by Glenda Larke
He sat back on his heels, regarding her speculatively where she sat, still half-wrapped in her bedroll. ‘I’d like to think this is an invitation to something more like yon Corrian had in mind, but somehow I think not. So, lass, what is it you want for me? Something to courier, doubtless?’
She nodded. ‘Seven letters, to people in different stabs. They are all mapmakers. For some of them, I don’t know the full address.’ She reached into her bedroll and drew out the letters to show him.
‘It doesn’t matter; mapmakers are easy enough to find. You do realise I won’t be delivering them all myself, though? I’ll pass some on to other couriers going in the right direction; it’s quicker that way.’
She nodded. ‘Pass them on, by all means. And there’s something I should tell you, before you accept the letters. They contain knowledge that Carasma and his Minions would kill for.’
Gawen shrugged. ‘No reason for them to ever hear about them, is there? I’m a courier, lass. I shan’t even tell those who carry them where they came from. Now, let’s get down to essentials. It’ll cost, you know. Let me see: the Fifth, I’ll charge you as silver for that one…’
~~~~~~~
‘I don’t know why you say you’re such a coward,’ Keris remarked to the Chameleon. ‘Seems to me that jumping a Minion in the dark demonstrates a certain amount of reckless audacity. And as for standing on a pet’s tail—!’
Their mounts were walking side by side across a plain of cracked red soil, and Quirk wore an expression of long-suffering fortitude. His knee was hurting him and he did not much mind if everyone knew it. ‘Midden,’ he said by way of contradiction. ‘I thought the fellow was some scrawny bandit. Believe me, it never occurred to me that the apostate bastard would shoot fire from his cheek-bones like a spit-lizard shooting its slobber.’ He eased his knee against the saddle with his hand. ‘The shitty little turd. I may not be able to see it, but that stuff hurt.’
She nodded. ‘Ley moulded to the wishes of the one who wields it. It’s said they carry it in all the spaces of the body and can concentrate its exit through the pores of the skin.’
‘Like Meldor through his fingers. I don’t know what that blind man did, but it was miraculous. The pain has only just come back. How can ley be used to both hurt and heal?’
She didn’t answer. She was looking off to the side where a vast tower of red dust swirled upwards. ‘A whirlwind,’ she said, awed. ‘Ley-fire, look at it!’ Its base was twenty paces across, while the top disappeared into a red billowing cloud of dust. They’d seen many whirlwinds since they’d left the Fifth Stability, but this one was by far the largest. It screamed as it moved, sucking up the soil and whisking even rocks into its inverted skirt of whirling power.
‘Disintegrating the land,’ Portron muttered from behind them. ‘The Unmaker at his unholy work again. There won’t be much left of the Unstable if he continues to destruct it at this pace, damn his cursed unsoul.’
‘We are close to the Deep,’ said Scow, riding up to join them. ‘You can see the top of the canyon from here.’
The Chameleon grimaced. ‘The last bridge. I’ll be glad to get this over and done with.’
Keris tore her eyes away from the whirlwind, which was already speeding away into the distance, to see where Scow was pointing. There was a long line of rocky slopes beyond the Deep. The tumbled blocks and pinnacles of rock interspersed with ugly patches of slime looked more like gigantic rotting teeth with bits of half-masticated food caught in the gaps. The scree below the blocks was then the gums anchoring the teeth, wet and slimy with fouled rivulets of moisture, sloping down to the edge of the gullet, the canyon that contained the Deep.
The canyon was the widest they’d had to cross yet and the rope and slat bridge that spanned it had all the fragility of a spider’s anchor thread. It swayed and undulated, moved by some invisible draught of air that rose from somewhere below.
‘Oh help,’ the Chameleon said, pulling at his ear, ‘Keris, I really don’t have a head for heights.’
She contemplated the rotting teeth of the landscape ahead with profound distaste. ‘How much was taken away from us,’ she murmured. ‘Whole cities and communities once lived here. It’s said that Malinawar was once the most beautiful of all countries, that its people were the most blessed. Yedron had too much desert, Bellisthron too much water and Premantra was too flat—but Malinawar was paradise.’
