Deep Water

by Pamela Freeman

  Bramble’s breathing stopped.

  The Well of Secrets turned sheet-white and staggered. She grabbed on to the edge of the table to stop herself falling. The man sprang forward to support her. While she stood, breathing fast and weak, the red marks began to creep up Bramble’s arm again, but the girl lay still as stone.

  The healer released herself from the man. She faced the table with determination and placed her hands again on Bramble’s shoulder.

  Ash moved forward and stood next to her, and put his own hand over hers. He didn’t quite know why, but he was sure that he had to do it, sure with Sight and with something more familiar to him than Sight, a fighter’s instinct, solidarity.

  This time the Well of Secrets’ song was stronger, like a call to arms. Sweat stood out on her forehead and her hands began to shake, but she kept singing. The song rose in pitch and loudness until it was painful to hear. Ash began to tremble and feel weak, but he didn’t know if it were just the noise, or if power was being taken from him.

  He closed his eyes and saw that both were true, that it was the song itself that siphoned strength from him. He could feel himself getting weaker, but he knew that it wasn’t going to work. That Bramble was dead.

  The Well of Secrets stopped singing.

  Ash almost fainted as the power drained away, and he thought he might topple backward, but then he felt someone giving him a push in the back to steady him and he stood upright, firm on his feet. A surge of strength went through him and into the Well of Secrets. She began singing again, louder than before.

  Bramble coughed and began to breathe again. Her eyes stayed closed, but she said, “Oh Maryro-ose!” in the voice of a young girl complaining about having to do something she didn’t want to do — clean up her room, perhaps.

  The Well of Secrets began to sing again, her voice dropping suddenly to a whisper, a plea. The wound disgorged a great gout of pus and then began to close, weeks of healing before their eyes. But it was greater than healing, because the wound itself disappeared. Then the chant died away and there was no mark on Bramble’s arm, not even a scar to show where she had been wounded.

  “She’ll sleep the night through and wake hungry,” the Well of Secrets said, her words blurred with exhaustion. She patted Ash’s arm in acknowledgment and he almost fell. The big man guided her away, up the stairs. She only came up to his armpit. Not a tall woman, not beautiful, not commanding or elegant or motherly or any of the things that gave women power of various kinds in the world. Ordinary, except for those eyes. But there, thought Ash, lay Bramble whole and unmarked. And he himself was still trembling.

  As they reached the bend in the stairs Martine found her voice. “Thank you,” she said, her face showing that she knew the words were inadequate. The Well of Secrets smiled at her wryly, acknowledging the thought as well as the thanks, and continued up. The man stayed on the landing, watching until they heard a door close upstairs.

  “Most people don’t find their tongue so fast,” he said. “She doesn’t get many thanks.” It was not clear whether he thought this was a good or bad thing. He came back down the stairs and turned to Ash. “She’s not so good at giving them, either.”

  “It wasn’t me,” Ash said. “Something else helped.”

  The man looked at him skeptically and shrugged. “I’m Cael,” he said. “You’d be Ash and Martine, yes?”

  They nodded. Ash was uncomfortable and wondered instantly what else Cael knew about him. Martine’s mouth was set. She didn’t like it either. She sniffed, and then motioned to the pool of pus on the coverlet. “I’ll clean that up, if you tell me where to find water.”

  He smiled with his eyes. “Most people don’t think of that, either. Expect it to disappear by enchantment. Don’t worry. There’s someone paid to clean.” He looked at Bramble. “Do you have another shirt for her?”

  “Her pack is on her horse,” Martine answered.

  “I’ll get it,” Ash said, and he made for the open door, glad of the excuse to get out of the room, but still having trouble controlling his legs. Halfway to the door he had to sit down on a bench.

  There was a crowd standing just outside. They had clearly been listening and matching. They looked at him with interest and his cheeks reddened.

