for that,” Mirel said.
“The Daisain has a plan for you, and it will require you to be well-rested.”
The Daisain, alive! She had barely believed it when the Lawkeepers had spoken ofthe possibility, but when she had seen the Son of Panthers standing before her prison cell... it could have been no one else’s training in him but The Daisain’s. “Just before I cut through master’s throat, he told me he would
come back, Lann, but I never thought it would truly happen – it was master’s fault, of course – his choice. He brought that death upon himself. But he’s not like you and I-”
Lannda nodded. “It was our blessed Law-keepers’ own error to allow what happened with your... accident of memories.”
Law-keepers! Hah! Lannda still believed they possessed endless powers, but she was ignorant. The Daisain was their
creation, but he had outgrown them long ago; he made all decisions. He always had. “It was no mistake. It made me stronger – it made me see. Our master engineered it.” Mirel did not attempt to hide the threat in her voice.
“Perhaps. But the Lawkeepers have ultimate responsibility, and they should have admitted that they were too arrogant to accept he was needed, even with his faults, and
that a man like him would be necessary to put their other mistakes right. They should never have allowed him to die at your hand.”
They were not powerful enough to make such allowances... “They should never have tried to make a new one,” Mirel said.
Lannda drew her lips into a thin line. “Perhaps. The Daisain was foolhardy with you, but I believe he has learned his lesson, and he is strong. The younger one has proved to be too... weakened by sentimentality, and his skills have come on far too slowly when time is so limited. Perhaps he will come to a broader point of view eventually. I’m told the Law-keepers are working on him as we speak. But The Daisain remains focussed. He will leave his current accommodations and join us in good time.”
“Did he give you any indication as to when that might be?”
Her sister shook her head. Lannda was a curious-looking woman: all earthy skin and hair and fingernails full of dirt. But she dressed like a noblewoman, and carried herself like the most serene of empresses. Aside from their shared grace, no one would ever have believed they were sisters.
“I need to bathe,” Mirel said softly. Her imprisonment, combined with so many days and nights of riding, had made her
smell truly revolting. She had managed to drag a dagger through the worst of her hair on their second stop to change horses, but it still required some dedicated attention in order to make her look civilised.
She departed her sister’s side and wandered down to one ofthe smaller mountain lakes near their camp. It was silvercoated by the daylight, and seemingly devoid of any wildlife. At that time of year, it would be
colder than any bath the Furini would have known, but she hardly cared. The sensations of surfaces other than white crystal against her feet, or of scents other than her own body, or of sounds other than dripping cave water were still small revelations. And the sky... she had not recalled it ever being so... big. Once she had divested herself of the clothes her sister had so thoughtfully provided her with, Mirel collapsed into the
lake. It did feel rather icy against the skin of her back, but it was nothing she could not bear. She closed her eyes and permitted her mind to drift. As always, her first thoughts focussed on the threat of what loomed ahead, the warnings from the Law-keepers and all of the other babble they had spouted at her. Snows of Forda, those fools had gone on about things she already knew! Her second thought was of Erowan, though it was irritating
that her consciousness bothered with him at all. There were more important things than her son, and the way in which the Lawkeepers had gone about making her produce him was evidence enough that he ought not to exist at all. No woman should ever be made to endure such treatment, or be forced to bear a child against her will. It was bad enough that the Law-keepers were idiots, but truly a terrible thing that they had such
influence in all senses ofthe word. At the very least, Mirel hoped the boy would be grateful for the blood that ran in his veins. It was very fine blood.
Her third thought was of the duty The Daisain expected of her. She did not know what it was yet, but already her heart beat fast in anticipation of it. Mirel had not followed his instructions in a very long time, and after her last and unfortunate encounter with him, she had much to make
amends for.
The sound of someone approaching caused her to open her eyes once more, and she saw Fardine disrobe at the edge ofthe lake. From his lack of embarrassment or shyness, he probably had not observed Mirel floating amidst the reeds. She watched him bathe for some time, and when he appeared to have acclimatised to the cool temperatures of the water, she swam toward him. His eyes
widened pleasingly as she approached.
“Hello,” she said sweetly.
He nodded in polite acknowledgement, but made sure to keep his eyes directed no lower than hers.
“What I cannot fathom,” she said, “is why you were brought along to my rescue. You did not fight, and you did not open my prison nor distract any who would see us. So, Fardine, what is your purpose?”
He shrugged. “I carried the spoon.”
No. The Daisain must have had something else in mind. He never did anything without good reason. What was it? Mirel brushed aside some of Fardine’s thickly curled hair. He was evidently built for fighting, and had enough meat upon him to survive for some years in un-life. He would make a very nice pet indeed. “But you are a warrior?”
“Knight of Forda – until
recently. Sell-sword these days, if you want to call it that.”
