Second Sight: Second Tale of the Lifesong

by Greg Hamerton

  The bowman peered down at Bevn and Gabrielle again. “Show for us your palms!” His words were spiced with an unusual accent.

  Bevn couldn’t see any benefit to being defiant. He may be a king, but they had spears. He spread his hands. The spider-ship creaked as the men above leant further over their rail to inspect the two Eyrians.

  “Look good for me,” the stripe-eyed man said, aside, “they look as hunters, clean as ugly.”

  “I can’t see if they devildusters are, or not,” argued the bearded fellow. “They must first talk!”

  “Bevinn? Gabreel?” asked the bow-man.

  How did he know their names? Bevn wondered.

  “He is Bevn, I am Gabrielle,” answered the Shadowcaster.

  “King Bevn!” Bevn corrected hastily. “I can speak for myself!”

  Gabrielle snorted beside him.

  “Rook!” the bow-man ordered. His men lifted the spears up and away, and stowed them alongside their basket. “Come onto,” the bow-man offered, extending his hand and waving them up.

  “Don’t on the silversand stand!” a voice shouted from above. “Use the board outer and the ropes!”

  Bevn stopped where he had been about to walk around the outrigger to reach the ladder of lattice-worked cane which he had presumed was the easiest way aboard. He had almost set his foot down into the metallic grit of the desert.

  “Why not?” he demanded.

  “Because it is dorra! Malaka! Magic!” shouted the bow-man. The others clustered at the rail again, as if something was about to happen.

  “Where?” Bevn looked suspiciously at the ground.

  “In the sand. Silver is the potentest, it waits for living flesh. Stand away!”

  The silver was magic? He saw the desert sands anew. From horizon to horizon, the landscape had been ravaged. Maybe there had been trees, people and even cities on those barren plains, before the silver magic had turned it to sand. A thrill passed through him. He had to ask.

  “Whose magic is it? Where does it come from?”

  “Who else?” answered the bow-man with a scowl. “It is of the one whose name should not spoken be.”

  The Sorcerer Ametheus. He had wielded great power here. He had laid waste to an entire land. Someone must have upset him, but the Sorcerer obviously had an immense store of magic, and he wasn’t afraid to use it.

  This was the Sorcerer they were trying to find; the one who ruled Oldenworld with his awesome might.

  Bevn breathed out slowly.

  He followed Gabrielle’s lead and stepped onto the outer running-board then used the thin rope to reach the ladder. The rope was unfamiliar, it was translucent and it gripped his skin lightly when he held it. Everything about the spider-craft was strange: its slanted, curving geometry, its delicate appearance, the pale woven material of the long basket, the coloured designs painted upon its sides. As Bevn climbed up the wide-spaced ladder he noticed there were streaks of black and grey upon its legs, just above the running-boards, as if fire had licked at it. He scooted up the rungs, away from the glinting malice of the dry naked earth.

  The bow-man introduced himself as Jek. He looked more weathered and sterner than the others, if that were possible. But he extended a rough hand nonetheless, and welcomed them on board his cutter. So he called the craft.

  “A messenger to us came, he had said that he for another man worked, one who wished a secret to remain,” the captain explained. “But his word is as good like his gems. South-west from Eastmark by five leagues did he say, and south-west by five did we you find. We shall you to Rôgspar ride, the first corner of our land of sides six, wherefrom you to Koom the woven roads can take. There you shall find further aid from the man who said you would know him by the meeting in a cavern. Makes this sense for you?”

  A cavern… They were talking about the wizard. Black Saladon had sent the men with their sandcraft to collect them. The mention of the six-sided land reminded Bevn of something else the wizard had said about the peoples of Oldenworld.

  “You are all Lûk?”

  Jek nodded, and then grinned wryly. “Some Lûkfolk would disagree, they’d say we are only half Lûk, and half madness. We are windrunners, are we not, comrades?”

  “Full with the wind!”

  “We laugh in danger’s face!”

  “Zigana krom jak jin jeer!”

  The last comment by the bearded man must have been in Lûkish, because it produced a round of laughter from the other Lûk men.

