A Time of Ghosts

by Robert Holdstock

  Having ridden through the night and half the morning, she soon came to a rise, sand covered and windswept, that looked across the fertile grasslands towards Lyand itself. Within an hour she would be there.

  A sudden wind-squall whipped up the sand in front of her, completely obscuring her view of Lyand. She kicked her horse forward and rode down the slopes. A moment later the sand was swirling about her and she was completely blind.

  She climbed from the saddle and walked around to stand in front of her horse, protecting its eyes from the stinging sand. She heard movement close by and squinted through the storm.

  An old man walked into vision, bent against the wind, his dark robes whipping about his limbs. He beckoned to Raven, urgently, repeatedly, and she thought she heard him call to her, but the howling sand storm drowned all sounds. But she followed the old man, intrigued by him, and half hoping that he had a shelter close by.

  As abruptly as it had come the desert storm vanished, swirling across the rise behind her on its frantic journey south. Raven brushed herself down and shook her hair to lighten its dusty load. She looked for the old man and saw him nearby, seated beneath a slanted hide-canopy, staring at her.

  As Raven reached down to brush sand from her limbs she realised there was no sand there. Puzzled, she straightened and ran her hands along her steed’s flanks: they were wet with its efforts, but not caked with desert as they had been moments before.

  Beneath the canopy the old man was laughing.

  “Raven!” he called. “Come and sit.”

  She left her horse cropping the sparse scrub and stooped to enter the primitive tent. The old man patted the rug covered ground next to him and Raven squatted down, quite glad for a comfortable surface beneath her after her furious ride on the leather.

  “I am Nivik ir Maalsen,” said the strange man, reaching for a pewter jug and two small clay goblets. Raven stared at him, noticed how thin he was, how feeble. His eyes sparkled yellow, his hair was white streaked through with black. The teeth in his mouth were badly decayed. Nivik poured a goblet of sparkling red wine for Raven, who swigged it gratefully, and through she grimaced at the bitterness of the brew—she still held out the cup for more.

  “How do you know me?” she asked.

  “You are she they call Chaosbringer,” said Nivik with a smile. “Raven, swordmistress of the Gods. You are better known than you think.”

  Something about him reminded Raven of Spellbinder; it was an intangible something, perhaps just a woman’s instinct, perhaps an unconscious perception of some similarity between the two men. She said, “You are a warlock. I can tell.”

  Nivik’s eyebrows raised slightly. “Well observed, my lady. But…” He was thoughtful for a moment, “perhaps over-observed. I would hardly call myself a warlock. I have some simple magical skill. Once I was apprenticed to a warlock called Runeweaver. He was a strange man, a renegade from some magic isle. Perhaps he came from the Isle of the Sorcerer Priests itself, from Kharwhan, there are enough sorcerers cast out from those hallowed shores. Who knows? He taught me some rudiments of magic, simple spells such as the striking of fire…” As he spoke he swiftly made a movement of his fingers and fire sprang into existence before him, floating in the air before Raven’s startled eyes. She could feel its warmth, smell the acrid stench of wood being burned. The fire vanished. A few paces away a small log of wood, lying on the sand, was smouldering. “To create flame one must burn wood,” said Nivik. “Magic merely allows one to transfer the energy to an alien point. A simple trick, a simple skill.”

  “Was the sand storm a tric? Was there really a storm?”

  Nivik chuckled. “In your mind there was. That is the simplest trick of all. In our minds there resides all our strengths and weaknesses, all our memories and experiences, and they can be drawn on, to be used as weapons, or as suggestions, or as suggestion-getters. It’s a simple notion, and one that magicians and Sorcerers draw upon repeatedly. Most of the magic that you will see in your life is not magic at all, but simply illusion. True magic requires a very rare training. True magic is only practised on certain islands in the Worldheart Ocean, in particular the Ghost Isle.” He smiled. “More of this?” Waving the flagon at her. Raven declined.

  “There is,” she said carefully, “something I don’t understand...”

  Nivik laughed delightedly. “Only something? Not many things?”

