unbuckling his hauberk, and it occurred to Thasha that the previous Turach commander had died in the very act of beating Pazel about the head, and then the boat shot skyward like a rock from a sling, and split across the keel, and Thasha was flying, spinning, shards of hull and mast about her as the tail of the diving serpent snapped like a whip and was gone.
She caught a glimpse of Pazel, arms crossed to protect his face, crashing back into the sea as through a sheet of glass; then Thasha herself struck, headfirst. She barely slowed: the monster’s descent had created a suction that dragged her down, and the cold and terror of sudden darkness nearly made her gasp. But she did not gasp: Thasha was an admiral’s daughter, a thojmele fighter, a survivor of the Nelluroq crossing. She held her breath and tore at her boots.
They were large and came off easily. The woolen coat took longer to escape; by the time she succeeded the water was black and leaden. Somehow she had the clarity of mind to swim sidelong to the downward current. Eight, ten, a dozen aching strokes. Then the current slackened and she aimed for what was left of the sunlight.
Dark flames, overhead. The sharks were returning. She pushed through them, heedless; all she wanted was air. When at last she broke the surface, the dorsal fins were flowing by her like small gray sails.
Her lungs made an ugly croak. There was barely room to tread water among the sharks. She waited for the first bite, cold and angry. But the sharks were dispersing, their collective mind on the serpent and the greater pickings it provided, and not one of them harmed her. On the crest of a wave she saw Pazel, naked to the chest, and Mr. Fiffengurt clinging to a broken plank. She heard Hercol shout for Haddismal but saw neither man.
Her head slipped under again. Her remaining clothes were going to kill her. She clawed at the knot that secured her sailor’s breeches, but only managed to tighten it hopelessly. Giving up, she shed her blouse, then tugged off the breeches with brute force. Rising again, she found the shore at a glance and knew she would not drown.
There was Ibjen: supporting the younger Turach, who was limp. Thasha kicked toward them, doubting that the boy could swim a mile through swells and breakers with a dying marine. But before she had taken three strokes the other dlomic man, Bolutu, surfaced on the other side of the Turach and caught his arm. Together they bore the soldier away.
Thasha’s own battle to reach the land was much harder than she expected. She grew light-headed, and her limbs began to seize with cold. The back-swell fought her, urging her away from the beach like an overbearing host. Blackness, death, come and see, come and see.
When at last her foot grazed bottom she thought suddenly of her father, signing his letters with the word Unvanquished, and dragged herself up from the waves with a growl.
The sand was warm. A mallet smashed at her eardrums with each beat of her heart. She raised her eyes: there were large black animals, walrus-like, lurching fearfully into the waves a hundred yards from where she stood. She fell down and rose unsteadily and fell again. Then she remained on hands and knees and watched a trickle of blood run down her bare arm. A cut on her shoulder, nothing dangerous really. Unless you were swimming, tiring, needed all your strength.
Footsteps, staggering nearer. Someone dropped to his knees beside her and made a choking sound. Pazel. He put his hands on her back and shoulder, inspecting.
“You hurt?” she said.
More choking. Then: “No… only the Turach… he’ll live.”
She turned her head. Pazel was naked and shivering and bleeding from the scalp. His whole body caked with sand. Up the beach she saw the others, crawling or rising shakily to their feet. Her vision blurring, she counted them. A miracle, she thought.
“Find… some clothes.”
A fit of retching took her, but she smiled through it. The nearest clothes were six miles off on the Chathrand. She dropped on her side, facing away from him, then reached for the hand that had not left her shoulder and kissed it, and got a mouthful of sand for her trouble.
“No one died, Thasha.”
“I know.”
Then she rolled over, facing him. No one died. She began to laugh, and Pazel caught her eye and did the same, and then with a shared impulse they turned their backs to each other, no longer laughing exactly, in fact what was it, weeping, fits of pain? Whatever they were about they did it quietly, convulsed but voicing nothing, showing nothing, least of all faces that might have acknowledged, inflicted, the truth.
