‘I would know
if she were.’
‘What makes
you think that? What makes you think you had some sort of rapport
with her that would tell you the moment her life snuffed out? You
couldn’t even tell when she was hurting while she was alive!’
Without
warning, Davron’s fist shot out and caught Scow in the centre of
the chin. Taken by surprise, Scow overbalanced and landed heavily
on his rear.
Portron and
Quirk, who had been listening with leaden faces, helped him up.
Scow, rubbing his jaw, watched as Davron turned away without a word
and walked to the cliff edge. The guide stood for a moment, looking
down, then he swung himself over the rim.
‘Disorder damn
it!’ said Scow.
Portron knelt
on one knee and began the ritual of Reverence, hands fluttering and
head bobbing in the required gestures to indicate his subservience
as a petitioner.
Corrian, who
had also been following the whole conversation, gave a snort of
disgust. ‘You wasted your time there, young man,’ she said to Scow.
‘Master Davron lost his wits when he lost his heart. There ain’t
nothing like the idiocy of a man who’s thinking with his emotions,
or his privates for that matter, instead of his head.’
This statement
was greeted with a startled silence. Scow, remembering the beauty
and sweetness of Alyss of Tower-and-Fleury, was disbelieving. Quirk
looked puzzled, but it was Portron whose reaction was the most
extreme. His head jerked around, ritual forgotten, and the
expression on his face was one of appalled horror.
Scow finally
stirred himself, choosing to ignore Corrian’s words altogether.
‘Quirk, can you sneak up on to those rocks somewhere and keep
guard? I’m worried the owner of that pet might decide to wreak some
revenge. Chantor, now that you’ve finished your kinesis, would you
hobble the horses?’ He turned hesitantly towards the canyon’s edge.
‘I—I want to see how he manages.’
Wordlessly
they watched him go.
~~~~~~~
‘Margraf—’
Heldiss the Heron scratched the back of one unnaturally long and
thin leg with the claw-like toes of the other, as he often did when
he was agitated. ‘Someone is climbing down the cliff face.’
‘Davron,’
Meldor said with certainty. ‘The poor romantic fool. First Alyss,
now her.’ He sounded more resigned than annoyed. ‘Why, Heldiss, is
it that I am surrounded by people who lack vision?’ The question
was rhetorical and he didn’t wait for the Unbound man to comment.
‘How soon can you have a new bridge across?’
‘If we had the
materials it could be done in a day. But we don’t have enough rope,
and we don’t have any boards. We’ll have to order both. It’d be
quicker for you to go around rather than wait. There’s another
bridge to the east as you know. I’ll send some of my men with you.’
He glanced across to the other side of the canyon. ‘They’ll need
some of their supplies over there—with some archery and what rope
we have we can rig up a pulley system to get necessities over to
them. The rest can go with you.’
Meldor nodded
his acceptance. ‘I’ll write a note for Scow that you can send
across. I’ll leave as soon as your men are ready.’
Heldiss’s
bird-like eyes widened in surprise. ‘You won’t wait to see what
happens to him?’ Forgetting Meldor’s sightlessness, he made an
explanatory gesture with his hand towards Davron, still inching his
way downwards.
The blind man
shrugged. ‘I do not waste my energies on what I cannot change,
Heldiss. Davron will either live or die, and I shall find out which
soon enough.’
‘I thought he
was a friend of yours!’
With unerring
accuracy, Meldor reached out a hand and laid it on the Heron’s bony
shoulder. ‘Heldiss, you’ve known me a great many years, yet you
still do not know me. I have no time for friendships. You know my
vision, I think. You have family in Havenstar, I know. Would you
have me linger to weep over a friend, or would you have me turn my
back and go on, remembering that there may come a time when I would
turn my back on you, if circumstances dictated it?’
Heldiss
hesitated before replying, but only briefly. ‘I would have you go
on, Margraf,’ he whispered. ‘I have children who need a
future.’
Meldor nodded.
He had never doubted the answer.
