”). This was revenge: an insane, wildfire revenge, carried out by men who just minutes ago had been savoring the fullness of their stomachs and the warmth of the sun. From hundreds of mouths came the throbbing refrain:
Death! Death! Death!

Pazel ran blindly along the topdeck. Ixchel bodies, some horribly mangled, littered his path. The men who had refused the order were faring badly: there was Big Skip Sunderling, being shoved and pummeled by several men. And humans had fallen too: with horror Pazel stumbled over Mr. Lapwing, open-eyed beside the tonnage hatch, one hand clutching at his bloody throat. Off to his left, a midshipman was limping, dragging one foot as though the tendon had been slashed. The ixchel would not go down without a fight.

“Stop this lunacy!” someone was shouting. Pazel whirled and saw to his amazement that it was Prince Olik. Alone of all his people he had leaped into the melee. Waving his hands, pleading. “Listen to me! We can broker a peace between your people! A just peace, an honorable—”

No one harmed him, but they did not listen, either. On the quayside, the dlömic citizens cried out to their prince. “Sire! Sire! Get out of that snake pit! Come back!”

Then Pazel saw Thasha, surrounded by a mob of advancing men. She was just holding them off, slashing the air with her knife.
Rin above, she’s wounded, she’s holding her chest
. No, not wounded, burdened: there were four living ixchel beneath her arm.

Pazel drew his skipper’s knife and flew toward her. Whatever had changed inside her, she was still Thasha, still the one he could not live without. He had almost reached her when a terribly familiar voice cut through him like a blade.

He whirled. A few yards to his left, two massive Burnscove Boys were squatting beside the sixteen-foot skiff, raising it and striking (with cries of glee) at something underneath. They had caulking hammers. Pazel swore under his breath and ran at them.

Under the lifeboat he saw Felthrup, backed into a corner, snapping, biting, dodging. Beside him an ixchel woman crawled in a pool of blood.

Pazel attacked so quickly the men never knew what hit them. As the nearer sailor raised his hammer for a killing blow, Pazel snatched it, brought it down sidelong against the face that turned by instinct, threw his body hard against the wounded man and bashed him into the other. With his knife he slashed the far man’s ear, then his cheek right at the bone, and atop the two of them he struck with head and hammer and knees and knife-hilt, until he realized that they were not fighting, they were curling into balls.

He scooped up Felthrup, unharmed it seemed, and the ixchel with the bloody scalp. Adept at the move by now, he tucked his shirt firmly under his belt and thrust rat and woman in through his open collar. They clung there, awkward but safe, and Pazel raced to Thasha’s side.

The madness of the fight engulfed him. Once again he found everything he had learned from Thasha and Hercól ablaze in his mind. The forward-seeing, the awareness of the blow and its consequences before he landed it, the balance and velocity of his limbs. He was not stabbing, not fighting to kill. He was using the knife to ward and to scratch, its hilt and both fists and his elbows and knees to wound and stun. All the same there was a blade in his hand. One small mistake and he was a killer. Of his own kind.
A killer of someone I don’t hate, in defense of those I don’t know …

With her back to Pazel’s, Thasha fought like a tigress. She did not say a word; she could not spare him the attention. But when the opportunity came, with the nudge of her sweaty shoulder, the bump of her hip, she moved him in the direction of her goal: the Silver Stair.

Of course. She was trying to bring them to the stateroom.

From the ladderway came crashes and thumps and howls of pain. Out of the corner of his eye Pazel saw Hercól, fighting his way down through a great mob of sailors. They were armed with all manner of swords, knives, hammers, cudgels; Hercól fought bare-handed, disarming one man after another, clearing a path.

Thasha crouched, whirling with one leg extended, and sent the gunner’s mate crashing to the deck. Pazel brandished his knife, holding off a Plapp’s Pier man and a midshipman. He leaped, and just cleared a capstan bar aimed at his kneecaps. To his dismay he saw that the one who held it was the tarboy Swift. His brother Saroo had been among the final captives. Swift looked at him with rage, and utter incomprehension. He swung a second time, and once more Pazel leaped. Again he and Thasha shuffled closer to the stairs.

Then Alyash himself appeared and charged right at Thasha. His first blow nearly caught her, and she was forced back from the ladderway, dancing just out of his reach, barely escaping one blow after another.

“Hercól!” Pazel cried. But the swordsman was out of sight. Pazel glanced again at Thasha—and this time Swift’s blow caught him in the ankles.

He had just enough presence of mind to pivot as he fell, so that Felthrup and Ensyl would not be crushed. He rolled, and Swift struck him across the back. Pazel snarled with pain but still, somehow, managed to gain his feet. He rose, strangely weightless, only to realize that the sensation was due to the fact that four men were lifting him by the arms.

They knew what was under his shirt, and were trying to stick their knives through it without actually killing him. “Give ’em up, give ’em up,
Muketch
, or you’ll bleed!” He lashed out with his legs, but the men caught them too. Thasha, ten feet away, had been reduced to shielding her ixchel from Alyash’s nonstop blows.

