The River of Shadows (43 page)

“They are human, Vadu,” said Arunis. “Don’t make me repeat it. The North is rife with them.”

Vadu looked thoughtful. “How many are there, really?”

“They are more numerous than the crickets in the
chúun-
grass,” said Arunis. Then he raised his head and looked Vadu in the eye. “Before the burning season, that is.”

The driver flicked the reins, and the horses trotted off. Lightning flashed; the mountains appeared in looming silhouette, and vanished again. On the bench beside the driver, Greysan Fulbreech shivered. Not with cold, but with a sort of intoxicated wonder. His changes of luck that night had been breathtaking. He had been duped by the Isiq girl, tasted her body, faced a hideous, gelatinous devil guarding his master’s door. He had nearly been strangled by Arunis, and saved only by Ott’s wish to torture him at leisure; then he had been saved from Ott by his true master’s swift instigation of the raid. Yes, a night of dangerous gambles. But as always his hand was a little stronger than the day before. The ship was doomed; he would not stay with it. And it was clear that in all the world there was no greater patron than Arunis.

Unless this Macadra was
his
master, perhaps? Fulbreech was unclear on this point, but no matter. Time would tell him what to do. A flood was rising in the world, and he would do as he had always done, scramble from rock to higher rock, and who could fault his strategy? What harm, after all, had come to him during these months of violence and death? A black eye from Pathkendle, tonight a little scratch on the chin. He touched it gingerly: the bleeding had stopped already, yet for some reason he found it difficult to ignore.

The carriage left. The Great Ship sat in darkness. Rain poured down the tonnage shaft; the wind prowled as indifferently as it did the hulks and wrecks that littered shores from one end of Alifros to the other. Here and there a sound echoed in the lightless corridors: a mouse, a cricket, the ghost of a laugh. And in the stateroom, in Admiral Isiq’s former cabin, in the back of the closet, in a box turned to the wall, Felthrup Stargraven lay twitching, unconscious, dreaming with a will.

Under Observation

4 Modobrin 941
233rd day from Etherhorde

“Prisoners,” said Neeps. “We’ve crossed the entire world to become prisoners who stare at the walls.”

“It is certainly better than the forecastle house,” said Dr. Chadfallow, biting into a silver pear.

“This is more room than
I’ve
ever had in my life,” said Dr. Rain. “Not all of us had mansions back in Etherhorde, or crossed the Nelluroq in the Imperial Stateroom.”

“We’re being examined,” said Uskins, crouched in the weeds, his eyes on a large antlered beetle near his foot. “They’re spying on us. I can feel their fishy eyes.”

“We’re just monkeys, as far as they’re concerned,” said Mr. Druffle, rising to Uskins’ gloomy bait (he was suffering greatly from lack of rum). “The experiments will come later: the injections, the probes.”

“And then they’ll turn us into frogs and eat our legs,” said Marila, whose opinion of Druffle was even lower than Dr. Chadfallow’s.

Pazel turned his face to the sky. “At least the sun is out,” he said.

He was seated on the steps near the glass wall, eyes closed, basking. Thasha was leaning against his shoulder. They had clung together quietly since his mind-fit, and her own brief spell of strangeness. It was Thasha who had held him through his last raving hour, Thasha who had washed his bloodstained face, cradled his shivering body while he slept. Thasha who had explained, when he woke in the dawn chill, that they were in a place called the Imperial Human Conservatory, and that the hoots and squeals and grunts that woke him were the
tol-chenni
, in some other part of the compound, screaming for their morning food.

Now she rose and looked at their prison again.

You could call it a garden, or the remains of one. It was about fifty feet long and half as wide. Ragged shrubs and flowers, un-pruned trees, a fountain that had not flowed in years. Benches and tables of stone, a little wood-burning grill and stocky chimney, a fenced-in patch that might once have been used for vegetables (this was where Uskins sat). Five tiny bedchambers, with no doors in the frames.

The main courtyard was roofless, but the walls were nearly forty feet high. Set into the wall across from the bedchambers was an immense pane of glass, thirty feet long, six inches thick, and without a scratch on its gigantic surface. Hercól thought it might be the same crystal used in the
Chathrand
’s own glass planks, a substance lost to the knowledge of the Northern world. There were small bore-holes in the glass, possibly for speaking through. To one side, tucked into the corner, was a solid steel door.

It was through this glass wall that the birdwatchers came to stare at them, to take notes and whisper together. From the corridor, the birdwatchers could see the whole space within, and even much of the bedchambers. You could sleep out of sight, but the moment you got to your feet you were on display. So of course were the birdwatchers themselves. Close up, they had revealed themselves as rather careworn, older dlömu, grubbing for handkerchiefs in the pockets of their gray uniforms, squinting at their notebooks. But they were earnest in their study of the prisoners. On the second day they had brought a painter, who set up his easel in the corridor and worked for many hours, filling a number of canvases.

