by Jude Fisher
Bëte, who during this latest display, even with her fur blown this way and that by the force of the spell, had not moved an inch, now considered the old man expectantly. He squeezed his eyes shut and coughed. With a muted plop, an acorn fell at the cat’s feet. She nosed at it curiously, then at the Master’s hand as he retrieved it.
He pressed the acorn to the cat’s face; but she made bars of her fangs. The Master pressed harder. A second or two more of resistance; then the sharp teeth sprang apart and Bëte had the acorn in her mouth, one of the mage’s hands clamped over her muzzle, and the other rubbing at her throat. Her eyes bulged, as if in panic; then she swallowed.
Rahe smiled distractedly and said something soothing to the cat. Then he bent and picked a speck of dirt – or else something indistinguishable – from the floor. After inspecting it minutely, he muttered over it, turned twice upon his heel and cast it aloft. The chamber seemed to ripple before Virelai’s eyes, then, where the oak had previously been there abruptly appeared a great winged creature, twelve feet tall and covered from spiny head to clawed foot in luminous scales.
Even in the relative safety of the tower-room, Virelai gasped in terror. Unbelievably, it seemed that the beast had heard him, for it turned its head ponderously and regarded him with eyes as multifaceted and unreadable as any bluebottle’s. It opened its monstrous jaws.
Then it seemed that the mage addressed it, for the appalling creature swung its head away. Released from that terrible scrutiny, Virelai pulled back the focus of the crystals in time to see the beast begin to dwindle, then to spin and rush towards its creator. A moment later the Master stood untouched and alone. Protruding slightly from his mouth was a small white object, which he gingerly withdrew and held out to his familiar. Upon his palm lay a single leathery white egg. Bëte showed considerably more interest in this than she had in the acorn. Her nose twitched, then she carefully set her teeth around it and, leaping light-footedly down from the table, carried the egg back to the rug, where she ate it slowly with the side of her mouth.
Something the Master had said in the tower-room came back to Virelai then. He had been so distracted by the visions of Elda that it had not registered at the time, but now it all came into clear focus. There’s nothing worth saving in the end. May as well break it all up, let nature take its course. Rahe was reversing his spellcraft, destroying all his magic.
A red mist boiled in Virelai’s head . . .
The Master straightened up, passed his hand across his exhausted face and began to pace the chamber. Avoiding his feet nimbly, the cat sprang up onto a table upon which a large crucible held a pile of ashes and what looked like a pair of charred brass hinges.
Virelai stared at the hinges. His head itched. He knew them; he knew them . . . His hand made a minute adjustment to the lever and the vista skewed around the chamber. Where was the great leatherbound volume in which the Master recorded each of his procedures and findings, adding to the wisdom of his predecessors? Where was the Grand Register of Making and Unmaking?
The terrible suspicion hardened into certainty.
Virelai abandoned the tower-room and, taking the stairs three at a time, hurled himself down into the familiar corridors of the stronghold. Such a waste; such a stupid, senseless waste! Anger surged and flowed inside him. The old fool! The old monster! A fount of lava bubbled under his pale skin; yet over the years he had learned to control his temper. No trace of his fury showed in eyes as cold and pale as a squid’s. Twenty-nine years: twenty-nine years of unreasonable demands, of useless tutoring, fetching and carrying and general humiliation; twenty-nine years of being beaten on a whim and called ‘boy’. And now Rahe was eradicating all those paths to magic that Virelai had been so patiently following, eradicating them and storing them out of his reach in the blasted cat, and just as he was beginning to gain some understanding of the processes, some mastery of magic’s complex structures. It was too much to bear.
By the time he reached the chamber, both the Master and his familiar were gone. Virelai crossed to the long table and stared down into the crucible. It did indeed appear to contain the last remnants of the Book of Making and Unmaking. He fished out the two hinges and weighed them in his hands. They felt lumpen, bereft of magic, useless without the great tome it had been their purpose to enclose. He put them down again, his heart as heavy as the cold metal.