~~~~~~~
Davron climbed
on. The cliff was friable and treacherous, he knew that. He was not
unskilled at rock-climbing; it had been part of his training on the
Storre Domain, and he’d had cause to use the skill on occasion in
the Unstable. But never before had he climbed with a ley line
below, a line that showed itself from time to time through a
cloaking mist, turgid purple tangles like the obscene coils of a
giant’s disembowelled entrails. Never before had he climbed knowing
that the Unmaker was below him, waiting. Never before had he
climbed feeling the way he did now. Ice-cold. With knowledge inside
him that he did not want.
Keris
—
Scow was
right. Why would he know if she lived or died? He felt nothing of
her, neither her presence nor her death. Nothing. The knotted agony
in him was nothing new; he’d felt that the day Alyss had taken his
children from him. He felt it every time he returned to
Tower-and-Fleury and caught a tantalising glimpse of his daughter
at play.
He climbed on
and tied the pain deeper into his unconscious. What was the use of
letting it surface? Mirrin, his daughter, was lost to him forever.
Staven, his son, would be unknown to him forever. And Keris—even if
she was alive—could never be his, no matter that she loved him
enough to come to him in the night, loved him enough to have cut
through the rope that tied her to life. His touch on her skin could
only waken pain. He could offer her nothing, except perhaps death
in the final call from Lord Carasma.
Despairing
thoughts needled him: What honour have you now, Davron of Storre?
You who once believed that a Trician had a responsibility to serve
his stability and his people with rectitude and purity of spirit? A
duty to serve the Maker with faith and fortitude? What price your
honour now, Davron of Storre! A mapmaker’s daughter has served with
more integrity and more courage, while you remain bondsman to the
Unmaker because you haven’t the courage to die…
He could let
go, drop into the ley, meet death and end it all.
He looked down
and shuddered. He didn’t want to die. He didn’t want to condemn his
children to future tainting. And what of Keris? What if she were
alive, and Carasma had her? He climbed on. And remembered his first
few weeks as a bondsman to Carasma. Remembered the times when he
had come closest to taking his own life, or ending it in some
reckless attack on a Minion or a Minion’s pet. It had been Meldor
who’d stopped him then. ‘No, Davron,’ he’d said. ‘Alive, you will
be my advantage against the Unmaker. When Carasma learns who I am,
and what I plan, he will decide to use you against me, against
Havenstar. You will be his weapon.’
‘And how will
that be to your advantage?’ Davron had asked.
Meldor had
smiled, a cold, humourless smile. ‘He will not bother to forge
another weapon when he thinks he already has one in place. You and
I must never be parted, Davron of Storre, for in you I will know my
enemy, and an enemy that is known can be defeated. A weapon that is
understood can be used against its wielder. One day I shall use you
against Carasma of Chaos.’
And now— Now
Davron no longer knew whether he stayed alive because Meldor
decreed it, or because he was selfish enough to want to live, to
want his children to live untainted.
He climbed
on.
~~~~~~~
Keris fell
silently, but she heard Davron’s anguished denial rend the air
after her. She heard it and knew that he loved her.
It is
enough,
she thought.
No, that was a
lie. It wasn’t enough. She wanted to live…
She hit the
first of the ley mists, now drowsily lifting from the boiling
below.
And she slowed
. The canyon walls that had been
feeding past her so fast they had seemed only a blur, now showed
their rough details. She was drifting down, a feather on the air.
And then the thought hit her: not a feather. A fruit plucked and
dropped into the hands of the Unmaker. Only he could have drawn on
the power of the ley to slow her fall and save her life. Relief,
barely begun, drowned under an even greater fear than that of
merely dying.
She landed on
her feet and fell, jarred to her knees. The ugly puce of the ley
twisted around her feet and thighs, anchoring her there. He had
planned it that way, of course, to humiliate her.
He sat on a
raised seat—an edifice rather than a chair, with massive feet and
arms and back, a throne strewn with animal skins still attached to
lifeless heads and clawed feet, all matted with dried blood.
Ygraine was among them. Carasma lounged back in his chair,
insolently and nakedly at ease, arrogant in his assumed
nobility.
‘Maid Keris
Kaylen,’ he purred.
She had to
swallow before she could talk. ‘Yes.’
‘You had
Deverli’s maps all the time, didn’t you?’
