‘You don’t remember me, do you?’ Truth asked, as he approached Meg.
She stared at the man’s salt-and-pepper beard and hair. His blue eyes sparkled with fierce energy in the lantern light. But there was something in his deep, resonant voice—and then she recognised him. ‘It was you.’
Truth smiled. ‘So you do remember? I knew you would.’
She edged back beside Jewel, ready to protect her son. ‘You tried to kill me,’ she said.
He laughed. ‘I did?’ he asked.
‘You called me an aberration. You said I had to be destroyed.’
Truth nodded. ‘Possibly I said those things. But you didn’t stay to hear what else I had to say.’ He looked down at her feet. ‘I see your familiar is still protecting you.’
She glanced down at Whisper, before she met his calm gaze. ‘Familiar?’
‘Animals possessed with demon spirits.’
‘Whisper’s not possessed by anything,’ she retorted. She noticed men moving through the chamber, carrying boxes towards an opening lit by torches. ‘What else is going on here?’
‘You’re going away,’ Follower said.
‘Thank you, Follower,’ Truth said perfunctorily. ‘You have work to do, I believe?’
Follower bowed again, and skulked away towards the workers.
‘Follower is a good servant of Jarudha, but he forgets his station on occasion.’
‘What did he mean by that?’ Meg asked.
‘You already know,’ Truth replied. ‘The Queen has sent you away for your safety.’
‘You work for the Queen?’
He smiled wryly. ‘I serve Jarudha.’
‘And Diamond?’
‘Fool,’ Truth calmly replied. ‘He serves the Queen.’
‘Then why did you attack me at Broadfields?’ she asked, her uneasiness increasing in his presence.
‘I didn’t attack you.’
‘You had me kidnapped.’
‘Yes, I did. I wanted to know who this girl was who’d killed Marchlord Overbrook,’ he explained.
‘But I was under the Queen’s protection.’
‘I serve Jarudha, not the Queen,’ he reiterated. ‘I think you already know enough about the political situation.’
‘That I’m a woman?’
‘In part.’
‘What else?’
A man came jogging across the chamber towards the Seer, bowing as he arrived. ‘Your Eminence, the tide is turning.’
‘Thank you,’ Truth replied, and turned back to Meg as the sailor withdrew. ‘There’s a great deal you don’t know,’ he said, ‘and there’s no longer any time for you to learn it. But you will have plenty of time to come to terms with everything where you’re going.’
‘Where are we going?’ As she asked the question, she was aware of movement behind her. She turned at the same instant as she heard Run! echo in her head, but arms were wrapped around her, pinning her arms tight. Jewel screamed, but as Meg turned her head she was enveloped in suffocating darkness, rough fabric scraping her cheeks. Her struggle was futile.
‘Don’t fight it, Amber,’ Truth’s deep voice warned beyond the hood. ‘You don’t have a choice.’
Magic, she decided.
‘The Conduit,’ she heard Truth say. Hands pawed at her vest, inside her tunic, across and between her breasts, and the necklet was wrenched from her neck. She screamed inside the stifling hood. ‘You won’t need this where you are going,’ Truth said, when she’d stopped struggling. She felt a hand firmly grasp her jaw through the hood. ‘Perhaps one day you’ll understand why all this happened. It might even make you happy, if you live to see it.’ Then she was released. ‘Take care, Amber. Or perhaps it should just be plain Meg Farmer again. Make what you can of your new life. Be grateful that Jarudha has shown you some mercy.’
Endless, sickening motion—rise and fall, rise and fall. On her knees, she retched into the wooden pail, but her stomach was long empty and nothing came but spasms. She coughed, wiped her mouth and collapsed sideways onto the wooden planks as they tilted towards her. Eyes open, she was in semi-darkness, dull patches of sunlight slanting through cracks in the decking dancing along the planks and ribs of the ship’s hull. She was dying—she had to be to feel like she did. Water spilled across her hands and trickled under her tunic. She was sodden, but she couldn’t rise. Her strength had been vomited away into the pail and across the bilge. Everything was in seesawing motion and all she could do was keep begging it all to end. Something small and black stared at her from the shadows.
