Wild Magic (49 page)

Then the sail came free of its lines at last and whipped around the mast like an enraged beast. Now they were entirely at the mercy of the storm.

Aran looked out at the place where he must shortly die. He was surprised to discover that felt no great, all-encompassing emotion at this fact, but rather a vague sense of regret and an even fainter sense of culpability for the lives of the others for whom he was responsible. His fingers flexed, and he found that he had by some odd instinct clutched hold of the map-pouch in the midst of the storm, as if its very touch offered him some obscure, supernatural comfort. There was surely magic in the map, he thought again; and something in him was suddenly sure that whatever charm had been sealed into the parchment would see them through this disaster. It offered Sanctuary in return for his faith. It was his amulet; his talisman.

The sea, however, appeared to be unaware of any such bargain. It was tumultuous, awesome in its sheer destructive power. It might crush them all at any moment. But still the waves held their shape; apart from the spindrift which the wind dragged off their crests, they did not break. Rather, now they began to crash into one another and pile up into a great confusion. For a while it seemed as if the sea was coming from all directions at once. The ship pitched this way and that. The moon buried itself so completely that no light fell on the turbulent waters at all. Time seemed suspended. Aran lost any sense of orientation he had had. A great collision of waves shook free one of the skiffs and the wind got under it and hurled it over the side, nearly taking the Master with it. He held on grimly, thankful he had tied himself to the sturdy gunwale and not the faering; unlike poor Marit Fennson, whose diminishing wail was now lost in the generalised roar of the elements.

The bombardment went on and on, punctuated by vivid bursts of light and ear-numbing thunder. Aran watched helplessly as the blond man who had tried to rescue Haki Ulfson was himself lost to the sea, the cord which had bound him safely to the mastfish sundering under a strain it was never designed to withstand. Another of his crew – he thought it might be Pol Garson – lost his hold on a brace and was picked up by the wind like a straw doll and dashed against the deck. His right arm flopped at an angle which suggested his shoulder had been dislocated and the limb broken below the elbow. Blood ran down his face and was almost instantaneously washed away by another onslaught of the waves, which sucked his inert body perilously close to the edge of the gunwale. There, two men – Erl Fostison and his cousin Fall it looked like, though it was almost impossible to tell through the mixture of lashing rain and seawater – caught hold of him and saved his life by wrapping the end of the rope that held them in place around his waist. Not that he’d be much good on an oar, Aran found himself thinking uncharitably, even if he survived.

His eyes searched the chaos of the deck for Fent’s flying red hair, but his youngest son was nowhere to be seen, which was hardly surprising, since most of the men were desperately hunkered down, trying to keep out of the worst of the wind.

Towards what counted as dawn in this godforsaken region, the storm finally blew itself out, and the wind died away to nothing more than a brisk southerly breeze. It took Aran Aranson several minutes to unstrap himself from the gunwale. His hands were wet and frozen, his fingers red and raw and bruised. He seemed to have no strength at all. Every inch of him ached. The rope had swelled from soaking up the brine, so that even though he had taken care to tie himself in with knots which were designed to be easy to undo in emergency, the influence of the elements had prevailed, turning them stubborn and intransigent.

Then he tottered down the deck on rubbery legs and surveyed the not inconsiderable damage, feeling very little like the hero who had stood at the helm just short hours before.

By some miracle or favour of the god, it appeared that the
Long Serpent
and the greater part of her crew had survived the worst of what the Northern Ocean could throw at her.

Twenty-two

Beasts

Do not try to use the old man’s voice on me again. I will bite you.

‘I promise I will not, if you will return to your true form.’

I am sure you prefer me as the tiny one whom you can trap and tame, but I do not choose to adopt that guise any longer. This is my true self. What is yours?

‘I am what I am. What do you mean?’

You do not smell the way a man should. You have some of the right scent, but more of worms and earth. Indeed, I am not sure I would want to bite you too hard, for fear the taste would linger.

‘You have become remarkably talkative since you took on this new form.’

The Beast flicked its tail impatiently but gave no other response.

