by Ian Irvine
“In Thurkad I heard of your troubles,” said Malien, “so we came earlier than we’d planned. We’re all here, save Tensor, Asper and Basitor, you’ll no doubt be pleased to hear.”
“How is Tensor?”
“Well enough, considering.”
“I can hardly tell you how glad I am to see you,” said Karan, kissing each of them. “I don’t know how we’re going to feed you, but we’ll worry about that later. Come in.”
“We didn’t come empty-handed,” Malien laughed. “Look!”
Karan put her head out the door and saw, looming up out of the fog, the biggest wagon that she had ever seen, a vast affair with six wheels and a canvas-covered load that extended a span and a half above the sideboards.
“What’s for breakfast?” asked Malien.
“Porridge and pancakes,” said Karan.
Malien jumped up on the tongue of the wagon and rummaged inside, coming back with a huge flagon of black syrup. “I’ve just the thing for porridge and pancakes,” she said, and they all followed Karan inside to the kitchen fire.
That night Karan, Malien and Shand discussed the affairs of the last months, including Llian. Later, Shand took Karan aside. “You don’t need me now, so if you can spare me I’ll go at dawn.”
“Go with my most heartfelt thanks,” she said, unable to hold her grudge any longer. “Without you I would never have coped. And I know what you put in my chest last night. More than I can ever repay.”
“I deny putting anything in your chest,” he said with a straight face. “And therefore I beg that you never mention it again.”
“Very well. Are you going home?”
He sighed, running thick fingers through sparse hair. “I wish I was. No, I must bear tidings to Thurkad.”
“About Llian,” she said in alarm. “Must you tell Yggur about him too?”
Shand hesitated.
“Please, Shand. He’s much better now. Give me this chance. What can he do here, with Malien watching? Surely even you must admit that you could be wrong.”
Shand looked reluctant. “Very well,” he said grudgingly. “There is an infinitesimal possibility that I am wrong, and if so it could have very bad consequences. I will say nothing until we next meet, but be careful.”
He was already gone when Karan rose with the sun. The weather was good so everyone headed up the cliff path, seldom used, that led to Gothryme Forest. Beyond that the track wound higher and higher, to the long-abandoned fortress of Carcharon, high in the windswept mountains to the west. Karan’s father had been slain up here when she was eight. On this path had Karan wandered when she set out to find Shazmak at the age of twelve; and when she left it again, six years later. And this way Tensor had returned to Shazmak the previous year, to try and catch her with the Mirror. Every step of the path was embedded with memories for Karan. But they did not go beyond the forest: Carcharon was a folly and Shazmak was occupied by the Ghâshâd.
Llian felt good today. He walked beside her all the way up, fascinated by the Histories of her family, and noting everything so that he could tell them one day.
For more than a week they were blessed with fine, cold weather, and they collected hundreds of sacks of nuts, still good; several barrels of fish from the lake; dozens of baskets of fruit, most spoiled though still edible—these they would make into jam; and some autumn berries that in the drought had shriveled on the brambles. They also gathered mushrooms, wild onions and edible roots and tubers. And game, more than they expected. Enough, with what the Aachim had brought, to tide them over, unless the winter was very bad, and some to send down to the town.
By this time, prodigious labor by the Aachim had repaired some of the stone walls and put a new roof over them. That would give them five extra rooms when the inside work was done, though they would still be terribly cramped. Then winter really set in and it snowed for a week without stopping. Gothryme was completely cut off.
Winter’s fury meant that there was less to do—only emergency work could be done outdoors. The rebuilding went on inside, but now it was artisans’ work and proceeded at a more leisurely pace. Some of the Aachim went up to the forest to hunt. The cold meant nothing to them.
