Sorcery Rising

by Jude Fisher

  ‘Are ye all right, girlie?’ a gruff voice said, and she whirled about to find Kotil Gorson behind her, his blue eyes shining unnaturally bright in the web of dark and weatherbeaten creases of his face.

  ‘I’ll do,’ she grinned back, though her entire body hurt like hell.

  He nodded. ‘Good effort, lass. Glad they didn’t burn yer. ’Twould have been a sore loss after Tor and Erno, too.’

  Katla bit her lip. Her eyes returned to Ma Stensen: a tall, slight woman whose long blonde hair had faded in the course of the last year to an unhealthy-looking white streaked with yellow, like the mane of a pony Katla had once owned. She would have come here all the way from Falls Ness in the north of the island, hoping, no doubt, for her share of the money Tor would have earned from the sardonyx. Life was tougher the further north you went: the farms yielding less and less; the fishing wild and treacherous, and with only Tor’s little brother, Matt, to aid her, times would be hard indeed. I will make the finest sword I have ever fashioned, as soon as I am able, Katla promised herself, and I will sell it and give Ella Stensen the proceeds. It was hardly enough to compensate for the loss of her son, but the gift would be worth more than soft words.

  Some minutes later the faering crunched its way onto the pebbly strand and more willing hands were assisting her out onto the shore. The ground felt strangely unsteady under her feet, as if it were the sea that had been motionless all these days of the voyage, and the earth beneath that had moved and was moving still. Katla tried to pitch and roll with the absent swell, and fell flat on her face, to the great amusement of the crowd who had not yet remarked the bandaged arm or her other, less obvious, injuries. She lay there, stunned, and the voices and laughter washed above her head like another sea; then a counter-rhythm began to pulse through the cheek that touched the ground; through her hip, her ribs, through her chest and arms and legs. Heat followed – not fiery, but a warm, engulfing flow – so that she felt almost that she was floating in a hot spring. Blood buzzed and sang in her head. Someone pulled at her shoulders and began to lever her up, and she went unwillingly, feeling ever more light-headed and disorientated as she came away from the ground. Upright once more, she was vaguely aware of people talking to her, of one embrace and then another, and the familiar scent of the lavender water her mother used; then she was moving through bodies, propelled by others’ hands, away from the water.

  An unknowable time later, she came back to herself with a start, and found that she was standing before the Great Hall at their Rockfall steading. How she had got there, she barely knew. People milled about in front of the outbuildings, and animals roamed the pastures beyond. The grass seemed greener than it ever had before she went away; the sky lucent with hidden light, the birds sang as loudly as they did at the onset of spring. Behind the steading, the waterfall known as the Old Woman plunged off the crags and into the upland tarn in a neverending stream of white water and surf; and beyond the crags, the mountain rose preternaturally distinct against the pale sky. She took a deep breath and felt her body respond to the rush of air in her lungs. Then Ferg, their hound, came bounding out of the gate, barking fit to wake the dead, and launched himself at her at full speed, slobbering with adoration. Instinctively, she turned slightly away from him, and he hit her full on the injured arm. With a yelp that had more to do with surprise than pain, Katla stepped backwards and fended him off with her other hand, till Aran called him and he ran obediently to his master’s heel.

  Katla’s arm throbbed dully from shoulder to fingertip; but the nausea-inducing wave of agony that should have ensued from such an onslaught never materialised.

  Brows knit in confusion, she allowed herself to be led away into the longhouse, feeling like a fraud as everyone fussed around her.

  Twenty-one

  Silver and Stone

  In his castle in Cantara, far in the rocky south of Istria, Tycho Issian seethed and raged. To have come so close to owning the Rosa Eldi and to have had her snatched from his very grasp was desperate enough; but to have lost her to the licentious embrace of the barbarian king was far, far worse. The fact of her loss plagued him whether he were awake or asleep, for night after night she visited his dreams with her green eyes, her hot mouth and willing hands. Some mornings he had felt her presence so powerfully that he could even smell her perfume – a light, earthy scent with just a hint of musk to it – and had turned in the bed to draw her to him yet again, only to find the left side of the mattress cool and smooth and entirely unoccupied.

