The River of Shadows (46 page)

“They may hear you in the common room,” said Garapat.

“Worse,” said Felthrup. “If I grow hysterical I shall wake, and it will be over, finished. I am alone on the
Chathrand
already! The dlömu have evacuated the ship, and a new crew is coming. I fear I will soon wake no matter how I behave. It is not easy to sleep so long. My stomach is empty and growling like a wildcat.”

“Eat some cake,” said the ink-stained scholar.

“It won’t help, he’s a dreamer, you’re not listening!” hissed the others.

“Do you mean,” said the voice of Pazel Doldur, now hushed and astonished, “that the Nilstone, Droth’s Eye, the Scourge of Erithusmé, is back aboard the
Chathrand
?”

“Back?” said Felthrup.

“Of course, back. The great wizardess herself conveyed the Stone through Alifros upon that ship, in her quest to banish it from the world. She had a hidden safe built right into the wall of her cabin, lined with all the spell-dampening materials she could lay her hands on, and yet the Nilstone still caused terrible things to happen aboard the
Chathrand—
altered it, too, by drawing ghosts and spell-shards and residue of old charms into that vessel like iron filings to the lodestone. Felthrup, sir: you must tell me more of this. I am very fond of Suthinia, you know. She named her son after me.”

Then the scholars, and Professor Garapat, and his five invited guests, began to talk in great excitement, spouting names, grabbing books, completing one another’s sentences. Felthrup twisted and turned, his stumpy tail knocking against the tankards and plates. Then the Flikkerman raised his arms and flashed so brightly that everyone was briefly dazzled.

“We’re going to wake him ourselves at this rate,” he said.

“Quite right,” said Doldur. “Now do tell your story, Felthrup—but briefly and calmly, pray.”

Felthrup did not manage to respect either condition. His nerves were all but destroyed, and the gleam of hope in this eleventh hour had gone straight to his heart. But with the aid of Garapat and the other invited guests, who had heard it once already, he got the essence of the tale across. “I can’t imagine what will happen to the human crew,” he said in closing. “Will they be killed, or taken away as curiosities to Bali Adro City? Will they be enslaved?”

“It will not long matter what becomes of them if you lose the Nilstone,” said Doldur. “No, this is truly frightful. To think that my book has done so little good! That it has even come close to informing Arunis how to master the Nilstone! And this travesty involving the Shaggat! It seems that Arqual has only sunk deeper into corruption since my death.”

“There is hope for Arqual,” said Felthrup, “if Empress Maisa should somehow regain her throne. As for your book, it had little chance to do good, for the Magad dynasty has sought out and destroyed nearly every copy—along with their owners. When mere possession of a book can see one burned at the stake or tossed into the sea, the natural inclination is surely to get rid of it.

“But Master Doldur, there is something I do not understand at all. The thirteenth
Polylex
was written a century before my time. How is it possible that you know Suthinia Pathkendle? Is she ancient? Did she marry Captain Gregory and give birth to Pazel as an old, old witch?”

“Nothing of the kind,” laughed Doldur. “Indeed, I believe in your time she is barely fifty. It is a long story, Felthrup. The creation of the thirteenth
Polylex
was an adventure in its own right. But here is an answer to your question, in brief: I was orphaned by Magad the Second. His wars of greed and conquest took my father and my elder brother—soldiers, both of them. And his royal cousins, flatterers, bootlicks—they took the life of my mother. Not with a spear but with a disease of the bedchamber. She’d given herself into their foul hands for years, in exchange for my school money. Right there in Etherhorde, right under my nose. Astonishing what a love of books can blind one to. You know the revenge I sought, don’t you?”

“To expose his crimes,” said Felthrup.

“His crimes, and all the crimes, lies, venality of Arqual. In pursuit of that end I was a driven soul, a maniac. But only a mortal maniac, and an impoverished one at that. I needed help, and in good time I found help, from the one being in Alifros who could make my impossible dream a reality. I mean, of course, the wizardess Erithusmé.”

“Aha!” said the rival historians. “Magical help from the start! That’s cheating!”

