by Ian Irvine
She let out a ghastly shriek. Smoke gushed from her mouth then brown foam bubbled out, and slimy muck. The diamond phial fell from her hand and disappeared. Her lips vanished, then her teeth, and her long snout crumpled like a deflating balloon. Her head caved in, and the remains toppled off the roof and landed with a soggy thud. The dissolution continued along the chimaera’s body.
“One single drop of nivol and it’s eating her away,” Llian said in horrified awe.
“Good riddance!” Blappey fired his spike through the seat again. “Disgusting beasts.”
The other chimaera backed away, then bolted.
“That’s that then,” said Yggur. “We’re going home.”
It was a crushing failure and Llian was not looking forward to explaining it to Janck. But why, after all it had taken to create that drop of nivol, had he wasted it on such an ill-advised attack? Was Janck reckless, incompetent, or just desperate for any kind of victory? Gloom settled over Llian at the thought. They didn’t have a hope.
“We can’t give up,” said Tallia at the emergency council called within minutes of their arrival in Zile next morning. “We’ve got to try again. If they reopen the gate and bring the rest of the Merdrun through, we face oblivion.”
“Can we sleep the summon stone, as Mendark did ten years ago?”
“We don’t know how he put it to sleep … and he used the vast power released by his own death to do so. Any volunteers?”
No one spoke. They were meeting in Nadiril’s private sanctuary, the Rare Books section of the library, which few people knew existed and even fewer had ever been allowed to enter. It was a beautiful chamber full of scrolls and codexes and records on wax tablets, baked clay, tree bark and every other material that had been used in the eight thousand years since writing had been invented on Santhenar. Every book there was priceless, including—Llian was pleased to see—the manuscripts of the twenty-two Great Tales. Lilis had rescued them after Snoat’s death and brought them here for safekeeping, along with the charred remains of the twenty-third. He now regretted the mad impulse to burn his manuscript of the Tale of the Mirror.
Janck was not there; he had flown north to Framan, the port city at the mouth of the River Zur. In his absence Tallia had relaxed the edict on secrecy and called everyone to the council, even Sulien.
“How long to make some more nivol, Aviel?” said Malien.
“Without any Archeus?”
“Yes.”
“A year.”
“What?” cried Tallia.
“All the other methods are really complicated and some of the steps take months each.”
“Is there any way the time can be shortened?”
“Maybe, by a master alchemist. I wouldn’t know where to begin.”
“We had a master alchemist, and now he’s dead,” said Tallia coldly.
“Then you should have ordered him to make the stuff,” said Yggur. “Since you chose to use Aviel, and she got it right the first time, better listen to her.”
“A year—or even a month—is out of the question. We keep getting hints—” Tallia broke off.
“There’s such a thing as too much secrecy,” said Yggur.
“—from various endeavours of ours, which I won’t detail,” said Tallia, “we feel sure the Merdrun will soon be able to escape from Gwine. We’ve got to act fast. Aviel, how much nivol could you make at a time if you had enough Archeus?”
“Eight to ten drops,” said Aviel.
“How long would it take?”
“Five days, since I have all the other ingredients.”
“Then get started.”
“I don’t have any Archeus.”
“Shand does,” said Malien, “and I don’t think he’s far away. Yggur, you’ve known him longest. Hunt him down and get the Archeus.”
“By hunt him down, you mean …?”
“I’d prefer the traitor was taken alive, so he can be interrogated, but if there’s no other way but fatal force to get the Archeus back, do it.”
Yggur sat in silence for a minute or two, then said, “Very well.”
“Given our failure with the summon stone,” Tallia went on, “and our utter inability to do anything about it in the next week, it’s all the more urgent that we find out what stage the Merdrun are up to. Karan, you’ve got to go to Gwine at once.”