  “You, Little Vole, go and get the girl’s pack from Mullet,” Cael ordered a young blond boy. The boy ran off and Cael closed the doors. Ash let himself sit for a moment to recover. He didn’t have to prove anything to anyone.

  “They were expecting us to arrive,” Martine remarked.

  “She told them to keep the street clear so the horses could get through. She said there was no time to waste.” Cael’s voice held a slight disapproval.

  “We came as fast as the horses could bear,” Martine said. She shifted uncomfortably, aware abruptly of her own chafing and sore muscles. “And that was a good deal faster than I found comfortable, I can tell you!”

  He laughed, a booming laugh as big as the rest of him, and Martine smiled, but she wasn’t as easily distracted as that.

  “Are we allowed to know who you are?” she asked.

  “I’m uncle to the Well of Secrets.” He used the honorific sarcastically. “Her real name’s Safred. She told me to tell you.”

  “Why?”

  He shrugged. “Fools need the mystery. Those who have mysteries of their own need the truth.”

  “Did she say that?”

  He regarded her quizzically, head on one side and eyes bright.

  “Nay. She’s not one for turning phrases. She said other things, though. Like to find you lodgings somewhere cheap but clean, and look after the horses, and make sure the young lad eats well.”

  Martine laughed. “No fear there. He has the appetite of a wolverine.”

  The door banged open and the boy, Little Vole, ran in with Bramble’s saddlebags. The men left it to Martine to dress Bramble in her clean shirt, and when she was ready, Cael picked her up and led the Travelers to their lodging house, around the corner in the marketplace.

  Oakmere was not what Ash had expected. Although there were more inns and lodging houses than you would normally find in a town of middling size, there were no shanties on the edges, no crowds of beggars targeting new arrivals, no one selling souvenirs on the street, no one offering to guide them or cure them or sell them an underage daughter, guaranteed a virgin.

  Ash walked behind, still guarding their backs. Oakmere had a thriving market, judging by the number of shuttered stalls and tents. As in Turvite, in Sator Square, the marketplace was alive at night, with eating houses and a few stalls still open.

  Two Travelers and a third being carried attracted some attention, but not the black looks he had been braced for, the type Travelers normally endured in small towns. Here, there was curiosity but no hatred. A couple of stallholders and diners even smiled at him. It unsettled him more than open hostility would have. He wasn’t used to a world where Travelers were welcomed.

  There was a large inn on the southern side of the marketplace, but Cael turned into a much smaller lodging house near it.

  Despite Safred’s advice Ash wasn’t interested in finding dinner. They had settled into their room and Bramble was sleeping deeply on a bed in the corner.

  “You heard. She sang with — with the voice of the dead.” He sat on the edge of his bed, elbows on his knees, his hands hanging.

  Martine looked at him with affection and some concern. “Well, she’s a real healer, a prophet, a conduit for the gods.”

  “But the voice of the dead! That’s my voice, the voice I sing in! Could — could I be a healer, too? She took my strength, she used it.”

  “I think you would know by now if you had that gift,” she said gently. “Apart from anything else, I think Doronit would have found it out.”

  Ash flinched slightly at Doronit’s name. She had trained him as a safeguarder, and he had planned to make his living that way since those were the only skills he had mastered, but now he had to ask, what was he? A
healer? An enchanter? Or just someone with a bit of Sight that the Well of Secrets could use?

  Martine reminded him, “The Well of Secrets said you had to eat.”

  “But why?” His voice rose like a young boy’s and he flushed. Any message from Safred sounded portentous, threatening who knew what.

  “I think just because she foresaw that you would be… overset a little, and wanted you to settle down.”

  “Does that mean she saw what I’d do?”

  Martine shook her head. “No. I’m sure of that. She was surprised when you stepped forward. I don’t think she’s used to getting help, especially strong help.”

  He reddened and bent to fumble at his bootstrap to conceal it.

  “Come downstairs and eat,” Martine said as though she hadn’t noticed.

