With tentative
fingers he explored one arm with the fingers of the other, seeking
reassurance. Its texture was that of skin; the rest was illusion, a
trick of light and colour. He flung back all his covers and sat up.
Shocked, he stared at the rest of his body. He was naked—they had
put him to bed as they’d found him—but in his panic he did not care
that Keris was there.
His body had
not changed in shape; he was still too thin, he still lacked
muscle; his ribs still showed across his torso. But he had changed
in colour. His lower body blended in with the blanket he lay on;
his upper body merged into the green colour of the tent at his
back. When he placed his hand on the ground next to his bedroll,
the fingers fused visually with the soil he touched. Keris had to
look several times just to make sure he still had a hand.
‘I’m tainted,’
he said, stupefied with horror. ‘I’m tainted, aren’t I? It really
happened.’
She
nodded.
He touched the
skin of his chest and stomach. ‘It still feels like me.’ Suddenly
aware of his nakedness, he pulled a single blanket up over himself.
And saw, in appalled fascination, that where cloth touched his
skin, it too blended into the background, as if it had been
contaminated by his body. For a moment he was blank-faced, then his
expression changed as the realisation hit him that any clothes he
wore would behave as his skin did. He shuddered and looked up at
her. ‘What—what does my face look like?’
‘We’ll talk
about it in the morning,’ she said and bent to give him his plate.
‘Right now I’ve brought you your supper.’
‘Don’t
patronise me, Keris.’
Her head
jerked up in surprise. It was the first time she’d ever heard Quirk
be assertive.
She reddened,
knowing she was in the wrong. ‘Sorry. You look—er— Oh Creation, he
changed your—your eyes. I’ll get my mirror.’
A few moments
later she handed her glass to him, trying not to show her dread of
his reaction. His face was still human, except for his eyes. These
were now mounted at the top of mobile mounds ringed with wrinkles
of skin: they were a chameleon’s eyes, completely saurian, able
even to tilt up and down and sideways without any movement of the
head. The pupil was a black slit in a yellow background.
He stared for
a long time at his reflection then handed back the glass. ‘I guess
I knew,’ he said at last. ‘The way I blink is different. The way I
see things is different. I knew there was something. I’m a sort of
lizard, aren’t I? A—chameleon, that changes colour according to the
background. And more than that. I’m a reptile that changes the
colour of anything that touches its skin.’
Fury swelled
inside her. ‘You’re a human being, Quirk! A man, not a
damned—damned—
gecko
.’
He sighed. ‘A
camouflaged human being who has to spend the rest of his life
living in a place that scares the teeth out of his sockets. Keris,
I can’t ever go back to a stab. From this moment on, I’m one of the
excluded! Ley blast it, what am I going to do?’
‘You’ll go on
living,’ Davron said, from the entrance to the tent. He came in and
crouched by Quirk, giving him a quick visual once over. ‘You’ll
adapt to life here. The worst has already happened, Quinling.’
Keris,
thinking him insensitive, glared at him, but Davron was
unrepentant. ‘How do you feel?’
‘As well as
can be expected?’ Quirk suggested tentatively after some thought, a
strand of his old self-deprecating humour surfacing. And then,
‘Why, I think it cleared up my sinus problem. Now, that has
possibilities, doesn’t it? The secret of Quirk Quinling’s
guaranteed cure for sinusitis, only half a gold...’ When they did
not laugh, his mood changed. ‘The Unmaker did this, didn’t he? It
wasn’t just a random change by the ley. This was carefully thought
out. The bastard has a cruel sense of irony.’
Davron looked
puzzled. ‘Pardon?’
‘I saw him,
when I was rolling around feeling as if I was being turned inside
out like a leech on a stick. Chaos, the pain! I saw him and knew
who it was. He was laughing. He knew I was a nothing, a non-entity,
so he’s made me even more so. Now I have no physical identity free
of the background around me. I am always to be … blurred. A shade
intangible.’ He paused, then swore. ‘Well, damn him! I’m more than
that! You’re right, Keris, I’m a human being, not a blasted
colourless iguana, and I’m going to fight that bastard and all he
stands for even if it kills me.’ A moment later he gave a crooked
grin, sheepishly amused by his own vehemence. ‘Which it probably
will, I suppose. Kill me, I mean.’
