people. Rin’s eyes, some of them must still love that prince.
Chadfallow begged a lamp from one of the work crews and led Pazel down a side passage into forward first- class: a ravaged corner of the ship, burned in the rat-battle, and unoccupied since their landfall at Ormael. The once-luxurious cabins gaped in a line, like five missing teeth. Rose had ordered the doors removed, to prevent the ship’s deathsmokers from creeping in and lighting cigarettes-one fire per voyage was more than enough.
Chadfallow sniffed. “The drug is still in the air,” he said. “Bring an addict here and he will go feverish before your eyes.” Then he froze. “Look, there it is.”
Across from the first of the gutted cabins was a waist-high green door. Pazel was startled: he had seen that door before, but not on the lower gun deck. They approached it. The door was untouched by fire, although the wall around it was black with soot. Yet the portal was clearly ancient: warped and cracked, with peeling paint and an iron handle that had rusted to an irregular lump.
“It’s exactly like the door on the berth deck,” said Pazel. “The one Thasha showed me, the night she fell into a trance.”
“Where on the berth deck?” asked Chadfallow.
“Starboard aft, I think,” said Pazel. “The odd thing is that I never could find it again.”
“Then it is the same,” said Chadfallow. He pointed down the corridor. Twenty feet from where they stood, someone had drawn a rectangle in chalk upon a bare stretch of wall. The shape was roughly the same size as the little green door.
“I drew that not an hour ago,” he said, “around this very door. It moves, Pazel. It slides, and melts away, and reappears on other decks.”
“A vanishing compartment?”
Chadfallow nodded. “They are quite real. And they lead to other places, other Chathrands, lost in both space and time. Some are reached through doors like this one, others merely by walking passages in a prescribed order. Some flare to life when a mage is near, or a powerful spell troubles the firmament. Others flicker in and out of existence like an erratic flame, as though the well of their enchantment is running dry.”
Pazel looked again at the door. Suddenly it felt menacing, like a trap waiting to break the leg of an unlucky dog. “How do you know all this?” he asked.
“I made it my business to know,” said Chadfallow, “and I would have told you myself ere now, if you had not tried so hard to avoid me. There are benefits to a life spent in diplomatic circles. One is the chance to collect on favors. I have a friend inside the Trading Company-a record keeper, and a man obsessed with the magical architecture of this ship. Not long after I received my orders to report to Chathrand I paid him a visit.”
Chadfallow looked at the green door. “He told me about that one. It is unlike any other magical portal on this ship. It is part of a relic spell, I think, laid down even before Erithusme’s time, by the mage-shipwrights who built this ship for war.”
“Ramachni warned Thasha not to open that door,” said Pazel.
“Hercol informed me,” said Chadfallow, “but I am not Thasha, am I?”
He put his hand on the corroded knob. And Pazel was suddenly flooded with apprehension, with outright fear. “Don’t do it!” he shouted, seizing the doctor’s arm.
Chadfallow gave him an unpleasant smile. “What awful thing do you imagine lying in wait?”
“Pitfire, Ignus, do we have to find out? If Ramachni said to avoid it that’s blary well good enough!”
“Normally, yes,” said Chadfallow, “but I have an equally valid reason to want to proceed. I was told that finding this door might prove the key to our success. To ridding the world of the Nilstone, that is, and perhaps Arunis as well.”
“Told, were you? By whom?”
“By Ramachni,” said Chadfallow. When Pazel gaped at him, he added, “It was a dream, some months back, as we drew close to Bramian.”
Pazel quickly averted his gaze. “You can’t trust dreams,” he said.
“Ah, but can we afford to ignore them?”
“You’re absolutely cracked,” Pazel heard himself say. “That dream could have come from Arunis. We know he’s been getting inside people’s minds.”
“The minds of the weak and the ill,” said Chadfallow, “or do you count me one of those?”
Pazel turned away, a string of florid Ormali curses on the tip of his tongue. “Damn it all, I don’t feel like arguing,” he said at last. “Just stay away from that door, wherever it turns up. Ramachni didn’t warn Thasha through any blary dream.”
“True,” said Chadfallow thoughtfully, “it was a message in an onion-skin, wasn’t it?”
Not waiting for an answer, he walked on. After a minute Pazel hurried after him. Soon they reached the entrance to sickbay. Pazel could hear someone groaning within.
The doctor opened the door but did not enter. Pazel looked in and saw that the beds were almost full. Men and tarboys glanced up miserably, holding their stomachs, leaning over buckets and pans. Two or three called out to Chadfallow.
“I will attend you presently,” said the doctor to the room at large. Then he closed the door and looked at Pazel. “Thirty patients,” he said. “The water at the Tournament Grounds was unclean. Some sort of parasite, I expect.”
“I’m sorry to hear that,” said Pazel, wondering if they were finished.
Chadfallow leaned against the passage wall. He looked at Pazel with great melancholy. “I am still a hostage, you see: this time to the well-being of the ship. Rain is no use. I am the only reliable doctor this side of the Ruling Sea. The only human doctor, I mean.”
“And you sure are reliable,” said Pazel, looking away.
Chadfallow’s voice grew hard. “I know what you’re thinking: that unless Arunis is stopped and the Nilstone recovered it will not make any difference whether or not these people live or die. That is true. But my own choice is not between defeating Arunis and saving these souls. It is between the certainty of saving lives here, and the small chance that I will be of decisive use on the expedition.”
“Glad to know how carefully you’ve weighed all this.”
A spasm of irritation passed over Chadfallow’s face; then his look became resigned. “You will believe what you wish of me,” he said. “I could change your mind, perhaps-but I would prefer you reached your own conclusions. That has always been my aim: to give you the freedom to think for yourself, and all the tools I could to make that thinking fine.”
“Ignus,” said Pazel. “We’re not going on that expedition, either.”
The doctor stared at him, taken aback. “None of you?”
“How could we, damn it?” said Pazel. “We cause a panic everywhere we go. It will be a hundred times better if the dlomu go by themselves.”
“You were chosen by the Red Wolf.”
“So was Diadrelu,” said Pazel, “and look where that got her. And credek, you just finished talking about choosing for oneself. Did you mean a single word? Because it seems to me I do just fine when I make choices alone. The trouble is when all of you try to choose for me. If it’s not the Wolf it’s Ramachni, or Ott, or Captain Rose. Or you.” Then Pazel added wildly, “Neeps and Thasha feel the same way I do. We’re humans. We belong on this ship. It’s not as if we brought the Nilstone into this world.”
“What does Hercol say to this?”
“You’d better ask him.”
Chadfallow straightened his back. He looked down at Pazel and nodded. “I understand your reasoning perfectly,” he said. “Your decision mirrors my own, after all.”
No words could have been less welcome to Pazel’s ear. “I think I’ll go back to the stateroom now,” he said.
“May I walk with you?” asked the doctor.
Pazel shrugged. He set off, retracing their steps, and Chadfallow walked at his side. Pazel had the grating feeling that he’d just been outmaneuvered once more by a man who’d made a lifetime game of needling him. Had someone told the doctor about his own dream of Suthinia? Was this his way of gloating over how wrong Pazel had been?
“Ignus,” he said through his teeth, “I’m going to ask you a question. And if you answer with anything but yes
