The River of Shadows (31 page)

“Feeding time at the zoo,” said Marila, glancing up at them.

Neeps frowned at her. “There’s a cheery thought. What put that into your head?”

“The way you eat,” said Marila.

The tarboys laughed, and so did Pazel, for there was nothing mean or cutting in the other boys’ voices: they appeared ready, for the moment anyway, to let Pazel and Neeps back into their fold.
About blary time
, he thought.

Then he saw Thasha a short distance away, eating olives from Fulbreech’s hand. She was turned away and did not see him—but Fulbreech did, and raised an eyebrow in his direction, a wry salute.

Rage went through Pazel, sudden and murderous. He turned away with the remains of his meal. And found himself facing Ignus Chadfallow.

“Hello,” said Pazel, not very warmly.

Captivity had aged the doctor. His craggy face was stained with soot that no amount of washing had yet been able to remove. His deep-set eyes shone with a new, more desperate fervor. The nose Pazel had broken on Bramian had healed with a subtle clockwise twist.

“I’ve been looking for you since yesterday, Pazel,” he said at last. “Why have you been avoiding me?”

Pazel shrugged. “I’m here now,” he said.

They had crossed paths twice since the doctor gained his freedom. Both times Pazel had hurried by, mumbling about his duties. He had no desire to be cornered and questioned by the man.

“You should eat less sausage, more fish and greens,” said the doctor. Neeps slid a whole sausage into his mouth.

Pazel scowled. “What is it you want, Ignus? Missed trying out drugs on me?”

“May I sit down?”

Neeps and Marila glanced at each other and edged away. Pazel sighed, and Chadfallow lowered himself stiffly to the deck. He was not holding a plate. Instead he cradled a leather pouch in both hands. It appeared to contain some object no larger than a matchbox. Chadfallow held it as one might a fine glass figurine.

“I’m a doctor,” he said. “I took an oath to defend life.”

Pazel gave him a discouraging look.
No philosophy, please
.

“Would you like to know what I’ve been asking myself this morning?” Chadfallow continued.

“Dying to,” said Pazel.

“What if it were you in there? What would I be thinking now? Would I have even stopped to think?”

“What are you talking about?” asked Pazel. “In where?”

Chadfallow lifted his eyes in the direction of the forecastle house. Pazel grew still.

“Hercól is my oldest friend, after Thasha’s father,” said Chadfallow, “and he loved an ixchel woman, desperately. I honestly don’t know what to do.”

“Ignus,” said Pazel, trying to keep his eyes off the pouch, “what’s going on? What
is
that you’re carrying?”

“I’ve just told you,” said Chadfallow, “the antidote.”

Pazel gasped. “The
permanent
antidote? What, another pill?”

“Another ten pills. One for every remaining hostage. At least, that is what the note said. When I reached my desk in the sickbay the pouch was waiting for me.”

“But that’s fantastic! You can set them free!”

“Softly, you fool,” hissed Chadfallow.

Glancing about, Pazel quickly understood. There were ixchel all over the deck. And men who had been taught to hate ixchel all their lives. Thasha, he noticed suddenly, was now seated alone; Fulbreech had moved off to starboard. Perhaps they’re fighting, thought Pazel, with a vague sense of hope.

“Why can’t it always be this way?” said Chadfallow suddenly, his eyes sweeping the deck. “Peace and cooperation, sanity. There’s enough room on this ship for men and ixchel. And Rin knows there’s enough room in Alifros. Why do we fight? Why don’t we get on with living, while we’re alive?”

Now that the doctor pointed it out, the scene did look more harmonious than ever before. Men and ixchel milled about together, not exactly with warmth, but with a sated sort of tolerance, as if the feasting had crowded their mutual animosities to one side. At the starboard rail a Turach was holding an ixchel sword in the palm of his hand, squinting at it, while its owner chattered on about the workmanship. Beyond the circle of tarboys, several topmen actually seemed to be trading jokes with the little people.

Diadrelu
, Pazel thought.
You should be here. I’m looking at your dream
.

But of course he wasn’t, really. The jokes had a bitter edge. Each side had too many deaths to blame on the other. Rose was an infamous crawly-killer, and others—Uskins, Alyash, Haddismal—were almost as bad.

“Tell me about the note, Ignus,” said Pazel quietly.

