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Chapter Thirty-Nine

When everyone but the first watch had gathered round, Ulchakh began without preamble. “We cannot enter Khorkrag. The streets are loud with mutters about humans in the area, even a caravan of them. Some say it is the Legate’s, others swear that they are rogues, independents. But whether this is chance or connected to your activities in Forkus, the town is too excited. There are rumors that the Ormalg liege may soon announce a bounty on humans and all found with them.”

“Then how shall we cross the river?” Arashk grumbled.

“Let’s leave that aside for a second,” Riordan said quietly. “First, should we still go to Achgabab?”

Arashk sputtered. “B-but we are from Achgabab. We must return there.”

“Eventually,” Caine amended.

Ulchakh nodded. “I see. Yes. It may be wise to change our destination . . . for now.”

“Where to?”

Ulchakh looked toward Ta’rel, who was already smiling.

He extended his arms in a wide gesture. “Ebrekka would welcome its old friends Ulchakh and Yidreg, and its new friends Leaders Caine and Peter and all those humans who travel with them.” Riordan noticed, but did not elect to mention, that he had not made any mention of trogs. At least, not yet.

“I think it would be a wise detour,” the mangle added. “Ulchakh is well known in the streets of Khorkrag. He is also known to trade with Kosvak of Forkus, who is sworn to the human liege Vranadoc.” Ta’rel shrugged. “Since Ulchakh is now known to have arrived from Forkus, and might likely have humans in tow or at least word of their doings and intents, I fear that the tempers in the town might lead some to waylay him on the path back to his home in Achgabab.”

Ulchakh nodded vigorously. “Friend Ta’rel speaks truth. Even if they do not suspect that I travel with you and yours, Friend Caine, I may seem a likely source of information about that which has them enraged: your kind. So we shall not head in the direction they suspect.”

Yidreg nodded. “If we head due east, our course will allow us to slip beneath the southern limit of the wadi country the praakht call the Orokrosir. And I am sure that Ta’rel is familiar with all the hidden paths we might travel from there to Ebrekka.”

“Not just hidden paths,” the mangle added, “but hidden refuges.” He turned toward Peter. “As you saw, we have concealed places—small caves, mostly—spread across the entirety of Brazhgarag. But whereas they are thinly scattered around the continent, they are thicker in the region of our largest communities, of which Ebrekka is one of the greatest.”

“It sounds as though that’s both the carrot and the stick, then,” Craig Girten said amiably. When the nonhumans stared at him, Peter explained the saying in Ta’rel’s own language.

“Ah,” the mangle said, “Leader Craig says that our choice of path is simple, since there are jaws behind us and a meal before us.” Approving mutters arose.

Arashk went so far as to pat a very gratified Girten on the shoulder. “It is past time a trade band journeyed to Ebrekka. When I left Achgabab, there were already careful countings of how many packets of moss remained. We shall not only elude whatever angry warriors and scouts stream outward from Khorkrag, but secure needed supplies for our home.”

Ulchakh nodded. “I agree. Clan arguments prevented us from sending a timely porter caravan to our friends among the Mangled. With our growing numbers, we consume more moss . . . and there will have been no trade over the winter.”

Peter looked from Ta’rel toward Ulchakh and back again. “I understand that the moss is an important curative, but everyone is speaking as if h’achgai will perish without it.”

Ta’rel looked at his friend in genial but utter bafflement. “Of course.”

Riordan frowned, glanced at Ulchakh. “Does your kind have a special medical need that only the moss can answer?”

Now Ulchakh stared at Riordan as Ta’rel had stared at Peter. “No more than yours. Or theirs.” He gestured to the praakht sitting in the circle, who murmured grave assent.

“I have not had any since leaving Forkus,” Arashk growled as if to emphasize the severity of their need. “And I will take any death before a descent into s’rillor.”

Ayana frowned. “That word seems a combination of several others. What does it mean?”

“You are correct, Leader Ayana,” Ta’rel said. “They are Deviltongue words run together: ‘to make ash of the mind.’”

“So . . . ‘mindless’?”

Ulchakh’s expression was one of horrible awakening as he leaned forward toward Caine and his companions. “Yes. It means the descent into mindlessness that occurs if one does not consume the moss. Were none of you aware?”

Riordan felt a cool chill as he realized that concealing their ignorance might wind up killing them.

Dora had leaned forward also. “And this is . . . what? A disease? That affects all species?”

“Yes,” Bey said quietly, “as soon as one arrives at the age of bearing or siring young. Thinking creatures or not; it makes no difference.”

“Even x’qai?”

Ulchakh shook his head sharply, surprised. “What? Of course not: not x’qai!”