She was knee-deep and naked in grey water in a cavern of light. Encircling her were a host of men in Seer robes, a wall of blue that hurt her eyes. Suspended above her was a baby in blue swaddling cloth, and above the baby floated a sphere of white light. Instinctively she reached for her amber crystal but it wasn’t around her neck, and she was so overcome with sorrow that the light above her dimmed to a dull yellow. It brightened again, and when she looked up she saw the baby’s tiny hand manipulating the light, a bangle of amber around his wrist.
The light was gone and the world was still. Water lapped gently against the invisible hull. The planks creaked. A small warm weight pressed against her side. She reached down to pet the rat, but as her fingers brushed the fur, boots scraped on the decking overhead, wood groaned and iron clanked, and the rat bolted. Lantern light flowed down the steps and glittered on the dark bilge brine. ‘Wake-up time!’ a voice announced, and men descended the steps, bringing the light.
‘Fuck me!’ a man declared. ‘Smells like shit in here.’
‘Trip a bit rough for you, eh, girlie?’ another man asked, as he bent over her.
‘Go empty that pail, for Jarudha’s sake!’ another voice ordered.
Shapes moved around her, while her eyes were adjusting to the bright intrusion. ‘Come on, girlie,’ a sailor said, and arms lifted Meg to her feet.
‘Pretty little bitch, eh?’
‘Much as I hate telling you this, mate, keep your paws off. His Holiness will have your balls for rissoles if you touch her.’
‘Greedy bastard. Booty like this should be shared around.’
‘I’ll tell him you said that.’
‘Fuck you.’
Somehow she found the strength to climb the steps with the rough aid of the sailors, half comprehending their chatter, half wanting to vanish. The cool evening was as soothing as cold water in the morning on her face, and she was glad to breathe fresh air after the close stench of the bilge. Her captors led her to the rail of the ship in the mixture of moonlight and lantern light, and made her climb down the rope into a small rowboat. She went without a fuss, too addled by the seasickness and the shock of events to protest, and she sat in silence as the oarsmen rowed towards the boom of waves rolling onto the beach. The sailors hauled the boat onto the shore, and they guided Meg out onto the sand. They offloaded boxes and crates. As the crew climbed back into the boat, one sailor said gruffly, ‘That’s it, girlie. Welcome to your new home.’
PART EIGHT
‘It has been written many times that out of
misfortune can come fortune, that out of the
ashes will rise the new tree, that after the floods
the world is reborn under a rainbow.
Look upon every adversity as an opportunity to
divest yourself of the past and commence anew.
Consider it as a gift to you, and you will see
beyond your immediate miseries to the
possibilities in waiting.’
FROM The Word, CHAPTER SEVEN, LESSON 23,
ACCORDING TO ERIN THE WISE
CHAPTER FORTY
Waves washed against the sand. Hermit crabs scampered across the flat rocks from pool to pool, dodging the seagulls whirling above them in search of morsels. She sat on the beach, wrapped in her sorrow, staring out to sea. Jon was gone. Her baby was gone.
She’d huddled all night between the crates the sailors had left on the beach, numbed fro
m the chill by her fathomless grief. She slept fitfully, and dreamed, but the fragments were incomprehensible to her now. She’d woken at sunrise to the rattle of the ship’s anchor chain in the still air, and ghostly voices calling orders through the mist, and only then did she realise that she’d been taken to a strange place and abandoned. Cold, desolate in her soul, she watched the sails unfurl and the ship turn as a gentle breeze drove it out to sea.
