The River of Shadows (34 page)

“Excellent,” said Olik. “Now everyone I wished to speak to is here.”

“I do not understand your interest in these mutineers,” said Rose. “You’ve still not met our spymaster, or Lady Oggosk, my soothsayer hag.”

“I saw quite enough of Mr. Ott four days ago,” said the prince with finality. “As for these people, I wished to see them because their behavior in that terrible circumstance was the opposite of his—and yours. But I have another reason, and this one includes you, Rose: for you also bear the mark of Erithusmé.”

Thasha whirled. “Do you mean our scars? What do you know about them, Sire? What do they have to do with Erithusmé?”

“Close the door, Lady Thasha,” said the prince, “and let us keep away from the windows, too. Counselor Vadu and his legionnaires know quite enough about me as it is.”

“We, however, do not know much at all,” said Hercól. “I would ask you to change that, Majesty, before asking for our trust.”

“Nothing could be more fair,” said the prince, “or alas, more difficult. I cannot say all that you might wish, for I don’t know how far my words will travel. Oh, I’m not impugning your good faith, my friends. You won’t breathe a word if I ask you not to—I’m confident of that. Even in your case, Captain Rose.”

“I’ve given no such promise,” grumbled Rose.

“But you
will
keep my secrets, all the same,” said Olik with a twinkle in his eye, “except perhaps from that Lady Oggosk of yours, and she will not breathe a word. But not only words can be spied upon—as you should know, who fight Arunis.”

“You know about Arunis?” asked Pazel.

“Who does not, in the South? You are safe within this splendid chamber, but you cannot always be here. And when you emerge, he probes at you, and feels the outlines of your thoughts.”

“Just a minute,” said Neeps. “You still haven’t told us how you know about our blary scars. Maybe you saw Pazel’s hand, and Thasha’s, and Rose’s arm. But Hercól’s scar is under his shirt, and Bolutu’s hair covers his. And I was never anywhere near you, until today.”

Thasha sheathed her sword. “I know the answer to that question,” she said.

“Let us not discuss that now!” said the prince. He went to the table, lowered himself into a chair. “We may have only minutes,” he said. “The physicians have nearly made their choice.”

“Physicians?” said Ensyl, who had climbed onto the table.

“The men who watch you from the quay, and report to Vadu—the ones your men have so delightfully labeled ‘birdwatchers.’ They are about to choose a few representatives for an audience with the Issár. And I have a strong hunch that you will be among them, for they are tasked with determining who is uncontaminated.”

“Uncontaminated!” thundered Rose. “That is outrageous! Fewer than twenty of my men have touched dry land this side of the Ruling Sea, and six of those disappeared without a trace. Of the rest, it is precisely these agitators who spent the longest time ashore. Yet you expect them to be chosen to visit the lord of Masalym? What, pray tell, does that Issár think we might be contaminated with?”

“Why, madness,” said the prince. “Captain Rose, you appear to care about your men. Do you realize the harm you have done them already? The Masalym physicians were on the point of attesting to your crew’s sanity when you ordered that killing spree against the little people.”

“So they’re admitting we’re human after all?” said Fiffengurt.

“My dear quartermaster, everyone in Masalym knows that you are human—the poor of the Lower City, the shipwrights under orders not to speak to your own carpenters, the Issár’s scientists and above all Vadu and other servants of Emperor Nahundra. They have known since we sailed into the Jaws of Masalym. They simply hope, with some desperation, to keep the world from learning about it. From their perspective it is convenient that we are at war. This city and its Inner Dominion are effectively quarantined. News does not easily escape by land or sea. I happen to know, however, that letters have already been sent by courier albatross. I can only assume that they repeat the official story.”

“You mean that nonsense about albinos,” said Pazel, “and the Magnificent Court of the Lilac.”

“Precisely,” said Olik. “But even as he spreads a nonsense tale, the good Vadu is struggling to determine just what kind of humans you are. With my encouragement, and after days of reports, he was prepared to let you all come ashore. But now that is out of the question.”

“We didn’t even catch that many,” Rose objected. “Crawlies, I mean. As an extermination it was a dismal failure.”

“How dispiriting for you,” said Olik. “Still the show you put on was gruesome enough. The rage to kill! It can, in fact, be a sign of the onset of the mental degeneration that turns humans into
tol-chenni.
” He looked at their shocked faces and added, “That, and a sharp smell of lemon in one’s sweat.”

