‘What is that
stuff?’ she yelled at the chantor.
‘Kinesis-dew!’
he shouted back, but the words meant nothing to her. The Minion
turned his ley on Portron and the chantor emptied his jug at him in
total panic.
She scooped up
the knife and hesitated briefly before she could brace her courage
enough to slide the blade into the Minion, who was still
desperately batting at his arms trying to wipe away the water. The
steel caught on bone and grated, making her wince, but the man
slithered to the ground jerking the knife out of her grasp.
‘That’s me
lass an’ all, brawly done by the Maker’s grace!’ Portron said,
slipping almost unintelligibly into his broadest brogue. He smirked
with an unchantry-like satisfaction and pulled the knife free to
hand it back. ‘The unsouled bastard of that maggot-ridden Lord of
Lies, Carasma—bless me, but ye’ve snaggled his goings on, once and
for evering!’
But there was
no time for congratulations, or even to wipe the knife clean.
Something came lurching out from behind the tents looking and
smelling like a midden heap on the move, with huge maws overflowing
with teeth in the middle of a triangular head. Words stirred in
Keris’s mind:
a pear-shaped dog with too many teeth for its
mouth,
and she felt cold prickle her spine.
She edged
back, still clutching her bloodied knife. It was useless against
such a beast, even if she managed an accurate throw. The pet had
too many layers of fat, too much sheltering flesh… It took a step
towards her, and she threw the blade anyway. It buried itself
hilt-deep just below the creature’s eye. It did not even seem to
notice.
‘Oh ley-life,’
Portron muttered, and shook his flask of kinesis dew. It was
empty.
‘Midden,’ she
said, and cast around for someone in a better position to help.
There was only Corrian. She was now standing in the doorway of her
tent, swearing, a spate of invective that would have embarrassed a
bullock-driver. She was waving what appeared to be an ordinary
saucepan, and when she saw the pet was advancing on Keris she threw
it. It hit the creature on the back of the head, a blow it scarcely
seemed to notice, but this was followed by a volley of missiles
pulled haphazardly from Corrian’s belongings. A small sack of
beans, a packet of dried beef jerky, a boot, a cake of soap, a
candle holder, the other boot and her tin of pipeweed followed the
saucepan. This last must have represented considerable sacrifice on
the old woman’s part and it caught the pet between the eyes as it
turned its head to investigate the airborne barrage. The animal
gave an enraged bleat and flung itself at Corrian.
It snatched at
her, and she threw up an arm to ward off the attack, still
screaming profanities all the while. And the beast scrunched its
many layers of teeth over her forearm.
Teeth stuck
out all over the place
…
When it turned
away from Corrian, back towards Keris, it held Corrian’s severed
arm in its mouth. Blood dripped down its jaws, bone crunched,
splintered.
And something had taken a great bite out of his
neck—
Keris
retched.
And
remembered, too late for Corrian, her ley. She remembered it only
because her rage loosened her hold on it and it danced out of her
fingertips, unbidden, to glow there as an aura of wrathful light.
The hands of the knights in the mural on the wall of the shrine
in Hopen Grat,
she thought stupidly.
Ley. Meldor was
right.
And then the
pet, still chewing Corrian’s arm, was coming at her. She tilted her
fingertips at him, and let her anger and the ley run out like
crackling fire, intent and power mingled into force. Her fear
vanished. Perhaps she would die as Piers had died, and maybe that
was not such a bad death. She was guilty, she had abandoned her
mother, she was drunk on forbidden ley, she loved a man who was
bonded to the Unmaker, she’d rejected Chantry for a renegade
apostate knight. Nothing seemed clear-cut any more.
The ley hit
the beast in the middle of his massive brown chest, where wrinkles
of skin furrowed into folds. It flared and then spread into lines
of burning current. The pet sizzled. It doubled up, screaming, and
began to run. Keris didn’t watch it go. She looked down at herself,
briefly puzzled that she was still alive. Then she remembered
Corrian.
She went to
follow the old woman, who’d dragged herself off into her tent, but
Portron prevented her. Around them the noise of the fighting was
dying down and the Minions were backing off, calling their pets to
them. They’d been repulsed, she thought with mild surprise. She
looked past Portron to search out Davron. He was unhurt, poking at
the mountainous heap of a dead pet, to make sure it really was
dead.
