Darksong

by Isobelle Carmody

  ‘She believes that the Chaos spirit does not see her as a stranger because it did not see her crossing,’ Feyt murmured.

  ‘She is obviously correct in saying that she crossed to Keltor at the same time as the Unraveller, but I believe that her invisibility to the Chaos spirit has more to do with her bond to the feinna.’

  ‘That story was remarkable,’ Feyt said. ‘She claims the link is broken but can such a link be broken?’

  ‘A child is weaned from its mother and eventually leaves her as an adult …’

  ‘But they are not mother and child …’

  ‘What is an unyk to his myrmidon?’ Alene asked.

  What is an unyick? Glynn wondered and felt herself drifting away into sleep again.

  29

  When night falls

  and the dark song calls,

  will you hear?

  Will you tread the moon paths?

  Will you sing the lost soul home?

  SONGS OF DANAE

  ‘You said two things,’ Glynn said.

  Tareed glanced at her, puzzled. ‘Your pardon?’

  ‘This morning when we were talking, after I had told my story, Alene asked if you had any thoughts, and you said there were two things, but you only mentioned one: why the legionnaires had not come here at once to look for Anyi.’

  ‘Oh,’ Tareed nodded. ‘The other thing I was going to say was that even if none of the Vespians would help Coralyn, there was always the Nightwhisper.’

  Glynn thought for a moment, then remembered. ‘The ship that belonged to Fulig’s exiled brother?’

  ‘Yes. His ship is a renegade and it is said that Sharayde, who masters it now, will do anything for coin. I was thinking that maybe Coralyn had thought of using him to carry her legionnaires to war if anything went wrong with the Vespians. After all, it is likely he was part of the conspiracy to blame Bleyd for the poison sent to Tarsin anyway.’ She looked warily over her shoulder at Feyt.

  Glynn sighed.

  She thought that waking in the soulweaver’s hut had been one of those pure, unexpectedly perfect moments that would be a vivid memory even if she lived long enough to be terribly old and had forgotten almost everything else. The dimness of the hut bathed in the honey glow of the fire, the red shaft of Kalinda light cutting through the open door, the sweet smells of the trees and grasses flowing in and mingling with the scent of wood smoke and frying eggs and the scent of drying herbs – all had seemed so vivid and lovely. For a moment she had felt a surge of undiluted happiness just knowing such simple things could move her almost to tears with their beauty. Such memories sustained you through the grey times, Glynn thought, and wondered what memories sustained Ember. Now, I will be a memory to her, the thought came to Glynn as an ache.

  ‘Are you thinking about your home?’ Tareed had asked softly. She was making some heavy-looking golden pancakes on a metal plate laid across the fire.

  ‘I was thinking of my sister,’ Glynn admitted. ‘I told my father that I would take care of her, but I have failed.’

  ‘I do not think your sister would feel you had failed her,’ Tareed said, very seriously.

  ‘You are right,’ Glynn said sadly. ‘Once we were very close, but when she found out that she was dying she couldn’t seem to care about anything or anyone. It wasn’t until I came here that I realised Ember has lived most of her life waiting to die. But what she feels or doesn’t feel isn’t the point. I should have been there with her to the end. I promised it.’

  ‘You said … Ember,’ Anyi said. He had been sleeping but now he was sitting up in bed, his hair flattened against his cheek on one side. Their voices had probably disturbed him.

  ‘I did,’ Glynn said. ‘It is the name of my sister in my own world.’

  His eyes widened. ‘But … that is the name of …’

  ‘The visionweaver who saved Tarsin?’ Glynn asked, smiling. ‘I know. I nearly had a heart attack when Tarsin asked me if I had seen where Ember was. For a minute I actually thought he meant my Ember. But of course she could not possibly be this visionweaver.’ It suddenly struck Glynn that these people had actually met the mysterious visionweaver.

  ‘The visionweaver …’ Anyi began.

  ‘No,’ Alene snapped. ‘For once, Anyi, be as the Holder you will become and obey the advice of a soulweaver. Say nothing more of this. Go and bathe in the lake.’