Mirel tilted her head to examine him, and then she hit upon the answer. Fardine had been, and still was, a test. Well, that was a disappointment after so many dry years. She sighed resignedly and withdrew a small distance from him. “Knights are supposed to remain... virtuous in Forda, correct?”
He nodded.
Of course, he was just about as tempting as a man could be to her. Lannda would know that, and Lannda would use Mirel’s behaviour with him to prove or disprove her utility in whatever plans The Daisain had described. She almost laughed aloud. The Daisain would also have known that she would pass such a test, and that this was for her sister’s benefit alone. “I must go to find my clothes.” Mirel swam to the water’s edge, and soon she was dressed and clean like the most
respectable of mortal women.
Lannda was writing some correspondence and seated upon an improbably large toadstool when Mirel returned to their campsite. The orange and white mushroom had not been there when she had left. What a curious talent it was that Lannda had! “Sister,” Mirel said, “I think you will find I have proven myself worthy for whatever mission you have in mind for me.”
Lannda looked up only after a moment. “And how have you achieved this?”
“Fardine still has his skin.” ...and she was still intensely frustrated.
A wide grin spread across Lannda’s features, and she put her writing aside to stand. “Then you truly are ready. And it will be worth it, Mirel... I promise you. What the Daisain has planned – it will please you.” Her sister embraced her, and Mirel might even have described it as a
It had taken her five full days to engage her prison guards in any sort of conversation. For the most part, they seemed keen to communicate with her using only sour expressions and the
quietest of grunts. But then, one day, whilst handing her a bowl of water, one of them had murmured, “Jintow.” And that was the first word of their peculiar language that she had picked up. From there, she was able to establish the names of the things around her – the walls, the stones, chains and bars. She found the clicks and whistles difficult to properly master, but could imitate them well enough to be understood. It had not
taken her long to realise that she would be in this world of
endless night for many months before she found a way free of it, and so she set about learning as much as she could, as quickly as she could. Two weeks into her imprisonment, she had tried to get a fellow inmate to teach her more basic words, but when her guards had giggled uncontrollably at everything she tried to say to them, she soon realised that the other woman was teaching her
nothing but profanities. Not that such things weren’t useful, of course. Artemi catalogued those words and phrases away in her mind for later application.
After two months, she could express most of the things she wanted to express to them, even if her mastery of their grammar was poor. “I am no threat to you; I am not bad,” she would say. And each time the guards would shake their heads and walk away. She probably had not helped
herself by snapping the bars in her cell during the previous week. Artemi had not intended to do so, but she had become annoyed when no one was listening to her, and had kicked once at the metal without thinking. Solid iron had snapped like old, hollow wood. When she had not tried to use her clear route to escape, they had reacted with fear once more. Again they had tried to kill her with their strange tube device, and again they had failed.
Artemi was placed in a stone cell after that, though she knew that she needed to do little more than sneeze and it would be enough to set her free. By the third month, she had established that they called her something that meant “splinter-touch”, which she rather liked. It was a change from Fireblade, anyway.
All ofthis was beginning to feel much like her almostvoluntary imprisonment during Morghiad’s confusion, and Artemi
found herself wondering if she enjoyed being in dark, damp cells a little more than she ought to. She just had to remember her goals here. First, she had to befriend these people enough to find out more about how to get off this damned world, and second, she had to get home to Morghiad. And Tallyn – there had to be a way to force the Lawkeepers into bringing him back. There had to be...
A small, quiet voice inside
her head whispered that she ought to accept his death just as she had accepted thousands of others before, but she told it that she knew differently. Tallyn had been different. What sort of mother would she have been if she did not try to do all she could for him?
Can he be returned to life?
We do not have the power to do that.
The Law-keepers were clodheaded and blind, but were they
ever liars?
Selfish, another memory whispered to her, but she could not recall if the voice behind it had belonged to them, The Daisain or Mirel. Attributing certain words to certain people from her past became increasingly troublesome the longer she lived, it seemed. For the moment, she tried to think of Morghiad, and ofthe embrace he could give her that was capable of dispelling millennia of
unhappinesses. There was no better place in any world, or moment in time, than that which could be found in his arms. From what she was able to tell, there was a concept of love in this world, but it only ever seemed to exist between three people rather than two. At first she had assumed it was something similar to the Casfinian marital arrangements, where a wife could take two brothers for husbands, or
perhaps the old Ortan tradition, where a man could marry a second wife. But then she had met what was known as an injra. These were a third sex – something that was neither male nor female.