Portron
continued to drag at her arm. ‘You used ley,’ he accused. His face
was the colour of white pottery clay. ‘Keris, it’s a sin! How could
you?’
‘It saved our
lives, yours and mine and Corrian’s too, perhaps. Portron, get
Meldor. Tell him what happened, quickly. Corrian’s hurt.’
She pushed him
away and dived into the tent.
It was dark
but she could see that the woman was sitting on her bedding, her
pipe still in her mouth, and alight at that, her hand gripped
tightly around the truncated end of her arm to stop the worst of
her bleeding. Keris had expected to find her weak and prostrate
with pain. Instead she was livid with anger. ‘Did you see what that
rotting-livered bastard did to me? That pock-marked pox-ridden sod
of a monster
ate my arm
! He frigging-well ate—’
‘Corrian, hold
the stump up above your head,’ she interrupted. ‘You don’t want to
bleed to death—’
‘It’s all
right, Keris,’ Meldor said as he entered the tent, Scow behind him.
‘We’ll take care of it.’
Relieved, she
ducked out, only to find she’d fallen into Portron’s clutches yet
again. She tried to divert him. ‘Chantor, what, by all that’s dark
in Chaos, is kinesis-dew?’
‘It really is
dew. Dew taken from between the Chantry Houses along the kinesis
chain. Dew that’s fallen in places that have been soaked with the
presence of kinesis devotions for generations. It burns the
Chaos-damned like acid. Keris, I want to talk to you about what
you’ve done.’
‘Well, I don’t
want to talk about it,’ she said rudely. Then, as she glimpsed the
anguish on his face, she relented a little. ‘Listen Chantor, I know
you’re worried about me, but I am of pilgrim age, you know. I make
my own decisions, my own mistakes. And the decision I’ve made is to
follow Meldor. With this hand of mine, I probably don’t have all
that many choices anyway, but I’ve made this one. And that,
Chantor, is that.’
She pulled
away and went to look for Davron.
‘We lost a
man,’ Davron said as she came up. ‘One of the Unbound who came with
Meldor. Kellin Large Ears, poor man. Ley-burned.’
She shuddered,
remembering the sizzling flesh of the pet. ‘Corrian’s lost an arm.
I left her swearing at Meldor fit to burn the hair from his scalp
with her vocabulary. Was anyone else hurt?’
‘A few cuts
and burns. Nothing Meldor can’t fix. You? I saw you facing up to
that pet.’
‘I singed it
and it made off.’
‘It won’t
last. I killed its mistress.’
‘I’m glad. She
was the woman with the red hair, I suppose? I think she may have
been Cissie Woodrug, the Minion involved in the death of my
father.’
‘Then I’m
doubly glad I’ve disposed of her.’ There was grim satisfaction in
his voice. ‘Did you see the Chameleon’s trick with the burning
turds from the fire? He found it was effective against furred
beasts. Burning manure sticks to them, apparently.’
She swallowed,
trying to loosen the knot in her throat. ‘Davron, what was it all
about? Could it have been—me? Lord Carasma said Cissie would be
punished for letting the map get to me. Maybe this is her revenge
for the punishment?’
He thought
that over, then said slowly, ‘Or maybe it’s just that she sensed
from Carasma that he would prefer you dead, especially if it has
been reported to him that your hands are not as badly injured as
they are supposed to be. Perhaps she thought she’d be in his favour
again if she did the deed?’
She closed her
eyes for a moment. ‘Oh Davron. You’ve just—just scared the freckles
off my nose.’
His lips gave
a lopsided twist. ‘I have not. They’re still there. I happen to
like them.’
‘You must be
the only person who does.’
‘Suits me.
Keris, it will be all right. Tomorrow we’ll ride like the wind, and
we’ll leave the bastards behind. Our mounts are rested and the
Minions have been sorely battered tonight, I’ll swear. We’ll
sandwich your tent between Meldor’s and mine and Scow’s from now
on. In fact, you are welcome to share my tent if you want, except—’
He made a gesture with his hands that spoke volumes.
She shook her
head violently. ‘I’ll be all right.’
