Riverkeep Page 7

  Beneath the Flikka, the mormorach floated happily in the current, mouthing the pieces of drifting weed and sea scraps that passed. Another echo told it that even the squid were gone, and the waters of the bay were entirely without fish. The constant impulse to eat meant the empty water was transmitted as threat, and it allowed itself to drift sideways, senses working to find another meal.

  “There it is!” cried a steward, pointing.

  The rest of the crew rushed about, following the direction of his steady hand and peering through the brightness of the sky glare on the waves. Doc rushed to the bridge’s edge.

  “Throw!” he yelled, spotting the creature’s gliding shadow.

  A flurry of harpoons speared the water.

  “I hit it!” shouted one man, pulling on the rope that fixed his harpoon to the gunwale. It came up too easily, the point of the blade loose in the water. “But no spike!” he cried. “I’ve winged it only!”

  “Keep throwin’!” shouted Doc. “It’ll sound if ye keeps missin’ it!”

  The harpoons were recovered, thrown again, the lurking shape of the mormorach shrinking as it allowed itself to sink away from the confusing bubbles.

  One of the hissing columns had grazed its side with a sharp sting. The shape on the surface was hostile, and with so little food in the water a competitor could not be tolerated.

  “It’s comin’ back!” shouted Doc. He looked at the speed of the moving shadow and grabbed ahold of the tiller. “Lavernes’s name,” he whispered.

  The mormorach broke the surface and kept rising, clearing the height of the ship and scooping two harpoonists in its jaws before smashing through the edge of the deck in a shower of broken wood and crashing back into the waves. It threw its head from side to side, serrating the sailors’ bodies and sending their limbs drifting, then it passed its mouth through the blood cloud around their corpses, sifting for flesh, biting at clothing and hair and bone. Then it sounded, turning against the seabed before whipping its tail and roaring again.

  “To me!” shouted Doc, grabbing a fallen harpoon and mounting the gunwale, rolling with unconscious balance on the swell of the sea against the frozen wind. “When he comes back you stick him with all you’ve got!”

  The mormorach soared past Doc, its massive head knocking him into his crew and shattering the central mast as it broke once more through the deck and—Doc saw with a constriction of his guts—the hull. With majestic slowness, the sail began to topple into the water, and the Flikka split in two.

  The sea rose in an instant to Doc’s feet.

  “The ship!” he shouted. “She’s breached! She’s sinking! Abandon . . . abandon ship!”

  But his crew had already begun to flee, throwing themselves from the sinking vessel and swimming for the shore or the boats that surrounded them.

  Only Doc remained, scrabbling at the red deck that, now sharply inclined, tipped him into the sea’s turbulence. He fought for purchase, the toes of his boots fast on sodden boards now slick with blood, its iron smell filling his nose over the water’s salt. As the deck passed below the surface, Doc felt himself come loose, his flailing, heavy legs exposed to the black depths, a million icy needles stabbing his skin, and he looked around desperately for a sign of the mormorach’s silver shadow.

  “Help!” he shouted, waving frantically at the other hunting boats. “For the sake of . . . Help!”

  The boats, faceless under sails he did not recognize, rolled in the current.

  As his thick layers of clothing saturated, Doc sank, his face splashing through the waves, spray filling his mouth as he gulped in a final, desperate breath.

  On board the Hellsong, far off in the safety of the harbor and leaning on his crutch, Gilt Murdagh snapped closed his telescope between wide leather-skinned palms.

  “Mormorach right enough, Cap’n?” asked Ormidale, the first mate, his wide, dark face scrunched in the light.

  Murdagh nodded, a grin splitting his beard. “That fat sod Fletcher jus’ lost his boat. Himself too, it seems. Went after it wi’ harpoons like it was a reg’lar game fish.” He snorted and laughed, shaking his head.

  “’In’t we usin’ harpoons, Cap’n?” said Samjon.

  Murdagh glanced at the wind-pinked cabin boy, then shifted his weight to the whalebone stump below his left knee. “There’s a reason this ol’ tub’s still floatin’ while others’ve made their way to gatherin’ hermits an’ coral on the seabed.”

