An Artist's Eye (Dica Series Book 5)

by Clive S. Johnson

  “There doesn’t appear to be anything to tie up to, nor steps to gain a landing,” he said.

  “Is thee planning on going ashore then?” Breadgrinder asked, hopefully.

  “Not yet, no, not whilst we‘ve still got water beneath the keel. But I suspect there’ll come a time before long.” Phaylan then turned and called, “Master Mate?” which brought the sound of feet on deck.

  “Aye, aye, Steermaster?”

  “All ship-shape I hope?”

  “It is now, Steermaster. In fact, the crew are a lot more in shape than I feared they’d be. They seem to be getting over their ... their, well, their unfortunate reticence, if I can put it that way, sir.”

  “Good. Good. Then break out the grog, Master Mate. Small tots mind. All things considered, I reckon they deserve it. At least they’ve not mutinied.”

  “Err ... aye, aye, sir. If thee insist.”

  “I do. Oh, and Master Mate?”

  “Aye, sir?”

  “Do you think we could hoist the craulena as high as that quay over there?”

  The first mate peered across the water, then aft at the hoist, below which something hid beneath a large tarpaulin. “I think so, sir. Only just, though, but I’m sure we could manage it.”

  “Good,” Phaylan said, more to himself than the mate, who he then dismissed.

  Phaylan watched him go, noticing how the setting sun behind him had already touched the lustrous green of the horizon.

  He turned back and once more leant on the rail beside Breadgrinder, lifting his gaze to the eastern sky, now darkening above the Southern Hills. Quietly, he said, “Our first night where no Dican has ever been before.”

  “Aye, I suppose so,” Breadgrinder said, drawing his jerkin together across his broad chest, “and it’s already starting to feel cold.”

  “As though we’ve slipped unknowingly from Leiyatel’s warm embrace,” Phaylan almost whispered, then spat into the water. He watched the fleck of foam quickly dissolve and so disappear, as he felt sure they too must do, now they’d broken free at last of their own true world.

  25 What be there in a Kiss?

  “I can see it, there, straight in front of us,” Falmeard said, aghast. “What’s wrong with you, Prescinda?”

  “No, Falmeard, you’re wrong. There’s nothing there. You must be imagining it. Look,” she said, pointing at the Lost Northern Way, “what’s wrong with us carrying on the way we were going?”

  “But we weren’t going that way. We were heading east, along Eastern Walk. Don’t you remember?”

  Nephril had at last stood up, a bit unsteadily. “Nay, Falmeard. What madness hast gripped thee?”

  “Then where were we supposed to be going, eh, Nephril? What on Earth would we be doing going north?”

  Nephril was clearly at a loss, making Prescinda think hard about Falmeard’s question. “Eastern Walk?” she pondered, but it still didn’t mean much. “Well, are you ready?” she found herself saying. “Can we get on now? It’ll be dark soon,” and she turned and began walking away.

  The look on Nephril’s face spoke of pain but he hobbled after Prescinda nonetheless, leaving Falmeard completely baffled. “Oi!” he called as he hurried to catch up.

  Although she couldn’t quite remember where they were going, she knew they had to get there before nightfall. It put a spring in her step so she steadily left Nephril behind.

  “Where are you going?” Falmeard’s voice surprised her as she felt her arm grabbed and smartly jerked back, spinning her into his embrace.

  His lips were on hers before she knew it, warm and sensuous. She tried to object, to pull away, but something in the tingle at her lips sapped her strength.

  How long it lasted she couldn’t guess, but when Falmeard slowly withdrew, and she raised her fingers shakily to her mouth, she noticed Nephril’s shocked face. All she could find to say was, “What? What? Falmeard. Why?” but then noticed the camper van.

  Stepping forward a pace or two, still staring, she stopped beside Nephril. “I ... I don’t understand.”

  “Be thee all right, mine dove?” Nephril asked as he placed a hand tenderly on her arm. “Thou look like thou hast seen a ghost.”

  “Nephril?” she said. “Just turn around a minute would you, and tell me what you see.”

  He did but shrugged. “Just the junction, mine dear. Why?”

  “Come on,” she urged, and threw her arm about his waist, hurrying him back that way. “Quick. I don’t think we’ve much time.”

