The River of Shadows by Robert V. S. Redick

Author:Robert V. S. Redick
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Fantasy, General, Fiction
ISBN: 9780345523815
Publisher: Random House Digital, Inc.
Published: 2011-04-19T05:16:36+00:00

All this time Ensyl had waited in the ceiling of the darkened passage. Her people had once had a spy-hole beneath a cot in sickbay, but it had been deemed too risky: Chadfallow liked to rearrange the furniture, and to inspect the walls for fungus with a magnifying glass. She kept watch now above a spring-loaded trapdoor. Fortunately there was no other entrance to sickbay.

What were they doing stalking Greysan Fulbreech? A fool’s watch, a fool’s errand—or the most vital task on Alifros? Ensyl had no way of knowing which of these she had undertaken. But Dri had died believing in Hercól as well as loving him. And who was she, Ensyl, if not the guardian of her mistress’ beliefs?

It had grown harder, though. Hercól explained so little. Worse, he had become morbidly obsessed with Thasha: her moods, fancies, above all her romance with the surgeon’s mate. Was he another Dastu, another spy for Sandor Ott? Ensyl had demanded. Hercól had begged her not to ask, and more strangely, not even to think overmuch about what they were doing.

It weighed on her, that last request. Don’t think? Blind obedience? That was part of what Dri called “the madness of Ixphir House,” the disorder she feared would ruin the clan. And what if Hercól was wrong about Fulbreech? What if he was no more than he seemed? A fuse was burning, Dri had whispered once: a fuse that will end in a blast to set the world on fire. The Nilstone, she’d believed, was the explosive at the fuse’s end, only waiting for its spark. How much time did they have? How many more mistakes could they survive?

Then Fulbreech stepped back into the passage, and Ensyl forgot her doubts. The youth’s eyes were desperate, his mouth tight and strained. Those were not the eyes of one whose work was done. He slid to the left of the door and stood there, back to the wall, like a hunted thing. Seeing no one in the corridor, he suddenly darted across it and threw open the door opposite sickbay.

Ensyl swore. Hercól was right all along. For the place Fulbreech had entered was a tiny pump room, a service cabin for the machinery that lifted water from the bilge or the open sea, for dousing shipboard fires. It was probably the least-visited cabin on the deck. No other door led into the chamber. Nothing stored there was used in sickbay.

She pulled the trapdoor open wide. The passage was deserted all the way to the bend at the foremast. But just around that bend, she knew, waited her accomplice. Dangling upside down, she spread her lips, tightened the muscles in her throat and produced a high, soft cheeet: very much like a cricket’s song. An answering shadow flickered at the bend in the passage. Ensyl nodded to herself, jerked her head back inside and sealed the door.

On soundless feet she ran to the space above the pump room. Four large bilge-pipes rose through the ceiling and continued to the upper gun deck.

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