"We don't have to kill him to make him a cripple!" he said.
On his last word the Shaggat's big toe shattered to dust.
"Stop! Stop!" bellowed Arunis. "You shell-island scum! Very well, I release her-for now."
Thasha gulped air, writhing in Pazel's arms. Her throat was red and raw. Eberzam Isiq dropped heavily to his knees beside Pazel, and together they held her.
Sergeant Drellarek came forward. "Sorcerer," he said, "you speak with contempt of the Shaggat Ness. You are no believer. Why make use of him? Why did you not take the stone for yourself?"
"Keep to your own affairs, Turach," snarled Arunis.
"That's an easy one," piped up Druffle, from the edge of the crowd. "He was afraid! Didn't know what he was afraid of, exactly, but whatever the risk, he wanted somebody else to take it. The Shaggat's just your hand-puppet, ain't he, you louse?"
"The Shaggat is everyone's hand-puppet!" screamed Arunis.
"Or no one's," said Ramachni.
"Idiot mage! Why do you meddle in the affairs of my world? Have men not done enough harm in your own? Look at that beast!" He stabbed a finger at the Shaggat. "Made for slaughter! A curse on any land, a plague-bearer, a despoiler of all he sees! If he ever conquers Alifros he'll find himself the emperor of ashes!"
Pazel looked up at the sorcerer. Then why are you helping him?
"You are wrong about humans," said Ramachni. "There is evil in them, of course. But there is also sublime beauty, and a thirst for good. It is that thirst that makes them change, and grow, and wake each day a bit more fully."
"They can no more change than His Nastiness here," said Arunis. "They are statues. Gargoyles. Souls of stone."
Ramachni shook his head. "They are fluid souls. What they can feel, and imagine, and rise to-not even they yet appreciate."
"Even the Shaggat is more than just a statue," said Hercуl.
Sergeant Drellarek raised his hand. "Enough! This is a stalemate, wizard. You cannot beat them, nor they you. Leave the deck! You have already come close to sinking the Great Ship. If it is true that the Shaggat can be restored to life, then our mission will go on. I know nothing of curse-stones and magic wine, but I have my orders. The girl will marry and fulfill Ott's prophecy. We shall feign our own wreck and vanish into the Ruling Sea, and Captain Rose will see us safely across her. You, sorcerer, will have months to prove that you are smarter than three youths and a mink."
Arunis' hands clenched in rage. "You, Throatcutter-you and your kind sought to kill me forty years ago. My body hung from a noose on Licherog, but my spirit lived. Death is my servant, not my master. I will free the Shaggat. And Thasha will marry, or die at my feet. This I promise you."
"Then the Emperor's will be done," said Drellarek, and his warriors cheered: "His will be done! His will be done!"
"Rin help us, the idiots," Dri whispered to Pazel. "They're cheering for their own deaths."
Arunis looked from face to face, his eyes shining with hate. Last of all his gaze fell on Chadfallow.
"What says the good doctor?" he sneered.
Pazel and the others looked as well, hardly more friendly than Arunis. Chadfallow dropped his eyes.
"The Emperor's will be done," he said.
The Wolf-Scar Oath
6 Teala 941
The olive-green mountains of Simja rose in the west. Already the sea was festooned with sails: ten, no, eleven men-of-war, sporting flags of Arqual and Ibithraйd and Talturi, racing like the Chathrand toward the city between two empires. Thasha's marriage would be well attended, if it happened at all.
The Shaggat Ness was lowered through the tonnage hatch and chained to a bulkhead. Arunis screamed for the king to be put in his own cabin-but no one wanted the sorcerer left alone with the Nil-stone. Drellarek set a day-and-night guard on the statue, and a more discreet watch on Arunis himself.
Farther aft, Hercуl stood guard as welclass="underline" just inside the closed door of the stateroom.
"You will have to shut that book at some point, Thasha," he said.
Thasha, her neck wrapped in a cotton bandage, looked up at him and smiled. She closed the Polylex. "I was reading about the Mzithrini diet. It says they eat beetles fried in sesame oil."
"Nonsense!" said Eberzam Isiq. "And what does it matter to you?"
"I have to go through with it, Prahba," she said quietly.
"No you don't!" shouted half a dozen voices at once.
"Shame on you, Thasha," said Neeps. "Haven't we promised to get you out of this?"
"Arunis will kill me," she said. "I'm only alive because he needs me to marry."
"He makes mistakes," said Pazel. "Ramachni's already fooled him once."
All eyes turned to the little mage. He was crouched beneath the dining table, beside a basket where Felthrup lay asleep, looking very frail. Ramachni did not look quite right either. Something was gone from the sheen of his fur, the glitter of those wonderful eyes. He looked up from his patient.
"Felthrup bleeds beneath his skin," he said. "I have put him in the healing-sleep, but that may only be a gentler way for him to die. I cannot telclass="underline" either he will wake, and live-or never wake at all. But there is another who needs our attention, Hercуl."
He gazed over his shoulder. On the bench under the gallery windows stood Niriviel, Sandor Ott's falcon. A black hood covered his head, and his leg was tied by a leather strap to a hook on the windowsill.
Hercуl and Ramachni approached him, and the Tholjassan removed the hood. Ramachni leaped to the bench.
"Will you speak to us now?" he asked.
"I will," said the bird in a voice like tearing canvas. "But what are you going to do to me?"
"Nothing whatsoever," said Ramachni. "We are not your judges."
The bird cocked an eye at Hercуl, suspicious. "You hate my master," he accused.
"Never," said Hercуl. "Remember that he was once mine as well. But I have outgrown him, Niriviel. Oh, not in skill at arms-that I hope will never be tested. My heart has outgrown him, outgrown the cage in which Ott prefers all hearts to dwell. The cage he cannot live without: I mean love of Arqual."
"That is no cage!" shrieked the bird suddenly, flapping his wings. "Arqual is the hope of all people! It brings safety, riches, order, peace! It is our mother and father! Arqual is the glory of this world!"
"But Arqual is not the world," said Ramachni. "Alifros is vast, and many of her people love their homelands as deeply as you do yours."
"One day they will all be Arqualis," said the falcon. "And you traitors. You shall go to Licherog and break stones."
"When I watched you from the gardens of the Lorg," said Thasha, approaching, "I used to think you were the freest soul in Alifros. But I was wrong. I don't think you know what freedom is."
"Remove this strap from my leg and I will show you what freedom is."
"That is what I hope for," said Ramachni.
He put his teeth to the leather strap, and in four bites chewed it through. Hercуl, meanwhile, raised a window. Instantly the bird leaped to the windowsill. He leaned forward, wings lifting-
— and drew back. His sharp eyes darted here and there in amazement.
"You release me! Why?"
"Because we do not enslave," said Ramachni. "And you should ponder the form of slavery to which you are accustomed. Those bonds only you can break."
The bird fidgeted on the sill, one eye trained on Ramachni. "You're a mage," he said at last, "but not so very wise."
Thus speaking he dropped from the window, shrieked once and was gone.
"A child," said Ramachni, his voice heavy with sorrow. "I would hazard that he was Ott's creature long before his waking, and took the spymaster's faith and cause as his own from the first hour. A terrifying process, waking: some do not survive it with their minds intact. Others need a God or cause or enemy to anchor them, for above all they fear choice, that great abyss."