  The smell of fish frying was coming up from the kitchen. Saliva flooded into his mouth and he was suddenly hungry.

  “I’m ravenous. Come and eat,” she said again, and this time he came.

  It was full dark as they sat down to the table in the kitchen below, and the other lodgers had eaten long ago. But the woman of the house served them, a young, squint-eyed red-head called Heron, wearing the brooch that widows in the Last Domain were given a year after their husband’s death.

  Heron sat down with them after she served their meals, with a cup of cha warming her hands. Ash ate without paying attention, food to mouth without looking and without tasting.

  “Heron,” Martine said. “That’s an unusual name for a red-head. And we met a blond Vole earlier.” Ash was curious about that, too, but he hoped the woman wouldn’t take offense.

  “A lot of us in the Last Domain have Traveler names now,” Heron said easily. “I was named Freyt, but my parents learned Valuing a good twenty years ago and they renamed me.”

  Martine showed her surprise.

  “You didn’t know?” Heron said, surprised in turn. “We’re most of us Valuers hereabouts. It’s why she’s safe here. She’s one of us, you know. Raised as a Valuer, for all her father was a warlord.”

  They nodded. All the Domains knew that the father of the Well of Secrets had been a warlord, although rumor varied about who, exactly. More than one warlord had smiled when he was asked. None of them wanted to deny it, even those who were reputedly happily married at the requisite time.

  Ash realized this explained the strange normality of Oakmere. Only in a Valuer town would the extraordinary powers of a Well of Secrets be housed in an ordinary house. Only in a Valuer town would a true prophet have to pay to have her cleaning done. Because in Valuer philosophy no one person was fundamentally more important than another. All lives Valued equally. Even Travelers. To show they believed it, Valuers took Traveler names. In a Valuer town, charlatans and treasure-seekers would find little to pick over, because Valuers were rarely rich. The rich had no time for a way of thinking that meant they were no better than the nightsoil collector. What was the point of being rich, if that were so?

  Martine was smiling and gestured at her bag of stones to thank Heron for her explanation. “I could cast for you, if you like.”

  Heron shook her head. “Safred will tell me if there’s anything I really need to know. But I give you thanks for the offer.” She collected the empty plates and went out to the scullery, leaving them to contemplate life in a town where their only valuable skill was considered worthless.

  Martine shrugged and smiled at Ash. “Maybe I’ll have to learn to cook at last,” she said to him.

  He looked at her blankly, realizing that he had heard the conversation, but had immediately forgotten it. His mind was still full of the ebb and flow of strange powers; he wondered if he would ever feel such strength again.

  Martine sighed. “Come on, then. Time for bed.”

  Ash lay in bed, looking up at the dark ceiling, and went over the healing again in his mind. He had done nothing, he realized. He had just stood there and let his strength be used. Just like he had let Doronit use him. It was why he had left her, because all she wanted to do was use his strength for death and destruction. But she had used him easily before that, because he had felt he had nowhere else to go, nothing to offer the world. She had used him again and again, and he had let her, out of fear and desire and a terror of being cast out into the world on his own. It wasn’t like his parents had wanted him. A singer who couldn’t sing, a musician who couldn’t play — what use was he to his parents, who were consummate performers? That was an old grief, and he forced it away by thinking of that moment when strength had flowed out of him to Safred.

  Was that all he was good for? Giving his strength away to others — to women? The thought profoundly disturbed him, but he couldn’t find an answer. He tried to feel again the power Safred had so easily drawn from him, but had no sense of it within him. Perhaps she had drawn it all away. Or perhaps she had emptied him temporarily and when he was recovered, he would be able to find it again.

  He slept uneasily and dreamt of a tall red-headed woman standing in a doorway, nodding encouragingly at him.

  Saker

  OH, IT WAS so easy! There were so many bones here, and not buried, just thrust into the cave like garbage, and the stone rolled across the cave mouth to keep down the smell. No laying out, no ceremony. There had been no sprigs of pine between these fingers, no rosemary under their tongues. Hundreds of bones, hundreds of skulls. So many names responding to his call.

