spasm?”
“Nothing would please me more, Doctor,” said Fulbreech, “but I must beg your indulgence for ten minutes; I haven’t come for my regular rounds, you see.”
“Quite right,” said Chadfallow. “You’re here for Tarsel, naturally.”
“Tarsel,” said Fulbreech, eyes darting.
“You have a surgeon’s passion, Fulbreech. At noon I give you Lognom’s Joints and Their Injuries, and twelve hours later here you are, ready to set a man’s thumb.”
“As it happens, sir, I’m not entirely ready.”
“Good!” replied Chadfallow. “Overconfidence is a plague in our line of work. And such manipulations cause agony, nearly every time.”
Fulbreech gave a deferential nod. He had not even glanced at Joints and Their Injuries. “I hope you won’t hold this against me, sir.”
“Not at all, my boy.” Chadfallow stood and led him down the row. “Why, I too needed help restraining the patient, the first time I wrenched a thumb.”
The man in question, Tarsel the blacksmith, lay with his right hand floating in a tub of some aromatic broth of Chadfallow’s. The thumb, pointing backward, was swollen up like the thumb of a drowned man. Tarsel lay shaking. His good hand was clamped on the edge of his cot.
“Doctor,” he said, “I can’t wait no more.”
Chadfallow put his own hand in the tub. “Still warm,” he said. “The ligaments should be pliant enough. Go ahead, Mr. Fulbreech.”
“What, him?” cried Tarsel, raising himself in the bed. “Nay, Doctor, nay!”
“Silence!” said Chadfallow. “You’ve no cause for alarm. This is a simple procedure.”
“Simple for you,” said the blacksmith, “but this lad here, he’s just a clerk. And he’s nervous as a maid on her wedding day!”
Fulbreech was staring at the hideous thumb. How hard, he asked himself, could it be?
“Mr. Tarsel,” said Chadfallow, “you will kindly lower your voice. Men are sleeping. Besides, you risk distracting the surgeon, to your own inconvenience.”
“My inconvenience!” screamed Tarsel. “Look at him, he’s set to soil his breeches! Keep him away from me!”
“Shall we proceed, Mr. Fulbreech?” said the doctor.
Fulbreech never knew how he got through that wrestling match with the blacksmith, whose arm was muscled like the haunch of a bull, and whose screams must have woken men far beyond sickbay. He was not really aware, or much interested, in his own efforts to wrench the thumb. His mind was on the story he would have to tell to escape the doctor’s clutches. He finished piecing it together just as the blacksmith fainted dead away.
“Low pain tolerance,” said Chadfallow, placing two fingers on the man’s neck. “Ah well, finish up. You’ll have no trouble now.”
Somehow, brutally, Fulbreech snapped the thumb back into place, with a pop that made him fear he might be ill. Chadfallow’s praise was restrained: he might be blind to other matters, but in medicine little escaped him. Then Fulbreech explained that he would have to forgo the pleasure of the vestibular spasm, as he had actually been sent for headache tablets. “The captain’s own request, sir: he’s lying in the dark, quite unable to sleep.”
It was a perfect fib: even if the captain later denied asking for the pills, Chadfallow would attribute the contradiction to Rose’s lunacy. Chadfallow took a small vial out of a cabinet and tossed it to Fulbreech. Then he looked the youth squarely in the eye.
“You may wish to consult Lognom again,” he said.
“Before I sleep, sir,” promised Fulbreech, and slipped out.
All this time Ensyl had waited in the ceiling of the darkened passage. Her people had once had a spy-hole beneath a cot in sickbay, but it had been deemed too risky: Chadfallow liked to rearrange the furniture, and to inspect the walls for fungus with a magnifying glass. She kept watch now above a spring-loaded trapdoor. Fortunately there was no other entrance to sickbay.
What were they doing stalking Greysan Fulbreech? A fool’s watch, a fool’s errand-or the most vital task on Alifros? Ensyl had no way of knowing which of these she had undertaken. But Dri had died believing in Hercol as well as loving him. And who was she, Ensyl, if not the guardian of her mistress’ beliefs?
