by Jude Fisher
They had the grace to look abashed at that, sheepish even. Katla found herself grinning lunatically at the poor pun; and it was at this point that she knew she really was unwell. A moment later she was sitting on the ground with her head between her knees. Everything inside her skull was spinning. She opened her eyes. Everything out there was spinning, too. Then she fell over on her side and lay like one dead.
‘What’s wrong with her?’ said Magla peevishly.
‘She’s sick,’ Hildi replied in a low voice. She sounded scared. ‘Very sick.’
Fat Breta started to cry. ‘What’ll we do? What’ll we do?’
There was a long moment’s silence.
‘We could carry her,’ Breta sniffed.
‘You can carry her,’ Magla returned unfairly. ‘I’m certainly not going to.’
Fat Breta wept louder.
‘We could leave her—’ Magla started, eyes aglow with daring at the idea. ‘We could leave her here and make our way along the coast to a port of some sort . . .’ There she stopped, imagination having failed her.
Thin Hildi snorted derisively.‘And then what? Ask a kindly Istrian sea captain to sail us home? We’re at war, Magla Felinsen. Eyra is at war with Istria and here we are – four Eyran girls lost in enemy territory with no money, no weapons and no word of their language between us.’
They all fell silent after that, considering their fate, while at their feet Katla writhed and sweated in her feverish sleep. Silent that is until, some time later, Magla heard voices.
‘What was that?’
They crowded into the hollow of the trees as if by doing so they might become part of the bark; but Katla Aransen’s tawny tunic made a great, bright pool of colour against the grassy floor and they could not move her. Thin Hildi bobbed her head up and gazed fearfully in the direction of the voices. It seemed that minutes went by as she stared and stared, then: ‘Men,’ she whispered hoarsely. She sat back down, even paler in the face than she had been before. ‘A lot of them, all wearing blue cloaks and helmets with great crests, leading their horses.’
‘They don’t sound much like the men who stole us away,’ Magla said doubtfully.
Fat Breta’s face brightened. ‘Perhaps they’ll help us go home.’ Her stomach rumbled fiercely at the very thought.
Hildi laughed. ‘I do not think so, Breta,’ she said more kindly than the big girl perhaps deserved. Then her expression became solemn. ‘Though they look rather more reputable than the men who brought us here.’
Now Magla took a turn at spying on the approaching men.
When she sat down, her eyes were thoughtful.‘These men don’t look at all like slavers,’ she said softly. ‘They must surely be soldiers. Officials, by their appearance. And they are very well turned out, very finely arrayed indeed . . .’
No one pointed out to her that on first sight she had thought the raiders rather fine in their outlandish garb, with their long silver earrings and oiled black hair.
She caught Hildi by the arm. ‘We should give ourselves up to them,’ she said fervently. ‘I am sure they will give us better treatment than the brigands who sacked Rockfall. And Feya knows we will not survive for long out here without food or shelter.’
And before either Thin Hildi or Fat Breta could utter a word of protest, Magla Felinsen was on her feet hailing the Istrian militiamen.
Twelve
In the Desert
Virelai ran until his lungs were full of dust. Then he ran some more. He ran till his eyeballs felt seared by the sun; then the sun went down and still he stumbled on. He had no idea of where he was, and cared less; as long as he was far away from Alisha Skylark and the stone she had laid upon him. He had traversed an area of desert, then one of thorny scrubland, been dead-ended in a dry gulch and had to climb out, half-blind, in twilight, with every muscle he owned trembling in panic at the likely consequences of a fall onto the spiky rocks below. He had crossed a river, without meaning to, for soft sand had gradually become soft mud which had tried to suck him down and down, so that in plunging forward to be free of it he had abruptly found himself in water up to his knees, and was out the other side before he’d barely had time to notice the change in elements.
