The Ruling Sea (61 page)

“You were magicked, somehow,” said Marila, dabbing at his ear. “I saw the change halfway through the practice session. Your eyes went all funny. I thought you’d had too many whacks on the head.”

“Thasha—” Neeps began.

Thasha squirmed abruptly; the divan shuddered and groaned. “This blary thing’s too small,” she said. “Unless anyone wants dinner I suggest we all go to sleep.”

No one moved. “I don’t want to sleep,” said Felthrup.

“You’ve been up for days,” said Thasha.

“Neeps,” said Marila. “You kept saying
Raffa, Raffa
. What was all that about? Raffa who?”

Neeps took the napkin from her hand and turned to face the window. After a long silence he said, “Undrabust.”

“Ah,” said Thasha.

Neeps’ voice was hollow. “I told Pazel a bit, once. How I jumped my ship when it landed at Sollochstol, and ran home to my village. And how the Arqualis came after me, and caught me the same afternoon. But that’s not … the worst part.”

He looked at them, angry and beseeching. “My older brother, Raffa, asked ’em how much it would cost for them to let me go. While they were still lounging around the village, drinking. Three pounds of pearls, they said. And Raffa haggled. Right there in front of me, wheedling like, until finally they caved in. ‘Two pounds, since he’s so small, and you’re such a nuisance.’ Raffa told ’em he’d see what he could find. The Arqualis said they’d only wait an hour. But in fact they waited all afternoon. They wanted those pearls more than they wanted me.

“Trouble was, so did Raffa. He was the best pearl-diver in the village. He had boxes of ’em hidden in the smokehouse. He was saving up for a ticket to Opalt. A cousin had come back from there years before and told Raffa our palm roof was embarrassing. He said Sollochis lived like animals. That Ballytween City was the place for a man to get ahead.”

Neeps fell silent. Thasha wanted to say something, but was afraid to; all at once she felt like a fraud. She’d grown up in a mansion on Maj Hill, in the heart of the world’s greatest city. She remembered Syrarys combing her hair, telling her that they lived in the only place in Alifros that nobody could look down on.
Why don’t they hate me?
she thought.
Why doesn’t Pazel hate me?

“Raffa never came back that day,” said Neeps. “I guess the price was too high.”

Marila silently touched his arm. They stayed there, motionless, listening to the thumping and bellowing of men on other decks. Fiffengurt had said the work might go on all night, but to Thasha the noise was soothing; the warm stateroom felt like the center of a hive. As she closed her eyes she heard a wet sound that was either kissing or one of her dogs flopping down with a contented slobber. Then she realized Marila had her arms around Neeps.
That blary vixen
, she thought, and fell asleep.

Felthrup slunk away from the divan when Neeps and Marila began to kiss. He was not quite clear why humans did such things—the written accounts varied wildly—but he knew they did not much care to be watched in the act. He crept over to Suzyt, who lay beside the washroom door.

“I won’t go to sleep,” he told her.

The mastiff’s tongue enveloped him like a warm, wet towel. Felthrup curled tight against her chest, looking out at the darkened stateroom. He had fought to remember the dreams until his brain ached, and had come up with almost nothing: a pair of glasses, a taste of candy and the words
peppermint oil
. He was a nervous idiot. What could be so terrible about dreams he did not even remember? There were a million rats in Alifros who would kill for the kind of safety he enjoyed.

“Master Stargraven,” said a gently mocking voice.

Felthrup gave a start. The dog slept on beside him, but how she had shrunk! No, she was the same—but he had done it, he had fallen asleep at last, and now everyone would pay for his weakness.

He stood up and adjusted his spectacles.

The three youths slept like the dead. He walked to the divan and looked down at them. So peaceful: Neeps’ head lay pillowed on Marila’s lap. He saw the damage his own teeth had done to the boy’s ear, and winced. But he had saved Thasha’s life.

Surely it was Arunis who had called his name? There was no sign of anyone else in the room, but that would not keep him safe for long. In every dream he felt a compulsion to walk, to leave the shelter of the stateroom and wander, until the sorcerer found him and the torture began.

Tonight was no exception: his feet were already guiding him toward the stateroom door. Twice he swerved and teetered clown-like back into the center of the room. But he could not hold still.
I will betray them again. Every time it grows worse. I will be the reason they perish, the reason Arunis comes to rule the world
.