The dlomu, astonishing swimmers both, had not needed to shed their clothes. They brought their shirts to Thasha to cover herself, and with an arm over her breasts she thanked them, then looked at each in turn, and lastly at Pazel, until all three turned away.
Ibjen had struggled not to stare. Even now he made as if to glance back at her over his shoulder, but checked himself. Thasha watched him as she ripped his shirt open at the seams. Whatever else they are, they’re men.
But then Ibjen had been staring at the humans since their arrival the day before. He still jumped occasionally when one of them spoke. The way humans did, Thasha mused, when faced with a woken animal, a creature who used words when they expected brays or screeches.
For in his lifetime Ibjen had never met a human capable of more than that. They were animals, dumb animals: every last human known to exist in this hemisphere. They had, he admitted when pressed, rather less sense than dogs. Perhaps as much as cows or sheep. Thasha, Pazel and Hercol had met a few of these damaged humans yesterday, naked, drooling, clustered about Ibjen’s father, gazing at the newcomers in thoughtless fear. He had tamed them, the old man said. He had given them names.
She tied the torn shirt about her waist and pulled the other, wet and chilly, over her head. The sun was low in the west; in an hour it would be dark, and they would be cold indeed if the wind kept up.
Fifty yards along the beach, stranded by some long-ago storm, lay the bleached trunk of a mighty tree. It was a good five feet thick, and Thasha saw that the men had withdrawn to the far side, peering over it timidly as she approached. On another day she might have laughed. Arquali sailors, for all their crassness and carnal appetite, would rather be hanged than spied naked by a woman.
But as she neared the trunk she realized that something had changed. Ibjen was talking, and he looked like a messenger with so much bad news to impart that he expects to be chased off or stabbed before he finishes. Fiffengurt and the Turachs stood motionless, pale. Hercol had decided to tell them the truth.
“You are-” Ibjen stammered, embarrassed. “They are dying out in the wild, I understand. Winter kills so many. They get sick, they can’t find food, and people-dlomu, I mean-aren’t allowed to set up feeding stations like they used to. The war shortages, you see.”
Feeding stations. Human beings who scavenged along the edges of woods, the outskirts of towns. Humans who ran like deer when the dlomu approached, or waited, blinking and terrified, for a handout. Humans without human minds.
“We call them tol-chenni. That’s a foreign word, I forget what it means-”
“It means ‘sleepwalkers,’ ” said Pazel.
“In Nemmocian,” added Bolutu. “How very… evocative.”
“We’re breaking Imperial law by feeding them,” said Ibjen. “The Grain Edict, dlomic labor for dlomic mouths. Some of the men want to drive the tol-chenni off into the woods, but they won’t cross my father. Besides, there aren’t any laws these days. Not really. Not out here.”
Thasha sat down with her back to the tree. Out here was the Northern Sandwall: a ribbon of dunes stretching east to west, horizon to horizon. On one side, the Nelluroq: the vast, vindictive Ruling Sea. On the other, this Gulf of Masal: warmer, infinitely calmer, and such a brilliant blue that it was like the sea a child paints who has never beheld one. Yesterday, quite literally dying of thirst, they had limped into this gulf around a sandy knob six miles to the east, a place that Mr. Bolutu had recognized with cries of joy as Cape Lasung.
They had reached the very margins of his homeland, he declared: Bali Adro, an empire greater by far than the Empire of Arqual, which was Thasha’s own country, and one of the two great powers of the Northern world. Bolutu had lived for twenty years in Arqual. Twenty years magically disguised as a human; twenty years with no hope of returning, until he joined the crew of the Chathrand. Still it was not surprising that he knew Lasung at a glance, for a singular landmark stood upon the cape: Narybir, the Guardian Tower, a weird, wax-like spire of red stone. The tower graced coins, he said; it appeared in murals and paintings and books of architecture. No citizen of his beloved
