working the berth deck, snatching boys from their hammocks at night, clapping hands over their mouths and bungin’ ’em in the lockers until they bleed. At five bells another deathsmoker appears in the galley, in worse shape than the first. He’s a Plapp as well, but this time the Burnscove Boys get to him first, and turn him in. I suppose his execution will follow.
Someone is knocking at my door: more bad news, or else Uskins, drooling and vague, with a word from the captain. I should have married her in secret. I should have told her old dad to get stuffed.
There is heat in Rose’s innards yet. I went straight to him with the tarboys’ problem, having some inkling that the crime would touch a nerve. That it did: hardly had I spoken when he exploded out of his stuporous slouch and thundered to the cabin door, bellowing for the nearest lieutenant. A moment later he was back, questioning me furiously about the incident. He was taking it very hard by the look on his face, and then he shook my hand. I did not dream that: Captain Nilus Rotheby Rose shook my hand, and did not bite it either. A knock at the door. He scowled and shoved me, but I didn’t mind. The boys would be safe. As I left I saw who was waiting to enter: Sergeant Haddismal and the Bloody Son.
Later there are distant explosions in the south, and flashes like bubbles of fire — rising, bursting, gone. The War Furnaces, whisper the dlomu. Fed not with coal but lead and diamonds, and above all eguar bones. Machines so huge and hot the discharge can be seen these hundreds of miles. The lads just stand and stare, as if the Nine Pits were gaping open there on the horizon, as perhaps they are.
‘Do they threaten us, away out here?’ I ask the dlomic commander, a thick-chested fellow whose long, fleshy earlobes make me think of soup spoons.
He shrugs. ‘When I saw the armada pass by Masalym, I thought, “They’ve emptied all the shipyards of Orbilesc and Bali Adro City; there mustn’t be a boat left to watch over the heartland.” I was wrong. Those sorts of flares, you see them only when a warship launches. Part of the fleet is still here. We’ll be in danger if they spot us.’
‘We’re flying the Bali Adro flag. Won’t that help?’
Only to a point, he says. When they run out of enemies, they fire on one another, ram one another, close and grapple and kill. The eguar gave them indescribable power, but it also made them frenzied and fearful, almost rabid. ‘And a rabid dog must bite
He is a good fellow, Spoon-Ears, but he never cheers me up.
So we run and run, with many a backwards glance. Lady Oggosk crouches topside day after day, like a gargoyle, staring in the direction of the Sandwall, which most days one needs a telescope to see. Felthrup, of all Rin’s creatures, has taken to chatting with her, and even sits in the old crone’s lap. The vicious Sniraga, who used to kill rats by the score for food and pleasure, wails and flicks her ruined tail but will not touch him. When the hag wants Felthrup’s company she sends Sniraga to howl outside the stateroom, and the cat leads Felthrup to her door like a bodyguard. Mr Teggatz watched them walk by and cracked his knuckles and burbled cryptically:
‘Cat takes rat, bah ha! Quite enough, quite enough. Cat takes
If Teggatz is right about the approach of doomsday we could well be the last to know it. There is no one and nothing out here. We could be launched already into the heart of the Ruling Sea, save for those brief glimpses of the Sandwall, and the meekness of the waves, which have not topped fifty feet. Some land mass ahead must be taming them, unless the lions of the deep have all turned lambs.
Rose navigates by Ott’s ancient map and a fine dlomic chart provided by Prince Olik, but the former is a faded scrap and the latter only depicts the margins of the Island Wilderness. Our immediate goal: Stath Balfyr, that last bit of Southern land, from which place Ott’s sniffing about in books and archives back home produced detailed course headings for our run across the Ruling Sea. We stand a fair chance of locating the island, too: Prince Olik ventured there in his youth and has pencilled in his best guess at its location.
And what a great black joke if we succeed.
For we’ve kept the secret so far — ‘we’ being just myself and Marila and Felthrup, now the others have departed. Alone on the
That is nonsense, of course: they are flesh and blood, not pixies. They are also a brave and decent people, no more vicious or deluded than we ourselves, and more committed to one another by far. Probably they slipped ashore in Masalym, to try their luck on some less lethal ship. Rin save us, if men will rape tarboys half their size, what will they not have done to tiny ixchel, in the silence of attics, laboratories, holds?
But now that the ixchel are gone, should I tell? Should I try to persuade Ott that his whole mad circumnavigation of Alifros is based on a lie? Soon enough I’ll have no choice, for he means to start our northward run the minute Stath Balfyr gives us our bearings. For the moment I see nothing to be gained by speaking up: Ott would insist on attempting the crossing anyway, sooner, probably. Stath Balfyr will not help us get home, but so long as we are searching for it we are at least on the same side of the world as our friends.
Felthrup is sleepwalking. This is preferable, he declares, to not sleeping at all, by which malady he nearly perished on the Ruling Sea. Yet any sleep disorder in the rat should set alarm bells ringing throughout the
He has come a long way as a dreamer, Felthrup declares. Time was that Arunis had infiltrated his dreams, and placed a lock on them, so that he could torture and interrogate the rat all night, and be certain Felthrup would be none the wiser by day. Now that lock is broken (another result of the sorcerer’s death, maybe?) and Ratty can remember his dreams like anyone else: imperfectly, that is, and through the veil that falls with the opening of the eyes. I ask what he thinks he’s searching for, when he roams the passageways, or bumps along the edges of the stateroom chambers in his sleep. ‘The doors of a club,’ he tells me cryptically. ‘I have a friend there who might help us, if I can only find him.’
Marila has a little bulge at her beltline already, as though her stomach aspires to catch up with those round cheeks of hers. Felthrup tells me that she is ‘miserable, weak, sickly, ill-humoured, dolorous’, but he is distressed whenever one of us suffers a hangnail. What is certain is that Mrs Undrabust has no patience with the indignities of her condition. She storms about looking for work and grows irritated when the women steerage passengers — old spinsters to the last, since the desertions in Masalym5 — coo and cluck at her and tell her she should be abed. Mr Teggatz lives in fear of her: she is usually famished but gags on his offerings. The tarboys are sniggering over a rumour that she begged the cook for a salted pig’s ear, claiming it was for Thasha’s dogs, and then was seen gnawing it herself on the No. 3 ladderway.
Dr Chadfallow, for his part, is healing — Ott knows just how far to torture a man — but he is broken in spirit, and does not hide the fact. ‘I have chosen all the wrong paths in life,’ he said this evening, as Marila and I changed his bandages. ‘I should never have set foot in the Keep of Five Domes. I grew to like it there, among the jewels and courtesans. I thought I could stand beside Magad and nudge his Empire towards the good. I thought reason would prevail. Self-delusion, nothing more. The Emperor gelded me the day he called me to court.’
At that Felthrup began to leap up and down. ‘The villain! The wretch! Was the operation terribly painful?’
‘Hush, Ratty, it was a figure of speech,’ I said. And to Chadfallow: ‘All you could do was try, man. Nobody steers a ship but the captain.’
The doctor was having none of that. ‘When a captain will not turn you must place another boat across his way. I should have fought Magad sooner, while there was still time.’
‘You’d have made a lousy rebel,’ put in Marila, who has a knack for getting to the heart of things. ‘You’d have
