He nodded and then slipped through the curtains and into the main part of the mermod’s apartment. He probably had some other stealthy exit.
Ember sank back into the pillows, her mind returning to her dream. If it had been a dream. The manbeast had said she was soulweaving. Well, that was a common enough ability here, though Tareed had said the visions people had were as often lies as true. Only soulweavers saw true all of the time. Was it possible that she might have some ability here which she did not have in her world?
But what of the manbeast? Ronaall, he had named himself. Was he real or a Void illusion or simply a delusion of her own? He had claimed to have projected himself from the Void to the sea to save her, and said that this had established a link between them. He had also said her coming to him was dangerous: My only safety is to remain secret.
Ember decided that, dream or not, maybe she would not say anything to Tareed about the manbeast. Let him keep his secret if he was real, and hers, if he was not. She would not mention her vision of the Unykorn, either. In any case it was easy enough to understand. She had been looking too much at the tapestry of the Firstmade. Alene had even warned her it would have an effect.
She heard a key in the lock and sat up when Tareed held up a lantern and peered into the room. ‘Where is Bleyd?’
‘He had to get a parcel from the pier,’ Ember said.
‘I will have to leave a chit for him. We must get you back to the soulweaver’s apartment before the evening halls begin. Here is your veil.’ When Ember was ready, Tareed let them out of the apartment with a key and relocked the door behind them.
Feyt opened the door to admit them to the soulweaver’s apartment and Tareed explained about Bleyd. ‘No one saw her,’ she added.
Ember debated uneasily whether she ought to have mentioned the boy, Anyi. ‘What happened with Coralyn?’
Alene sighed. ‘I spent several hours entertaining the Iridomi chieftain. If the words we spoke were true, it would have been pleasant, but there were barbs under every compliment. What a poisonous creature she is.’
‘She is from Iridom,’ Feyt said.
Alene looked disapproving. ‘Truly poisons are an Iridomi speciality, but there is much the olfactors concoct which does good. Medicines and healing salves and sweeteners of air and earth …’
‘It is true there are two sides to the Iridomi coin,’ Feyt responded. ‘The problem is that under Coralyn, the coin falls too often on the destructive side. They do say mendicants are not much valued these days and that all olfactor apprentices are occupied in making the latest pleasure drug or poison.’
‘Speaking of poisons, I need to talk with Bleyd about my dream,’ Alene murmured.
‘You did not warn him when he was here?’ the amazon demanded.
‘Coralyn’s arrival ended our conversation too quickly. But I thought he would come back with Ember.’
‘What did you dream?’ Ember asked Alene curiously.
‘I wove of a danger to the mermod’s life,’ the soulweaver said.
Feyt mistook Ember’s expression. ‘Do not look so shocked. Murdering mermods is a favourite pastime in the citadel.’ She nodded to Tareed. ‘Go and find the mermod, Tar. He needs to be told. I will go down to the harbour and find Bleyd.’
They left, and Alene went to lock the door. Ember watched the soulweaver cross unerringly to the door, unable to decide whether or not to say that she had seen Asa and a woman plotting murder before she had met the emissary, since Alene’s mention of poison suggested they had dreamed the same dream.
‘You understand that it was you Coralyn wanted to see,’ Alene said, coming back from the door.
A frisson of fear trickled down Ember’s spine. ‘Do you think she knows about me?’
‘She questioned me about you. I think she believes that you are a visionweaver, and that, ironically, is the problem. Kerd mentioned seeing you, and she wishes now to meet you as well. I did my best to convince her you had suffered a relapse since meeting Kerd. I implied that you were likely to vomit in her lap right now if she insisted on seeing you. She agreed it would be better if you rested at least another day or so before being presented to her. She goes on a hunt this evening. It will take some days, but she wants to see you when she returns. She will not be put off a second time.’
Ember did not know what to say.
