The man rubbed his jowls, his brows rising. ‘We’ll have a look for him,’ and he lumbered off.
‘Shimmer,’ K’azz said, ‘what happened?’
‘I found the tiller unmanned.’
Rutana snorted at that, as if scornful.
‘You have something to say?’ Shimmer asked.
The woman nodded, her gaze defiant. ‘We may have had a pilot, Isturé, but another has been in control of the vessel for some time.’
‘Another? Who?’
Rutana smiled as she squeezed the bands indenting her upper arms. ‘Ardata, of course.’
The captain reappeared. ‘He’s not on the ship. Must’ve fallen overboard. We’ll have to go back to look for him.’
‘We are not going back, Captain,’ Rutana announced without breaking gaze with Shimmer.
‘Yes, we are,’ K’azz said. He motioned to Shimmer. ‘Turn us round.’
She clasped both hands on the long arm of battered wood and pushed. The broad tiller swung but somehow the ship did not respond. It continued its slow sluggish advance.
Rutana’s contemptuous smile climbed even higher. ‘There is no turning back now, Isturé.’ And she walked off.
Shimmer’s gaze found K’azz, who was eyeing the tiller arm, his mouth sour and tight. ‘What now?’ she asked.
He drew breath to answer but a shout went up from the crow’s nest. ‘A village ahead! People!’ The crew surged to the larboard rail. Even the crewman from the crow’s nest came swinging hand over hand down the ropes. The Avowed gathered at the stern with K’azz. Banners of mist painted the river’s surface and coiled along the jungle shore. Through them, Shimmer glimpsed a clearing dotted by leaf-topped huts standing on tall stilts. Figures lined the shore. Most were in loincloths and bright feathers decorated their hair and hung at arms and legs. The crewmen and women waved, shouting. ‘Hello! Help! Help us! We are ensorcelled!’
‘Back to work, damn you all!’ the captain bellowed in answer.
‘We’re cursed!’ one shouted and jumped overboard.
‘Not a good idea …’ Rutana warned.
The rest of the crew followed in a surge, as if terrified they would be held back. They jumped, arms waving, and splashed into the murky water to emerge blowing and gasping. The captain managed to catch one woman by the arm only to be smacked down for his trouble. He lay holding his head and groaning. The entire crew swam for the shore. Shimmer shot a questioning look to K’azz who motioned a negative. ‘Let them go,’ he murmured. ‘Perhaps they will find their way to the coast.’
‘Or perhaps they will all be eaten,’ Rutana offered, laughing her harsh cackle.
K’azz faced her. ‘Then see that they are not …’
Her hands, closed about her neck, seemed to squeeze off her laugh
in
a hiss. She jerked her head to Nagal at the bow. The big man climbed up among the loose rotten rigging and yelled to the shore in a language Shimmer had never heard before. A banner of mist wafted across the river and the bank and when it had passed the figures were gone, disappearing as if they had never been.
‘Thank you,’ K’azz said.
But Rutana only sneered and turned away.
Through the scarves of fog Shimmer caught glimpses of the crew dragging themselves up the muddy shore and running into the jungle. Then a curve in the river’s course carried them from sight. She turned to K’azz. Their commander had a hand on the tiller arm, which jerked this way and that, yet to no apparent shift in the vessel’s course. ‘What is it?’ she asked.
He shook his head as if awakening from a reverie and his gaze jerked from hers – as if terrified, she thought.
Terrified of what? Our situation? Or of what he may reveal?
‘A lesson here, Shimmer,’ he murmured, his mouth tight. ‘One can squirm and fight against it, but everyone is drawn inexorably along to the fate awaiting them.’
‘I don’t believe in that self-serving predestiny justification that religions flog.’
He nodded his understanding and she was struck by how skull-like his features appeared. ‘Well, let us call it a natural proclivity then,’ and he offered a smile that struck her as heart-achingly sad. ‘No one’s alone from now on,’ he called, raising his voice. ‘Watches at all times. A mage on each watch.’
Shimmer saluted. ‘Yes, Commander.’
