The Ruling Sea (54 page)

21 Freala 941
130th day from Etherhorde

Her heart is a throbbing beast, her body a wilderness, her shores a stone wall and her few harbors held by savages who roast their foes on spits. Great teams of explorers set off for her interior; months later broken men straggle out with tales of whip scorpions and swarms of carnivorous bats, and great monsters that bask on riverbanks or blend with the trees. There are also stories of lost races of thinking beings, whole cities perhaps, in the valleys of her central range
.

Whatever the truth of such tales, on this you may rely: Bramian is merciless. If you contemplate some exploitation of her riches, be warned: only the very wealthy, and very disciplined, have succeeded in turning a profit on this island twice the size of the Westfirth. “Above all,” writes one old survivor, “let your stay be brief. Cut a swathe of jungle, mine a little ore, take a few hundred hides—and be gone. If you do this you may live to enjoy your takings, however smaller than your appetite they prove.”

—The Merchant’s Polylex,
18th edition (959)
,
page 4186
.

He passed a night of dark dreams in which he crept over canyons on bridges of scrapwood and straw. Every step caused the bridges to groan and bend, and yet he had no choice but to cross the dismal gorges. Now and then he would half wake and find himself curled against the wall of the brig, intensely grateful for its solidity, for the absence of an abyss, but then the drug’s haze would claim him again.

At dawn the spymaster came for him. Pazel leaped up with raised fists, light on his feet if nearly out of his mind, striking the stance Hercól had taught him at their first lesson in the stateroom. It seemed necessary to demonstrate his hatred of the spymaster, of his whole clan of murdering liars. But Ott just laughed and sidled toward him without making eye contact and felled him with three blows. Pazel never saw Ott’s hands at all, until they lifted him by the shirt.

Minutes later he was on the floor of a skiff, descending the dark wall of the
Chathrand
to the rhythmic clanging of the davit-chains. Ott and Drellarek were seated near him, and ahead of them sat the tarboy brothers Swift and Saroo. Neither of the Jockeys glanced at him as the boat rattled seaward. He could hear the murmur of other men, the rasp of Turach armor. A man’s voice chattered indignantly from the stern.
You should treat me as an equal, Warden. And even that is a great concession. Remove these straps! You are a mortal man. I am the son of the divine
.

They struck the waves with a smack. Pazel bolted upright, only to feel Drellarek’s stone-hard hand on his shoulder. Men were fighting the chains, fending them off the
Chathrand
with oars, while the twenty-foot skiff pitched like a rocking horse. Even in his delirium Pazel knew he must keep still.

At last they were clear. The sail shot up. Elkstem held the wheel, Rose the gaff, and together they calmed the boat and took her out of the cove.

Pazel ground his teeth. Chadfallow had a drug that could force his mind open to languages, force his Gift to start performing on command. That, Pazel thought, was the missing piece of the puzzle. The doctor had not brought Pazel along as some sort of favor. He did not mean to reunite him with his family at all, because Pazel’s family reunited was the
last
thing he wanted. No, he had brought Pazel along as a tool: one that could help him regain Suthinia, wherever she was; and one that could keep Chadfallow himself in the good graces of Rose and Sandor Ott. Whoever or whatever they met with on this voyage, Pazel would be there to offer his special services.
You haven’t stopped the conspiracy, you’ve become a part of it
.

Bramian groped toward them, a giant on hands and knees. The sound of waves shattering against her cliffs grew to awesome proportions, as if Bakru’s lions were indeed prowling the breakers, hurling their wrath against the land. Pazel knelt in the cold bilgewater, nauseous and dizzy. He put his fingers in his ears, but there was another kind of roaring inside.

The shorebirds found them, and began to wheel and shriek. There was no shore: just the stone cliffs, and a number of titanic rocks half submerged in the swell. Where were they to land? Elkstem kept them running straight for Bramian, while Ott stood watching at the bow.
They’re all mad
, Pazel thought, shutting his eyes,
unless I am
.

When he looked again time seemed to have leaped forward. They were in the island’s shadow, right among the rocks. The sail was furled and the mast struck down, and straight ahead of them was a round black hole in the cliff.

“Pathkendle!” roared Elkstem. “Take your blary oar!”

