by Jude Fisher
There came another huge thud, followed by cries of terror. The monster had rammed the vessel. Timbers shrieked in protest; then, with an ear-splitting crack, the prow of the ship sheared away. Katla looked up just in time to see Flint Erson fly over the side and into the weltering sea, where he disappeared soundlessly beneath the boiling, creamy surf. Enraged at the loss of one of his crewmen, and his best tumbler to boot, Tam Fox roared imprecations at the monster, and hurled his shortsword with such aggressive finesse that it sank without trace into the creature’s gill-striped cheek; but still the sea-beast came at them.
Katla leapt to her feet, makeshift harpoon in hand, and made for the mutilated prow. There, for an instant, she found herself staring into one of the creature’s eyes. At first all she saw was her own reflection, a horrible red parody waving a pathetic length of wood with a pin stuck to the tip; then her heart lurched horribly. She was looking, unmistakably, into a human eye.
The eye regarded her. It was the deepest velvet brown, the brown of a cow’s eye; but around the iris, white cornea showed, tapering at either end. The eye was fringed with lashes. It blinked as if startled at the intimate contact, and then Katla heard a strangely familiar voice in her head. It spoke her name, haltingly, pleadingly, so low as to be a subterranean rumble, coming not from the bizarre creature before her, but from a thousand and more miles away, deep below Elda’s surface. Then water filled the eye and it blinked again. What looked horribly like the largest tear in the world rolled slowly down the vast fish’s face. Katla found herself caught neatly between empathy and revulsion; but the Red Sword knew its task. Of its own volition, or so it seemed to a stunned Katla, her arm drew back the spear she had fashioned and released it with brutal power. Hard and true the carnelian blade flew, burying itself to the hilt in the monster’s eye-socket. For a moment, all was still. The Snowland Wolf settled itself; everyone took a breath. Then the creature reared up and its wail of agony rent the air. Up it went, propelled almost to the vertical by the frantic beatings of its many tails and fins, all of its mouths opening and closing in hellish concert, each uttering a different cry of hurt.
Katla stood teetering on the gunwale where her cast had brought her, engulfed by the monster’s shadow. Even with the thing hanging in the air above her, she found she could not move.
‘Katla!’
She heard the voice, but it sounded far away, swallowed as it was by the cacophony of the wounded beast.
And then it pitched down.
Halli’s free hand wrapped itself firmly around Katla’s ankle, dragging her backwards, just as the sea-creature plunged. Flying backwards, barely registering the pain of her landing on her elbows, her back, her left shoulder, Katla watched as the monster crashed down upon the Snowland Wolf, watched as the splintered stempost pressed delicately for a second against the mottled skin of the beast’s belly, puckering the area between two gaping mouths. Then the pale skin gave up its futile resistance and swallowed the spar, impaling it down the full length of the shattered prow. With a final mournful bellow and a gush of vile-smelling fluids, the monster died.
But the worst was still to come.
Under the weight of its new burden, the ship tilted violently. There was a moment of uncanny calm, then the sail came free of its rigging and, flapping wildly, swept Bella and two other tumblers over the gunwale. Barrels and boxes tumbled headlong; the iron cauldron and its tripod rolled the length of the ship, gathering speed, and caved in the other half of Urse’s smashed head. Down the creature went and the Snowland Wolf went with it, inexorably bound for the vile maelstrom of the beast’s death-throes.
With a groan, the mastfish – fashioned two centuries ago by the Master of Hedebu from the heartwood of the greatest oak in his ship-grove – split asunder. No longer firmly anchored, the mast wavered desperately, then plummeted to the deck, carpeting the ship with the great sail, which writhed as those trapped beneath it tried to fight free, so that the wolf and the serpent appeared to do battle for the fate of the world once more. Then the ship tilted crazily again and the mast, sail and all, slid sideways and crashed through the larboard gunwale, taking another half dozen shrieking figures with it. In its wake, two men lay screaming amidst a wreckage of tortured wood and rope; Katla could see the white of their legbones shining through a mess of cloth and blood.