  “Few of our kin would choose to live like this,” Jek continued, “but we—we find it harder to live in any suffocating down. You’ll see few of any kind out on the wastes; fewer still come out this far. Know you that we two days from the forest are, even with good winds?” He looked to where Bevn and Gabrielle had come from with a puzzled expression, but seemed to catch himself. “We were told your journey urgent is, and so we shall ride the sands while the winds hold. Meet the crew of my cutter.”

  The others had short names. Käl, Lowki, Ska—his black stripe set askew by laconic eyebrows—and Mûs, the wire-bearded fellow who manned the trailing oar. All the Lûk men were short, no taller than Bevn, but they outweighed him by far—their hunched shoulders, broad chests and bowed legs displaying all the muscular thickness of smiths or loggers. They seemed tough and impressive, intelligent for savages, for that was what they must be, thought Bevn. They all smelled of smoke and spices—pungent—a healthy smell but one that gave a strange sting to Bevn’s nostrils.

  The outriders, who waited farther out in the desert on their skuds with the sails raised, were named Eitan and Hack. As soon as the brief introductions were made, Jek resumed his place at the bow and gripped the curved bar that was set upon a swivelled steering column. He hauled to the left, and the shimmering yellow sail dived from its tethered position in the sky. The bow of the great spidery craft whipped around and they scudded away across the sands.

  The wind whistled in Bevn’s ears. After a juddering start, the sand-cutter settled into a smooth motion, as straight as an arrow and whispering-fast. It seemed to glide over the sand, hardly touching it at all, the running-boards only churning in the sand when they crossed an uneven ridge or gully. Bevn wondered if the thin skin stretched taut and low between the cutter’s legs had something to do with it—maybe it made something like a cushion of air upon which they rode.

  As they descended from the higher ground, the wind became warmer. Jek told them it had changed direction, coming more from the south, but Bevn knew the savage was just confused, because the wind was still blowing in his face from the bow of the cutter, which had to be from the north. He didn’t question the windrunner captain. The stony-faced savage probably couldn’t recognise the direction of his own farts in a bathtub. Besides, he looked as if he was concentrating hard enough just to guide the sail to catch the wind and to scan the ground ahead. Now and again he shouted terse commands back to bearded Mûs, who altered their course with his oar to follow the darkest streaks in the soil.

  The sun followed them erratically, tracking through the tilted panels of the sky like a light behind fractured glass. As the day passed, it wandered from its proper arc, and the light often seemed to come down at the wrong angle given its position, though Bevn knew that that illusion might be partly due to the changing course of the cutter and his growing disorientation. He couldn’t get his head around what he was seeing. The ground wasn’t steady, either. The cutter sometimes felt as if it was crossing crests and troughs when the ground appeared level. He could swear that out of the corner of his eye he had seen one long ridge move, and a large area of boulders become standing stones once they had passed. Soon Bevn couldn’t tell which way they were headed at all, except that Jek drove the cutter forward across an endless sea of silver, ahead of the dry winds. The desert gave off a burnt scent, savoury-sweet, like cinnamon upon overcooked meat.

  He could not believe how big it was. The distant dark line on the horizon had come no closer. The Lûk cutter almost flew acr
oss the desert and yet had gone nowhere.

  Rock rock rock rock rock.

  Sand sand sand sand sand.

  He began to wonder if the silver grit really was dangerous to walk on. The Lûk were convinced it held the raw power of the Sorcerer, but maybe that was just a story to make them get onto the cutter, to force them to pay some reward for taking them across the desert. The savages were going to ask them for something, like gold or his crown, Bevn just knew it. And they were sailing in circles, just to make Bevn and Gabrielle think they had performed a great service for them. They must be sailing in circles, or they would have reached the edge of the wasteland. Bevn was sure he could have walked on the silver stuff. It couldn’t be that bad, it was just like ash.

  Maybe one of the tailriders would crash, and he’d get to see if there was any truth to the danger.

  He could always hope.

  “Po jis fon! Bajar!”

  The woven deck tilted beneath Bevn’s feet as Captain Jek swung the flying sail hard across their bow, forcing them to double back on their track. The cutter rolled sickeningly outward in the turn and tested the full strength of the outrigger. Bevn was tipped against the rail and could see deep mounds of silver grit whipping by below him, sand which burned the nose of the foremost outrigger. A strong hand gripped him and pulled him away from the rail. He sat heavily on the central bench as the cutter flopped back onto a level course.

