by Ian Irvine
Karan settled back in her favourite saggy old armchair, enjoying the sound of the teeming rain. She felt no need for conversation and evidently neither did anyone else. Rachis was nodding in his chair, Sulien asleep in Llian’s lap. He was staring into the fire, his Thousand-Year Lisk untouched—and that was unprecedented.
“Are you going home tomorrow?” Karan said to Malien.
“No, I’m taking Yggur to Thurkad.”
“What for?”
“Things to do.”
Karan raised her eyebrows. Malien and Yggur had never been friends; the idea of them working together was hard to take in. But the past three months had changed everything. “I thought you were in a hurry to get home to Tirthrax?”
“Things have changed.”
“The world will be really different when there are sky ships everywhere,” Karan mused. “Wicked old Thurkad will only be two hours away. I’m not sure I like the idea of that.”
“You don’t need to worry,” said Malien.
“Why not?”
“The device that allows a strong mancer to channel power to a sky ship’s rotor depends on a very rare mineral—so rare that only fifty suitable crystals are known to exist. We brought them all with us, but thirty-two have been destroyed in crashes and explosions, another nine are in our remaining sky ships, and by now we will have taken the other nine back.”
“Why?” said Karan.
“We don’t feel the time is right for old humans to fly.”
“That’s pretty damn arrogant!”
Malien shrugged. “The crystals were only ever on loan for the duration of the war. If old humans really want to fly they can find their own way.”
This illustrated, not that Karan needed reminding, how different the Aachim were from her own kind, and the belief in their own superiority that they never tried to hide.
The conversation petered out. Llian carried Sulien up to her bed and came down again. “Think I’ll have an early night. Rachis, can I help you to bed?”
“Won’t be as warm or as comfortable as where I am now,” said Rachis sleepily.
“I’m going too,” said Karan.
All she wanted was her big old box bed and Llian beside her. At the turn of the stairs she looked down. Rachis was asleep. Malien and Yggur had drawn their chairs together and were deep in conversation. Extraordinary!
She undressed and got into bed. Llian was staring at the ceiling. “Do you want me to blow out the lamp?” she said, snuggling up to him.
He put an arm around her. “I don’t mind.”
“Want to talk about things?”
“Not tonight. Tomorrow, when everyone else is gone.”
When Karan went down in the morning Rachis was dead in his chair. She stood there, frozen, staring at him. She had been expecting him to die for years, but now it had happened she could not take it in.
“Mummy?” said Sulien anxiously from the doorway. “Are you all right?”
“Rachis is—”
“I know, I came down early. I … I sat with him for an hour. He looks so peaceful.”
“All his troubles are over. Dear old Rachis. He was an old, old man, more than eighty, but still …”
“Yes.” Sulien stroked her hand.
“He’s been the mainstay of my life. All my life he’s been here, always reliable when … when Mother and Father were not.”
Karan sat beside her old friend, keeping him company and remembering all the times, good and bad, when he had just been there. He had never asked for anything save his modest salary, and there had been times when he had slipped it back into her money box, unspent. As a younger man, she knew, he had wanted a family, but it had never happened and, without complaining, he had become part of her family.
When the rain eased an hour later they buried him in the garden next to Piffle. Karan, Llian and Sulien filled in the grave with earth that was rapidly turning to mud. Yggur, Malien and the Aachim stood there for a few minutes, heads bowed, then set off in the sky ship for Thurkad.
It was overcast and very cold, and soon it began to rain again. Llian tamped down the mound over the grave and they spent a few minutes more by it in the teeming rain, then ran inside and stood by the fire, muddy and dripping.
“It all seems a bit … hasty,” said Karan. “Our farewell should have taken longer.”
“I’m sure it’s what Rachis would have wanted,” said Llian. “He hated to be fussed over, and he did love the rain.”
“I suppose so,” she said mournfully. She shivered in her sodden clothes. “I need a nice hot bath.”
