Bolutu looked to the others for support. Hercol nodded. “It is time we did speak, at that. You had best sit down, Captain Rose. And you as well, Mr. Fiffengurt.”
“Sit down?” shouted Rose. “To the Pits with that! Tell me!”
“This is the little something you wouldn’t talk about, ain’t it?” said Fiffengurt, angry himself. “That night by the fire on the Sandwall, when I asked if there was more, and you all played dead-to-the-world. From me, Pathkendle, Undrabust! You kept secrets from me, from old Fiffengurt, your friend through every spot of nastiness since we sailed out of Sorrophran! No I won’t sit down either!” Fiffengurt stamped his foot. “I’m hurt, Miss Thasha, that’s what I am.”
“You won’t care about that in a moment,” said Thasha.
Her hollow voice scared Mr. Fiffengurt sober. He sat down. Rose would not, at least at first, but as Thasha began to speak of the time-skip he groped for a chair. Pazel found that watching the emotions (denial, outrage, terror, wonder, loss) surfacing on Rose’s craggy face brought his own agony back to him. Gone, everything gone. It was one thing to imagine death at sea, quite another to survive a terrible ordeal and know that your world-the world that made you, the people you loved-had not. He thought of Maisa, Hercol’s beloved deposed Empress, whom he had fought for years to restore to the throne. He thought of his mother, whom he had dreamed of so strangely for several nights, and of Eberzam Isiq. Their old age, their final years, their deaths with no family beside them. He thought of Mr. Fiffengurt’s Annabel, raising their child, never knowing what had become of the father. Mother and child were dead and gone, their very names forgotten, and the Chathrand reduced to a few lines in the latest Polylex. The Great Ship, the one that vanished two centuries ago.
He could see that Rose did not believe a word.
Fiffengurt, for his part, was turning from one face to the next. Begging someone to laugh. Pazel’s eyes grew bright. Stupid, he accused himself, even you don’t quite believe it yet. How can you ask them to accept it, if you’re too frightened yourself?
With a great effort he summoned one of Hercol’s teachings from fighting-class, a phrase from the Thojmele Code: You will fail in proportion to your resistance to change. Fluidity is universal, stasis a phantom of the mind.
“Two centuries,” said the prince. “That is much worse than my own case. I set sail just after my twenty- seventh birthday, aboard the great Segral-class ship Leurad. There were five ships in that expedition: all bound for the North, to your own lands. It would have been historic, the rekindling of contact between two worlds, and it might have brought a measure of safety and peace to both, for there were warnings we meant to give, and facts we sought to learn. But the moment our ships entered the Red Storm we lost sight of one another, and when the Leurad emerged on the Northern side, she was alone. Worse still, a horrid gale bore down on us not two days later, and we were almost sunk. We limped home again, passing once more through the blaze of light-only to find some eight decades had elapsed. That was twenty years ago. I have become a creature of this latter-day world, but I still mourn the one I lost.”
Rose leaned on his elbows, his hands folded before his face. “No,” he said, “this is absurd. This is the stuff of madness, nothing more.”
Pazel had never seen him so shaken. “It’s true, Captain,” he said. “Everyone we left behind is dead.”
“Oh no,” said the prince, startling him.
The others turned him a mystified look. “What do you mean, no?” said Thasha.
“I mean,” said Olik, “that you have misunderstood the Storm. Not surprisingly-I did as well. But I have made a study of the phenomenon since my return, and have established a few points beyond question. First of all, the time-skip occurs only when sailing northward. Your two centuries vanished, Mr. Bolutu, when you first sailed north. It is a matter of how totally estranged North and South have become that you were not even aware of it, during the twenty further years you dwelled in those lands.”
Pazel felt light-headed. He saw Thasha gripping the edge of the table as though some wild force might try to snatch it, or her, away. She said, “When we passed through the Storm on the Chathrand, then, heading south-”
“No time-skip occurred at all,” said Olik. “I guarantee it, my dear.”
