by Jude Fisher
Then he tottered down the deck on rubbery legs and surveyed the not inconsiderable damage, feeling very little like the hero who had stood at the helm just short hours before.
By some miracle or favour of the god, it appeared that the Long Serpent and the greater part of her crew had survived the worst of what the Northern Ocean could throw at her.
Twenty-two
Beasts
Do not try to use the old man’s voice on me again. I will bite you.
‘I promise I will not, if you will return to your true form.’
I am sure you prefer me as the tiny one whom you can trap and tame, but I do not choose to adopt that guise any longer. This is my true self. What is yours?
‘I am what I am. What do you mean?’
You do not smell the way a man should. You have some of the right scent, but more of worms and earth. Indeed, I am not sure I would want to bite you too hard, for fear the taste would linger.
‘You have become remarkably talkative since you took on this new form.’
The Beast flicked its tail impatiently but gave no other response.
He started again. ‘If you were to kill me, how would you return to your mistress? She is across the ocean and even a cat as great as you cannot swim so far.’
A flicker of amusement. First a master, now a mistress. Do you truly think of the Rose of the World in that way? How strange you are, worm-man. A worm, in the heart of the rose, in the heart of the world. No, we will go south, to the Red Peak.
‘I do not want to go to the Red Peak: I have read that it is all ash and fire and moving rock. Why would anyone want to go there, except to die? We go north, to Halbo, then to Rahe.’
We go south.
‘Nor— Aaah!’
I told you not to use the voice. That was but a mere nibble in comparison with what I might do. We will go where I say, which is not across the ocean. No cat wishes to swim, and I shall not be getting in a boat with you again until the seas run dry.
Saro looked around. His head felt blurry, as if he had woken from a drunken slumber. He blinked and took in his surroundings. He was in a grove outside the walls of the city of Jetra and it was dark. A little distance away from him a horse he recognised as Night’s Harbinger was tethered to a tree, rubbing its shoulder against the bark so hard that its branches jiggled. Two or three objects hit the ground in a series of soft thuds and then a powerful scent of overripe orange filled the air. Back home in Altea, where the harvest came later and was less certain, and where every cantari counted, every piece of fruit that could be sold, crushed for juice or boiled up and preserved for the long winter would have been gathered in by now: but here in Jetra they left the fruit to rot on the trees. It was a rich city; rich and foreign and wasteful of its bounty.
The sharp citrus scent served to clear Saro’s head. A vague memory of sneaking out of the castle and saddling up the stallion came to him out of nowhere; he recalled looking up at the Navigator’s Star. He thought he remembered making a decision to head north; but why that should be, he could not now imagine. North, to Eyra, the land of barbarians, with whom they would imminently be at war: what had possessed him? And yet something nagged at the back of his skull, something that murmured of disaster and ruin if he were not to remove himself as far from this place as possible. He reached for it, failed to grasp it, and was instead assailed by a bizarre collage of images and sounds, uppermost of which was a man’s voice telling him to wait, wait here for my return. The command had been imperative, ungainsayable; and so he had waited. But now he began to wonder why, and for whom, he was waiting. The necessity of flight, which had impelled him out of the Eternal City in the first place, began to reassert itself with growing urgency. His limbs itched to move, but seemed as rooted as the trees. Concentration even on this simplest of tasks proved hopeless. After a while he became deeply annoyed with himself.
‘Falla’s tits!’ he swore, trying desperately to raise a foot, but his boot remained in obdurate contact with the ground.
As if the curse had woken some kind of demon, a low growl swelled into the darkness behind him; and then Saro began to remember some of what his mind had thought it best to forget. Narrowing his eyes, he stared into the gloom and found that the thing he had believed a figment of nightmare was actually walking in Elda. As if it held the power to materialise at will, it now revealed itself as a huge cat – a vast black beast with glowing golden eyes and massive paws – and if that were not bad enough, at its side was the tall pale man he had inadvertently touched in the Star Chamber, a touch which had disturbed his dreams ever since, as if he had been infected by some illness the man carried.