46
I’VE GOT TO HELP HIM
“You will look for Wilm, won’t you?” said Aviel, clutching Karan’s hands. Colour tinged her cheeks; she pulled away as if regretting the impulse and looked down at the bench. “He’s the only friend I’ve got, and …”
“I’ll try,” said Karan, who had come to the workshop to hear, first-hand, everything Aviel could remember about Gwine. Karan felt sick; spying on the Merdrun again was reckless and surely doomed to failure.
Aviel’s eyes were wet. She turned away to a wooden rack of cork-stoppered tubes, taking them out one by one, holding each up to the light and putting it back. She drew the bung from a tube half full of a thick pale orange oil, and a powerful fragrance made Karan’s nostrils tingle; it was like a mixture of cloves and mandarin, though sharp, almost biting. Aviel stoppered the tube, put it back, glanced sideways at Karan then away. She started to say something, but stopped, again flushing a delicate pink.
“Is there a message you’d like me to give to Wilm, if I find him?” said Karan.
Aviel looked pathetically grateful. “He saved me in Carcharon, and on Gwine he sacrificed himself to protect me. That’s the kind of man he is … and they’ll make him pay. You know how cruel they are. Do you think there’s any hope?”
“There’s always hope,” Karan lied.
The words were meaningless, but Aviel seemed to draw comfort from them. “I’ve got to help him, Karan.”
She crossed the workshop to an end bench and drew another rack towards her, a small one containing about thirty little glass phials. Using a series of eyedroppers she drew up small quantities of selected oils, sniffed each one, then blended them in another phial. She stoppered it, shook it twenty times to the right, four times in an up and down motion and eleven times to the left, then removed the stopper and sniffed it again. She frowned, added another drop of a tea-coloured oil and repeated the shaking procedure. This time she was satisfied. She wired on the stopper, wrote WILM on a label and stuck it to the phial.
“Will you give this to him?” she said tentatively, as if afraid Karan would refuse.
Karan took the phial and tucked it away. “Of course. What’s it for?”
“It’s a scent potion to strengthen his belief in himself. I’m sure they’ve tortured him and tried to break him. Wilm is brave and strong and true-hearted, but sometimes he lacks confidence. He’s … had a hard life.”
Aviel had too, though one thing she did not lack was confidence.
“To get to Gwine,” said Karan, “I’ll need the best picture you can give me of the place. I was going to use a mental image from the time when I fought the triplets, but it’s too dangerous.”
Aviel described it: the brilliantly green grass, the exotic flowers, the forest of gigantic trees whose trunks flared out into buttresses many yards through. The brown river winding across a fertile plain and the town on its further bank, its streets a series of sinuous curves. The smaller town below the hill where the gate had opened, its streets barricaded, its buildings burning, its dark-skinned valiant people doomed.
Karan tried to create the scene in her inner eye but it wasn’t clear enough to take her there in spirit form; it was just a description. “What else do you remember?”
“We weren’t there long when Gergrig saw us. I mainly remember the attack on the town.”
“That won’t help,” Karan said hastily. The last thing she wanted was an image that might take her to him.
“Well,” said Aviel, tapping her fingertips on the bench, “I remember the smell perfectly.”
And smells could create very clear pictures. A particular smell cou
ld take Karan back to her childhood, to the best times of her life—and to the worst. But could a smell Aviel remembered take Karan to the place? “What did it smell like? Can you describe it?”
“I can make it.”
Aviel drew her rack of scented oils towards her and chose three phials, which she lined up on the bench. She sniffed them, then went down to the other end of the workshop, opened a cupboard and took out a much longer rack which must have contained a hundred phials.
“My reference collection,” she said. “I keep it in the dark; the scents last longer.”
She selected another five phials, sniffing each one carefully then putting two back and taking others. Karan caught hints of woodsmoke, grass, flowers and freshly ploughed earth, and a thick, humid, organic odour, not unpleasant, that she associated with visits to the tropical north many years ago. Finally Aviel seemed satisfied. She added the seven phials before her to the three lined up on the other bench and began to blend them.