“But there’s no hot water,” said Llian, moving closer to the fire until his clothes steamed. The vast old stove Karan’s father had built to heat water for the household had failed a year ago, and Karan could not afford to get it fixed.
“Yes, there is,” said Sulien smugly. “The Aachim can fix anything made of metal. They took the stove apart in the middle of the night and made it better than ever.”
78
MY PEOPLE WOULD FORBID IT
“I dreamed about Maigraith last night,” said Sulien in a hollow voice at breakfast the following morning. “And that evil Julken. She’s coming to take me away. Coming fast.”
Karan started and knocked the teapot over. Tea flooded across the old pine kitchen table towards the pile of estate papers she had been going through last night. She blocked it with her forearm.
“She’s not taking you!” Llian said explosively. He moved the papers onto a bench and mopped up the tea with a frayed towel.
“It’d be worse than being a little Whelm,” said Sulien. “I still feel like a little Whelm, sometimes.”
“This is all my fault. If I hadn’t made up that tale—”
“Either I’d be dead, or you would be,” said Karan wearily. “In which case Maigraith would have taken Sulien long ago, and the Merdrun would have escaped from Gwine, reopened the Crimson Gate and conquered the world. It’s nobody’s fault—or maybe it’s mine. If I hadn’t dosed Maigraith with hrux—”
Sulien clapped her hands over her ears. “It’s Maigraith’s fault!” she said through her teeth. Then, in the stern parental tone that Karan sometimes used to her, “Maigraith’s doing this and you’re not helping by arguing about it.”
“But what are we going to do?” said Llian.
“Whichever way Maigraith comes,” said Karan, “she can be here in under three weeks, if she hurries.”
“Then we’ve got to be gone in two weeks. At the latest.”
“But there’s nowhere in the world where she won’t hunt us down,” said Karan. “Unless … I ask Malien to take us in.”
“Do you want me to link to her?” said Sulien.
“I don’t see as we have any choice.”
Sulien made a link to Malien far more easily than Karan had ever done, then included her in it.
Sulien? said Malien and paused. Karan sensed that she was eating. Is something the matter?
Mummy wants to ask you a favour.
Yes?
I dreamed about Maigraith coming to take me away. Sulien paused but Malien did not speak. Mummy wants to ask you to please take us in and hide us.
The silence stretched until it became uncomfortable, then continued for a minute longer. Karan’s pulse was pounding in her ears and she felt a sick dread that Malien was going to say no. Llian was staring at her. Although he could not be included in the link, he was adept at reading faces.
It’s the first thing Maigraith would expect, said Malien. And … she’s too powerful now and a bad enemy. I’m sorry, Sulien, but my people would forbid it. Taking you in, I mean. The best I can do is take the three of you east or wherever you want to go.
“Oh!” said Sulien aloud. Th-thank you. She broke the link, cutting Malien off as she started to apologise again.
We’re kin! Karan thought furiously. How can you turn us away? The rejection was crushing. “That’s that then,” she said heavily. “Get everything packed and ready
. The moment Malien comes back I’ll get her to take us east … somewhere. Long before Maigraith gets here we’ve got to disappear. There’s no other solution.”
After another very long silence, Llian said, “Maybe there is.”
“What, Daddy?” said Sulien, gazing at him in wonder.
“Remember what I told you about Rulke when he was a prisoner in the Nightland?”
“No,” said Karan numbly.
“He wrote about using his virtual construct to travel to the future, to ease the unendurable burden of his sentence.”
“Doesn’t ring a bell.”
“He never mentioned it again, but the next nine hundred years of his time in the Nightland are unrecorded, and that doesn’t make sense. Why would he say nothing about his life for nine centuries?”
“What if he did go to the future?” she said irritably. “We’ve got no way of getting to the Nightland. And supposing we could, and his construct could go forward in time, we’d still be stuck there.”
He looked sheepish, but said, “I’m going to follow it up. I’ve still got the bulk of Rulke’s papers to translate.”