Now, with all light gone from the sky and his heart hammering in sudden fear, he could go no further. As soon as he came to a halt, every part of his poor body shrieked for attention. Everything hurt. And hurt in a way he was not used to: insistent, inescapable aches and pains, rends and tears and distress. His leg muscles felt burned and stiff, and there was a dull throbbing in the bones of his shin. His chest was as tight as if someone had bound it mercilessly with ropes: he could hear the air wheezing in and out of it with every breath he took. He could feel the air inside him, scouring out his lungs, in a way he had never felt it before. And as soon as he registered one complaint, another surplanted it: he had a thorn in the big toe of his right foot, a gouge from a sharp stone in the sole of his left; some vile desert plant had applied tiny mouth-like suckers in a long row across his calves; his thighs felt as though they had gone to wood, they were so hard and stiff; but a wood that had been set afire in some dry forest blaze. Insect bites stung and itched, and sweat – a substance he had never produced before in all his life, let alone in such quantity and pungency of odour – had run freely then dried and chafed between his legs and under his arms.
And through it all, his head was plagued by a question he dared not examine, let alone answer.
Whatever was it that Alisha Skylark had done to him? And how had she dared to take such a decision upon herself? Given the stone’s properties, she might as easily have destroyed him, blasted him off the face of Elda like those other poor souls, with their eyes seared white in its killing light and their bodies as limp and empty of life as a child’s straw doll. As it was, even death might be preferable, for his body – more alive than it had ever been in his entire existence – was proving to be much more of a torment to him than a blessing.
If this is what it means to be alive and fully human, Virelai thought, then I will settle for my old half-life back again, whatever its peculiar limitations.
He sat down heavily upon the sandy ground and put his head in his hands. This availed him nothing more than a grim pulsing in the veins at his temples and a new ache at the back of his neck, so he applied himself to locating and extracting the thorn which had lodged itself rather firmly in his right big toe. This endeavour, requiring much concentration and the problematic coordination of a thumb and forefinger trembling with exhaustion, took so much time that a faint blush of light tinged the eastern skyline by the time it was successfully completed. But the relief of the pain was immense, blissful, washing over him like a warm wave.
‘Extraordinary,’ he muttered. Even his voice sounded different to him, emerging as a full-blooded croak rather than his usual dry-leaf whisper.
His new body was telling him things; urgent things. He was thirsty, he realised; hungry, too. How long was it since he had taken any sustenance? The militiamen who had taken them captive in the far south had given him some brackish water out of a poorly tanned skin and a hunk of unleavened bread – when? About two hours before they had been ambushed. But how long had he lain on the battlefield, unconscious, oblivious to the violence and murder that had gone on all around him? He shook his head. It was impossible to know.
Now, too late, he remembered the stream he had run through without the slightest thought for drinking from it, which was stupid, from any living being’s perspective, though maybe less so from his own. He had required very little maintenance in his prior form, though he had not realised it at the time. He had eaten when others ate and had drunk when others drank, and barely tasted the food or the liquids he took down, and his excreta – such as they were – had been minimal. He had never thought about the mechanisms involved before now: they had seemed remote, inconsequential, uninteresting. Now the basics of human life were revealed for the glorious tyrannies they were: he must eat, and drink, if
he was to live.
Wearily, he pushed himself to his feet and looked behind him. His progress to this point was marked by vague indentations and scuff-marks in the sandy soil, marks which stretched away across dunes and through the sparse brush, marks which were highlighted along their left-hand edges by the rosy light of the rising sun.
He had no destination; so turning back on himself seemed less of a chore than it might have done to any other traveller in this wilderness. Indeed, he reasoned, any direction might prove as useful, or as perilous, to him as any other. The stream he had waded through could not be far away: the hem of his robe was still damp from the crossing. Finding in himself a new resolve that might loosely be considered as a will to live – a resolve which seemed an integral part of this unfamiliar new existence – he squared his shoulders and forced his complaining muscles to retrace his steps.