He started again. ‘If you were to kill me, how would you return to your mistress? She is across the ocean and even a cat as great as you cannot swim so far.’

A flicker of amusement.
First a master, now a mistress. Do you truly think of the Rose of the World in that way? How strange you are, worm-man. A worm, in the heart of the rose, in the heart of the world. No, we will go south, to the Red Peak.

‘I do not want to go to the Red Peak: I have read that it is all ash and fire and moving rock. Why would anyone want to go there, except to die? We go north, to Halbo, then to Rahe.’

We go south.

‘Nor— Aaah!’

I told you not to use the voice. That was but a mere nibble in comparison with what I might do. We will go where I say, which is not across the ocean. No cat wishes to swim, and I shall not be getting in a boat with you again until the seas run dry.

Saro looked around. His head felt blurry, as if he had woken from a drunken slumber. He blinked and took in his surroundings. He was in a grove outside the walls of the city of Jetra and it was dark. A little distance away from him a horse he recognised as Night’s Harbinger was tethered to a tree, rubbing its shoulder against the bark so hard that its branches jiggled. Two or three objects hit the ground in a series of soft thuds and then a powerful scent of overripe orange filled the air. Back home in Altea, where the harvest came later and was less certain, and where every cantari counted, every piece of fruit that could be sold, crushed for juice or boiled up and preserved for the long winter would have been gathered in by now: but here in Jetra they left the fruit to rot on the trees. It was a rich city; rich and foreign and wasteful of its bounty.

The sharp citrus scent served to clear Saro’s head. A vague memory of sneaking out of the castle and saddling up the stallion came to him out of nowhere; he recalled looking up at the Navigator’s Star. He thought he remembered making a decision to head north; but why that should be, he could not now imagine. North, to Eyra, the land of barbarians, with whom they would imminently be at war: what had possessed him? And yet something nagged at the back of his skull, something that murmured of disaster and ruin if he were not to remove himself as far from this place as possible. He reached for it, failed to grasp it, and was instead assailed by a bizarre collage of images and sounds, uppermost of which was a man’s voice telling him to
wait
,
wait here for my return
. The command had been imperative, ungainsayable; and so he had waited. But now he began to wonder why, and for whom, he was waiting. The necessity of flight, which had impelled him out of the Eternal City in the first place, began to reassert itself with growing urgency. His limbs itched to move, but seemed as rooted as the trees. Concentration even on this simplest of tasks proved hopeless. After a while he became deeply annoyed with himself.

‘Falla’s tits!’ he swore, trying desperately to raise a foot, but his boot remained in obdurate contact with the ground.

As if the curse had woken some kind of demon, a low growl swelled into the darkness behind him; and then Saro began to remember some of what his mind had thought it best to forget. Narrowing his eyes, he stared into the gloom and found that the thing he had believed a figment of nightmare was actually walking in Elda. As if it held the power to materialise at will, it now revealed itself as a huge cat – a vast black beast with glowing golden eyes and massive paws – and if that were not bad enough, at its side was the tall pale man he had inadvertently touched in the Star Chamber, a touch which had disturbed his dreams ever since, as if he had been infected by some illness the man carried.

The stone seemed to respond more positively, though. Like the cat’s eyes, it began to glow, emitting a wan greenish-gold light. Illuminated by this eldritch sheen, the sorcerer looked haggard and drawn, though it was hard to ascribe this notion to anything specific: the man’s face did not exhibit the usual signs of age, for no frown-lines crossed his smooth forehead, no raven’s-feet radiated from his eyes, no gouges marred those colourless cheeks.

Virelai put out his hand in a warding gesture. ‘Please,’ he said, his eyes fixed on the glowing moodstone. ‘Don’t.’

At this, the great cat slumped down, lifted a massive leg and began to groom its private parts with a vast, rough tongue and intense self-absorption, so that the rasping sound was soon joined by a full-throated rumbling which filled the night air and thrummed in Saro’s breastbone. After a while the combination of the purring and the intense simplicity of the beast’s grooming made something in Saro relax, and as he did so he found that the pale man’s voice no longer had the same hold over him as it had before. Movement returned in tiny increments, but rather than lift his feet, Saro’s fingers went instinctively to the moodstone, closing tightly over it so that the light squeezed out between them, livid and garish.

