by Ian Irvine
They continued for half an hour and more. The wind had come up and the lake was growing choppy. It was now bitterly cold on the water. Maigraith was glad when Shand, peering through the haze, grunted. “There it is!” and turned the boat toward the shore.
“See it?” He pointed to the top of the rather ominous-looking cliff in front of them.
All Maigraith could see was a ragged mound the same color as the rock. However, as they sailed toward the cliff a gap opened up, a cleft-shaped inlet that ran inland for a few dozen boat lengths.
The keel scraped on rock at the end of the cove. Maigraith stepped over the bow, pulled the boat up and tied the rope to a wiry bush growing out of a crack. She looked around, wondering how they were going to get up, for the untamed cliffs surrounded them.
“There are steps cut in the rock,” said Shand. “It’s a bit of a scramble.”
“They must have been cut a long while ago,” she panted, following him up a zig-zagging path that was barely distinguishable from the rest of the cliff. The rock was like coarse sandpaper, colored pink or rusty orange, and the steps were crumbling to sand.
“More than three thousand years!” he grunted.
After a number of scares due to the treads crumbling underfoot they reached a plateau as flat as a table, covered in heath that tossed in the wind. In the distance a wall of forest curved around the place from cliff top to cliff top. Below, waves crashed sullenly at the rocks.
“That’s Huling’s Tower,” said Shand. “All that remains of it.”
Ahead a little way, on the edge of the cliff, was a mess of crumbling stone surrounded by bare land where nothing grew but lichen. Between ripples of blown sand the ground was glassy smooth.
A patch of gray-leaved bushes grew at the top of the path, sparsely covered in black berries. Maigraith reached out to pick one. Shand caught her hand.
“Are they not edible?” she asked.
“The bush is called Assassin’s Spurge,” said Shand. “With good reason.”
“After the death of Shuthdar the tower was taken apart, stone by stone, in the search for the golden flute. It wasn’t found, of course, and afterwards the tyrant who held sway over this province (Daguar the Third, her name was) ordered that the tower be rebuilt as a perpetual monument, and a warning not to meddle with the unknown. It was put back together in exactly the state of ruin it had been in after the flute was destroyed.”
They went in through an arch which was still complete, though much of the wall further on had collapsed. Ahead was a stone stair, jumbled with broken blocks of rusty sand-stone. The downstairs rooms were in ruins. Maigraith scrambled up the stair. This stone was not so crumbly, the grains being fused together like sugar, while some surfaces had been melted to glass.
At the top she came out onto a flat roof with a high wall around it, though much of the wall was broken and in one place fallen stone lay in a curving heap high enough to hide behind. A wide crack ran across the roof from one side to the other, where the tower had been split open. The stone up here was also fused and glassy, except for a perfect circle on one side which was not marked at all.
Maigraith could feel worms creeping through her grave. The place was steeped in pain and horror.
Shand had clambered up on top of a piece of surviving wall. With one foot he indicated the crumbled stone in front of him. “This is the very place where Shuthdar was standing when he destroyed the flute.” His foot slipped. Shand threw out his arms for balance.
“Careful!” she cried out.
“Come on up. There’s a wonderful view from here.”
She scrambled up beside him, as much to make sure he did not fall off as to see the view. It was magnificent, though bleak—the gray, churning lake, the dark, wet rocks below, the gloomy forest hanging back from the tower.
Shand pointed straight down. “That’s where Shuthdar fell, and where he died.”
Maigraith imagined herself plunging at the rocks, and turned away. “I don’t like this place.”
“Nor I, but I can’t stop coming back to see it. What happened here has shaped the Histories for the past three thousand years.”
“And is still shaping them,” said Maigraith, climbing down. “Will it ever end? I’d like to finish it.”
“Maybe you will. Who knows?”
Maigraith was halfway across to the stair when abruptly she screamed and leapt backward as if something had sunk fangs into her foot.
“What’s the matter?” cried Shand.