He stumbled to an oar-seat. The cave mouth, which all but vanished with each swell, was the width of a minor temple’s doorway. On either side the waves exploded against the cliffs, vaulting skyward in spray and foam. But at the cave itself the sea raced into the dark, only to flow out again with a vast obscene slurp. “Row!” Elkstem was screaming. Everyone but he and the Shaggat’s son had taken up oars.

Twenty feet: they rose and plunged, and the sea broke over the stern. The foam atop each wave nearly brushed the roof of the cavern. Pazel saw Drellarek make a hasty sign of the Tree.

“Save me, Father!” wailed Erthalon Ness.

“Ship oars!” Rose bellowed. “Heads down and hands inside!”

Pazel wrenched his oar into the skiff. He threw himself down, the daylight vanished, the gunnels scraped the top of the cave mouth, and then like a grape sucked through greedy lips they were through, blasting down a straight stone tunnel on the force of the wave. Pazel crouched in two feet of water, Alyash on one side and Drellarek on the other. It was impossible to guess how far the wave had borne them.

But just as it began to recede more shouts erupted—shouts from somewhere beyond the boat. A grinding noise echoed behind them, and instantly they slowed.

Pazel raised his head. The cave had widened into a circular chamber some sixty feet across. Around the perimeter stone ledges had been cut at various heights, and bright fengas lamps hung from wooden posts. Pazel looked back the way they had come and saw men laboring on an iron platform, bolted to the rock near the tunnel mouth. They were turning a heavy wheel, connected by chains and pulleys to a half-submerged granite slab. The slab itself was mounted on rails, and it was sliding over the tunnel mouth. Even as Pazel watched it ground to a halt. The tunnel was sealed. “Welcome to Bramian, Master,” said someone ashore.

The next thing Pazel remembered was climbing a stair. The way was steep and dark; far ahead someone carried a single bobbing lamp.
“Where is my brother?”
Erthalon Ness was whimpering.
“You killed him, didn’t you? Are you going to kill me?”

It was on the stair that Pazel noticed the sharpened hearing that sometimes accompanied his Gift. He could catch every whisper and echo: Alyash’s soft curse in Mzithrini, Rose’s wheeze as he lurched up each step.

How is it going to end? When will the mind-fit come?

At last they reached a broad wooden door. Ott stepped to the front and gave a sharp, four-note whistle. From the far side, startling everyone but Ott himself, came a woman’s laugh.

Bolts slid free. The door swung outward, forcing them to shuffle back. A brighter lamplight flooded the stair. And in the doorway stood Syrarys Isiq.

She put out her hand to the spymaster. Her beauty left the men abashed. She wore a white blouse embroidered with red coral beads and a necklace of cobalt-blue pearls. Her olive skin glowed in the lamplight, and her sumptuous lips curled with mirth, as if the men crowded below her on the steps were part of some great parlor-game whose rules she knew better than anyone. “We beat you by a full day, darling,” she said.

Ott took her hand and kissed it. “I have been here four,” he said, “keeping watch by sea, until the Great Ship reached her hiding place.”

Syrarys spread the fingers of the hand Ott had kissed. Along with rings of gold and silver, diamond and bloodstone, she wore a simple, tarnished ring of brass. “A little bird gave me that one,” she said.

Ott laughed, then took the ring from her finger and slipped it on his own. “Come, Syrarys,” he said. “You know what this day holds.”

He swept through the door and into a great stone chamber, and the woman who had raised Thasha from a child went with him. As he stepped into the chamber Pazel recalled the creaking bridges of his dreams. He felt as if he were upon one again.
They told us she died in Ormael. They told us she leaped from a tower into the sea. We know nothing, we’re toys in their hands
.

They bound his wrists with metal cuffs and sat him in a corner, too far from the hearth to be warmed in that chilly underground. Unlike the chamber below this was not a natural cave; the room, and several others adjoining, were carved from the living rock. They gave him water and ship’s biscuit, later a handful of berries that resembled coffee beans and tasted like sweet smoked grubs.

Syrarys came to look at him, with Ott beside her. Hatred shone in her eyes.

“Thasha’s little friend,” she said. “Do you know what her father did to me, bastard? Something much worse than rape or beatings. He bought me, like a dog. He groomed and bathed me and took me out in society on a leash, so that the Etherhorde nobles could admire my tricks.”

