Isles of the Forsaken

by Ives Gilman, Carolyn

  “What do you mean?”

  “Yora’s not that big. You surely knew him.”

  “Knew who?”

  “The Heir of Gilgen. Goran, son of Listor. He called himself Goth Batra, I think.”

  Harg felt like a shell had just detonated in his face. For a moment he was blinded, staring at Jobin without seeing him. “Goth is the Heir of Gilgen?” he said. His voice sounded distant, someone else’s.

  “You didn’t know?” Jobin looked surprised in turn.

  Goth was a prisoner of Tiarch. It was Goth’s life that was a variable in the cruel political calculus of the Inning occupation. It was not the Heir of Gilgen, it was the person Harg cared for more than any human being alive.

  Jobin had already seen how staggered he was by the news. Instinctively, Harg knew he had to get out before he gave anything else away, as he was sure to do. Without another word, he went to the door and left the room. Out in the hall, a Torna clerk who had been doing paperwork for him was passing by, but paused, arrested by Harg’s expression.

  “Go get someone to take charge of the man in this room,” Harg said. “He’s a spy, a dangerous one. I don’t want him talking with anyone. Understand?”

  “Yes, Captain,” the clerk said.

  Harg left the customs house by the back door. He didn’t want anyone to see him or ask questions. The whole world had rearranged around him. He had to talk to someone from Yora.

  He headed uphill fast, toward the dhotamar’s house. When he knocked on the door, it was opened by the pretty, pregnant Adaina woman. “Captain Harg,” she said, surprised. “Come in.”

  “Is Tway here?” he asked.

  “Yes, I’ll get her.”

  He stepped in warily, glad to see that Spaeth was nowhere in sight. He couldn’t face her just yet. Before the woman could call out for Tway, she came into the room, drying her hands on a towel. “Harg!” she exclaimed. “What—”

  “Is there a place we can talk? Privately?”

  She gestured him to follow her out into the back yard. It was a snug little brick enclosure, entirely surrounded by walls, and shaded by a large oak tree. Once the back door was shut, Tway said in a low voice, “What is it? You look like someone stepped on your grave.”

  And so he told her. She was surprised all right, but nowhere near as blindsided as he had been. In fact, she shook her head and said, “This sure explains a lot.”

  “Where he was, for one thing,” Harg said. “Tway, how could Tiarch’s people walk in and carry him off without anyone in Yorabay noticing?”

  “It must have been those lead prospectors,” she said. “They weren’t looking for lead at all, they were looking for him.”

  “And now Tiarch and Talley are quarrelling over who gets to execute him first.”

  “They wouldn’t dare,” Tway said firmly.

  He tried to laugh at her certainty, but it came out sounding anguished. She put a hand on his arm, as if she had just worked out what this meant for him. “Harg, this means that you—”

  “It means I have to figure out what to do,” he said. He felt as if he were in a dream where he had to run and his legs wouldn’t work.

  “What’s to figure out?” she said. “We’ve got to help him.”

  Maybe it was that simple, he thought. Maybe there really was no nuance in the situation. Whatever the risk, whatever the sacrifice, they just had to help him. “How?” he said.

  “What do you mean, ‘how’? You’ve got four warships, you’ve got prisoners, you’ve got half the South Chain behind you!”

  And none of it would make the slightest difference, he knew. Not against an implacable empire that refused to bargain. Goth’s only hope lay in ruse and subterfuge. He needed corruption, treachery, and a daring jailbreak. It couldn’t be done from the South Chain. It could only be done from Tornabay. Harg shook his head. “I can’t just abandon what I’ve started here and run off to do something personal.”

  “Harg, what makes you think this is personal? Everyone’s been telling you to pay attention to this for a week.”

  He realized that she was thinking “Heir of Gilgen” while he was thinking “Goth.” “It’s personal because I wouldn’t do it otherwise,” he said. “I don’t give a rip about the Heir of Gilgen. I give a whole lot of rips about Goth.”

