Night sounds, emptiness, a world without people. She drank it in for what felt like hours. Her mind was alert, but robbed of will and purpose; her heart drifted in a void. She thought that if the wind rose just a little she would float away, a cinder, and nothing in the universe would change.
And then out of the darkness Mr. Fiffengurt said, “There’s more to tell, ain’t there?”
Deeper silence, suddenly, as though they were all waiting to breathe. Thasha wondered who would answer first: Hercol, Pazel, she herself? And once they answered, who would be the first to go mad?
But she did not find out, for the silence held. None of them, it seemed, was ready to admit to being awake.
Love and Cataclysm
The world is a little house. If you listen, you will hear your country’s exiles, grumbling. They have been in the next room all along. -
21 Ilbrin 941
Thasha could not recall those moments in the village, but Pazel could. When the tol-chenni stepped into the crumbling square she had turned to him with unfocused eyes, clutched his arm, whispered in terror:
“I didn’t mean to. It was never supposed to happen. You believe me, don’t you?”
Now, some thirty hours later beside the fire, he looked at her-directly, at last, for no one was awake to catch him at it. Only the fire itself was in the way. On one side he saw the bedraggled mass of her hair, not at all pretty, like something that had slithered out of the gulf and expired by Ibjen’s knees. On the other side he could see her legs below the makeshift skirt. Bruised, sleek, powerful. He closed his eyes and it made no difference; if anything he saw them more clearly. Think, he told himself. Face yesterday. If he didn’t the fear would come back in his sleep, pounce on him, tear him apart.
Thasha’s grip had been close to excruciating. “An accident,” she’d said. “I tried to fix it, Pazel, I tried so hard.”
With difficulty he had pried her hands from his shoulders, then held her as she shook, repeating her confession and her plea for belief. “I’m not the devil,” she’d added helpfully. Pazel was shocked by the coincidence of their thoughts. He had made no guesses, diabolical or otherwise. But he was asking himself just who in Alifros she might be.
He gave her water, the cold, sweet water Ibjen had just pumped from the well. Drink deep, drink slowly, he urged. It was the only way to make her stop talking.
For apart from the horror of the mindless humans, there was suddenly the horror of Thasha’s claim that she had made them so. From the other side of the world, apparently. What could one say to that?
He had decided to say nothing at all. Ibjen and his father, Mr. Isul, were saying enough. They were as excited as children: the visitors were the first “woken” humans the old man had seen in fifty years, Ibjen in his lifetime. Still working the pump handle, he cried to Bolutu: “Did you bring them from Masalym, brother? Is there a cure?”
Bolutu just stared at the tol-chenni. His tongue had been mutilated by Arunis the sorcerer, and he had only recently regained its use (dlomu, like newts and starfish, could regenerate lost parts of themselves). Now it was as though the tongue had never grown back.
Hercol recovered first. With an oath he sprinted into the gatehouse at the edge of the square, just in time to keep the rest of the Chathrand’s landing party from barreling through. For the rest of his life, Pazel would remember the man’s swiftness, his absolute resolve. Hercol was in mourning: just weeks ago the woman he loved had been murdered before his eyes. He had as much right as anyone to paralysis, to shock. In the gatehouse the Turachs raised their spears; Mr. Alyash, a trained assassin, sidled toward him with intent. Hercol did not even draw his sword. They could not enter, he said again. They must go back to the ship.
Thasha’s mentor was the deadliest fighting man on the Chathrand, with the possible exception of his old mentor, Sandor Ott. But Alyash had also trained with Ott. And the Turachs were lethal: commandos trained to fight and kill the sfvantskor warrior-priests of the enemy, and to guard the Arquali Emperor himself. How could Hercol have known they would not attack? The answer was obvious: he hadn’t.
And yet there was no bloodshed. The landing party, cursing, retreated to the shore road outside the wall. As soon as they left the gatehouse Hercol turned and shouted to Pazel in his birth-tongue: “Keep them all inside! The dlomu and… those others. Keep them out of sight! And bring fresh water: as much as you three can handle alone. Quickly, lad! Without water no one will go back to that ship!”
Pazel obeyed; at that moment he would have obeyed an order to eat sand or jump into the well; anything to break through the drumbeat inside him. All of them animals. An epidemic, a plague. By that point several more dlomu had crept into the square, and Bolutu had recovered enough to beg water for the ship. Good-natured, his fellow dlomu had run for casks, but the vessels they returned with were small indeed: not above thirty gallons apiece. Pazel and Bolutu rolled these out to the waiting men, and at the sight of the tiny barrels even Fiffengurt lost his temper.
“That won’t come to half a draught per man! We need ten times that just for starters! And the men are hungry, too. What’s Teggatz supposed to cook with, bilge?”
“We will bring more when you return for us,” said Hercol. “Go now, and ask no further questions. Don’t you think I would answer if I could?”
“No,” said Alyash. “Ott’s made you as tight-fisted with secrets as I am.”
“Sandor Ott’s first lesson was survival,” said Hercol, “and survival is all I am thinking of. Go, Alyash! We are plunged in drifts of gunpowder, and you berate me for not striking a match.”
They followed (almost chased) the men back to the pilot boat, and watched them row for the Chathrand, where men thronged like beggars to the gunwale. Elkstem had tucked the ship in behind the largest island, out of sight from the gulf. It was a sensible precaution, for they had not been an hour in the vicinity of Cape Lasung when a trio of unknown ships had passed: slender vessels, running east by southeast with all the canvas they could bear. They were battle-scarred, and too small in any event to threaten Chathrand, but who could say what followed in their wake?
The answer to that question, when it came, had brought with it the second terrible shock of this new world. It had occurred shortly after the standoff at the gatehouse. Pazel and Thasha were searching the village for Bolutu, who had blundered off into the streets, like a dazed survivor of a massacre. Ibjen’s father had said something about food and hobbled away. Pazel and Thasha were sweating: there was no breeze inside the wall. From sandy lanes and unglazed windows, the dlomu peeked out at them in awe. Once a boy of five or six burst laughing from a doorway and collided with Pazel’s legs.
He saw the human hands first, then looked up in terror at Pazel’s pale, brown-eyed human face, and screamed. “Don’t worry, we’re friends,” Pazel ventured. But the boy fled back into the house, wailing, and the word on his lips was, “Monsters!”
The village was small, and in short order they reached a second gate, the chains of its rusty portcullis snapped, the gate itself propped open with timbers. Passing beneath it, they found themselves west of the village, on a footpath that led by way of grass-covered dunes into the stunted forest. Near the edge of the trees, his back to a small, wind-tortured oak, sat Bolutu. His face was grim and distracted. They were about to hail him when voices from inside the gate began to shout in alarm:
“Hide! Fires out! Wagons in! An armada comes!”
They ducked back inside the wall. No one gaped at them now. Children were running, weeping; a woman swept two children into her arms and dashed for cover. Dlomic boys were crouching behind the parapet atop the wall, raising their heads just high enough to peer at the gulf. After a quick scramble, Pazel and Thasha found a staircase and joined them.
It was like a vision of the damned. Four or five hundred ships of unthinkable size and ferocity, rushing east to