The last thing she saw as water flooded into the fine old ship that had been the Snowland Wolf was her brother, with Jenna plastered against him like a drowned kitten, sawing desperately at the well-knotted bonds which tied the pair of them together. Then the sea rushed in and carried them all away.
Twelve
The Master
Abandoned by the thing he had made, the thing he had stolen and the beast in which he had stored much of his magic, the Master paces his chambers in the icy fastness of Sanctuary like a madman. For lack of any other society, he has over the passage of the last few months attempted to create new companions for himself – with spit and earth and a little, just a little, of his own blood to give them life – but without the presence of the cat, they have proved to be hopeless experiments, shambling, misshapen creatures who bumble into walls and knock off pieces of their new anatomies, who drown in the lake, or stumble away into the snowy wastes, never to be seen again; or simply grind to a halt, staring into space as though they have discovered some new existence in an entirely other world. He makes no effort to patch them up or reanimate them; indeed, he makes no effort even to tidy their remains away, so that the tunnels and grounds of the stronghold have become littered with these failed creatures in varying states of decay. The long sleep seems to have sapped all energy and will from him, and now he has given up his experiments; since even the best of his creations have barely been able to string two words together. It is discourse that he craves, he lies to himself; the lively interplay of minds, and not mere company – he has the wailing seabirds and the visitations of corpse-whales and seals to serve the purpose of mere fellowship. But at night, in his fitful rest, it is the Rosa Eldi’s body he sees, pale and gleaming, lithe and inviting, always ready for him, never questioning, her lost will bolstering his own. And each morning he awakes more enervated than he had been before pitching into the night’s sleep.
Most of the time it is as much as he can do to forage through the neglected gardens that Virelai used to tend and there procure himself sufficient ingredients from which to make a meal. There is not much left, after the unadulterated arctic winds and the feral things he made and then forgot to dispose of have had their way. More often than not he eats what he finds raw, gnawing upon it like a rat, and when he is able to summon the vigour to boil turnips or roast onions, it is always without artifice or condiment. Everything tastes of ashes to him: what point can there be in disguising the taste of the truth? – that he has failed in all he has attempted. For he held a whole world, and what should have been the recipe for eternal happiness, in his grasp and yet allowed it all to fall away from him. Lost, lost, forever lost.
He spends many lonely days in the tower room, surveying the world he once regarded as his own through his complicated device of crystals and levers and clever reflecting glass, and is by turns perturbed and exhausted by what he sees. He turns the levers to show him the barren Northern Isles, but other than the appearance of the odd sea-monster (only to be expected, given the sudden unnatural influx of magic back into the world) finds nothing particularly surprising – people fishing; people fighting; people birthing and dying in much the same way as they have always done in their pathetic little existences.
In the Southern Empire, he searches for the Rosa Eldi, in vain. Instead, after much random casting about, he finds his hapless apprentice engaged in some bungled attempt at sorcery for a man who looks as if he might very soon lose his temper. Here he stays for some time, watching.
At least he has located the damned cat.
But even the sight of Virelai attempting to use the magic he has stolen fails to keep his interest for long. Listlessly,
he seeks again for the woman, the perfect one, but although he trails the length and breadth of the Southern Empire, which is surely the only place a woman of such perverse refinements is likely truly to be appreciated, he can find no sign of her: except for the little incidents of magic that appear to have seeped out into the fabric of the world in a variety of warped and bizarre manifestations. By swinging the crystals to and fro without any deliberate pattern he comes upon wells and watercourses in the deep south of the world that once were pure and potable and have now become poisoned by the ingress of heavy metals ejected from veins in the earth far, far below; he finds streams in which fish have developed legs; birds which have suddenly grown teeth and turned upon their own; feral chickens which have escaped the barnyard and have scurried out into the woodlands and meadows. He comes upon other oddities and phenomena which pique his curiosity for a little while, then he resumes his search for the Rose of the World, trawling once more through the towns and cities of Istria.