I could
bear this,
she thought.
It could even be tantalisingly
enjoyable, if I knew that one day we would be together. If I could
see some hope, somewhere, sometime. But there’s nothing ahead. We
have no future together.
Maker help
us
.
~~~~~~~
Scorn not any
road to salvation if that road is true. When the Lord Carasma uses
ley, his evil is manifest, but should a Knight use ley and his
heart be pure, who are we to say that there is not purity in the
act?
—Knights IV: 9:
5 & 6 (Kt Jorgan)
Keris baffled
Portron.
She was just
twenty, a maid as yet unwed, and for all that she had apparently
worked for her father, she had no great experience. She should have
therefore been biddable, amenable to Chantry strictures, willing to
follow the advice of an older and wiser man wearing Chantry
colours. Instead she was intractable, stubborn, self-opinionated,
recalcitrant and far too curious about things that should not have
been of concern to an unencoloured woman of tender years. She ought
to have been content to follow a chantor’s leadership. Instead
she’d decided to throw in her lot with two Unstablers of dubious
morality and motivation who dabbled in the forbidden and kept
company with one of the tainted. Scow might be harmless enough,
perhaps, but Meldor-Edion was clearly an apostate of the worst
kind, intent on corrupting the innocent… And as for Davron, his
influence was diabolical. The man was little better than a satyr,
it was obvious.
Could Keris
really be interested in such a man, as Corrian had implied?
Certainly she’d been spending a lot of time in his company lately,
and he had rescued her from the Deep, but Portron could not imagine
what the attraction was. He thought Davron, for all his obvious
lechery, was far too severe a man to appeal to someone as young and
as lively as Keris. Why, the fellow hardly ever smiled, and those
black eyes of his were like pits filled with coal, showing a soul
as cold as a smith’s unlit forge.
Portron shook
his head in bewilderment and remembered Maylie. Skinny, curious,
generous Maylie with her freckled nose and trusting grey eyes. He
had loved her—ley-life, how he’d loved her! She’d had red,
roughened hands, he remembered, product of a lifetime of hard
manual work. He’d thought them a badge of honour. Not like Keris’s
hands. Hers had been long and fine and artistic.
Had been.
What by all that was holy in Creation had happened to the left one?
She wasn’t saying…
Sometimes now
when he recalled Maylie’s face, it was Keris’s he pictured. They
were so alike or was it his memory playing tricks? He had only his
memory to rely on. There had never been a picture of Maylie, and
his memories of her were twenty years old now. She would remain
forever twenty in his mind. Twenty, and in love.
And so like
Keris.
They’d had a
daughter, he and Maylie. He knew that much, although the knowledge
of the baby’s gender was supposed to have been forbidden them.
Certainly Maylie had never seen the baby she’d given birth to, but
she’d bribed a lowly unencoloured worker to tell her whether it had
been a girl or a boy and then she’d smuggled the information to
him. He’d been long gone from her chanterie by then, of course,
back to his Rule Office.
She would be
Keris’s age now, wherever she was, his daughter.
Impossible, of
course, that Keris was Maylie’s child. Keris knew her parents and
had been raised by them. Whereas Maylie’s child, his child—she’d be
a chantora somewhere. She was born into Chantry, would have been
raised by Chantry, would now be part of Chantry, encoloured into
one of the Orderings.
Yet Chantor
Portron could not help but feel that his child, wherever she was,
would resemble the pilgrim maid from Kibbleberry. Whether he ached
to guard Keris from the twin dangers of ley and her own headstrong
nature because she reminded him of Maylie, or because she made him
think of the daughter he’d never seen, remained a matter of
confusion to Portron. He regarded her with paternal affection and
protectiveness, yet there were times when the jealously he felt was
more akin to that of a lover. It shamed him, and he buried it
deep.
It’s just my
pastoral duty. I want to help a girl who is alone in the world,
alone and unsupported. It is my duty.
And then he
would remember with tearing potency the way Maylie had looked at
him the day they’d been unable to hide her pregnancy any longer and
they’d known he’d be obliged to leave.
When he
thought of that moment now, it brought the kind of feelings that
made Portron sigh and kneel to perform the kinesis of penance.