The Aware (The Isles of Glory Book 1)

by Larke, Glenda

  ‘Ruarth and his family lived on my window sill and in the niches around it. It was a large and very ornate sill: lots of crannies. One thing I used to do was put out food for them. I soon found I could recognise one from another, and that there was one that seemed to be especially friendly. Ruarth, of course. After a while he used to fly in to spend time with me. I was only about four when this started. I used to talk to him as if he was a person. Gradually I learned that he was actually talking back to me, it was just a matter of understanding it… Some Dustel language is obvious. Shakes of the head for no, or nods for yes, just like everyone else. Other gestures are more subtle, but fairly easily understood—things like wait, come, here, there. A stamped foot means “I’m angry”, shrugged shoulders means “I don’t know”, and so on. The chirps and sounds, I learned those the same way a child learns speech from the adults around them: by repetition. We both learned to read at the same time, and that helped. I’d write out the alphabet, and he would peck at the letters…’

  ‘Did you go to school?’ I asked.

  She shook her head. ‘No. None of the Cirkase nobility went to school. It was the mark of the despised middle class to be educated—why learn to read and write when you can pay someone to do it for you? But I learned anyway. In a way, I was lucky. My father was so busy he didn’t ever have time to worry about me, and my mother was neurotic and so often ill that I was left to my own devices even more than most. Ruarth’s mother said I should learn, so I persuaded my father’s accountant to teach me to figure and his scribe to teach me to read and write.’ She looked at Ruarth’s sleeping form fondly. ‘Without the Dustels, and without those two men, my life would have been very different…’

  ‘I didn’t realise it was so bad,’ I said. ‘Is it true that Cirkase is run by clerks and bookkeepers? This so-called middle class?’

  ‘Absolutely true. In the past it worked because the Castlelord kept a tight rein on his underlings. Now,’ she shook her head, ruefully, ‘it’s all falling apart—and so it should. It’s no way to govern. The literate class is going to overthrow the nobility one day, and they won’t know how to stop it. Why should they—the scribes and accountants and merchants—do all the work, carry all the responsibility, for very little pay? —D’you know, Blaze, as a little girl growing up in the Castle, I had seventeen personal servants. Seventeen. I never had to brush my hair, or tie my own shoes. I never had to do anything. Anything at all. And what did I do to earn that kind of service? Nothing. If it hadn’t been for the Dustels, I would have been the world’s most spoiled and unhappy child. It was boredom that made me take a second look at the birds on my window ledge; it was a child’s inquiring mind imprisoned in a stultifying environment that led me to question what I saw… How many other inquiring minds has the Cirkasian system stifled?’

  She looked down at her amputated arm. ‘I’m glad I left. I’d do it all over again, even if I knew beforehand the price I would have to pay.’

  In my heart, I knew she wasn’t talking about just her arm.

  ‘Yes,’ she said, answering my unspoken question. ‘Even that. If I’d stayed in Cirkasecastle, what would have happened to me would have been worse than rape. I would have been violated again and again, in subtle and degrading ways, every day of my life.’ She was silent for a while, then said, ‘A noble woman can’t walk outside without being heavily veiled. Everything you look at, you see through a layer of cloth. Lower class people aren’t supposed to see our faces. And yet our servants saw us—even bathed us. So where’s the logic? It was just another way of keeping people in their “place”. It was hell, Blaze. In the end I would have been married off without consent, to bring prestige or commercial benefits to my family, as if I was a commodity.’

  She met my gaze. In the candlelight she looked lovely: the soft light muted her pain and blurred the edges of her beauty but, to me, it was her compassion that made her truly lovely. ‘I’m sorry; you who have had such a hard life must find my whining about the luxury of mine somewhat tasteless.’

  I shook my head. ‘We all have our prisons. We just have to transcend them.’

  ‘Yes. The Dustels showed me how. What about you, Blaze? How did you climb out?’