The stone seemed to respond more positively, though. Like the cat’s eyes, it began to glow, emitting a wan greenish-gold light. Illuminated by this eldritch sheen, the sorcerer looked haggard and drawn, though it was hard to ascribe this notion to anything specific: the man’s face did not exhibit the usual signs of age, for no frown-lines crossed his smooth forehead, no raven’s-feet radiated from his eyes, no gouges marred those colourless cheeks.
Virelai put out his hand in a warding gesture. ‘Please,’ he said, his eyes fixed on the glowing moodstone. ‘Don’t.’
At this, the great cat slumped down, lifted a massive leg and began to groom its private parts with a vast, rough tongue and intense self-absorption, so that the rasping sound was soon joined by a full-throated rumbling which filled the night air and thrummed in Saro’s breastbone. After a while the combination of the purring and the intense simplicity of the beast’s grooming made something in Saro relax, and as he did so he found that the pale man’s voice no longer had the same hold over him as it had before. Movement returned in tiny increments, but rather than lift his feet, Saro’s fingers went instinctively to the moodstone, closing tightly over it so that the light squeezed out between them, livid and garish.
‘No!’
The word seemed imbued with some strange power, for Saro’s hand dropped away from the moodstone as if he had been burned. Both hand and pendant felt suddenly as cold and heavy as lead.
Saro frowned. ‘You know about the stone,’ he said softly.
Through the grey pre-dawn light, the sorcerer held his gaze and nodded slowly.
‘What do you know?’
But Virelai’s eyes became uncommunicative, as flat and dead as those of the giant whiskered fish Saro had once caught in the stagnant waters of the Crow Marsh. It too had returned his astonished gaze with this inimical expression – an expression which spoke of arcane knowledge gradually accrued by absorbing the experiences of the denizens of those grim and murky depths – and then whipped its spine back and forth so hard that it had broken the line and vanished beneath the surface of the lake. Virelai broke the connection between them just as effectively, dropping his gaze and moving to where the stallion was tethered.
Night’s Harbinger began to back away, eyes rolling, but the sorcerer put out his hand. ‘Shi-rajen,’ he said to the horse and it quieted immediately. Then he turned back to regard the boy. ‘Come,’ he said, and as if they belonged to the sorcerer rather than himself, Saro’s feet began to shuffle forward.
Behind them, the cat gave a low growl.
You may use it on him, it said into his mind, and on the stupid horse; but remember what I told you.
Dawn announced itself with an extravagant flourish. It came rolling across the Southern Ocean, flushed the wide estuary of the Tilsen River a rich rose red, and cast its rays like Falla’s own blessing upon a flotilla of fishing vessels setting out into the placid coastal waters to gather up the lobster-pots and crab-traps they had set the night before. It warmed the terraced hills above Lullea, making the vermilion earth glow so brightly it was as if the colour itself were some rare crop, while down below in the shaded valleys, the groves of olives and pomegranates and orchards of apples, limes and lemons released a freight of rich scents into the air. Further inland, to the south-east of Jetra, in the little town of Lord’s Cross with its na
rrow winding passageways of whitewashed houses and its ornate temple, the tower which dominated the settlement cast a long, long black shadow down the main street like a pointing finger. A mule-borne trader setting out early on his journey from the hill-village of Falcon’s Lair to the produce market there that morning with a cartful of persimmons, turned his head at an opportune moment – he never knew what had prompted him to do so – and was gifted with the momentary glimpse of a strange caravan of figures silhouetted on the distant southern horizon.
That evening, in the Hawk’s Wing tavern in Lord’s Cross, surrounded by a rowdy group of fellow-merchants who had already drunk their way through most of their day’s profits, he would not be dissuaded from his assertion that he had spied ‘the largest mountain cat ever seen in Istria, walking along as friendly as you like beside a pair of fellows leading a horse with all the lines of a fine racing stallion’. Mountain cats were not unknown this far north; but they tended to be runtish creatures, driven out of their natural habitats by their stronger siblings and rivals; and anyway, whoever heard of anyone other than the Lord of Cera taming one of the beasts?
