Davron,
unperturbed, poured himself a morning cup of char, or Scow’s Brew
as they’d come to call it, and repeated what he had just said. ‘We
are not going to the Eighth Stab after all. I have spoken to my
friend Martryn, he’s the guide of that fellowship that’s camped
just over there—’ he waved at the small group of tents just down
the valley ‘—and he’s more than willing to have you join them. They
are on their way from the Seventh to the Eighth, and expect to
arrive at the kinesis chain in two days. I have recompensed him.
You won’t have to pay him anything.’
‘But—’ The
chantor gazed at Davron in bewilderment. ‘But where are you
going?’
‘Our
destination does not concern you, Chantor,’ Davron said and this
time there was a hint of steel in his voice.
Portron turned
to her. ‘Keris—?’ he asked.
‘Chantor,’ she
said, ‘I’m an Unstabler now, and I’m not going to wait to be told
I’m also one of the excluded. Besides, I don’t want to have Chantry
coming after me because I’m drugged up to the ears with ley.’
Portron
winced. ‘Don’t say that!’
‘It’s true.
It’s what I am. And you know it’s your duty to report it. Just be
grateful that Davron is letting you go.’
Portron went
several shades paler. It had apparently not occurred to him that he
might have been in danger. ‘I wouldn’t have betrayed you,’ Portron
said quietly to her.
Did he mean
it? Probably, but she wondered if he would remain steadfast once he
was part of a chantery again. ‘Chantor, you’ve done your best with
me, and by your own standards you have failed. Let it remain like
that.’
He stared
silently for several long minutes. She didn’t budge, nor did she
lower her eyes. He tore his gaze away and looked at Corrian.
‘Mistress? Surely you are not going with the Master Guide too?’
The old woman
shrugged. ‘I hadn’t thought to, but what the lass says is dead
right. I’m lacking an arm, and I’m no great shakes as a citizen as
far as Chantry is concerned at the best of times. What are the
odds, think you, that I’ll be excluded by you encoloured
prayer-chanting folk as well?’ She turned her gaze to Davron. ‘I’m
not much use to anyone respectable-like, ’cept maybe as a one-armed
cook, and I have only the slimmest notion of where you’re bound,
Master Guide, but if you’ll have me—?’
He hesitated,
glanced at Meldor who had been standing aloof from the group,
received a nod from the blind man, and said with a smile, ‘Anyone
brave enough to fight a pet by lobbing cooking pots at it is
welcome, Mistress Corrian.’
‘Not to
mention hurling invective,’ Keris said with a laugh. ‘I believe I
learnt more swear words in two minutes than I had in a lifetime
before that.’
Portron gave
her a grim look of disapproval. ‘Then I guess that means I’m the
only one,’ he said. ‘Very well. I’ll go with Master Martryn.’ He
puffed himself up a little. ‘I hope you don’t all live to regret
this.’ He stalked away into his tent to pack.
Meldor stirred
and the smile he gave was enigmatic. ‘I hope so too,’ he said
softly. ‘Havenstar may depend on it.’
~~~~~~~
Why must
humankind insist on making themselves unequal, one to another? The
soft-spoken man shrinks before the strong, the proud beauty preens
before the plain, and both accept their place as if it were
rightful. Havenstar was built for all men to march as brothers,
Havenstar was created for all women to walk tall. But always there
are some pigeons that strut and others that cringe, for we are all
human after all.
—Later writings
of Meldor the Blind
Keris’s parting
with Chantor Portron had not been a happy one. He was mulishly hurt
by her refusal to accompany him to the Eighth even after he assured
her, with more optimism than evidence, that her maimed hand would
not be sufficient reason for her to be excluded. She’d then
informed him that she no longer trusted Chantry to be fair, and was
no longer interested in living under the Rule anyway. ‘Maylie,’ he
had cried, ‘how can you say that!’ He appeared unaware that he’d
called her by the wrong name, and for a moment she’d been sure
there were tears in his eyes. Then his resolution hardened; he made
a remark about it being the duty of all chantors to see that the
Maker’s servants were dutiful, a comment she did not like the sound
of at all. His final goodbye was cold.
