The Ruling Sea (27 page)

Pazel and Neeps handed over their tools. But even as they turned to leave cries broke out in the next compartment.

“You give that blary thing back to me, Coxilrane!”

“Can’t, sir, can’t!”

“Blast you to Bodendel! It’s mine!”

All down the passage boys were turning from their work. The voices drew nearer. Suddenly Firecracker Frix galloped into the compartment in a kind of terror, his long beard flapping and a notebook of some sort tucked under his arm. Behind him came Fiffengurt, barefoot and red with fury, shaking his fists above his head.

“Thief, thief!” he roared. “I’ll tear out your damned beard by the roots!”

Frix apparently believed him: he was running for his life. But as he drew even with Pazel he took a bad step. Groping for balance, his palm slapped the last spot on the wall Neeps had painted with resin. There was an audible sizzle. Frix screamed; the notebook flew from his hands, slid across the deck—and stopped at the feet of Mr. Uskins, who had just entered the passage from the opposite side.

“What’s all this, Second Mate?” he snapped.

“My h-hand—”

Uskins scooped up the book and examined it suspiciously.

“Now, Uskins, don’t involve yourself,” shouted Fiffengurt, closing the distance.

Uskins put his back to the quartermaster. “Mr. Frix?” he demanded.

“It’s his p-private journal, sir,” said Frix, still shuddering on the deck. “Captain Rose knew about it, somehow. He sent me to take it from his quarters—it wasn’t my idea, Mr. Fiffengurt! See here, he gave me the master key and all! Whoopsy!”

Frix dropped the key and scrambled after it. Fiffengurt kicked his prominently displayed backside, then reached out to Uskins for the book. Uskins ignored the gesture. He had opened the journal and was flipping through the sheets of neat blue handwriting.

“There must be two hundred pages,” he said. “You’ve kept yourself busy, Quartermaster.”

“It’s none of your business,” said Fiffengurt. “Hand it over.”

“I doubt I have ever missed her more,”
Uskins read aloud with mock reverence.
“All the beauties of this world are dust without my Annabel.”

“Devil!”

Fiffengurt lunged for the journal, but Uskins kept his body between the quartermaster and his notebook. He was very nearly laughing. “Carry on, Frix,” he said. “I’ll see that this reaches the captain.”

“But it’s my blary property!” shouted Fiffengurt.

Uskins looked at him with naked malice. “I am glad to hear you say so. First, because you will be held to account for whatever libel or mutinous matter I find in these pages.”

“You
find?” said Neeps.

“And second,” Uskins continued, “because to keep such a journal is a crime in itself.” He backed in a circle, holding off the quartermaster with one hand and waving the open book above his head with the other. “Except for letters home, an officer’s every written word is the property of the
Chathrand
Trading Family. Imperial law, Fiffengurt. We’ll see how Captain Rose decides to punish—
Ach!”

Pazel had crept around behind him and grabbed the journal. Uskins was caught off-guard and stumbled over the resin can, which oozed bubbling across the deck. But he kept his grip on the book. Furious, he slammed Pazel against the wall with his shoulder, even as Neeps and Fiffengurt grabbed at the book themselves.

“The lamp! The lamp!” cried the other boys.

Fiffengurt looked up: Uskins must have struck the oil lamp with a wild swing of the notebook. The peg on which it hung had cracked, and looked set to break at any moment. Walrus-oil lamps were sturdy but not indestructible, and fire in a passage awash with flammable resin was too grim a thought to contemplate. Fiffengurt let go of his journal and grabbed the lamp with both hands.

Uskins gave a vicious, whole-bodied tug. Pazel and Neeps held fast—and the journal ripped at the spine. Man and boys fell apart, each side gripping half the ruined book.

The first mate looked at what he held. With an approving snicker he jumped to his feet and ran off along the corridor, leaving sticky resin bootprints.

“That pig got almost everything,” said Neeps, riffling the mangled pages. “This is the empty half of the book.”

“Are you hurt, lads?”

They assured him they weren’t. Fiffengurt inspected them to be sure, moving slowly, as if in a daze. At last he turned to his beloved journal. Out of two hundred pages he was left with three.

“I’m so sorry, Mr. Fiffengurt,” said Pazel.

The quartermaster stared at the crumpled sheets, as if expecting them to multiply. Slowly his jaw tightened, his teeth clenched and his hands began to shake. The tarboys shuffled backward.

