The Ruling Sea (16 page)

He was seated cross-legged on the floor, shirtless, back straight and eyes half closed. A posture of meditation. His arms and chest were muscled like an ixchel’s: no weak spots, no inch of flesh allowed to luxuriate in softness. His blackened sword lay before him like a talisman. This was good luck, Dri decided: it was hard to catch Hercól by himself.

He raised his hands in a seated stretch. How serene he was, how purposeful. She had come to tell him of the incubus—
only the incubus, keep that clear
. But doubts assailed her as she watched his steady breathing. What would they say, her people, if they saw her now? There were scores of men in this compartment. The walls were thin, and the air was still and noiseless. It would be reckless to make contact here.

He twisted his upper body, and she saw the wolf-scar on his rib cage, glistening with sweat. She should have gone to the stateroom, she told herself, to the tarboys and Thasha. What need did she have to approach this man directly?

Dri felt her heart begin to hammer. She rehearsed her words.
I must talk with you, stand up, let me in. I will trust you with knowledge that could kill me. Not of the incubus, but of
—

She caught herself up short. Mother Sky, what was she thinking? To speak … of
that
? Could she tell a human about
that
, and still call herself a member of the clan? She closed her eyes and pressed a clenched fist against her mouth, as though it might speak without her consent. Impossible. Impossible. You are losing your mind.

One level below, in the gloom of the orlop deck, the Shaggat Ness, God-King of Gurishal and Fifth Monarch of the Mzithrin Pentarchy, stood with his stone ankles buried in straw. Dri studied him with equal parts fascination and disgust. His lifeless face wore a look of outrage, and the beginnings of fear. His left hand, held high but shrunken and withered, grasped the deadliest object on earth.

The Nilstone. It was small and round and pitch black.
Too black
, like the body of the incubus: Dri’s eyes seemed to stop working when she tried to focus on its surface.

The large compartment was known as the manger; it was a fodder room for the ship’s cattle. Half the straw bales had been removed, the rest stacked against the aftermost wall to within a few feet of the ceiling. Atop these crouched Diadrelu, studying the men below.

Two of the group, dressed in yellow robes, were chained to the aft bulkhead. One sprawled on the floor, asleep; the other paced the length of his chains, scratching and arguing with himself. These were the Shaggat’s sons. They looked to be in their twenties, but were in fact more than twice that age. On the Prison Isle of Licherog the men’s chatter had so annoyed Arunis that he had cast sleeping spells on them both. The spell had never quite worn off: to this day they were given to fits of narcolepsy.

They had aged more slowly in their sleep. But the long captivity, and perhaps the oddness of passing so much of their lives unconscious, had eroded a good deal of their sanity.

The others were all Turach soldiers. Three guarded the room’s single door (left open in the vain hope of a breeze), and three more stood in precise formation around the stone king. They were gigantic and terrible men: elite commandos, rated worthy to guard the Emperor himself. They drank fire storax at dawn to shock themselves awake, gulped pills made from the bones of Slevran panthers to increase their strength (though Dri had heard Bolutu begging them to give up the “vicious habit”), plunged their fists into buckets of gravel and scarlet chilies to deaden them to pain.

But yesterday, facing Arunis and his corpse-warriors, some of the Turachs had hesitated, seemingly afraid, and in those few seconds lives had been lost. Punishment had come this morning. Sergeant Drellarek, their commander, had stood all those who had retreated in a line on the main deck. He then told his lieutenant to recite the seventh of the Ninety Rules of the Rinfaith.

“Rule Seven,” the young man had shouted. “‘Fear rots the soul and gives back nothing, but wisdom can save me from all harm. I shall cast off the first for the second, and guard the sanctity of the mind.’”

Then Drellarek had drawn his knife and slit the throat of every seventh man in the lineup. Those who escaped bound their comrades’ bodies in sailcloth and twine.
Monstrous
, thought Diadrelu.
And very effective. From now on they’ll fear nothing but him
.

