by Glenda Larke
The Eight Stabilities are islands of order surrounded by corrupting, lethal chaos—and the chaos is encroaching.
All Keris Kaylen ever wanted was to be a mapmaker like her father. Instead, she finds herself on the run into the realm of Carasma, the Unmaker Lord of Chaos. When her path crosses that of the traitorous aristocrat, Davron Storre, she’s way out of her depth, with no idea that the magic map she’s inherited might make a difference to the world …
HAVENSTAR
Glenda Larke
(writing as Glenda Noramly)
Published by Glenda Larke on Smashwords
Copyright 1999, 2012 Glenda Larke
Smashwords Edition, License Notes:
This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.
~~~~~~~
To my mother
Jean Larke
Who taught me how to read
~~~~~~~
What others have said about Havenstar:
“Terrific stuff…10/10” -- Starburst
“This is an exciting, fast-moving page-turner that draws you in from page one and holds your attention until the final full-stop.” -- The Alien Has Landed
“An outstanding example of good fantasy.” -- Boothbay Register
A note from the author:
Havenstar was my first published book, and is the only book of mine written under my married name of Glenda Noramly. The story has not changed one iota in the intervening years, but this ebook edition has been re-edited to reflect all I have learned about being a better writer. The artwork for the map was done for me by Perdita Phillips.
I have followed UK/Australian spelling and punctuation conventions, so you will find humour rather than humor, ploughs rather than plows, and dishevelled travellers instead of disheveled travelers... Forgive me, I’m an Australian.
~~~~~~~
Chapter One
In the beginning there was only Chaos—but this was displeasing to the Maker, so He took the matter of Chaos and moulded it to form the firmament and the stars, which was more pleasing to Him. But the Unmaker Lord looked on His work and was unhappy, for Chaos is Lord Carasma’s Realm, and only in the Unstable does he find joy.
—Creation, Book I: Passage 1, Phrases 2 & 3
Piers Kaylen drew rein at the top of the rise and looked across to the horizon. He sat unmoving in the saddle of his mount, and his emerald eyes missed nothing as he shifted his gaze away from the distant mountains and bordering roughs to the tree-spattered plain, and finally to the stolid buildings of the halt below. Beside him, his pack-horse—laden with the tools of his profession—shook a dusty head and then nudged its master’s leg as if to tell him to get moving again. It was a crossings-horse, with all the habitual bad-temper and impatience of its breed. Piers Kaylen, however, Master Mapmaker from Kibbleberry, was not a man to be hurried by his pack animal’s irascible temperament.
He surveyed the scene below with careful scrutiny. He saw nothing unstable although he searched for it, and he had thirty years of experience at recognising instability. He saw no flicker of colour, no veiled movement or mirage-ripple that would speak of danger, of change. The halt, built of uncut and undressed logs, still squatted toad-like beside a soak, shedding bark from shingles and walls like scales of unwanted skin, exactly as it had done when he’d passed this way on his outward journey. The spiked poles of the stockade surrounding the buildings were still level one with the other, their tips as even as a ruled compass heading; no signs of Unstable attack there either.
‘Your luck holds, Pickle my friend,’ he thought. ‘Three years in one spot, and not a hint of ley. You chose well.’
He knew enough not to be complacent. There were no paths to and from the halt, no tracks leading to the building, no trace of the passage of man or animal. The blue-grey grasses and the scrubby prickle bushes around the stockade looked as if nothing had disturbed them for a generation, which was all the indication needed for him to know that instability was as powerful here as ever. This was no place of Order, for all that the buildings still stood, untouched and untainted, three years after they had been built. Here, nothing could be taken for granted. This was the Unstable after all.
Piers urged his mount down the gentle slope and the pack-horse followed obediently. Where the feet of the two beasts had crushed the grass a moment before, the grey leaves sprang back into shape as the plants quivered and shook off the effects of their violation the way an animal shakes water from its coat. Where the weight of the horses had impacted the soil, sand grains stirred and loosened themselves, their irritation shivering the ground like a heat mirage.
Piers took no notice. In the Unstable, that was normal.
~~ ~~~~~~~
The jangle of the bell-pull brought Pickle himself out to swing open the gate of the stockade. Piers knew the haltkeeper well enough not to be fazed by the nightmarish personification of a troll rather than a man, and grinned. ‘Greetings, Pickle. Still here, I see.’
‘How goes it?’ Pickle asked in return, using the ritual words of greeting to all ley-lit, and he accompanied the phrase with a kinesis of welcome to a friend: right hand moving from heart to diaphragm, then extended palm outwards.
The words and gesture may have been ritual, but Piers knew a full answer was expected. ‘Ah, you’re secure enough this night,’ he said as he rode into the safety of the enclosed courtyard and swung himself down from his mount. ‘There’s no change I can see, not within twenty leagues east, anyway.’
‘The Wanderer?’
‘That bitch travels east this season. Moving fast, and the emanations from the Snarled Fist are even nastier than usual with a number of new off-shoots, all as mean as Chaos, but none of it’s coming this way. Your halt will stand a little longer, with the Maker’s grace. How’s the company?’