“Of course,” a new voice said—and it took Riordan a moment to realize that it was his own. “That’s the x’qai’s real power, their real advantage!”

“What do you mean, Commodore?” Duncan asked, eyes narrowing.

“The x’qai don’t reproduce sexually. They spawn. They’re asexual.”

Newton sucked in a deep, daunted breath. “Of course.”

“What are all of you going on about?” Miles griped, but with a hint of unease.

“It’s been there all around us. From the start,” Caine said, not caring about how much ignorance it revealed because this cat was not merely out of the bag; it had left the planet. “Camphor trees—all cedars—are parthenogenetic. So are all the tubers we’ve been eating. So is a lot of seaweed. And fungi. And moss itself. Everything here that goes through puberty, or any sexual maturation phase, becomes susceptible to something in the environment. Something lethal. But all x’qa are immune.”

Newton nodded. “Yes, and this explains the rarity of individuals past early middle age.”

“Except those with wealth or connections,” added Katie, stealing a glance at Ulchakh.

“It is why,” Bey added quietly, “no matter how hardy a species, we die sooner than we should . . . unless we eat the moss from youth onward. When we stop, the s’rillor takes hold and increasingly impairs us. Finally, we become the mindless, which the x’qai call deadskins.”

Mindless. Riordan heard the word echo as he recalled his first thoughts upon entering the streets of Forkus. Of seeing the haggard inhabitants, some of whom were so blank-eyed and dirty that they hardly seemed aware of putting one foot in front of the other. Because that’s all they could do. Because they really were mindless.

Dora was having a very similar flashback, apparently. “Madre de Dios, I thought what I saw in Forkus was what I saw growing up, just much worse.”

Newton’s voice had shifted to that of a doctor in a terminal ward. “How much moss is required?”

Ta’rel held up a small hide pouch, showed what was inside.

“Hmm. Small. What is the interval of dosing and adjustment for body mass?”

“Our healer wishes to know,” Ayana translated, “how often one must eat the moss and if they must eat more if they are larger?”

Ta’rel considered the question carefully, looking a bit like a physician himself. “Every thirty to forty days. I have never seen nor heard that larger persons suffered from taking the same amount.”

Duncan raised an eyebrow. “Which could mean that smaller persons might need less.”

Newton almost spat his negation. “Inconclusive. Logically, onset and progression are most intense as the organism enters sexual maturity. More moss might be required at that time, but less once the progression is established. If so, observers might conclude that efficacious dosing was independent of patient mass. Without rigorous multi-phased double-blind testing, it is impossible to assert a proportional efficacy ratio supporting a ‘smaller dose for smaller patient’ thesis.”

When the locals, and several of the Crewe, simply gaped at the stream of unfamiliar words, Newton’s eyes dropped. “We can’t be sure about dosing,” he summarized.

Riordan noticed that while Ta’rel struggled with the vocabulary, he eagerly followed Newton’s statements and seemed to have kept up with the general logic of them. “Ta’rel, these hidden caves throughout Brazhgarag: are there similar networks on other continents, as well?”

He nodded readily; no one seemed surprised, so that too was common knowledge evidently.

“And is that where you grow the moss?”

This time his nod was slower. No one was surprised, but the locals almost leaned away from the conversation.

Riordan waved as if to acknowledge that, although there were far more queries to pose, the time had come to relent. For now.

But Ta’rel leaned forward, not ready to leave the topic. “We all wondered, I think, if among your other magics, you had a mystic remedy for s’rillor.” Although he phrased it as a statement, it was clearly a question.

Caine tried to keep his bounding thoughts in check. Might their precautionary battery of inoculations prove effective against the underlying microbe? What about the Slaasriithi theriac in his bloodstream: would that work like an inoculation? Why hadn’t the Dornaani samplers detected the microbe? And what if there was a low-tech way to combat it? But that was an even deeper and more labyrinthine rabbit hole of possibilities and dangers. “I do not know, Ta’rel. None of our devices told us we were in danger. They still haven’t.”

The mangle nodded. “Perhaps when we reach Ebrekka, you will allow us to test you.” He waved a reassuring hand. “It is painless and it never fails to detect the animalcule that causes the decline, no matter the species.”

If we test negative, then we have some time to decide what to do. But if positive—well, traveling to Ebrekka puts us at one of Bactradgaria’s major moss markets. “I’m sure I speak for everyone when I say we accept your kind offer to be tested. But for now, we have a more pressing problem.”

Arashk nodded irritably. “Getting across the river.”

Caine glanced at Yidreg. “You said that it grows deeper north of here, without growing wider?”

“That is correct. The water often calms there.”

