The Aware (The Isles of Glory Book 1)

by Larke, Glenda

Above me a mocking voice called down: ‘Thought you’d like the company, halfbreed!’ I didn’t bother to look up.

  She was alive. She moved her head a little and groaned.

  ‘Eylsa —?’

  She moved again and then spoke. ‘Blaze?’

  ‘Yes. I’m here. How badly are you hurt? Can you move at all?’

  She was silent so long, I would have thought her unconscious if I hadn’t seen that she was making some attempt to move. Finally she said, ‘My face hurts. My arm is broken. I hurt inside. Help me on to my back, Blaze.’

  I did so, gently rolling her over. Then I saw the extent of the damage. Her nose was broken and bloodied, her teeth smashed, her arm was crooked, but none of that alarmed me as much as her laboured breathing and the bright frothiness of the blood that oozed out of her mouth. Her ribs had gone through her lungs. God only knows how she managed to speak.

  I looked up in rage and hate. The rim of the blowhole was deserted.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she said.

  She was sorry! ‘Oh, Eylsa. It doesn’t matter. The Keepers will be here the day after tomorrow. Someone will pull me out of here eventually. I can wait.’

  She nodded faintly. ‘I hurt, Blaze.’

  ‘Yes, I know.’ She would read my tone, I knew. I was telling her she was going to die. I knew what the froth at her mouth meant, the strangeness of the sound of her breathing; even Garrowyn Gilfeather and his Mekaté medications could not mend that kind of injury. A sylv might have healed the damage, but only if they acted immediately.

  Her next words told me that she understood and wanted me to know what was important while she could still talk. ‘Alain—I moved him. I found a ladder… Seemed wise. He’s hiding—a store shed—on the right as you…enter Creed…from the south.’

  It was difficult to follow her; her speech was distorted. I wiped blood from her mouth. ‘I understand. That was a good idea. When they knew we had escaped, they might have taken it out on him. But where did you go? One moment you were there with us, then you weren’t.’

  ‘Forgive…not brave. Can’t fight. Chimney…to the roof. They hadn’t seen…me.’

  I thought back to the torture room and the wide chimney above the fireplace. I nodded. ‘You were sensible. You couldn’t have changed what happened.’

  ‘Wish I could.’

  ‘Don’t talk if it hurts, Eylsa.’ I was kneeling beside her, wanting to take her in my arms but afraid to do so, knowing it would hurt her. Instead I held her hand.

  ‘Want to. So much to…say. Looked for you everywhere. Couldn’t find. Then heard slaves talking…followed guards…found you.’ She clutched my hand tight. ‘Friend.’

  ‘Yes. Always.’

  ‘Not just Eylsa. We are one. All of us. The pod.’

  I didn’t understand that at all, but I nodded anyway.

  ‘Want to give…you…something. Raise…my…head…’

  I wrapped the bag she had brought inside the guard’s coat and, very gently, put the bundle under her head. Her breathing eased a little when she was raised. ‘Want to…mark…your palm.’

  I had no idea of the significance of that, but I asked softly, ‘How?’

  ‘With my claws…’

  I nodded and put my right hand by her feet. I forbore from mentioning that another cut was going to cause me problems with blood-demons. It was obviously important to her, so I acquiesced. This was the way they did the ear tattoos, I knew—using their claws. I hadn’t known, though, just how razor sharp those talons were until they sliced into my palm, leaving a thin trail of blood. Even as I watched, I saw that there was a liquid that dripped through the hollow groove in the centre of the claw, so that each time she pricked me, a drop was left behind, mingling with my blood, seeping into the cut. She was in pain, dying, yet she moved her toe—just one—with precision and complete control until she had completed the pattern she wanted. It looked like a curled ‘M’ with a horizontal line behind it.

  ‘That’s a bouget…symbol…water vessel…my people. Place your palm in my blood.’

  I did as she asked. I put my hand face down in the blood that had come from her mouth and now covered her neck. Our blood mingled. The wound tingled like bubbles were breaking in the cut.

  ‘My name…is Mayeen. Remember it.’