“I thought you handed them in to the college library so Thandiwe could write his Histories.”
“Only the ones she translated, and I’d already memorised them.”
“Why not the rest?” said Karan.
“Must’ve slipped my mind,” he said blandly.
“Daddy!” whispered Sulien, scandalised but admiring.
“Now you’re being a bad influence on your daughter,” said Karan, but she was smiling. “Sulien, link to Malien and tell her we’ll be ready when she gets here.”
“All right. Do you want to talk to her?”
“No.”
The rain stopped for a day, then started again, though gently now. The River Ryme was still in flood and spreading a thick layer of fertile silt over the fields. Gothryme would have wonderful harvests for years to come, but Karan would not be here to see them. She gazed out the window at her unfamiliarly green estate, then wiped her eyes and got on with her work.
“Can we finish sorting out all the old stuff?” asked Sulien three days after their return. They were in the library, and she was at the table with Karan. She was still clingy, and no wonder.
“I thought we had,” Karan said absently. Why was Malien taking so long? Maigraith was getting closer every day. Karan could sense her, a great knot of vindictiveness and implacability.
“There’s still that old box of Faelamor’s in the secret passage. Where did you get it, anyway?”
“At the end of the Time of the Mirror she felt guilty about all the wrongs she’d done me, and she left me the contents of her cave in Dunnet as reparation.”
“What was in it?”
“Just Faellem stuff, none of it worth much to anyone else. I sold most of it years ago to keep Gothryme going through the drought.” Karan frowned at Sulien. “How did you know about the secret passage, anyway?”
Sulien rolled her eyes.
“I can’t keep anything secret from you, can I?” said Karan.
“No you can’t, Mummy. Can I get it?”
“All right. Do you need me to show you …”
Sulien was up in a flash and had opened the passage before Karan could finish speaking. After some minutes she came out bearing a beautifully made box, a foot square and high, made from silkwood aged to the colour of amber.
“What’s this?” she said when they had taken everything out. Sulien held up a dirty wooden ball the size of a small orange. It was rather knobbly.
Karan took it. It felt rather too heavy to be solid wood. “It’s called a mimemule.”
“What’s it for?”
“No idea.”
“Can I have it?”
Karan felt reluctant, but then, it was just a carved piece of wood. “Yes, but be careful. It belonged to Faelamor and it could be enchanted.”
“I thought the Faellem were forbidden to use enchanted objects.”
“They were. And she broke the prohibition more than once.”
Karan saw much less of Sulien after that, and when she did, her daughter was always playing with the mimemule. She had scraped the layers of compacted grime away to discover that it was actually made of four interlocking wooden spheres, red-gold in colour. Like all Faellem artefacts it was beautifully made, but what was it for?
The next morning Karan turned over in bed and Sulien was standing beside it, her teeth chattering.
“I saw Maigraith again.”
Karan shot upright. “Where?”
“Galloping along a dusty road. Then she came to a town where everything was made from blue stone and all the roofs were green.”
“Dark blue stone?” said Llian.
“Yes, except the town hall. It was yellow and had a tower at each end.”
“Shantin,” said Karan. “It’s about a week north-west of Chanthed.”
“It’s easy riding from Shantin to Chanthed. At this rate Maigraith could be here in …”
“Thirteen days,” said Llian. “Five days earlier than our worst fears. She must be riding half the night.”
Karan got up and busied herself with her final preparations. She was almost ready to leave; Sulien and Llian had their bags packed and were ready to go at a moment’s notice. Karan had found a few more items to sell to add to her small emergency stock of gold tells and silver tars. She had written to everyone who needed to be notified that she was leaving Gothryme indefinitely, though she had not yet sent the letters, and she had written out deeds giving her farmers the land they worked.
It had proved surprisingly easy to set her affairs in order; she had little left of value save the estate itself. Her family had lived here for almost a thousand years, and soon it would be gone. Since a distant cousin would take over the manor and the bulk of the estate when she was gone, she had to put Gothryme out of her mind.
