“Whales?” said Pazel.
“Whales,” said Vispek. “The better to observe your approach, and your doings aboard the Chathrand.”
“Your crew spotted us,” said Jalantri. “We were a rare sort of whale, blue-black and small.”
“Cazencians,” said Pazel. “Yes, I saw you-but it was here, on this side of the Ruling Sea. Neda, was that you?”
She gave a curt nod. “We trailed you along the Sandwall.”
“Until attacked by sharks,” said Vispek. “They were vicious and innumerable; we escaped them only by hurling ourselves upon this shore.”
“And these possessions?”
Vispek gestured with a turn of his head. “Shipwreck. Three or four miles west, along the inner beach. A grim discovery, that. The bark itself was weird and slender, and partly burned; we thought it a derelict. But inside it was full of murdered creatures, like black men except for their hands, hair and eyes. Their throats were slit, all of them. On the deck where we found the bodies a word was scrawled in blood: PLATAZCRA. Can you tell us the meaning of that word, boy?”
He looked expectantly at Pazel, who nodded reluctantly, knowing his face had given him away. He knitted his eyebrows. “Something like ‘victory’-no, ‘conquest’ is closer. ‘Infinite conquest,’ that’s it.”
They all looked at him, shaken. “The boat was maimed,” said Cayer Vispek at last, “but only partly looted. We found fine goods-fabrics, dyes, leather boots of excellent workmanship, even gold coins, scattered underfoot. It was as if the attackers had struck in haste, or fury, intent on nothing but the death of everyone aboard.”
“They took the food, though,” said Jalantri, frowning at the memory.
“Why didn’t you return to the sea, once the sharks departed?” asked Pazel.
“We could not,” said Vispek. “The Father tried to give us the power to change ourselves back and forth at will, but he never succeeded. Once we returned to human form, only the scepter in a Master’s hand could make us again into whales.”
“And the scepter went down with the Jistrolloq?” said Hercol.
“I told you that we came here with nothing,” said Cayer Vispek. “Our elder changed us a final time, even as the sea flooded the decks. That is the only reason we survived.”
Neda glanced sidelong at the Tholjassan warrior. What a sly one. He knows the Cayer avoided his question. She busied herself with the gnawing of flesh from a bone, thinking how cautiously their leader was handling this moment, how attentive they would have to be to his signals. Above all we must say nothing of Malabron.
Inside her the memory blazed, hideously clear. The collapsing hull, the grotesque speed of the inrushing sea, the old Cayerad bringing the scepter down against her chest and the instant agony of the transformation, no pain-trance to deaden it. Squeezing from the wreckage, the whirling disorientation before she spotted the glowing scepter again, in the aperture where the old man was working the change on a last sfvantskor: Malabron. She had watched his body swell like a blister. Confused and zealous Malabron; desperate, damned forevermore. He had believed in the utterances of mystics, believed they were nearing a time of cataclysm and the breaking of faiths. And with the enemy victorious and their mission a failure, Malabron the whale had done the unthinkable: bitten off the arm of the old Cayerad, swallowing it and the scepter whole, and vanishing into the sudden blackness of the sea.
They had never seen him again, and Cayer Vispek had not speculated as to what had driven Malabron to such treason. Jalantri merely cursed his name. Neda, however, recalled his furious, quiet chatter, his ravings. In the last weeks they were almost continuous, in the hours when talking was allowed, and so much of it was outlandish nonsense that the others took no heed. But Neda heard it all, her manic memory sorting the drivel into categories and ranks. And in one category, by no means the largest, were his mutterings about “the path our fathers missed” and “those who fear to be purified.”
Neda chewed savagely. You should have spoken. You could have warned Cayer Vispek before it was too late. For Malabron’s words had carried a sinister echo. They resembled the heresy once preached by the Shaggat Ness.
She cringed, feigning some bone or gristle in her mouth. I couldn’t do it. Not to any of them. It had taken them five years to trust her, the foreign-born sfvantskor, almost a heresy in herself. Five years, and all the wrath and wisdom of the Father, taking her side. How could she have admitted that she did not trust them back-even just one of them? How could she have reported a brother?
“Neda?”
Pazel was staring at her. Devils, I must take care with him! For her birth-brother’s glance was piercing. Even now he could read her better than Vispek or Jalantri.
She was struggling for calm. With an uncertain movement Pazel reached for her elbow.
“Do not touch her,” said Cayer Vispek.
Pazel jumped and shot him a look. “I was just-”
“Coddling a sfvantskor,” said Jalantri, regarding Pazel with a mixture of amusement and contempt. “Now I see why the Father did not wish the two of you to meet, sister. He knew no good could come of it.”
“Listen to me,” said Cayer Vispek to Pazel. “The one before you is no longer an Ormali, no longer Neda Pathkendle. I do not expect this to be easy for you to grasp, but know that every parent, brother or sister of a sfvantskor has faced the same kind of loss.”
“The same, is it?” said Pazel, his eyes flashing. “I haven’t blary clapped eyes on my family in nearly six years.”
“Neda has left your family,” said Cayer Vispek. “She has become Neda Ygrael, Neda Phoenix-Flame. And she has been reborn into a life of service to the Grand Family of the Mzithrin, and the sfvantskor creed. Only if you remember this can I permit the two of you to speak.”
“Permit us?” said Pazel, as though he couldn’t believe his ears. “She’s my sister! Neda, is this what you want?”
Neda held herself very still. The eyes of all the men were upon her. With a ritual cadence to her words, she said, “My past is of no consequence. I am a sfvantskor, a keeper of the Old Faith, foe of devils, friend of the Unseen. The life before was a game of make-believe. I can recall the game, but I am grown now and wish to play it no more.”
“So speaks our sister in the fullness of her choice,” said Cayer Vispek. “You must accept her decision or else insult her gravely. Is that your wish?”
Pazel looked at the older man, and his dark eyes glinted with anger. But he held his tongue.
The Cayer watched him a moment longer, as though noting a source of future danger. Then, turning to Hercol again, he said, “There is more I would know. What sort of land have we come to, where men are killed under the banner of infinite conquest? Who are these black beings with silver eyes? And where are the humans? We have only met with miserable savages, hardly better than beasts.”
When the telling was done Neda felt wounded. As if some crushing harm had struck her body, some venom or germ that stole her strength and clouded her mind. She believed Hercol; his voice was too raw and bleeding to be feigned-and she had seen the men he called tol-chenni, and had thought them imbeciles from the start. But a plague of mindlessness. She squatted by the fire, clenching her fists. Protect us in this our black hour, she prayed. Defend us, that we may water Alifros with the blessings of your will. She addressed the prayer to the Unseen, the Nameless Ones, in the Mountains of Hoeled beyond the world. But did the Nameless Ones care about these strange Southern lands, or was their gaze fixed elsewhere? It was a troubling question, and probably forbidden.
Hercol looked up at the sky. “Dawn comes,” he said. “Pazel and I must return to our shipmates. And you three must make your choice, for I expect to see a boat from the Chathrand approaching by the time we reach them.”
“Choice?” said Neda, the bitterness rising in her again. “What choice is that? To return to your ship and be put in irons, or stay here and starve?”