  ‘Your spirit name?’

  She nodded. ‘Show your palm…to my people…if you need their help…’

  I was moved. I kissed her cheek. ‘Mayeen,’ I said, ‘I thank you.’

  She spoke only once more. A few minutes later, when she reached up to touch my left earlobe, she said, ‘I wish I could have…’

  ‘It doesn’t matter,’ I said, and for the first time in my life, it really didn’t. ‘It has been a privilege to know you, Mayeen.’

  She didn’t speak again, but she was a long time dying.

  ###

  I sat on a rock with the water swirling around my ankles and Eylsa’s body in my arms, stupidly reluctant to release her to the rising water. She was dead, what did it matter what happened to her body? But it did. It mattered like hell.

  I still couldn’t understand what had made her give me the gift of her name. What had I ever done for her? It was she who had helped me; freeing me from the yoke and then dying in an attempt to rescue me. All I had done was to treat her exactly the way I would have treated anyone else in similar circumstances. I had liked her, it’s true, but as she died she made me special to her. I felt inadequate, less than I should have been. Someone had died for me, someone whose kind I had once despised, and now all I had once cared for—the search for citizenship, the wealth, the security—seemed petty. What did any of it matter? I would have given it all to have Eylsa whole and well. The life of a ghemph was suddenly worth more than all my ambitions.

  ###

  I was still sitting there when Morthred came. He wasn’t alone: Flame was with him, and so was Tor.

  I had eyes only for Tor. He was supported, or rather dragged by two armed subverted sylvs and he was naked and shackled, hand and foot. There were several other guards as well; Morthred evidently enjoyed overdoing the security measures these days. They pushed Tor to the edge of the hole so that I could see him.

  I didn’t move. I sat where I was, up to my waist in water, still holding Eylsa, but I couldn’t take my eyes off him. He stared sightlessly outwards, not looking down at me. I could see what Flame had created: eyeless sockets, bloodied mouth, mutilated manhood—but I saw it all as a sylvmagic haze blurring the reality. Only then did I know just how much I had worried that she wouldn’t be able to do it, that his mutilation would be real. Only then did I acknowledge that one part of me had feared Morthred really had subverted her a second time.

  I don’t think I heard the mocking torments they yelled down at me; if I did, I don’t remember them now. I don’t even remember seeing them any more; I, who had once not known what it was to weep, was crying too hard.

  Then they went away and left me there.

  ###

  What had made Flame do such an insanely dangerous thing? To follow us voluntarily into Morthred’s lair, pretending his dunmagic spell and her arm had never been removed, pretending his spell really had subverted her? To step voluntarily into the purgatory of an existence at Morthred’s side, to be abused by him as he willed? One mistake, one false move and she would doom herself—not to death, but to an even worse kind of perverted, degrading slavery. Her magic was enough to make him see and feel the arm, but it wasn’t enough for her to pick something up with it. The deception wouldn’t have been an easy one to maintain and one tiny slip was all that was needed for Morthred to guess that her left arm was not real. And if he realised that, he would guess why it had been removed and he would know that she lied, that her subversion was a sham.

  I remembered the dunmagic that played over her—Morthred’s traces on her skin. I remembered the way she’d flinched when he mentioned the night. No, it wasn’t purgatory, she was living in hell already. A volunteer in hell. And
she had known what he would want of her…

  He had already raped her once before. Even if he never guessed at her deception, she had known she would suffer.

  She was a paradox: sometimes made of marlin horn, hard and unbreakable; sometimes as soft and as vulnerable as fish spawn tossed in the tide. She could do something so brave it gave me spine-crawls just to think of it; but she couldn’t harden herself to the violations of her body. She didn’t have my shell. I sensed she couldn’t have done it at all if Ruarth hadn’t been there to support her: she couldn’t stand alone the way I could.

  I looked down at Eylsa again.

  And I didn’t know what I had done to deserve such friends. I still don’t.

  I released the ghemph into the water.