  At that, she put her arms around him and hugged him close. He felt like she was infusing him with her strength. When she drew back he kept his hands on her shoulders. “Tway, do you think Spaeth knew?” he said.

  She glanced back at the house. “Not unless she’s a lot better liar than I think she is.”

  So Goth had deceived her, too. “How could he hide it from us?” Harg said. “This wasn’t a little white lie, Tway. It was a great big lie.”

  “Harg, you don’t know enough to blame him,” Tway said. “Let it go. Just forgive him.”

  But can I forgive him? Harg wondered. He couldn’t know until he could face him. Forgiveness was not something that could be done in the abstract, from a distance. It had to be reciprocal. Until they could face one another, there was going to be unfinished business between them.

  He could think of nothing else till this was resolved. No longer was he fighting a war about occupation or independence. It had become personal.

  12

  Spiderwebs of Iron

  Heir of Gilgen. Heir of Gilgen. The words pounded in Spaeth’s brain as she sat staring out the rain-pebbled window of Anit’s house.

  During daylight hours, she had been spending time in the abandoned upstairs rooms of the building where Anit lived, for it suited her darkening mood. The windows there were mostly boarded over, so that very little light leaked in to illuminate the litter of broken beams and pigeon droppings. For the past week, direct sunlight had sent slivers of pain into her eyes and made her skin blister like poison ivy.

  She had been up there when Harg had arrived, and the sound of his voice had drawn her irresistibly to the nearest empty window to listen while he spoke to Tway in the yard below. And so she had learned of Goth’s location, and the identity he had hidden from her. But the most shocking thing she had learned from Harg was that it was possible to be angry at Goth. Now she felt, for the first time, a sense of separation from her creator. He had made her subject to the cruel compulsion of dhota, then gone off to Tornabay, abandoning her. She could feel Harg’s resentment spreading like a dangerous contagion to her own heart.

  There was not the slightest doubt in her mind what she had to do. She was only waiting till it was a bit darker to leave the house.

  By the gloomy light, she examined her hands. The fingers were black as far as the second knuckle. Her palms had gone dark grey, and unwholesome streaks ran up her wrists. She pulled on the long gloves she had found to hide her hands—from her own sight as well as others’. When she looked up into a small mirror on the wall, she glimpsed behind her own reflection a catlike shadow, her constant companion.

  “I have to find him,” she said quietly.

  “Yes,” Ridwit said. “You are ready.”

  “Will you help me?”

  “I will,” the cat said. “Trust me.”

  Spaeth reached under the chair where she had secreted the bag holding Goth’s bowl and knife, and a cloak the colour of storm clouds, stolen from Lorin’s room. No one was there to see her leave; Anit was asleep, Lorin was out shopping, and Tway had disappeared somewhere after Harg’s departure. Drawing the hood over her head, Spaeth slipped out the front door. The rain blew into her face, but she paid no attention. Gloomy as the waning day, she walked down the windswept street.

  Heir of Gilgen, Heir of Gilgen, the breakers thrummed along the shore. She could not get it from her mind.

  “You humans are so impatient,” the panther said, padding soundless at her side. Her black coat glistened with
rain.

  “Have you seen my hands?” Spaeth said.

  “You have plenty of time yet,” Ridwit drawled. “It has to reach your heart, you know.”

  Ahead lay the pier where the cog Fairweather Friend was tied. The longshoremen were working in the rain, loading cargo for Tornabay. A man in a raincoat and broad-brimmed hat was supervising the work. Spaeth approached him.

  He paid no attention till she came close enough that he could see the silver hair beneath her hood. Then, “Blessed guardians!” he exclaimed. His round face and moustache had a kindly look, but he was Torna, and obviously uncomfortable with her identity. Spaeth laid a hand on the panther’s back, feeling the sharp shoulder bones beneath the fur. It gave her courage.

  “Will you take a passenger, Captain?” she asked.

  “That depends, lass. Where are you bound?”

  “To Tornabay.”

  He frowned. “Not many of your kind there. Why do you want to go?”

  “I won’t ask your business if you don’t ask mine.”