‘Building up. Still a little early in the season for much in the way of pilgrims, but there are one or two small fellowships in, with a devotions-chantor among ’em too. There’ll be a kinesis session in the common room after supper.’
Piers grimaced. ‘Thanks for the warning. I’ll stay in my room. You do have a vacancy?’ He began to unsaddle his mount without even waiting for an answer; there was always a place for a mapmaker to lay his bedroll even when the beds were all taken.
‘Oh, aye. No worries there. You can take the room you had last time.’ Pickle signalled a reluctant stable boy to come and help unstrap the bundles from the pack-horse. The horse curled its lip back and displayed its discoloured teeth in an evil grin.
‘Stop that,’ Piers growled and pulled in warning at the stiff hairs of the animal’s striped mane.
‘Join me for supper,’ Pickle said.
Piers nodded his thanks, knowing his meal and his lodging would be free; no ley-lit mapmaker ever paid a reckoning in a halt. It was their knowledge that helped haltkeepers stay alive, after all.
Pickle stomped off on thickened legs, the heels of his bare feet hitting the beaten earth of the yard like battering rams. The haltkeeper weighed three hundred pounds, and every pound was solid flesh and muscle. Pity that his hide is that colour, Piers reflected, not for the first time. Green made people think of creatures such as wart-toads or jowled water monitors, which was a shame, because Pickle was very much a man for all that he looked like something that lurked in the dark of age-old slime beneath a bridge.
Keeping an eye on the snapping teeth of the pack animal, the stable boy led the
two horses away. In the gathering dusk their stripes blended into the perpendicular lines of the stockade wall behind them. Piers, staff in his hand, watched for a moment, then headed for his room and a much-needed wash.
~~~~~~~
Supper was a stew, over-laden with yams and onions and heavily spiced in a vain attempt to hide the stringiness of the dried meat it contained. Meat in the halts of the Unstable was never fresh.
As usual the conversation in the common room centred around the latest peregrinations of ley lines. Pickle was not the only person interested in what Piers had to say. Two couriers, a guide and a trader, all ley-lit men, wandered over to exchange a word with the mapmaker and to learn what they could of the changes. With none of them was he particularly forthcoming even though he was acquainted with them all. ‘My information is for sale,’ he told them, ‘as usual. I have old maps of every area north of the Wide, including the best Wide crossings. I can sketch in the latest changes now as well, or you can have properly updated maps within a couple of weeks from my shop. You all know my place in—’
‘—in Kibbleberry on the South Drumlin Road in the First Stab,’ one of the couriers finished for him, grinning. He turned to the others, saying, ‘Come on, you load of misbegotten Unstabler carrion-eaters, you ought to know by now you’ll get nothing out of Piers Kaylen without paying for it.’
‘Bloody freeloaders,’ Piers said without rancour, addressing Pickle once they were gone. ‘They want the best information to save their hides, but they hate to have to pay for it. They forget I’ve been out there in the Unstable for three months, risking my neck half a dozen times a day. I was attacked by Minions near the Fist, nearly lost my life fording the Flow, got bitten by a snake-devil within a leyflame’s throw of the Wanderer—do they think I do it all for nothing?’
Pickle laughed. ‘A normal trip, eh? By all that’s dark in Chaos, Piers, I reckon you must be the toughest bit of leather ever to roam the Unstable. There’s not many can say they’ve lasted as long as you have. And often alone, what’s more.’
‘True.’ He felt a quiet pride. ‘Thirty years I’ve been at it. And I reckon it may well die with me too. That damn son of mine’ll never make a decent surveyor. Maker knows what sort of maps he’ll turn out, left to himself.’
‘Seemed tough enough to me the few times you’ve brought him here.’
‘Nah, he’s all bluster. He’s about as tough as melting sugar-cakes.’ He thrust out his left leg and waved a hand at it. Flesh and bone ended just below the knee and the stump nestled inside a leather cup attached to a wooden peg leg. ‘This happened twenty years back, and it never stopped me. Saw my own foot disappear down the gullet of one of the Wild and I survived. That son of mine winces when his hipbone nudges a pebble under his bedroll!’ He sopped up the last of the stew with a piece of bread and shrugged. ‘He’ll run the business into the ground when I’m gone. My girl’s got twice his gumption and it’s a jiggin’ shame she’s the wrong sex. Jiggin’ shame too, that Chantry took the other son we had, the over-encoloured bastards. Still, why worry, eh? I don’t suppose I’ll be around to see what happens to Kaylen the Mapmaker’s twenty years from now.’ He paused suddenly, head cocked in disbelief as he listened. ‘Chaosdamn, Pickle—you’ve never got a baby in here?’
From somewhere above the unmistakable sound of a hungry infant wailed down into the common room.
Pickle gave a grimace that made deep green furrows in his face. ‘What’s the Halt coming to, eh? Yep, it’s a babe right enough.’ He lowered his voice. ‘The parents are a young couple, making the Long Pilgrimage, so they say. But the babe’s Unbred, or I’ll be pink and white myself. They are certainly keeping it away from yon chantor.’ He nodded at the man who had appropriated the room’s most comfortable chair by the fire. He was dressed in the scarlet and mauve robes of Chantry and was reading the text of a book with the aid of a gold wire-rimmed lorgnette. Every now and then he shook his yellow silk stole to emphasise the importance and holiness of what he read, and the bells along the hem tinkled.