At the northern bank of the stream he had crossed in the small hours of that day, Virelai came upon an area of churned ground and a heap of discarded belongings he had missed in the darkness. The marks in the mud were fresh, giving slightly under the hand rather than baked hard as stone, and showed a mass of hoofprints and the impressions of a number of large boots: it seemed the militiamen who had attacked the troop which had held them prisoner had passed this way, and not too long ago. This surmise was borne out by the presence of a scrap of fabric which lay off to one side at the foot of a thorn-bush. It was faded and striped in pinks and greens, and he recognised it at once. It was a muchloved weaving Alisha had made as a youngster under the tuition of one of the older women in the nomad troop, and although it was inexpert in its bled dyes and wobbly edges, she had kept it as a liner in the base of her old wooden chest until Falo had taken a liking to it, as small children will. Thereafter, it had gone everywhere with him, usually trailing from his mouth, softened and moistened by his constant chewing during the time when his teeth came in. Once Falo had passed through that stage of his childhood, he had demanded the cloth be draped over his bed at night: without it, he would not sleep.
Looking at the fabric now, forlornly draped over a boulder in the middle of this inhuman place, brought a sudden and unwonted lump to Virelai’s throat: the last time he had seen the cloth had been in Alisha and Falo’s wagon on that fateful day when the soldiers had come for them. Falo’s last day on Elda.
Sadly, he walked over to it and picked it up. Beneath it lay no boulder, but Alisha Skylark’s seeing-stone.
The massive crystal lay dully in the dirt, its polished surfaces dusty and ungiving. The soldiers had obviously jettisoned it like any other rubbish. It was heavy and slowing them down and they could see no use for it, and so they had thrown it down here, along with the cloth it was wrapped in.
Virelai looked at the stone with his head on one side, as wary as a bird viewing a snake. He had been raised among stones such as this, for the Master had a large collection of crystals and he knew their power. The crystal he had stolen from Sanctuary had shared a similar provenance to Alisha’s stone, which had been unearthed from among the hot rocks of the Dragon’s Backbone, where the Golden Mountains met the volcanic peaks of the south. Discovered in Alisha’s grandmother’s time, it had been passed down to that wise old seer, Fezack Starsinger, and thence to Alisha herself. And although Alisha had contested that the stone had lost much of its ability with the death of her mother, Virelai was not so sure this was the truth of the matter.
The proximity of the crystal made his new skin crawl. It vibrated: it sang. He knew he would never be able to leave it where it lay without at least touching it. Even so, the exigencies of his thirst drove him harder. With one eye on the crystal, in case it were somehow to burrow into the ground or meld itself with its surroundings, he backed down to the water’s edge and scooped handful after handful into his grateful mouth and throat. Amongst the detritus the soldiers had left behind, miraculously, he found a discarded waterskin, punctured in one corner, but perfectly serviceable if carried upside-down. This, he filled. There was, unfortunately, no food. He pushed away all thoughts of hunger, since there was little he could do to ameliorate those pangs.
He could put off his interrogation of the crystal no longer. Propping the waterskin against the thorn-bush, he hunkered down on his heels and laid his hands on the stone. At first, all he registered was that the seeing-stone was wonderfully cool, even though the sun had risen high above them and was as hot as a bread oven. It fitted his spread hands like a boon. Unthinking, he caressed it, running his fingertips lightly over its surface, allowing his palms to make firm but gentle contact. Nothing happened. It felt like the piece of dead rock that it was, lumpen, chilly, burdensome. Even Alisha had hated it, he recalled.
As if responding to this memory, the stone came abruptly to life. It buzzed, sending tiny tremors up his arms. Then, humming like a hive of bees, it appropriated him, invading his sight, his sensations, his skull, until coloured lights swirled in the depths of his head and his eyes were filled with visions.
He saw: fifty or sixty men and women burning in a great round contraption formed of complicated bars of white-hot metal which held them all prisoner amid the flames, but allowed the crowd of onlookers a clear view of their torments. On a dais behind the crowd sat the bloated creature he knew to be Tanto Vingo, dressed in rich purple, with a crown of bright flowers wreathed around the bald dome of his head and two scantily clad women twined about his legs. Beside him, a wooden frame had been erected. And upon this frame was stretched a naked figure, its wrists and ankles bleeding from the spiked wire which confined them. Its eyelids had been sewn grotesquely open, but even so, he knew Saro Vingo’s face as well as if it had been his own. In the background, elegant rose-red walls and turrets rose into a vivid sky streaked with purple and red, and ragged streamers of thick black smoke . . .