Karan spent most of that week sitting with Rachis at the big table in the refectory, surrounded by the records of the past year: ledgers as long as her arm, made of thick homemade paper—her family Histories. In these books every detail of life at Gothryme had been recorded for over a thousand years: births, deaths; crops, yields, failures; stocking rates and breeding records; fires, floods, pestilences, famines, droughts, wars…
But every time she sat down to work some distraction arose, or if it did not she found that she could not concentrate anyway. Then, lying awake in the middle of the night Karan looked up and saw that the dark face of the moon was full. Suddenly she sensed, what the matter was. In the black abysses of the world another piece had just clicked into place. The enemy was abroad! Karan realized that she had been waiting for it to happen.
Llian went back to his books, reviewing the notes he’d made of the time he’d spent with Tensor, his descriptions of the Nightland, and Kandor’s papers too. He worked away at these tasks placidly and methodically, but without fire or any real interest in what he was doing. There was no intensity in him, and generally he put his books away early in the afternoon and sat staring out the window at the snow. He felt terribly sad.
Or he would walk about the house, sometimes browsing in Karan’s family archives, sometimes studying the architecture, or just dreaming. He especially liked the old keep, said to be two thousand years of age. Several times Malien came upon him there, lying on the floor looking up at the ceiling, or sitting on a bench staring at a tapestry, absently dreaming.
The night of Karan’s premonition he was woken from an exhausted sleep by an unpleasant dream. He sat up in bed, trying to piece the fragments into something that he could make sense of.
He had dreamed that he was carrying wood, stacking it in huge stacks against the stone wall of a woodshed. But it was not Gothryme, for he humped his load along the pinnacle of a dangerous ridge through a gale that wanted to sail him across the sky. Then Llian realized that it was not wood at all, but a piece of strangely curved metal that was cradled in his arms. Every time he tried to put it on the stack, it would not fit and someone shouted at him. He kept carrying his piece of metal back and forth along the ridge, and each time it was a different shape, and none of the shapes would fit where he tried to put them. Then he went back to sleep and the dream disappeared.
In the morning Malien found him sitting on a step in the keep, just staring at the wall. She stood watching him for a while, worrying about him. He looked to be trying to stare through the stone.
“Llian,” she said. He did not move. She touched him on the shoulder.
Llian turned slowly, giving her a blank look. “Yes?” he said eventually.
“Come with me. There is news.”
She went out and down the corridor. Llian followed, dragging his feet. He was far away, wrestling unsuccessfully with his dream.
Malien turned into the refectory where Karan was working with Rachis. There was a fifth person in the room, a farmer from the barren western part of her lands who supplemented his living by hunting in the Forest of Gothryme.
“Dutris, this is Malien and Llian,” said Karan. “Tell them what you saw two days past.”
Dutris was a young man, perhaps no older than Karan herself; short and wiry, with a tanned face and hard, slender hands. His hair was almost white, but his beard was dark. He spoke quickly in a soft voice, barely audible from the other side of the room. He was direct to the point of brusqueness.
“I was hunting in the forest. My camp was on the western side. Two nights past I saw a light high up on the old western path. But that path goes nowhere, only to Carcharon. I went to see. There were lights in Carcharon. I dared not go too close. I came down at once.”
He looked anxious. Perhaps he had done the w
rong thing.
Karan reassured him. “You did well to learn this without risking yourself. Did you see anyone?”
“Once! They were coming across from the track that goes up into the mountains. Ugly people with gray skin, skinny as sticks. Ghâshâd! And the lights were pale blue and burned steady. That’s all.”
Karan thanked and dismissed him, and turned to Malien.
“The Ghâshâd are coming down the path from Shazmak again. I knew it! I sensed something last night. But why can they possibly want Carcharon? There is scarcely a more inhospitable place in all Meldorin. It defends nothing.”
“What is Carcharon?” asked Llian, roused from his indifference at last. “I’ve heard the name before.”
“A folly!” Karan said. “It was a madness of one of the lords of Gothryme, in olden times. Basunez was his name, an ancestor of mine on my mother’s side. A necromanter of sorts, a practicer of the Secret Art, and he thought that he had found the perfect place for it—so my father told me. Some places are thought better than others for such business, because of the resonance of the land or the intersection of lines of power, or some such nonsense.
