Pettar began to feel uncertain. “You guess right, Master Storbanther, it was Steward Melkin who recognised the provenance of the message. We took it to him at Lord Nephril’s insistence, for his Lordship has lost all knowledge of its tongue.”
At last, an involuntary flash of surprise now passed across Storbanther’s face, but it was quickly masked by yet another contrived grin. “And thee reckons it’s ‘is Lordship’s old tongue I were after?” He yelped a short laugh. “Nay, but thee’s wide o’ mark, and bi a long way. ‘T’aint Lord Nephril’s wit I be needing, no, not ‘is wit. So,” he stated in a voice that obviously brooked no argument, “we’d better get on an’ throw your Melkin Mudark out, ‘adn’t we?”
Pettar began to panic. “But, Master Storbanther, we can’t simply turf him out like that. It’s getting so late, well on to sunset, and he’d never get home in time. We can’t just throw him out into the night, not after all the help he’s given getting his Lordship here.”
Storbanther stopped, having stood up, and pondered, his hand rubbing his chin, before throwing Pettar a beady eye. “I suppose it would be a bit mean. Aye, summat in me thin veneer strikes a chord with ‘is plight, aye, it does. Maybe thee’s right, and it’d do no ‘arm for ‘im to stay t’night, no, not just the one night.”
Storbanther opened the door and quietly instructed the sentry without before saying to Pettar, somewhat obliquely, “He can stay locked up for the night, in enough comfort, afore we throw him out yet again.” As though the issue was now well and truly settled, he turned to look down at Nephril.
He stood there for quite some time before his thoughts unguardedly leaked out. “So, Leiyfiantel, we’ve got our jemmy, albeit damaged some. Preserved, aye, in corporal way, but unfixed in mind. By ‘eck, but we gorit wrong, didn’t we, eh, reet wrong. If only he’d hung on to t’slip, then maybe he’d have had some of thesen to sustain ‘im out in yer shadow, maybe that would’ve kept him whole in mind.” He seemed to remember Pettar. “Far from all lost, though, Pettar, far from it. Simply a case o’ relocation, as it were.”
A lot then seemed to happen, although Pettar saw little of it; a lot of quiet toing and froing, the issuing of orders and the receiving of reports, all conducted from a room just down the corridor. All he could gather was that Sentinar Drax had everything in order, that the conveyance was ready and that somewhere suitable had been found.
His inactivity steadily drew Pettar towards drowsiness, which seemed to make way for a single word to drift into his thoughts. It was one he didn’t truly understand, nor rightly remember from where it had come, but it seemed confident in its own shape and presence. The word was ‘Naningemynd’ and it strutted before his mind like a strumpet. Not a particularly fulsome one, it had to be said, for it failed to hold him back from slowly slipping down the steep slope, down to the small stream in his own land of, well, not quite everlasting dreams.
Whilst he slept, preparations moved on apace. In the room down the corridor Storbanther was demanding, “Tell me again, Sentinar Drax, exactly where you’ve found for us.”
Drax smiled as he produced a fold of paper from his tunic, opened it out and laid it between them on the table. He pointed at a place down near the bottom left-hand corner. “There, on the same level as the culvegang, there’s a suite of rooms well out of the way. That part of the installation’s pretty well empty most of the time anyway.”
“Good,” Storbanther said as he scrutinised the plan. Presently, he lifted his eyes back to Drax, worry quietly colouring their stare.
“What’s wrong, Master Storbanther? Is there a problem with my choice?”
“Hmm? Oh! No … no, not with there or it. No, more wi’ who really.”
“Who?”
“Yes, it’ll be safe enough for Pettar and Nephril, there’s no denying that, but I don’t like t’idea of ‘aving that Bazarran stuck back ‘ere on ‘is own, no, a bit risky that, even fer a short time.”
“Well, just throw him out then. I don’t see the problem.”
Storbanther wasn’t so sure. He’d made his promise to Pettar of course, but there was something more to it than that, something in the rind of his affinity with Melkin that spoke of caution. There was also a touch of intrigue that seldom found place in his wholly different grain. He was sure he’d come across Melkin Mudark before, many years before, yes, but he couldn’t quite remember.