  She noticed Falmeard’s long shadow out of the corner of her eye, drawing up fast behind their own, but kept her gaze ahead for fear of losing sight of the camper van. Nephril’s weight now lessened, and so she knew Falmeard had taken his other arm.

  She noticed, again out of the corner of her eye, their joint shadows draped over the edge of the road. They stretched out across the grass verge until almost reaching the ragged hawthorn hedge beyond.

  The junction now came beneath their feet, two deep, curving ruts arcing back towards the castle. Prescinda turned the other way and saw their own shadows stretch out ahead, but dissolving against the pristine dust of Eastern Walk.

  It stopped her, and so stopped them all. Her gaze once more lifted to where the camper van had been.

  “Falmeard?”

  “Yes, Prescinda?”

  “Where have our shadows gone?”

  “Shadows?”

  “Has the sun set yet?”

  She felt Nephril shift as Falmeard no doubt briefly turned.

  “Not quite. Why?”

  “So, where are they?”

  Falmeard fell silent for a moment, but then confirmed that their shadows still stretched out before them, almost to the camper van.

  Unable to turn her gaze away, she swallowed, steadied herself and gritted her teeth. “I think, Falmeard, I need another kiss.”

  This time her lips burned, their fire swelling to engulf her neck, sending fingers of flame to lick at her breasts. When Falmeard’s face moved out of the way, she saw their shadows had returned, stretching out along the road to stand, like beckoning spectres, at the camper van’s door.

  Prescinda stepped forward but Nephril’s frozen form held her back. She didn’t dare avert her eyes and so blindly tried hard to pull him along.

  “NO!” Nephril screamed, almost deafening her, but she gripped him all the tighter.

  “Trust me, Nephril. For the love of all that’s right, please believe in me,” and she barked, “Falmeard? Help me!”

  Nephril’s plaintive wail nearly broke her heart. “No, Prescinda, there be nowhere that way.” He broke free of her arm, knocking her aside.

  Fortunately, Falmeard again had a firm grip on Nephril’s arm, a grip that looked so cruelly hard.

  Something in Prescinda snapped.

  She rushed over, grabbed Nephril’s face between her hands and planted her own hot kiss on his cold, grey lips until he stopped struggling.

  When she drew away, he again looked shocked but certainly stilled, and between them they managed to hustle him all the way to the camper van.

  Only when Falmeard had thrown the rear door open did she again catch sight of Nephril’s face, seemingly absent of life. They almost had to lift him in before carefully laying him on his bunk, then Falmeard slammed the door shut behind them.

  “Bloody hell,” he breathed. “What’s got into you two?” but Prescinda couldn’t answer for her legs had gone weak and the place swam before her eyes. She felt Falmeard’s arms slide around her waist, carefully lowering her to the comfort of her softly yielding berth.

  How’s Nephril?” she said, her voice sounding distant. Falmeard’s assurances set her mind at rest before sleep slid in and softly overtook her.

  Falmeard carefully placed blankets on both his sleeping friends and sat down at the end of Prescinda’s bunk.

  “Maybe,” he quietly said to himself, “maybe I should have come by myself, as it should have been. Oh well,” and he drew in a sharp
breath. “Too late now. What’s done is done.”

  He looked around the darkening camper van. “Well, I don’t suppose I need worry about us being unlit in the middle of this road,” and smiled as he leant back against the wall, closing his eyes. He listened to Nephril’s soft snores as night air stole in, carrying with it the chill of another world.

  26 Versed in Falmeard’s Ways

  Eastern Walk was little more than hard-packed ballast, a mixture of soft blue shale and hard grey granite, although some amount of chalk or perhaps limestone gave it a deathly dry-bone look. A curving bone it was, often bent as though badly set from a nasty break. The road also rose steadily, not enough to tax the camper van but enough for Dica to appear that little bit lower each time they stopped for a break.

  Noon drew near, noon of their first day away from all that Prescinda’s world had ever been, and little seemed to have changed other than Dica’s slowly receding distance. The familiar march of the Gray Mountains still formed the northern horizon, the nearer Strawbac hills periodically appearing above the crumpled ribbon of the Forest of Belforas.