On the floor beneath the table a couple of torn and crumpled pieces of parchment lay abandoned. He picked them up. The first had lost its top third and started midway through a sentence. He scanned it rapidly, recognised it as the charm for making a charging horse dwindle to stallion’s seed, and cast it down again. The second piece was almost entire and he could remember the missing words; and while he could think of no immediate use for a spell to remove rockfalls from choked caverns he pocketed it anyway. The third scrap of the Book contained a rather fiendish recipe of the Master’s own devising, that and a grim description of its effects. Virelai read it through once without much interest, then stopped.
His head came up. His eyes narrowed. He read it again. A sweat broke out on his brow and his heart began to thud. Clutching the parchment in his hand as if it were his pass-key from hell, he scurried to the kitchens.
Sanctuary had been carved so deeply out of the ice and into the rocky bones beneath that its walls were like the stone of unvisited caverns: dark and ungiving, ready to chill you to the marrow. Even the torches burning in the sconces lining the dim passageways in the heart of the stronghold seemed to make little impression on their surfaces. They barely flickered as Virelai passed them at speed later that the evening, carrying the Master’s meal on a tray. It would be the last time he did so. The chill he felt as he walked the corridors that encircled the mage’s chambers was not just a physical temperature, for the Master’s magic bore its own cold with it.
Where the ice gave way to rock strata, minerals glittered in the flickering candlelight: feldspar and pyrites; cristobalite and tourmaline; greywacke and hornblende and pegmatite. To Virelai, taught to respond to natural harmonics, each one bore a different resonance to its fellows, each a different voice. He liked to think of the voices as the souls of the earth: bound in its crystals, trapped there for millennia: and perhaps they were. Virelai had seen the Master speak to the walls; even before he had thought him mad.
Towards the heart of the labyrinth, the walls gleamed gold and silver. Virelai had learned from his reading that although many of the minerals had little worth in the lands beyond – the world he now knew as Elda – others were considered as ‘treasure’; though it had to be said that if this were the case, the peoples of Elda must confer most arbitrary value to the different rocks, for some of the so-called worthless ones (which were extensive in the tunnels) were remarkably close in appearance to those that men fought over in the old stories.
Fourth passage: dead end; take the first door past the hanging icicle; go down three steps; press the wall behind the tapestry.
Once in the vicinity of the Master’s suite of rooms, Virelai became furtive. He lifted the metal dome that covered Rahe’s meal and sniffed it again, although he was careful not to take the vapours too deep into his lungs for fear that even in steam they might do their damage. But despite the virulent ingredients he had added to the stew from the old parchment’s recipe, he could sense none of them, through any of his senses, natural or attuned. He smiled.
When he reached it, the door to the Master’s chamber was slightly ajar and he could hear voices within. His heart hammered.
Balancing the tray carefully, Virelai applied his eye to the door-crack.
What he saw almost made him drop the dishes. The blood rushed to his head, his chest; his loins. His jaw sprang open like an unlatched gate. He stared and stared, taking in detail after detail of the scene. Then he grinned wolfishly. To the opportunist shall be granted opportunity, and he who takes Destiny by the throat shall be rewarded threefold: was that not what the books said? Virelai counted his blessings. Threefo
ld indeed.
He knocked smartly upon the door.
‘Your supper, lord.’
There was a hush, followed by a soft scuffle, the rustle of heavy fabrics. Then: ‘Leave the tray outside, Virelai,’ came the Master’s voice, a trifle querulous. ‘I am somewhat engaged just now.’
‘Indeed, lord: may you have pleasure of it.’
Bëte the cat emerged from the Master’s chamber and watched Virelai retreat down the long corridor. She hovered for a moment beside the tray, sniffed at the covered dish and recoiled with a sneeze.
The only witnesses the next morning to Virelai’s departure were the terns that frequented the bay beneath Sanctuary, and a single storm petrel, the light of the brassy winter sun lending its wings an oily iridescence. The petrel flew on, uninterested in the drama that was being played out below: it had many miles of berg-strewn ocean to cross on its long journey. The terns, though, were curious as to the nature of the large wooden chest the cloaked figure was manhandling into a single-masted sloop that looked perilously close to overturning. They dipped and wheeled in expectation of a tidbit or two. Bëte the cat, swaddled unceremoniously in a blanket laced with leather ties, lay motionless save for the flick of her eyes as she watched the flash of their plumage, their bright black eyes, their pretty red beaks: so close but so infuriatingly inaccessible.