Maigraith’s hands were shaking so hard that she could not hold them still. She was deathly pale. “It felt as if I’d trod on something horrible; evil.” The glassy stone under-foot glittered with tiny golden specks.
“Shuthdar was evil, no doubt of that.” He helped her to a block of stone and sat her down. “Try this!” Shand held out his flask.
She gulped the fiery liquor down like water, then gave him a weak smile. “It was an awful, prickling sensation. All my nerves feel on fire.”
Shand went to the place where she had been standing. “I can’t feel anything, but the tower is steeped in the terrible deeds done in this place. You must be tuned into it, while I am not.”
Maigraith clutched the gold around her throat and felt better. “Space and time are very thin here,” she murmured. “I can feel the Wall of the Forbidding all around, as if it’s radiating out in every direction. And something else. It’s like a gate, waiting to be opened into the void.” She felt panicky. There were forces here that she could never match. She understood nothing.
“We won’t be going that road!” said Shand, helping her to her feet. “Have you seen enough?”
“To last me all my days.”
Maigraith went back down the cliff very slowly and carefully, though her mind did not register a single crumbling step. What she’d felt up there had terrified her. The whole world was in peril if the balance was not restored. Suddenly Maigraith’s purpose in life seemed much more urgent, though still she had no idea how to begin it.
They returned to Thurkad, having been away for three weeks and more, to learn about the hasty attack on Elludore and the dismal result. Karan was sunk deep into a depression that no one could raise her from. Mendark was beside himself with his own folly, he who in the past had done nothing without planning it in the minutest detail and allowing for everything that could possibly go wrong. Yggur, withdrawn and bitter against Karan and Mendark, had been brought so low that it seemed impossible he would ever rise again. The morale of his armies had been shockingly undermined. They would be easy prey for the subversion of the Ghâshâd this time.
Only one good thing had come out of the whole miserable affair. Jevi had lived in terror the whole time Tallia had been away, and the news of the disaster had broken one of the barriers inside him. Tallia and Jevi were friends again.
For all her fears, Maigraith was pleased that they had failed to get Faelamor’s gold. They would be corrupted by it just as she had been. But it did not solve her problem.
Later there was much talk, especially from Mendark, about “pooling their resources” and “pulling together”, but all Maigraith could see was that she had the Mirror and he wanted it. She felt resentful. She had not freed herself from one tyrant only to accept the yoke of another. She said nothing about finding the birthright, and kept the gold well hidden.
28
The Assassin
Two nights later a shadowy figure slipped into the citadel and made her way down to the office where Llian worked. Ellami knew where it was, for she had already spied it out. The door was locked but it was no special lock and she had it open in a minute.
She closed the door behind her, conjured ghost light from her fingers and searched the room for Yalkara’s book. She found it almost immediately—it was sitting on a shelf in full view. It was just as Faelamor had described it, the strange, half-familiar, hateful glyphs almost fighting themselves to get off the page at her.
Ellami closed it with a snap, tucke
d it into her bag and went out. One-third of her work was done—the easy third. With luck she would complete it tonight and be out of this stinking cesspool of a city before dawn. She did not want to do it. Indeed, what she had to do was a horrifying betrayal of Maigraith, but for the survival of her people there was no choice. She aimed to cut Karan’s throat in her bed, then do the same for Maigraith.
Ellami got into Karan and Llian’s rooms in the fortress without any trouble at all, for the Whelm guard had been withdrawn some time ago and the door was not even locked. She crept through the sitting room with her knife out, then froze. There was a light on in the bedroom. Edging her head around the door, she saw Llian sitting up in bed, reading. Where was Karan? In the bathroom? It was unlit but she checked anyway. The room was empty. After a while Llian blew out the candle and settled down on his pillow, alone.
Karan was not here. Ellami cursed. She would not be able to complete her work tonight. She crept out again and headed for Maigraith’s room.