“It was vile and sarcastic,” said Chadfallow. “
Play God
, it said.
Hand out life and death like sweets to children. The ones who die first may be the luckiest
. It was written by an ixchel hand, I’m certain of that. And the ink was not yet dry.”

Pazel looked away, and for several minutes he and the doctor just studied the deck. No, it was not all good. Taliktrum’s Dawn Soldiers were eating in a huddle apart, scowling at those of their brethren who mingled most freely with the humans. A Turach glanced from a pie to a group of ixchel and back again; he frowned, as though concluding that they had touched it.

“You can’t just let them out,” whispered Pazel.

“No,” said Chadfallow, “not yet.”

“You should hide the pills.”

After a moment the doctor nodded. “Hide them, and negotiate. Once we are certain who speaks for the little people. Is it Talag, now that his son has fled? Or Taliktrum’s security chief, the one called Saturyk? In either case, if we are intelligent we may prevent bloodshed altogether.”

Their eyes met. To his own surprise Pazel actually smiled. “Diplomacy, Ignus?” he said.

The doctor inclined his head. “My specialty.”

They both laughed—and it hurt to share a laugh with Chadfallow, after so much betrayal and deceit. But it felt good, too. Ignus had once been like a second father. He had even saved Pazel from slavery. After Pazel’s real father, Captain Gregory, abandoned them, Chadfallow had protected the family, and at last revealed his consuming love for Pazel’s mother. But halfway across the Nelluroq, Mr. Druffle (who had also known Gregory) had told Pazel that the doctor’s love for Suthinia had begun years earlier—that it was, in fact, the very thing that had driven Gregory away. Pazel had begged Chadfallow to deny it. The doctor had only replied that things were more complicated than they appeared.

Pazel doubted he could ever forgive Chadfallow for breaking up his family. Still, in the midst of so much waste and ruin and killing, that sort of sin, loving another man’s wife, suddenly appeared very small. Of course, Chadfallow had done other things, darker and more suspicious, things that love could not explain.

“You let Arunis board the ship, Ignus,” he said. “That day in the Straits of Simja. Why in the Pits did you do that?”

“He was about to kill Thasha with that necklace. Wouldn’t you have done the same?”

Pazel scowled. He’d asked himself the same question, many times. No answer he could come up with made him feel good.

“You would have done so out of love for the girl,” said the doctor. “I might have wished to do so out of love for her father, but I would not have. No, I would have let her die, if I had not felt—”

“What?”

Chadfallow drew a slow breath. “A hunch, nothing more,” he said at last. “An instinct, that her death would bring a greater disaster than any of us could foresee. I feel it still. In the way Hercól speaks of her; the way Ramachni called her ‘my champion.’ They have never trusted me with the whole story of Thasha Isiq. Nor have any of you.”

Pazel averted his eyes.
He thinks I know more than I do. But he’s right, I haven’t trusted him. How could I, how could I, after—

“Ignus,” he heard himself say, “why didn’t you warn us of the invasion? You could have saved us then and there. We could have escaped.”

It was the question he had never dared ask, the question that had burned inside him for almost six years. Chadfallow looked as though he had expected it.

“Escape?” he said. “Do you think Suthinia Sadralin Pathkendle would have been content to escape, to run off into the Highlands with her children? Or”—he hesitated, swallowed; his face was suddenly vulnerable and young—“with me?”

“Definitely not with you,” said Pazel. “Oh, damn it—that’s not what I meant—”

“She would have raised the alarm. She would have stormed out into the city and told everyone the Arqualis were coming.”

“They’d never have listened. They all thought she was crazy.”

“But they did not think
I
was,” said Chadfallow. “Suthinia would have named me as her source immediately. And I could not afford to lie. I was doing everything I could to negotiate Ormael’s peaceful surrender, with guarantees that the city would not be looted, the people enslaved or slaughtered, the women raped.”

Pazel shut his eyes.
Neda
, he thought.

“Admiral Isiq agreed,” said Chadfallow, “although it meant disobeying his Emperor. We had it all arranged, Pazel. Not a shot was to be fired, not a woman touched. The Turachs hated the plan, but we had them under control.
Tenuous
control, boy. Any friction and we knew they’d riot. It was your own lord, the Suzain of Ormael, who provided that friction. He dug in his heels and swore Ormael would fight to the last man.”

Pazel’s head felt rather light. “Against all those Turach battalions? Against that whole mucking
fleet
?”