  By contrast, the loss of his daughter Selen seemed a minor privation, except when he remembered the words of the map-seller (whom he had now grudgingly come to regard as ‘the sorcerer’, though the man’s sorceries were as yet grossly deficient): ‘in a boat with a northern man’ – a statement which, under intense questioning, had rendered a little further detail; ‘a tall, young man with a beard so blond it was almost silver; a man with plaits and shells bound into his hair’. It was this last particular that stayed with Tycho. The bizarre braidings and knottings that the Eyrans made – in their hair, their beards, their tally-ropes and those dreadful pieces of string that seemed to stand in for decent parchment and quill – were yet more proof to the Istrian lord, if proof were needed beyond the heretical worship of their ocean-god, of their primitive and boorish nature. What fate did Selen face in the hands of an enemy; an enemy, moreover, who could neither read nor write, a man who tied strange, uncrafted objects into his own hair?

  He had had Virelai scry again and again for the whereabouts of both women, though he knew even at the outset it was a useless exercise: for where else would either be bound but to the vile and frozen north? Nevertheless, he had forced the sorcerer into the practice of these searches, as much to stamp his will on the man as for any valuable information. The crystal, time after time, gave back nothing but bland images of fog and cloud, rocks and sea, and eventually Tycho grew bored with the whole procedure and switched his attention to the matter of persuading the sorcerer to find ways of turning brass and alloy into pure silver. Virelai, however, smarting from the Lord of Cantara’s unrelenting contempt, practised the scrying in private in his room; and one night, perhaps aided by Bëte being uncharacteristically curled up in his lap, his persistence had been rewarded by a single tantalising glimpse. On a headland that looked too green and forested to belong to the bleak northern isles, a tall man with his head swathed in a turban, and a small dark woman in a red gown climbed a steep path through a rocky brake. He watched as the dress was caught by a bramble runner, forcing the woman to spend some seconds trying to disentangle herself; but the tall man did not even turn, let alone stop to help her; and a few moments later, she ripped the fabric free, leaving a small rag of red on the bush, and ran after him in what seemed some panic. Virelai had seen no more of Tycho’s daughter than that one brief sighting in the crystal amidst all the chaos at the Allfair; but her dark, frightened eyes had struck a deep, empathic chord in him: he knew he would recognise them anywhere.

  After some deliberation, however, he decided to keep this tiny nugget of information to himself. It might not, he reasoned, in an attempt to justify his decision, be a true vision – which would only result in further vilification and probably even another of the lord’s unusually painful punishments, and Virelai was in no hurry to incur a repeat of this experience. All that he had suffered at the hands of the Master had paled into mild discomfort by comparison, and it was with increasing frequency that he regretted the way he had poisoned the old man and left him wrapped in a sleep that might – he realised rather belatedly – eventually kill him by starvation or dehydration before any of the eager northern expeditioners reached the island. And if the Master died thus by Virelai’s hand, albeit so belatedly, then the geas that the mage had explained to him so grimly and in such grisly and elaborate detail would surely be invoked. He had thought his little ruse with the maps and the promise of gold beyond measure so foolproof, so clever, for surely to have the old man fall to another’s
hand could not count against him? The thought evaporated into panic, and a moment later he found himself wondering desperately how he might find a way to escape Tycho Issian and return to Sanctuary in time to save the old man. Perhaps, he thought, if I pretend it was all a terrible accident . . .

  Miraculously, the horses recovered, due to Saro’s care and a fresh source of clean water; but Tanto failed to show any significant improvement, and it was with a sinking heart that Saro viewed the prospect of his home. He had always loved the town and environs of Altea but as the Golden River debouched into the great fertile plain at the foot of the southern mountains and he had gazed out across the winding terraces of orange groves and vineyards, punctuated by stands of tall poplar and pillar-firs, the fields of spice and balsam, and the mauve haze of the lavender plantations, instead of feeling uplifted by the beauty of the scene he had found himself in the grip of a cold dread. There was no denying that he was now a completely different person to the naive and hopeful young man who had set out from his home only a few weeks before; and that a very different future from the one he had always envisaged for himself awaited him there. Consigned to tending to his festering brother (the smell alone some days was enough to make him retch) while grieving relatives came and went, shaking their heads and (no doubt) privately opining that it was a shame the two sons’ fates were not reversed, he would surely go quite mad.

