Darkfall

by Isobelle Carmody

  This had no effect on the furious Saxa. ‘I wish to dissolve our handfasting now.’ He flung a mangled blue flower at her feet. ‘She can be a witness.’ He pointed at Glynn contemptuously.

  Hella flinched, as if he had struck out at her. ‘There is no need for a witness. You are … released,’ she said quietly.

  When he was gone, Hella turned like an old woman, her face a ghastly white where it showed under the paint. ‘They know about Solen. It is too late for us to warn him.’

  ‘He hasn’t been judged yet.’

  Hella shuddered.

  ‘If you collapse now you might as well push Solen over the cliff yourself,’ Glynn said harshly. ‘We have to go on as we planned, and maybe this is not a bad thing because now we can say how weak and cowardly Solen is, and how Flay forced him into taking her to Darkfall.’

  The other girl took a deep breath. ‘I will try, but let us go.’

  Scala met them at Nema’s door with her familiar scowl, telling them that they had kept the Lady waiting. But Nema was not troubled, and told them so, as they helped her into a tapestried sedan chair. ‘It is no sadness to me that we will be late. I do not enjoy these occasions. Arriving like one of the courses in this ridiculous contraption will be bad enough. But, in addition, the banquet will be too rich and will give me indigestion and unspeakable gases, and there will be too much talk without anything being said.’

  ‘But what of the music? You enjoy that, surely?’ Hella asked, as they walked alongside the sedan chair, carried by two silent legionnaires. It was impossible to speak freely, but they were both worried Saxa would report that Hella had admitted to knowing her brother’s plans. They had decided to say she knew only that her brother meant to take Flay to Mymidor.

  ‘When I was a girl I enjoyed the balladeers’ songs,’ Nema admitted. ‘But I do not approve of modern balladeers. They are secular and immodest and their songs are no longer true.’

  ‘The old songs are being interpreted differently …’ Hella said.

  ‘You are very silent, girl,’ Nema said reprovingly to Glynn.

  ‘I was … I was thinking I have never worn such a beautiful dress.’ Glynn stammered out the first thought in her head.

  Nema looked pleased. ‘The dress is fine, but you are beautiful. I thought you would clean up well enough, but you have surpassed my imagining. As a young woman I would have envied your appearance, for I was never a beauty, but now that I am old the sight of beautiful things warms me.’

  ‘It is Hella’s doing. She made me look like this.’

  ‘You cannot turn a lump of dirt into a darklin,’ Hella said, but she was smiling too.

  The site for the wing hall was a great cavern three times as long as it was wide, and situated at the very centre of the settlement. Two ranks of natural stone columns ran down the room separating the side sections, with their seats and trestle tables laden with food, from the central section which was left empty except for a table at the head of the room. Unusually for Acantha, there were no chimneys to allow daylight. Instead, the hall was illuminated by a gigantic wheel, suspended by a great metal pulley fastened by an end ring to one of the pillars, whose rim and spokes were hung with hundreds of lanterns. Directly below were two pools filled with water tinted an iridescent blue, which reflected the spectacular fiery wheel. The only other light came from a series of blazing fires in small hearths around the walls and from candles rising above the table centrepieces.

  There was only one entrance to the long cavern and this opened into the central section of the chamber. Bare except for the two pools, this was really a long corridor leading to an imposing dais at the other end. Upon it was arranged an ornate throne and several smaller chairs drawn up to a silk-draped table decorated with flowers and a bank of candles in holders glittering with jewels. To one side, a troupe of musicians played some dreadful squalling racket.

  ‘Come, girl, do not stand gaping like a stunned aspi. Give me your arm lest people wonder why I chose you,’ Nema said sharply.

  Glynn took her arm obediently. Hella supported the other and smiled reassuringly at her over the old woman’s head, as they made their way down the central section to the throne table. Glynn was acutely conscious of those seated at the trestles watching them avidly through the stone pillars. Her mouth was dry with fear by the time they reached the dais because she had learned to her dismay that this was where she and Hella were going to sit!

