Faint screams above the cacophony: I raised my eyes to the window and saw two men at topgallant-height, clinging to a forestay. The rope was straining towards the Vortex, and when it snapped an instant later the men did not so much fall as fly, like two weird, ungainly birds, grey on one side and glowing red on the other.
'Well, Ott,' I said, catching the spymaster's eye, 'you can keep the bonus pay we discussed. But then a third of Magad 's treasury's going into that damned hole, along with the Nilstone and the Shaggat and the lot of us.'
'Is that all you wish to say, at the end of a life?' said Ott, smiling acidly.
I shook my head. 'One thing more. I piss on your Emperor.'
He uncrossed his legs and stood, and would have done something painful to me had I not placed my hand on the doorknob. For once I had a way to kill faster than Ott, and more democratically.
Then, to my astonishment, the door was wrenched open from the outside, and who should fly in under my hand but Neeps Undrabust. We all reeled from the burst of fresh air, and I, closest to the door, nearly collapsed with the pain. When I recovered I saw Undrabust struggling with the stowaway girl. He was trying to embrace her; she was striking and shoving him back towards the door. 'What are you doing!' she shrieked. 'Get out of here! Don't breathe! You'll be trapped like the rest of us!'
There came a thump at the door — but this time I held the knob fast. Pathkendle and Thasha Isiq were out there, shouting much the same thing as Marila. But Undrabust stood his ground, trying to calm and hold her, telling her he had nowhere else to be. 'Stop it, Marila. There's just minutes left, you hear me? Keep still. You don't have to fight any more.'
I pressed my face to the window, and saw a gruesome sight: the watery horizon was higher than the rail. We were below the rim, descending, speeding up. We had entered the demon's mouth. Pathkendle and the girl were the only figures anywhere close to the forecastle. They must have been pursuing Undrabust, guessing what he meant to do. The lad was right, of course: it no longer mattered. I watched Pathkendle draw the girl down beside him in the biting spray. They crouched with their backs to the door, holding each other, like a pair of orphans in a picture book, and the outlandish notion came to me that perhaps these four youths were the sanest of us all, for in the midst of insanity they were caring for one another, which I might assert, Father, is an aspect of the healthy mind.
Suddenly Thasha Isiq raised her head, tensing like a deer. Pathkendle was staring at her, mouthing some question. Very firmly and quickly, she freed herself from his arms. She stood. He tried to grab hold of her again, but she fended him off with great force, her eyes still looking skyward. Then like a woman in a trance she stepped forwards, oblivious to the death she was courting, and stretched her arms high above her head. The wind surged, lifting her like a doll. Pathkendle threw himself on her legs; she did not know he was there. And then the Red Storm swept over the deck.
It was like the glow from some unthinkably colossal fire, but there was no heat. The rain and spray turned to red gold, the deck red amber; the rigging was like wire heated nearly to melting. We had completed another circuit of the Vortex, and ploughed into the red cloud at last. Cloud, I say — but it was neither cloud nor aurora, neither rainbow nor reflection. It was just what the Bolutu-thing called it: a storm of light. Liquid light, and vaporous, and edged like whirling snowflakes. It snagged on the gunnels and dripped from the spars. It burned through the outstretched fingers of Thasha Isiq.
As we plunged deeper, several things happened. The first was the cessation of all noise. The grinding of the Vortex faded swiftly, like the noise of a foundry when you walk away from it, shutting door after door behind you. That led me to a second, absolutely wondrous and blessed discovery: the Vortex itself was gone.
Not dispersed, not disrupted. Gone, as if it had been no more than a soap bubble on the waves. Men crept from the hatches, stark wonder in their eyes. We were no longer heeled over, no longer caught in a death spiral on a butter-smooth sea. There were waves again, and we were pitching on them, the wind from starboard abeam.
Then I saw that the clouds too had vanished: I mean the thunderheads beyond the Red Storm. The sky was swept clean of them, and in their place I could glimpse only shreds of cloud burning like embers in the south. The whole sky beyond the storm was new — and though I could not be sure from within that bright madness, it seemed to me that the sun itself had changed position.