Virelai blinked and stared, horrified by these vile images.
It is impossible, he thought, his mind racing wildly. It cannot be. He thought hard. They had been captured by the second brigade of soldiers only two days ago – unless he had lain unconscious for longer than he thought. And they had been far, far from Jetra when the ambush had come. Then he remembered something old Fezack Starsinger had said.
It sees all manner of things, she had told him when he had first joined the troop, my scrying-stone. It is of the finest crystals from far down in the earth, closer to her magic than the others, you see. If it favours you, it can show not only events in our world now, but also those taking place in the past, and in the future. Things which may come to pass; warnings, portents and signs, it offers them all to me. It is the earth-magic speaking, my boy, showing us what we need to see, to guide our actions and our thoughts. Elda looks after her own, my dear. Even as she takes us back into her bosom, she looks after her own.
I am seeing the future, he thought dully. A terrible, terrible future. He felt no emotional attachment to the burning people in the ball of fire, although no one should die so horribly under the eyes of a monster. But to see Saro so treated, and by his own brother, was more than he could bear. Of all those left living in the world, he counted only Saro as a friend. The intensity of his outrage took him greatly by surprise. He felt it as a physical presence in his chest and in his head: a swelling of heat hard against bone and muscle.
A mad thought came to him. He would save Saro! He would journey to Jetra and find him, release him from his vile bondage, spirit him away to safer regions.
But even as the thought came to him, despair overwhelmed it. How could he, Virelai, failed apprentice mage, enigma and trickster, achieve such a grand aim? He was lost in a desert, brought back from the dead: an unnatural thing in an inimical place. He had no power, no plan, no map of the future.
But perhaps the crystal knew better. He laid hands on the stone again and brought the image of Saro clearly to mind, concentrating every scrap of willpower he could muster.
Unhelpfully, however, instead of Jetran vistas the crystal now offered him desert light and billowing ash-clouds. A
blurred view of towering rock. Streams of fiery red snaking out of fissures, coursing between boulders, cooling into steaming ribbons and heaps.
What place is this? thought Virelai fearfully. As if in answer, the crystal drew back its focus so that he now saw the scene from afar: a sharp red peak gouting black smoke and yellow fumes into the sky, a great swathe of boulder-strewn sand stretching below it. Two tiny, separate, silhouetted figures could be discerned to east and west in the far distance, making their way – not towards the viewer, but crazily, suicidally, towards the ash-spewing mountain. One was some huge creature, for it walked on all fours. The other appeared human, its head encircled by a tawny nimbus of hair; but whether this was its natural hue, or whether it took its colour from the fiery air, it was impossible to tell. The first figure stopped, turned, appeared to sniff the air; and then Virelai saw and knew it.
Bëte. The Beast; as large as life and healed from whatever wounds it had taken in that rout by the river.
He shivered. Something odd and unsettling was afoot here, and he had no understanding of it at all.
Virelai closed his eyes and touched his forehead to the stone in weariness. At once, he jerked back as if burned. With terrible clarity, Alisha Skylark came riding into view upon a black horse. He shrank back, aghast.
He knew that horse. He had seen it lying stone-dead on the same battlefield where he had himself been raised.
A trickle of sweat ran into his eye and he blinked it away desperately, wanting, but not wanting, to see what the crystal now showed him. The view came closer. He saw Alisha’s jutting chin, the rosettes of white sweat which had crusted on her forearms and face, and on the flanks of the black stallion; and he saw its mad eyes, dull as a dead fish’s. The crystal stayed with this view of horse and rider for many minutes, as if unwilling to relinquish contact with its former owner. Virelai saw them crest a dune, saw Alisha shade her eyes then urge the stallion down the other side with barely a pause. They galloped across a dry river bed without bothering to examine it for any sign of water; they passed a great spotted lizard which reared up on the rock on which it sat, spreading the frill around its neck in alarm. Neither horse nor rider appeared to notice the beast. Even with her fingers knotted in the stallion’s mane, Alisha’s right hand was clenched in a fierce fist. Inside that fist, he knew, was the deathstone.