  The lanky one called Lowki had pulled him back. He was looking behind the cutter now, gesturing wildly with the others, to the two riders who trailed them. Right, right, his gestures said. The tail-riders barely needed to be warned; they read the cutter’s movement instinctively and changed their course with graceful sliding turns.

  They were approaching something dangerous.

  “What is it?” Bevn asked excitedly, tugging on Lowki’s sleeve.

  “Bajar! A time-spaw!” Lowki shouted. His speech slowed as he considered the right words to use. “If we enter might we a day lose, or worse, is it a slow-spaw. Might a quick-spaw be, but you can never sure be from the outside, even with the way the stones they are.”

  The sunlight wasn’t as harsh as it had been at noon, but it still set the mottled desert sands a-shimmer. Bevn looked hard into the shallow depression they skirted. Dark patches lay in the silver sand, but they were hardly remarkable—he’d seen such streaks before. The ground in the hollow was smooth except for the scattering of loose stones littering its surface, and a semicircle of white pebbles.

  “What’s a time-spaw?”

  “That is.”

  “How can you tell?”

  “They spit always those white pebbles out. And the shadows fall on the wrong side of the stones. Look.”

  They scudded past the area Lowki had indicated. Bevn looked and looked but he couldn’t see what they were talking about. The tail-riders were giving the hollow an even wider berth than the cutter. Bevn wondered if the savages had spent too long in the desert under the blinding sun.

  Only as he looked away from the affected area, did he begin to see the difference. The stones everywhere else squatted upon afternoon shadows lurking under their north-eastern sides. Within the hollow those shadows were absent or hidden on the far side so they couldn’t be seen. How had Jek noticed such a small detail in time to avoid it? What else did their captain watch out for in the desert ahead?

  “How can it ... do that to the shadows?” Bevn asked.

  “When wildfire too many changes in one place forces, it can through the pattern that the elements have been stitched upon eat and the ordered passage of hours beneath unravel. It’s like a run in a loom when a stitch is dropped—the rest of the tapestry remains unaffected for a while, but the line what through one place runs is upset and follows not the pattern of those on either side. Inside a slowspaw, time slips back. It won’t a slowspaw stay, it cycles backward and forward, gains it time, loses it time. Some of them fade away. Some of them stay unbalanced for years. There’s a horrible one near Rôgspar, the worst quickspaw I’ve ever seen. Kal and Eitan run it on their bugboards in high summer, when the days long enough are a jump to span.”

  “They run it?”

  “You’ve got it to see, just it see!” Lowki exclaimed.

  “Right through the core and out in a heartbeat!” Kal admitted, a sparkle in his eye. “That’s four leagues and it takes me a quarter-day to back come. But the speed! Nothing like it!”

  “One day it’s going to flip, the quickspaw will flip, and they’ll still in there be when the snows to Koom come,” Jek grumbled over his shoulder.

  “Jek-ai, you can by the colour of the crystal tell.” Kal turned to Bevn. “You throw a clear rock in, and if it still speeding is then flashes it red, if it’s blue it’s cold gone.”

  “Scollip!” cursed Jek. “That’s not an exact art, and you know it! The surface isn’t smooth, you might a fold on the edge just hit.”

  Kal grinned at his captain’s back. “If there not some danger was who’d it want to do?”

  Behind Kal, out in the desert, Bevn caught a sudden movement. One of the tailriders had cut in hard across their trail, heading for the timespaw.

  “Look, it’s Hak! Hak’s going it to sketch!” cried Lowki.

  Jek cursed in Lûkish behind Bevn, but the other Lûk men turned as one to watch the mad rush of the tailrider.

  “He’s the line read!” shouted Mûs.

  “He’s got grey to use!” Lowki added.

  “What’s he going to do?” asked Bevn, not understanding why the tailrider had chosen to ride into the timespaw. “Didn’t you say it was dangerous to go in?”

  “Right. We can’t in go with the sickle-sails. The lines are so long they’ll outside the spaw be while you’re in. You’ll a sickle that way lose and a strike in the dorra have.”

  “So what’s he doing?”

  Lowki held up a finger. “Watch.”

