The Ruling Sea (58 page)

“My people,” he said, and there was more loneliness in those two words than Pazel had ever heard a voice express.

The man permitted Alyash to take his elbow, and together they descended the stair.

*
But Greysan Fulbreech learned of them on a plundering foray into Pathkendle’s foot-locker. Among other thefts, Fulbreech helped himself to a few loose pages titled simply “In Case You Live to Remember.” After recounting the conversation of the birds, Pathkendle writes:
Lady Oggosk must be wrong. How could the Waking Spell be a curse if it made those owls, and Felthrup, and so many other wonderful creatures?
The pages went to the Secret Fist, and so, in good time, to me.—E
DITOR
.

24

The Editor, Being of the Opinion That Suspense Is a Vulgar Commonplace, Reveals the End of the Story

One by one they died. All of them, the vicious and the virtuous, the Drellareks and the Diadrelus, their lovers, their foes. The nations they bled for, killed for: those perished too. Some in extraordinary style, a conflagration of prejudice and greed, coupled to war machinery. Others were simply buried as the vast, unsound palaces they dwelt in collapsed, those houses of quarried contradiction.

They died, you see. What else could have happened? I witnessed a number of deaths, heard others related by those who were present; I even contributed some names to the tally—your editor is a murderer; it’s not as rare as you think. Until quite recently I had comrades from that time, fellow survivors, people in whose eyes a certain light kindled when I said
Chathrand
or
Nilstone
or
the honor of the clan
. Never many. Today, none at all.

It was all so long ago, an age. How many of the young scholars around me today, in my incontinent dotage, believe that the world of Pazel and Thasha ever existed—that it was ever as cruel or as blessed or as ignorant as we found it? No one in this place even
looks
like a Pazel or a Thasha. Why should they believe in them? So long as I live I am proof of a sort—but I, who sailed on
Chathrand
to her last hour, resemble myself less and less each passing year. And when I die there will be those who pause on the library stair to gaze at my portrait, wondering if the artist were mad.

What’s left of those people? The ones I loved, the ones I detested? Not their faces (you must give them those yourself), nor their bones (though I keep Ott’s skull on the parlor table, and talk to it sometimes; he’s the only one whose looks have improved), nor their skins, shoes, teeth, voices, graves. Even the museums that collected artifacts from that time have crumbled, and the stone markers that read
HERE STOOD THE MUSEUM.
What’s left? Their ideas. Still today—when the world is utterly changed, when men of learning begin to argue that human beings never had a time of glory, never built great cities, never tamed the Nelluroq or tasted the magic that moves the stars—still today, we need those ideas about the dignity of consciousness, the brotherhood of the fearless and the skeptical, the efficacy of love.

I hear your laughter. The young scholars laugh too, and whisper:
That old spook upstairs has gone sentimental, mixing up his memories and his dreams
. Laugh, then. May your mirth last longer than a thunderclap, and your ironies, and your youth. In the end you’ll be left with ideas—nothing else—and one or two of you will have spent your lives working honestly to help the best ideas flourish and grow. My friends on the
Chathrand
were such people. That is why I must record their story before I go.

We are not blood and gristle and hair and spit. We are ideas, if we are anything at all. That part of us that was never truly living is the only part of us that cannot die. Now then, back to Bramian.

25
A Picnic on the Wall

23 Freala 941
132nd day from Etherhorde

When dawn broke in the tower, Dr. Chadfallow at last did Pazel a good turn: he took the youth on his own horse, getting him away from Sandor Ott. When the spymaster noticed the arrangement, he gave the doctor a long, cold appraisal, but did not speak.

It occurred to Pazel that Chadfallow might have just saved his life, but it was almost impossible for him to feel gratitude. For a long time he could think only of his last glimpse of the Shaggat’s son, releasing Alyash’s hand in a muddy clearing beneath the tower, and being lifted onto the shoulders of the thin, strong, wildly tattooed and altogether deadly Nessarim. He heard again the terrible war-cry that had started when they lifted Erthalon Ness: a cry that swept down to the riverbank, leaped across the water, and then like a fuse that has burned its way to the firecracker, exploded from every mouth in the settlement:

From one spark a storm of fire, from one womb a nation!

The Shaggat for us is truth entire, for others a conflagration!