He’s
right,
she thought. It was a deliberate cruelty. A diabolical
alteration tailored to mock an individual. It was all she could do
not to sent Davron a look of pure hate. How could he even think of
serving a creature who delighted in devising such torments?
~~~~~~~
On the other
side of the ley line, Chantor Portron Bittle lay back on his
bedroll, and tried not to remember what he had seen that day. That
animal erupting up out of billows of ley, a confused movement of
figures trapped in ribbons of misty colour… Scow, clamping a huge
hand on his arm, anchoring him to safety, telling him Meldor had
said the Unmaker was there. ‘There’s nothing we can do,’ the
Unbound had said. ‘Not when Carasma is involved.’ And then, more
kindly, ‘Davron will look after her as best he can.’
But he did not
trust Davron. How could he trust a man who played with the evil of
ley?
Then that
final glimpse of Keris, naked, in the swirl of colour… A glimpse
that had hit him like a butted head in the belly. Maker save and
protect her!
He remembered
Maylie. Keris was so like Maylie ... like Maylie had been, when
he’d known her. A strange mix of innocence and innate wisdom, of
shrewdness and trust. Boyish figure, yet possessing surprising
muscular strength. A nondescript face, hair of an indeterminate
shade—nothing about Keris was memorable, yet somehow she could
never be forgotten, just as he had never truly forgotten Maylie,
though he had tried. Tried hard, for twenty years, and sometimes he
had indeed put away all thought of her, until something came to
remind him. A woman with the same turn of the head, perhaps, or the
familiar habit of biting her lower lip when puzzled, or a similar
way of sounding cross. And now there was Keris, who reminded him
all the time of what he had once possessed, for such a short time,
so long ago.
Nine months,
twenty years in the past; that’s all they’d had...
And now he was
once again travelling towards a woman and a child, just as he had
twenty years ago. He had no hopes of recapturing what was past and
precious; it had gone, swept away by the Rule. Whoever it was he
was going towards, she was not Maylie. And the child would not be
Maylie’s daughter.
Nine months,
and a child they’d never seen, to last them a lifetime. It had not
been enough. It would never be enough.
Ah, Keris, please be all
right. Please be all right. Maker grant that you have the courage
to withstand
.
~~~~~~~
To cross the
ley line the next morning took all the courage Keris had, and what
she did have was not enough to stop the dryness rising in her
throat and nausea permeating her gut once more. She’d declined
Davron’s offer to take Quirk first and come back for her. ‘We can
all go together. If anything goes wrong I’ll look after myself,’
she told him, ‘while you attend to Quirk.’
Quirk took the
crossing in his stride, calmly following the guide as if he was off
for an evening stroll. ‘Sure, I’m afraid,’ he said to her as they
started out, ‘but I’m done with being scared witless. Master Storre
is right: the worst thing that could possibly happen has happened
already, so what more do I have to lose?’
She was not so
indifferent. By the time she arrived safely on the other side of
the ley line, she was sweating like a steamed-up window in a
crowded tavern. Her knees were so weak she had to cling to the
saddle when she dismounted. Scow greeted her with a grin and an
amused, ‘Arthritic joints at your age, Keris?’ He held out a water
skin.
‘Shut up,’ she
growled, straightening up and attempting to look nonchalant. She
took the skin and drank, glad to wet the dryness of her throat.
She looked
across to where Davron was confronting Meldor, and it was a
confrontation, she felt sure, although Davron’s words were mild
enough. ‘I could have done with some help,’ he said as he
dismounted. ‘You must have known Carasma was there.’
Meldor nodded.
‘Yes, I knew. I just didn’t think that it was the right time to
draw attention to myself.’
‘And what of
us? One tainted, Meldor, and one subverted to be a Minion. That’s a
high price. We could have lost Keris as well as Baraine, if she
hadn’t been strong enough to resist. You weren’t to know what else
he wanted.’
‘I knew it
wasn’t you,’ Meldor said calmly. ‘This is neither the time, nor the
place. It was just a warning. A way of weakening you, if you let
it.’
