The Jasper Forest

by Julia Gray

  'Begin.'

  Terrel did his best to explain that the creature had been woken too soon, that it was not supposed to be above ground, and that water drove it mad.

  'If it's not released it will start a great earthquake,' he went on, coming to the main point. 'An earthquake more violent than anything you have known before. All of Macul will be destroyed.'

  'And how do you know this?'

  'It's been prophesied in dreams.' Throughout his brief speech Terrel's words had been met with muted sounds of derision, but at the mention of dreams there was a brief hush. This was something they might take seriously, even here.

  'Ooh, a prophecy. What fun!' Ekuban's sarcasm dashed the boy's hopes. 'I assume you know when all this is going to happen.'

  'On your name day,' Terrel replied.

  At this the king whispered an aside to some of those nearest to the throne, and mocking laughter spread quickly through the hall. Terrel didn't know what had been said, but - to his shame - he felt himself blushing.

  'So,' Ekuban said, steepling his fingers and pretending to be in earnest.

  'What must we do to prevent this disaster?'

  'Don't send any more prisoners into the castle,' Terrel replied, answering the question even though he'd realized now that he had no chance of convincing Ekuban to take action.

  'Leave the demon alone. Drain the moat and the dungeons so it can return to its proper place underground.'

  'Is that all?' the king asked, feigning surprise. 'You don't want us to invite it to a celebratory meal? Or suggest that it marry our daughter?'

  'The danger I've described is real. You'll regret—'

  'We think not,' Ekuban stated flatly. 'You were entertaining for a while, but you're boring us now. You're only a peasant, so there's no reason to take you seriously. But even if what you say is true, we are in no danger here.

  This palace might look like a work of art, but its foundations are sound — and we are protected.' He glanced at an old woman who stood next to the throne and who seemed vaguely familiar to Terrel, and she nodded, smiling slightly.

  'Talazoria has withstood a great many tremors,' he went on, 'with only minimal damage. And if you think we're cancelling the festival because of what you think is going to happen, then you truly are mad.'

  'Then at least let me talk to the creature,' Terrel pleaded, desperate now.

  'You want to meet it?' Ekuban asked in surprise. 'You're either very brave or completely insane. Perhaps both.'

  Some of the courtiers were whispering among themselves now, darting suspicious glances at the boy, but the king ignored them.

  'Very well, you shall have your wish,' he decreed. 'You will go to the demon with all the others during the festival.'

  'No! That will be too late. I'm not the only one who—'

  'Silence!' one of the courtiers shouted. 'The king has spoken. This audience is at an end.'

  Terrel turned to his last resort. Even as he called silently to Reader, he had a dreadful foreboding of disaster — but what else was he supposed to do? The sharakan's image flickered into being next to the boy, his ghostly hand grasping the message-handle just above Terrel's. Most of the courtiers gasped in wonder and fear, but one of them laughed abruptly. Terrel could not tell who that was, because he was looking at Reader in dismay. The old man was bent almost double, and was obviously in a great deal of pain. His eyes darted about,

  apparently searching for something he could not see.

  'You really shouldn't try that in here, little brother,' the old woman said.

  'My magic has always been more powerful than yours.'

  Terrel realized in that instant why her face had seemed familiar. He also knew that there really was a protective dome over the palace — not of glass, but of sorcery — and that Reader's sister was responsible for it. What was more, it was somehow affecting the mystic.

  'This sharakan is your brother?' Ekuban asked his elderly companion, his amazement genuine this time.

  'I would recognize him anywhere,' the woman replied, 'even though he abandoned me when I was only eight years old.'

  'Marika, please,' Reader croaked. 'You don't know what you're doing. This could . . .'

  'Always jealous,' she commented as his voice died away. 'Even now.'

  Terrel tried to say something, but his lips and tongue were frozen. In fact his entire body was paralyzed, as if he had been turned to stone. He couldn't even blink. Reader turned to give him a look that was full of regret, as his image faded and then vanished.