“Basunez divined that this place was the best in Santhenar, at least in the parts of it that he had been to, for the Secret Art. So he named it Car-charon (meaning better than the Charon) though whether this referred to the character of the place or what he hoped to do there I never heard.
“Twenty years it took to build Carcharon, a terrible labor, for Basunez was never satisfied. Three times he tore it down to bare stone and built again. It’s cut out of a horn of rock in the center of a steep and knife-edged ridge, utterly barren. There is no water there, and nothing grows, and it is exposed to the most violent and bitter winds. Even in summer it’s terribly cold, but in winter it’s perishing. Every stick of firewood must be carried in by hand, and every bit of food; up a steep and dangerous path. Why would anyone want it? It guards nothing, not even the eastern way to Shazmak. That takes the next ridge south, half a league away.”
“Why they want it is of little moment,” said Malien. “They are there!”
“Basunez’s researches came to nought. He never found the secret he was searching for, and slowly went mad in frustration and despair. His servants left him one by one. He lost his fingers from frostbite and eventually froze to death in the worst winter of that century.
“He had made a fortune before he went mad, but every grint of it went on this folly. Our house was bankrupted by the extravagance. After he died Carcharon was abandoned. It still belongs to my family but we do not go there. Nothing remains but the folly of a madman.”
“What can the Ghâshâd possibly want with it?” Llian wondered.
“I haven’t the faintest idea.”
“We’d better send word to Thurkad,” said Malien.
Karan could not sleep after that. Had they taken Carcharon to prepare the way for Rulke, or because it was close to Llian and her? That night, as soon as it got dark, she imagined them swarming out of Carcharon, filing down the cliff path, coming for her. Just by being here she put Gothryme and the whole valley in danger.
But that night a runner came with an urgent letter. Men-dark was returning by ship from the east; Yggur summoned them to a council in Thurkad.
“That’s all I needed,” said Karan with a shudder. “I won’t go! I loathe Thurkad and I’m having nothing more to do with this business.”
“None of us can avoid our responsibilities,” said Malien. “That’s how this all began.”
The news woke Llian’s dormant fears as well. His respite was over; the dreams and the torments would soon return. He suddenly knew what the strange dream was all about. The metal things that he had been carrying were pieces of the construct, and in his dream he had been helping the Ghâshâd carry the finished parts into a storeroom. Was that what they were doing now, up there in Carcharon?
37
* * *
A REUNION
After a troublesome, mostly silent journey through heavy snow, Karan, Malien and Llian slipped into the city quietly, by ways that Malien knew. They found Thurkad to be bruised and battered but not cowed. Its people were as unruly as ever, and they went about their stealthy and wicked businesses much as before. Not even Yggur had been able to curb their wantonness.
At one of the dozens of cafés on the waterfront they met Shand. He gave Karan the most perfunctory embrace and shook hands with Llian and Malien distantly.
“Is something the matter?” Karan asked as they headed back to his lodgings.
“I’m wasting precious life here, pandering to fools and waiting on villains,” he said grumpily. “One more problem and I am off for Tullin, and I won’t be coming back.”
“Anything particular the matter?”
“They’re all out for what they can get.”
“Who are you talking about?”
“Yggur, Mendark, not to mention Hennia the Zain! She’s changed sides half a dozen times this year. Treacherous bitch, like all her kind.”
Shrinking visibly, Llian turned away.
Karan tried to cover it up with jocularity. “Well, that’s human nature, which is irreducible, as you should know.”
“And mine is to go home and hide from my problems. I need Tullin just as much as you do Gothryme.”
“Did you speak to Mendark about Chanthed?”
“His ship hasn’t come in yet.”