Llian was working furiously on his pointless project of translating Rulke’s papers and crafting his tale of The Gates of Good and Evil, focusing on his work as he had not for years. She envied his ability to escape their overwhelming troubles. Annoying man!
She had to focus on where to go and how to hide. They had to leave Meldorin, but going south was out—Shazabba was the realm of the Whelm, and the lands further east were equally bleak and inhospitable. The few Faellem who still lived on Santhenar could be found in the endless forests of Mirrilladell, south of the Great Mountains, though they were not a welcoming folk.
North was also problematic. The huge island of Faranda was mostly sweltering desert and she did not know how they could survive there. The north-east was possible—it had vast rainforests, though it was also unbearably hot and humid and neither she nor Sulien were comfortable in such climes.
It had better be the east then. Malien would take them there in her sky ship, and they could lose themselves for a while in the endless forests and mountains of the east coast, though when their money ran out they would be indigent foreigners in a land none of them knew. What then?
A huge shadow passed across the window, and Malien’s sky ship settled next to the swan pond, sending them flapping in all directions, hissing and trumpeting.
She and Yggur had come alone; the other Aachim had stayed in Thurkad. After a cool and reserved early dinner, Karan hardly saying a word to Malien and a frosty Sulien steadfastly playing with the mimemule and ignoring Malien’s every approach, Llian returned to the ridiculous idea he had mentioned the other day.
“Rulke definitely did go forward in time,” he said, holding up a piece of paper. “I have the translation here, and it says how he did it too, though it didn’t help him escape the Nightland.”
Yggur took the paper, scanned it without comment and handed it to Malien.
When she had read it he said, “He’s careful not to say anything that another mancer could use to reconstruct what he did.”
“You wouldn’t need to,” said Llian. “All you’d have to do is stu
dy the settings of the virtual construct.”
“A truly great mancer might succeed, assuming he could get to the Nightland, understand the controls and mechanisms of Rulke’s virtual construct—if it still exists—and had the power to use it, but it would be fiendishly dangerous. What works in the strange reality of the Nightland might go dangerously wrong in the real world. But, lacking any way to get to the Nightland anyway, I’m sure it’s impossible.”
“I’m not,” Llian said. He poured the last dribble from a bottle of miserably bad wine into Yggur’s goblet. “Sorry. All the drinkable stuff went years ago.” He took on a dreamy expression. “Remember the bottle Nadiril shared with us the night before Thandiwe’s Great Tale?” He sighed heavily. “I can recall every sip. The Uncibular ’81, if I’m not mistaken.”
“Are you ever mistaken about wine?” Karan said tartly.
Clunk. A freshly uncorked bottle of Uncibular ’81 appeared in the middle of the table. Llian started, gaped, then reached out suspiciously and sniffed the bottle. A dreamy look appeared on his face.
“Thanks, Malien,” he said, pouring a measure and tasting it. And sighing.
Malien was staring at the bottle. “That was beautifully conjured, but I didn’t do it.”
“Neither did I,” said Yggur.
“Then who did?” said Llian.
79
OUR FRIENDS DON’T GIVE A DAMN ABOUT US
Sulien was twirling the mimemule on her palm. “Umm … it was me.”
“Can I see that?” said Yggur, plucking it away. He wrapped his big hands around it, closed his eyes and appeared to be concentrating hard. “Where did you get it?”
“Faelamor left it to Mummy, ages ago. It’s called a mim—a mimemule.”
“I’ve never heard of such a thing. Where did you conjure the wine from, Sulien?”
“I didn’t conjure it. Daddy wanted some, so I made it for him.”
Yggur stared at her. “How do you mean, made it?”
“I imagined the wine Nadiril had really clearly, turned the mimemule in my hands, and the wine was there.”
“Have you made anything else?”
“Umm …” Sulien shot a nervous glance at Karan. “Just some … little things I wanted.”