‘I’m afraid he
might do something foolish,’ she said to Davron as the chantor rode
over to Martryn’s camp, flicking his fly switch in agitation as he
went. ‘Has Meldor coerced him to make sure he doesn’t ride straight
to Chantry with news of what you are up to?’
Davron
shrugged. ‘I don’t know, but you can be sure Meldor has thought of
every contingency. The Magraf,’ he added, ‘does not tell me
everything.’ He flashed her a fleeting smile. ‘Perhaps because he
knows I wouldn’t approve. Or—’ The smile was gone. ‘Perhaps because
he knows he can’t trust me.’
She didn’t
know what to say, and he glanced at her apologetically. ‘Sorry.
Shouldn’t have said that. It was pointless. D’you know, sometimes I
wonder if this whole thing is not some sort of divine retribution,
the Maker’s little joke on me because I was once such a
sanctimonious peacock, stuffed up with pride, certain I would never
do anything to be ashamed of, not me. And now I have to live with
the shame of being Carasma’s bondsman. Ley-life, Keris, I
hate
him so much—’ He threw up his hands with a laugh.
‘There I go again, wallowing in it. Kick me when I get like
this.’
‘Were you
really such an awful high-nose?’ she asked curiously.
‘Horrible. So
sure I was right. So sure that I knew it all. Now I don’t seem to
know anything. I can’t even work out why I am loved by a certain
wench who has as many freckles as a wyvern has scales—’
~~~~~~~
Halfway across
to the other camp, Portron looked back and stood stock still. Keris
was chasing Davron, threatening to hit his rump with her blackwood
staff, as if they were a couple of children on a picnic. Neither of
them noticed him.
~~~~~~~
They rode for
a further five days without seeing anyone, heading away from all
the pilgrimage and trade routes. The direction they took went
nowhere but Havenstar. They saw no one until the fifth day, when
they stopped for a break at midday. As usual, it was Meldor who
sensed company before the others had seen or heard anything at all;
it was Meldor, too, who first recognised the newcomers as
Haveners.
‘Favellis and
Dita,’ he said as soon as the riders came into sight accompanied by
a pack of dogs, and turned back to his midday meal. ‘I’d know the
sound of those undisciplined hounds of theirs anywhere.’
‘They work for
Meldor,’ Scow said by way of explanation to Keris and Quirk.
Corrian had long since dozed off in the shade of a nearby rock, and
was now gently snoring. ‘They live in Havenstar. Ley-lit excluded,
both of them. I wonder what the Chaos they are doing out here?’
‘Women?’ Quirk
asked, impressed by the idea that two women would venture into the
Unstable alone. ‘They must be a formidable pair.’
‘They are,’
Davron agreed, grinning. He walked out a little way to greet them
and Keris could not control the stab of irrational jealousy she
felt when the two slid off their horses and hugged him with
enthusiasm, hugs he returned whole-heartedly, albeit carefully. The
dogs milled around sniffing and wagging tails.
Introductions
were made and news was swapped back and forth, mostly about people
and places unknown to her, so she spent the time assessing the two
women. They were both attractive, in their thirties she guessed,
browned by days in the sun, and both muscular and fit enough to
suggest they had lived active lives. Favellis was talkative and
bright; Dita more serious, slower to think things through and
slower to see implications. She allowed Favellis to do most of the
talking, only inserting the occasional question, usually about
something that had been under discussion a few minutes before.
Keris would have thought her a little simple except that the
questions were astute, if belated. Both had a good rapport with
Davron, and after observing how easy he was with them Keris
suspected that they knew of his bonding to Carasma. She tried not
to feel jealous.
He’s had a
whole life before you came along
, she thought.
Other people
to share his troubles, to care about him…
‘—so, when we
heard there were fixed features cropping up like spring mushrooms,
and Zeferil asked for someone to go and check it out, we
volunteered,’ Favellis was saying. ‘You know us; can’t keep our
noses out of trouble.’
‘We know
you
,’ Davron said to her, and shared a smile with Dita.
‘Anyway, what did you find out?’
‘Absolutely
nothing, really. From what Meldor just said, you’ve heard pretty
much all there was to hear from Rossel when he caught up with you
at Pickle’s Halt.’
‘What has
happened to the fixed features since then?’ Meldor asked, pushing
away a dog that was trying to lay its head on his knee. It trotted
off to sniff at the still-sleeping Corrian instead.