‘No!’

The word seemed imbued with some strange power, for Saro’s hand dropped away from the moodstone as if he had been burned. Both hand and pendant felt suddenly as cold and heavy as lead.

Saro frowned. ‘You know about the stone,’ he said softly.

Through the grey pre-dawn light, the sorcerer held his gaze and nodded slowly.

‘What do you know?’

But Virelai’s eyes became uncommunicative, as flat and dead as those of the giant whiskered fish Saro had once caught in the stagnant waters of the Crow Marsh. It too had returned his astonished gaze with this inimical expression – an expression which spoke of arcane knowledge gradually accrued by absorbing the experiences of the denizens of those grim and murky depths – and then whipped its spine back and forth so hard that it had broken the line and vanished beneath the surface of the lake. Virelai broke the connection between them just as effectively, dropping his gaze and moving to where the stallion was tethered.

Night’s Harbinger began to back away, eyes rolling, but the sorcerer put out his hand. ‘
Shi-rajen
,’ he said to the horse and it quieted immediately. Then he turned back to regard the boy. ‘Come,’ he said, and as if they belonged to the sorcerer rather than himself, Saro’s feet began to shuffle forward.

Behind them, the cat gave a low growl.

You may use it on him, it said into his mind, and on the stupid horse; but remember what I told you.

Dawn announced itself with an extravagant flourish. It came rolling across the Southern Ocean, flushed the wide estuary of the Tilsen River a rich rose red, and cast its rays like Falla’s own blessing upon a flotilla of fishing vessels setting out into the placid coastal waters to gather up the lobster-pots and crab-traps they had set the night before. It warmed the terraced hills above Lullea, making the vermilion earth glow so brightly it was as if the colour itself were some rare crop, while down below in the shaded valleys, the groves of olives and pomegranates and orchards of apples, limes and lemons released a freight of rich scents into the air. Further inland, to the south-east of Jetra, in the little town of Lord’s Cross with its narrow winding passageways of whitewashed houses and its ornate temple, the tower which dominated the settlement cast a long, long black shadow down the main street like a pointing finger. A mule-borne trader setting out early on his journey from the hill-village of Falcon’s Lair to the produce market there that morning with a cartful of persimmons, turned his head at an opportune moment – he never knew what had prompted him to do so – and was gifted with the momentary glimpse of a strange caravan of figures silhouetted on the distant southern horizon.

That evening, in the Hawk’s Wing tavern in Lord’s Cross, surrounded by a rowdy group of fellow-merchants who had already drunk their way through most of their day’s profits, he would not be dissuaded from his assertion that he had spied ‘the largest mountain cat ever seen in Istria, walking along as friendly as you like beside a pair of fellows leading a horse with all the lines of a fine racing stallion’. Mountain cats were not unknown this far north; but they tended to be runtish creatures, driven out of their natural habitats by their stronger siblings and rivals; and anyway, whoever heard of anyone other than the Lord of Cera taming one of the beasts?

‘Lodu, you should go see Mother Sed tomorrow: get yourself something to improve your eyesight!’

‘Is she still practising?’ Lodu asked. Most of the nomads had cleared out well before the current round of edicts and executions. ‘I didn’t see her setting out her stall this morning.’ He paused. ‘In fact, I didn’t see her today at all.’

His friend shrugged. ‘I haven’t seen her for weeks,’ he admitted.

‘I heard she burned well,’ called an unfamiliar voice from the back of the room.

Lodu turned to survey the speaker, almost as curious to see who it was who had such remarkable hearing to have picked up this fragment of private conversation as to discover the fate of the healer, and found himself looking at a tall, dark man with closely set eyes and a thin mouth currently curved in a cruelly appreciative line, as if the very idea of an ancient crone going up like a torch on one of the Goddess’s pyres warmed his immortal soul.

‘They burned old Mother Sed?’ This seemed unbelievable.

‘That’s what we do with these cursed Footloose, or have you been living in a cave in the Bone Quarter?’