Fiffengurt turned on his heel and bellowed:

“Uskins! Son of a leprous limp-teated dog-spurned side-alley whore!”

The Lady Oggosk, Eighteenth Duchess of Tiroshi, had for reasons never well explained made her quarters in a little room inside the forecastle house, between the smithy and the chicken coops.

The cabin had been hers for a quarter century, since her first voyage with Captain Rose. When Rose was stripped of his captaincy in 929, Oggosk departed as well, but her last deed was to mark her cabin door with a strange symbol in chalk. According to tarboy legend, anyone who set foot in Oggosk’s cabin from that day forward broke out in chills, boils, warts or mortifyingly confessional song, depending on who was telling the story. There was no proof of these claims. What was certain was that her little cabin had stood untouched for twelve years, until she and Rose returned in triumph to the
Chathrand
.

The door was painted robin’s-egg blue: a strange choice for a woman nearly everyone on the ship was afraid of. Pazel had had time to reflect on this curiosity for some minutes now. Oggosk was making them wait.

“We don’t have to be here,” said Neeps. “We’re not in the service; we don’t have to hop when Uskins says so.”

“Don’t be a fool, mate,” said Pazel. “We may not be tarboys, but we’re sure as Pitfire not Rose’s guests. We’d be better off if they gave us
more
work to do. If Rose ever gets it into his head that we’re useless, why, he’ll toss us down to steerage with the rest of those poor louts, and only let us out to use the heads.”

Neeps grunted. “I’m blary starved. When we’re done here we
have
to make Teggatz slip us something to eat. It’s our meal shift right now, you know.”

Pazel smiled. “Your stomach’s growling like a street dog.”

“I want to be strong for our fighting-lesson, that’s all,” said Neeps.

“There’s one thing we have to do before we eat,” said Pazel, his mood darkening. “Track down Greysan Fulbreech.” He glanced about nervously, then whispered: “You know that the minute we’re past Talturi, Thasha’s coming out of hiding.”

“So?”

“Neeps, if Fulbreech has anything—well,
shocking
—to say about her father, I want us to know first, so we can break it to her gently.”

“Right you are,” said Neeps. Then the ship’s bell began to ring, and he stamped his foot. “That’s eight bells, by damn! What in the Nine Pits can that old crone be—”

The latch clicked. The blue door swung wide, and a pungent odor met their nostrils: incense, ginger, old sweat, dead flowers. “Come in, monkeys,” said Lady Oggosk from the shadows.

They entered, warily lifting aside an old batik curtain, and saw the duchess seated on a black-cushioned chair against the far wall with her enormous cat Sniraga pacing before her, its red tail twitching like a snake. The light was dim: no lamp burned, but a six-inch-square bit of glass planking was set into the ceiling, allowing a little pale, diffuse sunlight to enter from the deck above. “Close the door behind you,” said Oggosk, “and sit down.”

But where? The cabin was small and preposterously cluttered. The boys’ shoulders bumped together as they took in the shelves, footstools, scroll cases, stoppered flasks, ancient sun parasols, bead boxes, cigar boxes, dangling bunches of dried herbs, weird animal statuettes. It was not clear where Oggosk slept: the furniture was buried under shawls and sea-cloaks and massive age-darkened books.

There was literally no space free of clutter except for the thin path between Oggosk’s chair and the door. So when Oggosk indicated with an impatient gesture that she really did mean for them to sit, that is where they did so.

“Did you hear that messenger bird on Simja?” she asked without preamble.

“The woken bird?” asked Pazel.

“Of course.”

“I did,” said Neeps, “what of it?”

“Do you know the story of the Garden of Happiness?”

Pazel sighed. “You can’t grow up in Arqual, or anywhere near it, without hearing that stupid tale.”
^*

But the children of the minor lords had heard their fathers curse Axmal night after night, and were jealous of the gifts lavished on his son, which were finer than what they received on their own birthdays. When the adults went in to table, they stripped and gagged the boy, tied him to his birthday pony, set the beast’s tail on fire and whipped him around the courtyard. Two days later the domains were at war.

“There was a peacock too,” said Oggosk, “in the governor’s palace at Ormael, who fawned on his brainless wife. ‘O saintly lady,’ it called her. And one of Mr. Latzlo’s beasts, a climbing anteater, has the look in its eye right now: the look of terror that comes before a waking. The animal should have been given to the Simjans—where is it to find ants, on the Ruling Sea?—but Sandor Ott’s order that no one be allowed off the ship extends even to animals, it seems. And perhaps he was right, at that.”

