“Arunis, you mean?” said Pazel, blowing the sawdust from his sanding-stone.
Neeps shook his head. “Olik. As though he’d warned us that he was with Arunis, and then had to prove it by nudging him to kill again.”
They were on a scaffold over the tonnage hatch, along with Thasha, Marila and Hercol. They were sanding a part of the enormous pine trunk that would replace the makeshift foremast. The pine was their one spare mast- trunk, the other having been lost to fire. It was propped at a diagonal, one end jutting out over the quay, the other six decks below, where men were still ripping away the bark with drawknives, tackling knots with chisels and planes. The dlomu had taken charge of the Chathrand’s exterior-their own scaffolding rose on either side of her damaged hull-but they had so far left all other repairs to the crew.
“He didn’t quite say he was with Arunis,” said Thasha. “I mean, yes, he said Arunis was with the Ravens, and he called them a ‘noble Society.’ But he never claimed to be part of that Society himself. And even when he stopped pretending to like us-stopped saying ‘my friends’ and all that, and told us how reckless we’d been-even then he never praised Arunis. It would have been easy to say ‘the Great Mage’ or ‘my master’ or anything of that kind. But he wasn’t gloating, the way Arunis does himself. He really did seem to be warning us.”
“To judge by Bolutu’s despair,” said Hercol, “all such warnings must be in vain, if the Ravens have truly seized control of Bali Adro. They were, you recall, the very ‘gang of criminals’ who opposed the old, just regime he so proudly served-the gang who sent Arunis to the North in the first place, to seek the Nilstone.”
“If Olik is with the Ravens,” said Neeps, “then we can’t trust what he said about the Red Storm, either. He may just have wanted to keep us off-balance, by giving us hope that we might return to our own time one day, or something close to it. So that we’d spend our time pondering that, instead of ways to fight him.”
Hercol shook his head. “I think he spoke the truth about the Red Storm, at least. Think of Arunis. If we cannot return to the North without leaping centuries into the future, what sense is there in his plans? Either he has always been ignorant of the Storm’s nature, or he is counting on the Shaggat cult remaining powerful enough to trigger open warfare hundreds of years after his first rise to power. Neither is likely. Therefore Arunis, too, must be counting on a weakened Storm.”
Neeps gave them a stubborn look. “I still say Olik’s lying big about something,” he said. “You know I can tell when people lie.”
“Oh please,” said Marila.
“There was something wrong about his whole visit,” said Pazel. “Neeps is right, it doesn’t add up. And every other time a mystery like this has surfaced, we’ve eventually traced it back to Arunis. Credek, we may have just let one of his servants walk around in the stateroom.”
“Why is Arunis doing all this killing lately, anyway?” said Thasha. “Obviously he’s not afraid anymore of what will happen if he kills the spell-keeper, and the Shaggat comes back to life.”
“Or rather,” said Hercol, “he is no longer constrained by the fear of chancing upon the spell-keeper, when he kills. And that can only mean that he has found a way to rule certain people out. And that can only be because he has learned who the spell-keeper is. Either that, or he has despaired of the Shaggat altogether, and no longer minds the risk. He had his own copy of the thirteenth Polylex for a short time, before Pazel destroyed it. Perhaps in that time he glimpsed some other method of using the Nilstone. Some more remote chance, but one that he never forgot. Maybe he is groping toward it even now.”
“You think he’s doing some kind of experiment?” said Neeps. “Sending one person after another to touch the Nilstone, and watching what happens?”
“But the same thing happens with each of them,” said Pazel. “They shrivel up and die. And anyway he’s not there watching, unless he’s turned into an ant or a flea.”
“Maybe he’s watching their minds, not their bodies,” said Thasha.
They worked in silence for several minutes, and then Pazel spoke again. “I’m going to have a fit.”
All the others stopped work and looked at him. They knew what “a fit” meant in Pazel’s case. Thasha reached out as if to touch his arm, but hesitated. “Soon?” she said.