  I thought about that. Was it the crazy-crone, in the Duskset Hill cemetery, who taught me to rely on myself? Was it the Menod who started me on the right path with their unworldly charity? Arnado, who introduced me to elegance and his own brand of honour? Duthrick, who gave me something to aim for and a mission in life? Or was it just my anger—my rage—at the injustices my mixed birth had ordained for me.

  She seemed to read my mind. ‘Don’t tell me it was Duthrick. That man is poison. Keepers are all—’

  ‘Oh don’t you start. I hear that all the time from Tor.’

  ‘He’s right. If it weren’t for the Keepers, who prop up the creaking aristocracy in Cirkase because they find it easier to deal with tyrants, our islandom would be a better place. Keepers preach equality and the election of leaders, but in practice, in other islandoms, they think it threatens stability and so they make sure the tyrants remain.’

  ‘I think Ruarth must be an anarchist to have taught you all these things,’ I growled. ‘You and Tor are a pair. Have you any idea what sort of government you’d get if all the Islandlords suddenly disappeared? There’d be chaos!’

  She snorted, an unladylike sound, and we both retreated from the subject for fear we would end up arguing. We chatted a little more, but then she stirred restlessly, trying to get comfortable. I gave her more medicine and she drifted off to sleep, holding my hand in hers.

  ###

  I woke later to find that I had slept sitting at her bedside, my head on her bed. She was still sound asleep. Ruarth was nowhere about.

  It was the sound of Tor moving around the room that had awakened me. ‘Flame’s fine,’ he said.

  I stood up and groped for equilibrium. In retrospect, what had happened during the night seemed unreal. ‘Tor,’ I said slowly, taking care to keep my voice down, ‘why didn’t either you or I rush out of the room and run a sword through the bastard? We don’t have to fear his magic.’

  ‘D’y’know, I think it might have been what he wanted us to do? I think he’s a little afraid of us—of you, anyway. How much he knows about me is uncertain. Perhaps he thought you would rush out of the room in search of him.’

  I thought about that. ‘You think it was a trap? Someone like Domino—several of them—waiting with him, swords drawn.’

  ‘It’s possible. I’m sure he must have been protected, but perhaps his main intent was just to tease us.’

  ‘But…I never thought of attacking.’ I was taken aback, and oddly shamed. ‘He had me so frightened, I was almost paralysed.’

  He gave a grim smile. ‘Ironic, isn’t it? That he bothered, I mean. He’s more afraid of us than is warranted. He just doesn’t know what it’s like to have Awareness.’

  I knew what he meant. We weren’t just made aware of the presence of dunmagic, we felt, and smelled, its wrongness, its evil; we could sense its terrible capability. When faced with Janko’s power, our senses were almost overwhelmed with the horror of what he was, of what he could do. The night before I hadn’t the slightest doubt that he could have submerged a string of islands beneath the sea, and laughed while he was doing it. It was no wonder we had found it hard to act.

  ‘Dunmagickers, Tor: who—what are they?’

  ‘Menod texts say they are manifestations of the Sea Devil.’

  I gave a grunt of dissatisfaction. ‘That tells us nothing. Are they born, or are they made?’

  ‘You’re wondering if they all start off life as sylvs, and are later subverted.’

  I nodded. I’d asked the same question of Duthrick; I just wanted confirmation.

  He shook his head. ‘No. There are definitely cases of dunmagic babies born to sylv mothers who were raped or bedded by dunmagickers. Just as many nonsylv women have sylv children when the father is a sylv. And I rather think tha
t dunmagicker women always tend to have babies contaminated with dunmagic.’

  ‘What makes them different? Why do they seem to feed on pain and the despair of others?’

  ‘I don’t know. The Menod belief is as good as any—that all evil comes from the Sea Devil.’

  ‘To believe in the Sea Devil, one has first to believe in God,’ I said.

  He gave a faint smile. ‘Yes,’ he agreed. ‘But then, I do.’

  I didn’t want to think about that. I changed the subject. ‘What do you know about the inundation of the Dustels, Tor?’

