The Ruling Sea (30 page)

The thing slipped behind me. I heard its voice at my shoulder. “Beware. You insult the dead. When all else is robbed of a man in death, he has yet dignity. This you stripped from your fallen sailors, using their bodies to gild your lie.”

“The Emperor’s lie,” I protested, but the spirit clawed at me, annoyed by the contradiction. “This false wreck you have authored, Rose: it is a prelude. A rehearsal for the death awaiting
Chathrand,
a ship that was mine and many others’, in a proud fellowship over centuries. Never once was that fellowship broken except by death or honorable retirement, until you in disgrace were relieved of command.”

“Damn your crooked tongue! I was reinstated!”

“For a little while,” said the ghost. “Her next pilot is already aboard.”

His insolence astonished me. “Her next pilot? Get hence, you old vapor, or I’ll have my witch root you out of these boards with a cleansing spell!”

That frightened Levirac: I felt him withdraw a step or two behind me. His voice was softer now: “One other will stand at
Chathrand
’s helm
—
and that one briefly, briefly. You are this vessel’s doom.”

“And you’re a lying, man-shaped stench. Prove you know something, Levirac. Give me a name.”

The spirit only tittered behind me. I started away, and then under his breath I heard him slander you and Mother, sir, with a lie too noxious to repeat. I turned on him in wrath
.

What a shock! In his place stood Thasha Isiq, alive, solid as the hand that writes these words. Her mastiffs were beside her; they held me in their gaze and growled. I said nothing; I was waiting for her to thin and vanish like any ghost. But those blue-black dogs were real
—
and so, I knew in a moment, was the girl
.

Pathkendle and Undrabust came up the ladderway and stood beside her, and all three glared at me with hatred. Then I knew who the real deceivers were
.

“You sent Pacu Lapadolma to her grave,” I told them
.

“We didn’t,” said Pathkendle. “You did. You and Ott and your Emperor and your whole bloody gang.”

Then Firecracker Frix saw the girl and squealed like a pig. The commotion was immense: first terror, then wonder, at last elated cheers. “Thasha Isiq! Thasha Isiq! The longest of lives to Thasha Isiq!”

If I had been quicker I might have moved against them: killed the mastiffs, tossed the girl overboard, declared her a risen corpse and an abomination. I know this is what you would have done in my place, Father, and you need not chastise me for the missed opportunity. I am not perfect. This we both know, and I humbly suggest we cease pretending otherwise
.

Now in any case it is too late: the men are quite aware that she is flesh and blood. They were only too happy to learn that the former Treaty Bride had been hiding from them, behind the spell-wall that keeps us from the stateroom. The only gloomy faces were those of the youths themselves. They saw how well our “sinking” went, and knew that for all their tricks, the Plan marched forward, unstoppable, with war and ruin (and riches, for some) its only conclusion
.

Fiffengurt meanwhile has gone from bad to worse. He is often red-eyed, as if from crying, and goes on about a “wife” back in Etherhorde who will soon be reading of our deaths at sea. He may have a sweetheart or two, but I know for a fact that he has no wife. Man’s capacity for self-deception is a wonder, is it not?

This morning we found ourselves in a pod of Cazencian whales. I had thought the great toothed things all but extinct, for the folk of Urnsfich like nothing so much as the taste of “sweet whale,” as they name them. On another voyage I should have put down a boat or two and given chase. But Cazencians are fierce fighters, though small for whales, and I should have trusted no one but myself to take them on. Above all our time is short. Each day we linger the Vortex grows, and with it the danger of the crossing
.

Once again we have spotted a ship to the north: the same vessel, I think, and a little closer than before. There is still no danger of being recognized, but I must end this letter and adjust our course
.

Enclosed is a diamond wristlet. Mr. Druffle the freebooter gave it to me in exchange for a midshipman’s berth. How Druffle, threadbare slave of the sorcerer that he was, came by such a priceless thing I cannot guess. But maybe it will bring a smile to Mother’s eye
.

As ever I remain your obedient son
,
Nilus R. Rose

P.S. If you are, in fact, dead, may I trouble you to state as much in your next communication?

*
Rose began this letter several times. A draft recovered from his personal effects contains a variety of first sentences, all discarded: “I trust this finds you well,” “Rest assured that [unfinished],” and most curious of all, “Ghosts and sorcerers lie, but from you, Father, I expect no less than perfect truth.”—E
DITOR
.

14
Among the Statues

Lightless. The cage was lightless, and his mind was already succumbing. Not a cage; why had he called it a cage? That was for animals. This was a dungeon made for ordinary people. Bakers, shopkeepers, farmers on the fertile slopes above Simjalla. A carpenter. A schoolboy or-girl with her books still under her arm. His arm? What did it matter, when arm and books and heart were locked in clay?