The birdwatchers paid unusual attention to Marila and Neeps. Once, when Neeps stood close to the glass, a dlömic woman had lowered her nose to the bore-hole and sniffed. Then she had backed away, eyes widening, and fled the corridor, calling to her fellows.

The intense scrutiny had abated, however. On this third day their keepers had so far appeared only at mealtimes. But they had not abandoned the watch altogether: a dog had been left on duty. The musty brown creature sat upon a wooden crate carried in for the purpose, watching them through mournful eyes. Thasha had tried speaking to the dog, as she would to Jorl or Suzyt. The animal had turned its eyes her way, but it never made a sound.

The birdwatchers never spoke to them either, but they were as generous with food as everyone else in Masalym. Twice a day, under heavy guard, the steel door was unlocked and a cart rolled inside, heaped with fruit, vegetables cooked and raw, snake-beans, cheese and of course the small, chewy pyramids of
mül
. They never ran out of
mül
. Druffle was morbidly chewing one left over from breakfast.

“You know what we have to do, shipmates,” he said to no one in particular. “We have to show ’em we’re sane.”

“Ingenious,” said Chadfallow.

“You leave him alone,” said Neeps. “If the two of you start fighting they’ll throw away the key. Anyway, he could be right. It might be the only way out of here. We
are
sane, after all.”

“Did you hear that bird?” said Uskins, brightening. “It sounded like a falcon. Or a goose.”

The south wall was lined with cabinets and shelves. There were some books, mold-blackened, nibbled by mice, and cabinets with cups and plates and old bent spoons, a tin bread box. The north wall was a grille of iron bars, at the center of which hung a rusted sign:

Treat Your Brothers with Compassion
Remember that They Bite

Beyond the iron bars stood further enclosures, which were larger and wilder, with ponds and sheds and stands of trees, all neglected, all walled off from the city. Now and then, between the trees and outbuildings, Thasha saw the
tol-chenni
, squatting naked, raking hay into piles and scattering it again, picking things from the dirt and eating them, or trying to. They seemed quite afraid of the newcomers. Neeps had tossed a hard dlömic roll over the gate: it had lain there in the sun all day, untouched. But by this morning it had disappeared.

This, surely, was the place Ibjen’s father had spoken of, where Bali Adro had tried and failed to cure the degenerating humans. But what was its purpose today? Were they locked in a prison, a hospital? A zoo?

“The dlömu are moving in the next wing,” said Hercól, from his listening post near the glass wall. “Be ready—our chance may come at any time.”

Thasha sighed. He had been talking that way since their imprisonment began. She drifted into the chamber she shared with Marila and looked down from the barred window at the world outside their prison. She had spent hours here, entranced.

The Conservatory was built on a bluff over the river, near the cliff that divided one part of Masalym from the next. They were in the Middle City, but a stone’s throw from the window the land fell away into Lower Masalym, vast and largely abandoned. Oh, there were people—two thousand, she guessed, or maybe three. But the homes! There must have been fifty thousand or more. The Lower City by itself was the size of Etherhorde, and yet it was very nearly a ghost-town. Countless streets lay empty. Yesterday smoke had risen in the distance: a blaze had consumed three houses, unmolested by any fire brigade. The ruins were smoldering yet.

And there were stranger things: hulking buildings of iron and glass, and monstrous stone temples that looked as old as the surrounding peaks. But like the tower of Narybir these giant structures lay closed and dark.

By daylight she saw the dlömu scurrying about their lives, carting vegetables, mending windows and fences, gathering scrap wood into bundles. They met at street corners, talked briefly, anxiously, scanning the empty streets. A mother marched her child down a sunlit avenue, clearly afraid. A face appeared at an upper window, through moldering curtains, vanished again. Four times a day, a dlömu in a white robe climbed the steps of a half-ruined tower to strike a brass gong, and the lonely noise lingered in the air. His coal-black face, framed by the white hood, turned sometimes in her direction, thoughtfully. At dusk, animals crept from the abandoned homes: foxes, feral dogs, a shambling creature the size of a small bear but quilled like a porcupine.

There were also soldiers, of course, servants of the Issár. She could pick them out here and there. At the port, they surrounded the
Chathrand:
the Great Ship was plainly visible from her window. Along the road they had followed two nights before, a few troops came and went. And on the outer wall there were soldiers, milling, marching, tending the great cannon that pointed down into the Jaws of Masalym.

But for all the busy movement along the wall, the number of men there was not very large. There were far more guns than men to use them. By night, they lit lamps at sentry posts where no actual sentries stood guard. By day they appeared at pains to keep every man on duty out of the turrets and walking the battlements in plain sight.
It’s a façade
, she thought.
They’re hiding behind those cannon, these cliffs. They’re mounting a guard around an empty shell
.

