by Glenda Larke
‘Forget the how and the why,’ Corrian grumbled, refusing to be impressed. ‘Just don’t tell me we have to go up there.’
Meldor answered Quirk with off-hand casualness, ‘Why scar the land with a town if one can build it in the air?’
‘But how?’ Keris repeated.
‘Switchen and his fellow builders extended the possibilities of building with ley-impregnated brick to the limits.’ He smiled at them. ‘Here a pedestrian bridge-mender has learned to soar. He found that whole streets could be supported by a single column, so why not?’
‘It was as if, once the restraints of the Rule were removed, there was a whole lifetime of experimentation to be crammed into a few years of construction,’ Davron added. ‘And, when using ley-impregnated brick and stone, there are few limits to what can be done.’
‘I trust ley doesn’t leech out of the brickwork,’ she said.
Meldor laughed. ‘Fortunately, no. Just out of the soil because of Carasma’s past unmaking of the earth. And if it’s any comfort, a city that sounds much like Shield is mentioned in Predictions as lasting a thousand years.’
‘I’ll be tainted,’ Corrian muttered. ‘But how do we get up there? I don’t see any stairs, and it’d be quite a climb anyways. Too much for my old bones.’
‘Stunning, isn’t it?’ Davron said. ‘It never fails to take my breath away, and I’ve seen it all before. And as for getting up there—well, let’s ride on to the port. We take the transport from there.’
‘Oh, Chaos.’ Keris’s thoughts were taking her in directions she didn’t want to pursue. ‘Davron, tell me you were joking about the wyverns.’
‘I was joking about the wyverns,’ he said obediently.
‘Then what?’
‘Something called a wildbell. We used them for the building of the towers, for transporting materials to build the city, and now they’re our transport. You’ll see.’
He urged his horse onwards towards the cluster of buildings at the quayside, and the rest of them followed. As they rode under the edge of the town, they all looked upwards, flinching as they crossed from sunlight into shade.
‘Unnatural,’ Corrian said, still muttering. ‘Humankind weren’t supposed to live up in the air like a turkey perched in a tree.’
‘I’ve got a bad feeling about this wildbell,’ Quirk added in a mutter of his own. ‘I’m not sure I’m going to like anything that’s capable of getting me from here to there. Oh, Keris, I really wasn’t born to have adventures.’
There was a notice on the wall of one of the buildings that read, WILDBELL TRANSPORT, TWO COPPERS PER HEAD. A sleepy-eyed man was sitting on an upturned fishpot underneath sign. He was untainted and wore silver rings. Next to him there was a huge wicker basket big enough to hold a dozen people, strongly built, with several handles. Keris could not guess its purpose or see how it could be used to transport people upwards, but a couple of wooden steps next to it indicated it was meant for people to occupy.
‘Lamri,’ Davron said. ‘How’s business?’
The man jumped up and made a stiff bow. ‘Margraf, welcome back. How’s my business, milord? Excellent! Lots of newcomers been coming to gawp. Your animals going upside too?’ He waved at a row of paired horse stalls. They too were made of closely-woven wicker.
Davron nodded, Lamri called out to someone inside the building and soon there were people bustling about, blindfolding the horses and leading them into the stalls. Lamri waved a hand at the steps. ‘Would you be so good as to board the basket?’
Corrian looked dubious, the Chameleon horrified. ‘Is that a joke?’ he asked.
‘Tell me what it is that picks this thing up,’ Corrian said, and balked, until Scow approached her as if he was going to lift her over the edge of the wickerwork. She hurriedly scrambled up the steps and stepped down into the inside. The others followed.
Davron tried to hand over some money to Lamri, but it was firmly refused.
Once inside the basket, Quirk was openly nervous. Corrian contained herself better, but only just. Keris was more curious than fearful. Whatever was about to happen, it would certainly be no worse that falling into a ley line from a cliff.
‘Hold on to the rope looped around the side,’ Davron advised. ‘And watch Lamri.’
The man had turned to face the water and was now letting ley drift out of his hands in a ribbon-like band, towards the surface of the lake.
‘I know I’m not going to like this,’ Quirk moaned.