Virelai, having eventually succeeded in his battle to stow his oversized cargo, boarded the little vessel himself, untied and shoved off from the natural breakwater, and rowed inexpertly out into the ocean, followed by the birds, distracted from their search for food, in a stream of white. Once out of the shelter of the icewall, the chop of the waves made the boat roll alarmingly. The cat, splashed with freezing seawater, mewed piteously. Virelai missed his stroke; cursed, shipped his oars and after a certain amount of fiddling around, managed to put up the sail. For some moments the sail hung as slack as a turkey’s wattle. Then, a little breeze bellied the fabric and began to drive the sloop slowly, inexorably, back to shore, until the prow, its painted eye staring blindly ahead, bumped the ice of its home, and the seabirds shrieked their derision. Virelai put his head in his hands. He was a fool, a fool, a fool: he could not even sail a tiny boat. Idiot, his inner voice chided him. Use the magic! A wind spell: it was a simple thing, but even so his memory had deserted him. Digging in his bag he pulled out a small notebook and riffled through its pages. Then he unbound the cat’s head from the swaddling, and made a short incantation. Bëte fixed him with an unforgiving eye, then made a choking cough. The sail went slack, then swelled on its opposite side. The terns, caught unawares by the sudden change in wind direction, banked to correct their coverts. The sloop sailed smoothly out into the ocean.
Virelai shaded his vision against the rising sun and watched as it delineated the deceptive curves and rises of the place he had regarded all his life as his home. To the untutored eye, it might have been no more than the usual vast jumble of ice you would expect to find in such an arctic region: great blocks and floes that had been piled one atop the other by a thousand ocean storms, ice that had been carved into bizarre and unlikely shapes by wicked seawinds; all bleak and wild and uninhabitable by any except the seabirds and narwhal. But to the mage’s apprentice Sanctuary revealed itself in all its sorcerous glory. Where a shady cornice met a cliff of ice, Virelai, narrowing his eyes, saw how the curving wall of the great hall met the stern face of the eastern tower; where higgledy-piggledy blocks lay as if scattered by the hand of a god, he noted how elegant stairways twined up from the statuettes and balustrades of a formal garden that to another might offer nothing but the unrelieved whiteness of an untouched snowfield. Spires and pillars, columns and masonry, all perfectly proportioned and crafted; cold white surfaces now limned in dawn-golds and pinks by the romantic sun.
The Master had brought his exacting eye to bear on every detail of his ice-realm. Nothing here was natural: nothing occurred by chance. Virelai wondered if he had viewed it from this very point, perhaps even from this very boat, when he had conceived Sanctuary’s form.
How it or he had come to be here, and for what purpose, Virelai had no idea: but he meant to find out. Turning away from the island of ice, he set a course south, to where the world began.
PART
ONE
One
Sacrilege
Katla Aransen stared out across the prow of the Fulmar’s Gift as it ploughed through the grey waves, the foam from the ship’s passage spraying back into her face and wetting her long red hair, but Katla did not care. It was her first long voyage and they had been at sea these past two weeks, but she was nineteen years old and hungry for the world: she could not bear to miss a moment of it.
Behind her, she could hear the great greased-wool sail cracking and roaring in the stiff wind, the wind that carried away her father’s voice as he shouted orders to the crew. Many of them, she knew, would be hunkered down amidships amongst the cargo and sea-chests, trying to stay warm around the tub-fire. A sudden hissing signalled the start of preparations for the evening meal: they stored their meat in leather buckets full of seawater till it tasted more of brine than anything else, and cooking it by putting it directly onto the embers was the only way to make it palatable.
A warm hand on her shoulder. She spun around, to find her twin brother, Fent, beside her. His long red fringe was plastered to his face; the rest he had bound up with thongs to stop it whipping into his eyes.
