crocodile. Now I will tell you how he came aboard.
His Nastiness has lain these forty years on the prison isle of Licherog, halfway from Uturphe to the Quezans. Imperial law bars any ship from nearing the isle unless in danger of sinking outright, so I was forced to invent such a condition. Swellows did it, with Uskins standing guard-sawed the portside tiller-shaft down to a nub. To make things sweeter I let the blame fall on Fiffengurt. The old pest had the wheel at two bells past midnight, when the wind turned of a sudden. He gave her a sharp spin, the shaft broke and Chathrand heeled over like a cart kicked by a mule. Twelve hundred men, women and brats went sprawling. The men's breakfast fell off the stove. Now Fiffengurt is less well loved than before.
For two days we limped north. The men feared we were lost, drifting, and cheered when the lookout cried, 'Land! Two points off the starboard!' But they shuddered and made the sign of the Tree when that great black rock loomed out of the waves.
A cruel wall encircles Licherog, pierced only by gunnery and a solid iron gate like the door of a furnace. Birds in the thousands wheeled overhead. Miles out, the men saw sharks, big monsters gliding in our wake. Hundreds swarm those waters, and never starve: on Licherog there is no graveyard but the sea.
A skjff came out and led us through the reefs. We passed the wreck of a four-masted Blodmel, sunk half a century ago in the harbor mouth. The day was so clear I glimpsed skeletons on her deck: Sizzy men, drowned in their armor, shreds of calcified rigging in their hands.
I left Fiffengurt in charge of repairs and went ashore with Ott and Drellarek. The warden of Licherog, a gaunt old spook in a robe fashionable thirty years ago in Etherhorde, greeted us at landfall. The man is a duke from an ancient family, exiled there after selling his own niece to the Flikkermen. He knew the real purpose of our visit: I could see that in the way he sweated and squirmed. He was terribly excited at the prospect of getting rid of His Nastiness.
'Come, sirs!' he said. 'You've traveled far, you'll want food and wine and a place to sit down! This port is a foul sty, but the wind is fresh up in the citadel. Follow me!'
He marched us up the bird-filthy stairs from the water. The furnace door swung open, and we entered Licherog.
We all hear ghastly tales of that prison, Father, but the reality is worse. Most of the condemned live underground, in meandering catacombs untouched by sun or rain. They have nothing. They drink from their hands, eat off the stone floor or from plates beaten together from the mud tracked in by the guards. I saw a man who had fashioned a bed from his own hair, so long had he lain in one room. The halls go on forever. Whole floors have been abandoned to anarchy: food is piled up at a master door, and bodies removed there, but no guards enter and no prisoner even dreams of escape. One level the warden calls the Faceless Floor, comprised of those whose identities are lost or cast into doubt, or whom the Empire wishes the world to forget.
We were a long time in reaching that fresh wind, but finally another door was unchained and we stumbled out on the top of the island itself. East to west it is perhaps six miles long, all dust and naked rock. We saw quarries where men labored under the withering sun, the gallows where some fresh troublemaker dangled like a rag. And at the far end of the island, upon a rise, stood a fortress with an ornate little tower.
'That is your residence?' asked Drellarek.
'Oh no!' The warden laughed nervously. 'That is the… Forbidden Place. It was built as the warden's home, but since the war-since the sinking of the Lythra-you understand that I rarely speak of the place, or its special purpose? But soon enough I shall take you there. Come, friends, the meal is served.'
'Take us now,' said Ott. 'We will dine better if we know that we have not sailed all this way in vain.'
'I can assure you-'
'Do no such thing,' Ott interrupted. 'Show us the S-. 2*
A little carriage was brought round. We thumped along wordlessly, guards on horseback ahead and behind. An army of near-naked prisoners gaped all around us.
The fortress was embellished with stone vultures and murths and skulls and cobras, every symbol of death one could think of. The warden pointed to a dead man sprawled on the ground and bristling with arrows. 'The guards would even shoot one another, if one strayed too close without permission,' he said proudly. 'We leave the bodies in plain view until the birds tire of them. Here we are, gentlemen.'
The guards here were Turachs like Drellarek (he had trained some of them in Etherhorde) with crossbows primed, and slavering hounds at their feet. When they had searched us thoroughly and taken all our weapons, the carriage was ushered in through the gate.
Inside that fortress-paradise. A green yard led to a stand of lemon trees in pungent bloom. Beyond that, frangipani and cedars, a spice garden, peacocks strutting at liberty. There was a slate terrace and a cobalt pool, where a slave girl sat bathing her feet. She fled like a doe at the sight of us, and we trailed in past a bowling court with silver pins, a glass table heaped with pomegranates, a statue of the Babqri Child. Somewhere a fiddle played. Across the yard I saw two cooks roasting a hog.
'All this… is for him?' I asked, disbelieving.
'Certainly not!' replied the warden. 'You forget he has two sons.'
We came to the tower stair, but before we could climb them the door flew open and a man of about twenty, wearing a dirty yellow robe, burst out, pointing at the warden.
'Rabbits!' he shrieked, in a voice like an old woman. 'You promised, Warden!'
The warden cringed. 'Your Majesty, I promised to try. My men are hunting rabbits across Licherog even now. But I fear we have eaten them all.'
The man looked at us for support. 'Always lying, this one! Variety! That's all I ask! How are we to put up with the same five cuts of meat, year after year? And any fool can see the island is full of rabbit holes!'
'The island is a rock, Your Majesty And now I must change the subject. We have important guests. Would you be so very obliging as to tell your royal father-'
'Divine!'
'— that the captain of the Great Ship requests an audience?'
The man hesitated, mouth agape. Then, slow and important, he crossed his arms. 'No audience,' he said. 'Take them away, Warden. I am not pleased with you.'
'But these travelers-'
'Is not my father a God?'
The warden looked as if he had dreaded this moment from birth. He glanced at me as if hoping I knew the answer to the man's question. But then Ott leaped onto the stairs. The man screamed: Ott knocked him aside like a broom and vanished through the door. We heard him running up the inner staircase.
The tower has four levels. On the first we saw a half-eaten roast upon a table, a shattered plate, and the slave girl peering at us from beneath the tablecloth. The second was a kind of playroom, with frightfully bad paintings on easels, some knobs of stone that might have been intended for sculpture, a grand piano and a second man in yellow sitting on the floor holding his forehead, a broken fiddle beside him. Ott had needed but half a minute to tame the S's terrible sons.
'You see how young they are?' said the warden softly. 'That is the work of Arunis, the King's old sorcerer. When they irritated him he would cast spells to make them sleep for days, weeks, even. Once they slept for three years-then ran about like mad puppies for a month. But it is an enchanted sleep, for they age not when they slumber. They should be nearing fifty, but they are half that.'
'Is there no means of waking them?' I asked.
'Their father discovered one. He sets their clothes on fire.'
'Rin's teeth!'
'That is why they refuse to wear anything but those robes. They can be thrown off in an instant.'
The third floor held a library full of moldering books in Mzithrini script. We pressed on to the next floor, which was the highest. An elegant bedroom met our eyes, with large windows open to the breeze. Sandor Ott stood to our left, stock-still, fingering a sharp little piece of the broken plate, his face glowing with some unspeakable fervor. And across from him was the S-.
He stood empty-handed by the window, gazing fixedly at the spymaster. I wrote already of his visage, his monstrous scars, but did I mention his eyes? They are red-tinted, as if he stares always through that curtain of blood he came so near to drawing over all the world. I knew he would be here, and yet I stood in awe. Those hands had strangled princes. That mouth had talked whole countries into joining his lunatic war. This prodigy of murder