Davron gave
him a dark look. ‘By the Maker, Meldor—I hope that when I really
need you, you don’t decide that it’s “not the right time” and turn
your back.’ He walked away, leading his horses, and his shoulders
were knotted with tension.
‘Hey,’ Scow
said to Keris who was still trembling, ‘it’s all right. You did
just fine. If the Unmaker appeared to you and you withstood, you
should feel proud.’
‘Sure. Proud
and petrified, that’s me. The Unmaker didn’t take my refusal
kindly. The day of reckoning has just been postponed, that’s all.’
She grimaced at him. ‘How’s your leg?’
‘Much better,
thanks.’
‘Keris, lass.’
Portron, his face a picture of fatherly concern, came hurrying over
from where he had been comforting Quirk. ‘Are you all right? Meldor
said the Unmaker appeared—’
She cut him
off short. ‘We’ll talk about it later.’
‘Let’s go,’
Davron called. ‘We don’t want to hang around a ley line any longer
than necessary.’
As she hauled
herself back into the saddle, she happened to catch sight of
Graval’s face. He and Corrian were watching Quirk, where the
tainted man was attempting to mount Baraine’s horse and making a
mess of the procedure. The animal had not yet quite come to terms
with his new rider’s peculiarities and was shying away in panic.
When Quirk accidentally touched the horse’s hide with his bare
hand, the touch stung, which did not help matters.
Graval was
amused by the unequal struggle between the slightly built man and
the determined animal, especially as Quirk and his clothes faded in
and out from one set of colours to another as his background
changed. ‘Chaosdamn, Quirk,’ Graval crowed, ‘you’re like a child’s
kaleidoscope. Turn the handle, and goodness me! You’re a new
man!’
You
bastard,
she thought and went to help Quirk.
~~~~~~~
During the
next few days she gradually began to accept the bizarre as normal.
The rocks that twisted into impossible shapes, the sudden shifts of
wind and weather, the weird coloration of the landscape, the beast
with three heads that attacked them and was killed with a single
knife throw from Davron, the streaming ribbons of cloud that
appeared suddenly out of nowhere and drifted among them long enough
to spook the horses and assail them with strange smells.
They crossed
three more narrow ley lines which were exactly where Piers’ maps
said they would be, and a fourth that was not. It had shifted
sideways, leaving the grey swathe of a burn mark behind. It took
them half a day to cross that blighted landscape.
They passed a
number of wooded gullies heavy with ley, yet which did not contain
ley lines. Called ley-mires, as Scow had told Keris, they were
always dark places, deep in muck and smells and strange creatures,
overhung with twisted growths, saturated with coloured miasmas that
hurt if inhaled. The ley-lit had no problem seeing and avoiding
such foul holes, but she was struck by how different they were from
the ley lines. The lines were dangerous, thick with power; mires
were just downright evil. Corrupt.
‘I don’t see
much difference,’ Portron said when she asked if he felt any
distinction between the two types of ley. ‘Both sorts are anathema
to anyone who serves the Maker.’
Davron,
though, disagreed. ‘Of course there’s a difference. ‘Mires are
places Minions and their Pets have made their own. Such holes are
thick with misused ley, and are often the den of very old Minions,
people whose humanity has been well and truly lost across centuries
in the Unmaker’s service.’
‘And the ley
of ley lines?’ she asked.
He shrugged.
‘It’s just different.’ She had an idea that there was much more he
could have said, but did not.
Sometimes they
saw other people. They passed a courier going in the opposite
direction, and he stopped for a cup of Scow’s char while Davron
questioned him in detail about the way ahead. Once they passed a
trader and a train of mules carrying goods from the Fifth Stability
to the First; he had three of the Unbound in his employ as well,
each mounted on tainted beasts with hides like armour and horns
like sabres. Another time they found a whole encampment of the
Unbound, perhaps four or five families of about thirty people,
including children born in the Unstable to tainted parents.
This group
operated a ferry across the Flow and charged for their services.
Davron paid them partially in Baraine’s dried meat, as that was one
thing not available in the Unstable and those who lived there were
always desperate for it. Portron was shocked by Davron’s casual
appropriation of Baraine’s things, but when the chantor protested,
Davron gave him one of his branding iron looks and Portron did not
pursue the matter.