‘Lodu, you should go see Mother Sed tomorrow: get yourself something to improve your eyesight!’
‘Is she still practising?’ Lodu asked. Most of the nomads had cleared out well before the current round of edicts and executions. ‘I didn’t see her setting out her stall this morning.’ He paused. ‘In fact, I didn’t see her today at all.’
His friend shrugged. ‘I haven’t seen her for weeks,’ he admitted.
‘I heard she burned well,’ called an unfamiliar voice from the back of the room.
Lodu turned to survey the speaker, almost as curious to see who it was who had such remarkable hearing to have picked up this fragment of private conversation as to discover the fate of the healer, and found himself looking at a tall, dark man with closely set eyes and a thin mouth currently curved in a cruelly appreciative line, as if the very idea of an ancient crone going up like a torch on one of the Goddess’s pyres warmed his immortal soul.
‘They burned old Mother Sed?’ This seemed unbelievable.
‘That’s what we do with these cursed Footloose, or have you been living in a cave in the Bone Quarter?’
This last made Lodu indignant. ‘She never did anyone any harm.’
Another man spoke up now. ‘She practised sorcery, man, and as such was an unnatural creature whose very presence on the face of Elda mortified our Lady Falla. Magic is the Goddess’s art: it is sacrilege for any other to draw upon her reserves so. Now she is cleansed away, returned to the Lady.’ He made a pious genuflection.
‘Sorcery?’ Lodu laughed, despite himself. ‘She brewed up love potions for gullible girlies and sold the herbs she grew in her own garden: if such is sorcery then my wife had better look out!’
The dark man narrowed his eyes. ‘Perhaps she had, my friend. Perhaps she had.’
Virelai swore.
Even though they had managed to leave the Eternal City and pass into the hinterlands without any obvious pursuit, all was not going to plan.
By the time they arrived at the bend in the river where the osiers and goat-willows had masked Alisha’s campsite, the place had been abandoned and the nomads long gone, leaving nothing behind but the cold, blackened stones of their bread-oven, an area of bare ground where the yeka had cropped the grass down to its roots, and ruts in the ground from the passage of their wagons.
He kicked one of the stones viciously. It hurt, but not as much as it should have done. He had the deeply unpleasant suspicion that if he were to examine the skin of his foot, he would find the area as grey as a dove’s wing.
Saro looked around. It was a cheerless place. ‘Why have we come here?’ he asked plaintively. The sorcerer had been remarkably unforthcoming on the journey, which had been slow and hard on the legs, especially since with every step southward he sensed that he was travelling in the wrong direction. Even so, and against any shred of will he had left to him, he felt compelled to accompany the man: he could not say why.
‘I had hoped to join friends here,’ Virelai said gloomily.
This surprised Saro: the sorcerer looked barely human, let alone the type of man to have friends. But after the events of the last night he really shouldn’t expect to be surprised by anything ever again. The cat – huge and black, even more terrifying to look at in bright sunshine than it had been when shadowed by the night – had stayed with them every step of their way from Jetra and somehow had proved to be more companionable and less disturbing than the pale man, which set the whole natural order of the world at odds.
Virelai sat down hard on the ground and clutched his head, fingers spread like tentacles across his skull, and as he did so Saro noticed there was a black bruise and a trace of blood around the base of the thumb of his right hand, and what looked suspiciously like toothmarks. ‘We are lost,’ the sorcerer groaned. ‘Now they will surely hunt us down. And if they catch us they will take the stone—’ His hands flew up to his mouth, but it was too late: the words were out.
‘The stone,’ Saro said softly. Something stirred in the recesses of his mind, coalesced; took shape and came into sudden, horrifying focus. The moodstone. In another man’s hand – a dark, elegant hand, a killing white light beginning to pulse from between the fingers . . . With tremendous concentration, he drew his focus back and allowed the vision which had driven him out of the city in the first place to wash over him with ever more appalling detail. Coruscations of colour assaulted his eyes, followed by a cacophony of groans and growls. And still the images came, dispelling whatever spell it was he had been under since the previous night.