“Don’t think he were a steward then either,” he said aloud, without realising, at which Drax looked mystified.
“No,” Storbanther finally said. “It ‘urts me to say it, but I reckon we’ll just have to tek ‘im along wi’ us. Is there enough room for us all in t’laadnimana?” Drax hesitated. “Well, Sentinar? Simple case o’ choosing yeah or nay, ain’t it?”
“Err, well, it’ll be close, but I reckon we can do it, only just mind you.”
For Storbanther that was more than enough. “So, when can we get t’laadnimana to t’gate?”
“Another hour at the most,” Drax allowed. Another hour provided it all held out, he thought. Another hour of suspense.
In the millennia of operation that Galgaverre had seen pass by completely uneventfully, all the myriad processes and activities that made up its purpose had always carried through without a single hitch. It had hardly been surprising given the nature and near proximity of its charge. Each and every duty and task had invariably been completed as it always had, with no variance or deviation, no cause for concern – until recently.
The last few decades had seen small upsets creeping in to their ordered world, perpetually reliable operations unexpectedly failing or previously indestructible items found rusted or worn. Galgaverrans had been used to following unwavering procedure and so tended to fall to disarray on such novel occasions. They’d quickly learnt, though, that their youngest seemed best able to cope. It was that very lesson that had led Drax to recruit one of his youngest to their duties that day. It was, therefore, Phaylan who sat hunched in the laadnimana as it squealed and scratched its way through the culvegang towards them.
He’d earlier gripped its prescribed instructions in his hand as he’d made his way to the laadnimana’s lair, midway along Galgaverre’s northern wall. Its berth unlocked, the laadnimana opened and Phaylan installed, he’d soon felt its growing hum slowly tingle up through his soles. He’d felt the slight kick of its body as it came free, and the almost imperceptible sway as it finally settled itself within the culvegang. Without any real fuss, the laadnimana had smoothly begun to move forward.
Phaylan sat alone, sealed in its empty belly, blind to its course as they gradually and quietly built-up speed until they were fair hurtling along. As prescribed, Phaylan had checked what the instructions required checking and had gained contentment that all was well, well enough for him to wonder again what load Drax had such an urgent need to move.
Where they were when it happened Phaylan had no idea, but the sudden lurch and ear-splitting scream that then vibrated through the laadnimana pushed all else from his mind. His arms instinctively shot out against the cold metal walls as he felt his bowels loosen. There was a brief silent respite, in which he managed to gather his wits, before the same thing happened again.
This time it was followed by a long, mournful groan, and Phaylan was thrown forward. When the moaning stopped, it was replaced by a low rubbing sound, one quiet enough for Phaylan to hear his heart thumping, almost beating at his chest. Without warning, everything went deathly quiet as the laadnimana stopped jerking, and before it settled to its previously gentle sway.
It left Phaylan rigid, repeatedly intoning a series of base swear words, his skin cold and moist, arms aching and bowels yet looser still. He soon realised he wasn’t breathing and so drew in a long and deep breath before slowly exhaling. Phaylan’s young mind then found space to step outside procedure, to make tentative adjustments that slowed the laadnimana.
It was fortunate he did for the same horrendous cacophony occurred again, only a few minutes later, but the
effects this time were greatly lessened. Further adjustments meant the next time it happened, although as sudden and as alarming, the jarring and jolting were absent, only the screech of vibrating metal coursing through the laadnimana’s walls.
Their progress was now tediously slow, the turn south coming after what seemed like an age, and shaking them most alarmingly from side to side. Phaylan was thrown to the floor where he stayed as the laadnimana steadily grew hotter and hotter.
Eventually, the laadnimana’s lights changed and Phaylan’s poached brain slowly realised, with overwhelming relief, that they’d finally arrived beneath the gatehouse.
Phaylan unlocked his grip from the floor and rolled stiffly onto his back. Above him, the laadnimana’s roof silently slid back, revealing two very familiar faces. The concerned one was Sentinar Drax’s, but beside it, Master Storbanther’s glared down in annoyance. Drax’s promised time of arrival for the laadnimana had clearly been wide of the mark.
