by Glenda Larke
‘But the tainted live in halts,’ she said slowly, following her own line of thought. ‘Fixed features, like the one on the ridge. And there is stability in such places. It must be of a slightly different kind to the ordered stability of stabs. If we could find out how such places were made… If we could duplicate the same forces that created such areas—’
He grunted. ‘What makes you think they were made? Maybe they are just the remnants of other stabilities. If ever you find out, tell me.’
‘Something keeps fixed features the way they are, and we ought to be able to find out what it is,’ she said, but he’d retreated behind a barrier of pain.
It was a relief when she heard the coming horses.
Meldor, Portron and Baraine had come with Davron and Quirk, and they’d brought lanterns with them. The light was needed now; it was almost dark under the trees. Quirk sent Keris a speaking look. ‘That damn horse of yours bit me,’ he hissed at her as he dismounted. He rubbed his backside meaningfully.
Davron slid off his horse and came straight over to her and Scow. For a moment he let his gaze roam, taking in the scene, then he ignored her and flashed a smile at Scow. It was the first time she’d seen him give a genuine smile to anyone and the effect was startling. He suddenly changed from a block of granite to a handsome man. The years dropped away and she could see that, yes, perhaps he was only twenty-nine. The obsidian shone, the face softened, the lines smoothed away…
‘Thought you had more sense, Sammy,’ he said. Sammy. Not Scow. His voice could never be anything but gravel on the move, but the tone was affectionate.
‘Didn’t look where I was going,’ Scow replied with a shrug. ‘You bring the axe?’
‘Yes, but that’s a last resort, my friend.’
‘Don’t waste your time, Davron. Let’s get it over and done with.’
‘There are other ways.’
Scow glanced blankly from Davron to Meldor and then seemed to understand what the guide meant. His face hardened. ‘No. you have no idea what might happen. And what about—?’ He gave a side-long look at Portron.
Davron shrugged.
Scow continued quietly, calmly, ‘Come on, Dav, let’s be practical here. This is me, Scow, remember? I can take it.’
‘Maybe you can, but who says I can?’ The words were simple enough, but there were levels of meaning beneath them, which they all heard.
‘I’ll do it,’ Baraine said without emotion. ‘I’m reckoned a pretty fine axeman back on my domain.’ They all knew he was probably not boasting. The rich young bloods of the First Stab ran log-chopping competitions among themselves, just for fun, and probably to irritate Chantry who frowned on almost any tree-felling as unacceptable change, but who were often powerless to intervene when the great Trician families were involved.
She saw the look Davron shot Baraine and thought it enough to frizzle his eyelashes, but Baraine did not even notice. She could not bear the thought of that elegant hunk of prime beef chopping off Scow’s leg and then going home to boast about it to his uppercrust friends as though it was some sort of adventure. Even Portron, who had knelt beside Scow to perform the kinesis of supplication, could not hide the expression of distaste that crossed his face at Baraine’s words.
Only Meldor seemed unmoved. He dismounted and walked unaided to Scow’s side. ‘Sammy, why have we done what we have done, if not for moments such as this? If we lose sight of smaller needs in our search for the greater good, then we lose our humanity.’
Scow glanced at Portron and Baraine.
‘We’ll send them away,’ Davron said.
‘I’m not going anywhere,’ Baraine drawled and moved closer.
Portron looked indignant. ‘I’m certainly not budging either. Kinesis may be of help—’
‘Chantor, this is the Unmaker’s realm,’ Davron pointed out.
‘It matters not a whisker,’ Meldor said, and he was speaking to Scow. ‘Let them see.’ He too knelt, but not for devotions. He laid an unerring hand on the bilee where Keris had uncovered it and beckoned Davron to join him.
Something about his determination made her step back nervously. Davron laid both hands on the bilee.
‘What are they doing?’ Quirk murmured in her ear, his uneasiness making his voice squeaky. Even Baraine, who had not bothered to dismount, and Portron, who was continuing his devotions, watched with wary eyes.