‘No!’
With fierce effort, Saro tore himself away from the nightmare, only to find Virelai’s strange light eyes with their white-fringed lashes fixed upon him, wide with shock. Beside him, the great cat had risen to its feet as if it might at any moment either leap for his throat or run for its life. Flashes of brilliance, like sunshine on a mirror, danced around them all. When he looked down, he found that he was gripping the moodstone so tightly that his knuckles were white through all its variegations of light.
‘Please don’t use it!’
Horrified, Saro stuffed the pendant back beneath his shirt; but instead of becoming quiescent, the thing continued to pulse and burn, clearly visible even through the weave of the rough fabric.
‘It won’t stop!’
Something unspoken passed between Virelai and the cat, and then the great beast took to its heels and in a flurry of displaced dust and water cleared the low willows and the creek with a single muscular bound. Saro watched it breast the low hill on the opposite bank and disappear from view with a certain measure of relief. The lights from the stone flickered and slowly died to a dull glow.
‘The thing you wear around your neck is a death-stone,’ the sorcerer said at last. ‘It is a most rare and treacherous object.’
A death-stone. This was the very same term which the old nomad healer at Pex had used of his pendant as she backed away from him in terror, sharing with him as she did so the horrible image of the men he had slaughtered with it, all unknowing, on the Moonfell Plain. It had killed three on the Moonfell Plain; and was destined to kill thousands in Tycho Issian’s hands. Now true fear gripped him: why had Virelai brought him out to this forsaken place if not to kill him and take the stone? His body might lie undiscovered for days: no one would ever know . . . But then why send the cat away? Death at the fangs and claws of a wild animal: it was the perfect alibi for the sorcerer: all he had to do was let the beast have its way with him and then retrieve the stone. Something here made no sense; his mind was still hazed . . . But if he was sure of anything it was that the pendant should not find its way to Tycho Issian.
‘Stay back!’ he warned the sorcerer. ‘You are the Lord of Cantara’s servant, and I had rather kill or die myself than allow this stone to fall into the hands of such an evil man.’
‘I have no intent
ion of hurting you,’ Virelai said. ‘The last thing on Elda I would want is for Tycho Issian to have access to a death-stone. He is a madman, a monster.’
That surprised Saro; but who knew the subtle machinations of a sorcerer’s mind? ‘Give me your hand,’ he said suddenly.
An expression of absolute distrust crossed Virelai’s face. ‘You’re going to kill me,’ he said fearfully, cringing away.
Impatience made Saro brave. Before the sorcerer could move further out of reach, he caught him by the wrist. The contact was stronger than he’d meant, and fuller far than the passing touch they had shared in the Star Chamber. The torrent of images by which he was usually assaulted on contact with another living being had been bizarrely, hauntingly absent on that occasion, but now Saro was determined. Gritting his teeth, he forced the stone to his will for the first time. At first all he caught from the sorcerer were echoes, like whispers from a distant room, or shattered reflections in a fast-moving stream; that and a marrow-freezing cold. He pressed on, ignoring the chill, concentrating on the fleeting images. With a supreme effort, he separated one from the crowd and examined it. It was pale and vague, a wisp of memory: thin boy’s knees pressed hard against an icy floor, small hands polishing, polishing. Another: an old man with an immense, craggy head and a sumptuous beard craned over a table piled high with parchments and diverse objects waving him away with a barrage of unheard abuse; a hand descending again and again; brief flowers of pain. Hunger, distant aches and pains: a sudden pang of loneliness; a cut finger which did not bleed. Snow and ice everywhere; thick mists, a choppy sea. Skin flaking off a grey limb. A black hound, saliva dripping from its maw. A naked woman, half-hidden by her long, long hair. A black cat, big, then small. Tycho Issian, a mad light in his eyes, thrashing out at him with a wicked-looking switch. Then himself, magnified by the sorcerer’s terror to the size of a powerful man, brandishing the glowing moodstone—