The surface of the lake erupted. A round hump pushed out from underneath the water, grey and smooth and glistening. It was also huge, the size of a room. Water poured off it as it thrust upwards like a mushroom pushing through soil…
Quirk closed his eyes. ‘I knew I wouldn’t like this.’
The creature broke free of the water and hovered above it. It was round and fringed with hundreds of white tentacles, each the length of a man’s arm. The grey canopy rhythmically contracted and expanded, keeping the creature otherwise stationary in the air. Jets of air, expelled with an almost subliminal hum, churned the water below its undulating edges. From the centre of the underside hung twelve or so long trailing feelers, purple and tuberculated, that tangled and untangled like writhing worms. Lamri’s twisting line of blue ley now connected these feelers to his palms.
The Chameleon, peeping through his fingers, groaned again and then managed to stutter, ‘What—what does it eat?’ He sounded hoarse.
‘Fish,’ said Davron. ‘Don’t worry, Quirk. Lamri has it under control with that ley of his. And here come his brothers to call up some more to transport for our horses. Wildbells, like most pets, are attracted to ley, and they can be pushed and pulled and directed with it. Perhaps they are open to suggestion from the mind as well; we really don’t know how it works. It just does. Anyway, Lamri and the other members of his family know how to handle wildbells just as skilfully as Minions handle their pets. They haven’t had a single fatality yet, or even a bad accident, and remember, we had these creatures help us with the building of Shield, a much more complex task than just lifting us up to the city.’
The wildbell shivered, still humming, and a shower of water droplets pattered down into the lake. When Lamri deemed the beast sufficiently dry, he directed it to a position above the basket, and he himself stepped in with his customers. ‘Hold tight,’ he advised.
Quirk went one better: he slid down on to the floor of the basket and put his arms over his head.
Keris looked upwards at the underside of the wildbell. It was neither an attractive sight, nor a reassuring one. In the middle of the ring of central tentacles there was a beak-shaped mouth with razor-sharp edges. ‘Do you think it ordinarily uses these tentacles to lift things into its gut?’ Corrian inquired.
That might have been the case, but Keris didn’t want to think about it.
With surprising gentleness, the creature looped its tentacles around the basket handles, then in apparent answer to some change in Lamri’s ley, it squeezed its canopy and jetted upwards, the hum becoming a louder whoosh. A few drops of water trickled down to splash on to the wickerwork and the basket floated away from the land. Keris’s heart lurched in sympathy. She felt like a hapless rabbit seized by a hungry eagle. The analogy appalled her, but then she looked over the edge and saw the tops of port buildings below and the lake spread out before her as if it was one of her own maps and she forgot her fear. Further out, over the lake, she could see several other wildbells. These seemed smaller and they carried no baskets. Instead a single man stood within the cradle of central tentacles. One of them lifted a hand and casually waved. Possibilities began to flood her mind.
She turned towards Davron, a question hovering. He grinned at her, and answered before she could ask, ‘Don’t get too carried away. Wildbells can only survive out of the water half an hour or so, therefore they can’t be ridden too far from the lake. But there’s no reason why you couldn’t ride them to map the lake edges.’
‘How do you know
what I’m going to say?’
He bent to whisper in her ear. ‘I know you.’
The basket lifted over a waist-height wall and was lowered down to a patch of grass. They had arrived in Shield.
‘You can open your eyes now, Quinling,’ Corrian said.
‘Won’t the horses be terrified?’ Keris asked Scow as they climbed out of the basket.
‘What they can’t see they don’t worry about. Besides, they rather like the smell of wildbells, for some reason or another.’
While they waited for the horses to arrive, she looked around, almost overwhelmed with a simultaneous desire to laugh with joy at the sheer light-heartedness of it all, and to cringe with fear at what Chantry would think. As she absorbed the details of what she’d only grasped in general from the ground, she decided that even for the ley-unlit, Shield would be pure magic. Humble houses were buttressed with flying filigree, arches thrust skywards in impossible shapes to decorate ordinary shop-fronts, domes and towers and vaulted roofs flaunted themselves across the skyline. Everywhere there were oddities and ornamentation: external staircases up to upper floors, cowled pots over ornate chimneys, oriel windows, stained glass, carved tracery, copper roofing, architraves, pargeting, pilasters… Nothing was overly large or high, for the emphasis was more on the delicate than the grandiose. It was a joyous place of absurdities and delight, as if the people of Havenstar, freed from Chantry’s strictures, had become wildly uninhibited.