Suddenly he knew what to do. He could end the dreams as quickly as they began. But how? A sword? A mouthful of broken glass? No, no—that was the sort of thing Arunis did to him anyway. He would be swifter. He looked at the gallery windows, gave a pitiful squeal, and ran straight for them.

He never arrived. Between one footfall and the next the ship spun about like a carousel, and instead of crashing through the window he found himself throwing open the stateroom door.

Lamplight: the Turach soldiers were still at their post. Behind them, and as invisible to humans as Felthrup himself was during their dream-walks, stood Arunis. The mage’s eyes fixed him like spear-points. He crooked a finger.

Get out here, you feeble, vacillating, sewer-pipe sniveler
.

The call was terribly powerful, but Felthrup, with a last mind-cracking effort, slammed the stateroom door and leaned against it.
Help
, he thought,
help. This time I really will go mad
.

Then, very faintly, he heard the voice again. The first voice, the one by which he had woken into the dream. It was not the sorcerer’s. It was coming from Admiral Isiq’s sleeping cabin.

Felthrup broke away from the door and ran toward the bedchamber, crashing against a shifted chair. Anything was better than what awaited him in the passage. He kicked the bearskin rug away from the door, reached for the knob—and froze. Surely this was another trick? What if Arunis had somehow penetrated the magic wall this far? What if the very act of opening the door was all he needed to breach their last defense? Felthrup cringed. He suddenly felt very ratlike indeed.

“Turn the knob,” said the voice, almost too softly to be heard.

Felthrup turned the knob, half expecting some horror to burst from the chamber, savage his sleeping friends, end their months of struggle in a heartbeat. Nothing of the kind occurred: the room held only dust, and the furniture Isiq had left behind. A large bed, two chests of drawers, Syrarys’ jewelry table, a dressing mirror, a mannequin draped in an elaborate gown: what the vicious woman had planned to wear on Simja, perhaps.

“Over here, lad, hurry now.”

The voice was louder, and suddenly Felthrup knew it, and gave a squeal of joy. He dashed into the room, afraid now only of waking, and cried, “Where are you, where are you?”

“The mirror, Felthrup. Dust it off.”

Felthrup looked at the mirror. It was tilted toward the ceiling, and the dust lay like a gray pelt upon the glass. He put his silk sleeve against the mirror and swept it clean.

Within the mirror there was no reflection. Instead he found himself looking into a dark and cluttered chamber of stone. He had an impression of clocks and telescopes, astrolabes and smoked-glass spheres, an icy window, lamps that threw clots of whirling color on the floor.

But all this he saw with but a corner of his mind, for directly before him stood a tall man in a sea-green cloak. The man was perfectly bald, but he had a thick white beard and enormous bottle-brush eyebrows, and beneath them eyes that were bottomless and dark.

“It’s you, isn’t it?” said Felthrup, feeling a lump rise in his throat. “It’s how you really are.”

“Right in the first count, wrong in the second,” the man replied. “Indeed I’m surprised one as afflicted with imagination as you still clings to the notion of
real
. Now step to one side—that’s it.”

The old man turned and walked away, deeper into the stone chamber. When twenty feet separated him from Felthrup he turned again, and then ran, with the ease of a much younger man, straight at the surface of the mirror. At the last instant he leaped, headfirst—

—and the black mink, Ramachni Fremken, sailed into the chamber as through an open door. This was the mage as Felthrup knew him: the one who had rescued him from drowning, slain fleshancs, taught Pazel the Master-Word that changed the Shaggat to stone. The one whose very name brought a look of fear into Arunis’ eyes, no matter how the sorcerer tried to conceal it. He landed in a cloud of dust on Isiq’s bed. Felthrup knelt beside him, sneezed, and burst into tears.

“Stop that at once,” said Ramachni. “What on earth is the matter, Felthrup? Surely we meet in better circumstances than before?”

“Oh no, Master, not at all.”

Ramachni sprang from the bed and vanished into the stateroom. Felthrup rushed after him, still crying, though he could not have said exactly why. He found the mage on the arm of the divan, looking down at the three sleeping youths.