  Before them, a broad valley lay swathed in Meadow Foxtail and Fescue, in Rye and Bromegrass. It spread an unbroken carpet from the forest’s edge all the way south to the barely visible rise of distant, dark and dirty-looking hills.

  To Prescinda, their colour reminded her of something. “Nephril?”

  “Hmm?”

  “Do you think those hills there,” and she pointed, “are what we saw from the balloon?”

  He peered that way but the camper van’s motion made it hard to see properly. Before she knew it, he’d hung out of the cab, looking back at Dica. Prescinda wished she’d never asked.

  Once back in his seat, Nephril stared again at the hills. “I suspect thou art right. Their plum colour be quite distinctive and in about the right place. They look like the start of another range, running towards the east. Dost thou know any better, Falmeard?”

  But Falmeard knew nothing of their route and could see no better than Nephril. “I reckon we’ll pass to the north, though, between them and the Strawbac Hills.”

  The uncertainty got Prescinda to wondering. “What did the drawing and the mural’s frieze reveal to you about our journey, Falmeard?”

  “And the rest,” Nephril said. “Find all lines made eight around, reaching down, eh, Falmeard?”

  The man himself stared at Nephril long enough for the camper van to begin juddering as it drifted to the edge of the road. He quickly swung it back but didn’t answer.

  “I take it that thine instructions lay hidden in the mural somewhere, mine friend, given the amount of time thou did spend gazing at it.”

  Again, Falmeard didn’t answer, but it now intrigued Prescinda. “You mean the verse...” She screwed up her eyes and tried to recall but Nephril saved her the effort.

  “Draw right and enter minder’s letters after four. Follow at left, move each a reading depth. Discover round aim encircling me, lo, am found.”

  For a while no one spoke, not until Prescinda asked, “What are the minder’s letters?”

  Nephril laughed then leaned in close to Prescinda and whispered, much to Falmeard’s annoyance, “The very lines do tell thee that, mine dear. Follow at left, move each a reading depth doth tell thee plain enough,” and he raised his brows in challenge.

  Silence once again descended but for the camper van’s growl and the crunch of pristine gravel beneath its leather wheels. Prescinda’s own mind, however, wasn’t silent, had they been able to hear, for she tussled with Nephril’s line of verse.

  After a while, Nephril asked Falmeard, “Did the mural tell thee how thou were meant to travel this way?”

  “It did,” Falmeard tersely replied and glanced at Prescinda’s still furrowed brow.

  “Was that why thou did fashion this campervan? I did wonder.”

  “Ha, no,” Falmeard said and grinned. “My intended means of travel has always stared folk in the face if they’d a mind to see,” but he said no more, and Nephril grinned.

  “So, a challenge for a challenge.”

  The road now bent sharply and climbed the steep rise of a brow that ran across the valley floor, and for the first time the camper van laboured. When they finally arrived at the top, they found the valley before them flat-bottomed and level. To the north, the Forest of Belforas finally began to thin, becoming tattered across a more scrubby landscape.

  The Strawbac Hills continued to heave the land beneath but they too had diminished, grown narrower, the Gray Mountains closer in. On the south side of the valley they could now see the rise of bare and smoothly worn hills, as Nephril had guessed. Their rock was indeed the colour of plums, stark against the yellowing valley floor at their feet and starker still against the greener sky beyond.

  Although not high, the range rose quickly, its sides steep, its tops rounded, running as a wall as far as Prescinda could see. The further she looked, though, along the road stretching away in a long line ahead, the more the distance held nothing but an ochre spread.

  “Ha,” made her jump, the barren prospect now dislodged by Nephril’s evident joy. “Eastern Walk. Of course,” he laughed and stared victoriously at Falmeard. “Walk east, eh, mine trying friend? Walk east,” and he sighed. “Simple really.”

  “But not so that verse,” Prescinda said, leaving Nephril looking smug. It didn’t last long, though.

  “It had to be memorable, didn’t it, Nephril? The verse had to last hundreds of thousands of years, maybe even longer, just sitting unused in Falmeard’s mind.”

  Nephril stared at her, clearly willing the answer, but at first she only grinned back at him.