  A slight, round-shouldered man with wispy hair was seated at the head of the table. His face bore a querulous frown, deep lines marking it as an expression he wore all too often. He was not ugly so much as insignificant. Without the robes and the chair, one would not look twice at him. There was absolutely nothing in his appearance to suggest he was related by blood to his half-brother Argon white cloak. Beside him was a plump older woman with a pretty, vacuous face and, beside her, three young girls.

  ‘You are supposed to be seated before I come in, mother,’ the chieftain said with some asperity. ‘What is the point of formalities if we do not bother with them?’

  ‘Does it trouble your dignity that an old woman takes longer getting ready than she once did?’ Nema asked, assuming a frail voice.

  Jurass stared at his mother with exasperated annoyance as Hella and Glynn helped her into her place. At a signal from Nema, they took their own seats on either side of her.

  ‘Clearly these girls are not able to aid you effectively.’ Jurass’s eyes settled on Hella, but she, busy rearranging the draperies of her gown, was unaware of his cold scrutiny. His eyes shifted to Glynn. ‘I understand that you are Fomhikan.’

  ‘Yes, um, your Excellency,’ Glynn stammered wildly, hoping the honorific was correct.

  Jurass looked startled but not displeased. ‘You come from a farm in the Fomhikan hills, do you not?’

  Glynn nodded, guessing from this that her honorific had been too high and Jurass took her for a country bumpkin. His words made it clear that he knew her whole story, which meant Lev or Mallin or maybe Teesa had been talking.

  ‘And you are working in the minescrape?’ Jurass’s eyes ran over the pale gleaming coils of her hair.

  ‘The minescrape?’ The woman beside him gasped. ‘Not truly.’

  ‘I am working a passage home to Fomhika, my Lady,’ Glynn said to her politely, being very careful with her accent. ‘It is no worse than some work on the farm.’

  ‘But I have heard it is so dirty in the minescrape.’

  ‘I would never do such a thing,’ the plumpest of the girls alongside her gushed. She was pretty but she had one of those faces that looked middle-aged even when young.

  ‘You would if you had no other way to get your sweetlings,’ another of the girls snapped.

  ‘Children,’ Jurass said mildly, ‘let us dine, for no one may eat, as you know, until we have begun. It would be churlish of us not to start for the food is already lukewarm.’ He did not look at his mother but this was clearly a jibe at her.

  Glynn had been hungry, but her appetite had vanished the minute they reached the hall. The smell of the food made her feel sick and the music was giving her a headache. Hella only picked, which suggested she felt the same, but she disguised this by her attentiveness to Nema.

  Jurass’s elder daughters, for so Glynn supposed them, began to squabble again. The youngest leaned forward curiously to study Glynn in a way that made her distinctly nervous. She ran her own eyes around the room, trying to look like a bumpkin thrilled to be out for a night. For an instant she thought she saw Lev, but she could not spot him again in the shifting crowd and decided she must have imagined it. What would he be doing here – a minescrape proxy among the Acanthan elite?

  So what are you doing here? a wry inner voice enquired pointedly.

  ‘It has come to my attention that your brother, Solen, has taken Flay to the Darkfall landing to offer herself to the misty isle,’ Jurass said suddenly and loudly. A silence rippled over the table, conspicuous against the background of music and chat
ter rising from the guests seated in the main body of the cavern.

  Glynn’s heart began to thud with apprehension, though they might have expected Solen’s name would come up, given what Saxa had said.

  ‘I have heard that rumour this very night, but it is not true, my Lord,’ Hella said composedly.

  ‘Heard it this night?’

  ‘Aye. There is some mistake, for although my brother journeyed with Flay, it was to Myrmidor they went, to seek training from the white-cloak academy there for our sister.’

  Sister? Glynn thought, startled.

  Jurass said flatly, ‘My information is that Flay is now on Darkfall awaiting mutilation.’

  ‘It can not be. My sister would not want to be mutilated,’ Hella said with limpid stupidity.

  ‘Your brother supports Darkfall’s foul practices, which they would call by some other name!’ Jurass snarled.

  ‘Could it be that your informants were mistaken?’ Nema interposed. ‘I cannot see that wastrel Solen performing a deed that would bring trouble to him.’

