by Jude Fisher
The Wandering folk believed that some measure of goodness was innate to everything, that every life had its own unique place in the world, that every person was a tiny, colourful stitch in Elda’s great tapestry; that the Three watched over all and together determined how such threads should be woven to make the most of every gift and skill, every act and outcome. But Alisha owed only half of her parentage to the gentle nomads: the other half came from a soldier who had raped her mother in the mountains where they had been ambushed. There had been rather too many times in her life when she thought she owed rather more than half her inherited traits to the former than to the latter. The nomadic people met every challenge with hope and cheer, believed the best of everyone they met, took each day as it came and gave little thought to the future. To Alisha’s mind, this made them impractical folk, vulnerable to the greedy, the exploitative and the violent; it meant they shored up nothing for the next day, had no thought at all of the days after that, and became everyone’s victim. She found herself a strange anomaly amongst these happy-go-lucky folk, constantly anxious, constantly looking for some control over her circumstances. It was a fruitless attitude, but it had meant that when her mother – the healer Fezack Starsinger, who had led the caravan for as many years as Alisha could remember – had died, the other members had at once looked to her to take the old woman’s place and lead them safely on their great journeys across the southern continent. How could they, who had no concept of responsibility, understand just how heavily this had weighed on her? Their expectation that all would be well she would have found daunting at the best of times; with persecution, hostility and distrust around even the safest-seeming corner in this intolerant, fanatical empire, the burden she found herself carrying was terrifying, absurd. Moving into her mother’s old wagon, with its symbolic stars-and-moon door and its shelves full of healer’s potions and scryer’s crystals, had made her anxious: worse, she had felt like an impostor, a charlatan claiming gifts and a history not her own. When she looked in a glass all she saw were the peculiarly light eyes and wiry red-brown hair of a woman who fitted into no clear social niche anywhere in this world. She hardly even seemed related to her own son, for Falo was the mirror image of his nomad father with his sharp, neat features, his dark skin and black eyes; his laughing carefree belief that if he fell, the world would catch him. If anything, his close fit with the Wanderers enhanced her own sense of alienation, excluded her further from their warm, tight mesh. And now even that link was severed. For Falo – beautiful, lively, gifted little Falo, who had barely seen out eight winters in the world – was gone from her, chopped down like sere grass by the careless back-hand sword-stroke of an Istrian soldier. The rest of her sadly depleted troupe had soon followed.
And she – Alisha Skylark, daughter of the most powerful scryer of all the Wandering Folk – had not even been able to see the faintest echo of this huge and cataclysmic event coming towards them, despite all the hours she had spent poring over her mother’s great crystal.
So much for responsibility; so much for anxiety; so much for control. So much for magic . . .
It would, Alisha admitted to herself now, in the midst of yet more carnage, be easy just to lie down and die and sever that last tenuous link with Elda. Indeed, for a long time she laid her head back down on the damp, churned earth and wept hot tears into it at the memory of her son’s terrible death, undeserved, unwished-for, untimely. She cried until no more tears would come and she felt entirely emptied out of all emotion, all individuality. Then she lay there and waited for oblivion to take her, but all that happened was that time passed and the sun rose higher, and vultures began descending from the skies and trees and settling on the battlefield. But as they set about their grisly feeding, Alisha found she could no longer wish herself into oblivion. It was impossible to close her ears to the sounds around her – the shrieking and ripping and tearing, the challenges of one carrion bird to another, the aggressive bluster of wings; so much greedy life among the dead.
Before she even knew what she had done, she was on her feet and yelling at the vultures, waving her arms, cursing in fury, and they were lifting in a great flurry of discontent and flying off to settle in their roosts to wait their chance to return for more delicacies once this annoyingly alive madwoman was herself dead. We can outwait you, their avid, beady eyes promised. We will still be here when all other living things have passed into the fires.