Artemi had only met one by chance – an inmate, of course and that an injra was a criminal at all was something of a novelty even here. Injras, as Artemi had learned, tended not to labour or leave the home like the other
genders. Males and females would run the gaols and walk about the town, but the injras would remain in their houses with the babies as far as Artemi could tell. She still could not quite comprehend how a sexual union would take place in this world between three partners, and all of the things she had imagined made her mind boggle. As she looked down at herself for the thousandth time since she had arrived here, she
remarked that she was certainly less obviously feminine than she had been. She had almost become used to her heavy thighs and long arms, but she was definitely a female whatever-itwas that these people called themselves. There was something else that was different though – something these people saw that she did not.
Just then, the distant sound of explosives breaking rock interrupted her thoughts. It was
followed by a long, low rumble and a peculiar whistling sound. Well, now would be as good a time as any to make a break from her cell. It had to be something to do with those red defensive walls – an attack! Perhaps the aggressors would turn out to be friendlier than her gaolers, or perhaps she could help her prison keepers enough for them to like her. Ifthere was one thing Artemi Fireblade knew how to do, it was choosing a side.
She hopped to her feet and took a running leap at the door. It was made of some kind of hardwood and braced with iron, but it shattered as soon as her shoulder impacted with it. She sprinted through as fast as she could, taking care not to trip over the broken bolts or the furniture that she had destroyed beyond. The tunnels were in complete disarray as she pelted through them, and they were filled with panicked, scurrying staff and
horrified inmates. Whatever had struck such fear in them, it was not Artemi.
Curious black and white portraits glared at her from the walls of every hallway and through the doors of each room. The picture was always of the same individual: empty-eyed, pickaxe-nosed and thin-lipped. Candles circled many of the portraits, but what Artemi had been unable to fathom during her stay here was just how the
painter had managed to make their strokes so fine as to be invisible. And how had they so perfectly replicated the same image a thousand-odd times?
That would be a puzzle for a calmer moment, she told herself.
She pressed onward through the melee and into the open air beyond. Though the outside was fresh and cleansmelling against the odours ofthe prison, there was no sun to light it. The skies were pitch rather
than grey, which was somewhat unexpected. In her windowless cell, and without the Blazes to aid her, Artemi had enjoyed access to few indicators to the passage of time. But to have been so far wrong – that was unusual.
As she drew nearer to the town’s limits, strange sounds of howling and screeching reached her ears. All around her, carts were overturned, rubbish scattered across the roads and doors slammed as the town’s
residents fled to the safety of their homes. Their terror was strange however, as not one of them screamed aloud or made any cry for help. The howling and screeching was coming from somewhere else. Another strange feature of this night-time town was that the street lamps all burned with their peculiar, hissing light, but there still lingered the smell of unburned spirit, as it was known here. Artemi had been here long
enough to have learned that the smell meant the lamps had only just been lit.
She slowed her pace a fraction, but came to a stop when she saw something reach over the peak of the town’s defences. Whatever it was, it looked to be clawed. Above her, several braced awnings appeared to have been drawn to the upper limits ofthe wall as if to seal the city beneath a solid canopy, but there were gaps. Whoever had been trying to close the defences had been interrupted.
There was a screech to Artemi’s left, and when she turned to its source, she found herself taking whole steps backward. There crept a creature, and it walked upon two legs as a man should, but its arms were too long and webbed with stained and ragged, bat-like wings. Those wings were not capable of flight like that, surely? At least, no farther than a clipped crow could fly. Artemi took another step back, waiting for the deformed creature to make its move first, and then the street lamps flickered, and died. Everything was thrust into pitch darkness; the howls stuttered to silence. There were no more screeches, no reflections, glimmers or even hints of light. Artemi was blind, and she might as well have been deaf. But almost as suddenly, the old Kusuru training she had received
made itsel
f known. She took seven silent sidesteps and crouched, stock-still, to listen. Blinding had been one of The Daisain’s favourite exercises in training his perfect killers. Before she and Mirel were old enough to wield, he would carve out their eyes and have them fight one ofthe sighted boys. Other times, the roles would be reversed, but that did not make the task any easier. Artemi still recalled how she had crept
behind an eyeless Tallyn Hunter with a dagger in her hand, and had stuck it into his back without a second thought. She had cried with guilt afterward, but The Daisain had soon corrected her on that display of sentimentality. This, however, was not the noisy, scent-filled mayhem of the Sokirin forest; in this place of half life, everything had become utterly silent. There were no sounds to echo against obstructions, and no screeches from the monsters to
reveal their location. And so, Artemi waited.
Just then, there was something... a sort of rustling or whispering. Artemi listened keenly to it while she held her breath, her hands pressed hard against the cold stone of the ground and her bare feet slick with mud. The whispering grew closer, until it was near enough to be the recognisable sound of large nostrils with a lungful of air moving through them, and then
Voices of Blaze (Volume 5 of The Fireblade Array) Page 5