She didn’t
answer. In her terror, she could not. To gain time she began to
unwind what was left of the rope from around her body. Anything to
avoid looking at him.
‘Now I’ve had
time to consider, I can see that it is the only explanation that
makes sense. And you gave yourself away, when you spoke to me of
wanting to be a trompleri maker. What could make you dream of that,
unless you had seen such a map?’
She nodded,
knowing herself too frightened to try to deny it. ‘There was only
one,’ she said in a whisper, because that was all she could manage.
‘It was delivered to me with my father’s things.’
‘So Cissi
Woodrug missed it, eh? She will be punished for that.’ He continued
to contemplate her with a gaze rich with meaning. He enjoyed her
fear, no matter how well she contained it, and his smile carried
terror into her heart. ‘Where is it?’
‘I destroyed
it.’
He will never believe me!
But he did.
Somehow he burrowed inside her head and lurked there, sorting
through her replies for the truth. With a flash of unwelcome
intuition—or was it his personal promise?—she knew if she lied, she
would die.
‘Ah,’ he said.
‘The flash of ley in your tent last night?’
‘Yes. I burned
it.’
‘Why?’
‘Because I was
afraid you were sending your Minions to look for it, and it would
be found… I—I didn’t know it would flare up like that.’
‘And did you
show it to your friends?’
‘No.’
He digested
that, leaning his chin on a propped hand. He glowed with health and
strength and beauty, and all of it was terrible. The health was
parasitic, the strength brutal, the beauty merciless. ‘So. You have
seen a trompleri map. And studied it. And you—foolish child—have
told me that you have ached to emulate the mapmakers who made such
things… I cannot risk that you succeed.’
She knelt
motionless at his feet, tasting the bitterness in her mouth.
Get
on with it, you sodding monster—
He smiled as
if he had read her thought. ‘Joy,’ he said with a deliberate
malice, ‘is in the length of time that suffering lasts. Why else do
you think your Master Guide still wanders the Unstable? For the
same reason, I shall not kill you. Yet.’ He gestured with a hand
and a wisp of ley the size of a small melon detached itself from
the twists at her feet. He spun his fingers and the ley, obedient,
twirled in the air, concentrating as it did so. Its colour changed:
it grew darker, more magenta, more tangled with anger. When it was
reduced to the size of a large apple, he flicked it over towards
her saying, ‘Take it in your hands.’
Fear swelled
inside her, jagged on the maliciousness of his smile, and
threatened to tear her apart.
‘Take it,’ he
said softly.
She could no
more have resisted his insistence than she could have spread wings
and flown away. She reached out with both hands and plucked the
ball from the air.
For one
brilliant moment of light she felt nothing. Then her hands gripped
convulsively and she began to scream.
She was still
screaming when Davron found her, an aeon later.
~~~~~~~
The screams
started when Davron was barely a quarter of the way down the cliff
wall.
The depth of
their pain painted horrors in his mind. He clung for a minute,
gathering himself around with courage, reforging his strength, then
climbed on towards the sound. She was alive, and he had thought her
dead even as he told himself otherwise, so one part of him rejoiced
in the sound of her pain, one part of him wanted it to go on and
on, for while it lasted he knew she lived still… The rest of him
turned inwards, refusing to hear, refusing to know because if he
accepted the reality of her agony he would lose his hold on
rationality.
And when he
finally stepped down into the ley, perhaps he was indeed not wholly
sane.
The Unmaker
still lounged on his throne, at ease, more so now that he’d had the
solace of another’s agony so delightfully played before him. Yet he
was also weary. Much was drained from him, because he had tampered
with one of the Maker’s followers. Order always strove to reassert
itself; to impose disorder was draining, to impose it on one who
worshipped the Maker was doubly draining. When Davron strode
through the ley to Keris and knocked the ball from her hands with
the stock of his whip, Carasma did nothing but smile lazily.
Davron stared
in shock at Keris’s hands.
For a moment
the rage that welled in him was a bare breath away from madness—but
if there was one thing that he knew, and knew well, it was control.
The slightest of shudders shivered his frame, then he edged his
right hand away from the knife at his belt.