  He glanced uneasily up the wharf. “Don’t you have a bandhota?”

  “No,” she said.

  “Then who’s going to pay your passage?”

  It had not occurred to her that he would ask for payment. She had never paid for anything in her life. She didn’t even know how people got money.

  Reading her silence, the captain shifted closer and lowered his voice. “There’s a way you could pay me.”

  Fearing he was going to ask for dhota, she said sharply, “What?”

  “Don’t be alarmed. All I want is a pint of your blood. The real article sells for a good price in Tornabay.”

  “Blood? It’s worthless alone.”

  “Ah, but they don’t know that, do they? It’s been a generation since most of them saw a dhotamar.”

  There was something deeply distasteful about the bargain. Spaeth’s hand fell to Ridwit’s back, and clenched on the loose neck fur. Ridwit looked up at her assessingly. “Squeamish?” she said.

  Spaeth drew a deep breath. If these were the dirty waters she would have to swim in, then better to dive than dabble. “All right,” she said. “You can have your blood. Where’s a knife?”

  “No, no, give it to me when we arrive,” he said. “It has to be fresh, you know.”

  A feeling of contempt for him, for herself, for the whole world pressed round her like a choking cloud. She stepped aboard the boat, dragging part of the dark with her. She glanced back at the captain before going below, and saw him looking after her with an expression of foreboding.

  It gave her a surging sense of power.

  “He feared me, Ridwit,” she said when they were below deck. “He looked like a cold wind had blown through him.”

  The cat grinned. “Nice, isn’t it?”

  Spaeth knelt, so that her face was level with Ridwit’s amber eyes.

  “The Lashnura are flawed, Ridwit. We are not fit guardians for the isles.”

  “You’re right,” the panther said.

  *

  The lamp cast a sickly yellow glow across Goth’s face, but he did not notice it. He lay with his eyes closed, longing for sleep.

  He was losing his battle to stay out of the black pit. Hunger gnawed at him constantly, but food had turned sickening. His nerves were in a state of hyper-exhaustion. Everything hurt, even trivial things. Even staring at the wall, because he had to be inside himself.

  It did no good to regret the foolishness that had brought him to this state. He had begun to give dhota too long ago, when he was sure of his ability to conquer himself. By steeping himself in many, he had thought no one could capture him. He could achieve compassion and detachment at once—detachment from the individual and commitment to the common essence of humanity. In that state of engaged disengagement, he had hoped to experience the seed of the divine in them all.

  It had proved far different in practice. No matter how often he gave dhota, there were always individuals who had a special hold on him, who tempted him into particular rather than generic love. That weakness had trapped him into causing pain instead of curing it. And now he was paying the price.

  The blackness inside his eyelids swirled and shifted, forming a scene, and he realized he had slipped through the fabric of reality without leaving his self behind. He stood at the top of Mount Embo and saw all the Forsakens below him, transformed. A mist from the east was covering the islands one by one, blotting out their colour, dulling the sparkle of the waves. The sea became a thick, reeking swamp, and the vapours that rose smelled of despair.

  “You see what your world has become,” a voice said.

  It came from below him. He looked down at the cinders beneath his feet. He could see through them, into the bowels of the mountain. A light was there: a dazzling, dangerous glow that churned and slithered, chained by the waning power of mora. A narrow head rose from the lava nest, looking at him with jewelled eyes.

  “You need us,” the firesnake said. It was the only vivid thing left in the world. Goth stared, mesmerized by its beauty and danger, his pain momentarily gone.

  “You need the Mundua,” it said. “We can free you.”

  “No,” Goth said, as he had been taught.

  “If you free us,” the firesnake said.

  He saw the new world he could create: one that glistened with fire and gold, and roared with cleansing heat. The moral fetor that was Tornabay could be cauterized from the world.

  “No,” he said.

  “Fool,” the firesnake answered. “We will be free without you, then.”

  Something was shaking him. He forced his eyes open, onto the hatefully familiar little room in Tornabay palace. A soldier stood at his bedside.

  “You are to come with us,” the man said too loudly. He was uncomfortable with his task.