  'Put him in the cells with the others,' Ekuban ordered. 'We'll save him for the festival, as we said. He might put on a better show than we first thought.'

  Soldiers came forward and grabbed Terrel. One of them tried to take the staff, but jumped away, yelling in pain, as soon as his fingers touched the wood. No one else wanted to try after that, and in any case Terrel's grip was like iron and quite immovable. The boy himself was held rigid, every muscle frozen in place, and in the end

  the soldiers had to carry him out. They were all careful to avoid touching the message-handle.

  Terrel couldn't even tell if his heart was still beating, and he felt sure he was about to die. He panicked, struggling uselessly against his internal captivity. A few moments later, when he realized he was not going to die just yet, he calmed down a little - but only a little. Even if everything else in his body was frozen, his brain was still working. He was able to think, and it was at this point, just as the bemused soldiers stood him against the wall of a prison cell, that he realized - too late - what the mysterious verse from the Tindaya Code had meant.

  Chapter Forty-Seven

  'Eat up, lads. You're going to need all your strength tomorrow. It's your big day.'

  The gaoler laughed as he went away, and for once the prisoners who shared Terrel's cell did not descend like a hungry pack of wolves upon the meagre rations. The imminence of death seemed to have robbed them all of their appetites.

  The festival was only a day away.

  Keeping track of time had been almost impossible for Terrel. Without the normal ways of measuring the hours and days - light and dark, the passage of the sun and moons, the rhythms of his own body - his attempts to do so had driven him close to despair. His utter physical helplessness, combined with an almost constant state of mental anguish, had meant that the time had passed with excruciating slowness. At first, when he'd still believed that his unnatural paralysis must either wear

  off or kill him, he had been alone in the cell. The only people he'd seen were the gaolers, who came to look at him occasionally and who left food he'd been unable to eat. Later, as the prison filled up with more men destined to play leading roles in Ekuban's show, he'd shared the space with others. Each batch of newcomers had inspected their strange cell mate, and one of them always tried to touch his staff, in spite of the warnings from those who had already seen what it could do. The pain it inflicted was severe, and left the victim's arm flopping uselessly at his side for an hour or more after the initial shock wore off.

  Even without the message-handle, the other prisoners would have regarded Terrel with deep suspicion. His peculiar appearance, and the fact that he never moved, unnerved many of them - and those who had the courage to touch him found his flesh as cool and as hard as marble. No one had made any attempt to harm him, but they talked about him as if he were not there. Terrel couldn't blame them for that. He could still see and hear, but his fellow prisoners had no way of knowing that. He could even smell his surroundings, and he was aware of the hardness of the wall at his back, the smoothness of the wood that he gripped tightly in his hand, and the dampness of the air. But he remained completely immobile. Only his eyes moved - and they were all that kept the world from assuming he was dead.

  With the arrival of his cell mates, it had become a little easier to gauge the passage of time. Their routine of eating and sleeping had given a pattern to the days, but all Terrel knew for certain was that a long time had elapsed. He
was vaguely aware that the date when the

  Floating Islands passed closest to the shore of Macul had come and gone. He'd known for some time that his chance of returning had vanished, but the absolute certainty was a further blow to his ravaged spirit. It was also an unwelcome reminder that when the earthquake struck, his homeland would still be dangerously close by.

  Terrel had also been able to learn a little of what was happening in the outside world from the conversations between his fellow inmates and, occasionally, from the guards. Preparations for the festival were under way, and extra viewing towers were being constructed for the main event. A lottery had been organized to award places on these platforms, and the competition among the citizens for the winning numbers was fierce. In addition, Terrel had discovered that Aylen was being kept in an adjacent cell, together with his co-conspirators, and that his friend had heard about his predicament and was asking about him. On a few occasions the boy had even thought he'd heard Aylen's voice, but of course he had been unable to reply.

