Authors: Jude Fisher
This last made Lodu indignant. ‘She never did anyone any harm.’
Another man spoke up now. ‘She practised sorcery, man, and as such was an unnatural creature whose very presence on the face of Elda mortified our Lady Falla. Magic is the Goddess’s art: it is sacrilege for any other to draw upon her reserves so. Now she is cleansed away, returned to the Lady.’ He made a pious genuflection.
‘Sorcery?’ Lodu laughed, despite himself. ‘She brewed up love potions for gullible girlies and sold the herbs she grew in her own garden: if such is sorcery then my wife had better look out!’
The dark man narrowed his eyes. ‘Perhaps she had, my friend. Perhaps she had.’
Virelai swore.
Even though they had managed to leave the Eternal City and pass into the hinterlands without any obvious pursuit, all was not going to plan.
By the time they arrived at the bend in the river where the osiers and goat-willows had masked Alisha’s campsite, the place had been abandoned and the nomads long gone, leaving nothing behind but the cold, blackened stones of their bread-oven, an area of bare ground where the yeka had cropped the grass down to its roots, and ruts in the ground from the passage of their wagons.
He kicked one of the stones viciously. It hurt, but not as much as it should have done. He had the deeply unpleasant suspicion that if he were to examine the skin of his foot, he would find the area as grey as a dove’s wing.
Saro looked around. It was a cheerless place. ‘Why have we come here?’ he asked plaintively. The sorcerer had been remarkably unforthcoming on the journey, which had been slow and hard on the legs, especially since with every step southward he sensed that he was travelling in the wrong direction. Even so, and against any shred of will he had left to him, he felt compelled to accompany the man: he could not say why.
‘I had hoped to join friends here,’ Virelai said gloomily.
This surprised Saro: the sorcerer looked barely human, let alone the type of man to have friends. But after the events of the last night he really shouldn’t expect to be surprised by anything ever again. The cat – huge and black, even more terrifying to look at in bright sunshine than it had been when shadowed by the night – had stayed with them every step of their way from Jetra and somehow had proved to be more companionable and less disturbing than the pale man, which set the whole natural order of the world at odds.
Virelai sat down hard on the ground and clutched his head, fingers spread like tentacles across his skull, and as he did so Saro noticed there was a black bruise and a trace of blood around the base of the thumb of his right hand, and what looked suspiciously like toothmarks. ‘We are lost,’ the sorcerer groaned. ‘Now they will surely hunt us down. And if they catch us they will take the stone—’ His hands flew up to his mouth, but it was too late: the words were out.
‘The stone,’ Saro said softly. Something stirred in the recesses of his mind, coalesced; took shape and came into sudden, horrifying focus. The moodstone. In another man’s hand – a dark, elegant hand, a killing white light beginning to pulse from between the fingers . . . With tremendous concentration, he drew his focus back and allowed the vision which had driven him out of the city in the first place to wash over him with ever more appalling detail. Coruscations of colour assaulted his eyes, followed by a cacophony of groans and growls. And still the images came, dispelling whatever spell it was he had been under since the previous night.
‘No!’
With fierce effort, Saro tore himself away from the nightmare, only to find Virelai’s strange light eyes with their white-fringed lashes fixed upon him, wide with shock. Beside him, the great cat had risen to its feet as if it might at any moment either leap for his throat or run for its life. Flashes of brilliance, like sunshine on a mirror, danced around them all. When he looked down, he found that he was gripping the moodstone so tightly that his knuckles were white through all its variegations of light.
‘Please don’t use it!’
Horrified, Saro stuffed the pendant back beneath his shirt; but instead of becoming quiescent, the thing continued to pulse and burn, clearly visible even through the weave of the rough fabric.
‘It won’t stop!’
Something unspoken passed between Virelai and the cat, and then the great beast took to its heels and in a flurry of displaced dust and water cleared the low willows and the creek with a single muscular bound. Saro watched it breast the low hill on the opposite bank and disappear from view with a certain measure of relief. The lights from the stone flickered and slowly died to a dull glow.
‘The thing you wear around your neck is a death-stone,’ the sorcerer said at last. ‘It is a most rare and treacherous object.’