  ###

  I plucked Eylsa’s bag out of the sea as it floated past and opened it up; she had brought me food and water and a rope. I forced myself to eat and drink; I needed my strength to face the night ahead. The rope was useless—there was nothing around the rim of the hole that I could lasso so that I could haul myself up. And doubtless there was now another guard on duty up there somewhere as well.

  As I dropped the rope into the water, I caught sight of the mark that Eylsa had etched on my palm. My eyes widened; it had healed already, and there was nothing normal about the scar it had left. It was gold. It shone like the flash of a carp leaping into the sunlight.

  You have noticed it, of course. It’s still there—see?—just as beautiful as it was that first day. Her gift to me—the bouget, the symbol of her people—and, as I was to discover, a mark that was to ensure me the unquestioning support of all ghemphs from the Calments to the Spatts. A mark bought with her dying blood.

  Note from Researcher (Special Class) S. iso Fabold to Masterman M. iso Kipswon, President of the National Society for the Scientific, Anthropological and Ethnographical Study of non-Kellish peoples.

  Uncle,

  I did examine the ‘bouget’ she refers to here. It is exactly as she described it: a tattoo inlaid with gold. The gold is flexible so that it does not hinder hand movements, and it must therefore be paper thin. Paradoxically, it does not seem to have worn away. (Remember, she is stating that it was done some fifty years or more earlier!) If she is telling the truth about how she came by it—which I doubt—then how can it be real gold? Yet it must be, surely, for it was not tarnished. I did ask if we could scrape away a sample for testing, but she refused in a way that made me think it would be unwise to ask a second time.

  Shor iso Fabold

  Dated this day 1/1st Darkmoon /1793

  TWENTY-THREE

  The morning brought still more horror.

  I had wondered at the relative absence of blood-demons during the night; only one had fastened itself to me and I’d quickly got rid of that.

  In the morning the absence was explained.

  Eylsa’s body rolled in the swell nearby, and her face had been eaten away. What was left of her head was covered in blood-demons.

  Even in death, she had kept me safe.

  ###

  The tide was going out. By mid-morning, when Ruarth came back, I was standing knee deep. I knew the moment I saw him that something was wrong; there was an urgency to the way he flew. I held out my arm and he alighted, already crying out his agitation.

  I interrupted, naming the worst possible thing I could think of: ‘Morthred discovered her subversion was a sham.’

  He nodded.

  ‘Damn him to the Trench.’ I thought of Tor, sightless, tongueless, maimed—for real, this time. I thought of what Morthred might do to Flame. The first thing he would do, in fact: put another spell of subversion into her body. ‘He’s done it to her again,’ I said, my voice no more than a whisper.

  He nodded. He was shivering, in shock.

  Not again. ‘When? Just now?’

  He nodded again. His claws dug into my arm, communicating his fear, his grief.

  ‘Tor?’ My tongue felt thick.

  He shrugged. He didn’t know.

  I knew what I had to do. ‘Listen, Ruarth, Eylsa’s dead. I’m going to try to get out of here by myself, through the tunnel where the water comes in, but I may not make it. You will have to fly to Duthrick and get him to attack today.’ I was already tearing a patch out of my shirt. I ripped open my finger on a piece of shell I rummaged from the sand beneath my feet and I wrote a message in blood on the cloth: URGNT ATTCK TDAY. Then I found myself frowning. Duthrick would never act on a note like that alone, just at my request, without any reason given. I squeezed some more blood out and added TO SAVE CSTLEMD and I signed it in the way I had always signed my personal communications to him: ‘B’ . ‘We’ll just have to hope that Duthrick still has enough faith in my judgement, and that he still trusts me enough to take notice of this. Take it and go, Ruarth. If you can’t find Duthrick, give it to anyone on the Keeper Fair.’

  He took the cloth in both claws and I threw him into the air.

  He disappeared and I readied for my dive.

  I emptied both drinkskins— the one Eylsa had given me and the original one from the guards—and filled them with air, recorking them tightly. I made a cord with material torn from the guard’s coat, and tied it to each drinkskin so that I could hang them around my neck. Then I breathed deeply a number of times, and dived into the mouth of the tunnel, dragging the drinkskins with me.

