'She took the Chathrand from me once,' I said. 'Now I have taken the ship from her and her damnable Company, for ever.'
It was then that the ghost intervened. Oggosk's lips kept moving, she was cackling and delighted, but instead of her voice I heard another, cold as a tomb, and saw the walking shadow approaching me from the jiggermast. 'For ever!' it hissed. ' That is but one of the black immensities! You know nothing of them, but I do. I know them, Nilus Rose. They gape at me like cavern mouths. One of them shall claim and devour me.'
The wind tore at its burial wraps. The rain passed through it, however: a sign of one whose years of death do not yet outnumber those of his life, if you believe the Polylex.
'Captain Levirac,' I guessed aloud, pretending I did not feel its icy hand on my heart.
'No more!' hissed the faceless thing. 'I am forbidden that name, any name, they took my names from me as they shall take yours from you.'
All the same it was Levirac. His wheezing voice had not changed in forty years: from the time when he commanded the Chathrand, and I the young purser waited on his orders. I fancied I could still smell his rotten teeth: in life he chewed sugar cane day and night.
'Go to your rest, and pay me no further visits,' I said (one must never show weakness before a ghost).
The thing slipped behind me. I heard its voice at my shoulder. 'Beware. You insult the dead. When all else is robbed of a man in death, he has yet dignity. This you stripped from your fallen sailors, using their bodies to gild your lie.'
'The Emperor's lie,' I protested, but the spirit clawed at me, annoyed by the contradiction. ' This false wreck you have authored, Rose: it is a prelude. A rehearsal for the death awaiting Chathrand, a ship that was mine and many others', in a proud fellowship over centuries. Never once was that fellowship broken except by death or honourable retirement, until you in disgrace were relieved of command.'
'Damn your crooked tongue! I was reinstated!' 'For a little while,' said the ghost. 'Her next pilot is already aboard.' His insolence astonished me. 'Her next pilot? Get hence, you old vapour, or I'll have my witch root you out of these boards with a cleansing spell!'
That frightened Levirac: I felt him withdraw a step or two behind me. His voice was softer now: 'One other will stand at Chathrand's helm — and that one briefly, briefly. You are this vessel 's doom.'
'And you're a lying, man-shaped stench. Prove you know something, Levirac. Give me a name.'
The spirit only tittered behind me. I started away, and then under his breath I heard him slander you and Mother, sir, with a lie too noxious to repeat. I turned on him in wrath.
What a shock! In his place stood Thasha Isiq, alive, solid as the hand that writes these words. Her mastiffs were beside her; they held me in their gaze and growled. I said nothing; I was waiting for her to thin and vanish like any ghost. But those blue-black dogs were real — and so, I knew in a moment, was the girl.
Pathkendle and Undrabust came up the ladderway and stood beside her, and all three glared at me with hatred. Then I knew who the real deceivers were.
' You sent Pacu Lapadolma to her grave,' I told them.
'We didn't,' said Pathkendle. 'You did. You and Ott and your Emperor and your whole bloody gang.'
Then Firecracker Frix saw the girl and squealed like a pig. The commotion was immense: first terror, then wonder, at last elated cheers. ' Thasha Isiq! Thasha Isiq! The longest of lives to Thasha Isiq!'
If I had been quicker I might have moved against them: killed the mastiffs, tossed the girl overboard, declared her a risen corpse and an abomination. I know this is what you would have done in my place, Father, and you need not chastise me for the missed opportunity. I am not perfect. This we both know, and I humbly suggest we cease pretending otherwise.
Now in any case it is too late: the men are quite aware that she is flesh and blood. They were only too happy to learn that the former Treaty Bride had been hiding from them, behind the spell-wall that keeps us from the stateroom. The only gloomy faces were those of the youths themselves. They saw how well our 'sinking' went, and knew that for all their tricks, the Plan marched forward, unstoppable, with war and ruin (and riches, for some) its only conclusion.
Fiffengurt meanwhile has gone from bad to worse. He is often red-eyed, as if from crying, and goes on about a 'wife' back in Etherhorde who will soon be reading of our deaths at sea. He may have a sweetheart or two, but I know for a fact that he has no wife. Man's capacity for self-deception is a wonder, is it not?
This morning we found ourselves in a pod of Cazencian whales. I had thought the great toothed things all but extinct, for the folk of Urnsfich like nothing so much as the taste of 'sweet whale,' as they name them. On another voyage I should have put down a boat or two and given chase. But Cazencians are fierce fighters, though small for whales, and I should have trusted no one but myself to take them on. Above all our time is short. Each day we linger the Vortex grows, and with it the danger of the crossing.
Once again we have spotted a ship to the north: the same vessel, I think, and a little closer than before. There is still no danger of being recognised, but I must end this letter and adjust our course.
Enclosed is a diamond wristlet. Mr Druffle the freebooter gave it to me in exchange for a midshipman's berth. How Druffle, threadbare slave of the sorcerer that he was, came by such a priceless thing I cannot guess. But maybe it will bring a smile to Mother's eye.
As ever I remain your obedient son,
Nilus R. Rose
P.S. If you are, in fact, dead, may I trouble you to state as much in your next communication?
14
Lightless. The cage was lightless, and his mind was already succumbing. Not a cage; why had he called it a cage? That was for animals. This was a dungeon made for ordinary people. Bakers, shopkeepers, farmers on the fertile slopes above Simjalla. A carpenter. A schoolboy or — girl with her books still under her arm. His arm? What did it matter, when arm and books and heart were locked in clay?
He walked carefully, heel to toe, from the carpenter to the dancer, arms outstretched in the blackness. He was far from the door, which smelled vaguely of food and was therefore a place of danger. Rested his hand on a gritty clay elbow. They are safer than I. The beasts will attack me first, each other second. Last of all these bodies in their stony sheaths.
He had done as Ott knew he would. He had touched them, explored their features, wondered at the attention to detail. Noses, eyebrows, lips. He would not give them names, though: that was a game for madmen, and Admiral Eberzam Isiq was not yet mad.
Ott himself came no more. The spymaster had stood outside the door on two occasions, issuing hushed, clipped commands to someone who called him 'Master.' Had he hoped Isiq would cry out, beg for deliverance or deathsmoke, weep? The admiral would not give him that satisfaction. When you lose your sword you have your hands. When your hands are tied there remain your teeth. When you are gagged and bound you may still fight them with your gaze. Isiq clung to the litany, an old War College saw from forty years ago, and tried to keep his mind from mocking it.
The want of deathsmoke. He huddled often with his back to the door, sweat-drenched in the hollow cold, heart racing, mind prey to ghoulish fixations. The eyes of the statues. The last thoughts baked into their brains.
Syrarys had kept him from feeling these pangs, by mixing an extract from the deathsmoke vine with the other poisons she passed him in sweet teas and brandies. Just enough to ease him along, believing himself sick but not envenomed, slowly forgetting what it meant to be well.
The detail, the ludicrous detail. Nearest the door stood a woman (do not recall how you learned it was a woman) clutching her throat with her left hand and reaching down it with her right. Choked on a shard of bone, a bit of gristle or hard bread. She was his height. He would not name her. She seemed to be aware of the door. As if dreaming that some bright angel would yet appear there, melt her agonies with a waking touch, lead her by the arm into paradise.