Riordan nodded. And if it’s calmer at the surface, the odds are that it’s even calmer toward that deeper bottom. “That is where we must go.”

“And do what?” one of the kajh exclaimed, adding the honorific far too late, “Leader Caine?”

Riordan met the praakh’s eyes until he looked uneasily away. “You shall see when we get there.” He turned to Bannor. “Colonel Rulaine has consulted with Yidreg and Ulchakh on how the river flows here and further upstream and believes he has a solution.” Caine turned to his friend. “Colonel, how do we cross the river?”

Bannor sighed, smiled crookedly. “You’re not going to like it, Commodore.”

Caine simply smiled. “I suspected as much. Lay it out for us.”

***

Riordan and his ad hoc command staff surveyed the river from the tallest of several rocky molars that pushed up from the dusty gums of the western river bank. Almost two hundred meters away on the far side, more stony teeth continued to march away into the east, albeit more rounded and worn. Starting almost a kilometer upstream, and continuing for another two downstream, the river was darker and ran slower than they’d seen elsewhere.

Yidreg pointed to the inkiest spot, just beyond their vantage point. “It is as I said: the slowest current between Khorkrag and Fragkork. But it can be treacherous.”

“Because the current can grow very strong?” Craig asked. He had once again been assigned to shadow Riordan as combination guard and runner.

“More because it is harder to predict the equiflow,” Bannor answered from where he was bent over one of the tallest, yet thinnest, of the basalt outcroppings.

Even with the Dornaani translator brought out of storage to help, building the necessary vocabulary had been a challenge. The terms and situation were so atypical that most of the Crewe, including Caine, didn’t even know them in English. “Equiflow” had been one such: the period where flow and contraflow were in a state of comparative equilibrium.

“Hell, how do ocean tides affect rivers this far upstream anyhow?” Craig sighed, scratching his head. “It’s over two thirds the distance across the United St—”

“It has to do with the moon, Sergeant,” Ayana interrupted hastily. “Although it appears distant, it exerts a much stronger gra—er, pull on the oceans. This is complicated by its elliptical orbit.”

“So, more, er, pull on the ocean at some times, less at others.”

“Well put, Sergeant Girten,” Tagawa said, trying to move the conversation away from planetary mechanics and into the less revealing realm of riverine dynamics. “Between these two factors, the oceans are subjected to unceasing yet rarely repeated oscillatory forces. Occasionally, when the patterns resulting from them align in certain patterns, a self-amplifying feedback loop is generated.”

“Ma’am,” Craig muttered, indicating their local audience, but including himself as one of the baffled listeners.

Ayana closed her eyes for a moment. “Because of these factors, there comes a time where the backflow—the return of all the water that has been pushed up the river—cannot fully clear, cannot equalize, over several cycles. The more of these cycles that accumulate without being able to equalize, the closer the river comes to reaching the high-water bank and the more it resists the current carrying the normal flow downstream. When that resistance and flow are almost equal, the river is said to be at equiflow.”

“Must make it damn near impossible to have any kind of reliable port, around here.”

“It’s difficult,” Bannor called from where he was performing what, to Caine’s eyes, was rope-wizardry around the natural stanchion they’d selected. “A boat floating level with the high-water bank could be stranded on the low-water bank twenty meters below just two hours later.”

“So that’s why we couldn’t start crossing right away. We had to wait for the time when the water going downstream and the water that’s been forced upstream are canceling each other out.”

“Actually, that’s still about two hours away, Craig. We need to have our lines ready before the equiflow starts or we’ll never get everyone across.”

“Got it, sir.” Girten turned to the onlookers: most of the senior h’achgai and trogs. About half of them nodded back; the rest seemed uncomfortable or, in a few cases, bored. But even they blinked in surprise and interest when Miles came marching out from the cluster of Crewe members who’d been prepping and checking his gear.

In addition to a Dornaani vacc suit, he had coiled lines carefully hung in containers fashioned from sections of the Dornaani ’chutes. Their smart fabric was bound together by the even more magical Dornaani tape, which could only be undone by “unzipping” the molecular bonds with the spatulalike device hanging from his utility belt. In addition to hand lights, a telescoping gaff, a grapple gun and Dornaani multitools, the life-support unit on his back had two of the Dornaani “pony tanks” mounted on either side.

Looking more otherworldly than he had for any spacewalk, he strode toward Riordan, stopped, and snapped a salute. “Ready to heroically save everyone here, sir!”

Caine couldn’t help laughing as he met the salute. “Get on with it, Chief. And in advance, Bravo Zulu.”

“Damn it, sir! Don’t jinx me!”

Riordan casually let his answering salute fall. “I thought you weren’t superstitious.”

