The Ruling Sea (94 page)

“‘The bear was nothing,’” said Pazel, dumbfounded.

Ramachni nodded. Suddenly he shook himself, head to tail, a movement of satisfaction and eagerness. “My strength comes back to me,” he said. “When you see me next, you will not be dreaming. Then you shall learn what it is to have a wizard fight at your side. Unless of course you decide to take that leap.”

“Now you
are
laughing.”

“A bit, lad. But don’t be angry, for I love you like a son. And that is a blessing for an ancient creature like myself, who never had children, and whose first family is so many centuries dead that even he begins to forget them. Remember: I will come when things are dark—terribly dark, darker than you thought to see.”

“Can’t you tell me what that
means
?” begged Pazel.

“If I knew, don’t you think I would say so? I am a prisoner to these riddles every bit as much as you, although I hear them from another source. But here in the wake of riddles is a fact: I am proud of you all. Fiercely proud, of your goodness and your strength. And now, Pazel, it is time for us both to
WAKE UP.”

His last words exploded like a cannon-shot, and with them he disappeared. Pazel had no sense of falling, but he was suddenly flat on the deck again. Thasha stirred beside him, filthy with ash and grime, and from all around them came the groans and exclamations of waking men.

40
In the Mouth of a Demon

16 (?) Ilbrin 941

The Honorable Captain Theimat Rose
Northbeck Abbey, Mereldín Isle, South Quezans

Dear Sir
,

Never were there stranger circumstances for a letter. I do not know whether to address you with pride or shame, so rather than either I shall begin with a warning: you must henceforth assume that the Lady Oggosk will read every letter you send me. She has not changed a wire hair from the days when she used to waddle into your house without wiping her shoes. She is a vulgar, conniving, calculating hag. And yet
—
grudgingly, and at great cost
—
she does perform the services of a nautical witch. I tolerate her because I cannot replace her
.

Have I failed, or triumphed? The duchess and I are prisoners of a clan of ixchel, along with our sailmaster, the Turach commander, and eleven other persons. I confess I do not know what to make of events; the disasters are so many and varied. Perhaps the worst
of them all is a man by the name of Uskins. But I am getting ahead of myself
.

The
Chathrand,
it appears, has been infested since Etherhorde. The crawlies have taken absolute control; they walk the decks openly, to the revulsion of the crew (except for Pathkendle and his cohorts, who knew of their presence and did nothing). Their tactics are exceedingly cunning. Besides the aforementioned prisoners they have taken Dr. Chadfallow, the Plapp and Burnscove gang leaders, Sandor Ott, the stowaway girl Marila (the ship-lice mistrust even their sympathizers, apparently), a handful of sailors and tarboys, two additional Turachs, and, for good measure, the thing that calls itself Belesar Bolutu. We are crammed into the anteroom of the forecastle house, that outer cabin by which one enters Oggosk’s hovel, the smithy, and the henhouse
.

Our captor appears to be a young crawly messiah; he goes about in a suit of feathers, and a brooding funk, now gloating, now fearful and suspicious. A deranged but nubile crawly girl attends this figure, and chides and bullies the others into acts of devotion. Simulated acts, in many cases. They do not all beam at him with the fawning love of his pretty acolytes, or his shaven-headed guards. His father is apparently somewhere aboard, and ruled before him, but is unwilling or unable to take up the mantle again
.

The doors are not locked, but we are prisoners all the same. When we woke from the drugged sleep we found ourselves alone in the forecastle house. There were rope burns on our ankles, for we had been hoisted like so many slaughtered steers. How much time had passed I do not know: many hours, to be sure, for even with wheelblocks and six hundred crawlies it is no small feat to move a man. Our weapons were gone. In a corner of the room a little fire pot was burning, filling the room with a rather agreeable, sagebrush scent. We could hear the Vortex, like the gods’ own millstone, ready to grind us down to flour. From the single window I could see the clouds forming spiral-patterns above it, and the Red Storm filling half the sky
.

A scrap of parchment was nailed to the topdeck
door. It was a “cordial notice,” explaining that anyone who left the cabin would die. It was signed by this selfsame messiah, whose name is absurdly unpronounceable. Below his name ran the words
COMMANDER OF THE EX-IMPERIAL SHIP
CHATHRAND
AND HER LIBERATED CREW
.

At this provocation I flung open the door, and seeing only my own startled men on the topdeck, going about the business of hacking the burned rigging down from the masts, I stormed out, shouting for Uskins. But no sound escaped my lips. I collapsed in agony, my lungs simply aflame. Nearly senseless, I dragged myself back into the forecastle house, and felt relief at my first breath of the scented air. Only the fresh breeze through the door brought back the pain; naturally I slammed it fast
.

The crawly lordling soon made his appearance, through a clever bolt-hole they have carved into the ceiling, directly above the little fire. “Ixchel keep their promises, Captain
—
Mr. Rose,” he said. “If we say that this or that action means death, it means death.”