They came to a halt at the edge of the canyon and waited while Meldor and Davron talked to the Unbound attendant. Below, the river of ley coiled its way between pitted walls of purplish stone, and long lines of ley mist cavorted above its surface with sensual abandon.
Scow had managed, as usual, to obtain animal pats for a fire, and was soon serving up char while the fellowship waited.
‘Must have been bloody mad,’ Corrian muttered as she sipped her char and gazed at the swaying bridge. ‘Why the flipping hell didn’t I stay in Drumlin’s Cess and be damned? By all that’s scabrous, but I miss even the smell of that place.’
‘The smell?’ Keris asked, blinking. She’d once accompanied Piers on a trip to Drumlin and had visited the Cess, that tumble of tenements in the heart of the city. There had been a discrepancy between the original cadastral maps of the area and the present configuration of houses, a situation Chantry regarded as grievous more because it involved change than because the cadastral maps were used to calculate taxes. They had called in the mapmaker to check out just what had happened and who was at fault. Her memory of the smells involved recollections or urine stink and rat-musk, stale pickles and rising damp, dung fires and spreading mildew. It was not anything that she could imagine anyone missing.
‘Yep, the smell. Nothing like it. Ever had a whiff of a brothel, lass? Cheap scent and sex, semen and—’
Out of the corner of her eye, Keris saw Portron beginning to puff up, but Corrian was saved from another burst of indignation from the chantor by Davron.
‘Everything’s set,’ he said, as he walked up with Meldor and several of the tainted. ‘I’ll go first as always. You’re next, Chantor. All of you, leave your pack animals for the attendants, as usual, and wait for my signal.’
They’d done it all before, but it had not become any easier with practice. Just to watch Davron make the crossing pulling his reluctant mount behind him made Keris feel sick. The bridge jerked and danced like a living thing, the ropes seemed so frail, the canyon so deep…
Four ropes, Keris thought. Only four. A handrope on either side and two more ropes on to which the slats of the flooring were lashed. A pattern of smaller cords joined handropes to the base. She tried to convince herself that it was just a path with a fence on either side, nothing to worry about, but she did not believe it, any more than the Chameleon did.
They crossed one by one: Portron after Davron, then Corrian, followed by Quirk who was interminably slow, and then Scow. Meldor remained behind as well. He regarded it as his job to spend a few minutes talking to each animal, calming it before the crossing.
When Scow had reached the opposite side, Davron gave Keris the signal that it was her turn. She blindfolded Ygraine, nodded to Meldor, and started across.
Don’t think about what’s below. Difficult, when the slats beneath her feet were each separated by several inches from the next, and there, through the gaps, the roiling of the ley was visible in ugly purple billows. Purple, the colour of the most violent forces of ley. Stop thinking about it—
She was about a third of the way across when something alerted her to trouble behind. She turned her head, glancing back, aware now that the Unbound watching the crossing had raised their voices. They were gazing upwards. She followed the line of their pointing fingers.
A bird. No, not a true bird; this was a featherless manta. It had just swooped low over the bridge, between her and the watchers behind. Its spotted wings undulated and as it banked around, it passed her overhead, a bare wingspan away. Two close-set eyes positioned at the top of the belly stared down an
d for one brief second they looked into her own. Intelligence gleamed, and worse—a Wildish malevolence.
She dragged at Ygraine’s reins and moved on, more hurriedly this time. The manta ray was a pet, she was sure of it.
On the next pass, it flew behind her again; but this time it slashed down with its tail as it came over the handrope. The tail, a fleshy poker that trailed out behind it, was edged with sharp bony plates that seemed to discharge searing heat; the slicing edge of it hewed through the rope as if it were straw and left smoking ends.