  Then there was the small matter of his mother, now that he had been made aware of the secret of his parentage. He dreaded her looking into his eyes for fear she would divine the knowledge he had acquired: her shame would be unquenchable, and how could he bear to bring her that pain?

  Time and again he stared off into the distance, where the Dragon’s Backbone rose like a low bank of grey cloud on the farthest horizon, and wondered whether he had the courage to just disappear; maybe even to take Night’s Harbinger and gallop off into the distance. And do what? he thought bitterly. He would last but a few days in the southern wilderness; be murdered, most likely, by the fierce tribes that infested the foothills of those mountains as he wandered, clueless and waterless, through that hostile landscape. And if he were to travel alone anywhere else in civilised Istria his furious father would have spies out looking for him and he would be spirited home again before any further dishonour could attach itself to the Vingo name.

  And so, here he was, about to set foot on the family land once more. With each step he felt himself a step closer to a prison he might never leave.

  ‘Ach! No one’s going to mistake that for silver, you fool!’

  Tycho’s toothmarks were clearly visible against the grey shimmer of the coin as dull brown marks where the original copper shone through.

  ‘Can’t you bribe the damned cat, squeeze it harder, or something?’

  Virelai stared dully at the pile of metal. All day he had worked, with poor Bëte chained to the table-leg, mewling angrily: all day to the effect of transferring the appearance of silver to the stuff; but as Tycho said, the result would barely fool a blind man for long.

  ‘I’m doing my best, my lord,’ he said wearily. ‘But it’s not perfect yet, I admit.’ He had started a week and more ago by melting down some of the plain coins and attempting to work a spell of transformation upon them, but all that had earned him was a single foul lump of slag worth less than the sum of the coins; that and a beating. The Lord of Cantara was very fond of beatings. After persisting to no greater effect for some days with attempts to make the metal what it was not, he had suddenly struck upon the idea of working with illusion instead, which had earned him a moment of Tycho’s most extravagant praise – until he realised that what the sorcerer had offered him was not a nugget of solid silver and the answer to all his pecuniary problems, but a shoddy trick. It was not until a day after the savage beating the southern lord had so promptly administered that Virelai had been able to speak well enough to explain his stratagem, for which he had won himself a grudging nod.

  The demands from the Council for the repayment of Tycho’s debt were becoming ever more pressing. This very morning he had received a messenger from Cera advising him that his fellow peers in their bounty had decided to extend his period of credit for a further thirty days; but no more. The parchment the messenger so hesitantly brought (his manner suggesting to Tycho that the man had done the unthinkable and actually unwrapped the scroll and read the contents) also went on to point out in the most polite terms that the funds were urgentiy needed by the state, and that if the Lord of Cantara failed to comply with this request, the Council would have no choice than to declare him apostate, requisition his castle and all his chattels and place them in the hands of Balto Miron. That grotesque fool! The thought of Balto’s fat arse squeezing itself into his exquisite oak chairs, hand-carved by the finest craftsmen in the Blue Woods, let alone swiving his comeliest slavegirls in his own bed, gave Tycho physical pain; at once he began to formulate a plan that would satisfy all his needs at one fell swoop.

  Saro watched his mother kneel beside Tanto’s litter and realised with bitter relief that he hadn’t needed to worry about her reaction to him at all: he might as well not exist. She knelt there, running her hands across Tanto’s pale face and the bald pink dome of his head, and her shoulders began to shake. It must be a shock for her to see her beautiful boy so reduced. Gone was that glossy mane of black hair; gone was his dark golden tan, the hard, flat planes of his cheeks, the strikingly sharp line of his jaw, to be replaced by this pale and sunken mask. Tanto’s brows and lashes stood out in stark contrast to his now-sallow complexion; but while these remained intact, no stubble broke through the skin on his jaw and slack jowls, and the changes did not stop there, Saro thought grimly, recalling the appalling vista currently hidden by the blankets, though the general stench must give Illustria some indication of Tanto’s state, for he smelled as if he were rotting from the inside out.