  Remarkably, the only person he had been able to talk to was Reader. Now that they were outside the palace — the prison was on the other side of the square

  - the message-handle enabled them to communicate at intervals, depending on the relative influences of the moons. Terrel had been given new hope when he'd discovered this, but that hope had soon been dashed. The sharakan was a broken man, a shadow of his former self, and although he was able to talk to Terrel, there was nothing he could do to help him. The message-handle, he'd explained dismally, had been effectively destroyed by his sister's magic - which was indeed much stronger than his own. His image could not be summoned, and no trading was possible. In effect it had been paralyzed at the same time as Terrel. However, the boy's link with Reader, especially during his early solitary days, had probably been the only thing that helped him hold on to his sanity, and it had been during one of their remote conversations that he'd learned Marika's story.

  As children, Reader and his sister had been inseparable. They had both shown early signs of remarkable abilities, but when a Collector had come to the village -when Marika was eight years old and Reader six - he had ignored the girl completely and spoken only to the boy, even though everyone - including the precocious children themselves - knew that Marika was the more talented of the two. When the sharakan had ridden off, taking Reader with him, the little boy had gloated over his triumph. Later he had come to regret it. During his many years in the mountains, he had tried to forget his sister, but he'd never succeeded. He had often wondered what had become of her. That he knew now had completed her revenge.

  The other person Terrel wanted to speak to was, of course, Alyssa. However, she had not made contact -and he didn't know whether this was simply because she'd been unable to get into the prison, or if there was some other, more sinister reason. Now that so much time had passed, he assumed she must have been forced to leave the city. In Betancuria she had been a stonechat for about fifteen days, and that had put her under an enormous strain, damaging her health and accentuating her eccentric behaviour. If Alyssa were still in Talazoria,

  she would have been a magpie for three times as long -and Terrel wasn't sure whether she could have even survived such an ordeal. There was always the chance that she had left in order to rest in her own body, and thus might return - either as a magpie or another creature. But time was running out.

  The only thing Terrel had been able to do during his incarceration had been to think — although few of his thoughts had given him any comfort. He'd spent a great deal of time brooding over the verse from the Tindaya Code. The fact that he was now almost certain that he'd deciphered its meaning gave him no pleasure. 'Beware the golden way, the silver steps deceive,' was not, as he had thought, a reference to some part of the jewelled city, but a warning against his mode of transport. He could clearly recall watching the setting sun turn the canal the colour of gold, and the gushing water of the locks were the silver steps. 'Until the royal day' now seemed to be a straightforward reference to Ekuban's name day, and the last line, the one that had proved the most enigmatic - 'the diamond moon believe' — he now took to be a link to his dreams about the Dark Moon. The moon had sometimes been illuminated by bright swirls of light, and at the beginning and end of eclipses there was also a diamond effect from the sun as it escaped from its shadow. This reasoning had led him to reconsider the advice he'd been given in those dreams. Although he'd forgotten most of it, the meaning of what he could remember was now clear. 'Move sideways first' had been an instruction to leave the canal.

  'Remember your sister' probably referred to Reader's sister rather than to any relation of his own, and 'Don't try to dream within the dome' was a warning whose relevance was now obvious. When he'd first heard it, he'd thought that it had meant the domes of the sharaken's towers. He realized now that it alluded to the sorcery protecting Ekuban's palace, and the dream in question had been Terrel's ill-fated attempt to conjure up Reader's image. He was still not sure whether the disastrous outcome of that experiment might have been caused by something that had happened earlier. Exactly why he had not been supposed to travel on the canal was not yet clear. Had it meant that the fluctuating curse Alyssa had talked of had somehow affected either him or the staff? Or was it because the presence of so much water had delayed Alyssa's arrival - and possibly that of the ghosts? Would they have been able to give him any advice about the possible pitfalls of his mission - pitfalls he had so spectacularly failed to avoid? Terrel had no way of knowing.