  Goth sat up, blinking, trying to collect the scattered pieces of his mind and lock them up in his body again. As he rose, the ground quivered under his feet. He put a hand on the stone doorjamb and said, “Quiet.” The rumbling faded.

  The corridors of the palace were quiet; it was just past daybreak. The two soldiers escorting him set a fast pace, heading into a part of the building Goth had not entered up to now. It had been recently remodelled. The dark, musty corridors had been broadened, lightened, and furnished; the archaic Torna motifs had been stripped from the walls; the thick, stocky pillars had been replaced with shapely, fluted columns; all irregularities had been smoothed out and made symmetrical. It was a more Inning place now. Goth felt the lid of the safe box-world of logic close over him. Here, everything was shaped like a diagram. These straight lines and perfect circles would never admit a breath of duality or serendipity. Dream and luck were locked outside. Here, there was only one answer for every question.

  They ushered him into a long, high-ceilinged room paneled in walnut. One of the walls was pierced by tall, arched windows looking out onto an open square. The main part of the room was filled with rows of empty wooden benches facing a raised dais with a towering lectern and adjoining seats. In the wall behind the altar-like stage was a circular window with leaded panes arranged so as to converge in the centre, like a spider’s web.

  The board floor made the soldiers’ synchronized footsteps loud as they led Goth down the central aisle to a railing at the front of the room. A single Inning—a small, neat man in spectacles—was sitting there at a clerk’s desk, reading some papers. One of the soldiers said, “Sir!” to attract his attention.

  The Inning jotted a note on one of his papers, then looked up. Behind the glasses, his eyes were ice-blue. He said, “Wait outside, please.” The soldiers saluted and left.

  When the door had boomed shut at the other end of the room, the Inning said, “I am Admiral Corbin Talley.”

  “I am—” Goth paused for a s
econd, uncertain who he was in this setting. “Goran son of Listor,” he finished.

  The admiral had noticed his hesitation. Looking at the man, Goth doubted there was much he didn’t notice. The mora that radiated from him was of piercing intelligence and force of will. But there were complex undercurrents, intriguingly hidden. The feeling was almost tactile: here was an intense nature barricaded behind walls of frigid reserve.

  “You had an Inning education, I am told,” Talley said, still appraising him.

  “Yes. Long ago.”

  “Then you know what this place is.”

  “Your temple of justice.”

  “Well put. This is the heart of Inning, and all our acts and institutions radiate out from here. We are a lexarchy: a government not of kings or parliaments, but of laws. In our land, courts are the ultimate authority. It is this system which will be our greatest gift to your people, when the proper time has come.”

  “A cruel gift,” Goth said, looking at the spiderweb window.

  “A demanding gift,” Talley corrected. “A gift which frees men to be responsible for their own actions, their own destinies. Inning law recognizes no mysterious forces, no fates, no gods. The cleverest and most industrious create their own good fortune. The violent and heedless suffer the consequences. We ourselves make whatever meaning there is in our lives.”

  “And you find this freeing?” Goth asked. “What if the wind blows up and sinks your fleet tomorrow—where will you turn?”

  “It will be my own fault for not having foreseen such an event. I will have no gods to blame, but I also will not have to rely upon gods to set it right. I have the power to rectify all wrongs.”

  “Then you have taken on a heavy burden.” In the silence that followed, Goth felt the mountain coiled in impotent fury beneath his feet. It took more than law to bind some forces, and the people who became their tools.

  Talley rose and turned around to face the judge’s tall pulpit, his hands clasped behind him. “Of course,” he said, “I speak of ideals. The reality is rather different.”

  He walked over to the railed-in box where witnesses stood to give testimony, and turned to face Goth. “You called this room a temple. You were right, of course. Here is where we have our priests and robes and ritual. We put our high shaman up there on that throne, and intone our liturgy. It’s all a grand masque, a performance to fool the ignorant into awe. It’s better than force at keeping the peace, and cheaper. But if I had my way, I would strip off all the rigmarole and bare it down to its abstract essence.”