Yet the spell that clung over the river and surrounding impenetrable walls of forest somehow made the distinction of being on or off watch irrelevant. Shimmer, and, as it seemed, the rest of them, found it increasingly difficult to sleep. She would lie only to stare at the damp mouldering wood unable to slip into any dreams. And so she would arise and go above and here she would find the majority of the party, eyes on the river or passing shores, silent and watchful, like a standing troop of mist-shrouded statues.
She saw, or thought she saw, bizarre creatures among the branches of the trees: enormous vultures and bats the size of people, hanging upside down. On the shore one of the long-snouted alligator-like creatures that swam along pacing the vessel heaved itself up on the mud slope and she was only mildly surprised to see it stand erect on two thick trunk-like legs, a wide pale belly
hanging
over a bare crotch. It followed them with its unblinking baleful eyes.
At one point she found herself next to Gwynn, the one-time mage of First Company, Skinner’s command, and she asked him, ‘Was this how it was when you were last here?’
The man shook himself, rubbing his eyes and frowning. ‘We weren’t here, Shimmer. We stayed on the south coast. It was pleasant there – much cooler.’
‘You didn’t travel through the countryside?’
The man laughed and waved to the shore. ‘Gods, no.’
‘Not to Jakal Viharn?’
‘No. Never been.’
The news startled Shimmer so much that she had a hard time comprehending it. She felt that it ought to alarm her, but for some reason all she could summon was a vague unease. ‘You haven’t … But I thought … I’m sorry. I thought you had.’
‘Skinner has.’ Then Gwynn ran a hand over his sweat-matted pale hair and frowned as if chasing after a thought. ‘At least he was gone for much of the time … We simply assumed he was with her.’
‘You never asked him about it – about the city?’
‘No.’
Shimmer found that difficult to believe. ‘Really? No one asked about Jakal Viharn? Not even once?’
Gwynn cocked his head, the edge of his mouth quirking up. ‘One does not ask personal questions of Skinner.’
Ah. There is that
. She knew that some people were just naturally less forthcoming or prone to talk about themselves than others. And Skinner even less so than most. He’d always been silent regarding anything other than the business at hand. He’d become utterly closed to her before the end.
Now Shimmer frowned, thinking, for it seemed so very difficult in this choking thick air. ‘Well, then, why don’t we travel by Warren?’
Gwynn rubbed a finger along the knife-edge bridge of his great hooked nose. ‘Jakal cannot be found via the Warrens. Ardata has seen to that. She
allows
you to enter. This time she sent a boat.’
‘Why?’
‘I do not know. A demonstration, perhaps?’
‘Perhaps.’ Shimmer tried to think through to the hidden motive behind the choice but couldn’t come up with any definitive possibility, and so instead she let it lie to be answered later and returned to watching the thick reddish-brown flow coiling and ribboning beneath them.
What she did come to understand was the spell, or sensation, she and her brother and sister Avowed were experiencing. She wasn’t certain where the answer came from; perhaps from a waking dream she had when the deck appeared populated by all the fallen Avowed brethren interspersed with the living, all journeying to their unknown destination on the river. And it struck her that this
timelessness
was a sensation she’d known before. Over these last few years it had been growing, ebbing and waning, yet always abiding just beneath the surface of her awareness. It was – perhaps – an artefact of the Vow they had all sworn together.
And now this land, Jacuruku, seemed to somehow intensify it … or perhaps the word she was looking for was exacerbate. Or aggravate? In any case, it was not entirely imposed from without and so she tried to let slip away her almost constant state of heightened anxiety.
She was, unfortunately, premature in that choice.
It began as a noise, a loud thrumming or hissing. It seemed to be coming from all around. Rutana, Shimmer noted, ran to the bow to stand tall, peering to the right and left.
‘What is it?’ K’azz called to the woman.
She shook her head. ‘I cannot be sure …’
‘Look there,’ Amatt called, pointing ahead upriver.
A cloud was approaching, skimming the dark bronze surface of the river, stretching from one shore to the other. Within the haze of the cloud a blinding iridescent storm of colours flashed and glimmered. Shimmer winced, shading her gaze. ‘What is it?’ she called to Rutana, just as K’azz had.
The woman just shook her head as she stepped down from the railing as if retreating. ‘I do not know.’