  And unless something miraculous happened, he would probably never know now.

  The night that must fall soon was the last before the festival, and even if he was still paralyzed, Terrel knew he could expect no mercy from Ekuban - or the elemental - when morning came.

  Terrel slept, with his eyes open.

  Apart from thinking, the only other thing he'd been able to do was dream. He'd had frequent nightmares about being held in a vice-like grip by some unseen force, unable to move - even though all his friends were in terrible danger and needed his help. And he always woke,

  wailing silently, to find that the nightmare was all too real.

  Dreaming that he could move was almost worse. It made the crushing disappointment of waking even more devastating.

  Tonight he felt the Dark Moon rise, an invisible but tangible presence in the eastern sky, and sensed a new purpose in its flight. But no one, not even Jax

  - whose voice had tormented him on several occasions - came to give him any advice.

  When Terrel awoke, the rank smell of fear filled the cell. The condemned men knew that this was the day they were going to die. No one spoke. They all avoided catching each other's eyes. Every sound from the corridor outside made them jump, as they waited for the guards to come for them. A few wept silently, while others only just managed to bottle up their impotent fury, but overall the mood was one of hopelessness and disbelief.

  Footsteps sounded in the passageway, and the prisoners grew even more tense.

  Then a voice, from further away, echoed throughout the dungeon.

  'Hey, Edo, come and look at this. It's amazing.'

  The footsteps retreated again, and silence returned.

  A few moments later Terrel felt an odd burning sensation in his left hand. At the same time he became aware of a new luminescence in the cell - a shimmering, dappled effect like sunlight reflected off running water. He also noticed that the other inmates were all staring at him.

  At the edge of his peripheral vision, the boy saw that the silvery glow was actually spreading from his hand, travelling along the entire length of the staff and making it shine as though lit from within.

  Terrel watched in disbelief as his fingers slowly uncurled, releasing their grip at last.

  As the glowing message-handle clattered to the floor — with some of the prisoners jumping out of the way to avoid being hit - Terrel took his first shuddering gulp of air as he began to breathe again.

 
It felt as though his entire body was burning from inside - but he could move at last!

  Chapter Forty-Eight

  Talazoria had never experienced a total eclipse before. Even the humblest sky-watcher had known that there would be an eclipse that morning, but no one had foreseen the fact that the Dark Moon would obliterate the sun completely.

  Being plunged into almost complete darkness in the middle of the day had a stunning effect on everyone in the city, including those who had gathered in the central square for the festivities. Silence fell over the celebrations.

  Terrel looked round at his fellow prisoners, unnerved by their collective gaze. They in turn seemed to be afraid of him. The cold fire of the amulet burned in his hand even as the rest of his body came back to life.

  'What is that?' one inmate whispered, clearly mesmerized by the talisman's delicate beauty.

  Terrel hesitated before answering, partly because he didn't trust his tongue to work after it had been paralyzed

  for so long, and partly because he did not really know what to say. In the end he didn't say anything at all. Before he could decide how best to explain the miniature star, he felt another presence - and another question.

  Had it been spoken in a human tongue, the nearest translation would have been

  'Do you have the spiral inside you?', but the enquiry came not in words but in an enveloping sense of curiosity. With a sudden breathless surge of excitement, Terrel realized that - somehow - he was in touch with the elemental. He knew from his earlier experiences in Betancuria that he had no need to form specific answers. He had only to think of something and the Ancient would know as much as he did. However, the only way he could take advantage of this unexpected opportunity was to treat it like a conversation using psinoma. There were specific points he desperately needed to make - and he didn't know how long the link would last.

  Whatever happens, you must stay calm. I know you 're frightened and angry, but please, please, don't start an earthquake. Although Terrel could now sense the incipient madness beyond the curiosity, he also felt that the Ancient was still interested, so he sought to reinforce his message. The people who are sent inside the walls mean you no harm. They are not to blame for your imprisonment. You don't need to hurt them.