Alisha Skylark, returned in some measure to herself by this inimical challenge to her humanity, drew her eyes from the vultures and instead began to stare around at the battlefield. Even with their now-empty orbs gazing sightlessly into the hot air, she would have recognised many of those lying there, their uniforms soaked and stiffened by their bodily fluids, their limbs all contorted in their death-throes. She should, she considered, feel some satisfaction that the men who had dealt out barbaric deaths to her loved ones and then defiled her had themselves met with such a violent and ignominious fate. But she just felt hollowed out, barely even human.
She began to wander randomly about the place, examining each corpse she passed with a dispassionate eye. Some of the cadavers were those of men she did not recognise, men who wore a different uniform from those who had annihilated her caravan, and this puzzled her, until she scanned the scene with a more focused and curious intent, and realised that young Saro Vingo was not among the dead. From his absence she deduced the men had come for him, no doubt spurred on to their atrocious deeds by the likelihood of some generous bounty. She began to pace about now, searching for a sign to corroborate her theory. There were bodies all around – fifteen? Twenty? More? She could not bear to count, even if most of them were enemies, it was such a waste of life.
Her eyes scanned the scene, around and around, so that one detail blurred with another – a hand twisted, palm up, as if to implore mercy; a face with one eye shut and the other missing as if making an obscene wink at death; a man wearing odd boots; a horse’s teeth, yellow and attenuated, stained with blood. And then suddenly, a sharp stab of recognition.
Virelai, Virelai!
The strange pale man with whom she had shared so many intimate embraces, with whom she had at one time thought she might spend the rest of her life, lay maybe thirty paces away from where she stood near a tangle of carved-up men and beasts, his body contorted so that one arm was bent beneath him while the other was splayed out, and his knees were drawn up tight to his chest as if to ward off further attack.
Oh, Virelai . . .
Alisha’s heart began to hammer against her ribs. Each breath she drew transferred little shockwaves of pain through her entire body, a reminder – though she hardly needed it – that the essence of being alive was to be vulnerable to hurt. Some dried substance had matted in the long white hair near the nape of his neck, and a wound gaped at his temple, an awful bled-out grey. His head was twisted away from her, but she could still see how his eyes were screwed tightly closed, though his mouth was stretched wide in a savage grimace. A blow to the side of the head appeared to have brought about the sorcerer’s demise, a blow of disproportionate force, judging by the size of the wound, for it was hardly as if Virelai had ever been much of a physical threat to any man, let alone any armed soldier. That he should meet his death by such simple brutality, when he had been so superstitiously terrified of the demons his master’s curse would unleash upon him seemed pathetically ironic. And that he should be able to die at all, given his true nature, was further proof of the arbitrary nature of the universe.
Suddenly, Alisha found her well of tears had not entirely run dry.
Overcome by this new and unexpected grief, she let the tears fall as they would. For a while she watched them drop, one after another, onto the ground between her feet. At first they made a small puddle there, then began to seep away into the earth. She blinked and blinked, but they would not stop.
After an unknowable amount of time, she found that her bleary vision was fixed on something glinting obscurely in the di
rt. She bent down, glad to have something to distract her from her misery, even if it was only a pebble washed clean by her tears.
But it wasn’t just a pebble. With growing certainty, Alisha reached out to the object. She brushed the remaining mud away from its surface, then jerked her fingers back as if bitten.
The object gleamed at her, pearly and malevolent, full of light.
It was the deathstone.
She had known it from the first moment she had glimpsed it; had known it in her bones, rather than in her head. Her fingers still buzzed and burned from the split-second’s contact. Unconsciously, she brought her hand up to her mouth, pressed the pads of her fingers against lips which moved in sudden, silent prayer to a goddess she had been ready moments earlier to renounce. Then, knowing that she was making an irrevocable decision, she reached down and grabbed up the pendant. It swung from its dirt-crusted leather thong, its opalescence absorbing every iota of light there was to be had from the dull day and giving it back to the world threefold. Alisha gazed at it, mesmerised as much by its deadly beauty as by the slow pendulum of its arcing movement from the nadir of the string. This was the stone which had been touched by Falla herself, inanimate crystal charged with Elda’s own power: an object which could suck the life out of any breathing creature with the merest touch.
