across the Ruling Sea. It was the ixchel homeland, a country ruled by the little people, the land Talag had sworn they would return to and reclaim.
He’s not going to tell them, Pazel realized. He’s no fool: better that they should want to find Stath Balfyr than that he should have to drive them there with threats. Of course it may come to that in the end.
“Sirs?” said a thin voice from the edge of the chamber.
It was Ibjen, the dlomic boy.
Taliktrum looked at him dubiously. “You have something to add?”
“The armada, sirs,” said Ibjen, his voice shaking. “There was talk of it in the village. Just talk, you understand. We are simple folk-”
“You don’t have to convince us of that,” said Taliktrum. “Speak quickly, and be done.”
“Out here we have little to do with the Empire, sir,” said Ibjen, “and the news we do have comes by way of Masalym. When my father came out to the Sandwall, boats still made the crossing from the city every day or two, and soldiers would be billeted with the townsfolk, and speak of the Platazcra, the Infinite Conquest. But that was years ago. For a long time now we have been abandoned-that is why my mother chose to send me here.”
“You ramble, boy.”
Ibjen made an apologetic nod. “Sir, before your ship we had had no visitors in half a year. And the last visitor died of fever in just three days. We have no doctor, so my father and I tended him as best we could. He was not a man of Masalym. Some guessed that he came from Orbilesc, others from Calambri.”
“These names mean nothing to us,” said Taliktrum. “If you cannot get to the point-”
“Listen to him!” said Thasha. “He’s doing us a favor, being here.”
“And those words blary well do mean something-one of ’em at least,” added Fiffengurt. “ORBILESC is engraved on our blary sheet anchors, though the letters are faded now. I always wondered if it referred to her home port.” He gestured at Ibjen. “You carry on, lad. I say you’re mighty brave, to step aboard this ship.”
Ibjen did not look brave at that moment. “Orbilesc and Calambri are cities far to the west, in the heart of Bali Adro,” he said. “And it is true that the Empire’s greatest shipyards are there.” He looked at Thasha and swallowed. “My father sent me to the neighbors’ house when the stranger began to die. But last night he told me something he had never mentioned before. That the dying man had broken his silence before the end. That he’d said he came from a village on the banks of the River Sundral, near Orbilesc. He said that the whole of the city had been caught up in some huge, secret effort, for years. That Imperial warships turned away all private vessels at a distance of fifty miles, and that a strange glow hung over Orbilesc by night. Later the mountains began to shake, and boulders crashed down upon his village. The fell light grew stronger. And finally the river gushed with boiling water that killed every fish, every frog and snake and wading bird-even the trees whose roots drank from the stream. That, the man had claimed, was when he fled east.”
Ibjen gazed beseechingly at his listeners. “My father thought it but the ravings of a dying man. Until yesterday, that is. Now he believes that Orbilesc was building ships for the Emperor. The same ships that passed in the gulf, Thashiziq. The ships of the armada.”
There was a long pause; the men were too unsettled to speak. To Pazel’s surprise it was Big Skip who broke the silence.
“Right,” he said. “Fleet or no fleet, we have to sail before we starve. And it can’t be north across the Nelluroq, even if we wished to-”
“Which we do not,” said Haddismal, “until we reach Stath Balfyr, wherever that may be. This is an Arquali ship, and Magad’s word is law, even here on the far side of Alifros.”
“Glory to the Ametrine Throne,” said Alyash drily, “and if that ain’t motivation enough, there’s the small matter of him crucifying us, with our families, if we return to Arqual without completing the mission.”
Pazel kept his face expressionless. Magad’s done all the punishing he’s going to do, he thought.
“So,” said Big Skip, “turn east and we might catch up with that hellish armada; turn west and we might find the hellish place it came from. And either way we won’t get far before we’re too hungry to do our jobs. Ain’t it simple, then? We head due south-to this Masalym, thirty miles across the bay.”
No one seconded the motion. Big Skip raised his bushy eyebrows. “It’s a city,” he insisted. “They’ll feed us, just as these good village folk gave us water. What about it, mates? Thirty miles to the butcher’s shop, says I.”
But Bolutu shook his head. “The Masalym of my day would have been a good choice,” he said. “It was a trading city, and so used to visitors-either by sea, or out of the strange mountains of the Efaroc Peninsula at its back. Yet if Masalym today is ruled by the same power that launched those ships, then I for one would rather keep my distance from the butcher’s shop.”
“Ha!” blurted Uskins. “The butcher’s shop!”
His laugh was jarring, almost a scream, and nearly everyone looked at him in anger. Uskins flinched, as though expecting a blow. Whether or not his fear was justified Pazel never learned, however, for at that moment the ship’s drums erupted in pandemonium.
“Beat to quarters! Beat to quarters!” Already the cries resounded through the ship.
“Damnation, we’re still at anchor!” shouted Fiffengurt. “Alyash, get to the starboard battery! Sunderling, on deck! Set Fegin and his men to bracing that foremast! Go!”
“Are we under attack?” Taliktrum shouted. “Fiffengurt, how can this be?”
“It can’t!” snapped Fiffengurt. “There’s no way in Alifros a ship’s crept up on us! But who knows, who knows, in this mad country?” He turned wildly about. “Pathkendle! Wake the anchor-lifters! We can’t afford to leave more iron on the seafloor! Run, by the Sweet Tree, run!”
A Hasty Departure
22 Ilbrin 941
Pazel sprinted from the manger. He heard Thasha shouting his name but did not look back. Foreign-born, mutinous, expelled from the service, sentenced to death-amazing how it all disappeared. In emergencies he was simply a tarboy.
Refeg and Rer, the anchor-lifters, slept in a kind of stall behind the portside cable tiers. They almost never moved quickly. Pazel flew across the orlop with all the speed he dared, leaping the broken floor planks, flinging open doors.
He heard their breath, deep organ wheezes, before his eyes discerned their shapes. The brothers slept side by side, curled in beds of straw, their six-foot-long arms folded against their mammoth chests. Their skin was yellow-brown and rough as rhino hide, and festooned here and there with clumps of fur, green-black, like moss on stone. They were augrongs, survivors of a race that had all but disappeared from Alifros, dwellers in an Etherhorde slum when not serving on some Arquali ship. They spent nearly all their time asleep, harboring their titanic strength, rising for just one meal a week or to perform some labor that would have required scores of men. Their language was so rich in metaphor it seemed almost the language of dreams, and Pazel was the only person aboard who spoke it.
Left to themselves, augrongs could take a quarter hour to wake, and another quarter hour to get to their feet. Shouting, pleading, beating on cans did nothing to speed the process, and no one in their right mind would nudge them with pole or pitchfork. But a faster method had occurred to Pazel. Bending close (but not too close) to their sleeping heads, he summoned his memory of the Augronga tongue and boomed in an inhuman voice: “Music in the forest: tomorrow calls me, I answer with my feet.”
Two pairs of fist-sized yellow eyes snapped open. The creatures surged upright, grunting like startled elephants. Pazel smiled. It worked every time: he had recited a phrase reserved for the saddest farewells. Each augrong thought that he was hearing the other’s voice, and after countless years cut off from their people, the brothers’ deepest fear was separation.
When they caught sight of Pazel they heaved irritated sighs. “Always the same one, the babbler, the noisy goose,” rumbled Rer, his huge eyelids drooping like batwings.
“Noisy till he’s plucked,” said Refeg, making a halfhearted swipe at Pazel.