  ‘He is not a wastrel, Lady, forgive me for contradicting you.’ Hella could not help but defend him. ‘He is … he was much shattered by the death of our father. He has never really recovered. But I can not believe …’

  ‘There is no mistake in this,’ Jurass snarled. ‘He was seen with Flay at the landing when the coracle came for her. He disobeyed my express command.’ For a second, Glynn saw in Jurass some of the cold hatred which everyone said animated him.

  ‘I … I do not understand how this can be …’ Hella looked frightened, but that was natural enough in the circumstances. After a tense moment Jurass turned back to Glynn, who too hastily swallowed a mouthful of sharp juice she had been sipping and began to cough.

  ‘What do you say, who travelled here with him?’

  ‘Sire, he hardly said anything to me,’ Glynn said stupidly, taking her lead from Hella. Jurass struck her as the sort of man who would be pleased to have his belief in the innate idiocy of women confirmed. ‘He drank so much he hardly said anything to anyone.’

  ‘Then how is it that you dwell with him now? Was your courtship without words?’

  The eldest daughter tittered behind her hand.

  ‘Your Eminence, Solen allowed me to stay in his fell if I would send him ten cases of the best cirul when I return home.’

  Jurass frowned. ‘Did Solen not say where he had been?’

  ‘Well, Sire, he did speak very harshly of his sister, Flay, and I once heard him speak of Myrmidor and another time of Fomhika.’

  A tall legionnaire came over from a nearby table and bowed low to Jurass. The chieftain accepted the man’s homage with an impatient gesture.

  ‘What is it, Rostor?’

  ‘With your permission, I would speak to a member of your table, chieftain.’

  Jurass nodded irritably and the man turned to Glynn. ‘Will you honour me with a turn later?’ Only his nod at the musicians alerted her to what was being asked.

  ‘Thank you,’ she said flatly.

  The man appeared slightly taken aback at her ambiguous response but, after a brief hesitation, he bowed and departed. Moments later, another man came and did the same thing.

  ‘Another admirer for the minescraper,’ the eldest daughter observed.

  ‘My dear!’ her mother said with faint reproof.

  ‘They would not want to dance with her if they knew what she was,’ she said haughtily.

  ‘They do not care what she is because she is pretty,’ the plump daughter said, preening.

  Glynn barely heard the exchange, for she was thinking how far this moment was from the school socials at which she had always been such a dismal failure. She had never been able to develop the sort of skills that seemed necessary at such occasions. She could not laugh easily. She hated to flatter and gush because she considered these to be forms of dishonesty. She had no idea how to make small talk and was invariably considered dull, clumsy and gauche.

  Once, to her humiliation, she had overheard herself described by a boy as a silent lump of a girl with nothing to say for herself. What a long way I had to come, to come so far, she thought, yet inside I am no more or less than I have always been. From the corner of her eye, she noticed Jurass looking at the door and realised he was doing so frequently. Was he waiting for someone? At least he seemed to have been distracted from his interrogation of them.

  ‘… believes the Shadowman dwells on this very isle,’ Jurass’s plump daughter was saying.

  ‘Fool,’ the thin daughter’s voice rapped out. ‘Everyone knows he comes from Fomhika.’

  The Shadowman. Another mysterious person, Glynn thought. Keltor abounded with mysteries and schemes. No wonder its politics were so tortuous.

  ‘His people are said to be everywhere in all septs, even here,’ the plump daughter said, wide-eyed. ‘They say he steals babies and eats them.’

  ‘Idiot! He is using his minions to funnel information to the Darkfall hags so they will know what strings to pull – like spiders sitting on the misty isle controlling Keltor,’ the other daughter said.

  ‘I understood that Darkfall did not approve of the Shadowman …’ their mother said, dipping her fingers into a bowl of water to clean them. Her eyes were cast down, but Glynn had the intriguing notion that Jurass’s wife did not oppose Darkfall at all.