Yet it was also shocking. They’d been brought up in a world where architecture was austere and utilitarian, and never changed. Where nothing was ever new, or different. Where, although the occasional sod-roof of a house may sprout spring flowers in season, most buildings were old and crumbling, lichen-covered or dirt-grey. In the stabilities only Chantry buildings had colour and decorations, only Chantry Houses had carvings, only Chantry shrines had murals, only Chantry devotion-halls had towers. Here everything was new, everything was different, everything was decorated. And everything was lambent with ley.
‘Well,’ Corrian remarked in a satisfied way as they mounted their horses a few minutes later, ‘Chantry prigs wouldn’t like this much, would they?’
‘I can’t even imagine what Portron would say,’ Keris said, ‘let alone the devotions-chantor back home.’ She turned to Davron. ‘Is that a windmill up on the roof there?’
‘It is indeed. There are quite a few. They supply power for the mills, and they draw water up from the lake. Come, follow me. It’s getting late and we’re all tired.’ He turned his horse up into the nearest cobbled street, she followed and tried not to remember that she was suspended several hundred feet above the lakeside.
‘Hmph,’ said Corrian, looking around, ‘If they do this to mere buildings, I wonder what the whores look like?’
Quirk craned to look upwards at a spiralled tower. ‘Do you think it will all still be here when I wake up tomorrow?’
‘You may not believe this,’ Davron said, ‘but Meldor actually insisted on considerable restraint. You should have seen some of the things Switchin wanted to build. Places with doors twelve feet high, towers that would snag passing clouds, onion domes piled one on top of the other, glass windows the size of a bean field—’
‘I was in two minds,’ Meldor said. ‘I still am, if it comes to that. This is undeniably pretty and joyful, and of course it’s obvious that everything has to be built new, but the Rule wasn’t all bad, you know. To dig the clay for the bricks, to quarry the stone for the blocks, to cut down trees for beams, to mine the copper for the roofs—all of it marks the landscape in horrible ways. Not all change is good, I find. I did insist on a small scale. No unnecessarily high roofs or huge rooms. Every tree cut must be replaced, just as the Rule decrees. But even so—’ He shook his head. ‘Some awful things were done to Havenstar to build all this. Perhaps I should have been more severe with the rules.’
‘Why weren’t you?’ Keris asked, knowing that Meldor never did anything without a reason.
‘Because somehow it seemed to be important for the human spirit to seek beauty. We have been too long under the Rule, too long constrained to conform. It has made people petty and mean-minded. I don’t need frills in my life—I didn’t need them before I was blind and I certainly don’t need them now—but I don’t like what the lack of frills and fripperies does to other men’s souls. We had become a bleak race of people, Keris, always thinking to punish and restrict, hating our neighbour if he dared to be different. I didn’t want Havenstar to be like that. Here people can spread their wings. We just have to be sure that in so doing we don’t destroy with the claws of our greed.’
She turned her attention to the people they passed in the street, many of whom gave kineses of respect when they saw the Margrave. Did they look happier than people of the stabilities? They certainly appeared brighter, for there was no restraint on apparel here. Any colour, any fashion, and any decoration was possible. She was not sure she entirely enjoyed the result.
‘Doubtless they will tone themselves down eventually,’ Davron remarked. He had been reading her mind again. ‘It’s just reaction to the narrow austerity forced on them under the Rule.’
‘I suppose so.’ A man hurried by; he had shoes that curled up at the toes so outrageously they had to be tied to his breeches at the knee. Another woman struggled through a doorway sideways because her skirts were too wide to enter any other way.
‘Maybe there’s an answer to your question about what whores wear,’ Quirk said to Corrian, indicating a woman standing in a doorway. She wore surprisingly little.
‘Those children—’ Keris said suddenly, staring to where a group of young children played. ‘Ley. There’s ley. And I’ve noticed so many children too! But the ley. Are they…?