But was there nothing else to be afraid of? Yesterday they had all learned that to touch the Nilstone brought instant death to any with fear in their hearts. What about standing near it, though, for hours on end? The men looked well enough—just itchy and uncomfortable in the heat. For the moment that was all Dri needed to know. She did not think Arunis would soon come for the Nilstone or his king. By his own admission he was weak—and after Drellarek’s measures, she had no doubt that these men and their eighty fellow Turachs would fight him to the death.

She tried again to see the Nilstone.
How can it be there and
not
there at the same time? What is that damned thing?
Ramachni had said it was
death given form
, and had indeed come to Alifros from the world of the dead. He had also assured them it could never be destroyed. And yet she and her human comrades had sworn to get rid of it somehow, before Arunis found a way to use it against them all.

“I want wine!”

It was the Shaggat’s son. He was glaring at his captors, stamping his feet.

“Is that a fact,” muttered a sleepy Turach.

“My father is a god! His hour is come! Surely you don’t want to die?”

“He’s not a god, you wretch. Why don’t you blary sleep?”

Diadrelu crawled back from the edge of the straw bale. Nothing more to be learned here. With a sigh she decided to return to the ixchel compound. She did not relish the abuse and ridicule that would await her there. But she was hungry—and like any member of the clan she had communal duties to perform: cooking, maintenance, care of the sick and wounded. Taliktrum had let her know that he had taken a personal interest in her chores.

“Give that bottle here!” said the Shaggat’s son.

“It ain’t wine, it’s water. And it’s ours. You threw yours up in the hay like a naughty baby, didn’t you?”

Dri smiled: the remains of a shattered bottle lay a few feet to her left.

The son was actually starting to cry. “You despise me.”

“Now you’re catchin’ on.”

“Very soon you’ll be sorry. When he is flesh again, and the Swarm explodes from the gray kingdom, you shall answer to my father. I will tell him and you will be crushed. You worms, you tiny insects, you—bullies.”

“What’s this ‘Swarm’ you’re always on about?”

But the Shaggat’s son had lost the thread of his rant. “Is it so much to ask, Warden? A good bottle and a bit of cheese? Even local cheese would do.”

Dri rose, stretched—and a flash of movement overhead sent her leaping, spinning, drawing her sword in midair, and the quickness of thirty years’ training saved her life.

A hideous insect crouched before her. It was as large as Dri herself, double-winged like a dragonfly, with barbed limbs, green composite eyes and a long stinger like a wasp’s curled under its body. That stinger had just stabbed the spot where Dri had lain a moment before.

She drew her knife as well. The creature made a sudden deep buzz, like a crosscut saw biting into a tree. It swiveled its black hairy head, fixed an eye on her, and launched itself into the air.
Skies, it’s fast
. She couldn’t see it: then it attacked again. This time she felt the brush of a leg. She struck, but her sword cut only air.

“Wine and cheese! Wine and cheese!”

“Shut up! Shut up!”

The thing was faster than Sniraga the cat. It dived a third time, vanished, dived again and missed her neck by a finger’s width. Dri spun into battle-dance, into the desperate pinwheeling that could hold off four humans at once.
If I stop, I die. If I leap from the hay it will sting me before I land
.

The room was a blur. In ecstatic dance she moved backward through the shards of glass. There was a higher bale there; she could back against it like a wall, burrow into it if need be.
If I have time. How many are there?
Then the insect was on her and the stinger pierced her cloak beside her rib cage, and knowing she had won before she struck Dri snapped the stinger in two with a twist of her body and plunged her knife-hand to the wrist in the insect’s eye.

It was minutes in dying. Its gore and spittle burned her head to foot, and a barb on its leg pierced her thigh. But at last its convulsions ceased. She threw the carcass down, bleeding, dumbfounded. What in the black Pits of woe had just attacked her?

“Will you fetch my bottle, please?” sniffed the Shaggat’s son.

A Turach groaned. “Fetch it yourself—the chain’s long enough. Only I think you broke it, your daftness.”

Dri took a few staggering steps. The insect’s bile stank beyond description. No one in Night Village was going to believe her. She should take back its head, or what was left of it. Then the hay bales moved.

She whirled. Pithor Ness was gaping at her, chin on the edge of the straw bale, not two feet away. One hand hung frozen above the broken glass. He was terrified.

