He had no reason to inhale. Admittedly, the plane offered breathable air, but it was completely devoid of smell. No odor came from the trees, the moss, the oily river water… I sniffed at my own skin, damp with the sweat of exertion and fear; but I couldn't smell the slightest hint of perspiration. In a way, it was worse than going blind.
«How's Wheezle?» I asked loudly, to force my mind onto other thoughts.
«Better,» Hezekiah replied. The gnome's hands had reverted to normal, the claws shrinking as quickly as they had grown. His eyes looked like gnome eyes, watery and brown, not empty hollows in his face. The single drop of Styx water had made Wheezle forget all that had happened to him among the umbrals, had purged his mind of their influence; the only question was, how much more of his memory had it stolen?
«See if you can wake him up,» I told the boy.
Hezekiah gave the gnome's cheek a few light pats, and said, «Come on, Wheezle. Wake up, come on.»
Wheezle stirred. His eyelids fluttered and his gaze focussed on Hezekiah. «Who are you?» he asked.
«You remember me – Hezekiah Virtue.»
«Ah.» Wheezle's voice sounded polite, but dubious. «Who are all you other people? Why can't I move my legs?»
Garou laughed. «Think of the positive side: at least he still remembers how to talk.»
As closely as we could figure, Wheezle had lost a year of his life: a year of unreclaimable experience vanished like smoke. To a Sensate, stealing those memories was a hideous crime; I cringed with guilt at the thought. Certainly, splashing him with that drop of water prevented him from turning into an umbral… but I felt as if I should have found some less destructive way to help him.
My father would have thought of something.
Garou poled on past the silent gray banks, as the others explained to Wheezle what had happened. He took it calmly, for the most part; he even thanked me for saving him. His voice, however, had nothing in it but formality, good manners without warmth… and his hands were continually straying down to his useless legs, pinching the skin as if he could not accept that he would live paralyzed all the rest of his days.
Wheezle lapsed into silence soon enough; and the rest of us found we could think of nothing to say to each other. The gray quiet pressed in around us, muffling emotion as well as sound. It was actually a relief when Kiripao woke and grabbed Miriam by the front of her shirt… but his anger evaporated almost immediately into a slump of exhaustion that laid him down on the floorboards.
«Are you all right?» Hezekiah asked.
«I'm tired,» Kiripao answered softly.
«If your mind is full of umbral thoughts,» Hezekiah pressed on, «Britlin has found a cure.»
«Yes?» Kiripao did not sound hopeful.
«It's only a last resort,» I said. «Why don't you sleep for a while? Now that we're clear of Carceri, the umbral influence should fade.»
Kiripao didn't answer. He closed his eyes, but I could tell he was nowhere near sleeping.
Time passed like an old man on weary legs. This stretch of the river had its share of misty patches, but Garou steered around them. Once I came close to asking him how much longer we'd have to travel through this soul-wearying plane; but the effort of opening my mouth seemed too great to bother.
Yasmin leaned back against me, her head settling against my chest. The feel of her there was a comfort; I wrapped my arms loosely around her, and after a while, the warm solidity of her body eased some of the dissipated melancholy weighing down my heart. Touching me must have had the same bolstering effect on her, because after a while she found the strength to ask Garou, «How much longer here?»
The boatman's eyes grew a deeper black, just for a second. In that moment, I had a flash of insight: that Garou was toying with us again, just as he had alerted the umbrals to our departure out of sheer malignant whim. Garou wanted us to succumb to the dreary oblivion of this place, the dull ache of its emptiness… not because he planned to rob us, sell us into slavery, or otherwise exploit the erosion of our wills, but simply because he liked to see us miserable. Suffering for suffering's sake: just to know he had the power to get under our skins.
«Yes,» I said loudly to him, «are we going to hang around this boring place much longer? It's putting me to sleep.»
Garou let out an angry snort and stabbed his pole into the water. «If you're so impatient,» he replied, «perhaps we'll take a short-cut.»
With a ferocious shove, he sent the skiff veering into a patch of mist we had almost passed by. The fog thickened around us until I couldn't see Yasmin's head still pressed against my chest; then the clouds wisped away and we were somewhere else.
Open water spread without end beneath a jet black sky. There were no stars, but three moons, all of them full – a white moon, a silver one, and a moon of frosted green, each lunar face pocked and ravaged with craters. The moons cast enough light to provide a clear view around us: the waters of the Styx, as foul and fetid as ever, streaming out like a malodorous black stripe across an otherwise crystal sea. Two paces away the sea water glistened with the dappling of moonlight, as calm as a windless lake. The sight made me yearn for a swim in the soft, beckoning waters; but even as I tried to touch the cleanness beyond the polluted path of the Styx, a body bobbed to the surface.
The body was naked and female, possibly human… but it was difficult to be sure, given the bloat of the corpse, plus the damage done by fish and eels. The woman's ears were completely eaten away; the fingers were simply bones held together by gristle, and the cheeks were both torn open into ragged holes. As I watched, a delicate silver pilchard darted in through one of the cheek cavities, bit into the dead woman's tongue, and tried to wrestle away a piece of pink meat.
I had to look away. When I did, I saw other bodies drifting up out of the sea, as if our arrival had loosed them all from some confinement fathoms below. Each corpse was tattered with bite marks; each belly was swollen with the gases of decay.
«A pocket in the Astral Plane,» Garou said. «The Sea of the Drowned.»
But Yasmin looked at the woman closest to us and whispered, «Mother.»
The woman's half-eaten eyelids opened. I saw now that her eyes had a tiefling cast: blood-red and feline, with no discernible whites. She did not move a muscle, but her body circled on some undetectable current until her face was focused on Yasmin. «I have been recognized,» she said, in a breathy voice that released the stink of gases from her gut. «What do you ask?»
«Nothing,» Yasmin answered immediately. «I don't want anything from you. Go away.»
«What do you ask?» the woman said again. Her breath fouled the air like sewage.
«I told you, I don't need anything. I don't want to talk to you.» Yasmin snatched up her sword, though the body was floating just too far to reach. «Go back wherever you came from.»
«Impossible,» the dead woman said. «I have been recognized. What do you ask?»
«I ask you to get out of my sight!» Yasmin's voice was becoming shrill. «Now!»
«That is not within my power,» the floating corpse replied. «What do you ask?»
Yasmin balled her hands into fists and covered her eyes. I put an arm around her shoulder and growled at Garou, «What's this all about?»
For a moment he didn't answer, perhaps debating whether the truth would cause us more pain than ignorance. Then he said, «Nothing truly dies in the multiverse. When a soul is killed in one place, it is merely re-embodied on another plane… but with no memory of its former existence.»
«Any leatherhead knows that,» Miriam muttered.
«But if the memories are gone, where do they go?» Garou asked. «They can't just vanish – the multiverse doesn't let anything slip through its fingers so easily. Every dying person's memory drifts like flotsam on unseen tides, until it fetches up in a holding basin like this one. Here lie the remembrances of all those drowned on a million worlds. I could show you other such memory sinks: the Poisoned Jungle, the Plain of Knives —»