“Is this another scent potion?” said Karan warily. “I’m not sure any form of mancery would be a good idea …”
Aviel’s laughter was like the tinkling of little bells. “It’s just a simple perfume.”
“I heard you once made a scent potion by accident. Are you sure?”
Aviel was still smiling. “I was only thirteen and had no idea what I was doing. I made a laxative scent potion; Shand had the runs for a week.” The smile faded. “How could he betray us so, Karan?”
She had often wondered the same thing. She had travelled across the Dry Sea with Shand and would have said he was one of the most reliable people in the world. How could the enemy have corrupted him so quickly?
Aviel completed the blending, capped the phial and shook it, and handed it to Karan. “A little sniff should be enough, but take it with you just in case.”
Karan took the cap off and walked away, mentally rehearsing the next step. Sniff the perfume, visualise the destination and trigger the dematerialisation spell the way Malien had taught her. She raised the phial to her nose and sniffed but caught only faint odours of smoke and grass.
“It’s thick,” said Aviel. “Allow it to warm in your hand, then sniff.”
Karan closed her fingers around the phial, held it tightly for a minute and took a deep sniff. She saw the image—her sensitive’s gift must have picked it up from Aviel—of a grassy hilltop, but the moment she thought about the triggering spell—
Bang!
Pain flared as her spirit was wrenched from her body. Karan felt her empty body crumpling to the floor of the workshop and saw the shock on Aviel’s face, then her spirit was hurled two thousand miles north-north-west to a grassy hilltop with a forest in the background and a river floodplain ahead and below her.
It was a hot, sunny afternoon, around four, with storm clouds building out to sea. But the Isle of Gwine was no longer the pretty, peaceful backwater Aviel had seen weeks ago. The town that had stood a quarter of a mile away had been razed; even the building stones were gone. Karan drifted up a few feet, the better to see.
Great swathes of the forest had been felled and other parts burned. What she could see of the once-beautiful island had been ravaged even more thoroughly than the towns the Merdrun had taken on Cinnabar. Why did they hate everyone so desperately? Did they resent other peoples having a world and an existence they, who had been exiled in the barren and pitiless void for tens of thousands of years, could only yearn for?
Not far from the town she saw an ugly scar on the landscape, a large rectangular enclosure surrounded by a crude palisade made from pointed split logs driven vertically into the ground, with a double wall at the gate.
Lines of laden wagons were heading east, carrying stone taken from the homes and public buildings of the old town, but where were they going? She drifted that way and saw another, far bigger scar on the land several miles away.
A curving ridge dominated by three cliff-bounded hills each half a mile apart fell steeply away to the north, forming a natural fortress on the northern and eastern sides of a small valley. The Merdrun, presumably using thousands of slaves, had built low walls along the ridge top linking the three hills, and timber watchtowers on top. They were now enclosing the western and southern sides of the valley with a much higher wall to form an encampment a mile from north to south and rather more than a mile east to west. It dropped several hundred feet from south-west to north-east, and a stream running in the same direction had been dammed not far inside the gate.
Karan dared not go too close; the triplets were bound to have traps. From half a mile away and a few hundred feet up she studied the layout of the fortifications, the height and thickness of the walls and the strengths and weaknesses of the place, creating mental pictures so she could report back as accurately as possible. If Janck planned to attack, thousands of lives would depend on the quality of her information.
Now to estimate the enemy numbers. The only buildings were on the western side, north of the camp gates, and they were crude wooden structures built from split logs—cookhouses, storerooms and the like. The Merdrun were used to living in tents as they moved from one siege to the next and would not waste time building permanent structures.