  “What’s the reason, Cap’n? Ow!” said Samjon as Ormidale kicked his ankle.

  “Patience,” said Murdagh. He opened the telescope again, pressed it to his good eye, and smiled. “We’ll wait till folks around here get nervous—money moves quick on clammy palms. Let’s see how the next lot gets on. . . .”

  The Keep

  Wull read the passage again.

  It was real. And what a beast! If he could get his hands on such an animal, he could buy all the whale oil in the world. And imagine how much the oil of a mormorach would be worth! What would the wealthy lords and ladies in the city pay to have their ballrooms lit by a creature of myth?

  He read it again.

  For all the wealth in its tusks and teeth, it was the secrets of its glands that stirred him most powerfully: the adventurous capture of treasure was dismissible fancy, but the properties described in the juices of its eyes and the liquids in its brain meant something altogether more urgent.

  Wull looked across at Pappa, at the cloudy strip of pale yellow that bled out below his half-open eyelid; the red-veined looseness of the skin on his face and neck; the hang of his strong head, from which came an almost audible buzzing of mania and pain.

  What might the juices of a mormorach’s eyes do for Pappa’s? And if the ooze of its brain could cure paralysis and sickness of the mind, could it release Pappa from the rotting cage of his body?

  Wull looked out the ice-patterned window. The river, closing under slabs of foot-thick ice, had reduced to a narrow channel of still-flowing water. He would need to light the lanterns soon, all of them, to stand a chance of breaking some of the locks of winter.

  He read the passage again, and this time searched out the cross-references, starting with the bohdan.

  His eyes flew along the tiny print, barely taking it in. He tore both pages from the encyclopedia and pushed the closed book to the back of the desk. Then he read them both again.

  He felt faint and short of air, his skin flushing with heat in the cold room. A bohdan—that was what had taken Pappa. Wull saw in his mind the brown mouth and the flash of the eyes, and vomited onto the floorboards between his feet.

  Wiping his mouth, gripping the arm of the chair, Wull glanced again at Pappa, saw the shrinkage in his body, fat and muscle having run off him like water from a drying corpse.

  He read again. There was still time, a few days at least.

  So it was settled: he could go or he could stay. If he took the few days’ journey to Canna Bay, he would need to go now and the river would freeze for certain, casting a pall of shame on the house of the Riverkeep. But if he remained and was unable to light the lanterns, he would be facing a winter locked inside the stinking boathouse with Pappa barking and shouting and angrily dying away from the light and the sky, the pall of shame cast regardless as the thing consumed him.

  And the river would cope. The river always coped, and whether or not he failed to light the fires or abandoned it to the creep of winter, it would thaw and rise and teem come the spring as it always did. By which point Pappa would be in the ground.

  “It that speaks . . . stinking boy . . . it . . . stinking it . . .”

  Wull looked at the furrow of Pappa’s brows in his muttering sleep and felt once more the acid wrench of it all, the weight of everything pressing on him, Pappa and the river and his closed-off future tightening around him, stabbing and knotting his guts until his fear throbbed in his
skin.

  He shook himself, read once more about the mormorach: curative of possessions. This monster was the answer.

  There was a drawing of it, a sketch of what the creature might look like from the guesswork of an artist too fond of flowing lines: the animal in the picture was an elegant ribbon of shining skin, tusks little more than decorative ornaments at the corners of a mouth that was coquettishly closed, like the pursed lips of a porcelain doll. Wull imagined the real thing would be more lumpen and raw.

  Whatever it looked like, inside it ran medicines that could save Pappa. He thought of the first page of the ledgers: to ackt with dignittie. Even though Pappa was still the Danék Riverkeep for the next three days, his dignity had been taken by the river—and by the thing inside him.

  But he was still there. There was still time. And that meant Wull had no choice to make.

  He moved aside the ropes and oilskins and fishing lines that hung in front of the harpoons stacked neatly along the riverside wall. They had never been used in Wull’s lifetime; Pappa had often boasted that they were sharp and heavy and made of good iron.