  “About you,” said Raven.

  Nivik understood, had understood all along. “Why did I trick you here? Would you have stopped in your headlong gallop to Lyand had I merely waved at you?”

  Raven agreed that she would have fled past, not stopping.

  “But who are you? Why even stop me at all? Do I smell the manipulating fingers of Spellbinder?”

  Again Nivik’s eyebrows expressed surprise, his eyes widening slightly. Raven enjoyed watching his highly mobile face as emotion and thoughts fashioned the lines and skin into different masks.

  “I will say only this,” he murmured, leaning forward. “You are no ordinary warrior, Raven, you are no ordinary woman. Your destiny, hard though it is to accept, elevates you above mortal men, mortal though you truly be. In those lands around Worldheart, and in the lands beyond those lands, there are those who are aware of you, and who are aware of your cause and causation. If we do nothing else, our lives will be fulfilled by having helped you once.”

  “Pawns,” said Raven, sipping her wine. “Puppets. Your strings are pulled by those same invisible priests who pull mine.”

  Nivik shook his head as he stared at the brash young woman. “Perhaps,” he said quietly. “If it is pulling your strings to have prevented you riding into Lyand to certain death, then perhaps it is good to be a puppet.”

  “Certain death? How so?”

  “The city was alerted after the raid on the slave-train. Messenger birds were released: no doubt you failed to see them in the heat of the moment. The entire city was waiting for you, preparing to come out in pursuit of you. You could not have disguised your beauty sufficiently to have escaped.”

  “Then I thank you,” said Raven genuinely. “But I must still go to Lyand.”

  Nivik looked at her questioningly. She said, “I seek a particular man, a man I was sure I had killed, but who I have been told is still alive. He is known as Karl ir Donwayne, and not two days ago he was in Lyand. I am hoping he is still there, or that the report of his existence was incorrect. But if he is still alive…” She found her fingers clenching on the broad hilt of her sword.

  “You wish to kill him.”

  “It would be as if I had not killed him at all. Even though my mind rejoices to the memory of striking him down, there is a nagging doubt that I struck something that was not Donwayne, the Weaponmaster.”

  Nivik shook his head. “If he was in Lyand two days ago, he is certainly not there now. A Weaponmaster moves like the wind, following the demand for his multiple skills. He could be anywhere.”

  “I know of nowhere to go but Lyand. For the moment.”

  Nivik reached across and took her hand in his, squeezed it. His eyes burned with an intensity that Raven had not noticed before. “Go to Quell,” he said, but then frowned, sat back and shook his head. “No. Quell is too far, and the stone too cryptic to risk such a journey.”

  “Why not, though? I was at Quel before. I know the route…a hard route, admittedly, but that would at least allow me to ask the question of Donwayne’s survival. My mind would be at rest, even if I had to hunt him all over again.”

  “It would take you many weeks to cover the ground to Quell,” said Nivik. He stared at Raven, his gaze piercing her skull as if he read her very thoughts. Raven blushed and felt uncomfortable beneath his scrutiny, and yet, like a tree tossed before storm winds, she could not drag her gaze away from his. “Raven,” he went on, “you are needed. Such empty quests are folly indeed. Forget this vile man, return to the north, quickly, quickly…”

  Raven patted Nivik’s hand. “I have a friend who speaks
like you. Like you he seems aware of things about me that not even I am aware of.”

  “My simple skills are the secret talents of a simple man. If I read what is in your mind it is to help me understand those who I meet; there is no maliciousness in me, no desire to report and destroy those who seek to keep these lands free from single tyranny. You work thus, Raven, and if you are not aware of why or how, remember what I said before: you are better known than you suspect! You are needed more than you know! Forget this quest of vengeance…”

  “Not until I know that Donwayne is really dead…or alive. I must know, try to understand that. Not knowing is torment, agony, worse than what he did to me. Besides,” she straightened, staring out of the canopy across the shimmering desert, “besides, my friend the warlock told me to obey my instincts. My instincts are to go to Quell, to ask the oracle of Donwayne’s fate.”