All this was strange enough. But even stranger, beside the windswept emptiness below was the bustle and noise of this higher part of Masalym, this Middle City. Thasha could see only a few blocks of it, but the curve of the cliff told her that the Middle City was a fraction of the size of the Lower. And yet the Middle City was alive. Its streets were crowded, its shops abuzz by early morning and aglow half the night. There were musicians playing somewhere; there were dlömic men with water pipes seated on rugs outside doorways; there was a fruit market that appeared as if by magic at dawn and disappeared by noon; there were dlömic children walking to school in daisy chains.

“It’s two cities, isn’t it?”

Pazel had stepped into the chamber. She reached for his hand and drew him near.

“Three, probably,” she said. “There’s the Upper City, somewhere. But I don’t know if we’ll be going there after all.”

“Not if the Issár’s as afraid of madness as everyone else.”

“And not if Arunis is as tight with him as he seems,” she said.

They stood in silence a moment. A bird cried shrilly. They looked at each other and smiled. “Uskins wasn’t dreaming,” she said. “That’s an eagle, or some other bird of prey.”

“Look,” he said, “the crew’s out exercising again.”

He pointed to the Tournament Grounds, three miles away in the Lower City, at the end of the broad avenue that led to the port. Thasha could just see the pale humans in the courtyard of the pavilion, a huge and crumbling mansion that might once have been rather splendid.

“I wonder,” she said, “if any of those people are going home.”

“Well, we blary are,” said Neeps. He and Marila had stepped into the room.

Marila threw herself down on the straw-stuffed bed. “I said I wanted a nap. Tell me you’re not going to start babbling about
plans
again.”

“Not exactly,” said Neeps. He was looking strangely at Thasha. “I want to talk to you,” he said. “By yourself, maybe. If you don’t mind.”

His request turned heads. “By herself?” said Pazel, knitting his eyebrows. “What do you have to tell her that you can’t tell us?”

“It’s not like that, mate,” said Neeps, “it’s just something I need to … bring up.”

“Something about what happened to her in the wagon?” Pazel demanded.

“What do you know about that?” asked Neeps, startled. “You couldn’t understand her words; you were in the middle of your own fit. You were screaming and covering your ears.”

“I haven’t forgotten, believe it or not,” said Pazel. “But I could still
see
. I know she was in trouble. What did she say?”

“Was it something awful, Neeps?” asked Thasha, studying him. “Is that what you want to tell me?”

Neeps glanced at Marila. “What does
awful
mean, really? You heard her. Would you call that awful?” When Marila only rolled onto her stomach and sighed, he turned back helplessly to Thasha. “Maybe,” he said, “we could forget the whole thing?”

Thasha closed her eyes. “You sound like a
perfect
fool.”

“Half right,” said Marila. “He’s far from perfect. And he won’t quit until he gets his way. Go and listen to him. Then you can tell us yourself, if you want to.”

But Thasha shook her head firmly. “No more secrets,” she said. “Not from you three. Not ever.”

She looked at Pazel, hoping he understood. What she’d had to do with Fulbreech, what she’d had to do to
him:
that had been the last straw. She turned to Neeps and snatched his hand. “You come here, and listen. I was there the night you talked about your brother. The night you almost killed me. I was on the same mucking divan with the two of you.”

Marila blushed; Neeps looked mortified. Pazel felt himself ambushed by a smirk.

“You’ve seen Pazel go crazy with fits,” Thasha went on. “You saw me pretending to be Fulbreech’s little … 
whore
. And you heard what Arunis said. It might be true, even though he said it to hurt me. Syrarys might really be my mother and … Sandor Ott—”

She could not bring the words out. Pazel stepped behind her and held her shoulders, and Thasha felt some measure of calm returning.

“We’ve shared all that,” she said, “and a lot more besides. So don’t tell me to start keeping secrets from you
now
. I don’t want any. I want friends who know who I am.”

All four youths were quiet. Suddenly Marila leaned forward and put her arms around Thasha’s waist, hugging her tightly. Thasha was speechless; but a moment later Marila released her with a mumbled apology, and quickly wiped her eyes.

Everyone looked at Neeps, waiting. The small boy sat down, ran his hands through his dusty hair, puffed out his cheeks.

“Right. Now don’t yell, anybody, unless you feel like sharing secrets with the rest of ’em out there. I don’t think your mother was Syrarys
or
Clorisuela. I think she was Erithusmé, Thasha. I think they’re hiding the fact that you’re the daughter of a mage.”

Even with his warning, the other three struggled to contain themselves. “Where in the sweet Tree’s shade did you get
that
daft idea?” said Pazel.

“From Felthrup, that’s where. He helped you read the
Polylex
, Thasha—for weeks and weeks, when touching the book used to make you so ill.”