‘I don’t know,’ she said.
Nothing happened for a long while. Then slowly the air around Meldor and Davron’s hands began to glow faintly. A thin red wisp of mist gathered there, before fanning outwards moving like vapoured-breath on a cold morning.
The skin across Keris’s forehead tightened and her hands tingled but she didn’t move. She only knew that she did not like the feel of what was happening.
Portron scrambled up abruptly, his face a mask of rigid shock. For a moment she thought he was going to intervene, but he controlled the impulse and remained standing, straight as a rhumb line on a map, radiating revulsion.
‘What—what’s happening?’ Quirk whispered, and she realised he could not see the glow, or the faint ribbon of mist.
‘I don’t know,’ she said again.
The tension in the air increased, the glow deepened. The temperature around them seemed to drop. She started shivering. Baraine dismounted and, his gaze intent on the bilee, edged closer.
And then the ground around Scow erupted.
Green liquid from the bilee squirted into the air in a stinging fountain. The glow around Davron and Meldor shattered into a thousand tiny comets of molten colour that shot through the air in every direction, trailing fiery feathering. One of them hit her on the cheek. It burned coldly, like winter’s ice on her face. She flinched and scrubbed the hurt away.
Scow fell backwards, ejected from the bilee like unwanted garbage. His foot, minus his boot, was covered in green slime and all three men were spattered with the same foul bile. Where the bilee had been there was now a depression in the ground.
Ley-life, she thought in blankest astonishment. Somehow they exploded it!
‘Water!’ Davron snapped.
Both Baraine and Quirk ran to the horses to fetch waterskins. They washed away the slime from Scow as best they could and then loaded him on to his tainted mount. No one spoke. Keris glanced across at Portron. He was still rigidly angry and deliberately refused to catch her eye. At her side, Quirk was pale with fear and Scow was equally colourless as he fought his pain. His leg was intact, but the skin was raw, stippled with pin-points of blood and oozing fluid.
Meldor wiped away the bile on his clothing and remounted his horse. Neither he nor Davron seemed affected. Baraine was suddenly displaying an unaccustomed animation, as if he’d just been watching a show put on for his benefit. He turned to Davron wanting to ask something, but one look from the guide’s black eyes halted the question before he could form the words.
They rode back to the ridge in silence.
It was Meldor who doctored Scow back in the camp. How, since he was sightless, she did not know, because he and Scow and Davron all disappeared into Scow’s tent. The rest of them, subdued, fended off the questions from Corrian and Graval, tended the animals, ate their supper and turned in for the night.
She could not sleep. She was tense with reaction, still thinking over what had happened and unable to make sense of it. Finally she could stand it no longer and left her tent to go to Portron. ‘Chantor,’ she whispered at his tent flap. ‘Are you still awake?’
‘Oh, aye,’ he said. ‘Sleep and I have parted company this night, I think.’ He sighed. ‘Come in, lass, and take a seat on my bedroll here. Surely, circumstances are unusual enough for us not to be bothered with conventions tonight. In fact, I was half expecting you. You saw, didn’t you?’
‘The glow, you mean?’ she nodded uneasily. ‘What was it? What did they do? How did they do it?
He sighed again. ‘I don’t think there is the slightest doubt but that you are ley-lit, lass
. That was ley you were seeing. They were working the ley.’
‘Working the ley? You mean, using it? But—that’s impossible, isn’t it?’
‘’Tis surely an abomination! The way of the Unmaker and his Minions.’ The anger in his voice was clear, but there was something else too. Fear. ‘Now I know why Davron made such a fuss when Baraine and I insisted on accompanying him and Quirk back to Scow and you. He didn’t want us seeing what he was going to do. I said I had to go because Scow might need a man of colours at such a moment. And Baraine was just curious. But Davron ordered us to stay.’
‘And you disobeyed?’