“I earned my reputation as a historian with no aid from any charm,” Doldur continued, “but Erithusmé saw the kernel of a mage within me, too. She warned me of the consequences if it should germinate—no normal existence, no wife or family, no rest—and I accepted them, dreaming only of my book, my book of revenge. So it was with her help that the
Polylex
came to be. I poured all the spellcraft I learned into research, research. I plucked secrets from the Empire like grapes from the vine, and gave them in bushel-baskets to my assistants. The book grew like a vine as well: mad, unruly, heavy with forbidden fruit.

“One warning, however, Erithusmé never gave me—that Magad would tear all Alifros apart in his desire to find and punish me. I became the most wanted man north of the Nelluroq. The wizardess could protect me only so well: she had other, grander fights than mine, and was breaking under the strain. Nor was there anyplace to hide me in the North. Arqual was impossible; the Crownless Lands were thick with Magad’s forces and spies; the Mzithrin was closed to nonbelievers. So the wizardess did what she could: she smuggled me away, to a distant time and place.

“It was a fair city called Istolym, part of the Empire of Bali Adro. A gentle and a wisely governed land, then. In time I learned that I was on the far side of the Nelluroq, living in the century previous to my own. Why she chose that place, I suppose I’ll never know. But I think now that she sent me back in time in case I should ever make the journey home—in the rough hope that the Red Storm would bring me forward about as far as I’d been sent back, so that I might return to an Arqual I recognized.

“I never heard from the wizardess again. But I dwelled in Istolym happily enough, growing as a mage, though lonely for my own time and country, and anxious about the fate of my book. Nine good years I spent there, until the day when another mage, Ramachni Fremken, came to me and said that Erithusmé was lost and feared dead. He told me also that a foul sorcerer had gone north to steal the Nilstone, and that an expedition was being launched to track him down.”

“Mr. Bolutu’s expedition?” said Felthrup.

“Yes, Belesar came with us,” said Doldur. “And so did a student of mine, a human woman of no great magical promise, truth be told—but such intensity, such a will to work for others! She had studied with me for one year, and we did not yet know if she would ever develop the powers of a mage. But she would not give up. She’d come from a hard, cold place in the Fastness of Ihaban, lost her family to an avalanche; she was as ready as anyone could be to leave the world she knew behind. Her name was Suthinia Sadralin. In time she would marry a Northerner, one Captain Gregory Pathkendle, and give up magecraft for years.”

“Pazel’s mother! Then she was not from the Chereste Highlands at all?”

“No, Felthrup. She was a Bali Adro citizen, and proud of it. She went north like a volunteer soldier, to fight a threat to her homeland.”

“And when you sailed north, the Red Storm caught you,” said Felthrup, “and propelled you
forward
again in time.”

“Yes,” said Doldur, “but we had ill luck with the Storm, and it hurled us two centuries forward. Arunis had decades to himself in the North—and when we arrived he was waiting for us. An ambush. We were massacred. The survivors scattered, lived for years in hiding, wanting to fulfill our mission but reduced to the effort to stay alive. Suthinia and Bolutu were the only ones who managed it, in the end. And all that protected them, truth be told, was their failure to blossom into mages. We learned later that Arunis could follow the scent of our Southern magic, like a hound follows blood.”

“But Suthinia did at last become a mage, didn’t she?” said Garapat.

“Years later. When the scent had grown cold. And when Captain Gregory abandoned her. She knew, you see, that she could not have both a family and a mage’s calling. The two simply cannot be combined. I think she was torn for years. When he ran away it must have become easier for her—though not necessarily for her children.”

“And see here, Doldur, wasn’t she rather good with dreams herself?”

“A fair hand, yes,” said Doldur.

“And if I recall, her favorite experimental subjects were her children?”

“That’s rather a brutal way to put it,” said the ghost. “What are you driving at, Professor?”

“Well, it’s plain as day,” said Garapat. “Felthrup can’t warn anyone back in Masalym, because he forgets everything the moment he wakes. But he’s told you, here and now. And you might just be able to tell Suthinia—”

“Ah!” said Doldur. “You startle me sometimes, Jorge Luis. Yes, yes, I could do that.”

Felthrup ran to the edge of the table. “Could you? Could you truly?”

“I don’t see why not. I did it once before, after the Arquali invasion. She heard me perfectly—though I was not able to offer her much comfort. She had just lost her children. This time, perhaps, I’ll be able to do more than wish her well.”