Shand’s lodging was a disreputable-looking tenement with stained stonework and falling render, a place that looked damp and filthy under Thurkad’s perpetually gray winter skies. It was not far from the room where he had nursed Karan back to health last winter.
“What a dump,” said Llian, though a year ago it would have seemed a palace compared to his student’s lodgings. “Haven’t they heard of paint in Thurkad?”
“Are you paying for it?” Shand said coldly.
“I have no money.”
“Then keep your thoughts to yourself. I don’t want to draw attention to us. Alliances made in the heat of battle, in the trials of Katazza or the desolation of the Dry Sea, need not hold up now that Yggur is back in the seat of his power with his armies behind him.”
“Pompous ass,” said Llian under his breath.
Karan started to say something, then thought better of it. She hated Thurkad; always had. If the rest of the week was going to be like this it would be unbearable.
However, inside they found Shand’s rooms to be well furnished and comfortable, though cold because of the wood shortage. Once they were safely installed Malien left them, going off to see Tensor. Karan stayed inside, since that was cheaper. She often thought about pawning the beautiful chain but could not bring herself to part with it—it was so connected with Llian. Every time she looked at it she remembered climbing the Great Tower, and the night after.
Karan spent most of her time working on her ledger in front of their pathetic fire, a thin candle fluttering in the end of a bottle beside her. She was preoccupied with the rebuilding of Gothryme and the re-establishment of the gardens on the uphill side of the manor, which had been trampled into the ground, though there was not a coin to spare for the work. This work of creation gave her more satisfaction than anything she had done in her life before. This was real. This was what she wanted.
Llian was miserable. He could not bear to be in the same room as Shand, whose contempt was all too evident. Since there was nothing else to do he went out. That was not pleasant either, for it was dismal weather. Being broke, he was forced to tell to earn his drinks, but his audience was only interested in the crudest of tales. He returned late that night feeling worse than when he’d left.
“Where have you been?” Shand snapped as soon as he opened the door.
“Telling yarns for a few drinks.”
“Better not be about the Mirror!”
Llian scowled, began to defend himself, then went into the other room and crawled into bed. He hated Shand.
“He’s doing i
t again!” said Shand. “Blabbing our secrets!”
“You heard him, did you?” she asked acidly.
“I know him, Karan!”
Nothing changed the second day, or the third. As Llian put his coat on, Shand attacked him.
“I’d prefer that you stayed here,” said Shand. “This is not a good time to draw attention to ourselves.”
“Well, I’m fed up with your dark looks and your conspiratorial exchanges.”
“Trust needs be earned!” Shand said angrily.
“Impossible for anyone who is Zain to earn yours! I’ve already tried that. You’ve been muttering about my heritage since the first time we met.”
“And I’ve been proven right!” shouted Shand, “as I told Karan in Tullin.”
“Shand!” Karan said, but the damage was done.
“So, you admit it at last, you grinning hypocrite! Well, I’ve known all along. I overheard you agree to betray me in Tullin, Karan. How could you?”
Karan leapt up, knocking over the table in her distress. The candle landed on the rug. Shand sprang to put it out.
Llian gave the pair of them a look that could have burned through rock, and left abruptly.
Karan was distraught. “I can’t do this, Shand,” she wept. “The two people that I care for most, constantly at each other’s throats.”
Shand was in no mood to make concessions. “I warned you. I’ve seen this kind of possession before.”
“I prefer to rely on my own judgment. Stop undermining Llian; leave him alone.”
“Your judgment is clouded by your feelings toward Llian.”
“And yours by your prejudice against the Zain,” she shot back. “Damn you, Shand, you’re a mean-spirited old bastard. Don’t ever mention it again.”
Shand was quite shocked, then looked away, went into the next room and closed the door. An hour later he came out again. “I’m sorry, Karan. I’ve been a fool.”
She looked up at him miserably, ran the fingers of one hand through her hair, leaving a tuft sticking up, and bent again to her work. The candlelight turned her hair to red gold.