‘I am going now to see if I can gain an audience with Tarsin,’ Alene said crisply. ‘I did not have the opportunity earlier because of Coralyn’s visit, but now there is all the more reason. I would that you could be gone before Coralyn returns.’ The soulweaver combed her hair, then departed, warning Ember to lock the door after her and to admit no one except the myrmidons.
Left to her own devices, Ember’s thoughts returned to the manbeast. He claimed to have projected himself out of the Void to save her from drowning. But he had not said why he saved her and how he had known she needed help. She was puzzled somewhat by her own reluctance to speak of him to Alene.
She went to the window and stared out at the twin moons which had risen at last. Tonight both were crescents and they looked down on Keltor like two slitted and mismatched eyes.
Abruptly the swooning blackness overtook Ember again.
She soared through the dark, trying to gain control of her movement. Suddenly golden light flared invitingly and she swerved towards it. She found herself floating above the very edge of a misty precipice, which reared out over the sea. A tall athletic-looking girl dressed in a filthy myrmidon tunic was standing with her back to the cliff and squinting inland through the mist. Her long blonde hair was not bound into dreadlocks as Tareed’s and Feyt’s was, but hung loose to her waist and blew like streamers of pale silk in the swirling fog. Or was it smoke?
‘If I could just hear,’ Ember fretted, and then she could hear. Abruptly as a channel being tuned, the pounding of the sea at the base of the cliff became audible and, in the distance, the sounds of shouts and cries and the clash of metal against metal.
Ember could not see who was fighting, but she noticed that the blonde girl’s right arm hung limply and was streaming with blood. Whatever the girl saw through the thick mist caused her face to contort in horror. ‘Solen! Watch out!’
A moment later she screamed despairingly. She took her knife from a belt sheath and shouted a challenge. Will it as she might, Ember could not see whom she addressed, but she heard footsteps approach the cliff and she saw the ghostly movement of a long slim blade. The girl fended it off clumsily on the edge of her knife. The blade flickered again but this time the girl danced aside with surprising grace. This evasion happened again and again and Ember was puzzled by the carelessness of the sword wielder who kept missing, until it occurred to her that the girl was being deliberately herded to the cliff edge.
Watch out! Ember screamed, willing her voice to the unknown girl. Her skull seemed to split open with pain.
The blonde girl stiffened as if she had heard the warning, but it was too late. In turning, she stepped back, straight off the cliff.
Ember gagged at the sickening lurch that accompanied her parting from the vision, and then she was kneeling on bruised hands and knees on a hard floor. For long terrifying minutes, she saw nothing at all. Then her vision cleared and she was back in the soulweaver’s apartment, the moons’ eyes staring down at her with stellar disinterest.
segue …
The watcher pursued the omen-image of the Unykorn through tapestry and dream to the Unraveller’s world …
‘Maybe they won’t let us in dressed like this,’ a boy was saying uncertainly.
‘It’s a museum, idiot. Not a restaurant,’ a girl responded, twisting her mouth into a scornful purple pouch. ‘Besides we have passes. They can’t stop us.’
The boy wanted to say people always stopped people like them, but he had got into the habit of being silent around the girl. One time he had told her he loved her.
‘Love? What does that mean? It’s a logo like on the Coke can or on a pack
et of cheese. It’s a generic brand name for sex.’
Humbly he had not said it again, because wasn’t she right about it being a word plastered on anything and everything?
‘We’ll go to Paris,’ she had said suddenly and had conned them a ride across the channel on the ferry and then a lift in a truck right into Paris. The driver had put his hand on her leg and she had said nothing even when they got out, not to the driver or to him. He had the feeling she felt it was a fair trade; a feel of her for a ride. Nothing for nothing, she always said. They had barely twenty pounds between them but she had got them food and they had slept dry and warm at night, squashed between two paralytic drunks who had sworn at them in French but had been incapable of anything more.