The girl Marila startled us by shouting at him. “You double-crosser! I want to see Neeps, or Pazel or Thasha. And what have you done with your aunt? Let me speak to her!” When they told Marila that the “aunt” she wanted had been executed, the girl wept, as though they were speaking of a member of her own family
.

The lordling went on to describe the trap we were caught in, with such swaggering pride that I felt at once he was claiming another’s invention as his own. The mechanism is diabolical. If the little fire goes out, we die. If our lungs are deprived of the vapor for even a minute, we die. In our drugged sleep we were all made addicts, simply by breathing the stuff for a few hours. Most staggering of all, this poison was created (they allege) by none other than the Secret Fist, by crossing the deathsmoke vine with a kind of desert nightshade. But unlike deathsmoke, the poison does not weaken and wither the body, in fact it does no harm at all until one is deprived of it. At which point it kills faster than any rattlesnake
.

The smoke is produced by burning the dry berries
of this plant, together with some coal to keep the fire going. The crawlies bring only a few berries at a time, hidden in their pockets, and none of my crew has had the slightest luck in determining where on the ship they keep them. If we are rowdy, or the crew disobedient, they simply withhold the berries, and we are soon screaming. But their craftiness goes even further. They possess a little pill that, if dissolved on the tongue, effects an immediate and total cure. This they demonstrated on the tarboy Swift: just hours after we awoke, a crawly presented him with the pill and told him he might go. He now walks the ship a free lad, although his brother, Saroo, remains with us. In this way the crawlies buy our submission, as much by hope as by punishment. And of course by their choice of hostages, they have put the whole ship into a state of fear. Everyone counts at least someone among us as too important to lose
.

Little Lord Unpronounceable has issued no orders, yet. Kruno Burnscove has concluded that they wish us no mortal harm: he rivals Uskins in idiocy, and that is an achievement. One only need consider the shifty cleverness of the trap to realize that they planned this assault years ago. Besides, I know crawlies. How could I not, being your son?
^*
Like Ott, they have patience. And like Ott, or a wolverine for that matter, once they sink their teeth into something they simply do not let go
.

The crawly messiah does not pretend to understand the mechanics of the ship. And yet he forbids me to issue orders to the crew. The hour-by-hour decisions, therefore, have fallen to Uskins, and in this emergency the man has proven himself an irredeemable fool
.

Fate [
illegible
] our family [
illegible]
^*

By rights we should have perished shortly after
waking
—
not by crawly poison, but in the Vortex. We were already in its grip before they drugged us, in fact. Just before the nightmare with the rats, I had to leave the topdeck for a time, in order to crush Pathkendle’s mutiny. It was while I was below that Elkstem issued the warning: we had entered the whirlpool’s outer spiral. I left Uskins in command (he shall never again command so much as a garbage scow), having reviewed with him exactly how one escapes such a predicament. The buffoon assured me he understood, and at the time he appeared to. But his mental frailty has worsened. I trusted him to keep watch on Arunis, and something about the task has left him distracted and easily confused, and afraid of his own shadow
.

I hardly need tell you, sir, that an aggressive tack away from the eye of a whirlpool must fail, unless the wind is fierce and perfectly abeam (it was neither). But that is exactly what Uskins called for. The result was disaster: at each change of tack, the line of the ship fell hard athwart the centrifuge of the Vortex. This rolled us nearly onto our beam-ends, and built up such a force that we slingshotted
deeper
into the spiral as we completed the turn
.

The first failure was difficult to prove: we were still too far from the heart of the Vortex to be sure just how quickly we were sliding into it. But Uskins repeated the order twice, trying to make the tack sharper, and failing more spectacularly each time. All the while Elkstem and Alyash begged him to desist, and repeated the sane alternative: to run
with
the spiral, using its strength and any cooperative wind to help the ship cut slowly, steadily outward. Had we done that within the first few hours of Elkstem’s warning, all would have been well. Uskins, however, brought us at least five miles closer to the eye
.

After the third failed tack Elkstem was contemplating a mutiny of his own. But at that point the giant rats began their siege. Elkstem remained at the wheel throughout the fighting, but he could not find enough men with their wits about them to brace the mains. Working two topsails alone, he and some
thirty stout lads kept us from sliding any deeper into the Vortex, but they could not break free. And then the crawly sleeping-poison felled us, and we became a cork adrift
.

By the time I awoke, imprisoned, matters had gone from bad to critical. It was midmorning. We were caught now in the lungs as well as the arms of the Vortex: the wind was cycloning toward the eye, six miles off. There were storm clouds; from the chamber’s single window I saw a gray sheet of rain bend away from us as it descended, and twist into a miles-long whipcord that vanished into the maw. The portside of every object was taking on a scarlet glow. The Red Storm, whatever it was, looked set to overtake us as surely as the Vortex itself. Do you remember that mad dog on Mereldín that ran in circles continually, all over the island, until one circle took him over a cliff? That was how we moved: around and around the Vortex, even as the Vortex itself drifted toward the storm. Which would claim us first? There was simply no way to know
.