  When at last Illustria raised her head, he could see that the front of her sabatka was so wet that it was almost as if he could see the glitter of her eyes through the sodden veil, though she had made no sound at all. Was the fabric so fragile; or were the tears a mother cried for the loss of her favourite son unusually potent? It was an uncharacteristically uncharitable thought and he felt ashamed at once. Without thinking, he took three steps across the room and laid a hand gently on her shoulder; and at once was assailed by her grief. It was so powerful that for a few moments he forgot to break the contact, as wave after wave of despair rose and broke upon the shore of his consciousness; and when at last he removed his hand the room swayed and canted and his knees gave way.

  ‘Saro!’

  His mother’s dark shape loomed over him, her mouth, painted in Falla’s colours, all red and gold – to welcome her husband home, he wondered incongruously; or his brother, Fabel?

  ‘Don’t touch me,’ he said sharply, as her hand hovered towards him. ‘I’m all right, truly.’ He levered himself upright.

  ‘You look . . . terrible.’ Her voice dropped almost to a whisper.

  ‘It’s been a long journey, Mother. I’m very tired, that’s all.’ He pushed himself quickly to his feet, wincing as his body registered the impact of his fall. The moodstone, safe in its leather pouch, thumped coldly against his breastbone; and he raised his hand unthinkingly to still it. As he did so, an acrid smell filled the room. It was an aroma he had become all too familiar with by now.

  ‘I must wash him again,’ he said dully, turning to his mother. ‘Perhaps you could ask one of the girls to help me?’

  ‘Nonsense,’ Illustria was brisk, all trace of tears gone from her voice. ‘I looked after him for years when he could do nothing for himself, and I shall do it again now. He is only ill: I shall nurse him back to health myself.

  Such assurance in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary, Saro thought; and how quickly she had gone from hysteria to this controlled calm. It was no wonder she had managed to mask her infidelity so effectively. ‘Father said I must care for him.’
<
br />   ‘And I say that my women and I will do it, and that no one else shall enter this chamber without my express permission.’

  ‘He will be angry.’

  ‘Let him be angry: I am not going to lose both of my sons. You look dead on your feet, Saro: go and rest. I will talk to your father.’

  And so for the next fortnight, Saro had found himself with time on his hands, as Illustria held to her word and in this one matter forced her will upon his father. Saro had heard their raised voices permeating even the thickest walls of the villa, rising from Tanto’s chamber (they had laid him in one of the guest rooms on the ground floor, where water could be fetched and carried more easily); then from the corridor outside, and finally from the entrance to the women’s room, and had marvelled how so demure a woman as his mother could become so fearsomely strident when her protective instincts were thus engaged. There had come the sound of a heavy oak door slamming shut with such force that the walls reverberated; and then silence, and Saro reckoned his mother had won her argument, for thereafter during the daylight hours he found the way to his brother’s chamber barred by the presence of Fina, a large woman whose grim and silent demeanour had as much to do with her bad temper as the loss of her tongue to a cruel slavemaster at the Gibeon market whence they had purchased her.

  He had occupied himself mainly in walking the hills, ostensibly to exercise the hounds, but more to escape the smell of his brother’s rotting body and the oppressive quiet of the villa. He would sit amid the sage brush and wild mallow watching the larks soaring into the deep-blue sky and eating the bread and cheese he had taken from the breakfast table, while the dogs rootled cheerfully among the rabbit holes and limestone terraces and brought him sticks and stones and even once a small brown snake with one head at either end of its twisting body which, miraculously unharmed by those sharp canine incisors, had observed him cautiously out of its four unnervingly unblinking copper eyes before slithering quickly under away into the shadows. And sometimes he caught himself thinking about a wild northern girl with hair which had blazed like a beacon on the top of Falla’s Rock; and then he would catch the thought and stow it carefully away before her dark fate came back to torment him.