It all changed with a sound. Or rather, two sounds: the enraged and murderous howls of the mastiffs. Pazel’s foes saw them before he did, and dropped him like a red-hot skillet. From the corner of his eye Pazel saw Alyash’s face freeze, and then he broke and ran for the nearest rigging. Jorl thundered after him, a dark blue boulder of a dog, while Suzyt leaped over Pazel and scattered his tormentors.

Pazel felt Thasha hauling him to his feet.

“Go!”

She practically threw him down the Silver Stair. Hercól had cleared a path; Thasha, fighting a rearguard, tumbled behind him, shouting to her dogs. Then she was beside him, studying him, terrified (he knew from one look into her eyes) that he might be bleeding, hiding some wound.

“I’m all right,” he said.

She wanted to speak: he could have sworn to that. But she did not speak; she only turned and dragged him on. Two flights down they ran, stepping on the bodies of the wounded and the stunned, trying not to stare at the ixchel dead. When one of them stumbled, the other’s hand was there. Then Jorl and Suzyt caught up with them and led the way.

They reached the upper gun deck, the landing, the Money Gate. They passed Hercól still fighting in a side passage: “On, on!” he roared. Thasha whistled, pointed: the dogs sprang to help Hercól, a friend they’d known as long as Thasha herself. But as soon as the dogs were gone half a dozen Turachs rounded the corner, and the chase was on again. They raced down the long passage toward the stateroom, the marines hurling weapons and curses, and then they reached the intersection with the painted red line on the floor, and they were safe. One of the Turachs shouted to their comrades:
“Look out—that’s the mucking magic—”

Blunt sounds of collisions, groans. Pazel and Thasha ran on, bearing their few survivors. They threw open the elegant carved door and tumbled into the stateroom.

Fulbreech was here already, along with Marila and Neeps and Fiffengurt. All four ran to give their aid. The quartermaster took Felthrup and the wounded ixchel woman from Pazel’s bloody shirt; Neeps caught his arm, saying, “Steady, mate, you did blary good work.” Marila unclenched Thasha’s arm, and the battered ixchel let themselves be lifted onto the dining table. Fulbreech ran to Thasha and seized her by the arms. “Darling!” he said.

Thasha looked up at Fulbreech. She was gasping, red-faced, a terror to behold.
She knows
, Pazel thought,
she must have seen what he did, seen him grin at me, seen him slip the antidote through that door. She’s going to kill you, Fulbreech. Right here, right now
.

Thasha lowered her face to his chest.

All told, eleven ixchel had passed through the magic wall—and become hostages themselves, although in better quarters than the forecastle house. As often before, Pazel watched in amazement at the speed with which they began to function as a unit, the strongest tending to the wounded, the designated guard keeping a sharp eye on the humans and the dogs (because who knew, who really knew?) and one more carrying their water bag from mouth to thirsty mouth.

If he had been among the men ordered (and mostly eager) to kill “the little brutes,” he might have been even more impressed. For the carnage of the topdeck—twenty-nine ixchel and four humans slain—was by far the worst that occurred. True, Sandor Ott killed five more ixchel in as many minutes, and Ludunte in an act of madness jumped onto the head of the whaling captain, Magritte, and plunged twin daggers into his eyes. True, eight of the little people were kicked and clubbed to death on the Silver Stair, and another three on the berth deck, and an Uturphan topman was found in a cow stall with the veins in his ankles slit. But the casualties ended there. When Ott raced ahead of everyone down the No. 1 ladderway, he was executing a plan. Slight clues, chance remarks by the ixchel to their captives, observations brought to him by Alyash and Haddismal and others—above all, endless hours of maniacally focused thought—had brought him to a certainty. The mercy deck. The ixchel had their stronghold there. Probably forward of the ladderway, in that massive barricade of boxes and crates that were never unloaded in Simja, locked down still by bolts and rings and iron-tight straps, the furnishings for the Isiq household that was never to be (that he, Ott, had made sure would never be).

Ott was quite correct; and with his usual ruthlessness he slashed the straps and shouldered over crates and axed his way into the heart of the barricade. But when at last he had torn open the hive-like fortress of the ixchel he found not one of them there to interrogate or kill. They had gone. Some spare clothes remained. A thimble-small teacup was still vaguely warm.

Ott sniffed the cup. He had killed too quickly, he had no one to question. He sniffed again, no conscious idea why he did so, and eighty years of immersion in killing schemes saved his life.

He leaped from the pile of crates, smashed headlong across the compartment, hurled himself down the open shaft of the ladderway—and an explosion tore apart the space where he had been standing.

A black-powder trap. The compartment bloomed with flame. Shards of the Isiqs’ antique china flew like deadly spears, silver cutlery embedded itself in walls, a trumpet was forced half through the floorboards into the orlop deck.