Maigraith stirred in her sleep, if what she was enduring could be called sleep, for her nights had been so restless since her return with the gold that most mornings she scarcely felt she’d slept at all. Her dilemma was impossible. She wanted to help the company with their quest. Much more than that, she wanted to open a gate to Aachan and bring Shand and Yalkara together. Every time he got that sad, yearning look in his eyes she longed to do that for him.
What else could her duty be but to remake the golden flute? Especially since that seemed the best way to achieve her own goal, to unstitch the Forbidding and restore the balance between the worlds. But if she did that, she would inevitably be opposing Rulke and her Charon heritage. She still felt troubling yearnings whenever she thought about Rulke. There seemed no solution to the puzzle.
Maigraith turned over on her side, facing the window, presenting a perfect target to Ellami as she edged in through the open door. Ellami had used no illusion of any kind—Maigraith might have detected that. She stood absolutely still, watching her quarry for any sign that she was awake. There was none—Maigraith lay still, breathing slowly. Ellami drew her long blade and tested it with a fingertip. It was wickedly sharp.
She crept forward, holding the knife hooked so as to slip it to the tender tissues of the throat and carve them open in one movement. She had never killed anyone before, nor even thought about doing so, but this seemed the best way. Maigraith would not be able to cry out; the blood would spray away from Ellami. Four steps to go; three; two.
Maigraith rolled back onto her other side, facing the door and pillowing her head on her hand. Now she made a more difficult target in the gloom, as the left arm half-covered her throat. Ellami recalculated. A slash across the side of the neck? A stab between the ribs, or round into her back? She decided that the neck was best from here, otherwise in the dark she might hit a rib. She dared not give Maigraith any chance.
Maigraith gave a little sigh and snuggled down against her hand. That gave Ellami pause—it was a childlike sigh and it reminded her what had been done to Maigraith as a child. It made her question what she was doing. The woman on the bed was someone she knew and liked. The murder grew harder every second.
Just do it! she told herself. The future of Tallallame is at stake. Don’t think about it. Get on with it and get away. She took another step, shaking in her nervousness, and kicked over a cup that Maigraith had left beside the bed.
Maigraith shot up in bed. Ellami flung herself forward, stabbing down. She was not quick enough. Maigraith rolled off the other side of the bed, hurled the covers in Ellami’s face and scrabbled across the floor, desperately trying to focus on her assailant.
“No, Ellami!” she screamed.
Ellami felt shamed, but could not acknowledge Maigraith. Untangling herself from the covers she sprang, slashing wildly. She missed again; Maigraith’s training had given her lightning reflexes. Now Maigraith caught her by the foot, twisted and Ellami felt her knee give—something had torn inside it. She tried to kick, overbalanced and fell on the knife.
It carved through the soft membranes of her stomach, almost coming out her back. Ellami wrenched free, scratched across the floor and ran for the door, the knife still buried in her belly.
Ellami tore the knife out and stopped the wound with her fingers. The pain was terrible. Behind her she saw Maigraith following. Ellami used a spell of concealment and vanished. Outside, the trail was washed away by rain on the dark cobbles.
Ellami barely made it to her inn. She burned the book in the fireplace of her room, stirred the ashes to dust and called frantically with her mind to Faelamor. That was a clumsy way of communicating at the best of times, but she got a message through, that the book was destroyed but both Karan and Maigraith were safe. Then she collapsed and bled to death on the hearth.
Karan had not recovered from Elludore, or Carcharon either. Every night she had nightmares where she watched the army marching to their deaths, powerless to prevent the disaster. In between those nightmares were other, older dreams, about Rulke and the construct, or the void-leech trying to drill in through her ear to suck her brains out. That ear still ached at times, and she did not hear as well as on the other side. Once she dreamed about hrux, the dried fruit that the Ghâshâd used to link their minds together, and woke sweating, her whole body craving it.