“O splendid man!” squealed Felthrup. “Greatest of dead scholars! Oh, brilliance, brilliance, joy and song!”

“Least I can do for someone who’s dared to read the thirteenth
Polylex.
” The ghost chuckled. “Of course, we don’t know if our efforts will go any further than that. It would be far better if I could visit young Pathkendle directly—but it is far harder for the dead to visit one they never knew in life. I would spend weeks merely trying to claw my way to Masalym in the darkness: your light is our darkness, you know, and the Little Moon in Southern Alifros is particularly hostile to the restless dead. I say, rat-friend: whatever’s the matter?”

Felthrup had gone suddenly rigid, head to toe. “The hatbox,” he said, through clamped teeth.

“Hatbox! What hatbox?”

“I am asleep within a hatbox. And I have become aware of it. My head is pressed against the wall of the box; I can feel the pressure. I am waking, waking. I cannot fight it much longer.”

The inky man stared at Felthrup as though tempted to poke him.

“Don’t you
dare,
” said Pazel Doldur. “Listen to me, Felthrup, my boy. I think it’s high time I paid my old apprentice a call. So tell me quickly: is there anything else you would like me to say to her, besides the fact that forces are coming from Bali Adro’s capital to seize your ship?”

“And the Nilstone, Master Doldur,” said Felthrup, not moving a whisker.

“Of course, of course.”

“And tell her that her son, your namesake—please, could you tell her that he is brave and kindhearted, and that the tongues he speaks number twenty-five at least? Oh, and that Dr. Chadfallow is aboard as well. Oh! And this is desperately important—that the destination of the ship is Gurishal, the island of Gurishal, is this too much to remember, sir?”

“My dear boy, I’m a historian. Come, what else?”

“Wise, quick-witted, mentally capacious ghost! Nothing else, unless … yes, oh yes!”

Felthrup forgot himself, turned his head, knocked it against something no one else in the room could see. It was done: the black rat faded like a mirage. His last words seemed to hang in the air when he himself was gone:

“Tell her that Pazel is in love.”

One hour later, at an unthinkable distance from the cluttered room in the lively tavern, Suthinia Pathkendle awoke with a start, in her hard bed in the rented cottage on the poor side of Simjalla City. The voice that had begun in her dream was still speaking, though she knew she was awake. It was a beloved voice, her old master’s; it filled her with the near-irresistible urge to put her hand out and grasp his own. But she could see no hand. And the message, when she fully woke and understood it, terrified her with the certainty that she had waited too long.

That remains to be seen, I think
.

“Master?”

He was gone. A normal person would already be deciding that he’d never been there, that the voice was only the wind’s, moaning under the eaves, sighing through the cracks she’d never bothered to fill. But Suthinia would never again be normal. She’d become herself at last, a true mage, and she knew a specter’s voice when she heard it.

After midnight the fire always died; the house grew bitterly cold. Suthinia lit a candle, pulled her tattered coat over her nightgown. She crossed the freezing floor into the main room. Yes, the curtains were drawn; the night patrols, the tramps and prostitutes, would see nothing. She took the vials of dream-essence from their hiding place within the brick wall. She studied them, red smoke, blue smoke, cherished links to two souls. Then she held them to her cheeks. The blue vial was cold. It usually was. Neda’s training as a
sfvantskor
had raised walls inside her; only in the deepest sleep did they come down.

But there was an answering warmth from the red vial. She moved it from her cheek to her neck, wrapped her coat over it, and her arms over the coat. As the vial warmed she could sense his nearness, the soft sound of his breathing, the beat of his heart. For the thousandth time in the last six years she found herself aching with the need to touch him, hold him as she was holding this hard thing of glass. She felt a violent tearing, a rending inside her and she knew the feeling was guilt.
Son of mine, son of mine. How did my fight become yours?

“It wasn’t your fault,” said Pazel to the woman who walked at his side. “It was Chadfallow’s, wasn’t it?”

They were in the tall grass over the headlands in Ormael. Below stretched the Nelu Peren, sparkling at midday, threshing against the rocks. Gulls cried, and curlews. The sea-wind moved over the grass like the bellies of invisible ships, racing one after another into the plum orchard beyond. The woman was holding his hand.