A death-stone. This was the very same term which the old nomad healer at Pex had used of his pendant as she backed away from him in terror, sharing with him as she did so the horrible image of the men he had slaughtered with it, all unknowing, on the Moonfell Plain. It had killed three on the Moonfell Plain; and was destined to kill thousands in Tycho Issian’s hands. Now true fear gripped him: why had Virelai brought him out to this forsaken place if not to kill him and take the stone? His body might lie undiscovered for days: no one would ever know . . . But then why send the cat away? Death at the fangs and claws of a wild animal: it was the perfect alibi for the sorcerer: all he had to do was let the beast have its way with him and then retrieve the stone. Something here made no sense; his mind was still hazed . . . But if he was sure of anything it was that the pendant should not find its way to Tycho Issian.
‘Stay back!’ he warned the sorcerer. ‘You are the Lord of Cantara’s servant, and I had rather kill or die myself than allow this stone to fall into the hands of such an evil man.’
‘I have no intention of hurting you,’ Virelai said. ‘The last thing on Elda I would want is for Tycho Issian to have access to a death-stone. He is a madman, a monster.’
That surprised Saro; but who knew the subtle machinations of a sorcerer’s mind? ‘Give me your hand,’ he said suddenly.
An expression of absolute distrust crossed Virelai’s face. ‘You’re going to kill me,’ he said fearfully, cringing away.
Impatience made Saro brave. Before the sorcerer could move further out of reach, he caught him by the wrist. The contact was stronger than he’d meant, and fuller far than the passing touch they had shared in the Star Chamber. The torrent of images by which he was usually assaulted on contact with another living being had been bizarrely, hauntingly absent on that occasion, but now Saro was determined. Gritting his teeth, he forced the stone to his will for the first time. At first all he caught from the sorcerer were echoes, like whispers from a distant room, or shattered reflections in a fast-moving stream; that and a marrow-freezing cold. He pressed on, ignoring the chill, concentrating on the fleeting images. With a supreme effort, he separated one from the crowd and examined it. It was pale and vague, a wisp of memory: thin boy’s knees pressed hard against an icy floor, small hands polishing, polishing. Another: an old man with an immense, craggy head and a sumptuous beard craned over a table piled high with parchments and diverse objects waving him away with a barrage of unheard abuse; a hand descending again and again; brief flowers of pain. Hunger, distant aches and pains: a sudden pang of loneliness; a cut finger which did not bleed. Snow and ice everywhere; thick mists, a choppy sea. Skin flaking off a grey limb. A black hound, saliva dripping from its maw. A naked woman, half-hidden by her long, long hair. A black cat, big, then small. Tycho Issian, a mad light in his eyes, thrashing out at him with a wicked-looking switch. Then himself, magnified by the sorcerer’s terror to the size of a powerful man, brandishing the glowing moodstone—
He broke the contact and sat back, sweating, and tried to make sense of it all. Fears: many of them, diffuse and scattered. Miseries and discomforts, pain and sadness: but nowhere amongst all these sensations was there any hint of threat or guile.
Retching loudly, Virelai coughed up a thin stream of bile, then knelt and stared at the resultant pool with his arms wrapped protectively around himself. He looked reproachfully at Saro, then wiped his mouth with the back of one limp hand. ‘Have you finished scouring me out?’ he demanded wearily.
Saro sighed. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I had to be sure you were not sent to kill me and take the stone. I know what it can do: I have seen your master laying waste to the world with it.’
Virelai looked shocked. ‘Rahe? He would never do that, for all he is old and cantankerous and complains of its evils.’
‘Rahe?’ The word was vaguely familiar, as if he had heard it somewhere a long time ago. Whatever it was, it eluded him, but it did not matter now, so instead he asked: ‘Who is Rahe? I thought the Lord of Cantara was your master?’
‘He is now,’ Virelai said mournfully. ‘But Tycho Issian is worse than the old man: I can well imagine him burning to a cinder anything which prevented him from taking back the Rosa Eldi. That is why I brought you here, to make sure he could not take the death-stone from you and use it for his own devices.’