‘So what are they doing dragging a baby all the way across the Unstable?’ Piers asked.
‘Looking for sanctuary in Havenstar, or I’ve missed my guess.’
He shook his head in disbelief. ‘Poor souls! Ah, Pickle, when will people stop believing in miracles? They’ll get themselves and their babe tainted, and all for a dream that doesn’t exist.’
Pickle gave the mapmaker an embarrassed look. ‘Maybe it’s a dream worth having.’
‘Ley-life! Not you too! Next you’ll be telling me there are winged fire-elementals sitting on your kitchen hearth.’ He yawned. ‘My friend, I’m for my room before that chantist kinesis-maker over there really gets going. Just listening to his bloody bells is bad enough.’
Pickle regarded the red and mauve figure pensively. ‘Don’t knock ’em, Piers. Kinesis devotions stave off the predations of instability and I’m damned sure they keep the Wild at bay, too.’
‘So they reckon. I wonder myself if they don’t just make the Wild flipping wilder. Anyway, I’m off.’
~~~~~~~
As he limped away, his wiry frame all muscle and sinew, in the eyes of those in the room who watched him go there was both envy and respect. Only his swinging walk betrayed his lack of a foot. The polished black staff he carried was more ornament than necessity. Piers Kaylen was a legend: an Unstabler who had survived thirty years of crossings, a mapmaker who often travelled alone in places most men would not go without an armed escort, a man who possessed all the instincts of a hunted animal and yet had the talents of a hunter. It was said that even the worst of the Minions of Chaos slunk away rather than face the throwing knives Piers wore strapped to his chest, at his hip and, so it was rumoured, in his single boot.
~~~~~~~
He was halfway undressed, stripped to the waist with his knives lying on his bed, when there was a knock at the door. Habit made him pluck up one of the knives as he went to answer it. He expected no attack and scented no danger, but you did not stay alive in the Unstable by being careless about anything.
‘Who is it?’ he asked. He laid his face against the door and was immediately aware of the faint vibrations of wrongness given off by one of the Unbound.
‘They call me the Mantis,’ came the reply. ‘You probably noticed me down in the common room. I want to talk to you ’bout a map.’
He unbarred the door with a fair idea of who it was he would see. The man standing there was, like Pickle, one of the Unbound, or an Untouchable as they were sometimes called, and the Mantis was an appropriate name. Piers had indeed noticed him in the common room. At seven feet tall, with limbs and body as elongated and as thin as the insect whose name he bore, he would have been hard to miss. He had to fold himself up to enter the room, and there was no way he could stand erect once inside. The ceiling was too low.
Piers put his knives away and waved a hand at the bed. ‘Sit down. You want a map? Are you buying on your own account?’
‘Well, no. I mean, I don’t want to buy at all, really. I want to sell, see.’ He shoved a hand inside his shirt as he sat and withdrew a mapskin wrapped around a rod of wood.
‘I don’t buy maps,’ Piers said. ‘I make ’em.’ But he reached out a hand to take the skin nevertheless. One could always learn something from another man’s chart.
He’d spent a lifetime dreaming about this, the wonderful instant when his hands would unroll a trompleri map and he would feast his eyes on magic. Yet as he opened up the skin and the dream became reality, he could not believe the moment had arrived. He stared at the map in his hands, felt his jaw dropping, and still could not believe it. A trompleri map. One of the legendary wonders that he’d only half-believed existed now unfolded before him in all its glory…
‘Where—where did you get this?’ he stammered finally. His knees gave out and he sat down heavily on the bed next to the Mantis.
‘What does it matter? What I want to know is, are you hankering after such like?’
The man poked his lean features into Piers’ face. His nose and chin and jaw were all sharp-edged, insect-like. A long-fingered hand seized his arm, circling it. There was surprising power there, even though his wrist was scarcely wider than a broom handle, and each finger as slim as a pipe-stem. ‘Do you want to buy it, master mapmaker?’
Piers strove to regain both his native caution and to avoid shuddering. He hated to be touched by one of the Unbound, even though the man was careful not to cause him pain by brushing against his bare skin. ‘Well, it’s not really of that much value to me,’ he said. ‘I deal with the land north of the Wide; this appears to be some place south of the Graven. Who in heaven’s ordering wants to go there? That’s even beyond the Eighth Stab.’
‘Don’t fool with me, mapmaker! I know the value of a trompleri map to one of your ilk. You’d sell your soul to have one of these, in the hope you can ferret out its secret, so you can produce the like. How much will you give me for it?’
‘I don’t carry much money with me. What need have I of money in the Unstable? I keep what meagre wealth I have at home in the First.’
‘And you know full well, you do, that I can’t go that far into a stability. Quite apart from the fact that any stab makes me as sick as a cat with worms, I’ve no wish to challenge Chantry, now have I? How much you got on you?’