He looked uncomfortable. ‘Well, not exactly. I protested, I felt I had to. There are times when a chantor has to be making a stand. Anyway, in the end Meldor said we could go. He told Davron it didn’t matter. I suppose he thought that as you and Quirk were going to see, it made no difference if Baraine and I were there as well.’
‘They are, er, Minions of Chaos? Meldor and Davron?’
‘And Scow their tainted servant… I don’t know, Keris. There was a time when the ley-lit could feel the presence of a Minion, but of late it seems the Unmaker’s servants have learned to conceal themselves better.’ He slumped a little and his voice in the darkness was that of a tired old man. ‘Maker help us all if that’s what they are, for none of us will reach safety again.’
‘I have seen Davron in the First Stability, twice, at Kibbleberry. The last time wasn’t long ago. He couldn’t have been a Minion then.’
‘You are offering me hope, child, but if they aren’t dedicated to the Unmaker, then it’s still a dangerous game they play. An abomination in the eyes of Chantry. Ley will subvert them, corrupt them, perhaps even kill them… That way there lies only evil. I should be confronting them, but I fear, lass. I fear. If they are truly the Unmaker’s servants ’tis certain death to be challenging them. I wish I could remember just where I’ve seen Meldor before. It might be important…’ His voice trailed away. ‘I’m just an old rule-chantor from the Order of Kt Ladma. I’m not even a good chantor.’
That was too much for her. If someone like Portron could not cope with what faced them, how could she? She said goodnight and scuttled back to her tent.
Still she couldn’t sleep. Fear chilled both her body and her emotions. Disorder be damned, you wanted to come to the Unstable, Keris my girl. You’ve wanted it all your life!
Was it only a short time ago she’d thought of herself as a butterfly touching the first freedoms of its new life? She’d rejoiced in the joy of it! Now she thought of Sheyli, and of Piers, and cried a little.
~~~~~~~
She woke to find someone shaking her foot through the padding of the bedroll. Immediately wide-awake, she sat up. It was dark, but she had no trouble recognising Davron’s outline against the cloudless sky. He was kneeling down outside, pushing the tent flap aside to reach in to her feet.
Fright flooded through her, unbidden, unwanted.
‘Your turn on guard duty,’ he said. ‘You and Portron, till dawn. Two hours.’
She nodded, trying to contain the fear. ‘How’s Scow?’
‘Fine. Meldor gave him something to help him sleep, and he dozes still.’
‘And is what happened yesterday evening another secret you don’t want told?’
She felt rather than saw his smile. ‘Bit late for that now, I think. Tell whoever you want. Portron certainly will.’
‘Is this what you are so ashamed of—using ley?’
The smile became a chuckle, but there was more pain than mirth in it. ‘Ah no, Keris. That I am proud of.’ He dropped the tent flap and moved away. She dressed and pulled on her boots, wondering why her mouth had suddenly gone dry.
‘Oh Maker,’ she thought. ‘Why, by all that’s dark in Chaos, didn’t I stay in Kibbleberry?’
~~~~~~~
Chapter Nine
And Kt Gredal held fast to his faith as the Wild sprang upon him and tore him asunder. His blood poured forth, but still he called not upon the Unmaker to leash his unmade beast. Instead, when he turned to the Lord of Chaos, he said: ‘The people hereafter shall bind themselves with devotions, and you shall be defeated. Chaos shall be no more.’
—Knights II: 3: 3-6 (Kt Gredal the Anchorite)
The second day on their way was worse than the first, the third worse than the second.
The land grew more and more alien, more and more grotesque. When Scow lit a fire to make tea on the fourth morning, the flames burned cold and greenish and the water refused to boil. Then, as a seeming reflection of the twisted landscape, things began to go wrong with the progress of the fellowship as well. Throughout the day, Graval’s mare caused a hundred different problems by spooking the other mounts. A pack loosened unnoticed on one of Baraine’s mules and chose to fall just as they were wending their way across a chisel-sharp col, to be irretrievably lost into the canyons below. Corrian’s mount cut its foot and had to be rested, so the old woman had to ride her pack animal while its packs were distributed among the others.
