that she could not have both a family and a mage’s calling. The two simply cannot be combined. I think she was torn for years. When he ran away it must have become easier for her-though not necessarily for her children.”
“And see here, Doldur, wasn’t she rather good with dreams herself?”
“A fair hand, yes,” said Doldur.
“And if I recall, her favorite experimental subjects were her children?”
“That’s rather a brutal way to put it,” said the ghost. “What are you driving at, Professor?”
“Well, it’s plain as day,” said Garapat. “Felthrup can’t warn anyone back in Masalym, because he forgets everything the moment he wakes. But he’s told you, here and now. And you might just be able to tell Suthinia-”
“Ah!” said Doldur. “You startle me sometimes, Jorge Luis. Yes, yes, I could do that.”
Felthrup ran to the edge of the table. “Could you? Could you truly?”
“I don’t see why not. I did it once before, after the Arquali invasion. She heard me perfectly-though I was not able to offer her much comfort. She had just lost her children. This time, perhaps, I’ll be able to do more than wish her well.”
“O splendid man!” squealed Felthrup. “Greatest of dead scholars! Oh, brilliance, brilliance, joy and song!”
“Least I can do for someone who’s dared to read the thirteenth Polylex.” The ghost chuckled. “Of course, we don’t know if our efforts will go any further than that. It would be far better if I could visit young Pathkendle directly-but it is far harder for the dead to visit one they never knew in life. I would spend weeks merely trying to claw my way to Masalym in the darkness: your light is our darkness, you know, and the Little Moon in Southern Alifros is particularly hostile to the restless dead. I say, rat-friend: whatever’s the matter?”
Felthrup had gone suddenly rigid, head to toe. “The hatbox,” he said, through clamped teeth.
“Hatbox! What hatbox?”
“I am asleep within a hatbox. And I have become aware of it. My head is pressed against the wall of the box; I can feel the pressure. I am waking, waking. I cannot fight it much longer.”
The inky man stared at Felthrup as though tempted to poke him.
“Don’t you dare,” said Pazel Doldur. “Listen to me, Felthrup, my boy. I think it’s high time I paid my old apprentice a call. So tell me quickly: is there anything else you would like me to say to her, besides the fact that forces are coming from Bali Adro’s capital to seize your ship?”
“And the Nilstone, Master Doldur,” said Felthrup, not moving a whisker.
“Of course, of course.”
“And tell her that her son, your namesake-please, could you tell her that he is brave and kindhearted, and that the tongues he speaks number twenty-five at least? Oh, and that Dr. Chadfallow is aboard as well. Oh! And this is desperately important-that the destination of the ship is Gurishal, the island of Gurishal, is this too much to remember, sir?”
“My dear boy, I’m a historian. Come, what else?”
“Wise, quick-witted, mentally capacious ghost! Nothing else, unless… yes, oh yes!”
Felthrup forgot himself, turned his head, knocked it against something no one else in the room could see. It was done: the black rat faded like a mirage. His last words seemed to hang in the air when he himself was gone:
“Tell her that Pazel is in love.”
One hour later, at an unthinkable distance from the cluttered room in the lively tavern, Suthinia Pathkendle awoke with a start, in her hard bed in the rented cottage on the poor side of Simjalla City. The voice that had begun in her dream was still speaking, though she knew she was awake. It was a beloved voice, her old master’s; it filled her with the near-irresistible urge to put her hand out and grasp his own. But she could see no hand. And the message, when she fully woke and understood it, terrified her with the certainty that she had waited too long.
That remains to be seen, I think.
“Master?”
He was gone. A normal person would already be deciding that he’d never been there, that the voice was only the wind’s, moaning under the eaves, sighing through the cracks she’d never bothered to fill. But Suthinia would never again be normal. She’d become herself at last, a true mage, and she knew a specter’s voice when she heard it.