The boys exchanged a look of impatience.

“That odious man spoke of
selling
his anteater,” she went on, “with no more concern for its well-being than if it were a piece of taxidermy—bloodless, soulless, stuffed.”

“Like Arqualis do with slaves,” Pazel couldn’t resist adding.

“Just so,” agreed Oggosk. “Though the ban on slavery that has taken root in Etherhorde may be extended to the outer territories, soon enough.”

“‘Soon enough’?” Neeps said, laughing under his breath.

Suddenly the old woman’s glance was sharp. “We were discussing the waking phenomenon,” she said. “Consider, boys: it has been going on for some eleven centuries. But in the first ten, only a few hundred animals awoke. There have been that many in the last forty years alone, and the rate is still increasing.”

“We can see that,” said Pazel. “But what does it have to do with us?”

“Try thinking before you ask,” she said. “What happened forty years ago?”

“The great war ended,” said Neeps at once.

“And?”

“The Mzithrin drove the Shaggat’s followers back to Gurishal,” said Pazel, “and Arqual took the Shaggat prisoner, in secret.”

“Yes, yes,
and
?”

“The Red Wolf,” said Pazel. “The Red Wolf fell into the sea.”

“With the Nilstone inside it,” said Oggosk. “Precisely. The Shaggat Ness, with Arunis goading him on, squandered the last of his military strength on a suicidal raid on Babqri City. He took the Wolf from the Citadel of Hing, though the Mzithrinis blasted most of his ships to matchwood as he did so. But the Shaggat escaped with the Wolf and made it as far as the Haunted Coast before we sank his ship. And from that day the Nilstone itself began to wake.

“The Citadel, you see, was a containment vessel for the Stone—a protection against its evil, like the Red Wolf itself. Half our protection, then, was stripped away forty years ago when the Shaggat raided the Citadel. The rest melted away with the Wolf.”

“So the Nilstone
is
behind all these wakings!” said Neeps.

“The Nilstone’s power, yes,” said Oggosk, “but the spell was cast by a living person.”

Her lips formed a tight line, and she studied them as though reluctant to share anything more. But after a moment she continued: “Beyond this world and its heavens, in the Court of Rin if you like, there is a debate about the worth of consciousness. What good is intelligence? What’s it
for?
Shouldn’t Alifros be better off without it? And if not, which creatures should possess the sort of minds we call
woken
? It is an ancient debate, and a hard one, even for eternal beings. It is not settled yet.

“But centuries ago, an upstart mage decided to take matters into her own hands. Every other wizard and seer in Alifros opposed her—but she held the Nilstone, and did not listen. Ramachni may have told you about this mage; I am certain he told Thasha. Her name was Erithusmé.”

“He told us,” said Pazel. “He said she was the greatest mage since the Worldstorm.”

“Undeniably,” said Oggosk. “She healed many a country devastated by the Storm, and drove the Nelluroq Vortex away from land, and put the demon lords in chains. But Erithusmé labored under a curse, for her power had been sparked by the Nilstone. She was the first being in twelve hundred years capable of using it, and no one has succeeded since. Courage made it possible: Erithusmé was born with an almost total lack of fear, and as you know it is through fear that the Nilstone kills. Without the Stone, her magical powers would have been unremarkable. With it, she changed the course of the world—and not for the better, mind.”

“Are you saying she was evil?” Pazel asked.

“I am merely saying that she relied on the Stone,” said Oggosk, “and the Stone is evil perfected: a coagulate lump of infernal malice, spat into Alifros from the world of the dead. She never let it master her, as the Fell Princes did of old. She was that strong. But no mage is strong enough to stop the
side effects
of using the Stone. Every miracle she worked came with a cost. She chained the demon lords, only to learn that it was in their nature when free to devour lesser demons, who began to flourish like weeds. She banished the Vortex to the depths of the Ruling Sea, but the spell-energy that pushed it there also doubled its size.”

“And the wakings—”

“The wakings, yes. They were Erithusmé’s last great effort. She looked at the world’s suffering, its violence and greed, its long history of self-inflicted harm, and decided that it all began with thoughtlessness. And so she decided that the cure must be more thought, and more thinkers. She prepared a long time in secret, for what would be the mightiest deed of her life. And when she was ready she took the Stone in hand and cast the Waking Spell.