‘As far as we can tell, children are born normal here, even to tainted parents, except they contain noticeable amounts of ley. Noticeable, that is, to the ley-lit. We don’t know yet whether it affects their development. So far, it doesn’t seem to. They can be ley-lit or not, just like anywhere else. And this isn’t the Unstable, thank the Maker. Children don’t appear to have in any way degenerated, and none of them are tainted. And there are a lot of them because people aren’t restricted to just two anymore. Not yet, anyhow. They can choose how many to have.’
She turned to Davron to remark how wonderful that was, and surprised a look on his face that left her breathless with pain for him. He had been staring at the children, aching for what he’d lost. She left unspoken the words she’d been about to utter.
Further on down the road, they pulled up outside a shop. She looked up at the sign dangling above the door, and her heart leapt as she saw the symbol: a map scroll. This was a mapmaker’s shop.
‘This was Kereven Deverli’s,’ Meldor said. ‘It is now yours, Keris, with all its contents. Kereven had no family, and anyway we bought most of what it contains. There is everything you need for mapmaking. I hope you don’t mind taking hold of a dead man’s pen.’
‘I’d be honoured. Deverli was a fine mapmaker, if the map I had was any indication.’
Davron dismounted and pulled the bell. ‘His manservant should still be here. If it suits you, keep him on. His name is Colibran, but he is known as the Cricket. His wife acted as Deverli’s housekeeper, I believe.’
‘I suggest Corrian and Quirk stay with you, until they decide what they want to do,’ Meldor added. She nodded, a little intimidated. There were times now when something about Meldor made her want to sink down on one knee in obeisance. She was becoming reluctant to address him by name.
Davron looked up at her. ‘Come on,’ he said. ‘Get off that animal and come and have a look at your house.’
She dismounted in a daze. A house of her own. A shop. Mapmaking equipment. Servants. Keris Kaylen of Kibbleberry?
The door opened and they saw why Colibran was called the Cricket. He was one of the Unbound, and his tainting had resulted in stick-thin legs and arms, two pairs of them, and his elongated head sprouted
rudimentary feelers. Two large oval eyes set perpendicularly on either side of his face stared up at Davron out of a long mournful face. ‘It’s late,’ he said. ‘The shop is closed—oh, it’s you, milor’! And Margraf—my apologies.’ His twelve inch feelers waved in a flustered fashion as he performed a kinesis of respect. ‘Do come in.’
Meldor shook his head. ‘Not I, I think. Scow and I will go on to the Hall.’
Davron nodded, and as the two men rode away he indicated the mounts belonging to Corrian, Keris and Quirk. ‘Take the horses, would you please, Colibran? And spoil them a bit, if you wouldn’t mind. They’ve come a long way and they need a bit of coddling.’
‘I’ll get my two boys to do it. Nothing they like better than coddling horses. Will you be staying the night, then, milord?’
‘No, but you do have guests, Colibran.’ Davron introduced the three others and added, ‘In fact, maid Keris Kaylen here is your new mistress and mapmaker.’
The feelers danced. ‘Kaylen? Kaylen? Would that be Piers Kaylen’s daughter, milady?’
Davron answered for her. ‘It would.’
‘Then I am doubly honoured. Fine maps he makes. Fine indeed.’ The man called for his sons as he led the horses away.
Keris muttered to Davron, ‘Milord? Milady? You might be entitled, but I certainly am not.’
‘That’s the way all ley-lit are addressed here, Keris. You are going to have to get used to it, I’m afraid.’
She wrinkled her nose and Corrian snorted.
Inside the house Colibran’s wife, who was also tainted, made them welcome, showed them the bedrooms, then bustled around talking of meals and baths. She was a large woman with whiskers and kitten ears.
‘Come,’ said Davron, ‘before you get plied with food and such, I’ll show you the shop.’ Which was exactly what she most wanted to see, of course, and he knew it.
It was all she could have hoped for, and more. There was a theodolite in the corner, complete with a telescope, worth a small fortune, she knew. She fingered some of the parchment on the workbench and itched to delve into the pile of maps on the shelf next to her. Davron saw the way her eyes lingered on them and said, ‘We did look through everything here, of course, looking for a clue about trompleri maps, but the shop had been robbed by then, by the Mantis. And apart from the maps, we didn’t know what to look for. Inks are just inks to us.’ He nodded at the corked bottles on the bench. ‘Who knows? They may be made of ley-drenched pigments.’