That morning, right on opening time, they had gone to a bookshop someone had told her about, on the banks of the Seine, called Shakespeare and Company. The irascible old man who owned the place might give them some work for a bed. It turned out there was a musty-smelling library in the floors over the shop, with hard couches where you could sit and read which doubled as rough and ready beds at night, but there was no work. They had just come into the front room to decide what to do next when a woman entered, weeping. She was followed by a young man with long pale hair.
‘Don’t worry about him,’ he advised in English.
Neither he nor the woman had taken any notice of the other couple. Perhaps they had not realised they could be understood.
More likely we don’t look worth bothering with, the boy had thought. Living rough turned you invisible after a while. People just stopped seeing you. Except the police, of course. You became more visible to them.
It was when they were leaving the shop that a man handed them the free museum passes.
‘We might as well go since it’s free,’ the girl had said outside as they shivered in the freezing wind. ‘It’ll be warm at least. Let’s go straight away and see if it’s open yet.’
Most of the museum turned out to be closed because of some sort of strike. They had passed a belligerent march on the way there, with people shouting slogans in French.
At the museum door they had been directed where they could go by a woman who first looked hard at their faces, as if memorising them for the police.
‘Old cow,’ the girl muttered.
The museum turned out to be dark and chilly with a lot of old stuff on the walls and piled around, and the same peppery damp smell as at Shakespeare and Company. There was piped music, but played so low as to be a mere buzz on the edge of hearing. They came to a circular room with thick carpet, where there were five big tapestries of a woman and a unicorn. A leaflet explained in a number of languages that each of the famous Lady and Unicorn tapestries represented one of the senses. They tried to figure out which was which.
‘That’s smell or taste,’ she said, pointing.
‘Touch?’ he offered uncertainly of the next tapestry.
‘Touch means sex,’ she said nastily and quite loudly.
The boy understood that her nastiness was a way of defending herself from the beauty of the tapestries. She had once told him beauty was a trick; lies and fakeness hidden by dazzling masks. That was what had made her choose this rough life when she did not need to; made her pull at anything beautiful and try to tear it. Maybe just to show she wasn’t a fool to be taken in.
Moved by an obscure impulse, the boy put his arm over her thin shoulders. She fell silent and, for once, did not shrug him off.
Together they stared into the eyes of the unicorn.
‘A unicorn is drawn to virgins,’ said a voice behind them. ‘That’s how you flush them out. The unicorn lays its head in the virgin’s lap and then the hunters rush out and cut its horn off.’
Someone else made a comment in French.
‘Virgins?’ someone said. ‘No wonder you never see unicorns around.’
The boy was remembering a documentary he had once seen of hunters hacking off the tusks of an elephant. The animal had been shot a number of times, but it had still been alive, thrashing and trumpeting in agony when they cut into it. Then afterwards, it had been left there, gaping red holes leaking blood and muck. The announcer said the horns were prized as aphrodisiacs.
‘Were there ever any unicorns?’ the girl murmured in a voice he had never heard from her.
The guard stepped forward and barked something at them in what sounded like German. Perhaps he judged them to be German, the boy reflected, and wondered why they did not understand. The guard said something else, still in the guttural language. He looked affronted. The boy had the impression they were being told not to stand so close to one another.
‘I hope maggots eat your eyes out,’ the girl told the guard pleasantly and loudly.
The English-speaking group looked at her, covertly shocked. The guard scowled and said something else. The girl mimed that they did not understand and they left. The boy was glad because something about those tapestries hurt him. Something about how beautiful and fragile they were. Anyone could hack them up. It seemed terrible to him that something so lovely should be so helpless.
Behind them, the circular room emptied momentarily, and the guard relaxed his upright stance. The thick veins snaking down his legs hurt from the standing but he dared not ask for a seat because everyone knew the next step was retirement. You were supposed to be capable of stopping vandals forcibly until help came, at least theoretically. Chances were it would be a bomb in this day and age with those lunatic fundamentalists on the verge of invading Europe. The day before, during the hour between dog and wolf, he had read that the authorities were soldering shut the rubbish bins so that no bombs could be hidden in them.