The bridge bucked under the onslaught. Keris, trying desperately to drag a balking Ygraine at a run, made a grab for the handrope when the bridge lurched. She missed the rope completely as it unravelled, and almost toppled over into the canyon. She fell to her knees, slid as the bridge twisted yet again, and snatched at the slats beneath her. Ygraine crashed into her, and then—with a scream of fear that tore into her heart—the horse slipped, legs flailing, from the bridge and disappeared into the canyon.
She dragged herself back to her knees, clutching the remaining handrope with both hands. Ygraine was gone. The mare that had served Piers Kaylen for fifteen years. The wave of grief she felt submerged her fear. Ygraine had been a link to her father, and now she was gone, just as Piers had gone… And she was kneeling on a half-wrecked bridge over a canyon, with the Deep beckoning below. She took a deep breath and looked up.
The ray had banked and returned; it was now heading back towards the same part of the bridge. This time it did not have everything its own way. Scow had his bow out on one side of the bridge, and several of the tainted were shooting at it from the other. It slewed, dodging, but came on.
‘Keris!’ Davron was calling to her from the far end of the bridge. ‘Run!’
She picked herself up, staggering as the bridge writhed, and started towards him. She screamed, ‘Don’t come!’ and willed herself not to look behind, not to see what was happening. Willed herself not to notice that there was nothing bordering her on the right now, no side to the bridge, no handrope; nothing to stop her from plunging over the right-hand side should she fall.
And behind her the ray slashed the second handrope, burning and cutting with a single slice.
She was on her knees again, tossed there by the living thing that writhed beneath her feet, clutching hard at the slats. There was no fence on either side now—just a path of slats, still swinging violently, stretching away before her. She stayed on all fours and scrabbled on, sobbing in terror.
Davron was shouting encouragement, but in her panic she could not hear the words. He’d run out on to the bridge, heedless of his own danger.
The next time the ray came in closer, so close she felt the downdraft of wind from its wings. She saw the savage slash of its tail as it plunged downwards on her right. This time there was no easy target—the two supporting ropes underneath were sheltered by the slats—yet in managed to insert its tail into a gap between the boards to saw at the rope as it dived past. The rope did not snap immediately, but twanged apart, strand by strand. She heard it. Felt it, as the bridge shuddered with each breakage.
‘Get back!’ she screamed at Davron. He turned and dived for the end of the bridge. She clung as best she could to what was left of it. The whole thing was bucking wildly now, alive, possessed, wanting to be rid of her…
The rope parted, the right hand edge of the path tipped down. She heard herself screaming. There was nothing under her feet. She was suspended, kicking. Clinging to the one remaining rope, her knees knocking against the slats that now hung vertically. Below, the purple ley flowed on.
The ray shrieked out its triumph and dived in once more.
She clamped down hard on her panic. She swung her body, used the momentum to shift herself sideways, sliding her hands one at a time. Once. Twice—Maker, how long can I hold on? She had lost sight of Davron; she no longer knew what was happening around her. Her whole being was concentrated on her hands, on holding fast.
She swung and her feet tangled in what had been the handrope. She struggled, but only wound herself tighter into a web of hemp.
The ray struck again.
And again.
It banked for a third attack on the last rope and caught a knife—Davron’s—in its eye. It fell tumbling towards the ley, shrieking its pain, but the damage had been done. The last rope was almost severed all the way through.
I’m going to be dashed against the cliff. Maybe that’s a better way to die than to drop into the ley…
The final strand parted and she was swinging toward the solid face of the canyon.
There was a vicious jolt on the ropes that entrapped her. If she had not been so tangled she would have lost her hold and fallen free. As it was, the jerk simply pulled everything tighter around her. A split second later she slammed into rock.
The breath was driven from her chest. Her shoulder and thigh took the brunt of the blow and pain speared into her body. For some moments she could see nothing, hear nothing, think nothing. Every rational sense was submerged in pain.
She swung in her cocoon of rope, wrapped tight and paralysed like a spider’s hoarded feast, and only slowly did rationality return. She was alive. She was dangling over space on a single anchor strand, free of the cliff that was somehow some distance away. She was bruised from neck to ankle—but she was alive.