After midnight the fire always died; the house grew bitterly cold. Suthinia lit a candle, pulled her tattered coat over her nightgown. She crossed the freezing floor into the main room. Yes, the curtains were drawn; the night patrols, the tramps and prostitutes, would see nothing. She took the vials of dream-essence from their hiding place within the brick wall. She studied them, red smoke, blue smoke, cherished links to two souls. Then she held them to her cheeks. The blue vial was cold. It usually was. Neda’s training as a sfvantskor had raised walls inside her; only in the deepest sleep did they come down.
But there was an answering warmth from the red vial. She moved it from her cheek to her neck, wrapped her coat over it, and her arms over the coat. As the vial warmed she could sense his nearness, the soft sound of his breathing, the beat of his heart. For the thousandth time in the last six years she found herself aching with the need to touch him, hold him as she was holding this hard thing of glass. She felt a violent tearing, a rending inside her and she knew the feeling was guilt. Son of mine, son of mine. How did my fight become yours?
“It wasn’t your fault,” said Pazel to the woman who walked at his side. “It was Chadfallow’s, wasn’t it?”
They were in the tall grass over the headlands in Ormael. Below stretched the Nelu Peren, sparkling at midday, threshing against the rocks. Gulls cried, and curlews. The sea-wind moved over the grass like the bellies of invisible ships, racing one after another into the plum orchard beyond. The woman was holding his hand.
“The more I learn of what has happened,” she said, “the less I dare to speak of fault. Except my own, that is. I know well enough what I might have done, had I thought more of you and Neda, and less of myself.”
The plum trees were suddenly all around them. The white blossoms had opened; bees moved from branch to branch, pollen-dusted. It was spring.
“Yourself?” said Pazel. “Come on, Mother. You thought of yourself even less.”
She looked at him sharply.
“I always knew you had something on your mind,” Pazel went on, “but I never for a minute thought it was anything selfish. Neither did Neda. We could tell, you know. You had awful tasks, awful secrets you didn’t want to burden us with. But you should have told us. We were jealous of those secrets. That’s why Neda was angry all those years. Because she missed you so badly, wanted you back.”
They were leaving the orchard for the ragged woods beyond, looking up at the Highlands, the land he had always thought she came from. He knew better now. His mother had come from the South; he himself was but half Ormali; he had cousins in Istolym-tol-chenni cousins, if any were still alive. She hadn’t told him in words, exactly; she had simply decided it was time he knew.
“I could have handled the truth,” he said.
“Yes,” she said, “you could have. You always had idrolos, that special courage that let you look at things squarely. Neda had far less of it, and so did I. Don’t you understand, Pazel? I couldn’t tell you the truth without facing it myself. And the truth was that I’d failed everyone-Doldur, Ramachni, my murdered friends. I’d failed Bali Adro, failed Alifros itself.”
“The fight wasn’t over, Mother. Arunis still didn’t have the Nilstone.”
“It was over for me. I gave it up the day I married Gregory. My friends from the expedition had all been found and slain, by Arunis or the men he hired for the job. One was poisoned at a meal I was late for. I’d have died that evening if I hadn’t gotten lost in the back streets of Ormael. Another was killed in Eberzam Isiq’s garden. He traveled all the way from the Mzithrin to the heart of Arqual, a miracle, and only managed to croak a few words of warning to Isiq’s daughter. She’s the one, isn’t she? The one your rat-friend believes you care for.”
Pazel looked down, suddenly shy. “Why did he mention that?” he asked.
“I wonder if he knew why himself,” said his mother. “The rat is not a mage, by any chance?”
“No,” said Pazel, worried now. His mother looked so grave. “You’re upset because she’s Admiral Isiq’s daughter, aren’t you?”
Suthinia shook her head. “That sort of thing doesn’t matter now. Pazel, does she love you too?”
“Yes. I mean, Rin’s eyes, I think so. She’s… alluded to it. Mother, why do you look so blary morbid?”
“I wish you happiness,” said Suthinia. “You know I always have.”