  Anyi stared at her. ‘But she …’ he began.

  ‘Anyi,’ Feyt growled. ‘You stink of blood and sweat. Go and bathe.’

  Anyi gave them both a long hard look, and again he seemed for a moment to be more man than boy with a mind, perhaps fairly enough, to resent their assumption of authority over him. But suddenly he turned stiffly on his heel and went out of the hut. At a signal from the soulweaver, Feyt went after him.

  Alene came over to Glynn and sat down. ‘She will warn him that he must be careful what he says to you. We have spoken of this prediction that you mentioned and we have agreed that it will be better to say nothing to you of any matter connected to … to the Unraveller, as you have asked, and there is a connection, we believe, between the visionweaver and the Unraveller. I will say no more of that. There is another thing I wanted to say to you. You have decided not to go to Darkfall, but I think you should reconsider, especially if you are concerned for your sister.’

  ‘You mean one of the soulweavers will be able to see how she is?’ Glynn asked. The thought had occurred to her, but she was not sure if she wanted to see Ember without being able to help her.

  ‘I will say only that many of the questions you thought to have answered by me, will be answered on Darkfall. And if it is true that there is a possibility of your causing harm to the Unraveller – I can not say that it is not true, though it seems very unlikely to me – then you are right in believing that there is less chance of doing harm if you are on Darkfall. And if Solen of Acantha feels as you do, then he will be waiting for you when you return.’ Glynn felt confused, for she had deliberately glossed over her relationship with Solen. The soulweaver was the least blind person she had ever met, and she wondered what it must have been like to have been Argon, living on an island of mist with all of those blind women who saw too much. No wonder he had been as he was, and maybe it had been inevitable that he would fall in love with a soulweaver.

  Alene carried the fragrant flat cakes to the table and began to prepare a buttery-looking sauce, summoning Tareed to help her. Left alone, Glynn sat frowning into the ashes, trying to decide what she ought to do. She was still there when Anyi returned, hair dripping into the collar of his borrowed shirt. He looked less angry but he cast a few doleful looks at Glynn, and she guessed that he felt she should be trusted with the identity of the Unraveller, because she had saved his life. He was young enough to see it as a simple matter of honour, as if matters of honour were ever simple.

  Alene suggested that Glynn bathe, too. ‘You will find it refreshing and, by the time you come back, the meal will be ready.’

  ‘I think I will,’ Glynn said, accepting a towel from Tareed. She was being got out of the way, but she was glad enough to have the solitude to consider Alene’s advice … or had it been an order?

  By the time she had sluiced herself down in the icy water, dried and dressed in a pair of Tareed’s trews and a long shirt of Feyt’s, she had made up her mind that she would go to Darkfall. In part because of what Alene had said about learning what was happening to Ember, but mostly to ensure she caused no harm to the Unraveller. It had shaken her that Alene had even admitted the possibility that she would betray him. The other reason was less clear, but it was connected to Solen. She had longed to be able to stay on Keltor with him, but now that she knew she could not return to her own world, she felt like a castaway. It would have mattered less if she was not also aware that, having communicated as no humans had ever done in either of their worlds, the two of them must rely on clumsy human words to communicate from now on. The thought made her feel uneasy and inadequate. After al
l, they had never even embraced. What if the deepest intensity of their feelings had been merely a side effect of the feinna link? They had been attracted before the birthing link had connected them so profoundly, but Glynn feared that, having experienced love with feinna-enhanced sensibilities, anything less would not be enough. For either of them.

  Yet maybe it was only a matter of getting used to being herself again, and that might be another good reason for travelling to Darkfall.

  True to her word, Alene had breakfast ready when Glynn returned to the hut. She accepted a platter of pancakes, discovering that they were delicious and unexpectedly crunchy, and she was ravenous. Anyi picked at his own food, casting discreet looks of concern at her, and she wondered if he pitied her because she had learned that she could not go home. He might well empathise for, as a mermod, he was so cut off from his family that he was unable to visit them until he was Holder. In his own way, Anyi was no less an exile than she was, Glynn thought. Maybe even Tarsin was a kind of exile.