She frowned. Then why had she herself not expired when she had wiped it clean?
Not caring whether she lived or died, but possessed by a reckless curiosity, she let the stone swing lightly against the skin of her other palm.
Nothing. Or rather, nothing but a gentle warmth like a ray of sunlight. She shut her eyes and focused on the sensation, letting it grow and take shape, letting it infuse her skin, then the muscles and bones of that hand, then radiate up into her arm and shoulder, her neck; the cavern of her skull. Mindlessly, the fingers of her free hand closed tightly over the moodstone. She felt it throb against her palm like a second heart. It was oddly soothing, as if she were surrendering her life to the stone, giving over all responsibility and decision to it. Volitionlessly, she began to move.
From somewhere distant to her actions, she was aware of kneeling by the sorcerer’s corpse, of laying hands on that disturbingly chalky flesh; then there was darkness and confusion. Chaos consumed her. Voices sounded in her head.
Out of me . . . get out of me . . .
Let me go . . .
I did not ask for this . . .
The Goddess, the Goddess . . .
What is happening?
Who is calling me? Who are you?
No—
I cannot help it. It is not me.
Who then?
She— Aaaaahhh—!
Convulsively, Alisha Skylark flung the deathstone away from her and sat in the mud, breathing hard. She was too afraid to open her eyes. Then a hand touched her face, and someone spoke her name . . .
Saro Vingo had plumbed the depths of human despair on a number of occasions, but none more so than as he bumped his way through the scrubby wasteland bordering the Eternal City of Jetra, bound hand and foot and slung face-down over a soldier’s pack animal. Considering the apocalyptic nature of what he had previously experienced, the smell of a sweating horse and the hot-and-cold waves of nausea caused by its incessant swaying should have registered as mere nuisance; but Saro had never felt so dreadful in all his life. Trying to take his mind off his current predicament, as scalding bile rose in his throat yet again, he recalled the self-disgust he had felt when he knew himself responsible for the deaths of innocent men at the Allfair; when being forced to take care of his loathsome brother after Tanto had been returned so unexpectedly and undeservedly to consciousness; when the full extent of the gift of empathy old Hiron the moodstone-seller had bestowed upon him had been revealed in all its aweful glory; when he had been visited by the appalling vision of Tycho Issian’s ambitions; and when, on a smaller but far more personal and poignant level, such death and destruction had been brought home to him by the sight of Falo, Alisha’s son, lying lifeless and mutilated, his hacked-off arm still clutching his grandmother’s stick. And all because of him, and Virelai; and the greed of a band of militiamen. But now those very soldiers and his sole surviving friends were lying dead and he himself had been captured yet again by soldiers who had ambushed his initial captors. All for money. All for power.
At least they won’t get the deathstone, he thought savagely.
And they won’t have Virelai.
He tried to push the image of that macabre, caved-in skull away into some recess of his mind, but it kept coming back to him in ever-increasing detail. He now recalled how the skin had been puckered all around the point of impact, how the interior of the wound, a great crater of a thing, had looked so pale and lifeless, as if every drop of his blood had to be absorbed by the thankless earth. How the white of bone had showed through the dead grey flesh.
He was still thinking about the odd chalky nature of the flesh revealed by his friend’s wound as they reached the shores of the great lake and began to traverse the narrow causeway which led to its towering rose-red walls of carved sandstone; he was gripped by images of death as they passed beneath the chilly shadow of the city’s arched southern gate, where the stone had been leached away by the elements like flesh eaten into by a leprous plague; he was wrapped around by thoughts of mortality when they rode through dank passages fringed with black weed and noxious scale gleaming at the lapping waterline, through tunnels in which the horses’ hooves echoed as loudly as the clang of weapons. As they turned a tight corner, one of the soldiers began to swear at another for bringing them in via the Misery – or this was what it sounded like to Saro’s distressed ears, though the man’s voice reverberated off the low ceiling and narrow walls like a blaring horn.
