“Well, now, young wizard. Perhaps now you’ll be sorry you were rude.”
And Pyetr’s voice: “Sasha?”
For a moment he believed it. Then he thought not, knowing where he had left Pyetr, knowing Chernevog would have wanted him out that door with more force than he felt out there, Chernevog could not so conveniently have found him. Chernevog would not have taken second place to the vodyanoi…
“Sasha?” Pyetr’s voice said. “Sasha, I’m in trouble. I’m In deep trouble. Can we have some help here?”
He squeezed his eyes shut and braced the door. He thought, hearing the boards above him creak with Hwiuur’s weight, Everything’s a lie. Everything I hear from it’s a lie. Pyetr couldn’t possibly be here. That’s the shapeshifter, that’s all it is.
It hasn’t a mind of its own, only what it borrows, like the likeness, that’s what Uulamets knew about it—
“Sasha! For the god’s sake, Sasha!”
Nothing more than an echo. It doesn’t know anything, it’s no more malicious than its original so long as there’s no one directing it…
“Sasha! God, Sashal”
Pyetr wouldn’t want me to open this door. Pyetr would never call me out into danger. It’s a damned clumsy trick… But a shapeshifter had no sense to know that. In its own right it had neither shape, nor mind…
“Sasha!” He heard steps running across the deck, heard Hwiuur’s weight slide across the boards and the steps stop abruptly.
Pyetr? he thought, wondering, he could not help it, what was going on out there: and something that felt like Pyetr was thinking. Oh, damn! Pyetr had expected help on the boat and ran straight into a trap-No. He wanted what Pyetr was thinking, and got nothing. Dark. Confusion. Pyetr was asleep somewhere, he tried to assure himself of that, the god grant it was only sleep. He heard Hwiuur move, heard Pyetr yelling, “Sasha, dammit, do something— help me!”
He kept bracing the door, the whole deckhouse creaking around him as the vodyanoi moved—the baskets crackling against his shoulders as he shoved against them… Baskets. God.
He reached back over his shoulder and rummaged in the dark, thinking, Fool, fool! Salt and sulfur—Nothing but clothes in the basket immediately behind him. He tried another, arching his back, straining with both his feet against the door, found clay pots, pulled them out and pulled stoppers one after the other. Marjoram. Parsley. Thyme… “Sasha! for the god’s sake!” Rosemary… “Sasha!”
The missing flour… Sasha dumped it, reached after the next, pulled the stopper— “Sasha!” Salt—He drew his feet up, rolled with the jar in his arms, eeled his way out the open door and scrambled upright on the deck under Hwiuur’s shadowy jaws—slewed the pot wide and sprayed a wide white cloud of salt at Hwiuur’s face and on around, where Pyetr stood with an expression of shock on his face.
Hwiuur hissed and thrashed backward for the water, rocked the whole boat as he went over, dragging bits of the rail with him.
What had been Pyetr melted and ran in little dark threads across the deck and off the edge, like spilled ink.
Sasha sat down hard where he stood, with the half-empty salt jar in his arms, white dust blowing across an empty deck and melting in the puddles of water the vodyanoi had left.
He shook, great tremors that knocked his knees together and made his teeth chatter.
Close, he said to himself, very close. He hoped Missy was all right out there, and that Babi was with her.
Most of all—he hoped Pyetr was all right; but he dared not think about Pyetr now, dared not, please the god—he dared not.
But—he thought, recalling that darkness he had touched when he had sought Pyetr—the shapeshifter until now had taken the shape of dead people, not the living; and Pyetr had not answered him.
His teeth kept rattling. He told himself it was magical and it would damned well take any shape it wanted, that anything else was only coincidence, only what they happened to have seen it do.
The greater danger had been in reaching out like that. Ho dragged his mind away from it, he wondered instead after Missy, wondered, still shaking, where she was.
Quite far away and knee-deep in water, as it seemed. He reassured her: it was safer near him. He wanted her to come back now, the bad things were gone; he wanted Babi to make sure she got here safely—but Babi arrived quite suddenly on the deck, a formidably large Babi, a very angry Babi.
“Go see about Missy,” he murmured. “It’s all right, the River-thing’s gone.”
Babi did not go at once, Babi marched over to the shattered rail and Sasha wanted him to stop. “See to Missy,” he said again, wishing Babi, strongly, and Babi went this time without looking over that edge.
Sasha hugged the salt jar against him and stood up, still weak in the knees, still thinking about the shapeshifter and its tricks, and leaned against the deckhouse. The wind blew pale salt across the starlit deck and the sail flapped and thumped against the willows.
He wanted to know Pyetr’s state of mind, he could not for a moment help himself—it was his heart at work, in the convolute way he had to think of such things. He dragged himself back from that thought and tried to tell himself what he had felt from Pyetr had not been the dark that death was. He had felt that dark silence many times, many times, if he went eavesdropping on people in their sleep—sometimes one overheard dreams and sometimes just a confusion no different than ghosts—
Another shiver came over him, a sudden chill, a breathing at his nape. He looked across the deckhouse roof to the stern, fearing to see Hwiuur’s massive head rising out of the river.
But there was nothing more substantial than a sudden chill, us if the wind had skipped around his shoulders and whipped mound into his face. It spun around and around him, touching him with cold.
Pyetr? he wondered with a heart-deep chill. Surely not.
The cold spot passed through him. Not Pyetr—thank the god, no. It left him weak-kneed and short of breath and shivering so he had trouble hanging on to the salt jar. He asked it, teeth chattering:”Who are you?” and waited for some manifestation, Nome pale wisp in the night.
But there was nothing. He stood there looking into the dark, not entirely sure he wanted to hear from it again—and felt an overwhelming anxiousness.
“Master Uulamets?” he asked whatever-it-was. “That’s you, isn’t it? Misighi said to look for you.”
It had shaken him worse than any ghost yet. He was all but certain now what it was—if it remembered its own name. He sensed its anger with him, and that was something he could not help at all—that he was profoundly glad this ghost was dead and Pyetr was alive.
“I’m sorry,” he said carefully to the dark, aloud, because it was easier to shepherd spoken words down a single, careful path. “It’s not that I’m glad you’re dead, understand, I never was. I’m not now.”
But it was hard to lie to a ghost, and he was terrified, now that he had found it. This one knew what to touch. What to ask. It had lent pieces of itself to him it might want back with a claim he might not resist—and he needed them and Pyetr did, desperately, this ghost having no love of Pyetr at all.
The boat groaned. There was the soft sound of water. He wanted the ghost to show himself, he wanted it to behave itself and forgive him that he did not want it alive and could not trust it. Uulamets had never encouraged trust. Quite the opposite.
He only knew he was supposed to take the baskets out of the deckhouse. All of them. Now. Immediately.