Her gaze wandered to a small dark object bobbing in the shallows, rising and falling as the waves swept by, heading for the shore. Curious, she walked along the beach to the point where the swimming creature would land. Coming formed as an image and a feeling in her mind. Whisper! The bush rat rode the last wave to the sand and waddled out of the ocean, weighed down by her sodden black fur, and stopped at Meg’s feet. ‘Whisper!’ Meg gasped with elation, as she scooped up the rat. And she stared in astonishment. Around the rat’s neck, dangling ludicrously from her sodden body was the amber crystal necklet. ‘Where did you get this?’ she whispered in awe, afraid to take the crystal in case it was an illusion. She held Whisper in her left hand and gingerly lifted the thin gold chain off the little animal. Then she kissed the rat on the nose. Whisper immediately started grooming her face. ‘I don’t believe this,’ Meg said, staring at the crystal and at Whisper. ‘No one would believe this.’ Dry, the rat projected, and shifted restlessly in Meg’s palm. Meg lowered Whisper, and the rat waddled onto the soft sand and immediately set to drying and preening herself. Meg glanced nervously out to sea, expecting to see the ship returning, but it was out of sight. ‘I wish you could tell me how you got the necklet off the Seer,’ she said aloud, ‘and how you got on the ship.’ Whisper stopped preening and looked up at Meg with her dark eyes. She shook and returned to her methodical task.
The crates and boxes were as much of a surprise as Whisper’s arrival when Meg opened them. One contained the meagre set of clothes Meg had packed for her journey. Four crates were full of books—texts from the Royal library, written in ancient languages. She recognised some that she had already read, and others that came from the same collections. On the top of the books in the third crate she discovered a vellum scroll. Unrolled, it was a note to her. ‘All that is an abomination in the eyes of Jarudha must be purged from the kingdom of his true believers. You are such an abomination. So, too, are these books, brought into our kingdom by the ignorance of the Royals. Like you, these books do not belong in Shess. Perhaps they will amuse you in your isolation.’ At the base of the note was a direct quotation from The Word: ‘Beware the lies of those who would conjure without faith, for they know only darkness and cannot find the true path.’
Meg sat on the sand to contemplate the events that had engulfed her. For certain, Follower Servant, the Intermediary, was the person responsible for betraying the Queen’s confidence. He possibly even coordinated the attempts against Meg’s life. His convenient killing of the Elite leader supported that theory. The connection with Seer Truth suggested that he was also active in the rebellion against the Queen—a supporter of the Queen’s eldest son, Future? So what had happened to Queen Sunset last night? Did they attack her as well? Or was the intention to tell her lies about Meg’s whereabouts and health? If so, why? To make the Queen feel vulnerable? Were the Rebels biding their time, plotting another attempt at taking control when they were strengthened again? And why had they taken Jon? Could they possibly know the truth about his father? Overwhelmed by the wave of emotions that swamped her, she collapsed on the sand and cried for the loss of her son.
The island took her half a day to traverse in any direction, and she was fascinated to be surrounded by the ocean. The landscape was hilly, rocky and thickly wooded—a mixture of mallee, gum and pine—and there were plentiful small marsupials and birds for her to trap. Growing up in her farming community, she had rudimentary survival skills and knew what could be eaten and where fresh water might be found. Three small creeks ran through shallow valleys, and although none were perennial, two cut through rock in their seaward journeys, leaving freshwater billabongs for the local fauna.
She covered a gap in a tumble of granite boulders with branches and leaves to create a sizable shelter, and used water from a nearby billabong to daub the construction with mud to bind the vegetation. She knew heavy rains would destroy her work if she was still on the island beyond Fuar, but she also hoped to have built something more substantial by then. She carted her books and precious few belongings to her shelter and set up home.
She lost count of the days and nights. Hunting and fishing, talking to Whisper, slowly building a stronger shelter and reading filled her time. In the first days, between long bouts of depression and loneliness and grief for Jon, she anticipated the sails of the ship appearing on the horizon, returning with Seer Truth to reclaim the amber necklet. He would have been mortified to discover the necklet missing, and she wanted desperately to know how Whisper had so effectively retrieved it without being caught. She focussed on trying to build communication with the rat, but it seemed Whisper only understood emotional images and images of objects. Their conversations were restricted to fundamental needs. Hungry, the rat would tell her, and vanish to eat. Hot, she would express, and slink under a cool rock ledge. Sleep came often. What Meg did learn gradually were the nuances in the rat’s language. Danger and fear were expressed according to the source and level of danger. So Whisper said Careful when a hawk hovered overhead on its hunting search. Meg knew Run meant exactly what the rat projected it to mean. The source of danger was too near and too nasty. The simplicity of the communication gradually bored her, although she enjoyed playing a fetch game with Whisper. She would think Stick or Pebble and Whisper would bring the item and drop it at her feet and wait for another instruction, projecting an image that could only be translated as Fun. Again.