“And you believe me? A known liar? Sheesh.” O’Garran smiled and dropped his hand. “Hey, Colonel?”

“Chief?”

“You done messing up—I mean, messing around—with that anchor knot?”

“Just about. You impatient and want to help?”

“What, sir? Me, sir? I’m just a SEAL. Don’t know squat ’bout tyin’ no knots, sir!”

“Can you just go and be a frogman, Chief?”

“Hey, that’s why they pay me the big bucks!” he replied, swaggering past Rulaine but sparing a moment to look over his shoulder. He nodded approvingly at the tensionless knot the colonel was completing for the anchor line: the first one they’d require for the crossing. O’Garran gave a similar once-over to the simpler fastening of his own shore-attachment line: five linked space tethers secured around a further rock and with Eku manning the already tested hardwire comms. But since some of the Dornaani tethers had been degraded by the CME, Miles, like Caine, would be restricted to Morse code rather than voice communications.

As O’Garran resumed his approach to the water’s edge, Bey’s constant companion, Zaatkhur, stared as Solsohn first fixed a bag of pebbles on one side of the SEAL’s belt, then a bag of small rocks on the other. “I know little of swimming,” the wounded kajh muttered, “but do you mean to do it carrying rocks?”

The little SEAL grinned. “I’m not swimming; I’m walking. But I’ve gotta get to the bottom to do that.” He patted one of the bags. “These will help me do it.”

Bey frowned. “Then why not simply use one large rock?”

“Now that, Miss Archer-Trog, is a very good question. Because until I’m down there, I won’t know how much weight I need to shed in order to maintain neutral buoyancy.” Bey stared at the words. “Umm . . . so I don’t sink lower or float up, but stay right where I want to.”

Bey’s frown did not fade, but she was also nodding now. So was Ta’rel. The rest of the locals wore expressions of resigned perplexity or continuing boredom.

Craig leaned toward Riordan and whispered, “But I thought the suit works like a . . . a BCV?”

“BCD,” Caine corrected gently. “Buoyancy Control Device. It does, but only to an extent. The chief wants the mass as a backup in case the suit’s system isn’t sufficient or it fails. And to control his ascent, he needs to be able to shed it in small increments.”

“Because otherwise he might get, uh, nitric- . . . nitro- . . . the bends?”

Riordan nodded. “Time for you to lend a hand with the tether line, Sergeant.”

“But sir, I’m your guard, too. I can’t—”

“Sergeant,” Riordan said, facing him directly, “I gave you an order. Besides”—he gestured behind at Arashk and two of his group—“I have all the protection I need.”

The h’achga stood a little straighter and nodded respectfully toward Girten, who saluted Caine. “Yes, sir.”

Craig got to the line just as Miles flung a saucy wave at the gathered company and began wading down into the water. The bank was so steep that three steps in, the water was up to his waist. Three more, and his head disappeared beneath the indolent current.

***

Miles O’Garran had done his share of river dives, but never one like this. After reaching the low-water point of the submerged bank, the angle of its slope did not decrease but, contrary to his prior riverine experience, dove even more sharply. Five meters further down, he could no longer walk at all; it resembled the step-off of a tidal shelf. Resigned, he signaled the shore team to stand ready to give him a lot more slack . . . and took the plunge.

The HUD’s light intensification was more helpful than the thermal imaging for a few dozen meters, but after that, neither one was particularly useful, in part because there was very little to see. But as he passed the one-hundred-fifty-meter mark, O’Garran realized why the flow slowed at this point: the depth and width of the channel retained so much water that it became an inertial impediment to rapid changes in either direction.

At one hundred and eighty meters, the suit’s crude sonar setting pinged: he was approaching the bottom. Time to risk using the hand light. Miles had decided against it for the descent, just in case the locals were wrong about the lack of animals in the river. The helmet lights were better, of course, but running them would be the equivalent of attaching a “free meal here” sign to his head.

Happily, the light did not reveal a set of dinosaur jaws widening to greet him. It only showed the bottom rising up . . . but also, sloping away again. The chief touched down carefully, discovered that the surface was more solid than he’d expected. It was more like stepping on fine clay, than sediment. He walked downward, as if descending into a dell or a small valley.

Fifty meters further on, the slope became increasingly less acute until, finally, he was on the surprisingly level bottom. About time. He started forward, sending the signal that he was about to begin walking across the river bed.

Ten steps into that underwater stroll, his lights picked something out of the darkness. A strange, still shape. He watched for the faintest sign of movement, checked the HUD for body heat: nothing. He took five more steps—and stopped. He only realized his jaw had dropped open when he voiced his reaction to what lay before him:

“Holy shit.”


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