The Rosa Eldi. The nomad woman whom King Ravn Asharson of Eyra had taken to wife. But what had Tycho Issian to do with such a low-born creature? Unbidden, the obscene image which had presented itself when the Lord of Cantara had embraced him in the Council room returned, luminous amid the carnage: a tall pale woman, her legs wide open to receive . . . Hastily, he banished the sight, the connection between the pair made all too clear. Could basic lust truly propel a man toward such atrocity? He would never have believed it, but then he had always been so naive: after his insights into his own brother’s stew of a mind, he could hardly doubt any individual’s capacity for evil ever again.
A larger truth presented itself to him then as particularity gave way to generality. It was such a vertiginous fall into comprehension that it left Saro feeling dizzy with shame and horror: shame for his gender and his race; horror for the fate of the world. For it suddenly came clear to him that Tycho Issian had engineered this war, had set the whole of the Southern Empire at the throat of its ancient northern enemy, all for lust. And that he had invoked the Goddess in order to do so demonstrated not only the sham that was their religion, but the stupid, vengeful gullibility of his fellow Istrians, who would swallow the words of any nobleman claiming any so-called just cause – no matter how lame, how fabricated, how hollow – and echo the preacher’s hatred a hundredfold and then a hundredfold again until the cries for war swept the entire nation.
Thousands upon thousands would die in the coming conflict; and for what? For the sake of one man’s obsession with a woman’s privy parts.
His skin turned hot, then cold and clammy. He thought he might faint. The stone he wore about his neck might be the only thing which could stop the madness. He was a peaceable, gentle man by nature; but he knew with the utmost certainty what he had to do. His hand folded over the leather pouch and he felt the death-stone pulse as if in compliance. ‘By all that is right and fair in the world, Virelai, I swear that I will stop him, by whatever means I have in my power,’ he said, turning his eyes upon the sorcerer. ‘And you must help me.’
Twenty-three
Sailings
The Northern Isles had never experienced such a fine winter. Shoal after shoal of herring were landed by the fishing fleets of Sandby and Hrossey; around the shores of Fair Isle, where the ocean usually boiled in and out, leaving sucking maelstroms and treacherous crosscurrents in its wake, the waters were so clear you could see the mackerel lying in the shallows: even the children in their scaled-down faerings and coracles were able to paddle out and catch them in complete safety, landing line after line of them and whooping with delight. Whales cast themselves ashore out of mirror-smooth seas; the seal population flourished. Gigantic walruses were seen in the Sharking Straits, farther south than they had ever been sighted before. Babies grew fat on rich milk; cows calved and lambings continued out of season. Puffins and guillemots lined the ledges of the seacliffs north of Wolf’s Ness, an area they usually gave up by the end of ninth moon for warmer regions. The sun seemed to shine for longer than was its usual wont in the short days; but maybe this was an illusion caused by the fact that everyone managed to accomplish far more than they had expected on waking and setting about their tasks, and with better humour, too.
In the gardens around Halbo Castle, roses bloomed in such profusion that their scent pervaded the air as far away as the streets around the docks, masking the usual stench of urine and brine, sweat and tar and semen with a rich and heady perfume. Following a late burst of blossom, the orchards outside the west gate of the city brought forth a second crop of apples. The people of the Northern Isles feasted and rejoiced: their larders and fish-stores were full, their offspring in good health, and the King’s foreign wife was robust with his child, which looked as if it were fast coming to term. Who cared that the Southern Empire had declared itself to be at war with them again? Everyone knew the Istrians had neither the good ships nor the expertise to sail them in order to cross the great Northern Ocean and bring battle to them. Let them seethe and simmer and shout up a storm: all was well in Eyra.
For the mercenaries, it was deathly dull. It had been impossible to find enough paying work as a group, so they had split up and taken whatever they could find. They were certainly not the only ones in the same situation: the whole of Halbo seemed awash with bored sell-swords fed up with running errands and fighting petty duels for nobles too useless or frightened to fight their own. Much of the time they fought each other: over dog-matches, card-games, spilled ale, shared billets and shared whores; for a word out of place, the wrong coloured hair or giving another a look askance. Wall-eyed Cnut, whose name came in for plenty of ribaldry as it was, got into so many fights he declared the whole city ‘a fucking sinkhole’ and rowed off down the coast to Bear’s Gut in a faering he’d ‘borrowed’ from Kettle Jarn, who’d nicked him in the leg the week before.