4
The raft did not inspire confidence. The party stood around it, staring; none of them could quite believe what they had built. ‘It looks like a pig’s stomach tied to a loom,’ said Neeps.
‘Your imagination does you credit,’ said Bolutu.
‘It is sturdy enough,’ said Hercol, ‘but I dare say it will be like no float any of us has ever taken.’
‘I don’t like it,’ said Dastu, probing the raft with his foot.
‘What would you like?’ Pazel asked him. ‘In case you haven’t noticed, we don’t have a highway to follow.’
‘Or wings to fly,’ said Ensyl, gazing upwards.
Thasha felt a stab of grief. It was about this time yesterday that Myett had been taken. Pazel had slept through the tragedy, but Thasha had seen Ensyl leap up as though stabbed, hearing what they could not: a fellow ixchel’s cry. Looking skyward, they had all seen the bird of prey, fighting in midair with something gripped in its talons, before beating a swift path to the south. They had raced up the stairs, crying Myett’s name. Ensyl had continued far up the ruined wall, her shouts and wails so eerily silent to human ears. She had come back stone- faced. ‘We are thirteen now,’ she’d said.
Of course Dastu had a point about the raft. It was a freakish thing. Its body was a huge bladder-mushroom, a tendril-fringed bag some fifteen feet in diameter. Half the party had ventured into the forest in search of such a fungus, Ramachni lighting the way, one last time, with fireflies. Thasha had joined the search: loath as she was to set foot in that hot, dripping hell, the thought of waiting for others to return from it was worse.
And light made all the difference. Beneath the bright canopy of insects the forest had mostly shrunk from them, closed its petals and pores. The flesh-eating trees withdrew their tentacles; the lamprey-mouthed fungi turned away. What could replace the fireflies, once the journey resumed?
It had taken hours to locate a bladder of the right size, and immense care to drain it from a single incision and cut it free of the ground. Even emptied, the thing was heavy, like a great rubbery hide. They slogged back to the clearing with it draped on their shoulders. When they arrived it was well past sundown. A fire burned in the clearing, with two geese roasting on spits, and when she tasted the sizzling meat Thasha groaned with pleasure.
‘I am telling you, no?’ said Neda, catching Thasha’s eye. ‘My master is best to kill with a stone. He is hitting anything, whatever you want.’
There were a handful of young pines in the clearing; those who had remained behind had felled and stripped them already. When dawn came, they had notched the soft wood with swords, tied them into a square frame with the vines that boiled at the forest’s edge, and woven a net of these same vines on which to rest the giant bladder. Then everyone had helped to stuff the bladder like a cushion, with anything that would float: dry grass, hollow reeds, a spongy moss that grew on the ruin’s north face. At last, using Ensyl’s sword like a sewing needle, they had stitched the incision shut as best they could.
‘It should carry us as far as the forest’s edge,’ said Hercol, ‘provided we keep that hole above the water line.’
The sun was by now almost straight overhead. They ate a hurried meal of cold goose. Then Ensyl brought something from among the stones, and Thasha felt the ache again, worse than before. It was a rough pine carving of a woman, standing straight, arms raised high like a child who expects to be lifted in its mother’s arms.
‘Farewell, sister, honour-keeper, brave daughter of the clan,’ she said, bending her voice so the others could hear her. Then, methodically, she broke the statue into twenty-seven pieces, and wrapped each one in a bit of cloth. Everyone but Dastu had contributed a scrap or two from their clothing. Ensyl gave the parcels to the stream one by one, and Thasha blinked back tears. If Myett had died among them, it would have been parts of her body in those little shrouds. Thasha had witnessed it before, this grisly rite, an assurance that no trace of the dead could ever be found by humans, and thus endanger the clan. Even funerals were part of the ixchels’ struggle to survive.
The ceremony over, Hercol brought out the sack containing the Nilstone (another sort of death-parcel), and tied it firmly near the centre of the raft. Ramachni circled it once, his black fur raised. Then he turned and looked at the others.
‘The sorcerer’s reek is still about the Nilstone,’ he said. ‘Stay as far from the sack as you can. If anyone should reach for it, we must assume his mind is under siege, and stop him by force.’
‘To do so would be simple mercy,’ said Hercol. ‘Four men on the
Together they dragged the raft into the shallows. Hercol and Vispek held the frame as the others scrambled aboard. The raft heaved and shifted, but it bore their weight. They spun away from the clearing, pushing off with long poles, and Thasha felt the current gather them into its arms.
Big Skip laughed aloud. ‘We’re ridin’ a blary jellyfish,’ he said. ‘By the Tree, I hope I live just to hear what people say when we tell ’em.’
‘They’ll say we are liars,’ said Bolutu.
‘Be still, now,’ said Ramachni. ‘We are above the very spot where the River of Shadows roars up most powerfully into the Ansyndra. The blend of shadow and water is very thin here. If we do not sink in these first minutes we may have hope for the rest of the journey.’
They brushed the side of the tower where it jutted out into the stream. ‘We
‘Spread out! Lie flat!’ Ramachni hissed, and they hurried to obey. The raft was teetering, one side and then another vanishing beneath the surface. Thasha lay on her stomach, half submerged, watching the river slosh around the crude surgical scar in the middle of the raft. She prayed, a reflex. The water black and chilling. They knocked along the tower wall, spinning like a leaf, then gyred out into the swifter current.
No one was laughing now. Thasha was dizzy and cold. She sensed a frightful nothingness below her, as though an endless black cavern waited for her there, lightless and roaring with wind; and this river surface, delicate as a soap bubble, was all that held them above its maw.
They sank lower still, clinging to the frame and to one another. The craft was all but submerged; the hole was like a pair of sealed lips just inches above the water. Helpless, Thasha watched the first surge of water pass over it. There were oaths. A second surge followed. Air bubbled around the wound.
And then, by the Blessed Tree, it stopped. The raft held steady, and — was she imagining it? — even began to rise. Thasha glanced at Ramachni, wondering if he had cast a spell after all. They rose higher, and picked up speed. ‘We’re out of it, aren’t we?’ said Pazel.
‘The worst of it, yes,’ said Ramachni. ‘Almost pure shadow lay beneath us for a moment. It was there that the Swarm of Night burst forth into Alifros, when our enemy called it yesterday. The further we drift from that spot, the thinner the darkness beneath us — but do not be deceived. The Ansyndra will go on mixing with the River of Shadows for hundreds of miles. We must try to avoid swimming — and never, ever dive.’
They were far from shore, now. Thasha looked back but could not see the campsite, the place where they had bled and triumphed, where she had killed a mage but failed to become one herself, where Ramachni had at last been free to tell her the truth of her birth. A strange truth, an awful truth. She had thought herself the child of Erithusme; now she knew that she