  He lifted one free and tried it in his hand. Although well balanced it was immensely heavy, and as he raised it to shoulder height the barb dipped and crashed onto the floor.

  “There must be a knack to this, right enough,” he muttered, trying again. His long arm quivered under the weight, and the barb fell once more, the clang stirring Pappa into a cursing sleep-mutter.

  Wull lowered the harpoon to the floorboards and freed the three others from the wall. Then he extinguished the fires in the grates, placed salted trout and hard biscuits in a canvas knapsack, and began laboriously dressing Pappa’s shouting, struggling body in the seula-gut and fur-lined clothes he would need on their journey to the coast, feeling all the while the torn pages of the encyclopedia burning like hot coals in his pocket.

  8

  The Danék Wilds

  Bohdan: literally, “skin-changer.” A creature of semi-myth (see also Greenteeth, Mormorach, and Suire), so named for its habit of wearing the skins of its victims. Details of reported sightings vary dramatically, but the alleged capture of a live specimen in the Splendic Ocean revealed that the creature is itself largely formless, consisting of little more than a tentacled mass of skull-less head, spinal column, and countless nerve endings. The bohdan achieves form by inhabiting the body and shape of its victims, a process that takes anything from three to seven days (depending on the victim’s size and species) and is outwardly symptomized through dramatic weight loss and clouding in the host’s eyes. Once the creature takes occupancy of a new body, the skin it has most recently vacated is almost always consumed completely by the bohdan in its new form. This would account for eyewitness reportage that describe the creature as goatlike, houndlike, and humanoid, and perhaps accounts for a great many unexplained disappearances. There is no known cure for attack by a bohdan, although various magics and mythical treatments are suggested in ancient literature (see Mormorach).

  —Encyclopedia Grandalia, University of Oracco Print House

  The bäta sat low in the water, heavy with the blankets and food that Wull had piled wherever he could find space: into the pointed nose of the bow, below the bottom boards, and under the stern thwart. Beneath the bucket of salted trout was a paper-wrapped bag: nearly forty ducats, every penny they had.

  Wull felt the bäta sulking like an unwilling dog. It seemed when its eyes sat in the periphery of his vision that they were cast away from him, unwilling or unable to look in his direction.

  “Can’t go!” Pappa was shouting. “Sleep only!”

  “You c’n sleep when we’re in the bäta—you jus’ need to get yourself in there for me, please,” said Wull. He was alarmed by the support Pappa needed to walk the jetty, but even more so by the ease with which he was able to carry him. Pappa’s whole frame was loose, bones knocking together in the absence of muscle and flesh, a few days having shorn off more than half his body weight. With his head pressed against Pappa’s shoulder, Wull’s ear felt the breath-heat of muttered insults and protestations, Pappa’s mouth rank and rotten with fish, their gleaming scales clumped on his unshaved face like the slobbers of frog spawn that bordered the riverbank in spring.

  Wull had tried over and again to wipe Pappa’s mouth clean, but had retreated from the biting teeth.

  “Sleep now, stinking boy it!” said Pappa, going limp in Wull’s arms.

  “Come on!” said Wull. “It’s for your own good we’re doing this.”

  “No good!” said Pappa, digging his heels into the jetty.

  Several minutes of balancing and cajoling and gentle pushing passed, Pappa’s anger rising steadily to a shout that was smothered by the river’s freezing air. Eventually he was slumped in Wull’s old seat on the stern thwart, limp with exhaustion, fresh spit glistening in the corners of his lips.

  “Take this blanket,” said Wull. “You’ll need it. It’s freezing.”

  “Heavy,” said Pappa, wriggling away from it.

  “You have to take it—you’ll freeze to death without it. Come on, please.”

  He tucked the blanket around and under Pappa’s spindle legs, checked the bonds on his hands and the knot of his scarf.

  In the bäta for the first time since he’d been taken into the river, Pappa looked even smaller, and Wull realized just how much of him had been shrunk and whittled away.