  He had an image, suddenly, of massacre sites like this one, scattered the length and breadth of the Domains. It had taken a thousand years, but Acton’s people had killed, and killed, and killed again, until they owned the whole of the country, from cliff to cove, from sand to snow. His own village had been the last to live freely in the old way, and the last to be slaughtered. No doubt the invaders had thought themselves safe, then, thinking they had killed the last of the pure old blood. But they had overlooked him, and now he would bring about their ruin.

  Saker looked greedily at the bones before him. Here was an army indeed, if even a fraction of those slaughtered by the invaders had stayed in the dark beyond the grave, yearning for revenge. He would give it to them, full measure and spilling over. They would take back their birthright and the land would flourish under its rightful owners. The people of the old blood — his blood — would live in freedom again, and he would be responsible.

  To raise the ghosts of the dead, he needed to know their names. He had brought the skull of the man Owl from Spritford in case he could not See the names of the dead here, but that was not necessary. He could feel the presence of spirits already, and he was sure he would be able to sense them respond as he called a litany of Traveler names.

  He placed Owl’s skull at the entrance to the cave anyway. The man deserved to be recalled from death, and he was a good leader. Saker tolled the names with glee: “I seek justice for Owl, Juniper, Maize (he thought briefly of his Aunty Maize, cut down by the warlord’s man), Oak, Sand, Cliff, Tern, Eagle, Cormorant . . .” So close to the sea there were lots of seabird names, and even fish: Dolphin, Cod, Herring . . .

  At almost every name there came the flick in his mind which meant that someone of that name was buried here, and in one out of ten a picture came to his head: men, women, grammers, granfers, all ages and conditions, with nothing in common but the fact that they were here, and angry. All of them, angry, and here in spirit, ready to take revenge for their deaths. It was the dark of the moon and he had used no light; they would be invisible to the inhabitants of the town below them. The brick houses of the harbor town looked more formidable than they really were. They would be upon the sleeping usurpers before they realized what was happening.

  “I seek justice for Oak and Sand and Herring and all their comrades.”

  Saker paused. He could feel their anger, the desire for revenge, building beneath him, here on the hillside overlooking the harbor. It was dangerous, that anger, to him as well as to the invaders. He remembered when the ghosts of Spritford had met two Travelers at the r
iver. For a moment, there, he had feared that they would strike down the Travelers, not recognizing their own. They had not. But because this was a night attack, when Traveler and invader would look alike, sound alike in the dark, he had made precautions. He entered the new part of the spell.

  “I seek recompense for murder unjust, for theft of land, for theft of life; revenge against the invaders, against the evil which has come of Acton’s hand… let no Traveler blood be spilled, let no brother or sister fall by our hands. Listen to me, Owl and Oak and Sand and Herring and all your comrades. Taste my blood and recognize it: leave unharmed those who share it with me and with you.”

  The spirits of the dead were listening. The rest of the spell wasn’t in words, but images in his mind, complex and distressing. Colors, phrases of music, the memory of a particular scent, the sound of a scream… When he had gathered them all he looked down at the skulls. He pressed the knife to his palm then drew it down hard. The blood surged out in time with his heart and splashed in gouts on the bones. He flung his arm wide so that the blood touched as many bones as possible.

  “Arise, Oak and Sand and Herring and all your comrades,” he commanded. “Take your revenge.”

  This time, he had a sword ready to give Owl, symbolically making him the leader. The other ghosts accepted it. They looked to Owl immediately, and he pointed with his sword toward the sleeping town, his face alight with anticipation. Then he began to run toward the houses, and the others raced after him, each of them holding whatever weapon they had died with: scythe, hoe, knife, sickle. Not soldiers’ weapons, but deadly enough.

  Saker watched, smiling, as they streamed down the hill, toward Carlion, and then he went to follow.