Storbanther’s state didn’t improve when it quickly became clear how foolhardy any further use of the laadnimana would prove to be. The last Phaylan saw of him was his hasty retreat as he left Drax to pull Phaylan from the laadnimana’s steaming belly.
Drax soon pressed Phaylan on every aspect of the journey, checked and double-checked until he finally sighed, a resigned look on his face. “Gird yourself for more, mi lad. Don’t relax your vigilance just yet.”
He turned from Phaylan but stopped, just as he was about to leave, and turned back with a smile. “Well done, Phaylan. You’ve acquitted yourself most admirably today and I’m proud of you. It must have been fearful in there.” He briefly glanced down into the laadnimana’s open belly.
“Wait here and get what rest you can for I reckon you’ll be called upon to do the same again, I’m afraid,” and with that, Drax rushed off, fast on Storbanther’s heels.
13 A Good Wind that Fills the Sails
“Nephhryl, meowyh Caegheorda?” the sweet voice oozed through the blackness, flowing like honey. “Meowyh Treowe Caegheorda, ingemynde tella!” but he hardly heard, the whispering wind now wafting through him as though he wasn’t there, faintly hissing its forgetting, filling his ears only with the rush of chaff in the air.
“Ingemynde, Nephhryl, ingemynde, ingemynde tella!” its distaff urge persisted, but still the words flowed through naught but barren lands. “Remember well, mine beloved, remember our union, remember mine warp and weft that warmed thy weave. Remember it well,” but he didn’t.
It was only the wind, only the dry brushing of sundried grasses, long in their stand and close in their throng, caressing, that pointed his aching emptiness. It was only the wind; ethereal and easy, empty and endless, a vacant thought in a never ending world.
The hush of a breeze through stems, of lightly rasping husks of seed, once more hinted at meaning, once more laid a fine dust of words along unswept paths. Her voice drifted in but only thinly now; hesitant of life, afeared for his own hurt, solicitous and solitary.
“Eyn an deop woded glenne…” her words began but soon dissolved away to forgetting, left no trace of ever having trod that way, the dust still thin and undisturbed.
“Eyn a deop woded glenne,” he dully echoed to himself, though no remembering dallied. “In a deep sylvan glen,” he eventually heard himself say, whereupon she quickly added, “…gelege af Naningemynd leasspelled,” bringing keen knowing in the warm breath of her voice. “In a deep sylvan glen lies Naningemynd’s lair,” she finally dripped to his errant ear, and it was enough.
Nephril now saw the verse, saw it for what it was, saw it in that way the mind grasps at surety, felt its solidity within him and knew, knew now with certainty, he was no longer alone.
His eyes shot open and he blinked in the glare, blinked hard against her blinding gaze. Before he could so much as stare, her voice filled him with a body rich and full and near. “Eyn an deop woded glenne gelege af Naningemynd leasspelled, plaece dannk nioere gangendes af der mannes.”
Without thinking, he mirrored her words but in his own late tongue, in his own rough Dican tones. “In a deep sylvan glen lies Naningemynd’s lair, dank place below feet of men.” Then, no longer hearing her ancient voice in his, he intoned afresh his own most cherished ode.
“In a deep sylvan glen lies Naningemynd’s lair,
Dank place below feet of men, above spring of waters,
In the land of the living,
In the land of everlasting hopes.
There struts remorse,
And vainglory,
Regrets for lives ill spent,
For unrequited envy of others.
There lives our own lie guarded from truths,
Beyond reach of purity in this gross world.”
In his own mind’s eye his face shone, his eyes glinted like diamonds raked by moonlight, and his mouth was wetted with knowing. In his own eyes, yes, but in Pettar’s earthly view he just lay there, still and stone-faced on the mattress, as he had done all that day and the day before. As though laid out on his own bier, he’d reposed there under Pettar and Melkin’s watchful eyes, they like bearers at their liege lord’s funerary watch.
They had, though, taken some hope from Storbanther’s blithe confidence. On the occasions he’d visited, he wouldn’t be drawn on the matter, would only say that Nephril was now in the best place, but the best place for what?