Pazel shrugged, applying his sanding-stone with force. “Maybe two days from now. Four at the most. The taste in my mouth started this morning. And the purring sound.”
“No fear, mate,” said Neeps. “We know what to do. You just run for the stateroom, bury your head in pillows. You won’t hear much in-well, in the admiral’s old room.”
The last time Pazel’s fits had come, he had fled to the reading cabin-that tiny, beautiful, glassed-in chamber off the stateroom. But the reading cabin was adjacent to Thasha’s own. For days now she and Fulbreech had passed an hour or two each evening in her cabin, laughing and murmuring. They kept their voices low, but it pierced the walls nonetheless. During his fits any voices at all were a torture to Pazel. Thasha and Fulbreech’s would be unbearable.
“Those signs, the purring and the evil taste,” said Hercol, “mean that your Gift is at work even now?”
“This very minute,” said Pazel, “for all the good that does us.”
“And your hearing’s sharper too?” asked Marila.
“I don’t know yet,” said Pazel. “It used to work only with translated voices-as if my mind was reaching for them, you understand? But the last time, when Chadfallow gave me that drug, I could hear almost everything. Birds, breathing, whispers fifty feet away. That was on Bramian. A lot of things changed on Bramian.”
Thasha was looking at him, pensive. “That thing you spoke with. The eguar.”
Pazel’s encounter with the deadly, magic-steeped eguar was one of the worst moments of his life. “What about it?” he said.
“It mentioned the South, didn’t it?”
“Yes,” said Pazel. “I told you. It called the South the world my brethren made.”
Thasha nodded. “Last night I was reading-”
Pazel bit his lips. With your darling Fulbreech.
“-and I learned something about eguar. Not under ‘Eguar’ of course; the Polylex doesn’t make anything that easy. But there was a little paragraph under Longevity. It says that eguar live an extraordinarily long time-longer than the oldest trees. Some of the oldest were born before the Dawn War, in the time when demons ruled Alifros. They can spend a year without moving, a decade between meals. And the book said, This near-immortality, along with the terrible black magic concentrated in their blood and bone, has long fascinated the wizarding folk of the South.”
“Ah! That is telling,” said Hercol. “Bolutu studied magic at Ramachni’s knee, though he says he never succeeded in becoming a mage. And he reacted strongly when you mentioned the eguar, I believe.”
“Strongly!” said Pazel. “He acted as though I’d met the prince of all devils, and caught the talking fever to boot. And Chadfallow wasn’t much better. He said Ramachni had spoken to him about eguar. He made us bathe in the first river we came to. When we got back to the camp he burned all our clothes, and made Ott’s men scrub the horses down with gloves on.”
“Well then,” said Neeps, “those Ravens wanted the Nilstone, but they haven’t got it. Maybe they found some other way to make themselves mighty-something involving the eguar.”
“Gods,” said Pazel, suddenly shaken, “that’s right, I’m sure it is. That shimmer over the armada-that weird, bright haze, you remember? It was how the air looked around the eguar, from a distance, when we first saw it basking in the sun. And the leader of the swimmers who attacked us-there was something of it around him as well. Just a touch. I could barely see it through the telescope.”
“I will speak to Bolutu about these eguar,” said Hercol. “In any case, Pazel, I am glad the creature never touched you.”
“It didn’t have to touch me,” said Pazel, flinching at the memory. He began to sand again, quickly, needing to move. Once more Thasha reached for him, and once more she stopped her hand.
“When you came back,” she said, “you were so different, for a while. So strange.”
“Must have been hard for you,” said Marila, “Pazel changing like that.”
Thasha turned to her as if she’d been slapped. Marila picked up her stone and began to work again. But she added quietly, “You let Fulbreech see the book whenever he wants. Handle it, too. He knows you have a thirteenth Polylex.”
“You’re a damned little spy.”
“Thasha,” said Marila, “you came out of your cabin last night with the Polylex under your arm. He took it before he… greeted you.”