  The tailrider called Hak was standing astride his skud, racing across the sand at breakneck speed. Bevn lost sight of him as he crossed behind the rear of the cutter. His gold-streaked sail blurred by. Bevn clambered over the central bench and saw Hak again just as the tailrider threw his body to the near side of his skud and turned hard at the very edge of the hollowed area in the desert. Dirty sand sprayed away from his outside rail in a wide rooster tail of silver-grey as he skidded precariously behind his whipping sail. Then he turned his sail upward and came shooting out of the turn like a bolt from a crossbow. He lifted one hand and punched the air as he howled like a wolf.

  Mûs at the rear-oar lifted a hollowed reed to his lips and blew a piercing note on the horn. The others yelped, barked and yodelled in a chorus of clamorous sounds.

  They were all completely mad, Bevn decided. Strange, savage, smelly and insane.

  Back at the edge of the timespaw, a long arc of sand still hung in the air, a perfect curling wave of frozen grey. The timespaw had caught the tailrider’s wake as it passed, and the moment had not ended yet.

  “Probably a slowspaw then,” Lowki said, nodding his head. “That side at least.”

  Bevn watched the curve of suspended sand, but it still did not fall, at least not as fast as it should have. Eventually it began to settle at the far end, rolling toward them like a snake slowly laying itself on its belly.

  “Rock-head! It’s so dangerous!” cursed Jek from the bow.

  But when Bevn turned to look at the captain he could see his shoulders shook with laughter. Bevn didn’t understand how the captain could let his men disobey his wishes and not care. “Why are you laughing? Aren’t you going to flog him, or something? In my land we always flog a disobedient underling.”

  “We do not have ... underlings ... in Lûk. You must live in a sad place, Bevynn.”

  The dumb grey-skin was still pronouncing his name wrong, giving it a comical ring to the last syllable.

  “Eyri is so much better than this stupid sandy desert you madmen ride on! So much better!”

  Jek ignored his outbu
rst. “You don’t understand. If Hak didn’t do that sort of thing, he wouldn’t be a windrunner, now would he?” Jek watched Bevn for a while then shook his head.

  They ate on the cutter—flattened dried fruit of some kind with some spiced papery meat rolled into soft uncooked dough. It was awful. A long tube of water was passed around, a stoppered pipe of polished wood which gave the water a bitter taste. Bevn preferred the water in his own waterskin, and he drank the one dry. The food didn’t improve with the second tasting. The look Lowki gave him when he asked if there was anything different to eat warned him to keep his distaste to himself. He guessed the savages were feeding them badly because Black Saladon wasn’t there. Bevn wished the mighty wizard would come to them. He’d put these uncultured pockmarked peasants in their place.

  They stopped before sunset because the wind died away. The sun was an orange orb sinking through the last lines of distant haze above the stark landscape. To the right of the sun, along the entire northern horizon, the desert ended at the dark green line Bevn had seen earlier in the day. At last the edge of the wasteland was visibly closer. Jek told him the cutter had slipped a bit west of their true course that day, but they had more than made up for it with speed. They would reach the forest by midday, given good winds, and tack across to the trailhead for Rôgspar by late afternoon. Jek guided them up a saddle and onto a wide plateau of dark sand, where the silver blight had long since lost its potency. The grey sand would be safe, Jek told them, so long as the surface was good and you didn’t dig under the crust.

  Two of the crew came up beside Jek and spun the windlasses which wound in the lines that held the great sail in the sky. The windlass axles were set against reinforced columns on either side of the main swivelstay and, while the crewmen wound, Jek continued to guide the sail overhead on the last of the failing breeze. It fluttered down upon their heads, threatening to swamp the entire basket. Bevn noticed that the yellow-washed fabric was translucent, and it had been sewn into many parallel pockets to catch the wind. It was an impressive piece of sewing—such a flimsy thing, and yet it could pull the cutter and all of them in it. At the last moment the crew members reached up and caught hold of the tips of the sail, and with a great whoosh it fell to their feet and slipped across the basket in an uneven pile of silky colour. It was lighter than paper, yet it seemed stronger than canvas. Bevn tried, surreptitiously, but he couldn’t push his finger through it. The men disconnected the lines off the tips, rolled it up and stowed it within the central bench.