“Guards,” he croaked.

“Careful! Careful, you blary—”

His hand withdrew. She saw his lips curl, forming another word, and then she flew at him, sunk her knife through his cheek, and using it for leverage stabbed down through his jugular with her sword. Blood struck her in a torrent: she was practically inside the wound. He made a sound that was not the word she feared, groped at the crimson straw, and watched her in disbelief as he died.

She leaped once more. He took four bales down with him, glass and all.

It was four in the morning when Diadrelu reached the ixchel stronghold. Men and women who had known her all their lives fell back in astonishment. Blood soaked her from head to foot; even her hair was stiff with it; yet her only wound was a minor cut on the thigh.

Taliktrum appeared, surrounded by his Dawn Soldiers, the shaven-headed fanatics he had inherited from his father. He questioned her in a sharp, peremptory voice. Was it the rat-king again? Or Sniraga? Was there danger to the clan?

“Yes,” she said.

“Of what kind, Aunt?”

She looked at him, the nervous young leader of Ixphir House. She did not know where to start.

“You must answer my questions the same as anyone,” said Taliktrum, almost shouting. “We survive through clan cohesion. We are not threads but a woven fabric, and discipline makes the weaving strong. Let it fray in one corner and the whole cloth unravels.”

“You don’t need to recite children’s lessons to me,” said Dri softly. “I taught them to you, by Rin.”

The soldiers tensed. Taliktrum looked from one to another. “My aunt is very fond of invoking Rin,” he said with a nervous sneer. “As often as she does Mother Sky, or the Wanderer, or any other ixchel figure.”

Dri shrugged. A part of her was screaming at his weakness, this ugly groping for standing and respect. “The tradition’s old,” she mumbled.

“And taken from the giants, like certain drugs and diseases. Tell me, Aunt: is Rin a god or a devil for you?”

She sensed the aggression in his words and was appalled. He was displaying her to his fanatics:
Here is one unlike myself, one I have risen above, despite our kinship
. It chilled her to the core to imagine what such tactics implied for the future of the clan.

Suddenly her other
sophister
, Ensyl, rushed into the chamber. A thin reed of a girl with a prominent forehead, widowed before she could marry, Ensyl was quiet to the point of invisibility much of the time; but Diadrelu knew the iron at the heart of the reed. The girl elbowed her way through the Dawn Soldiers, shot one furious glance at Taliktrum, and led her mistress out.

In her own chamber, Dri let the girl tear off her ruined clothes, then sat as ordered in the herring tin that served as her bathtub. She did not speak as her
sophister
poured bucket after bucket of cold water over her, scrubbing fiercely at the blood and insect substances. The girl had to hack some of it from her hair with a knife.

After several minutes Dri wet her lips. “Ludunte,” she murmered. “Didn’t he make a report?”

“He tried, Mistress. Lord Taliktrum was in the High Loft and would not see him. Skies above, lady, there’s glass in your hair!”

That broken bottle had been a godsend. As she crept away the guards were already debating whether the death was an accident or suicide.

“But it was neither,” Dri said aloud.

“What was neither, Mistress?”

She looked up at her
sophister
. “I killed a human,” she said.

The girl was quiet a moment, then nodded. “I thought so.”

“He was afraid. I don’t think he’d ever seen one of us.”

“If you did it, Mistress, I know it was the right thing.”

Ensyl’s faith stung worse than scorn. Dri hugged herself. Surely the word on his lips had been
crawlies
. What else did humans say at the sight of ixchel? Surely his death was unavoidable.

Given that she had let herself be seen.

She thought of Talag. His brilliance, the mad strength of his quest.
Reveal our presence and you condemn us all. If you can’t kill to silence a giant’s tongue you’re not fit to leave the shelter of a House. Stay in Etherhorde and be hunted. Do not follow us to Sanctuary
.

The man she killed had spent nearly his whole life in chains.

“Mistress,” said Ensyl, wondering. “You’re … branded. There’s a wolf burned into your skin.”

Dri nodded, covering her breast. Why was this happening, what was she doing here? How could she possibly keep faith with them all?

8
Faith and Fire