  Now again Nivik leaned forward, the intensity growing within him. “Not Quell,” he said. “Quell is too far. There is a place nearer to here, and easier to reach. What you seek can be granted there, if you are prepared to pay the price.”

  “Tell me,” said Raven, excited.

  “To the west, some four days right inland along an easy route between Ghorm and the great rift. There is a lake there, and along the shores of the lake are the remnants of a once great race, a civilisation that covered all the Southern Wastelands, and was destroyed by some unknown force in the centuries before the City States come into being. They are known as the Sons of Uthaan. They are tribal warriors, intensely proud, and the High Prince of the land lives in the wooden walled city known as Garakka. He guards a magic crystal, an oracle, that can answer your questions.”

  Raven thought about this. It would mean several days delay from returning to Spellbinder, but she was sure he would not object. And he had, after all, told her to obey her instincts, to do what she sensed was correct. “What price does the oracle demand?”

  “The oracle? None. It is the High Prince who demands the price.” Nivik smiled, narrowly, painfully. “Which is why I believe you will be successful.”

  Four

  “A broken city does not imply a broken people.”

  The Books of Kharwhan

  Swiftly, then, she rode to a rendezvous with Silver and the others. Exhausted by the amount of time she had been in the saddle, she found her concentration wearing thin. The perpetual scrublands stretched around her as far as the four horizons, and the lands shimmered in heat…in the shimmering air waves she saw cities and figures and found herself riding in great circles to avoid a ghostly troop of Lyandian soldiers, who transformed into red-berried desert bushes as she stared at them more closely.

  She scanned the skies for a sign of the bird, but the skies were empty, the bird winged north, somewhere, on a mission of its own.

  She pressed on, pausing atop each sandy ridge, scouring the rolling lands before her in the hope of seeing a familiar sight, or mark upon the country. She saw nothing.

  She grew disoriented. It was the heat, almost certainly, and the lack of food, and perhaps the heady effect of the sour wine. But soon she was riding slowly in a land that spun around her, a land that pulsed with some inner life of its own.

  Perspiration ran from her, soaked her. Her skin felt like it was bubbling and blistering on her body.

  Finally she stopped, slumped forward in the saddle, exhausted and lost.

  It was growing close to dusk, the sun already down behind the low hills, the sky darkening to the east. A sudden cool wind, a pleasant touch on her skin, made her straighten in the saddle, sweep back her hair and once more scan the dunes and ridges around her.

  She started with surprise. Ahead of her, atop a scrubby dune, a bright light gleamed. She narrowed her eyes and tried to make out what it was and after a while she saw the shape of a man…

  Like some silvered, gleaming metal golem the figure stood motionless in the distance, legs braced apart, arms hanging loose by its side. The waning sunlight caught every ridge and facet of the bizarre statue, and the light burned bright across the country, beckoning the lost traveler to it. Beside it stood a dark-haired woman, also watching.

  Raven waved. The golem waved back. Smiling, feeling such relief that she wanted to cry, she rode towards the man who stood there.

  “It will be a long ride,” said Silver, as they rested beneath a hastily erected canopy in the lee of a dune. The moon was high, half full, and the desert was grey and shadowy, a sombre place.

  “It will be no ride at all,” said Raven, adding, “for you.”

  Silver turned to look at her. Raven was sitting outside the cover of the canopy and in the waning moonlight her hair shone as metal, gilded metal, honed and smoothed to a fine texture. Her eyes were wide, yet dark, and the moistness of her lips, full and slightly pouted, made Silver fill with lover for her. “No ride for me? Are you leaving me, then?”

  Raven laughed. Karmana sat quiet and solemn, regarding the wind rippled desert.

  “I’m sending you to Ghorm,” said Raven. “I need you to take our new recruits, few though there are that will stay with me, to where Spellbinder will be waiting for you.”

  “There are others would do that just as well.”

  Raven shook her head. “I trust only you. At dawn the ships will sail, and I want you to be aboard. The Captain has been promised good pay, but I don’t trust him not to turn about for Lyand and re-sell the slaves on the market there. I need you to be on your guard for me.”

