mouth to thirsty mouth.
If he had been among the men ordered (and mostly eager) to kill “the little brutes,” he might have been even more impressed. For the carnage of the topdeck-twenty-nine ixchel and four humans slain-was by far the worst that occurred. True, Sandor Ott killed five more ixchel in as many minutes, and Ludunte in an act of madness jumped onto the head of the whaling captain, Magritte, and plunged twin daggers into his eyes. True, eight of the little people were kicked and clubbed to death on the Silver Stair, and another three on the berth deck, and an Uturphan topman was found in a cow stall with the veins in his ankles slit. But the casualties ended there. When Ott raced ahead of everyone down the No. 1 ladderway, he was executing a plan. Slight clues, chance remarks by the ixchel to their captives, observations brought to him by Alyash and Haddismal and others-above all, endless hours of maniacally focused thought-had brought him to a certainty. The mercy deck. The ixchel had their stronghold there. Probably forward of the ladderway, in that massive barricade of boxes and crates that were never unloaded in Simja, locked down still by bolts and rings and iron-tight straps, the furnishings for the Isiq household that was never to be (that he, Ott, had made sure would never be).
Ott was quite correct; and with his usual ruthlessness he slashed the straps and shouldered over crates and axed his way into the heart of the barricade. But when at last he had torn open the hive-like fortress of the ixchel he found not one of them there to interrogate or kill. They had gone. Some spare clothes remained. A thimble-small teacup was still vaguely warm.
Ott sniffed the cup. He had killed too quickly, he had no one to question. He sniffed again, no conscious idea why he did so, and eighty years of immersion in killing schemes saved his life.
He leaped from the pile of crates, smashed headlong across the compartment, hurled himself down the open shaft of the ladderway-and an explosion tore apart the space where he had been standing.
A black-powder trap. The compartment bloomed with flame. Shards of the Isiqs’ antique china flew like deadly spears, silver cutlery embedded itself in walls, a trumpet was forced half through the floorboards into the orlop deck.
Immediately the Chathrand’s fire crew sprang for the hoses, and a team raced to start turning the chain- pumps again-but there was no bilge to pump, and certainly no seawater. The men fought the blaze with fresh water and sand. But even with a hundred men battling the fire, Rose kept up the hunt for the ixchel.
He simply did not find any, then or ever.
They were not in the hold. They had not taken to the rigging. Many had been seen going over the sides, but where to then? Only one staircase led from the floor of the berth up into the city, and not an ixchel was seen upon it all day. Fifty, at most sixty, might have made it into the damnably protected stateroom-but not six hundred. They had not crawled between the inner and outer hulls, or into the forepeak, or the light-shafts, or windscoops, or into the bottom of the cable tiers. They had not burrowed into the rotting hay of the manger, or massed between the floorboards (Rose gassed these hidden spaces with sulphur, one after another, as day turned to night and the dlomu watch changed again and again).
Witchcraft, said somebody, after the fourth fruitless hour of searching. They’re with Arunis, said another. But the sorcerer’s lair also eluded them. Only his laugh came again in the darkness of the hold, just as a nervous Mr. Uskins was watching his lamp go out. He wanted to scream but could not. The mage is here, I feel it, that is his hand on my shoulder. Uskins crouched down, a quivering mass, and begged the darkness to spare him.
For those who had always loathed and feared the “crawlies,” the recapture of the vessel should have brought a feeling of triumph. It did not. They would go to their hammocks that night more afraid than ever of being murdered in their sleep.
The humans had chanted Death, death. Only some forty-three ixchel proved willing to die that day, however- though it might be assumed, thought Lady Oggosk, picking her slow way through the bodies on the topdeck, that they would all remember the sentiment.
Time Regained
1 Modobrin 941
230th day from Etherhorde
A warlord pauses on the field
Newly silent, newly taken by his men
There among many corpses shines a face he knows: They were friends as children
A time like a dream
The heart, once shattered, is open at last.
Three days passed. The stone oven was dismantled, and the stones carried away. The dlomu delivered much in the way of raw foodstuffs, and several enormous crates of mul. But they brought no more hot meals, and none of the black beer Mr. Bolutu had longed for. Masalym had evidently decided that the ship was intoxicated enough.
Pazel had never felt more disheartened. To think of all the hopes they had placed on Bali Adro! An enlightened Empire, Bolutu had said, a place of just laws, peace among the many races, a wise and decent monarch on the throne. A place where good mages of Ramachni’s sort would be waiting to deal with Arunis, and take away the Stone. Bolutu had not lied to them: he had simply been describing the Bali Adro of two centuries before.
What would they do with their visitors now? The signs were hard to read. From beneath the hull came the noise of saws and hammers: the repairs, at least, were going forward. Soldiers remained plentiful along the rim of the berth, but the ordinary townsfolk were no more to be seen. Teams of dockworkers, using two of the big cargo cranes, raised what were unmistakably gangways, and swung the wooden structures into position between the ship’s rail and the edge of the berth: lowered, they would have formed wide, railed bridges between ship and shore. But they were not lowered. The workers left them dangling, thirty feet above the topdeck, like a promise deferred.
The “birdwatchers”-so someone had named the dlomu in the ash-gray coveralls, with their notebooks and field glasses-came each morning, and left only at sundown. They studied the Chathrand in shifts, whispering together for a while when one man replaced another. Vadu joined them at the end of each day. He read the watchers’ reports, his usual gaping expression often changing to a frown. When he looked at the ship his head bobbed faster.
What had the dlomu really made of the slaughter four days ago? Were they shocked, or was sudden, mindless killing all too familiar to them? In a sense it hardly mattered. They had seen humans at their worst. Any chance of winning the city’s trust had surely disappeared.
So, of course, had some five hundred ixchel.
Early morning, the first day of the last month of the year: in the North, winter would have begun in earnest; here each day felt warmer than the last. Pazel woke with sunlight already hot on his face through the single porthole of the cabin he now shared with Neeps. He groaned. Neeps was snoring. He rolled out of his hammock and groped around on the floor for his clothes.
“Such a racket,” mumbled Neeps into his pillow. “Thought you were Old Jupe, outside my window back home.”
Pazel pulled on his breeches. “Your neighbor?”
“Our sow.”
Pazel tugged at one of the ropes of Neeps’ hammock, untying it, and lowered his friend’s head to the floor. Eyes still shut, Neeps oozed like softening butter from his canvas bed. He came to rest among their boots. “Thanks,” he said, appearing to mean it.
“Get up,” said Pazel, rubbing his eyes. “Fighting practice, remember? If you want to eat before Thasha and