  Glynn found herself remembering the sadness in Alene’s face when Feyt had shouted that Tarsin did not want her. ‘He does not want my duty,’ she had said.

  What had Tarsin wanted then? The obvious answer was Alene’s love. Glynn had supposed that the trouble between the Holder and his soulweaver arose from his jealousy of Argon, but meeting Alene had made it hard to see her as a mere pawn between the two men.

  Glynn was relieved when the meal was finished and they were making final preparations to depart. Feyt shouldered an efficient-looking pack, refusing her offer to share the load, then the big woman fitted one of the javelin poles, which Tareed explained were traditional myrmidon weapons, into a hide holster strapped between her shoulder blades. Anyi was stuffing leaves inside a spare pair of Feyt’s boots to make them fit, having decided that Tareed’s were too small. He hardly seemed to be aware of the cut on his leg, which had caused his so much pain the previous day, and Glynn wondered, not for the first time, what difference there was between the healing of a soulweaver and a white cloak.

  In the end, the parting from Tareed and the soulweaver was brief and almost perfunctory. Feyt told Alene sternly to take care, and then she bade Tareed to guard the soulweaver’s back. Anyi hugged Alene and while he did the same to Tareed, the soulweaver turned to Glynn, who had been standing awkwardly by to make her own farewells.

  ‘I’ve decided I will go to Darkfall,’ Glynn said.

  ‘I am glad,’ Alene approved. ‘Go safely.’

  ‘Goodbye,’ Tareed said to Glynn, and shook her hand. ‘May the Song be with you.’

  ‘Come,’ Feyt said brusquely, and that was that. Glynn cast a backward glance at the hut by the mirror lake just before they passed out of sight of it, but both Tareed and the soulweaver had gone inside.

  By midmorning, Skyreach Bluff loomed on their right, for Feyt had set a swift pace. They had walked first to the shore of the lake, and then they had made their way along the beach to reach the track they now followed, which skirted a weed-choked stream.

  They soon turned from the stream trail onto a less defined track which Feyt said would bring them to the plainway, and the terrain grew steadily hotter and more dry. Glynn was beginning to get a headache from the glare and wished she had a decent pair of sunglasses.

  ‘Your pardon?’ Feyt asked, turning slightly to look at her. Glynn gathered that she had been muttering aloud to herself without realising it. Her father had always laughed at this habit, saying she was not supposed to talk to herself until she was old and had no one else to listen.

  ‘I … I said I was glad to be moving,’ Glynn stammered, seeing that the myrmidon was waiting for an answer.

  ‘A myrmidonish sentiment,’ Feyt observed, turning away again. They were now relying on water bottles which Feyt carried around her neck, for there were no more streams. But when they stopped to rest and eat, they did so in the lee of a mound of rocks which hid a trickling spring of clear icy water.

  ‘You had best drink your fill,’ Feyt advised them. ‘We will be unable to consume water while we are on the plainway.’

  ‘The aspi herders manage to drink out there, and the traders,’ Anyi said, sounding querulous. Glynn had noticed that he had begun to favour his cut leg, and guessed he was in pain.

  ‘Plainway herders and traders have the equipment and they are adapted to it,’ Feyt told him mildly, and produced a salve which she said he must massage into his wound. ‘You do not look so well, either,’ she told Glynn.

  ‘I’m fine,’ Glynn said. But she was not. Her head was throbbing and she felt oddly lacking in energy. If it had not been impossible, she would have said she was feeling exactly the way she did when she had first used her feinna abilities. She could only suppose that the lack of sleep was catching up with her, or her body was reacting to the loss of the feinna link.

  Feyt prepared a scratch meal of bread and several pots of the paste-like spreads that Solen had always liked, then she emptied from her pockets the water bulbs they had collected along the way, saying again that the plainway was not for the faint-hearted.

  ‘It is the sort of road which, once begun, must be travelled to the end,’ she said.

  ‘Aren’t all roads like that?’ Glynn murmured, but she made herself eat some bread and two of the delicious cheese-like bulbs. ‘It’s like life. You can never really stop or go backwards, no matter how you might want it.’