“That’s not what I heard,” said Pazel. “I heard Isiq never asked for a slave at all. That the Emperor sent you to him, and the old man didn’t think he could refuse.” He looked at Ott. “I wonder who gave His Supremacy
that
idea.”

Syrarys slapped him, hard. Pazel raised his shackled hands to his face. “I believe the part about doing tricks, though,” he said.

She would have struck him again if Ott hadn’t drawn her away. Pazel found himself wondering what Thasha would do if Syrarys returned to the
Chathrand
.

The drug-delirium came and went. Several hours in that windowless chamber simply vanished. When his memory returned it moved in leaps, like a stone skipping on a lake. Men around a table. Captain Rose brooding over a chart. Elkstem waving his hands, shouting,
I can’t blary say, Captain! You don’t get that close to the Vortex and live to tell!
Drellarek sharpening a hatchet. The Shaggat’s son chained to the wall, asleep.

At another moment he woke with Syrarys’ voice in his ears, and flinched, expecting pain. But she was nowhere near him. He raised his head and saw her with Ott on the far side of the chamber. They were kissing, and arguing between the kisses. Pazel’s strange hearing brought it all to his ears.

Want to go with you
.

No, dearest. The job in Simja only you can accomplish
.

You said Isiq would be the last one!

I said I hoped, Syrarys. But there was madness when the girl collapsed
.

You bastard. I’ll make you pay. I’ll sleep with your spies. The pretty ones, the youngest
.

Don’t try it. They fear me even more than they desire you
.

Care to bet?

Pazel’s head swam. He fought to stay awake, to hear more of their argument, but the darkness closed over him again.

Later they stood him up and walked him to the table. It was by now covered with books, scrolls, loose vellum sheets. Nearly everything was old; some of the books appeared positively ancient.
Look
, they said, and spread before him something that might have been a scrap of sailcloth with old gray stains.
Look there. What is that?

“Your finger?” he said.

Rose seized his ear and twisted savagely, as if annoyed to find it so tightly fastened to his head.

“There’s writing, Pathkendle. Lean closer.”

Tears of pain in his eyes, Pazel leaned over the canvas. The faces around the table watched him, breathless. Rose was pointing at a symbol in pale blue ink. Was it a character, a word? The only thing Pazel was sure of was that he’d never seen its like before.

His vision blurred; he shut his eyes, and when he opened them again he read the word as easily as though it were his own name:

“Port of Stath Bálfyr.”

The men exclaimed: some relieved, others in doubt. “I told you,” said Syrarys, her voice softly ardent. “I
told
you it came from a chart.”

“What’s that language, then, cub?” asked Drellarek, pointing at the canvas.

Pazel hesitated. “N-Nemmocian,” he said at last. It was the truth, but he only discovered it by speaking the word aloud.

“Where is the tongue spoken, lad?” asked Sandor Ott.

“How in the Pits should I know?”

“The boy’s Gift does not extend so far,” said Dr. Chadfallow. “He learns nothing of the culture of the languages he … acquires. Nothing but what one may deduce from the words themselves.”

“Then we’re no better off than before!” huffed Alyash. “Why, we could spend the rest of our lives looking for a place called Stath Bálfyr, where they may or may not speak something called Nemmocian. And begging your pardon, Lady Syrarys, but we
can’t
be certain this was torn from a chart.”

“I don’t understand,” said Pazel.

The men looked at him uncertainly. It was Sandor Ott, of all people, who broke the silence.

“The world beyond the Ruling Sea,” he said, “is not
entirely
forgotten. What you see before you is all that the libraries, archives and private collections of the known world have yielded to my investigators, after a decade of searching.”

He lifted an ancient book, cracked it open, blew. The page flaked and crumbled.

“Not much to show for our labors, is it?” said Ott. “But there were a few helpful discoveries: that first canvas gives us some idea of the shape of the coastline we may reach. Another document seems to be a list of surnames—royal families, in all probability—and the lands they govern. But the jewel in this musty hoard is a page from a diary or logbook. I will not show it here, for it is so delicate that each time we remove it from its case a portion crumbles to dust. We have copied it out, however—word by word, number by number.”