“How untroubled they look,” said Ramachni, echoing Felthrup’s earlier thought. “And how fortunate that your dream-life is so splendid. But look what you have done to yourself tonight, my dear rat! Some turn themselves into warriors, angels, kings. You’ve become a librarian.”

“Not just tonight, m’lord. This is the form I take in every dream.”

“Every single dream?” said Ramachni, turning to him with surprise. “That
is
something to ponder, when I have a moment. But can’t you hold still, Felthrup? Why do you keep starting for the door?”

Felthrup checked himself, and dropped his head in shame. “Arunis is calling me. He never stops. He has a terrible power over me, and he is using me against our friends.”

“We shall see about that,” said Ramachni with a hint of temper.

“My lord!” said Felthrup, rubbing his chin with both hands in a most ratlike gesture. “Did you not say that Arunis was the stronger in this world, that when you travel here you leave a great part of your strength behind?”

“I did,” said Ramachni, “although when next I come to Alifros it shall be with a strength you have never seen. But tonight, Felthrup, the only traveler is you. When your dream began, you departed the Alifros you know and came here, to a dream-Alifros, only a small part of which was created by your mind. Arunis and I were here already, for dreams exist in a territory that the mage never entirely ceases to inhabit.”

“He is standing just outside your magic wall.”

Ramachni shook his head. “That wall is not of my making.”

“Not of your making!” cried Felthrup. “Then there is some other mage aboard, who wishes us well?”

“Perhaps,” said Ramachni, glancing curiously around the stateroom. “But this I can tell you for certain: the spell that made the magic wall was cast long before the
Chathrand
left Etherhorde—years before, in fact. How cunningly hidden it must have been, to keep me from detecting it! I wonder if there are more such surprises, and if they will all prove so helpful.”

Suddenly he turned and sniffed the air. Then he bounded across the room and onto the table, where he peered suspiciously at the pigsfoot casserole.

“Do not eat this,” he said. “Someone besides Mr. Teggatz had a hand in its preparation. There is a whiff of magic about it—dark magic, you understand. It is only a distant aftertaste, nothing so obvious as a curse or a potion. But we must take no chances.”

Felthrup clenched his hands in fists, and stared at them as if he had never seen anything more impressive. Then he picked up the casserole, crossed the room to the window and flung the dish overboard.

No sooner had he closed the window, however, than doubt returned to his face. “In my first dream Arunis flung Sniraga into the sea,” he said, “but the cat is still aboard. My dreams change nothing, do they? When I wake that dish will again be on the table. And my waking self remembers nothing of what passes in these dreams. I shall not be able to warn them, Ramachni.”

“Do not be so certain, lad. Your dreams certainly change
you
. I hear the exhaustion in your voice: you’ve been fighting for your very soul. In any case, you must try. Whatever is in that food was put there with malice of the blackest sort.”

Felthrup jumped, remembering. “Neeps took a bite!” he said. “And a short time later he went mad and tried to kill Lady Thasha. He almost succeeded.”

Ramachni looked up from the table. Now the anger in his eyes was terrible to behold. “It is time, Felthrup. You called out for help, and I am here to give it. Let us go and see the sorcerer.”

Felthrup swallowed, and pushed his spectacles up his nose. Ramachni jumped to the floor, crossed once more to the divan, and crawled up beside Thasha’s shoulder. His pink tongue dabbed once at her forehead; then he turned and studied the chamber again. His eyes settled on the bearskin rug. A look of satisfaction crept over his face.

“How dare you keep me waiting.”

The sorcerer waited just beyond the red stripe, his mouth twisted with anger. The four Turachs leaned against the walls. Arunis watched the thin, bespectacled man leave the stateroom without closing the door.

“So you can fight my summons now? Well, after tonight you’ll wish you’d never tried, you mangled, three-legged misery of a rat. Get out here!”

The thin man took his time, but at last he reached the magic wall. He did not immediately step through it, however. Instead he paused with his face just inches from the sorcerer’s own.

“After tonight,” he said quietly, “you will wish you’d never invaded his dreams.”

“Whose dreams?”

“Felthrup’s, you fool.”

With that the man in spectacles reached through the wall and seized Arunis by his scarf. At his touch the mage gasped aloud and tried to pull away. But the thin man held him fast, and began to chant: