The Aware (The Isles of Glory Book 1)

by Larke, Glenda

  ‘You’re a woman too, aren’t you? Don’t you want to help her? She’s so good, and so beautiful! Nothing must happen to her—she saved my life.’

  I blinked at the extraordinary logic. ‘So? Maybe you should start praying.’

  ‘How can you be so hard-hearted? She said all you cared about was money, and she was right! And you’re probably a thief as well; she said you searched our rooms.’ (Now how the Devil had she known that? I could have sworn I’d left no traces.) ‘How can you just stand there and let her be kidnapped or whatever it is that they’ve done to her? That dunmagicking bastard has got hold of her, hasn’t he?’ He gulped and tearfully added a final shot: ‘Why shouldn’t you help her? She’s worth six of you!’ He really knew how to endear himself to a girl, did Ransom Holswood.

  I tried to tug my arm out of his grip.

  ‘All right then!’ he cried, releasing me to dig into his money belt. ‘If it’s money you want, you can have it! Find her and bring her back to me safely and I’ll pay you!’

  Now that interested me. ‘How much?’

  He stopped digging around in his belt. ‘A hundred setus.’

  ‘Not enough. Not when dunmagic is involved. And it is.’

  He swallowed sickly, then looked down at his belt, calculating. He might have been infatuated with Flame, but he wasn’t going to beggar himself over her. ‘Er, two hundred. That’s all I’ve got.’ It was a palpable lie, but I accepted the terms. I was already thinking it might pay to have Flame in my debt; she was my only lead to the Castlemaid.

  ‘All right. Two hundred it is.’ I plucked a fifty-setu coin out of his purse. ‘Fifty in advance, non-refundable. Now go back to your room,’ I said, ‘and stick your nose into that breviary of yours. I’ll do my best, but prayers are about the only thing that’s going to save your bed-mate.’

  Heaven help me if he didn’t blush. It was then I remembered that the brothers—and sisters—of the Menod were supposed to be chaste and confine their lusts to marriage. It’s one of their sillier rules.

  Ransom Holswood had certainly slipped from grace on that one.

  SEVEN

  I paid Tunn to show me where the dunmaster’s four henchmen lived. Fortunately, the boy had heard of Mord and the others and knew where they stayed. He took me to a ramshackle place on the waterfront some distance past the main docks.

  There weren’t all that many people in the streets at that hour, although there was enough noise issuing from behind the doors of bars, gambling dens and other such establishments to indicate that Gorthan Docks was far from asleep. Once we even had to flatten ourselves against a wall to avoid being run over by a couple of boisterous drunks riding sea-ponies. The huge animals slithered past at top speed, their segments clanking and their airholes whistling with exertion. Looming up like that out of the darkness, almost out of control, they were as frightening as sea-dragons.

  Once Tunn had indicated the house, I sent him back to The Drunken Plaice and he was quick to obey. Mord’s reputation as a killer was well known.

  The building was typical of what passed for a house in Gorthan Docks: an untidy collection of rooms stacked on top of one another like a child’s cardhouse. It leaned drunkenly into its neighbour on one side, and projected out over the water on stilts on another. Buildings weren’t erected in one single flurry of construction; they just grew as their owners accumulated more building materials. Gorthan Spit, remember, had no trees. However, the island was in the path of the Great Summer Drift, the ocean current that came down from the Middling and Norther Islands for five months of every year, bringing with it all the flotsam from those more hospitable places. And every bit of wood that ended up on Gorthan Spit’s shores was carefully collected and used. Planks from a wrecked ship, a piece of a Calmenter jetty, a whole tree washed down a Cirkasian river, a broken tiller from a Fen canal barge—who cared. If it was wood, on Gorthan Spit it was precious.

  There was one thing that made Mord’s place different from the equally haphazardly built neighbouring dwellings: the odour of dunmagic clung to it like the smell of a long-dead whale.

  I concentrated my Awareness, sought out the most recent traces of power and found them in the form of a dulled red glow around one of the upper floor windows. I had no idea of whether Flame was there, of course, but I didn’t know where else to look.

  There didn’t seem to be anyone around the building itself, but occasionally someone would stagger out of a nearby bar and vomit or belch or giggled their way down the street. I waited for a quiet period and then shinned up a wall to the roof of the veranda that ran around at first floor level. The uneven planks made it an easy climb for someone as sure-footed as I was.

  The tiles of the sloping roof were made of cuttlefish skeletons, which definitely weren’t supposed to support the weight of a person; they cracked and crumbled under me, but at least the beams beneath held. I disturbed a huddle of small birds sleeping under the shelter of some guttering and they burst into agitated chattering, even louder than the sounds I had made breaking the tiles. Fear lurched inside me. I hissed at them angrily, ‘Shut up! You want the bastards to hear?’ A silly thing to do, because my voice only added to the racket—but then, it worked. The birds miraculously quietened. They continued to huddle together, their sharp eyes just black glitters in the moonlight, and my skin crawled. Their silence in response to my request was uncanny.

  Just as strange was the fact that one of them then flew out of the huddle and up to the open window I had been aiming for and disappeared inside the building.

  I dithered. A bird? Did dunmasters have traffic with birds? It seemed ridiculous. My fear was making me fanciful…

  I climbed on.

  The window, when I reached it, was shrouded with that savage redness of dunmagic. I loathed the look and feel of it even though I knew it could not hurt me. A bird—the same one?—was sitting on the sill, a dark-coloured creature hardly larger than a street-sparrow. In the moonlight it seemed utterly without feature: just a blackish bundle of feathers without anything to recommend it.

  I hauled myself into the room and drew my sword. The bird didn’t even move as I passed it.

  She was there, standing in the dark. Behind me, the bird chittered. ‘Blaze?’ she asked as if she couldn’t credit it was me. I didn’t blame her for being surprised, although I did wonder how she knew it was me. It was rather dark. ‘What in perdition are you doing here?’

  ‘Oh, I was just passing and thought I’d drop in. See how you were getting on, you know. Can’t you produce a sylvlight? I can’t see a damn thing.’

  She obliged, and a round silver glow hovered in the middle of the room. One of the handier sylvtalents, I’ve always thought. I looked around. The place was filthy. There was no furniture and you couldn’t have scraped the dirt off the floor with anything less that an ox and plough. Unidentifiable vermin scuttled away from the light.

  Then I looked at her. As I expected, she’d been raped; all the signs were there. She stood still, eyes bruised, hands hanging by her sides, clothes torn and bloodied. The physical damage she would already have repaired with her magic, but there are some things that are not so easy to fix. ‘Oh shit,’ I said softly.

  Her eyes dropped. ‘Yeah.’

  I suddenly felt very much a woman; I wanted to hold her, comfort her, but I sensed that it was the wrong moment. I wanted her strong, not emotional. ‘What happened?’ I asked.

  ‘Someone jumped me with dunmagic when I went to the privy. I don’t know who it was; I still don’t know. He blurred himself, even when he—’ She swallowed. ‘He got his bastards to bring me back here. I was knocked silly with dunmagic; I couldn’t do anything. He’s so goddamned powerful, Blaze.’

  ‘Mm. I know. What does he want with you?’ Besides the obvious.

  She held out her left arm. On the bare skin, between elbow and wrist on the inner side, there was a mark. I took her hand in mine and frowned as I looked at it. The smell was appalling: not just rotten, but evil. Ye
t it didn’t look like the usual dunmagic death sore. This was red, not suppurating. Even through the blurring of my awareness it looked swollen and unpleasantly inflamed. It filled me with inexpressible dread.

  ‘What is it?’ I whispered, afraid of the answer.

  ‘It’s a contamination. A dunspell of subversion.’

  I looked at her, uncomprehending, trying to remember why the expression sounded familiar.

  ‘It’s going to change my sylvpowers to dunmagic. It’s going to make me his willing acolyte, his spawn. But part of me, deep inside, will always know what I was, even as I live his hell. Do you understand, Blaze?’ She looked up and I noticed the wildness of her eyes. ‘Gradually this poison is going to spread through my body until I’m like him. And there’s nothing I can do about it. He is going to use me to do unspeakable things for him, with him…’

  I felt sick, physically ill. I wanted to vomit, as if by emptying my stomach I could reject the horror of what she said. Not her. She didn’t deserve that. I remembered now: another time, another place…some sylv children, kidnapped. There had been rumours of a similar intended fate for them, but on that occasion I had been in time. I heard my voice saying coldly, ‘Fight it.’

  ‘Do you think I’m not trying? But I can’t. My sylvmagic is nothing in the face of this. Within a few days or so, you won’t know me, Blaze. Oh, I’ll look the same. But I could kill you—slowly—and laugh while I did it. Yet underneath I’d know what I was doing, and be unable to do anything to stop myself…’

  ‘I’ll get you out of here, somehow—’

  ‘How? I can’t pass the dunmagic wards. Believe me, I’ve tried. And what difference would it make anyway? What’s happening to me will happen, whether I’m a prisoner here or free, out there.’ She clutched at my shirt. ‘Blaze, you’ve got to kill me. Now.’

  ‘I—’

  ‘You must. Don’t you see? You must. Please. Before it spreads.’

  I swallowed, still sick.

  ‘If you can’t do it, then give me your sword. I’ll do it myself.’

  I stared at her. She was so beautiful, so young. I felt a hundred years old in comparison. I’d never admired anyone as much as I admired her then. I’d never hated dunmagic more.

  I found my voice. ‘No. No, damn it. They won’t win this one. I won’t let it happen. Listen, Flame, there’s a whole shipload of Keepers down there in the port. That’s enough sylvmagic to fill the Great Trench. Together they might put an end to this—’ I indicated her arm.

  ‘But would they?’ Her voice was bitter. ‘They don’t much like sylvtalents who aren’t Keepers.’

  ‘They hate dunmagickers more. Of course they will want to stop you becoming one. Anyway, there’s another way out for you as well: if the dunmaster dies, so do his spells.’

  ‘And who would kill him for me?’ she asked simply.

  I wasn’t about to make any rash promises; I wasn’t that stupid. ‘The Keepers are after him for a start,’ I said. ‘Cheer up, Flame, there’s hope yet. But first I have to get you out of here.’ I looked around some more, tracing the remnants of the dunmagic warding that kept her imprisoned in an unlocked room.

  ‘How did you find me?’ she asked curiously as I examined the walls. I could almost feel the effort she made to speak normally.

  ‘Your boyfriend told me you were in trouble.’

  ‘My boyfr—? Oh, Noviss. And you came after me, just like that?’ She was politely disbelieving.

  ‘Well, no. Not exactly. He offered to pay me.’

  She put her head on one side. ‘How much did you take him for?’

  ‘Two hundred setus. Do you think I let him off too cheap?’

  She considered. ‘That’s a lot of money. But then he has quite a lot.’

  ‘What in all the islands do you see in him anyway?’

  She grinned knowingly, not a bad effort for someone who had landed in hell and hadn’t yet found a way out.

  I stared. ‘Really? Isn’t he a little young for, er, sufficient experience?’

  She was offhand. ‘Oh, they have a curious custom among the nobility of the Bethany Isles. When young men, or women, turn sixteen years old, they are put in the care of a professional love-teacher of the opposite sex. For a couple of months they are taught, by an expert, how to please a partner.’

  I was interested. ‘Is that so? I shall have to try a Bethany noble some time.’

  She smiled faintly. ‘Noviss was my first lover, you know. And it looks like he’s going to be my last.’ At least she wasn’t thinking of the bastard—or bastards—who had raped her. She was made of extraordinarily strong stuff, this Cirkasian. And she was puzzling. How had someone so ravishingly desirable managed to hang on to her virginity so long? Had she perhaps been one of Cirkase’s veiled, cosseted and closeted noble ladies? And why did I get this curiously mixed feeling when I spoke to her? Sometimes she seemed so worldly wise; at other times she was almost childlike.

  I finished my circuit of the room just as the bird on the sill flew across to land on her shoulder. In the sylv light it shimmered with iridescence and I recognised it as the same species—the same individual?—that had come and sat on the chair near me in the taproom of the Drunken Plaice that first day. Flame absent-mindedly raised her hand to stroke it under the chin with her forefinger, but it was the bird’s action that stilled me. It reached out with the tip of a wing and touched her cheek.

  It was such a human gesture, so unbirdlike, a gesture of comfort, of love— I think I must have gaped, because the expression on Flame’s face changed, challenging me, daring me to mention it. And I couldn’t. Not then, not when she was stretched so thin that only a superhuman effort on her part was keeping her together, keeping her from madness.

  I said calmly. ‘Our dunmagicking bastard has forgotten to ward the ceiling.’

  She forced interest. ‘Has he? But it’s too high for me to reach.’

  ‘Yes. I’ll break in from above and pull you out. That’d be the easiest way, I think. All right?’

  She nodded.

  I left via the window and made the further climb to the top roof. More cuttlefish tiles. Easy to pull them away and make a hole. I climbed through into the dark of the ceiling space where the rafters sagged under my weight. I kicked through the thin ceiling in one corner and looked down on Flame’s upturned face. Then the rafter cracked and I tumbled into the room, landing on the floor just ahead of half the ceiling.

  ‘It’ll never take the weight of us both, I said, a little unnecessarily. ‘The best thing is for you to climb through from my shoulders, and I’ll go out through the window again.’

  She nodded. And then we heard sounds: the unmistakable noise of someone climbing the stairs. Perhaps I had been a mite noisy with my ceiling demolition. I grabbed Flame by the neck of her tunic and jerked her sharply towards me. ‘Now listen to me, and listen well, Flame. If I have to worry about you being dunmagicked again, we’re both dead. You’ve got to get out of here. Don’t kill me by being noble. I can look after myself, I promise you. Understand?’

  She hesitated only a fraction of a second. Then she nodded.

  ‘Go back to The Drunken Plaice. The obvious will be the last place they look, I hope. Wait for me there. Tell Noviss to make a nuisance of himself asking everyone where you are, as if you haven’t come back.’ She put her foot into my hand even as I spoke and was up on my shoulders as surely as an acrobat. She reached up, had hold of the rafters and was gone just seconds before the door burst open.

  I recognised Mord from Niamor’s description: a red-haired killer; his brother Teffel—with the sea-potato nose—I’d met before. Killers with the hearts of sharks, both of them. They didn’t seem distressed to find Flame gone; I supposed they thought that with the dunspell on her arm she was as good as their master’s property already. They were much more interested in the fact that they had me, believing, no doubt, that I had come in through the ceiling, helped Flame leave the same way and was now trapped by the wards. By
the smirk on Teffel’s face, he appeared to have forgotten my skill with a sword. Or perhaps he just felt more secure in the company of his brother.

  They were armed with both swords and knives. Teffel reversed his hold on his knife and threw it. He knew what he was doing; only his stupidity in trying to maim rather than kill me gave me time to flick myself sideways. Even so, he nicked me in the arm. A minor wound, but it tore the upper muscle enough to hinder the effectiveness of my sword arm. I had no time to think before Mord followed up with a throw of his own. Another sideways flick, another wound. The knife went into my side, but it did more damage to my clothes than my hide. It bled copiously though, and looked a great deal worse than it was. I pulled out the knife and flung it through the window, an action that was designed to disconcert them; knives were a valuable commodity to Spitters and not usually thrown away, especially not in the middle of a fight. After that, I hammed it up a little in the best Hub theatrical tradition. I looked as though I was dying on my feet. The sword in my hand dropped weakly.

  Teffel, the fool, fell for it. Even as his brother shouted a warning to stop him, he came at me like a charging bull and I carved up his belly like raw beef. He died with a surprised expression on his face and a lot of his innards steaming on the floor. Then I, like an utter idiot, put my foot in the mess and slipped, going down almost under Mord’s feet. Enraged, he forgot I was a woman and put his boot where he thought it would do the most damage. It did hurt, but not enough to be incapacitating. I grabbed his foot and he went down into the blood and muck as well. I rolled clear then; it wouldn’t do me any good to indulge in wrestling with a man of his size. I counted myself strong, but I’d always found it was unwise to assume anything other than the fact that most men have the edge when it comes to brute strength.

  I managed to slice open his leg as I scrambled up, but it didn’t seem to worry him. The angrier he became, the less he seemed to feel. He erupted off the floor, sword sweeping at me as he came. I fended him off and sparks flew from the clash of blades. He didn’t have any finesse, but he was a strong man; agile too. I knew I’d win this one eventually, but I wasn’t sure how much time I had. We were making more noise than a couple of scrapping sea-lions and Mord’s fall must have shaken the whole house.