Keris had grown up with tales of the Unstable, yet nothing had prepared her for its reality, for its sheer unpredictability. They rode down a gully sweltering in foetid heat, rounded a corner—and were faced with a howling gale of freezing wind and lashing rain. They brushed up against bushes, only to see them crumble to dust. They pushed their way through a sea of waving grass tall enough to dwarf a mounted man, only to find that on the other side there was bare earth honeycombed with bottomless holes.
She’d drawn these things on maps, she’d heard Piers and others speak of them, she’d imagined them, she’d heard Davron tell them what to expect, and that morning she’d glanced at her own map as well, but still everything came as a shock, usually unpleasant. The gullies were bleaker, the heat and cold more extreme, the grasses more savagely serrated, the holes deeper, the rain more viciously determined than she had dreamed possible. They were her words on the map, it was her lettering that said: ‘jagged gullies—hard going’; ‘sea of grass (beware cutting edges)’; ‘holed ground—dangerous,’ yet when she saw those places it was as if she had never anticipated them. All her confidence, her youthful arrogance, ebbed away.
And to think I dreamed of being a mapmaker. I wouldn’t last five minutes out here alone...
She thought of Piers then. Six months in every year he had spent here, sometimes alone, mapping and surveying the dangers. The route they followed was his. Piers himself must have investigated a dozen others looking for the safest way, the least arduous, the least treacherous. She gained new insights into her father’s tenacity and courage, just by experiencing a little of what he too must have endured.
Still, it was hard to convince herself that they had it any easier than a mapmaker searching out a route, especially when it rained most of the afternoon. The clouds that brought the rain roiled just above them in ugly brown colours; the water stained everything the same dun tint. It even tasted sour on the tongue. Once or twice she thought she saw dark shapes slinking through the rain, shadowing them. Once or twice she caught the stale stench of rottenness that went along with any creature of the Wild, and she dreaded the night ahead.
‘Slashers, or some such,’ Davron said within her hearing. He glanced across at her. ‘Probably their ancestors were just cute domestic cats before the Unstable tainted them.’
Their mounts slipped and skidded and even fell. She was glad of Ygraine’s grumpy stolidity, her sure tread, especially when she saw both Quirk and Corrian ended up in the mud once. Fortunately neither was hurt, nor did the animals bolt. Corrian swore as she rode on, brushing mud and gravel out of her clothing. Keris had never heard those particular oaths before, although most were graphic enough for her to guess the meaning. By now, she had drawn her own conclusions with regard to Corrian’s line of work back in Drumlin city.
Sometimes they were forced to lead the horses, and Graval spent the time skidding and sliding, complaining about his boots, and somehow managing to stumble
into the others or get in their way. ‘I’m sorry,’ he’d say. ‘Terribly sorry. Didn’t mean it. It’s these boots, smooth soles, you know. Should have got ’em hobnailed, but I didn’t know— Oh, sorry—’
‘If the blighter says that one more time, I’ll clobber’m with ’is own muckin’ boot,’ Corrian muttered. ‘Clutch-footed muckle-top. Thought there wasn’t a man in the world I wouldn’t take to bed if I was desperate enough for a poke, but believe me, I’d draw the line with that one. Gives me the creeps, he does. Like a miserable gutter-cur that sneaks around the midden and has nivver learned to look a man in the eye. Apologise, apologise—why the shit doesn’t he just learn to do something right for a change, instead of muckin’ things up and saying sorry after?’
It was a sentiment they all had considerable sympathy for, even Portron who did his best to be charitable on principle, and Meldor who seemed to be able to remain equable in the worst of situations. Davron, Keris noticed with some surprise, was sucking in his cheeks as if he was having a hard job not to laugh. She’d not thought him to be a man who would find humour in the graphic earthiness of Corrian’s plain speaking, but then, she was beginning to wonder if she understood anything at all about him.