ship, mighty and helpless below. They were pointing, shouting, grasping at one another in shock. There was just enough light for them to know the crew was human.
“Thashiziq!”
Ibjen’s voice. Thasha saw him, waving excitedly from a platform. The other dlomu left a little space about him, looking askance. As though in greeting one of them he had become almost a stranger himself.
She waved. Ibjen was chattering, explaining; his countrymen did not appear to be paying attention.
“Pazel should be here,” said Neeps. “He should be with us right now, seeing this.”
“Yes,” said Thasha with feeling, turning to him. But the distance in Neeps’ eyes told her that his words had been meant for Marila alone.
“Are they talking?” someone shouted from above. “Listen! Listen to them talk!”
Then Bolutu laughed. “Of course they’re talking, brothers! There’s not a tol-chenni on this ship! Hail! I am Bolutu of Istolym, and it is long-terribly long-since I walked among my people! I want black beer! I want candied fern and river clams! How long before you bring us ashore?”
His question was met with silence. The dlomu on the walkway shuffled, as though all were hoping someone else would speak. Then Ibjen startled everyone by slipping under the rail. Deaf to the shouts of his countrymen, he scrambled out onto the cornice of the last stone pillar. It was as close as one could get to the ship. In a somewhat lower voice he called to them again.
“His Lordship the Issar of Masalym must decide how to welcome you. Don’t fear, though. We are a kindly city, and won’t leave you long in distress.”
“Just so long as you don’t leave us to sink in this blary well,” said Marila.
“Ibjen,” called Neeps, “where’s Prince Olik, and why in the Nine Pits did he jump overboard?”
“His Majesty has gone to the Upper City,” said Ibjen, “to the Palace of the Issar. I am sure he will speak well of you-generally well.”
“Why did you abandon us?” shouted the mizzen-man, Mr. Lapwing, somewhat crossly.
“I was never your prisoner, sir,” shot back the youth, “and Olik bade me come ashore with him. As you know, I gave him my promise.”
“Your worthless promise,” shouted Alyash.
“People of Masalym,” said Bolutu, raising his voice, “why are your houses unlit?”
“Because we’re all out here staring at you,” ventured someone, and the dlomu on the walkway laughed. Thasha felt a prickling of her skin: that was a forced and nervous laugh. A laugh like a curtain drawn over a corpse.
“Ibjen,” she shouted, obeying a sudden impulse, “we’re running out of food.”
The crowds above grew quiet, thoughtful. “I’ve told them, Thashiziq,” said Ibjen. Then all at once he gave her a sly look. “There’s a saying among us, that even after a hundred wealthy generations, the dlomu would never forget the feeling of hunger. Barren land and empty sea: from out this womb came I and thee. In my father’s village they still teach us those rhymes. We’re old-fashioned out there, you know.”
A new kind of grumbling came from the crowd above. Thasha saw Bolutu turn away, hiding a smile. “We’ll feed them, stupid boy,” called someone. “What do you take us for?”
There were uneasy nods, but no one moved. The sun-and-leopard flag rippled in the wind. Then a very old dlomic woman cried out in a voice like a shrieking hinge:
“You’re human!”
It was an accusation.
“That’s right, ma’am,” ventured Fiffengurt.
“Humans! Human beings! Why don’t you tell us how long?”
Captain Rose, gazing upward with a malevolent frown, echoed her words. “How long?”
“Tell us!” cried the old woman again. “You think we don’t know why you’ve come?”
Now the other dlomu mobbed the woman, hushing her urgently. The woman clung to the rail, shouting, her limp hair tumbling across her face. “You can’t fool us! You’re dead! Every one of you is dead! You’ve come on a ghost-ship out of the Ruling Sea, and you’re here because it’s the end of the world. Go on, tell us how long we have to live!”
Faces in the Glass
26 Ilbrin 941
There are guests and there are prisoners, and, very rarely, persons whose status in a house is so unusual that no one can assign them a category. Among the latter was an aging man with a bald, veined head and broad shoulders on the Island of Simja. For three months he had been a secret resident in the North Tower of Simjalla Palace, in a comfortable round room with translucent glass over the window and a fire always crackling in the hearth.
Making his case even more unusual was the fact that his presence, his very existence, was known to just three people on earth. One was his middle-aged nurse, who was quiet and attentive and rubbed brysorwood oil into his leathery heels. The other was a doctor who commended him for his habit of daily calisthenics. The third was King Oshiram, monarch of Simja. The nurse did not have a name for her silent patient. Only the men were aware that he was Thasha’s father, Admiral Eberzam Isiq.
It was barely a fortnight since he had recovered his name. It had been cooked out of him during his seven weeks underground, along with most of his memory, all of his pride. Like bricksteak, that detested navy product he’d choked down for decades, salt beef dried in the ovens against the weevils and the damp, food you had to attack with a chisel. After a week submerged in brine it might soften, might absorb something again-or it might not. So it was with the admiral. He had literally been pulled from an oven. From a kiln in a forgotten dungeon under Simjalla, where he had barricaded himself against the monster rats.
He was a stout old veteran, well muscled and formidable even in scarlet pajamas, his new uniform, worn as unself-consciously as battle fatigues. He stared for hours at his slippers, or his bed. He had survived not only the rats but the agony of deathsmoke, from which addiction the doctor was trying to help him break free.
Insidious doesn’t begin to describe it, the physician had told the King. It’s in his blood, his urine, even his sweat. He should have all the visible signs: nosebleeds, wheezing, numb fingertips. He suffers none of these, though his internal pain is classic deathsmoke. She didn’t want him guessing-not him or anyone else. But the only way to avoid those telltale signs is to increase a victim’s exposure to the drug very slowly-terribly slowly, Your Highness. The one who did this to him had the patience of a fiend.
For the doctor, Isiq was a return to form: as a medical student he had worked with veterans of the Second Sea War. For years now he had been the King’s own physician, and knew the monarch trusted him. He did not have a relationship of fear with the King, who was almost young enough to be his son. But he had seen the absolute warning in Oshiram’s eyes when the monarch swore him to secrecy.
“Not a whisper, not a glance, not a cough, do you hear me? They will kill him. I’m not telling you to deny that you’re caring for a patient in the North Tower. I’m telling you never to need to deny it. These people are masters of their trade. Imperial masters, Arquali masters. Beside them our own spies are imbeciles. They had a bunker inside our walls, under the Mirkitj ruins, and we didn’t suspect a thing. You must try not even to think of him, except when you’ve stepped into his chamber and barred the door.”
The doctor frowned and trembled, but he was no less thorough for his fear. The bloodroot tea he prescribed soothed Isiq’s craving for deathsmoke, if only a little. The fresh greens and goat’s milk brought color to his skin.
But memory proved less willing to return. They had given him a mirror; Isiq had turned it to the wall. After he regained his name he had reached for it again, but the moment his fingers touched the frame he felt a warning shock. The face he saw there might be too full of accusation, too aware.
The little tailor bird urged him to be patient. “Months of winter before us yet, friend Isiq. There’s no cause to worry, or to rush. You humans live so blary long.”
He was a woken bird, of course, and small enough to flit through the eye-level hole in the translucent glass of
