The Ruling Sea (60 page)

But he would not dance (the eguar knew this, knew it before Pazel did, knew every twitch and motive of his soul). The beast was looking for something very specific, and Pazel somehow knew he must not give it up. His rage at the intrusion was searing; he would have tried to kill any human who invaded him in this way, he was thinking like a lunatic, like an assassin, like Ott.

The eguar might have been amused. With another battering-ram of a word it told Pazel that it had already looked into Sandor Ott’s mind, and that Pazel’s rage bore little resemblance to the spymaster’s. Then he offered to show the killer’s mind to Pazel. And before Pazel could refuse the eguar gave him a foretaste.

Like floodwater released from a dam, Sandor Ott’s life history washed over him. Pazel could barely stand what he saw. Dark infant years in a slum; women’s hands feeding, then gouging him, twisting his limbs; other children screaming, horrible men always enraged. Slammed doors, broken windows, a barnyard stench in the crowded bedrooms, the dead wrapped in threadbare sheets. Alleys full of muttering men, victims of the talking fever; they seized at his ankles and he barely escaped.
Epidemic
, someone said. A cart heaped with paupers fleeing the city by night.

Then exile, a mud-wattle village on the side of a gritty, treeless hill. Threats from the cattlemen and gentry, the owners of that useless knob. Torched roofs, tortured parents, an elder staked and writhing on the ground. More years of road-wandering, sores on his shoeless feet, a beggar’s bowl tied to a string at his waist. Cold riverbanks, hard street corners, kicks. The taste of spoiled meat, fermented cabbage, potato skins scraped from the cobbles with a knife.

Pazel was tearing at his own face with his fingernails. “Make it stop! Make it stop!” he begged. The memories had spanned less than Ott’s first decade of life.

The eguar took its claw from Ott’s chest, and the flood ceased instantly. The spymaster began to moan and stir. The creature prepared once more to delve into Pazel’s mind. And all at once Pazel knew what it wanted, and knew the weapon he could use against the thing before him. The Master-Words.

He had two of them left, Ramachni’s gifts, a word to tame fire and a word that would “blind to give new sight.” He had no idea what the latter would do, but he knew that the Fire-Word might save him, might even destroy this beast and its blazing power.

No sooner had he formed the thought than the eguar knew it too. With the speed of a rattlesnake it coiled its body and leaped. A great wind threw Pazel flat. Then the eguar and its cloud of dark vapors were gone, and the weakness in his limbs disappeared.

He got to his hands and knees. The wall was slick with silvery ooze. Ott and Chadfallow lay moaning a few yards away. Pazel crawled toward the doctor and shook him. Chadfallow’s eyes were open but did not seem to see.

“Wake up,” said Pazel, his voice raw and burned.

From the jungle on the wall’s north side came a loud crack. Pazel turned, punch-drunk. Some hundred yards away, great trees were shuddering and bending. Then he saw the eguar slide its bulk onto a huge limb. Once more the white eyes gleamed—but this time Pazel looked away before it was too late.

“Child of Ormael,” said the eguar.

“Damn you to the Pits!” cried Pazel, weeping with rage. “You could speak like a human all this time?”

“The Pits have no place for me,” said the eguar. “Listen,
Smythídor:
I know where you are bound, and what awaits you there, and what you will need to face it.”

Pazel covered his ears. He would not speak with the creature, not when it had just eaten—

“Your enemy,” said the eguar, as if Pazel had spoken aloud. “A man hoping for the chance to kill you. But I do not think you should die yet, not while the Stone moves over the waters. Not while a war is struggling to be hatched—kicking, writhing in blood and fire from its shell. Not before you see the wondrous South, the world my brethren made. Rejoice, human, rejoice in your skinlessness, your immolation, the nakedness of nerves. Rejoice above all in your fellowship, ere you turn and find it a memory, a dry shell without warmth. But you must never again refuse knowledge,
Smythídor
. I would have shown you the doctor’s mind next.”

“I don’t want to see—and what I saw of Ott’s mind was
hideous
. Stay away, stay away, or I swear I’ll use that word.” He shook Chadfallow again. “Wake up, damn you, I need your help.”

Then the eguar hissed a final word in its own language, making Pazel wince—although it was, compared with earlier utterances, remarkably brief:

Acceptance is agony denial is death
.

With that the creature departed, thrashing and tearing through the trees. Pazel got shakily to his feet and put his hands over his ears. He could see Alyash running toward them along the wall. When he turned around Chadfallow was sitting up, filthy with slime and blood. His nose was bent sharply to the right.

“Get up,” said Pazel, smoldering. “What happens next is your problem.”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” said Chadfallow.

Pazel looked the doctor in the eye, and waited. One breath, two. And then he dropped to a crouch and squeezed his eyes shut as the mind-fit erupted in his skull.

26
The Taste of Treason

23 Freala 941

That evening on the
Chathrand
, Pazel’s friends found it hard to keep up their spirits. The landing party had been two days ashore. Hercól remained locked in the brig; Thasha, Neeps and Marila were hardly less prisoners themselves, albeit in grander quarters. Mr. Uskins had painted a red line on the deck along the base of Ramachni’s magic wall, and placed four soldiers there with orders to let no one in or out without his permission. Each time Thasha appeared in the doorway, they glared. They were the proudest soldiers in Alifros, and they’d bungled orders to arrest a sixteen-year-old girl.