Yet again, it seems, the people of the south are in preparation for another war, its people angry and unfocused, preferring to turn their attentions outside their own lives to rail against their northern neighbours for yet another imagined slight. Something to do – if his mouth-reading is accurate – with a barbarian king’s rejection of a swan. A piffling matter, clearly; as is usually the way with the seed of such disturbances. He remembers the immolation of two entire clans in the Northern Isles after a bloodfeud caused by one drunken man pissing on some piece of ground designated as ‘sacred’ by some other idiot. As if the fools had the least idea of what the word ‘sacred’ really meant: for if they did, it would hardly be small squares of hallowed turf that concerned them, oh no!
Bored with the southerners’ narrow rages and inhumanity, he shifts his view to the nomads – those wandering souls he had so easily displaced from their own lands and set about their random excursions – and finds little ant-lines of them trekking across the great wastelands, carefully skirting the cities wherein might lie renewed persecution and cruelty. It appears that the fervour which has the southerners in its grip once more has prompted a hatred of strangers and a fear of even the smallest magics, or indeed anything not immediately comprehensible to the dullest mind. He sighs. It was ever thus. Magicians and their kind were always distrusted: he had had to be rather more forceful with his own people when he had dwelled in the world than he might otherwise have chosen. A taste of pain, a terrible glimpse of what might be, was always one way to bring them back into line; the focused hatred of a third party another, even more effective, method.
He deploys the pulley system and brings one small caravan of yeka into closer focus. A young woman sits the leading yeka, her hair and skin an indeterminate reddish colour which suggests some miscegenation. She has light-coloured eyes, too, unlike most of her people. But the lad who sits beside her is one of the travelling folk through and through: dark-haired, black-eyed, lean-featured. He scans the rest of the troupe and notices that there looks to be no flesh to spare between them: they are a skinny bunch, all bones and sharp lines, stringy muscles and sagging breasts. Times have been hard for these folk. They have no unharnessed beasts left to them: an unlikely scenario, given inevitable lameness and the need for the rotation of mounts. They must surely have lost a number of the beasts along the way; had them stolen, he’d wager. (If such a thing were feasible – even when he lived in Elda, there had been few so stupid as to take a bet with a magician. Although one or two had been arrogant enough to try . . .)
Following this line of thought, he swings the crystals far to the south, deep into the mountains, to the foot of the Red Peak. There, he finds more evidence of disturbance, and this time a chill runs through him, making his skin creep into gooseflesh. Little chasms and vents have appeared in the flanks of the great mountain itself, revealing the blood of the world within, all red and boiling. Directly over its cap the most profound aperture of them all is gusting out clouds of fouled yellow vapour, vapour which, even as he watches, kills a bird stone dead as it foolishly takes a course through the mist, so that one moment it is gliding effortlessly through the evening air on wide, powerful wings and the next is tumbling senseless end over end to disappear silently into the mountain’s maw.
He sits back now, his hands shaking. Is there anything he can do to avert the likely disaster to come? he wonders. Perhaps a hundred years ago, when he felt stronger and more confident of his powers, more in love with the possibilities of his future than he does now, he might have gathered his energies and his remaining magic and set sail for the south; exacted revenge upon his erring servant and taken back the cat by force, then made swift passage into that wilderness, there to reinforce the ancient spells and bindings he had put in place. From the perspective of great age and weariness, it seems a monumental task, too great a venture to undertake. But if he does not . . .
He puts his head in his hands. For the first time in two hundred years the greatest mage the world has ever seen, Rahe the Magnificent, as he liked to term himself in the days of his prime, puts his head in his hands and weeps.
Thirteen
Ghosts
‘Ha!’
The Lord of Forent’s hawkish face was alive with triumph. He flourished a roll of parchment at Tycho Issian. The unmistakable green-and-red knotted ribbon denoting that the missive had come direct from the Duke of Cera himself fluttered discarded to the floor of the tiled bathchamber. In the midst of the room, chest-deep in a tub filled with a foaming mess of chopped brome and ramsons, sat the Lord of Cantara. The old woman who was tending to Tycho – a bent crone by the look of her, even swaddled as she was in the most traditional of slave sabatkas in the coarsest black hessian – took one look at Rui Finco and scuttled from the room as if her life depended on it.