‘Listen to this, small sister,’ he said teasingly, bracing himself against the gunwale with a knee, ‘and tell me what you think.’ He pulled from his tunic a length of twine that had been knotted at intervals in the complicated Eyran fashion that served both as memory aid and language. Moving his fingers nimbly up and down the knots he began to declaim:
‘From Northern Sea to Golden Sea
Smoothly swam the swan-necked ship
On the backs of Sur’s white horses
On the line of the lord’s Moon-path
Easily from the Eyran Isles
Came Rockfallers to the Moonfell Plain.’
He wrapped the twine around his hand and into a loop and folded it carefully back into his tunic before looking to his twin for approval.
‘You repeated “moon”,’ Katla said with a grin, and watched Fent’s brows knot in consternation. ‘And I’m not sure about “Rockfallers”, either.’
‘I couldn’t fit “the Rockfall clan” in,’ Fent said crossly. ‘It wouldn’t scan.’
‘I’d stick to swordplay, if I were you, brother. Leave the song-making to Erno.’ Their cousin, Erno Hamson, for all his skill at weapons, was at heart a quiet and serious young man, and he was currently conveniently out of earshot.
‘As if you’d know a well-made verse from your ar— Ow! What?’ Her fingers were suddenly tight about his biceps, digging into his skin even through the sturdy leather of his jerkin.
‘Land: I can feel it.’
Fent stared at her, his pale eyes mocking. ‘You can feel land?’
Katla nodded. ‘There’s rock ahead. My fingers are tingling.’
Fent laughed. ‘I swear you are a troll’s get, sister. What is it with you and rock? If you’re not climbing it, you’re divining it from the depths of the whale’s path! We’re miles north of Istria yet: Father reckoned on landfall at first light.’
But Katla was shrouding her eyes with her hand, gazing intently at where a dark smear lay between sea and sky on the horizon. ‘There—’
‘A cloud.’
‘I’m sure it’s not . . .’
There were clouds aplenty, piled up above the horizon in great lumps and towers, strewn about the upper reaches of the sky, which was darkening already and streaked with red, the sun having lost its daily battle with encroaching night: a blood-sky, as Erno would term it.
A shrill cry broke into their reverie. Above them, suddenly, a white bird veered past the ship, banking sharply. Fent watched it go, his mouth a round ‘o’ of surprise. ‘A gull,’ he said, li
ke a simple child. ‘That was a shore gull.’
Katla squeezed his arm. ‘See?’
And now the outline on the horizon was becoming clearer by the minute; not a cloud-bank, after all, but solid land – a long, dark plateau, bordered to the west by higher land misting away into the distance.
‘The Moonfell Plain.’
She could hear the delight in her father’s voice without even having to see his face; even so, she turned around at once, eyes alight with excitement, seeking his attention. ‘Land, Father: I saw it first.’
‘And sensed it before that,’ Fent muttered, clearly put out.
Aran Aranson grinned, revealing sharp white teeth amid weather-darkened skin and a close black beard barely touched by grey.
Ahead of them, the dark shape began to resolve itself further so that tiny dots of colour against the stark black gradually revealed themselves to be brightly-hued pavilions, the more vivid pinpricks of light between them as campfires. As they sailed into the sound they could see a whole host of other vessels bobbing quietly at anchor off the shore. ‘Istria: can’t you smell it? That’s the smell of a foreign land, Katla; that’s the smell of the Southern Empire.’
All Katla could smell was salt and sea and the sweat of bodies that had lived for a half-month in close quarters without fresh water to spare for washing, but she wouldn’t say so.
‘A foreign land . . .’ she whispered, awed.
‘Aye, and a load of bastard Istrians,’ Fent said under his breath.
‘To the south, sweet and fair
They lie, slumbering and fat
Ripe meat for the wolf.’
He didn’t need a knotted string for that one. Yet how his father could be so blithe at the sight of the old enemy’s land, he could not understand. He turned to make further comment, but Aran was already calling for the rowers as he ran back along the deck, nimbly skirting the boxes of cargo, the cook-fire, the startled crew. With a dark look at Katla, Fent followed his father and took up his oar-place with the others.