‘That’s what
we’ve just been doing, going back to have a look. Some of them are
a little tatty about the edges, as if the Unstable is sort of
gnawing away at them, but they are still stable. Green, too. Trees
sprouting, even. Ley-life, Margraf, if we could only work out how
they were made, we’d could change the face of the Unstable
forever!’
‘How many have
you found?’ Meldor asked.
‘Eight.’
‘Rossel said
there were seven.’
‘Yes. That’s a
funny thing. The first seven were all found at more or less the
same time, and they are in a fairly straight line between Havenstar
and the Eighth. As if someone was travelling that way and changing
sections of the route as he went.’ She paused to accept the mug of
char Scow had just prepared for her before continuing. ‘The eighth
is along the Writhe. You see, on Zeferil’s instructions, we have
been looking to see if we could find any more of the fixed features
anywhere else, but we never did, until about four weeks back.
That’s when we came across the eighth one.’
‘The Writhe
disappeared there,’ Dita said. ‘This char of yours is as good as
ever, Sammy.’
‘Huh?’ Davron
asked blankly.
Favellis took
up the story once more. ‘Yes, it’s true. About six weeks back we
were in that same area and everything was as usual. Then, when we
were returning the same way two weeks later, part of the Writhe was
missing. Gone. In its place was a fixed feature. Same size as the
other seven, with edges as straight as a ruled line. The ley line
started to back up at one end and then flowed around it on both
sides. The rectangular bit in the middle, the stable part, resists
its encroachment–like a tortoise with its head pulled in.’
‘Weird,’ said
Scow. ‘And we’re no closer to knowing just what it was that
occurred within that time frame to make it happen?’
Dita and
Favellis shrugged in unison. Keris gave a strangled sound that
brought all eyes to her. ‘You—you don’t know—’ she stammered,
struggling with a concept almost too large for her to handle.
‘Would you possibly know the name of the place?’
‘I don’t
imagine it has a name,’ Favellis said, and frowned as if she was
trying to work out just who Keris was.
‘Yes it does,’
Dita contradicted. ‘It’s Draggle Flats West.’
‘Oh, Maker.’
She felt colour flood her face, and then drain away. She suspected
she was as white as the chalk in her paintbox.
Davron was
quick with his concern. ‘Keris, what’s the matter?’
‘Oh, Maker,
don’t you see? Straight lines, rectangular— Deverli’s map! Davron,
the map I had was of Draggle Flats West.’
‘But we ruled
out he possibility you could stabilise something by drawing it into
a trompleri map,’ Scow protested.
She said,
impatient, ‘Yes, but what happens
if you burn a trompleri
map
?’
~~~~~~~
What Keris
said transfixed them all, and they lingered around the fire,
reluctant to move on until they’d sifted through the ramifications.
It did not seem possible, and yet they all finally came to believe
it. Everything she told them fitted. The stabilisation of Draggle
Flats West had happened, as far as they could calculate, around the
time she’d fed the corner of Deverli’s map to her candle flame.
She was more
appalled than delighted. ‘What if I killed someone?’ she whispered.
‘Maker help me, what if someone was there, at the time?’
‘Unlikely,’
said Favellis. ‘It’s hardly a well-populated spot.’
‘And the other
seven patches of stability? I guess we know now what happened to
Deverli’s missing trompleri maps,’ Davron said. ‘That area is where
he was doing a lot of his mapping, of course. Somebody must have
destroyed seven of the maps he had made, either when he was
killed—or later, more probably.’
‘What’s to say
anyone who was on the spot at the time would have died anyway?’
Dita said, following her own line of thought. ‘Just because the map
was burned doesn’t say the land and everything in it did too. We
didn’t see any signs of scorching, did we, Favellis?’
The woman
shook her head. ‘Nothing like that. The terrain around the
rectangle is much like it is here. No trees, just a bit of spine
grass and the odd prickle bush, and lots of the silver knobs the
horses eat. Mostly it’s just cracked rocky ground with the
whirlwinds and dust-storms. Typical unmade sort of place, you know.
Inside the rectangle it’s quite different, now at least. Green
grasses, flowers, a stream where the ley line was, a couple of tree
saplings starting. Nice place.’