  “It’s the first letter of each word isn’t it, eh, Nephril? Isn’t it, Falmeard? Follow at left, move each a reading depth. It’s your name, the first letters spell your name - Falmeard,” and she clapped, repeatedly, unable to contain herself.

  She stopped abruptly, her eyes growing wider. “In fact, if I could only remember it, I’d bet your name runs right the way through it all,” and this time she squealed in excitement, although Falmeard for his part seemed less than enthusiastic.

  Without a word, he pushed the camper van on towards the east, towards the distant, barren ochre spread, Prescinda beside him badgering Nephril for more of the verse.

  27 A Lesson Remembered

  By midmorning, the bleak buildings had given way to a precipitous rock face where the canal cut its way into the southern flank of the mountains to the north. What had been but the moderate rise of the Southern Hills had by now turned into a more formidable range.

  The face of the cut was impressive, perhaps a thousand feet or more, but for Phaylan it brought a worrying loss of the quayside. The southern side retained its own for the time being but another cliff loomed ahead along its bank, a mile or so around the canal’s gentle curve.

  The wheelhouse of the ketch was in no way a spacious place and so Breadgrinder’s presence hardly went unnoticed. Phaylan would have denied him access but for the value the steward had put on both the Nouwelmers.

  Mind you, Phaylan thought, they’d hardly been of much use so far. Their first task had been to ease the way beyond the bay, helping the Bazarran crew, and indeed himself, push through the barrier Leiyatel maintained in their minds. So much for the enger’s expertise. They’d clearly not accounted for seasickness.

  A quiet guffaw at the thought absently slipped Phaylan’s lips, bringing voice to Breadgrinder.

  “Sorry, Steermaster, did thee say summat?”

  “Eh? Oh, no, Master Breadgrinder. No, I was just thinking, that’s all.”

  Breadgrinder kept standing for’ard of Phaylan, which niggled him. “You wouldn’t mind staying behind me would you, Master Breadgrinder? It’s just that I need a full view you see.” It wasn’t true for the canal’s waters were hardly demanding of his pilot’s skills.

  As Breadgrinder squeezed between the map-desk and its compass, he asked, “Thee’s a wife left at ‘o
me ‘aven’t thee?”

  Phaylan’s eyes narrowed.

  “Must be hard on t’two o’ thee, what wi’ the uncertainty an’ all.”

  The ketch needed little adjustment to its course so Phaylan had nothing with which to deflect the seemingly amiable question, and so coughed instead, curtly.

  “She still in Grayden then?” Breadgrinder persisted, his voice deep and warm and somehow quite comforting. “Never ‘ad the worry misen, nor t’pleasure come to that.”

  Perhaps his wistful lilt had softened Phaylan, a touch anyway, for he turned Breadgrinder an unguarded look of his own, but only briefly. “Aye, Mirabel’s still at home in Grayden, and yes, I do miss her,” but despite Breadgrinder’s sympathetic smile, Phaylan said no more.

  The small naphtha engine with which the ketch had been fitted pushed them along at a miserable speed, and so it was a while longer of returned silence before the cutting loomed above.

  “If we run out of draught here,” Phaylan said, more to himself than Breadgrinder, “then we’re scuppered, well and truly.”

  “Maybe t’canal goes all t’way like this. Eh? Has thee thought o’ that? I mean,” and again Breadgrinder squeezed past Phaylan so this time he could peer up at the sight, “just look at t’depth that’s already been cut through ‘ere.”

  “I can’t imagine it’s like this all the way, though, for what, a hundred miles? It hardly seems likely.” Phaylan leant forward, peering up to see what Breadgrinder saw.

  Dialwatcher appeared on deck below, his angular figure purposely threading its way to the bowsprit. Only now did it strike Phaylan how much Dialwatcher reminded him of Storbanther.

  Now, there’s a thought from the past, Phaylan mused; the build and mannerisms certainly, but also that supercilious air. Why hadn’t he seen it before, back then, when they’d ended up having to steal the two men from Nouwelm all those years ago?

  “How’s Pettar?” Phaylan asked.

  “Pettar? Oh, he’s fine. Sorting out some new agents while I’m away. He reckons we can open up some more trade with Ufflangcoss, now it’s at last getting on its feet.”