  He pulled at his ear, as if that would help him to remember. ‘There are so many tales, it’s hard to say what’s rumour and what’s fact. I must admit I always dismissed the idea that a single dunmagicker could drown a whole chain of islands as just plain popped bladder-wrack. Empty of substance… Not proven. I do know that the Dustels had a lot of problems immediately before the islands disappeared. The usual sort of thing: the outer islands of the group thought they were badly treated, paid too much in taxes and didn’t get enough in return… It’s a common enough complaint, and we in the Stragglers have heard similar moans. A wise ruler does something about them before things get out of hand. From what I remember of my history, in the Dustels the ruling family ignored the complaints and there was a civil war. One of the Rampartlord’s sons joined the rebels. Some terrible atrocities were committed by both sides. Worse still, outsiders got involved: the Keepers stuck their nose in as usual; the Menod patriarchy were somehow involved, because there was a big monastery complex on one of the outer islands; the Stragglers supported the ruling house. Just before the islands disappeared, the rebel islanders were defeated in a huge battle and many of those that remained were executed. The ruling army was, however, decimated as well, so it wasn’t a happy victory. That’s about all I know.’

  ‘Morthred? Dunmagic?’

  ‘Lots of rumours after the fact. I once dug out some of the historical records on the period prior to the inundation, and there was some vague references to dunmagic use in the Dustels. Nothing much. Morthred was a name coined after the event, not before. It means “red death” in island argot and people called him that because they said he was responsible. I’m sorry now I didn’t poke around in the records a bit more.’

  I should have wondered about his scholarship and where he’d had access to those kind of records, but he pulled a rueful face and shrugged, and all my logical thought fled in the face of his charm. My heart beat a little faster, but there was nothing I could do about it right then.

  ###

  There was still a lingering smell of dunmagic about as I went down the stairs, sword in hand, to the privy a few minutes later. Everywhere I looked there were stale traces of angry redness to confuse my Awareness. It clung to the stair, glowed dully in the doorways, rotted around the chair and table legs in the taproom.

  There was a group of Keepers, sitting at the table near the kitchen door having a late breakfast. They were casually dressed; not a chasuble in sight. In the face of so much dunmagic their sylvmagic seemed wholly subdued. One of them I recognised: she had been at the sylv girls’ school at the same time as I had, but she did not react when our eyes met, so I let my gaze drift on as I walked through to the yard.

  Coming back a few minutes later, I ran into Janko just inside the doorway. He was his familiar salivating self, only now when I looked at him he did not seem pitiable, but obscene.

  And he thought I was still unaware of who he was. I knew I might never have such an opportunity again.

  My sword was out and plunging at his chest, almost before I gave a thought to what I was doing.

  I would have succeeded in the murder—and changed the course of history—but for one of those perverse acts of fate that occur sometimes to throw even the best plans out of kilter. The cookboy, staggering under an armful of seaweed for the stove, chose that moment to enter the room behind me. As he brushed past, his view obscured by his burden, he joggled my arm and the lunge that should have skewered Janko through the heart merely removed two fingers from his left hand.

  A number of things then happened at once. Janko let out a murderous yell and hurled a dunspell at my face. It didn’t harm me, of course, but it exploded in my eyes in a foul shower of bloody light and sent me instinctively cringing back, gagging. The cookboy shrieked and threw the seaweed all over us in his panic. Real blood from Janko’s hand sprayed into my face, and just when I should have been embarking on a follow-through attack, I had to spend time wiping it from my eyes. The innkeeper was in the kitchen doorway yelling: ‘Janko, what the piss-arse hell is going on?’ Janko did not answer; he was too busy warding off my next attack with another explosion of power. Then I had company. The whole contingent from the Keeper table joined me.

  I thought they had come to help. I thought they were Keepers from the Keeper Fair. I thought Janko was going to die. I thought I was about to become the Glory Isles’ new hero…

  But they weren’t from the Keeper Fair.

  They were dunmagickers. Subverted sylvtalents.

