Ship.
'That's live animals, up ahead, mistress,' said one of the men, pointing with his sheers. 'Like as not you heard one of Mr Latzlo's birds. Them golden parrots chatter up a storm, come feeding time.'
Thasha believed she could tell the difference between a woman's voice and that of a bird, but rather than argue she simply hurried on her way. The passage darkened. She had no lamp, of course, and the orlop deck was submerged and windowless. The light-shafts were all but useless at this early hour; until high noon they produced little more than a twilight glow. But the ladderway ahead should have been easy enough to spot. Where had it gone?
Far off to her left a familiar voice was chattering. It was Mr Druffle, the freebooter. He was terribly excited about something, but the walls between them prevented Thasha from catching a word. Then, just ahead of her, came a soft, bovine grunt.
She had reached the live animal compartment. Thasha had visited this place before, and hated it. Groping forwards, breath held against the reek, she saw the black rumps of cows in their stalls, the gleam of padlocks on Mr Latzlo's crates of exotics. She heard the sudden beat of caged wings, the furious snorts of the Red River hog bashing tusks against its wooden cage, the whimpers and squeals of countless smaller creatures. The planks were sticky underfoot. The thirty feet or so seemed endless.
As she stepped through the raised lip of the door at the compartment's end, something very shocking happened. The ship rolled. Instinctively, Thasha reached for the wall. Of course the Chathrand was always rolling gently, but this was different: a huge slow heaving, worse by far than the stormiest moments since the voyage began. The wind had exploded too: even here in the depths of the ship she could hear it, a monstrous moaning. Tree of Heaven, shelter me, she thought, involuntarily quoting a Lorg School prayer. How could the sea change so quickly? A moment later the ship rolled again.
'Mr Druffle?' she called aloud. Her voice sounded small and weak. The enormous motions of the ship continued.
Then the girl cried out again: farther ahead, and fainter. 'Don't touch me! Stay away!'
At once Thasha broke into a run. She was certain now: whatever else was happening, that voice belonged to a girl her age, and it was sharp with terror. Someone was trying to do her harm.
But now Thasha was truly lost. The passage stirred no memory in her whatsoever. It elbowed left where she expected a right. Doors she had never noticed stood closed, some bolted, others locked. The moan of a high wind reached her ears. Strangest of all, the air grew colder with every compartment she entered. It was more than the night chill that lingered in the Chathrand 's depths: this was a biting cold, like stepping into winter darkness from the warmth of one's home.
'Vadul-lar! Corl habeth loden!'
The shouts came from her left: big men, shouting encouragement to one another. A moment later Thasha caught sight of their lamps. There were a great many of them, broad-shouldered men with stern faces, running parallel to Thasha down another corridor. But what on earth was the language they were speaking?
She sprinted ahead of them, losing her balance as the great swells heaved the Chathrand left and right, smashing heedless against the walls. Her training had taken over, her mind was awhirl. I'm in darkness, they can't see me, they have axes, they are chasing a girl.
The mass of men had dropped fifty or sixty feet behind her when suddenly the girl appeared dashing across a wide-open chamber: a round-faced, dark-skinned girl of Thasha's height, dressed in clothes four sizes too large for her, the cuffs hacked off at wrists and ankles. On her heels were two of the strange men who had somehow outdistanced their companions. Still screaming for help, the girl weaved and darted, putting crates and stanchions between her and the men. But her exhaustion was glaringly plain: in another minute they would have her.
Thasha flew at them, an attack plan crystalizing in her mind without the benefit of conscious thought. As she crossed the chamber one of the men caught a fistful of the girl's dark hair and wrenched her head back. So it was that Thasha saw her face even as she reached them, and shouted her name instead of a battle cry:
'Marila!'
The first man snapped to face her, and his own turning magnified the force of her fist. Even without such an advantage Thasha could land blows that would be the envy of many a fighting man: she felt teeth give way to her knuckles, and checked the weak jerk of his axe-hand with her elbow, and thought no more of him as he fell.
The other man fared better. He was broad-shouldered and strong. Astonished as he was, he had the presence of mind to haul the screaming girl to his chest, a move that kept Thasha from striking him instantly. She feinted; he lurched to block her, thrusting with his axe, both of them staggering with the roll of the ship. Then Marila wrenched her head around and sank her teeth into the soft flesh of his forearm. The man howled and flung her forwards. Thasha leaped at him, twisting to let Marila fall past her. She had resolved to have his axe, nothing else mattered. The man was drawing back for a killing swipe when she closed on him.
Thasha was no master fighter — that was the attainment of decades, not years — but she knew as they connected again that her opponent was not trained at all. Her left hand rose to meet the axe. Her eyes never left it. And his eyes followed hers, unthinking, so that he never saw the knife that ripped across his belly, parting shirt and flesh in a foot-long gash. Thasha spun beneath his still-upraised arm, twisting the forgotten axe out of his hand. As the man doubled over she clubbed him down with the weapon's heel. He crumpled, beaten but still conscious, holding his gut and screaming for aid.
Now Thasha leaped to Marila's side, her mind surfacing from its trancelike concentration — but only just. Marila, aboard. The others are coming. Why is it so cold?
For it was freezing now: her breath plumed white before her eyes. And wasn't that a skin of frost upon a barrel-top?
'Thasha,' gasped Marila, looking up at her in terror. 'Am I dead?'
'What are you talking about? Get up, hurry!'
'Where will you take me? Can you help me?'
'I'm trying, Marila. Get up!'
But it was clear that Marila wanted something more than protection from the men. Whatever that something was had to wait, however. Thasha pulled her to her feet, turned, groped for the lantern the first man had dropped- and watched oil gush from its broken side as she lifted it. Oil suddenly blinding as the flame jumped from the mantle to the leak, and then spread with a terrifying whump across the racing slick on the deck.
'No! ' cried Thasha.
The oil forked and slithered, and the flame moved with it. Suddenly the whole pack of men burst into the chamber. They stopped dead at the sight before them: two girls ringed in flames, above two wounded men. Then they all began shouting the same word:
'Surl! Surl! Surl!'
Thasha didn't have to ask what surl meant. She pulled Marila away as they attacked the blaze, stumbling into the darkness of the passage behind.
'Are you bleeding?' she demanded.
'No,' said the Tholjassan girl. 'Thasha, who are they?'
'I don't know. Stowaways, thieves. The Turachs will slaughter them. Blast it, dropped my knife-'
'Thasha, you're not — I heard them shouting that you were-'
'Dead? Not quite, Marila. Hurry up, now, before they find a way around.'
'That man will bleed to death, won't he?'
Thasha's breath caught in her throat. She hauled Marila by the arm. 'No more questions. Not until we're out of this blary mess. Rin's teeth, that's ice on the deck!'
They stumbled on, feeling their way through a Chathrand both familiar and intensely strange. The very air had a different smell, and the wood itself felt smoother, less cracked and pitted with age. Thasha had a vague hope that they were still making for the stern, where they could not possibly fail to come across a ladderway. But in darkness the ship felt larger than ever, and in truth she had no idea where they were.
Suddenly she caught the scent of animals again. Impossible! But there it was, dead ahead: the dim shape of the compartment door, the screeching birds, the cattle. Somehow she had turned about completely and run back to the bow.
They dashed through the straw-littered compartment. Instantly the air warmed, and the far-off howl of the wind died away. Thasha pulled Marila to a halt. She touched a beam: the chill was gone. And now she realised that