Tentatively, disbelieving, she looked up.
Some distance above there was an overhang. The bridge had struck that first, and hooked itself there. Her body—entangled further down the rope—must have hit the cliff only at the extremity of its swing from the overhang, thus saving her from the full force of a collision with the canyon wall.
She looked down. The ley line was tens of paces below; too far to fall and survive. Her situation was still dire.
Meat on a butcher’s hook, she thought. What in the midden do I do now?
Carefully—very carefully—she began to free her arms and hands from the wrapping of rope.
‘Keris!’
She choked, acknowledging only then how much she’d wanted to hear his voice, to know he was safe. Davron. He was on the overhang, lying flat, poking his head out to look down on her.
‘Keris, are you hurt?’
‘No,’ she lied, ignoring the pain of her bruising. ‘Please get me out of here.’ I’m scared.
‘The rope’s fraying. Stay very still.’
She froze. She had already freed one arm; the other she left where it was. Her body revolved slowly, showing her the cliff face, then the length of the canyon, then the far side of the gorge wall where the tainted were lined up, watching…
‘Keris, I don’t have any rope I can use here, and I can’t haul you up on the one that’s supporting you. It will break for sure. I’m going to use my whip—wrap it around your wrist.’ The plaited raw hide snaked down. It seemed pathetically thin. The tip of it he had tied around what looked to be his torn-out coat sleeve, giving it more length and something to grab that was not impregnated with glass. It dangled in front of her nose. Cautiously she reached out to take it. Some small stones rattled down and hit her on the head, then there was a cracking sound she couldn’t identify. Her rope shivered slightly in sympathy and sent her spinning a little faster.
And another voice bellowed down the canyon. ‘Davron! That overhang is breaking away! It can’t take your weight…’ It was Scow’s voice from further up, and it was raw with panic. ‘Davron—for Creation’s sake—!’
Keris heard the words with an intense clarity, as if they were outlined in light. Davron’s weight. And her weight.
‘Davron!’ Scow’s bull-like roar again. ‘Take my hand!’
‘Wrap it around your wrist, Keris,’ Davron said without emotion.
She heard the cracking once more, saw the rock shift beneath him, absorbed the momentary fear on his face. Felt her ropes vibrate and slip a little lower.
Scow shouted, more anguish this time, ‘Davron—!’
With a calmness that se
emed to belong to someone else, she drew her knife from the scabbard at her belt. Still calm, she reached up to the single line of fraying rope that linked her to the overhang—and cut it through.
She fell in silence.
It was Davron’s ‘NO!’ that echoed from canyon wall to canyon wall, the sound of agony ripped from the soul of a man who had once thought he had no more capacity to feel pain.
~~~~~~~
Chapter Twenty-Three
Any deep study of the holy texts will tell a diligent student that the Unmaker, while he appears to Humankind most frequently in a human-like guise, is not a Being in any normal sense of the word. He is a god with no form but what he chooses to take. He is, simply, Chaos, just as the Maker is Order. What Lord Carasma cares to show us is illusion…and we should never forget this because it is essential to our understanding of his nature.
—From the writings of Kt Edion
‘Davron—there’s no point.’ Scow looked at the guide and unaccustomed worry lines furrowed into the large planes of his face. ‘She’s dead. Even if she survived the fall, she would not have survived the ley. Portron tells me it’s still roiling, a bruised purple colour. It’s a killing ley.’
‘Not necessarily. It’s like that because the Unmaker is down there.’
‘How do you know?’
‘I know. I felt him. The moment she fell, I felt him. He planned this.’
‘Then what the Chaosdamn are you thinking of? He must have wanted her dead very badly to risk a possible violation of the laws that govern his place in this world—’
‘She can’t be dead. I won’t believe it.’ Davron pulled on his fingerless riding gloves, then bent to check the lacing on his boots.