The soldiers’ tents were erected in lines on the low south-eastern side of the encampment. She counted twenty-five rows of forty tents, a thousand in all, so if each tent slept ten men they could have ten thousand troops, plus more elsewhere on the island, guarding the slave camp and controlling farms, roads and bridges. Their total numbers could be twelve thousand. Twelve thousand of the greatest warriors in the void, capable of beating an army at least four times that number. Karan had seen them do it on Cinnabar.
She was drifting higher, to make sure that there were no other camps or fortifications on the island, when she sensed a faint, distant alertness. She plunged to ground level at once. Could the triplets have detected her from so far away? She had to assume so and she could not risk staying much longer.
She floated down to the palisade wall, which turned out to be the slave camp, a foul, inhuman place. The thousands of slaves had worn the earth bare and it was now a sea of mud. The buildings were mere shanties, mostly wall-less, made from logs and roofed with palm fronds.
Presumably the slaves slept in the mud, and even in this warm climate that would be a miserable existence. The Merdrun probably planned to kill them before they left and would not give a damn about their health or comfort as long as there were enough of them to complete the fortress and harvest their food.
The sun was plunging rapidly towards the horizon. Darkness would come quickly here, and enemies must be securely locked in beforehand. Yes, in the distance she saw a column of slaves marching along a muddy track, roped together.
Karan headed towards them, keeping high enough to see the whole column, though not so high that she risked being detected. The triplets must not discover where she was going, or that she hoped to make contact with a certain slave. If they did, he would not last a minute.
Wilm’s tall figure would stand out among the smaller, darker Gwinians, but she did not find him in the first column of slaves, or the second. He could well be dead. Suddenly her sensitive’s gift picked up a series of tingling alerts that made her phantom pulse race. The triplets were looking for her. It was time to go.
Then she saw him, stumbling along near the back of the third column. His back was bent and his face downcast. Had they broken his spirit? She went lower, closer. There were Merdrun guards at the front and back of the column, and midway along either side, though they were just ordinary soldiers.
Nonetheless she kept well back, and only after the slave columns had been marched into the camp, the great gates were swung shut and barred, and the guards took up their positions outside, did she float over the wall and search the camp for Wilm.
The exhausted slaves were untied and fed slops and bread from open troughs as if they were animals. Perhaps the Merdrun thought of them as animals. Afterwards, many simply floppe
d down where they were and slept. Others wandered about, talking or playing games or, in many cases, staring listlessly into space.
Wilm had shuffled away into a gap between the back of one of the few walled shanties and the palisade wall. It was gloomy there, though not yet completely dark. Wondering what he was up to, she floated over the roof of the shanty and hovered, watching him.
He was as filthy as all the other slaves but his back wasn’t bent now. Standing straight and proud, he checked behind him then removed a carved length of wood concealed between two poles of the palisade and, holding it out like a sword, practised fighting strokes. His thin face bore the evidence of many beatings, and he must have been worn out after a day of labour, but he went through his strokes one after another, over and over.
After Dajaes was killed by Unick, Wilm had taught himself to use a sword from Llian’s pamphlet, practising every waking hour afterwards. Karan had seen Wilm in action at Carcharon and he had been astoundingly skilled—despite his impoverished background, or perhaps because of it, he was a remarkable young man. He had worn down and killed Snoat’s most experienced assassin, Jundelix Rasper.
She drifted down. Dare she risk materialising? She had to; there was no other way she could talk to him. She landed in front of Wilm and triggered Malien’s materialisation spell.
Her knees gave way. She had been so focused on getting here that she had forgotten how draining the materialisation spell was, and how weak she would be after several hours’ separation from her body. She fell towards him, right into the path of a savage, slashing blow.
47
NO ONE IS SAFE FROM THEM
Wilm halted the blow inches from her face, gaping at her, then lowered the weapon. “You’re … Karan!”
“Don’t have much time.” She could not get up; the mere act of breathing was exhausting her. She fumbled in a pocket and brought out the phial of perfume. “Aviel sent this. Said it’ll help you.”
His long face lit from within. “She’s alive? She’s well?”