  The first part was easy enough. The drinkskins were buoyant, but the tunnel roof stopped them from floating away. There was room enough for me to swim, and there was light.

  A little further in, the horror began. The tunnel narrowed and my body blocked off the light from behind. The light ahead was so far away it was nothing more than a murky suggestion in the darkness. I dribbled air out of my mouth and the bubbles bounced against the rock above me. I had no room to swim properly so I pulled myself along, grasping at the roof and floor. I had some help from the wash of the tide, but there was also an occasional surge of a wave that wanted to take me the opposite way.

  And the tunnel thinned still further.

  I was running out of air. The rock was closing in on me. I reached a narrow point and had to squeeze my body through, arms and air bladders first, then head. My hips stuck. I needed air. I eased the cork out of the first of the drinkskins and took the opening into my mouth. The sweetness of the breath I inhaled was heaven. I breathed back into the bladder: the air was too precious to waste. I was going to have to reuse it until it was too stale to be of any benefit.

  I was still stuck. I kicked desperately; pushed against the rock behind with my feet. I moved a shade forward—and wedged myself even tighter. In a panic, I tried to move backwards, and couldn’t. I was trapped. The panic swelled. I didn’t want to die like this, to be eaten by blood-demons…

  I tried twisting sideways. I clawed at the rock with my fingertips, tearing my skin. I pushed and pulled and squirmed. And I remained stuck. Sailors believe hell must be like that: dark and cold and lonely and fearful, without the promise of hope; they call it the Great Trench below, filled only with darkness and the unimaginable.

  When the air in the first bag was gone, I switched to the other, postponing death by a breath or two, as unwilling as ever to admit that I was defeated.

  Then pain ripped through me, a shocking, unexpected agony so great that it took a moment for me to pinpoint its place: my ankles, both of them—blood-demons settling into the ulcers that constant exposure to sea water had reopened. I couldn’t stand the horror of it, being eaten alive, being digested by their disgusting acids, being unable to reach back and tear them from me. My frantic struggles were irrational, but my frenzy brought success. I popped out into the wider part of the passage. The pain didn’t end. It went on and on and I still couldn’t twist back to get at the cause; the passage was nowhere wide enough. It bored straight on, too narrow to allow me to swim freely, and the light ahead was still dim and distant. I knew I didn’t have enough air to make that swim, but I started anyway, driven on by pain
, desperate to get somewhere where I could rip those creatures from my feet.

  The pain defeated me. I don’t know if the air in the second bladder was even finished when I lost it; I was beyond rationality, beyond anything but panic. I opened my mouth to scream—and took in air.

  Water surged, bumping me against the roof. I gulped and swallowed some. Again I wanted to scream, again I breathed air. There were pockets of air, air that had been caught in wave turbulence at the entrance, then forced back along the passage by the tide. I twisted over on to my back, pressed my nose to the roof and breathed long deep, steady breaths.

  Rationality returned. I scraped my feet along the tunnel walls until I tore the blood-demons free. Without the pain I could think. I rolled over again and set off for the light, pulling myself along, feeling for more hollows in the roof where there were air pockets. I knew then that I would make it.

  To shoot up to the surface, to be in the light and air again should have been heaven, but the first thing that happened to me was that I was flung against the cliff by an incoming wave. The tide might have been on its way out, but the waves weren’t. I could breathe, but I was in danger of being battered to death. I did the one thing that could save me—I went back down under the water. I dived and caught the undertow out beyond the breaking of the waves.

  When I emerged again, I still wasn’t far enough out. I dived once more and this time angled myself across the waves instead of directly into them. The next time I came up, I was out of danger. I had also picked up another blood-demon. I rid myself of that by stuffing it inside the pocket of my tunic, and started a long, tough swim back towards Creed.

  I was tired. I hadn’t slept in well over twenty-four hours; I seemed to have been battling waves, blood-demons and my own grief and terrors for as long as I could remember. I might live, but perhaps the man I loved was being torn to pieces, perhaps the woman I cared for was being turned into something irrevocably evil. My message to Duthrick, my escape, this infernal swim: everything I was doing might be too late…