‘Phew!’ Rui wafted a hand in front of his nose. ‘What in Falla’s name has the old bag been adding to your treatment now?’
‘Wild garlic,’ Tycho answered plaintively, reaching for a length of bleached linen that was hanging just out of his reach. The tub rocked dangerously. Little rivulets of pale green water spilled over the side, followed by a watery salad of crushed leaves.
The Lord of Forent stepped carefully over this noxious puddle, caught up the fabric and handed it to Tycho. The agreement he had made with the crone was that if all else failed to cool the southern lord’s insatiable ardour, she was in some other way to ensure that Tycho was rendered entirely undesirable to even the lowest whore, let alone the fastidious women of Rui’s seraglio. Steeped as he was in the vile liquid, he was likely to stink of the ramsons she had added to his bath for many days to come.
The Lord of Cantara stepped out of the tub and wrapped himself carefully in the cloth, but no matter how he tried to conceal the fact it was eminently clear to Rui that none of the crone’s other remedies had had any ameliorating effect on the man’s condition: his erection remained as recalcitrant as ever. Rui could not help but grin: if they did not launch their war effort on the north and recover the nomad whore soon, the man was likely to explode.
‘Still no surcease, my lord?’ he asked courteously.
Tycho regarded him with slitted eyes and wound the linen tighter. ‘No,’ he said shortly. He surveyed the scroll the Lord of Forent still grasped. ‘What’s in the letter?’
‘My lord Lodono, Duke of Cera and the Lords Dystra, by divine edict joint heads of the Ruling Council, do summon together all the nobles of Istria for a Council gathering, to be held on the day after full moon next in the Grand Hall of the Dawn Castle in the Eternal City of Jetra,’ Rui intoned with great pomp and ceremony, without unrolling the parchment. ‘Or some such nonsense. It’s particularly interesting, I think, that they should be holding this so-called “gathering” in Jetra though, don’t you think?’
Tycho frowned. ‘To honour the Swan?’
‘It must surely be a council of war.’ The Lord of Forent scanned the contents of the scroll once more. ‘Though it does not actually say so. Why else ho
ld it in the home city of the Dystras and their beauteous sacrifice, so despicably scorned by the barbarian king?’ He looked up again and his eyes glinted. ‘And you, my lord, are singled out for special mention.’
‘I am?’ He was surprised. The Duke of Cera had hardly deigned to speak to him before; for while Lodono could trace his ancestry back to the glorious days of the Hundred Day War, in which his family had routed and massacred every clan dwelling in the rich foothills of the Skarn Mountains down to the smallest child, he, Tycho Issian, could not even tell civilised company the true name and nature of his own father. He snatched the parchment from the Lord of Forent’s hand and read aloud:
‘“To Lord Tycho Issian, who husbands so well the city of Cantara, we extend a particular welcome in this time of his grievous loss.”’
He paled.
‘What grievous loss?’ He looked wildly about him, suddenly terrified that his shameful lust for the Rosa Eldi had been spied out. Then he realised what was meant. ‘Ah – no – Selen . . . Have they word of my daughter? Is it worse than I feared? Have they perhaps found her broken body washed up on some desolate shore?’
Rui shook his head. ‘Do not panic, my friend. I smell politics at work here, rather than disaster. Make the sorcerer scry for you if it puts your mind at rest. It seems to me that the Council may think to use you as a rallying point for the people, to work on their sympathy with a touching tale of abduction and horror . . .’ He paused, musing. ‘Or maybe, just maybe, our tactics have worked rather better than we had thought and public opinion is forcing their hand, for I cannot believe the old guard would welcome war anew. There must surely be considerable unrest to cause them to call us all away from our duties at such short notice. “The day after full moon next” – that’s barely a week away. We shall have to make swift provision for the journey.’ He clapped the Lord of Cantara hard on the back, leaving a sharply defined handprint on the other man’s bare shoulder. ‘Fine news, eh Tycho? Get ready to preach and rant in every market square on the way south to fan the flames. Better ask the crone to prepare you a new tincture that won’t drive the crowds away!’