He walked carefully, heel to toe, from the carpenter to the dancer, arms outstretched in the blackness. He was far from the door, which smelled vaguely of food and was therefore a place of danger. Rested his hand on a gritty clay elbow.
They are safer than I. The beasts will attack me first, one another second. Last of all these bodies in their stony sheaths
.

He had done as Ott knew he would. He had touched them, explored their features, wondered at the attention to detail. Noses, eyebrows, lips. He would not give them names, though: that was a game for madmen, and Admiral Eberzam Isiq was not yet mad.

Ott himself came no more. The spymaster had stood outside the door on two occasions, issuing hushed, clipped commands to someone who called him Master. Had he hoped Isiq would cry out, beg for deliverance or deathsmoke, weep? The admiral would not give him that satisfaction.
When you lose your
sword you have your hands. When your hands are tied there remain your teeth. When you are gagged and bound you may still fight them with your gaze
. Isiq clung to the litany, an old War College saw from forty years ago, and tried to keep his mind from mocking it.

The want of deathsmoke. He huddled often with his back to the door, sweat-drenched in the hollow cold, heart racing, mind prey to ghoulish fixations. The eyes of the statues. The last thoughts baked into their brains.

Syrarys had kept him from feeling these pangs, by mixing an extract from the deathsmoke vine with the other poisons she passed him in sweet teas and brandies. Just enough to ease him along, believing himself sick but not envenomed, slowly forgetting what it meant to be well.

The detail, the
ludicrous
detail. Nearest the door stood a woman
(do not recall how you learned it was a woman)
clutching her throat with her left hand and reaching down it with her right. Choked on a shard of bone, a bit of gristle or hard bread. She was his height. He would not name her. She seemed to be aware of the door. As if dreaming that some bright angel would yet appear there, melt her agonies with a waking touch, lead her by the arm into paradise.

They slid his dinner plate halfway to this woman at every meal, with an insolent shove that left part of the contents behind on the floor. Isiq had to pounce on it, kicking at the rats that hurled themselves on the food the instant it appeared, stumbling quickly behind the choking woman with his prize. A metal plate with three sections; he had licked it clean after every squalid meal, saying “fourteen,” “fifteen”; struggling thus to keep count of the days he had lain in Queen Mirkitj’s private hell. But what if they did not come at regular times? What if they fed him twice in one day and skipped the next altogether? He had only the cycles of his body to judge by, and they were becoming erratic. To breathe on one’s hand and be unable to see it. To rest one’s chin on a stone shoulder and have no idea of the face.

Someone’s name engraved on the back of the plate. Isiq had caught himself licking the signature, over and over, for his tongue was more sensitive than his fingertips, though not sensitive enough to feel out the tiny letters. Had an earlier prisoner used this plate, etched his name in it somehow, declaring,
I still exist, you have not reduced me to perfect nothingness for I remember myself, you have not erased me, you have not won
.

More likely it was the name of the manufacturer.
Do not believe it
. Believe it was defiance, stubborn will, blazing on like a mad candle in the dark.

Such were the orders he gave himself. He who had commanded fleets, abolished nations with a word, shaped the lives of thousands with a sharp decision, was now reduced to praying for obedience from an army of one.

He succeeded for a time. With the edge of the plate he was able to scrape a thin groove in the floor, a barely perceptible scratch, from the doorway to the choking woman, from the woman to the room’s central pillar, from the pillar to the pit. When Isiq got lost, when the smothered feeling rose in his chest and threatened obliteration, he dropped to hands and knees and sought out the groove, and followed it like an ant from one marker to the next, until he returned to the door. And with his forehead pressed to the crack between door and frame he could actually detect a light, the palest imaginable gloaming, a microscopic flaw in this perfection of darkness, this black stomach in which he was being digested.

That is why they wear stone. It makes them harder to digest
.

Madness. He took deep breaths, forcing the air from his lungs over and over, as if pumping bilge from a hold. What if the light is imaginary? The light is not imaginary. And he did not need a speck of light, a name on a food plate, a companion in agony.
I am a soldier, I solve problems, I will go about my tasks
.

Leaving the plate near the door he had set off on a tour of hell, groping left along the wall. It was a slow and frightful business. He had not gone forty squatting, creeping paces when he nearly died. A pit, yawning beneath his outstretched foot. He had teetered, then let himself fall sidelong, landing on the edge of the pit and just managing to twist back onto the floor. He had lain there, petrified. Cold air flowed from the pit like some fiend’s long and rapturous sigh. At last he had risen to hands and knees and groped on.

The pit was shaped like a tongue. At the point where it curved farthest from the wall his fingers had brushed a knobby protrusion. A foothold. He had extended his arm and found another below. One could climb down, deeper into hell. He had lain on his side and reached farther. And then screamed with pain and rage.