The old man’s look of worry intensified. “Thinkers, you mean? Beasts with reason, and human speech? No, no more. They were wicked creatures, maukslarets, little demons.” He looked down, suddenly abashed. “Or so we were told.”
“What happened to them?” asked Pazel, dreading the answer.
Isul drew a finger across his throat. “Condemned, all condemned,” he said. “Back when I was a child. And it’s still the law of the land: you’re obliged to kill a Thinker on sight, before he works black magic against your family, your neighbors, the Crown. You can get away with harboring tol-chenni, if you’re careful-in Masalym there’s even a place that breeds ’em-but get caught with a thinking mouse or bird under your roof, and it’s the axe. They’re all dead and gone, is what I reckon. And if there are any left you can be sure they won’t let you know they can think. You could be looking right at one, a stray dog, a dune tortoise, and be none the wiser.”
Now it was Thasha’s turn to look at Bolutu with rage. “We should never have trusted you,” she said. “They started killing woken animals when he was a child? That was a lot more than twenty years ago! Why didn’t you warn us? Do you realize what we might have done?”
Aboard the Chathrand was a woken rat, their dear friend Felthrup Stargraven. Despite his suspicion that something terrible awaited them ashore he had wanted to join the landing party-to share in any danger, he’d said. They had almost agreed.
The old man put a hand on the side of his woolen sack, probing something within. He glanced uncertainly at Bolutu. “Twenty?” he said.
Bolutu rose to his feet and dusted off his trousers. “Mr. Isul,” he said, “be so good as to tell us the date.”
“You know I can’t,” said the other, a bit testily.
“The year will suffice.”
It was then that Pazel noticed the tremor in Bolutu’s voice. The old man, however, was put at ease. “That much I know,” he said. “We haven’t lost our bearings altogether out here. It’s the year thirty fifty-seven, His Majesty’s ninth on the throne.”
Thasha looked at Bolutu. “You use a different calendar in the South. You told us that weeks ago.”
Bolutu nodded, his face working strangely. He bent and plucked a stick from the old man’s bundle. He squinted at it, picked at the bark.
“Of course, after all those years in Arqual, you’d know both calendars,” said Pazel.
Another nod. Bolutu raised the stick and considered it lengthwise, as though studying its straightness. It was not very straight.
“What’s wrong with you?” said Thasha sharply. “What are you trying to tell us?”
“If Mr. Isul is correct-”
“You don’t believe me, go ahead, ask anyone,” said the old man.
“-we have rather misjudged our time on the Nelluroq. By your calendar, it is Western Solar Year Eleven Forty-four, and we have been two centuries at sea.”
In the silence that followed Pazel heard the drums of the armada, still echoing faintly from the gulf. He heard the breakers on the north beach, the wind in the forest, the cry of a hawk as it circled the abandoned tower. Then another sound, a faint flapping, close at hand. Mr. Isul lifted his sack and gave the contents a poke.
“Wood hens for dinner,” he said.
Now, lying awake in the darkness by his shipmates, Pazel almost wished the armada had borne down on the village, landed some undreamed-of army, slain them all. Eleven forty-four. His mind still screamed with laughter at the notion-absurd, preposterous, tell me another-but his heart, his body, his nerves were not so sure.
There was the Red Storm. A band of scarlet light, stretching east to west across the Nelluroq. They had sailed right into it; the light within was liquid, blinding; it had filled their clothes, their lungs, eventually their minds, until they swam in the light like fish in a red aquarium, and then it was gone.
And later, when he and Thasha and the others began to discuss it: hadn’t they all asked much the same question? How long was I in there? Why can’t I account for the time?
His friends Neeps and Marila thought it had lasted days. But Hercol felt it had blown past them in six or eight hours, and Ensyl, the ixchel woman who had become their friend and ally, spoke of “that blind red morning.” Pazel himself had not dared to guess, and when he had asked Thasha how long she thought they had spent in the storm, she had looked at him with fear. “Not so long,” she’d said. But her voice brought him no comfort.
Two hundred years. How could he toy with believing that? If it were true, then everyone he’d left behind was dead. No more searching for his mother and sister. No more hope that one day his father, Captain Gregory Pathkendle, would return and beg forgiveness of his abandoned son.
Angry now, Pazel opened his eyes. Rin, how he wished he could talk to Neeps. Pazel felt astonishingly lost without the smaller tarboy, his first friend on the Chathrand. Neeps was clever and fiercely protective of his friends, but he was also a hothead with a knack for getting in trouble. Look at him now: trapped with Marila and Captain Rose and a dozen others, held hostage in a cabin filled with a poisoned vapor that would kill them if they stopped breathing it. What would happen to them? Would they ever leave that room alive? Every thought of his friends was black and terrifying, like that plunge into the sea.
He studied Thasha again: smooth apple of a shoulder, yellow lock of hair across her lips. Day by day the way he looked at her was changing. He wanted to be with her all the time. The fascination shamed him, somehow. Thasha was one of just a handful of women on the Chathrand, and if Pazel could not stop himself from thinking of her in this way, could not sleep with those smooth limbs in view, could not banish the thought that when the world was ending they could do as they liked in the final hours-then what about the rest of the men?
But you love her, Pazel. It’s different with you.
That wasn’t the point. Order on the Chathrand was breaking down. Arunis was still aboard her, in deep hiding; they could feel the sorcerer’s presence like a whiff of something explosive in the musty air. The hostage standoff, meanwhile, was in its sixth week, with no end in sight. The captain could hardly lead from inside a cage, yet the sailors trusted no one as much as savage, greedy, unbalanced Nilus Rose. He terrorized them, but he kept them working for their own survival. Now they were fighting among themselves: a thing Rose had brutally suppressed. Could even the Turachs keep the peace? When the ghastly news escaped, would they try? It was awful to reflect that their safety hinged on these men, elite killers all, and part of the same Imperial army that had sacked his city and beaten him into a coma. If they despaired it meant anarchy, a doomsday carnival. And who would protect the women in that case? Who would stop men who wished to die from taking their last, low pleasures with Thasha Isiq?
He heard their muttering, vile and explicit (how often they forgot about his horde of languages). What they needed, how exactly they wanted her to touch them, who they imagined she already was “Pathkendle.”
Pazel jumped. It was Hercol who had whispered. The Tholjassan lay with his eyes open, looking at him intently, and Pazel blushed, wondering how much Hercol had guessed of his thoughts.
“I wasn’t-”
Hercol put a finger to his lips. Then, after a long, listening moment, he rose to his feet, beckoning Pazel to do the same. Pazel stood, balancing carefully among the sleepers. Hercol moved swiftly down the beach toward the gulf. Pazel followed reluctantly. Two steps away from the fire and he was cold.
The moon suddenly brightened, and looking back Pazel saw it emerging from behind the twisted snag of Narybir Tower. Hercol walked in the foam, through the rainbow threads of surf. “Do as I do,” he whispered. “Stay deep enough to hide your tracks. I don’t want them waking and following us.”
He started west, and Pazel splashed along behind. “You’re taking me to read that memorial, aren’t you?” he asked.