  The shock of it—to see those tall golden people with dunmagic playing over their skins. To see the malevolence in those beautiful violet eyes, to see their hunger for my pain. Dunmagic Keeper sylvs! It was as if the sun had failed to rise…

  I fought. Dear God, how I fought. I grabbed up a chair in one hand and positioned myself against the wall. Janko, of course, kept out of the way and left it all to his acolytes. They came at me with their swords and their Keeper training and their hate. And somewhere at the back of those glowing eyes I saw traces of what they had once been; it was as Flame had hinted…there was indeed a part of them that knew what they had been, and behind the hate there was black horror.

  I had rarely had so little relish for a fight.

  I warded off the first flurry of lunges with the chair, and then managed to kill one of my attackers with a quick thrust made through the chair legs. They showed no signs of distress at her death, but they were more cautious after that. They took it in turns, two at a time, to come at me in a series of fast slashing attacks, one immediately following another, knowing that sooner or later my concentration would flag when I tired. These weren’t untrained street louts like Teffel and his ilk—these men and women had probably graduated from The Hub Academy and they knew how to fight in tandem. There are some odds that are just too great. I let out a bellow for Tor.

  One of the Keepers used a chair to batter at mine; I managed to open up a deep disabling gash on his arm, but I lost the chair. Without it, I knew I was going to lose.

  Then, just when I thought I was dead, the game changed again. Tor came down the stairs in a roaring fury, swinging a sword like an avenging angel, and lopped off a head in a remarkable two-handed stroke that had me wondering if he also had a Calmenter blade. It wasn’t a bad effort for someone who had—at least over the past week—shown a marked reluctance to wear a sword, let alone use one.

  The odds were a little better then.

  I fought on, concentrating on defence, blocking and blocking again as they lunged and slashed. There was no elegance, no finesse; it was sheer hard work and strength; a fast, brutal fight that we would probably eventually lose, in spite of our skill and experience, because there were more of them.

  Tor disabled another, a woman, and we were down to four opponents, plus Janko. I was vaguely aware of the innkeeper dancing around the room in a frenzy of worry, pleading with us not to break anything more, and would we please take the fight outside? Occasionally he added an agonised entreaty to Janko to tell him what the Great Trench was going on. Janko ignored him and shouted something about not killing either of us; he wanted us alive, turd-damn it, and then we had more company—more of his subverted sylvs—and it was all over.

  I was lying on my stomach on the floor, my sword taken from me, a foot planted firmly in the small of my back to stop me rising while my hands and feet were tied with a piece of fish netting. It hurt. Somewhere off to m
y left, Tor was receiving similar treatment. I made a quick review of the damage: a raw graze along my cheek where I’d been hit by a chair leg, a cut across the back of my right hand that hurt like the sting of a devilfish but which didn’t seem to be bleeding too copiously, a badly bruised side where I’d caught a blow from the flat (fortunately) of a blade. I’d live. Long enough to wish I hadn’t, I supposed.

  Once thoroughly trussed, I was rolled over on to my back. I felt like a king crab with its claws tied. Janko looked down at me, and for the first time I saw him as he truly was. No leer. The eyes that met mine were intelligent, and totally cold. The face was as twisted as ever, but the dribble was gone; and it was his good side I noticed now, not the deformed. It was the face of a handsome man, but one who had never been touched by compassion for anyone. Worse still was the icy hate that seethed there especially for me. He would have personally ripped me apart, piece by piece, if he’d thought that was the worst punishment he could offer me.

  ‘This time,’ he said, ‘you won’t escape. And you won’t die either. Remember that.’ The voice—that of a well-educated, well-bred man—was the one I’d heard when I’d been staked out on the sand, not the one I associated with whining Janko the waiter. He touched my face with his boot, digging the toe into the graze. A petty, pointless torture, except for its promise of a grim future for me. Then he crouched down, so that his face was close to mine. ‘You are going to wish you had never crossed me. Do you know what people used to call me, Blaze Halfbreed? Morthred the Mad. But they mistook: I was never mad. Everything I ever did was calculated, just as everything that will be done to you will be planned. To the last details. Remember that too.’