Mr. Fiffengurt came to the stateroom at eight bells, carrying a jug of drinking water and a plate of Mr. Teggatz’s pigsfoot-and-barley casserole. He also bore the dismal news that the skiff had not returned from Bramian, and presumably would not do so before morning.

The quartermaster did not linger, for the ship was in an uproar of last-minute preparations for the voyage out. “Don’t worry about Pathkendle,” he said as he turned to go. “The lad’s no use to them dead. They may not like him, but they’ll keep him safe.”

“It’s not what
they’ll
do that worries me,” said Neeps. “Pazel can get in trouble all by himself.”

Neeps wanted to pounce on the casserole, but Thasha insisted on a fighting-class first, despite Hercól’s absence.

“Forget your stomach for once,” she said, cutting off his objections before they began, “and come at me hard, because if I don’t think you’re trying to kill me I’m blary well going to show you how it’s done.”

Neeps hesitated, fuming. He wolfed one bite of the casserole, slammed down his fork and retreated to the washroom to change into his fighting-rags. Thasha whistled her dogs into her own cabin and changed as well, strapping the wooden shield to her arm and tying a leather neck-guard in place.

They unscrewed the furniture and slid it against the walls, and rolled up the bearskin rug. While Marila sat reading quietly in a corner, and Felthrup balanced on the back of her chair, muttering and swaying with exhaustion, Thasha and Neeps battled all around the stateroom with the balsa swords.

For once Neeps rose to her challenge. He had long passed the stage of angry charges, having tired of finding himself flat on the ground or symbolically beheaded. Thasha would not have told him (for Neeps’ pride needed no encouragement) but she was astonished at his progress. He was the only young person she had ever known more hotheaded than herself, and yet here he was, biding his time, matching his movements to hers—fighting with his mind. And his form when attacking was better too: his jerky tarboy strength was mellowing into something more fluid, more likely to keep him alive.

It was almost a shame to have to keep winning. Still, Thasha could not approach combat with any outlook but victory: the sixth apothegm reminded students that practice is never a game, but the prelude to a moment when a life may end.

“Surprise me,” she taunted him, darting from one side of a stanchion to another, bruising his left side and then his right, turning him at bay or forcing a retreat. “Do something I haven’t seen you do fifty times. Tired, are you? That’s when you die, you Sollochi runt.
Come at me!”

Neeps did not even blink. He was shutting out her insults, refusing to be drawn. To Thasha this seemed almost a miracle.

At last she raised her hand and stopped him. Neeps dropped his wooden sword and bent over, gasping, his face like a bruised tomato. He fumbled at the buckle on his shield. “You did well,” Thasha conceded, stepping toward him. “What made the difference, this time?”

“I just—”

He slashed at her with the edge of his shield, catching her squarely in the gut.

“—pretended—”

He had her down, pulled her against him, caught her neck in the crook of his arm.

“—that you were Raffa, Raffa—”

He spat the name, and tightened his grip uncomfortably. Thasha was furious—
surprise me
did not mean
attack when the drill is over
—and resolved to teach him a lesson. But when she thrust her elbow hard into his side, none too gently, his response was not at all what she expected. Instead of doubling over as she had done upon his shield, Neeps hurled them both backward onto the floor with amazing violence, and at the same time tightened his grip on her neck even further.
Much
further: Thasha remembered the bite of her necklace: the youth’s arm was crushing her windpipe with the same deadly force. She clawed at him. She felt him buck and twist, slamming her face against the wooden floor, putting the weight of his chest against her temple. Her dogs were howling behind the cabin door; Marila was screaming,
“Stop it! Stop it!”
and then came an explosion of glass and water. But Neeps did not stop, and Thasha felt her vision dim. She had a vague impression of his sweaty, wild-eyed face above her own, still mouthing the name.

And then, thank all the gods, he let her go—and began to scream himself. Thasha fell on her side and saw Neeps throwing himself from side to side. Felthrup’s teeth were locked on his ear.

“Let go! Let go! Damn you, Felthrup, you’re out of your mind!”

“He’s
not!” shouted Marila from the far side of the room.

Thasha drew a strangled breath, and Neeps whirled. A look of indescribable horror filled his eyes.
“Aya Rin,”
he whispered. “Thasha, Thasha. What’ve I done?”

Ten minutes later the four of them—Thasha, Marila, Neeps and Felthrup—were all collapsed together on the divan. Thasha was massaging her neck, while Felthrup teased bits of glass (shards of the water jug Marila had hurled at Neeps) from his fur and the fabric of her shirt. Marila, leaning back against Thasha’s knees, was holding one of the Great Peace dinner napkins against Neeps’ bloody ear. Neeps himself sat curled in a ball, staring at nothing. When the lamp sputtered out they were glad of it; none of them could quite stand to look the others in the face.

“I almost let the dogs out,” said Marila.

“Oh gods,” said Thasha with a violent shudder. “He would have died. I’d lost my voice, Marila, I couldn’t have called them off. They’d have torn him to pieces.”

“That occurred to me,” said Marila, “when I heard the door starting to splinter.”

“One of you was meant to die, I think,” said Felthrup.

“Neeps,” said Thasha, touching him with her foot. “It wasn’t you.”

“Yes it was,” said Neeps quietly. “That’s just it. The … madness. It came from inside me.”

“That still doesn’t make it your fault,” said Marila.

“Then I’d like to know whose fault it is,” said Neeps.

“Now you are asking the right question,” said Felthrup.