‘That’s what he said to do,’ the first man protested.
‘Who? The Lord of Cantara paid us to bring him to Jetra, to his state room; not down here. No one told me anything about this.’ He sounded thoroughly aggrieved.
‘Not him, the master’s new friend,’ the first soldier returned belligerently. ‘Caught me as we were leaving . . .’
Saro’s heart stopped. His ears strained to hear the rest; and he could tell from the sudden quiet of the rest of the troop that others were listening, too.
‘Stop talking in riddles, Tosco!’
The other man sighed melodramatically. Then he reached into his pouch and brought out a small roll of parchment, opened it with a maladroit fumble and read slowly. ‘“The old cells” something, something – I can’t quite read it, but look, see here: “the Miseria”. Says so quite clearly.’
‘No one in his right mind comes down here: it’s full of ghasts and demons . . .’
‘Who said anything about him being in his right mind?’
Saro didn’t catch the next bit of the exchange because at that moment the nag he had been bundled on like so much baggage rammed itself into the wall so hard that he had to put a hand out to prevent his skull from being mashed. At once he was assailed by a terrible stench – if he had thought the smell of a sweating horse was bad, then this was infinitely worse – a sickly aroma of blood and vomit and shit all combined with a sharp and lasting after-scent of terror and pain. As the impact of the smell passed off, there came a new assault on his senses. Dark shapes all around, flickering torchlight, shouts and screams, disembodied at first, then closer and closer until they seemed to be inside his own head. They were inside his own head, he realised suddenly – and he was being dragged, toes scuffing against the slippery and uneven cobbles, by two huge men, their heads swathed by masks, their boots sloshing through unnameable substances streaming along the gutters on either side of the passageway. Everything hurt. The socket of his left arm raged with fire: and then he remembered how they had hung him by one wrist from a chain suspended from the ceiling and beaten him with sticks and chains, with their hands and their boots till he swung and spun wildly across the gore-streaked chamber. And he remembered how they had lau
ghed when several of his teeth had sprayed out of his mouth and skittered across the stone floor; how they had reviled him and beaten him harder when he had pissed himself and one of them had caught some of that weak and bloody stream on his tunic.
And then the devil had come, that softly spoken man with the sharp features, the expressive brown eyes; how he had commanded the men in a rebuking tone to take him down and stop their torture; the blessed relief as his weight came off his ruined arm, the welcome cold stillness of the stone floor. He remembered being taken into a room with a carpet, a chair, an ornately carved desk; how the brown-eyed man had offered him wine which had burned his ravaged gums; and how he had begun to talk and talk and talk as if he could never stop – ridiculous, inconsequential nonsense about his childhood and Ravenna’s hair – and the man had listened patiently with his fingers steepled and his head nodding, nodding his encouragement, and only later, much later, had he spoken about his wife’s brother’s secret temple; how the slaughter-goats had danced and shrieked; how they had prayed and drunk a saltwater toast to the old god. And then the softly spoken man had pressed him for more detail, and more detail he had given him: more and more and more, like a well head unstoppered.
The next thing he knew, he was in his cell, unable to get comfortable: not because of the ever-flaming hurt to his shoulder and arm, but from some irritation beneath his right haunch. Further investigation had for long minutes seemed too exhausting, but the annoyance plagued him beyond endurance and at last he had been forced to address it. Reaching down, he had eased his hip away from the plank of his cell’s hard bed and found – not a stone or a knot in the wood, but one of his own molars embedded in his flesh, where he had dropped down onto it from the chain. And then he had begun to cry and cry, ashamed for his weakness, for his broken body, for betraying his entire family to the Goddess’s wicked priests and thus condemning them to the fires. He was weeping still as they dragged him down the long, stinking passageway to the death he knew awaited him – out in the city’s arena at the pyres where he would surely find his wife, her brother, his children, his friends and neighbours all bound to their stakes before being consigned to Falla’s flames.