  ‘Now you sound like Duran,’ Feyt said. ‘Tell me again of your meeting with her.’ Glynn obliged, although she suspected that the myrmidon was merely encouraging her to talk to ensure that neither she nor Anyi could speak about the Unraveller. ‘Chieftain Duran called you little sister?’ Feyt asked when she had finished, but it was not really a question for she had heard this when Glynn had first told the story in the soulweaver’s hut.

  Then Glynn registered what the myrmidon had said. ‘Duran is chieftain of the myrmidons? She didn’t say so.’

  ‘She leads the myrmidons and she is Chieftain of Myrmidor sept. And before you ask, that is not the usual practice. Duran was heir to the position of chieftain when she sneaked off and applied to join the myrmidons. The old chieftain was her grandfather, and she was his heir because her brothers and parents had died in a storming when their ship sank in the Turin Straits. Of course the myrmidons of the time did not know who Duran was when they put her through rhiad. She had dyed her hair dark and pretended to come from Fomhika. She ended up succeeding so brilliantly that she became the leader of the myrmidons. She was fourteen turns of the seasons then, and the youngest ever to lead us. She had been ruling for a week before it was discovered that the chieftain’s granddaughter was not visiting a friend as she had claimed. The old chieftain came to petition the myrmidons for help to find his runaway heir. Of course, he had to petition the leader of the myrmidons …’ Feyt shook her head, smiling. ‘That is a moment I will remember for ever. At first that world-weary old man looked shocked, and then he laughed. Many said that what came about after that was his doing because he had encouraged Duran to be wild and headstrong, claiming that a chieftain needed to be something of a rogue. He was certainly a rogue if the tales about him are true, but maybe they are exaggerated. After a person dies stories grow around them like grave weed. In any case, he fell from an aspi and broke his neck only a few days after discovering that Duran was leader of the myrmidons, and because he had not yet tried to undo what had been done, Duran was both chieftain and leader. So now, if her dual rulership would be altered, she must appeal to herself. There might have been trouble, but she had already proven her worth to the myrmidons and she sought the advice of Darkfall, who said that Duran was to remain both chieftain and leader of their protectors, for this had been foreseen. The Myrmidori muttered a bit back then, but these days they worry that she is irreplaceable.’

  ‘Somehow it doesn’t surprise me that she began that way,’ Glynn said. ‘But how is it that a chieftain can travel so far from her sept? From what I have heard, it seems as if chieftains an
d Holders do not travel much here.’

  ‘Or mermods,’ Anyi said resentfully.

  ‘Chieftains do traditionally remain on their sept, and that is considered wise, for you do not risk your head to save your foot. But it is not the myrmidon way to sit and rule. We believe that a leader must do all that she would command, so that she can temper need with mercy and compassion,’ Feyt went on. ‘Therefore Duran is an unconventional chieftain, and yet perhaps that is exactly why she is loved. One only need be with her to be warmed by the glow of her spirit.’

  ‘I felt it,’ Glynn admitted. She hesitated. ‘Why did you laugh earlier when I said that I didn’t tell her about myself because I was afraid she wouldn’t understand about the feinna link?’

  A shutter seemed to close over the myrmidon’s face. ‘To know the answer to that question, you must take up Duran’s offer, or ask her yourself when you are safely upon Iridom,’ she said, but not unkindly.

  ‘You still have not told us how we are going to get into the citadel,’ Anyi said.

  ‘Ah,’ Feyt said, clearly glad to have the subject changed. ‘Well, we can be certain that the gates will all be watched. But it is not the official gate legionnaires that we need to fear, so much as Coralyn’s greens, who will be stationed near every gate in case you appear. You see the reds will not know that you are missing, Anyi. If you appear, I think any reds who witness it will have to die. The greens will also be watching out for myrmidonish-looking women, partly because they will be wondering what happened to me, and partly because the draakira may have communicated the loss of their precious trakkerbeast to the Iridomi, so they will be looking for Glynn as well. To complicate matters, it is also possible that the red legionnaires will be looking for you on their own account, if Tarsin wants to question you about that darklin visioning.’