She could not concentrate at all. Her mind was loaded with those torments, day and night, and it did no good to talk about it with Llian or anyone else. For this ailment, talking was useless. She was afraid to do anything, for her every decision resulted in a cascade of ill consequences. Not even Llian could help her. She felt quite unsupported.
The morning before the attack on Maigraith, Karan had gone out and walked the streets of Thurkad. The politicking in the citadel had no interest for her. She was chafing to get back to Gothryme. She wrote to Rachis every day, wanting to know everything that was happening there, from the state of the weather to the minutest details of agriculture and animal husbandry, but as yet there had been no reply.
The failed raid must have discharged her obligation though, for neither Mendark nor Yggur seemed interested in using her talents again. Yggur was bitterly angry with her, still blaming her for the disaster in Elludore. Mendark, however, always taking the opposite side to his enemy, was more friendly than he had ever been.
After a while she found herself at the waterfront, next to the vast old wharves. She still did not like Thurkad, but she could bear it now. Even the wharf city, that had given her horrors on her first visit as a child, she now saw to be merely squalid, rotten and overcrowded.
Karan paced along the waterfront hoping to find Pender, but though she spent hours looking she did not see The Waif, and the people she spoke to had not heard of him. She was in the wrong part of the port, where the larger ships unloaded cargoes from Crandor and other faraway places. Pender would go to the other side where the smaller coastal vessels docked, and the barge traffic from the river. She knew vaguely where that was—a long way from here, for the wharves stretched the best part of a league around the shoreline. Too far, in the rain.
Pulling her floppy hat down around her ears, Karan headed back. Likely that Pender would be in a tavern anyway, on a day like this. There were hundreds to choose from along the length of the waterfront. She picked one that looked less grimy than the others and went inside, but it was a dark, stinking place where people spat on the floor and everyone stared with the resentful glower of those whose sanctum has been invaded.
She had taken her hat off as she entered, and her bright hair sprang out. She stood with her hand on the latch, wondering whether or not to damn them, then decided that prudence was better and went out into the rain again. A second tavern was as bad as the first. A man who had no teeth made ugly jokes as soon as he caught sight of her. On the bar sat a wooden cage in which a sad little creature squatted with drooping shoulders, staring at the floor. It looked a cross between a monkey and a possum, with huge, watering eyes. Karan felt cag
ed too.
The other inns looked the same. As she walked along, she came to a drab little market, a collection of half a hundred stalls, though few had customers. Stopping at a spice booth, she bought some tea spiced with citrus rind. The shop-keeper, a diminutive woman who wore dozens of filigree bracelets up one slender dark arm, weighed the tea out carefully, looked up at her with a smile, added a pinch over the weight for good measure and folded it in a little scrap of cloth.
“Good tea?” asked Karan, the way one does when unsure how much of the language the other person knows.
“Ya,” she replied, giving Karan a dazzling smile that revealed few teeth but a lot of gold. “Good tea. Very, very good.”
At another stall Karan bought a large slab of honeycomb. She broke off a small piece, picked the remains of a bee out of it and popped the lump in her mouth as she wandered along the wharf. The wax softened in her mouth and the beautiful strong honey dribbled out. Karan walked along, chewing the aromatic wax after all the sweetness was gone. She felt out of place in Thurkad. Llian would still be in the archives. She did not feel like going back to her room and drinking her tea alone.
Wandering off the waterfront at random through the back streets, Karan realized that the building across the road was vaguely familiar. It was the one where Shand had nursed her back to health after the Conclave. Memories of that terrible time welled up. She followed them down the alley and through a tangle of streets. Yes, here was the place where they had been interrogated by Yggur’s guards. Further on she came to the steps down which they had fled into the wharf city.
At the top she looked down on the green scummy water. The steps were not as steep as she remembered, nor as long. The tide was low, exposing the platform where she had nearly drowned. The stones and beams were covered in green and pink growths. She could recall every step of that previous journey, even how she had felt—cold inside, sick, lost. She didn’t feel much better now.