At first there’d been palpable enmity between Melkin and Storbanther, but it appeared to have lessened with each visit, or more rightly passed to tolerance. Storbanther seemed content, for the time being at least, that Nephril would be better served by the two of them than by Pettar alone, here in this remote and deserted corner of Galgaverre.
That they were here at all seemed something of a miracle. Pettar marvelled at how Phaylan had survived the even greater peril of his own lone journey to the gate, how he’d borne that terror so well on such slight shoulders.
On Pettar’s part, he was quite open about his own fears, about the trepidation that had filled him as full as the laadnimana had been crammed, each squeezed in like pilchards in a barrel. The terror at the noise and lurching, the oppressive and stifling stench of stark sweat, intimations of death and utter dismay all brought so close, cocooned as they’d been in the airless depths far beneath Galgaverre’s walls.
Few of Dica were well equipped to fend off fear, few outside depraved and destitute places like Yuhlm. Few had much grounding in such skills. Least equipped were those of Galgaverre, and didn’t Pettar now know it.
Drax had been one of their number and so plainly now knew it himself, the Drax against whom Pettar had held a whole litany of ills. It was a different Drax who’d finally emerged from the laadnimana, at its eventual but scarcely hoped for journey’s end. He’d quickly gone to ground, privy only to Storbanther in the seclusion of their own apartments.
Pettar and Melkin had taken turns to sit by Nephril, but it happened that Melkin now stood at the room’s large window, idly looking out upon Galgaverre. Considering how long he’d waited for this moment, he found it despairingly mundane.
Outside the window ran a narrow walkway at the inner edge of the wall, beyond which Galgaverre’s flat expanse swept away to the north. All lay well below the wall top, far lower on that inner side than without, letting Melkin look down upon it like some hovering hawk.
It was nothing more than a sprawl of small and low buildings, their design purely functional, seemingly stirred in amongst the odd steeple or two. Here and there, roads ran true and straight, either cutting between the buildings or running right across them, or occasionally darting beneath. Where there weren’t buildings or roads, or spires or squat towers, there were paths and walkways, pavements and snickets, the only thoroughfares seeming to know of the curve.
“Somewhere,” Melkin mumbled to himself, “somewhere in there is a library, and in it a hoard of ancient texts, an unread trove of knowledge that would put my own to shame.”
From across the room, at Nephril’s sid
e, Pettar was about to ask what Melkin had said when something caught his eye and he looked back at Nephril.
Pettar had come to know Nephril’s face quite well by now, knew every wrinkle and edge, every grey and white hair about his temples, the coarse and black ones that writhed from his ears or corkscrewed from his nose. He knew the lie of that land as though he’d walked upon it, as though he’d camped out under its stars or laboured over its many valleys and ridges in the noonday sun.
So, when both barrow mounds of his eyes no longer held tight their entombed mysteries but let their monumental bones scratch at the turf, Pettar immediately forgot Melkin’s soft mutterings. In fact, he yelped like a trodden-on puppy.
Nephril, however, had just reached ‘Thaer remors en idelgielpth strutianen’ for the umpteenth time when his words were unseated from their graceful mount, as it whinnied and shied, and were thrown to the ground.
“There struts remorse and vainglory,” Leiyfiantel had quickly prompted, her voice no longer soothing but sharp with alarm. Checking herself, she quickly dropped her tone and poured yet more honey into her words. “Thaer ure haban leasspelles dwelle. Is that not so, mine beloved Nephhryl?”
“It is,” he eventually allowed, far calmer now. “It is.” His shining face opened to her and let breathe a sigh, taking his answer with it into the brightness of her gaze. “From truth it be guarded, Leiyfiantel, fram treowlicas nerunganed, our own lie for want of truth.”
“And what gives our lie its currency then, eh Nephhryl, what tills rich loam in which it grows?”
Where his mind had been filled with naught but the lyric ode, its words shimmering against her startling gaze, there now arose a paler mass, a host of pastel shapes that writhed and coiled about themselves. Each, though, failed to hold true when grasped, each slipping through his fingers like frogspawn to plop back into an obscured mind once more. In time, the seething mass stilled, and in so doing clung one to the other, spread out before his inner eye a far more pleasant terrain.
Of Weft and Weave (Dica Series Book 2) Page 14