It had grown harder, though. Hercol explained so little. Worse, he had become morbidly obsessed with Thasha: her moods, fancies, above all her romance with the surgeon’s mate. Was he another Dastu, another spy for Sandor Ott? Ensyl had demanded. Hercol had begged her not to ask, and more strangely, not even to think overmuch about what they were doing.
It weighed on her, that last request. Don’t think? Blind obedience? That was part of what Dri called “the madness of Ixphir House,” the disorder she feared would ruin the clan. And what if Hercol was wrong about Fulbreech? What if he was no more than he seemed? A fuse was burning, Dri had whispered once: a fuse that will end in a blast to set the world on fire. The Nilstone, she’d believed, was the explosive at the fuse’s end, only waiting for its spark. How much time did they have? How many more mistakes could they survive?
Then Fulbreech stepped back into the passage, and Ensyl forgot her doubts. The youth’s eyes were desperate, his mouth tight and strained. Those were not the eyes of one whose work was done. He slid to the left of the door and stood there, back to the wall, like a hunted thing. Seeing no one in the corridor, he suddenly darted across it and threw open the door opposite sickbay.
Ensyl swore. Hercol was right all along. For the place Fulbreech had entered was a tiny pump room, a service cabin for the machinery that lifted water from the bilge or the open sea, for dousing shipboard fires. It was probably the least-visited cabin on the deck. No other door led into the chamber. Nothing stored there was used in sickbay.
She pulled the trapdoor open wide. The passage was deserted all the way to the bend at the foremast. But just around that bend, she knew, waited her accomplice. Dangling upside down, she spread her lips, tightened the muscles in her throat and produced a high, soft cheeet: very much like a cricket’s song. An answering shadow flickered at the bend in the passage. Ensyl nodded to herself, jerked her head back inside and sealed the door.
On soundless feet she ran to the space above the pump room. Four large bilge-pipes rose through the ceiling and continued to the upper gun deck. Like all handiwork on the Chathrand they were tight-fitted, built to allow no seepage of wind or moisture from one deck to another. But what luck-there had been damage here as well: a seam between board and pipe had opened, by warping or trauma to the ship. It was no more than the width of two fingers-two ixchel fingers-but it allowed Ensyl a view of half the chamber.
Fulbreech had struck a match and now was lighting a candle stub. Ensyl watched as he glued it with its own wax to the top of a cabinet. Then he pulled something else from his pocket: a brass jar, very small, no larger than a cherry. Lifting the lid, Fulbreech inserted a finger and scooped out a tiny amount of white cream. This he proceeded to rub into his palm. He rubbed thoroughly, entirely focused on his task. Then he put the jar back in his pocket and turned to face the door.
That’s it? thought Ensyl, for already Fulbreech was reaching out (with the cream-coated hand) for the knob. But no, he wasn’t exactly. The hand was aiming for a space above the doorknob. He moved slowly, and with trepidation, as though reaching into a darkened burrow. Then suddenly the hand stopped. The fingers probed, gripped, tightened. Fulbreech inhaled sharply. He stood as though holding a second doorknob, mounted above the first, but Ensyl could see plainly that he was holding only air.
Until, suddenly, he wasn’t. She gasped, and thanked Mother Sky that her voice was an ixchel’s and could not be overheard. Fulbreech was holding a second doorknob. She had seen no flash or puff of smoke. The knob was simply, suddenly there.
Fulbreech was shaking with fright. His free hand seized a pipe and held it rigidly, like a backstay in a gale. Slowly, with his eyes tightly closed, he turned the knob.
Something terrible happened. The door flew wide, Fulbreech stumbled, Ensyl drew back her head. The candle was extinguished-and strangely, no light at all came from the passage beyond. But in the last instant of light, Ensyl thought she had seen through the open door-but not into the passageway. Instead she had glimpsed a strange, dark space, not framed with wood but carved from solid rock. Ensyl had sensed some great bulky shape lunging forward, but then the light had died.
Mother Sky, what’s happening?