“Why do you think the palace was so badly damaged? They had to pry him out like an oyster from a shell. Your fool of a leader could not accept the simple truth, that his days of courtesans and clotted cream were over. He preferred to bask in glory—in the bonfire Arqual made of your city.”

“But for Rin’s sake, Ignus! Why didn’t Thasha’s father just
tell
me all this? Did he think I wouldn’t believe him?”

“You had just called him a mass murderer, as I recall,” said Chadfallow.

Pazel squeezed his eyes shut in pure frustration. A peaceful surrender. It wouldn’t have been justice, but it wouldn’t have been
that
, either: the burning and looting, the blood and death and rape. The terrible words of the eguar rang in his ears:
Acceptance is agony, denial is death
.

Suddenly he realized that he was once more staring at the leather pouch with the antidote inside. He started. “Pitfire, Ignus, you shouldn’t be walking around with that thing!”

“I don’t know where to hide it,” said Chadfallow. “Someone is still doing Ott’s work, you know. I find small items moved in my cabin, and in the surgery too.”

“Well put it in your pocket, for Rin’s sake. Are you daft?”

Chadfallow glared at him, then sighed and looked down at the pouch.

“Listen,” said Pazel, “why don’t you let me hide them in the stateroom? There’s no safer place. Thasha hasn’t shut me out, yet, and even if she does, Neeps or Marila could—”

“Hello there, Doctor.”

The voice, loud and abrasively cheerful, belonged to Alyash. He had sidled up to them without a sound. Above the grotesque scars on his throat and chin he was smiling, and his eyes were bright and merry. His hands dangled empty at his sides.

Chadfallow started to get to his feet, but Alyash put a restraining hand on his shoulder. “Didn’t you blary eat? You’ve got to get your strength back, after all those weeks locked in a cage.”

“Don’t answer, he’s up to something,” said Pazel in Ormali. Alyash just went on smiling.

Chadfallow looked nervously at the bosun’s hand. “I ate my fill,” he said.

“No discomfort, then? Mr. Elkstem had a little discomfort.”

“Of course he did,” said Chadfallow, sounding a bit like a cross professor. “He ate sausage. He spurned my advice. When one has been confined to a small space for weeks with little to eat, the gut contracts and heavy foods become the enemy, for a while.”

“Ignus,” said Pazel.

“Elkstem should have concentrated on the vegetables,” Chadfallow went on. “That is what I did. Naturally my stomach is at peace.”

Alyash’s grin widened. “The vegetables, you say?”

“And for my circulation, an ounce of fish.”

“An ounce of fish! Well, that’s blary fine.”

Alyash dealt him a vicious backhand blow. The doctor fell sprawling, and Alyash scooped up the leather pouch and ran.

Pazel exploded to his feet. “Stop him!” he cried, frantically giving chase. “Oh
credek
, stop him, someone!”

Alyash was making for the bows. To Pazel’s great relief he saw Thasha take in the scene and rise with the quickness of her training to join the pursuit. For a moment they ran side by side, leaping over amazed parties of men and ixchel still sprawled upon the deck. Then Thasha, always the stronger, pulled ahead.

Neeps and Marila and even Fulbreech were pounding after the bosun as well, but no one could match Thasha’s speed. She was within an arm’s length of Alyash when a wall of Turach muscle seemed to rise out of nowhere. Thasha slammed into them, fighting for all she was worth. She actually threw two of the soldiers to the deck as the others piled on—they knew from hard experience what a fighter she was. But Thasha’s fall had opened a path. Rolling and sliding, Pazel suddenly found himself beyond the Turachs, and raced on with all his might.

Alyash was past the mainmast now, holding up his prize, shouting to Sandor Ott. From the corner of his eye Pazel saw Fulbreech, sprinting—he too had somehow eluded the Turachs. The youths flailed forward. Alyash rounded the tonnage hatch, the forward guns, the jiggermast. Pazel saw Ott’s face at the window.
No
, he thought,
no!
From somewhere he found the strength to run even faster.

And then Alyash tripped.

He rolled almost instantly to his feet—he had his own training with the Secret Fist to draw on—but the stumble made all the difference. Pazel closed the space between them. It was his one chance. He leaped.

The jump did not carry him as far as he hoped, but as he fell, Pazel reached out and caught Alyash by the leg. The bosun crashed to the deck. The leather pouch shot out of his hand and slid forward. It struck the wall of the forecastle house, just beside the door.