  And that was all. Silver knew he could object as much as he liked, but it would be to no avail. He slept a scant three hours, and while it was still dark he rose and led his horse across the cold sands and sparsely vegetated hills. He was long gone by the first breaking of dawn, and Raven hoped there had been time enough for him to reach the others as they trekked northwards to the small city of Ghorm.

  “Thank you for letting me ride with you,” said Karmana, as the women mounted and prepared for the long journey.

  “You have a stake in this,” said Raven simply. They were away, then, across the wastelands, bearing west, several kli from the cities of Sara and Zantar.

  When they finally cut inland, away from the sea, they had been riding several days and nights, and were sore and tired of so much saddle.

  They reached a great curve in the river Utha and led their horses to the ice cold, gleaming waters. There they bathed and rested their aching flesh. It was green here, with tall, leafy trees and luxuriant colourful plant growth crowding down the mud banks and into the water itself. Raven was wary of river dwelling animals and several times scampered naked and dripping from the river as a great, horned-back slid silently past, some yards away. She was too small for the great river beasts to bother with, but she was nevertheless taking no chances.

  Across the river, in the distance, were the high hills and shrouded slopes of Haamscir. Small settlements dotted the slopes, appearing form the mist for a few minutes then passing again into obscurity as the fog rolled across them. It seemed a very uninviting land.

  Washed and rested, with their water pouches full again, Raven and Karmana continued riding, following the river now, knowing that it would lead them to Uthaan, and the city of Garakka.

  The lushness of the vegetation faded. Spiked plants, and trembling, leafless skeletons were all that gripped the sands and found some scant nourishment. A wind blew up and drove dry sand at them for several hours, and they rode, hunched and in distress, but unwilling to waste any time by sheltering.

  When the sandstorm subsided they found they had wandered away from the river valley, into higher land; they could see the river below them and away to the west, winding southwards.

  Near them, half buried in the sand, was a ruined city.

  A figure moved there.

  Once it had been as tall and proud a city as any that hugged the southern coasts. Gleaming spires had reflected sunlight in a thousand shades of red and green; plated domes had covered the streets, and walkways had wound among th
e buildings with almost sensuous ease. All had been metal bright, and colourful. Now it was scoured and scarred by sand and wind and time. The great sand barriers rose above Raven as she led the way through the ruined gate; stone baffles, and ornately carved sheer walls, stretched away on either side; when she looked up she could not see beyond the glare of sunlight, for the barriers reached almost to the sky itself. Their horses sank deep in sand, wallowed and waded through it as they came inside the city limits and stared at the ageless ruin beyond.

  The figure moved again, darting from the corroded archway of a dome, and fleeing along the buckled, twisted walkway; in the sun’s glare it was difficult to make out any details of the man.

  Raven dismounted, drew a star from her belt and held it ready. Her left hand rested easy on the hilt of her wide-bladed sword.

  Karmana stayed on horseback, leaning on her saddle as she breathed deep and rested. Both women gleamed with sweat, they had tied their hair back in great plaits, decorated their crowns with bands of platinum; their lean faces were free and tanned as they watched the desolation about them.

  There was a movement from a tower that rose from the sand to Raven’s left. She swung about and the throwing star skittered across the yellowishness and rang loudly off the metal of the rising building. It had narrowly missed the figure that had darted there, running from vantage point to vantage point, already close enough to be deadly with any throwing weapon.

  But a voice called out to Raven to hold her anger.

  And a familiar tall shape came from the darkness of the arch, ankle deep in the soft sand.

  “Moonshadow!” cried Raven, and relaxed her warrior’s grip on sword and star.

  He was naked but for a breechclout of some black material and a thick shoulder belt from which hung a curved Ishkarian cutlass. Raven could not imagine where he had found the sword, for none of the slavers had carried such weapons. His white hair was damp and hung heavy about his neck; his pale skin was neither reddened nor tanned by the sun. Steel grey eyes seemed to regard Raven warmly, but his lips never spoke of the smile his eyes allowed.