“No one on
Chathrand
smells of lemons,” said Felthrup, from Marila’s arms.

Olik shot to his feet. He stared at Felthrup with his mouth agape. “That creature,” he said at last. “I saw you with it on the topdeck, but I took it for a pet. Did it speak?”

“Marila is not a ventriloquist, Sire,” said Felthrup. “I can speak. I am woken. There are many like me in the North. And if you please, we consider
it
rather derogatory.”

The prince stepped forward, awestruck. He dropped to one knee before Marila and the rat.

“Many?” he said.

“More all the time, Prince,” said Bolutu. “The rate of wakings has exploded in … recent years.”

Pazel caught his look of torment.
Recent years
.

“Then perhaps it’s true,” whispered Olik. “Perhaps this
is
the ship of our doom. The council foretold it, and though I was part of their foretelling I could not make myself believe. Have we come to the end? Will I live to see … 
that
? O Watchers Beyond, take pity!”

“Your words are blary strange,” said Fiffengurt. “Can’t you speak more plainly, Sire?”

Olik crept to the window and peered out. “Yes, I can,” he said at last. “The poor folk of Masalym are not ignorant, by and large. Not two generations ago, every last dlömu in this city could read and write, and a great many had collections of books in their own homes—”

In Marila’s arms, Felthrup kicked and squirmed, overcome with feeling.

“—and that delight in learning has not left them altogether, though it is hard to keep alive in these darkening days. Those who believe that you are hastening the world’s end could give you reasons for that belief.”

He came back to the table and sat down. “There have been foretellings. Prophecies, if you like. For a century at least. The Empire has tried to silence them. They have jailed and killed the augurs, and those who repeat or publish the foretellings. Indeed the very practice of foretelling has recently become an Imperial crime. And why wouldn’t they try to silence us, when what we see ahead is an end to their dynasty, a final disintegration of their power?”

“We?” said Ensyl.

Olik looked up at Thasha. “You guessed, didn’t you? Tell them now, if you will.”

“I didn’t guess,” she said. “I felt it, when you passed through the wall. You’re a mage.”

Everyone tensed; Felthrup’s fur stood up bristling along his spine.

“I am a mage,” said Olik, “but I am nothing at all like Arunis. I can cast no spells, work no charms, summon no imp to do my bidding. I am a Spider Teller.”

Bolutu cried out in delight: “A Spider Teller! What joy, Your Majesty! Then they at least have not perished from the South during my absence!”

“Not quite,” said Olik soberly. “But we are hardly flourishing. I am the first member of the royal family ever to don a Teller’s cloak. My cousins in the capital feel quite vindicated, I understand: all along they thought me mad; now I have given them proof.”

Turning to the others, he said, “We Spider Tellers do only one thing. We search for clues. Clues about the future of Alifros, its destiny, and the secrets hidden in its immensity. A Spider Teller may seek this sort of knowledge by many paths. In my case, I was drawn to the order’s few surviving chasmamancers, and in time became one of them. Chasmamancers spend less time behind temple walls than our brethren, for to practice our art we must roam far and wide. We read the future through earthquakes, and volcanic eruptions, and other disasters.”

“My own mentors, Sire,” said Bolutu, “used to say that such violent events disturbed the universe.”

“Ever so slightly,” agreed Olik. “No more than a pebble tossed into a lake disturbs the distant shore. The larger the disaster, of course, the greater the effect. The Worldstorm occurred fourteen centuries ago, but the waves it caused are still breaking. These waves are the oracles we try to read.

“For a long time now we have sensed the coming of a terrible event. For decades its shape was too faint to discern. Only this past spring was the vision clearly revealed: a moving palace, gliding out of a storm. Within the palace were beings we could not see, but only sense. In the words of the foretelling, they were
the ones we thought were gone forever
. My brethren in the Spider Temple long debated who those figures might be. Some said humans, returned to their right minds. Others said
Thinkers
, what you call woken animals. Here on this ship you have both.”

“Not to mention ixchel,” said Ensyl, “who also came from this side of the Nelluroq originally, though you do not appear to know of us.”