Thasha Isiq was staggering towards the forecastle, red light splashing about her ankles. Pazel was still kneeling on the deck where he had held her. In the sudden quiet, he shouted: 'What in the Nine Pits is happening to you, Thasha? What did you do?'
She turned unsteadily. 'I didn't do anything. It was the storm.'
'The storm destroyed the Vortex?'
The girl shook her head. 'Nothing happened to the Vortex. The storm did something to us. Can't you feel it?'
She walked up to the window, so that we stood face to face. Light was actually dripping from her chin, from her eyelashes. She shook her head: light sprayed in droplets against the glass. 'Would you really have strangled him?' she asked me.
She was speaking of Pathkendle, naturally. But before I found words to answer her the duchess gave a scream. I whirled — and beheld a creature where Bolutu had stood a moment ago. The thing wore the veterinarian's clothes, and his smile, but it was not a human being. At the same time it was more like a human than any flikker or nunekkam, or even the sedge-men one sees in the Etherhorde Natural History Museum. This thing before me had a human body and face. It was svelte, and cinder-black, with silver hair and eyelashes, and large silver eyes. Those eyes were its strangest aspect. They had catlike slits instead of pupils, and a double set of lids. The inner lids were clear as glass; I do not know what purpose they can serve.
The creature raised a hand to calm us, then thought better of it and hid the hand in his pocket. But we had all seen it, the black batskin stretched between his fingers as high as the middle joint. Then he laughed, a little nervously, and brought out his hands for all to see.
'I play the flute, you know. In the past twenty years I grew quite good at the human sort. I will have to go back to dlomic flutes now — the holes are farther apart, to accommodate our webbing.'
It was still Bolutu: his voice was unchanged, and his taste for odd little confessions. 'Dastu has already told you about me,' he went on. ' You see now that I spoke the simple truth. The truth about myself, and also, incidentally, about this blizzard of light. For it is the same manifestation that struck us twenty years ago, heading north. Clearly it has magic-cancelling properties. It nullified the flesh-disguises of some of my comrades; now it has erased my own.'
' You look a bit like a giant crawly,' said Haddismal. 'Are you in league with them?'
Bolutu stared at the Turach in disbelief. 'No,' said Dastu. 'More likely he's with the Mzithrinis. Right, Master Ott? I'll bet he signalled the Jistrolloq somehow, as we neared Bramian.'
The lad took a step towards Bolutu, as if he intended some violence, but was unsure of the creature's abilities. Bolutu backed towards the door. From his corner, Ott shook his head. 'If the Black Rags had creatures from distant countries working for them, I'd have heard about it. My guess is that we are looking at Arunis' lieutenant. Where has he gone, creature? Did he double-cross you, leave you here among your enemies when the rats attacked?'
Oggosk caught my eye and cackled, and for once I felt I understood the source of her mirth. Just minutes ago we had escaped a horrible death, and yet like performing monkeys these three had snapped back into their routines, to suspicion and intrigue and lies.
Bolutu looked from face to face. 'Incredible,' he said. ' You haven't listened to a word I've said. Why do you bother to spy on us, when your own theories are so much more attractive? For what it's worth I have but one enemy on this ship: Arunis himself. You people, you humans of the north, should have been my natural allies, but most of you have lacked the sense to see it. And now I think I shall go. I have known twenty years of interrogations by angry, frowning persons like yourselves. I find the questions as sad and stunted as the questioners. Goodbye.'
And with that he threw open the door and walked out, breathing freely. Like the others I held my breath against the outdoor air, feeling it bite at the edge of my nostrils. But Bolutu was obviously, utterly immune. A result of his transformation, I presume. He strolled away through the Red Storm, past men and crawlies alike. When he caught up with Pathkendle and Thasha Isiq (she looked spent and fragile, now, and the Ormali held her tight in his arms) the creature greeted them like old friends.
You will be wondering how I can speak of pride, when still caged by crawlies? I shall tell you briefly, and then