The cloud engulfed them, flowing around the vessel. Her vision of either shore was lost in a hurricane of lustrous rainbow-like flashing. Blinking, Shimmer was astonished to find herself surrounded by hundreds of darting and rushing hummingbirds. The blinding colours came from their feathers, which held a metallic iridescence of every hue.
They hove in close to her face as if inspecting her. Their wings churned as near invisible blurs. She didn’t like the glow of their tiny red eyes and she gently waved them aside. ‘What is this?’ she called to Rutana. She had to shout to be heard above the combined roaring of the thousands of whirring wings.
The woman might have answered but Shimmer did not hear as one of the hummingbirds suddenly darted forward and thrust its long
needle-like
beak into her neck. She flinched and reflexively grabbed hold of the tiny bundle of feathers and threw it to the deck. ‘The damned thing stabbed me!’ she yelled, more surprised than hurt.
Grunts of shock and annoyance sounded all around as the Avowed waved their arms through the eddying clouds of birds. Then, all at once, as if at a given order, the birds crowded close all about Shimmer, jamming so tight they blotted out the day. Stiletto beaks thrust for her eyes, her neck, and clawed feet scratched for purchase on her ears. She covered her face to spin left and right but the mass of birds followed, stabbing her. She ran into someone, his face a steaming wet mask of blood, who howled. A scream sounded and a splash as someone fell or jumped into the river. She heard Nagal’s bull voice shouting in that strange language, then K’azz bellowing: ‘
Gwynn!
’
An eruption of power swiped her to the slick decking where she slammed into the side. Groggy, she fumbled for a grip to pull herself up. The hummingbirds were gone, as was what was left of the sails, and even the upper masts had been sheared away. On the deck only Gwynn and Nagal remained standing; all others had been pushed to the sides in a circle outwards from the mage in black. Something hit the deck at Shimmer’s feet. A dead hummingbird. It lay dull and lustreless now, so tiny. She peered up. Others fell all about. A pattering rainbow deluge of dead birds. Most struck the river, slightly behind, as the vessel continued its unhurried advance. She limped to where Rutana was straightening to her feet.
‘And just what in the name of Hood was that?’ she snarled.
The woman gave another of her uncaring shrugs. Shimmer noted that she was completely untouched; not one cut or jab marked her face or hands. ‘An inhabitant of Himatan, like any other.’
‘D’ivers?’
Again the indifferent shrug. ‘Of a kind. The forest is full of many such creatures. Here you will find all the old things that once walked the earth before you humans came.’
‘Well … you could have warned us.’
She laughed, waving a hand to dismiss her. ‘Even I have seen only a fraction of that which exists within these leagues,’ she said, and walked away.
Shimmer cast about for K’azz, to find him at the stern where he and others had thrown a rope to Cole, who had jumped overboard and now swam after the lumbering ship. Beneath the tiller arm lay the captain, dead, his eye sockets bloody and empty, his throat a torn gaping wound.
K’azz joined her to regard the captain. He motioned to Turgal nearby. ‘Find some cloth.’ He saluted and headed for the companionway.
Sighing, Shimmer raised her gaze to the shore. Hidden animals still roared and hooted in the distance in answer to Gwynn’s great blast of power. Masses of strange birds churned, flapping their huge ungainly wings over the ragged treetops.
You humans
, the woman had said.
You humans
.
Shimmer drew a hand down her slick hot face; it came away wet with blood that dripped from her palm to the decking. She felt a terrible foreboding that somehow they were never going to get out of this jungle.
* * *
Of course a Hood-damned storm would gather as he and Sour unravelled the last of the chains coupled to their dolmen anchors. Only four now remained, each at a compass point, and beneath the centre of the plaza the
thing
this entire installation was constructed to contain jerked and struggled like a gaffed dhenrabi the size of a war galley. Murk gestured his disgust to the massed black clouds blotting the night sky as the wind, the discharge of thunder, and the combers crashing into the shore made conversation almost impossible. From where he crouched next to the dolmen, Sour caught the wave and answered with the expression he was named for. Rain pelted down but at least it was warm rain, not like the freezing sleet of north Genabackis. Yusen emerged from the sheets to lean close to Murk.