The terrorists must be laughing themselves sick.
He glanced at his favourite of the tapestries. It was the largest of the five, and the one which the grubby young couple had stared at for so long. He hadn’t liked their looking at it, the boy with his sunken chest and hungry eyes, and she with her filthy hair and sharp little breasts. He felt they had degraded it just by putting their eyes on it. People like that could not appreciate something so precious. They had no doubt been itching to use spray cans on it.
He loved the tapestries better than anything else in the world. This room, he felt, held the last beauty that existed, and he was its guardian and its champion. He wished the tapestries belonged to him. He would have hidden them from all eyes but his own, in a dark closed room. He would have protected them from the world.
… the watcher studied the image of the Unykorn distorted by the old man’s weak eyes and soured soul, wondering if the Firstmade had truly imprinted itself onto this distant world at the beginning of time. If so, the minute threads binding the two worlds might date back to that moment and so perhaps to all of the worlds the Firstmade had visited. The existence of the Song in the Unraveller’s world suggested it. But the Firstmade could not have brought Chaos then, for Lanalor the damned had not released it into the world made by the Song until long after.
Perhaps it had entered the Unraveller’s world at the same instant it gained access to Keltor, using that long-implanted link.
It segued …
15
Lanalor longed for Shenavyre to see him.
He reaped the bounty of the seven isles
and laid it at her feet,
but she saw it not —
for she was filled and sated in all her senses by the Unykorn …
LEGENDSONG OF THE UNYKORN
Sweat ran into Glynn’s eyes, stinging them. She blinked and sat back on her heels, wiping her forehead absently. For all her efforts, she had not yet managed to find a single callstone and the day was more than half over. She did not know what she would say to Mallin. She could not say that she had been distracted with thoughts of the previous night’s interview with Nema.
As she and Hella left the old woman’s fell, the Acanthan girl had made a ghastly attempt, for the sake of the legionnaires stationed outside, to look excited to support the story t
hat they had been asked to attend the mother of the Acanthan chieftain at the next wing hall.
‘You are a very bad actor,’ Glynn said seriously when they were out of earshot.
Hella blinked at her unseeingly, then began to laugh. It must have been the tension of the moment because Glynn found herself laughing too. In fact, for a second it had felt like the funniest thing that had ever happened. That was when Scala came hurrying round the corner.
The look of astonishment on her face sent them both into renewed howls of laughter. She had scowled at them and hurried on looking completely confused.
The laughter dried in them simultaneously, as the enormity of what they had learned from Nema sank in anew.
‘Oh, Glynn, I fear for Solen. What can we do?’ Hella wailed.
‘We can do as Nema suggested and hope we are lucky. Running into Scala like that was certainly a godsend,’ Glynn added unthinkingly.
‘A what?’
Odd how the smallest things could trip you. For the moment Glynn had forgotten her own situation, but the slip reminded her of her priorities. This was not her battle, nor her world.
‘It is a Fomhikan saying for good fortune,’ she prevaricated.
Hella gave a pallid smile. ‘Scala did look perplexed. She would never guess from our behaviour what Nema had just told us. Do you think she will find our laughter strange, given that Nema has invited us to be her attendants at the hall? Such an invitation would not ordinarily invite laughter.’
‘It could have been nerves and girlish excitement,’ Glynn said, feeling anything but girlish. ‘The thing is to decide what to do now.’
Hella regarded her expectantly and Glynn had another hysterical urge to giggle, but she repressed it and considered the situation and Nema’s advice. She did not speak again until they were back in the bare races of the poorer section of the settlement.
‘We have to behave normally. We cannot seem frightened or worried. I think it would be reasonable for us to meet, since we have been asked to attend Nema together.’
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