  Her husband gave her a withering look. ‘The hags pretend to separate themselves because the Shadowman’s activities would prove how false they are. They claim Lanalor commanded them simply to wait, and watch,’ he said venomously. ‘The Shadowman’s people are the secret legion of the misty isle, which pretends to abhor the very activities they command.’ His eyes shifted approvingly to the face of his thin eldest daughter. ‘You are clever, Wasav. It is a pity you were not a son, for you would have been a fine wing lord after me.’

  ‘I will life bond with the wing lord and command him,’ Wasav announced firmly.

  Nema gave a cackle of amusement. ‘Child, you are as ambitious and unattractive as I was. My blood runs true in you, but do not place too much faith in wing lords or their ability to be commanded.’

  Wasav flushed unbecomingly with rage, and Jurass looked suddenly livid, but whatever would have been said was drowned in the ringing of a bell. It was a moment before Glynn understood this was the Draaka bell which she had first heard the night of her arrival in Solen’s fell. The clamour was so loud that the bell must surely be hung in an antechamber very near the cavern.

  Jurass rose in sudden agitation and summoned a servant with an imperious wave of his hand. ‘These girls who have attended my mother will have to be seated at another table.’

  Ushered swiftly from the main table, Glynn realised who Jurass had been waiting for. The Draaka. As a servant went to find seats for them, Glynn turned to watch for the entrance of the Draaka. There was a flash of white between the obscuring pillars of stone, then an older woman, with a face that was both intelligent and compelling, came to bow low before Jurass. She was clad in simple pale robes, long dark hair slightly streaked with grey at the temples, and lacking face paint or jewellery. This, Glynn thought, could not possibly be the dreadful vicious Draaka about whom she had heard so much.

  16

  When the blackwind blows, seek shelter.

  VESPIAN PROVERB

  The people sitting at the table to which Glynn and Hella had been shifted, clearly did not know what to make of them. They had been sitting at the chieftain’s table so they must be of some consequence, but who were they? The unspoken consensus seemed to be to smile politely and leave well enough alone, though one of the men gave Glynn openly suggestive smiles. The first time she blushed and looked away, but the second time a cool confidence seemed to flow though her veins and she met his bold look without expression.

  As the man’s eyes fell, Glynn marvelled at herself anew. Was this what it meant to be a woman? This self-possession? This certainty of power? And could a painted face and a dress of gold bestow i
t upon her? Was it that easy to step over the line between girl and woman? Or was it this world that had rung the changes in her?

  It occurred to her she was being somewhat self-centred, but the truth was she felt powerless to do anything to help Solen or Hella. Or their sister. She could not imagine what Jurass had meant by mutilation, though, challenged, he had blustered that Darkfall would use some term other than mutilation. She was beginning to feel as if she were sitting in a cinema watching a drama unfold.

  Nema was speaking with the Draaka, who had been given Hella’s seat between Jurass and his mother. A severe older woman was now seated at the very end of the table in Glynn’s place, and gazed about the room with cold disapproval. Her tunic was embroidered with the same red sun as worn by the men who had collected alms in the nightshelter several nights past. Glynn guessed she was the Prime draakira Nema had spoken of. Nema was nodding and the Draaka appeared to be very animated. Jurass was smiling but it did not do much to alter the embittered cast of his face.

  Some people rose to dance and Glynn turned to watch. It was not too difficult, she judged – rather like a minuet. She had become very good at following the steps of a partner to hide her inability to hear music. Just the same, she hoped the men who had earlier requested dances with her would lose interest now that she was no longer seated at the chieftain’s table. She turned to ask Hella if she could withdraw her acceptance, and found her sitting very still, back ramrod stiff. Following her gaze, Glynn saw Saxa leaning over a girl at a nearby table. As they watched, the girl rose and he ushered her on to the dance floor. Saxa’s eyes flickered their way, and Glynn felt certain that his asking a girl so near to Hella was a deliberately spiteful gesture.

  The girl looked up at Saxa with the eyes of an adoring puppy. Any minute now, she’s going to jump up and lick him on the nose, Glynn thought sourly, reminding herself to tell Hella she doubted Saxa had loved her; not because she was unworthy, but because people capable of such calculated nastiness were, in her opinion, incapable of the more generous emotion of love.