  The river was closing in front of Wull, the untamed ice reaching remorselessly inward to the boat-width channel that still flowed in its center.

  “We need to be going, Pappa,” he said. “I’m sorry the river’s like this. . . . I tried, honest. There’s no lighting the lanterns—they wouldn’t take the flame. But we need to get you proper help. That’s all that really matters.”

  He took a quick drink from his elkskin water pouch, then sat in the Riverkeep’s seat and hefted the oars, palms burning under tender skin as he rowed steadily away. In a silence filled only by the sound of the oars’ blades and the bäta nudging chunks of ice, he watched the unlit lump of the boathouse shrink, the closed eyes of its black windows reflecting a threatening sky from which daylight was rapidly ebbing, cloud cover speeding the approach of night.

  A grandfather (Wull was unsure how many greats were involved) named Wilcy had explored the river as a boy, and kept a journal, all the way to its mouth and the beginnings of the wider sea. There was an inn at the hamlet of Lauston that had a jetty and cheap rooms where Wilcy had spent the night and enjoyd fyne ales in such qwantittys as put me in a plais of fair disposytion.

  Ale tasted like old dishwater to Wull, but fair disposytion sounded good, he had to admit. From Wilcy’s meandering descriptions and the maps, he reckoned Lauston was close—two hours rowing, all with the current, away from the keep’s domain and toward the rest of the world. He rowed lightly, the water urging the bäta forward.

  Pappa would have known where Lauston was, would have known the names of the townsfolk, the traders, and the guards. He always knew the world of the river. Wull watched Pappa’s face as he sculled into the current’s center, willing him to lean forward and laugh with him, chide him and breathe lakoris at him for fun.

  “Are you comfortable, Pappa?” he said after he had rowed far beyond the sight of the boathouse, past twenty burned-out lanterns: silent sentinels in the full grip of winter.

  Pappa said nothing—merely glowered through the grime of his hair and chewed on his lips.

  “I couldn’t tame the ice,” Wull carried on. “You never had time to show me how to get the wicks lit; the flames jus’ bounced off. But I broke a big floe with a rod an’ found that face. My first recovery, an’ it put me onto this mormorach thing that’s down in Canna Bay.”

  Night had fallen. They were passing close to lantern twenty-one, and Wull shuddered at the shadowed berg it had become. With the fire of the lanterns dead, the river’s darkness wa
s breathtaking, lit by just the thin moonlight that struggled through the clouds.

  He looked over his shoulder, corrected his course, and carried on rowing as steadily as he could without his shoulders screaming their resistance.

  Lantern twenty-two—frontier of the Riverkeep’s world and near to where Pappa had been taken—slid into view. Wull’s chest skipped as he saw that, alone of all the lanterns, it remained lit, a tiny, wobbling flame dancing on the tip of its wick casting a fragile glow into the black.

  He had never been past this point. The Riverkeep’s domain was a blockage in the artery of the river, a clutch of islands and whirls of current that slowed the water and made it solid and immovable.

  Beyond it the river widened and quickened, a clear strip of it flowing all winter without a keep’s hand. Even unlanterned, the ice reached barely halfway into the center, leaving a channel through which to pass.

  A storm had been raging the first time he’d come out here in the bäta, and he’d trembled, huddling close to Pappa’s bulk as thunder rolled across the sky, so far from home and with the pull of the river so close to his feet. But when an ocean barge puttered past and Pappa waved to the captain, Wull’s chest had swelled—proud of Pappa’s being known, recognized.

  “What’s past here?” he’d asked.

  Pappa had chuckled. “In the Danék Wilds? Ev’rythin’. All the noise an’ danger ye’d never wish for. An’ beyond that, war.”

  “Isn’t there magic?” Wull had asked, thinking of his bedside stories.

  “Oh, aye, if ye can find it.”

  “Then why don’t we use magic to keep the river?”

  Pappa had lifted him onto the center thwart, onto the keep’s seat, held him in under his big arm, and pointed to the vein-bursts of pink lightning flashing on the horizon.