Every foe his wrath shall feel, every liar hear him! Lesser kings to him shall kneel, and fearless warriors fear him!

So ever nearer Heaven’s door in prayer and blood anointed
,

We follow him, we follow him, unto the hour appointed!

The chant had broken up into a high, fierce caterwauling that raised the hairs on the back of Pazel’s neck. Ott had explained that the Nessarim had borrowed this last cry from the Leopard People: it was the sound they made when they attacked the colony in force. The Nessarim actually admired the Leopard People’s courage and swiftness, he said, and tried to show their respect through the mimicry. Ott’s ultimate goal was conversion of the tribes themselves to the Shaggat cult: unlikely, he admitted, but not inconceivable.

Their second journey along the wall was even more spectacular than the first. A rainbow arched over the northern mountains; palms waved their emerald tresses from the ridgetops; a waterfall gleamed in the morning sun. But the beauty only made Pazel feel more sick at heart. He did not know why he had risked so much for a madman, but he knew quite well that he had failed.
The man tried to believe me. Why couldn’t he face the truth?

He clenched his fingers in the horse’s mane, thoughts sliding from mystery to mystery. At last they settled on one that concerned the man behind him.

“Ignus,” he said. “Tell me about the prisoner exchange, back in Simja. How do you know they had my mother, and Neda? Did you see them?”

Chadfallow tensed. For several minutes he said nothing at all. Then he said, “Don’t be obtuse, Pazel. When could I have seen them? My counterpart Acheleg swore that they were there, both of them, in Simjalla City.”

“When was the exchange supposed to happen?”

Chadfallow sighed. “The morning after the wedding. Which as it turned out was also the day the
Chathrand
and the
Jistrolloq
almost came to blows. The day you translated Rose’s threats.”

“Ah,” said Pazel. “Well.”

“Yes. Well.”

Pazel was glad the doctor could not see his eyes. He was furious. Did Chadfallow think he’d had a choice? Hadn’t the man noticed how he’d twisted Rose’s words to make them less insulting to the Mzithrinis? Was it his fault that Arunis had dispatched some kind of demon to murder the Babqri Father?

They rode on in silence awhile, watching mice and lizards at the horses’ approach. Then Chadfallow began to speak again. “I negotiated the exchange in private. I worked at it for three years—from the moment I heard of plans for a Great Peace. I obtained a writ of extradition signed by His Supremacy, to be presented to the Warden of Licherog. But all that was before I knew of the Shaggat conspiracy.”

“I don’t believe a word you say,” said Pazel, his voice tight as a wire. “You could have ended the conspiracy at the governor’s table in Ormael. Instead you denied that the Shaggat was aboard. You laughed at us, said that Arunis couldn’t be the
real
Arunis, called us a bunch of overexcited children. You kept us from exposing the whole festering lie.”

“I saw the Shaggat hanged!” snapped Chadfallow. “Of course I didn’t believe he’d returned! Besides, I was in shock, like you. In shock at the depth of Ott’s betrayal.”

“I don’t think you were shocked at all,” said Pazel. “I think you’re still a part of the conspiracy. I think your job from the start has been to make me useful to them—me and my gods-damn Gift.”

Chadfallow’s knuckles were white on the reins. He was struggling with himself.

“Did you see the list of Mzithrini names, that day?”

“I saw it,” said Pazel, recalling how he and Neeps had pored over the scraps of parchment.

“How many of them did we have on board?”

Pazel hesitated “Mzithrinis? None, as far as I—”

“None. Exactly. We never collected them—they rot on Licherog yet, if they are alive at all. Ott lied to me as he did to everyone. Three years of talks, and when the day came, I had no prisoners to give the Mzithrinis. What, then, do you imagine I planned to bargain with?”

“I don’t know, Ignus. Gold?”

“The Shaggat Ness. The Shaggat, author of eighty thousand deaths in the Pentarchy. Think, Pazel: any Mzithrini old enough to recall that face would give me the keys to the five kingdoms to be allowed to put a knife in his heart! Your mother and Neda—they would have been nothing, no price at all. By now they’d be free, Suthinia would be—”

A spasm shook his body. He dropped the reins from one hand and grabbed Pazel by the jaw.

“But a
statue?
What in Rin’s firebolts could I do with a
statue
of the Shaggat Ness? You ruined everything when you turned him to stone. You took away the only chance they had.”