Everyone but Rose and Fiffengurt cried aloud, their feelings irrepressible. Even Hercol’s face was transformed by a sudden, unbearable change in his understanding of the world. Thasha dropped her eyes, and Pazel knew it was taking all her effort not to weep. Her father’s alive. Somewhere, ten thousand miles from here, he’s alive and waiting. And my mother, too. And we can never, ever go back.
Bolutu rose and walked stiffly to the corner by the washroom. Pazel’s mind was flooded, the thoughts almost too sharp to bear. That man just learned that his world died twenty years ago. Twenty years in exile, never dreaming that every friend, cousin, brother, sister was dead and gone. He lived a lie for two decades. Aya Rin.
“My second observation,” said the prince, speaking over their oaths and laments, “is that the Red Storm is weakening. It has always fluctuated in intensity-and thus in its power as both a time-interrupter and a barrier to the flow of magic across the hemispheres. But there can be no doubt that it is in swift decline. I would not be surprised if it vanished altogether within another decade or two. Already there are periods when it is very weak.”
“Meaning what?” Pazel demanded, utterly forgetting that he was speaking to royalty. “Meaning that there are times when it wouldn’t toss us centuries into the future, even when we’re sailing north?”
“That is correct,” said Olik.
Now they were surrounding his chair, mobbing him. “How many years forward would it propel us?” asked Hercol.
Olik shrugged. “Forty or fifty? Perhaps fewer at the weakest times. My estimates are quite rough. It’s a difficult matter to put to the test.”
“And every year,” said Thasha, “it weakens?”
The prince nodded gravely.
“Then,” cried Marila, “say, in four or five years, even, those fluctuations, if we hit them just right-”
“Could mean that your time-displacement would be small indeed, on your return-if, as you say, your timing was perfect.”
Suddenly Hercol lifted Thasha right off her feet and into his arms. They had eyes only for each other, then- streaming eyes, and a look of understanding that left Pazel mystified.
“Did I not say it, girl?” said Hercol, looking almost furious. “Tell me, did I not say it?”
“You did,” she said, embracing him with arms and legs.
“Now say it yourself,” he growled. “Say it now and believe it forever. Claim it, Thasha Isiq.”
“Eyacaulgra,” she said. And as she kissed him, and Hercol lowered her to her feet, Pazel’s bewildered mind did the translating. The language was Hercol’s native Tholjassan, but the sentiment was her father’s maxim, his signature: Unvanquished.
A few minutes later Prince Olik rose to leave. He was glad to have given them new hope, he said, but he warned them that the immediate peril was real.
“I will leave you with three suggestions,” he said. “First, you should each pack a visiting bag-clothes and toothbrushes, sleepwear and such-to last you several days. Masalym hospitality is a ferocious business, and once he sees for himself that you’re not demons or dangerous lunatics, the Issar may very well insist on parading you through all the finer homes of the Upper City. You would cause great offense if you had to come back here for a change of socks.
“Second, ask for nothing in the Upper City. As a rule we dlomu take pride in our generosity, but in Masalym that pride is an obsession, and among the well-to-do of Masalym it must be experienced to be believed. If you want water, you mention in passing that the weather tends to dry one’s throat. To make a direct request is to insult your host for not having provided it already.”
“But all we did was ask, when we showed up in port,” said Marila. “Food, food. We practically begged on our knees.”
“Yes,” said Olik, “and that made it terribly difficult to feed you. Vadu was preparing a grand feast, but when you begged, he was so offended that he ordered the cooks not to deliver it to the port. I was unable to change his mind until the following day.”
“What about that first meal, the one that came by pulleys in the dark?”
“You can thank Ibjen for that,” said the prince. “He was clever to mention those nursery rhymes about the feeling of hunger. The poor of the Lower City know the feeling well, and it was the poor who fed you. I doubt if the