But she regretted learning animal communication the first time she caught a possum in a pit trap. The sun was rising on the eastern ocean horizon and mist wreathed the low island hills when she went to check her traps a few days after arriving. As she reached the tiny space under the trees where her pit trap was set, she felt the possum’s fear in her mind. The images of darkness and panic, indecipherable as words, were overwhelming. A desperate animal realised it was going to die. The impact of the possum’s psychic cry stopped her and she had to fight welling tears. At her feet, Whisper sat up, sniffing the air nervously and flinching, as if emotional arrows were hitting her, and she was reluctant to go any closer to the trap.
When Meg composed her emotions, she went to the trap and peered in. The possum, crouched at the bottom of the slender hole, looked up and the images of fear were superimposed with something akin to astonishment. As hungry as she was for something more than nuts, berries, yams and crabs, she realised she was going to have to kill a creature that could speak to her in its simple way—an animal that knew fear and happiness and sensed its fate. It would be like killing Whisper. Or Sunfire. She found a branch and pushed it into the pit, before retreating into the bushes and waiting. The possum warily emerged, sniffed the ground quickly and bolted into the undergrowth. ‘Fish and birds,’ she muttered, looking down at Whisper, ‘and I’d better not learn if they can communicate.’
The books that Seer Truth and his colleagues had dumped with her gave purpose to her long and lonely days. At first she read at random, feeling the magical tingle along her spine each time that she began decoding the languages and discovering how the attitudes of people in different lands varied towards magic. Some writers told stories of how magic was banned and the practitioners killed in wild frenzies by the magic haters. Other books described societies with unequivocal reverence for people they called wizards and witches and sorceresses, in some cases to the point where they held the greatest authority. She read tales of fabulous creatures that could breathe fire, cast magic and fly: stories of mighty heroes whose exploits were legendary in every sense of the word; tragic stories of the downfall of empires. Most were histories, although their facts se
emed more akin to the content of ballads than to accurate recording.
She reorganised the books into categories of origin and confirmed that there were five main sources. Three of the thickest tomes were written in the language of the Ashuak Empire, the place to the east where a great library existed. There were several thin texts written over a very long period in a language belonging to a nation of people who called themselves the Ranu Ka Shehaala. The oldest collection was five books written in variations of languages from the Andrakian kingdom, which appeared to have collapsed a millennium ago. A fourth set of books was written in the language of a society called the Alfyn. The remaining books, some thirteen, were an eclectic collection from small countries and cities, in a variety of languages.
As she catalogued her library, she discovered rare and potent books, like Doorways, a Ranu Ka Shehaala text that meticulously described the making and casting of portal magic. There was a fascinating text by an Ashuak who called himself Erin Vekesh, titled The Dark Spells, detailing a host of magical incantations the author called ‘Spells of Unmaking’, which she put aside to read. She rehearsed spells, learning how to generate a variety of fires, create illusions, float small objects in the air, change the shape of objects, unravel ropes, undo the effect of simple spells and make objects cease to exist.
And she found one spell in an Alfyn text that made the hair on the nape of her neck rise—a spell for embedding slivers of the Genesis Stone in living creatures. She read and reread the spell, memorising its sequence and practising the possible cadences, until she believed that she had the recipe. She knew her enemies wanted the amber. If Seer Truth came back to the island he would take it from her. But what if he couldn’t find it? What if she embedded it in herself? She considered the concept for three days, arguing with herself over the advantages and disadvantages, the risks, struggling to sleep at night because she was wrestling with the conundrum. If she embedded the crystal, and Truth found out, would he cut it from her? On the third morning she reread the text to answer her nagging concerns—and decided.
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