“Many stories mention you,” said Olik to Ensyl, “but few of us believed them.” He looked up at the others excitedly. “The last part of the foretelling was this: that the moving palace would appear at the time of the death of Empires, the sundering of nations. That its movement across the world would trace lines along which the world might be broken, snapped, like the lines scored in glass by a diamond blade. And that when all the world was in fragments a new mosaic would be formed out of the pieces, though how long it would take, and what the mosaic would show, we could not, and cannot, foresee.”

Captain Rose grunted and shook his head. “Rubbish. Poetry. We’re an Arquali ship, on a plain, ugly mission. We have old foes called the Mzithrinis, and we’re trying to stab them in the back. We’re only in the South because we couldn’t possibly find our way to the Mzithrin’s western borderlands by dead reckoning. The crawlies and the sorcerer and that blary woken rat—they’re unlawful passengers, nothing more.”

“And the Nilstone?” said Olik.

Rose started, glared at him. “I don’t know who you’ve been talking to, or how much you know about the Stone. But understand this: my crew did not seek that devilish thing, and my mission does not require it. All that matters is the Shaggat Ness. I will go further: after Arunis himself, the Nilstone is our mission’s greatest obstacle. It has already turned the Shaggat to stone. If you or your city possess the skill to remove it from the Shaggat’s hand without killing the bastard—your pardon, Sire—you may have it, with my blessing.”

“Captain! No!” cried the others, aghast.

“A strange blessing you offer,” said the prince. “I should rather be blessed with an armful of scorpions than to have the Nilstone placed in my keeping. But others in this city—others in my family, too—would like nothing so much. My cousin the Emperor and his fell advisers will gladly take the Stone off your hands. They will not accept your terms, however. They will pulverize your Shaggat, and kill you all, as eagerly as you killed the ixchel. Ah, Watchers above me! What are we to do?”

He considered the buttered bread Felthrup had nibbled, then snatched it and gobbled it down.

“Six of you bear the wolf-scar,” he said, chewing. “And five of you, along with this young woman”—he nodded at Marila—“fought to save the lives of the ixchel. That, more than Erithusmé’s mark itself, made me wish to see you. Of course, the sixth bearer of the mark gave the
order
to kill.”

Rose stiffened. “Have you come to debate my orders, Sire?”

“No,” said Olik, “though I find them highly debatable. Still, you must keep the Nilstone, and I must be grateful that it has not yet fallen into the hands of someone worse. At the very least you are not Macadra.”

His last word electrified Felthrup. He squealed, ear-piercing and high, and writhed so violently that he fell from Marila’s arms. When he struck the floor he ran in circles, smashing into chairs and tables and people and dogs, all the while shouting, “Macadra! Macadra! White teeth! White bones!”

At first no one could lay hands on him. Then Suzyt pounced, and caught him with loving firmness in her jaws, as she might a hysterical puppy. Felthrup’s screams went on for a short while, oddly magnified by the cavernous mouth engulfing his head. Then he fell still, whimpering and muttering. Suzyt disgorged him, and the two dogs curled around him protectively, half burying him in their folds of flesh.

“Skies above,” said Olik, “are they
all
like that?”

The others assured him that there was only one Felthrup. But the prince’s alarm did not abate. “How could he know of Macadra?” he asked with dread. “She
is
white, or at least unnaturally pale. And she is a terrible sorceress—as bad as Arunis, in her way. If she is involved in this matter things are far worse than they appear.”

“Felthrup’s instincts are uncanny,” said Hercól. “Though often bewildering even to him, they should not be ignored. He is possessed of an exceptional mind.”

“I shouldn’t argue with
possessed
, anyway,” said Olik. “But Macadra is not in the city! Vadu would have told me at once.”

“Unless he has a reason to keep it from you,” said Rose. “A reason, or an order.”

Olik looked at him. “You’re a disturbing fellow, Captain Rose, but I can’t dismiss what you say. Nor can you, my good people, stay in Masalym.”

“We have yet to leave the ship, Your Highness,” said Hercól.

“That will change tomorrow,” said Olik. “Be glad that I managed to meet with you beforehand. Remember: my powers in Masalym are mostly bluff and bluster. True, the Issár rules the city in the name of my family, and no one in Bali Adro may harm me, on pain of death. But it is the Issár and not Prince Olik who holds the Imperial mandate. When I am obeyed it is more out of habit than duty—and there are ways around any law, even the law that protects my person, if one is willing to sacrifice a few assassins. I too must be careful.”