Riverkeep by Martin Stewart Page A

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 theproperties 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 theflash 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.
    â€œIt 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, stabbingand 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