‘I’m not sure
I know what a trompleri map is, but whatever it is, do you think
you could do it again?’ Quirk asked Keris. ‘Why, with this you
might be able to banish the Unstable forever! Imagine—’
She
interrupted. ‘You’re brain’s tainted! It’s far too dangerous.
Imagine if there’d been anyone there. Even if he hadn’t been
rissoled by the upheaval or barbecued by a fire, he or she would
have suddenly found himself in the midst of a stability. They might
have gone mad!’
‘There’s
another possibility,’ Meldor said slowly. ‘Burning a trompleri map
apparently made a ley line disappear and stability appear in its
place. If my theories are right, this means the ley was restored to
its rightful place in the land and everything became normal again.
But just suppose there’d been one of the Unbound at Draggle Flats
West. Maybe he would have been cured, not killed or driven mad, but
healed as the land was healed. Maybe he would have ridden out of
there a normal man.’
‘Now there’s a
thought,’ Davron said with subdued excitement. ‘And I wonder what
would happen to a Minion? Or to—me?’
Keris
swallowed back the mixture of horror and hope that surged up from
somewhere near her stomach.
Davron freed of his sigil.
Davron
…consumed by a blinding white flash of ley, Davron
obliterated
—
‘You can’t
risk it, ‘ she said flatly. ‘It’s too dangerous.’
He gave a
bitter laugh. ‘Keris, my love, just living is too dangerous for me.
You once agreed on that, remember?’
Quirk blinked,
not understanding. Favellis, catching the endearment Davron had
used, gave her an interested look.
Scow said,
‘It’s an exciting thought, though, isn’t it? Someone will have to
volunteer to be—er—fired, so to speak.’
Keris shook
her head. ‘Fried, more like.’
‘I’ve just
this minute become very attached to my Chameleon characteristics,’
Quirk said in a hurry. ‘I suddenly don’t care if I’m never normal.
Don’t anyone dare go burning the land around me, thank you.’
‘We could
start with a Minion’s pet,’ Davron suggested.
‘Perhaps the
first experiment we should do,’ Keris said in dry tones, ‘is to
find out whether we really can stabilise the land. We must make and
burn another map, after making absolutely sure no one is
there…’
Davron was
almost glowing. ‘Ah, ley-life! This is the most exciting
development we’ve ever had. I can hardly believe it.’ He grinned,
and she thought for a moment he was going to hug her.
Meldor smiled
and brought everyone back to the present. ‘Keris can’t make a
proper map out here,’ he pointed out, ‘so the sooner we get to
Havenstar the better. Then we can start investigating all the
possibilities. Quirk, go and wake Corrian. Dita, I’d like you two
back in Shield too.’
She nodded.
‘We’ll have to go back and break camp first, so we’ll be a bit
behind you.’ She stood up, calling to the dogs. Favellis followed
suit, casually reaching out to brush some dirt from the back of
Dita’s clothing. Dita turned and gave her friend a fond smile of
thanks.
The touch that
lingered longer than was needed and the depth of the returned smile
momentarily stilled Keris. Her initial reaction, born of her
upbringing, was one of shock, but this soon dissolved into an
intrigued interest. As she considered what she’d seen, she felt a
moment’s compassion for Baraine.
That is what it should be
like,
she thought as they rode away.
No guilt, no Rule. No
having to hide what is.
‘That’s why
they were excluded,’ Davron said, reading her thoughts again.
‘Excluded for loving each other. They deserved better.’
~~~~~~~
The next day
they reached the Riven. They topped a rise and for the first time
Keris saw the Knuckle, the confluence of the Riven and the Writhe.
The Knuckle was a knotted weaving of the two ley lines. Entwined,
they twisted upwards one around the other until they splintered
into a shower of colour and fell back into the ley in shivering
fingers of light. Brooding treachery and scintillating witchery,
glowering malice and eldritch charm, the rank nastiness of the
Riven and the fey sprightliness of the Writhe, in a double
spiral.
Once again
Keris felt the draw of ley, and feared.
‘Power,’
Meldor said quietly at her elbow, as if he sensed her emotions.
‘Just power. A vast force, free and wild, mixed with the fickleness
of a lesser energy. Both unpredictable. Think of lightning. It can
strike a man dead, or it can just knock him off his feet with all
his hair standing on end. Ley’s like that too, sometimes. I suspect
one reason we’ve been so successful in Havenstar is because we have
two such different forms of ley to work with: the truly potent and
the charmingly fey.’
‘It’s
beautiful,’ she said.
‘And downright
scary when you can’t see a damn thing,’ Quirk muttered in a
disgruntled way, but his irritation didn’t last. ‘Hey, Keris,’ he
said, ‘what do I look like now?’ He placed himself so that she saw
him against the background of churning ley.
She had to
return his grin. He was transformed into a twist of colours as he
blended into the background of the Knuckle. ‘Idiot,’ she said
fondly. ‘You look like a kaleidoscopic sugar-twist covered in
fireflies.’
Then she
glanced past him and blanched at what she saw coming.
‘No,’ Davron
said in reassurance, before she could call a warning. ‘Not Minions.
Just Havenguards. Our Defenders, if you like. See? They have
colours tied to their pikes. White and gold, the colours of
Sunstream, a Havenstar village. And their collars are all tagged
green. That denotes a Havenguard.’
‘But those
aren’t normal dogs that ride with them. They’re pets!’ No normal
dog had a prehensile nose, and no dog moved with the sort of
prancing grace these creatures had.
‘There’s
nothing to say we can’t tame the Wild too,’ Davron said. His gravel
voice was uncharacteristically soothing as he recognised the hint
of panic in her tone.
‘That’s
against the Rule!’ she protested, aware immediately the words were
out that what she said was inane. All of Havenstar was against the
Rule.
He laughed at
her, and the love in his eyes sent her heart galloping towards
places she knew it could never wholly reach.
He said, ‘Pets
are only evil because Minions train them to attack humans and, of
course, they usually choose the nastiest animals in the first
place. These here are Wildish, certainly, but they are ours. We
call them sniffers and their job is to home in on strangers in the
area. I suppose they might attack if ordered to do so, but it’s not
their purpose.’
She digested
that, trying to discard her preconceived prejudices.
‘I want to
talk to that Havenguard patrol,’ Meldor said.
Scow grunted.
‘They’re sending someone across now. Two men. It’s Brecon the
Sunstream blacksmith, I think, and his son.’
Meldor nodded.
‘I remember them. We recruited them five years ago, just out of the
Third Stab. The son had become an Unstabler to search for his
father who’d been tainted twenty years earlier. A fine young man,
and a story that had a happy ending when they found one
another.’
‘How goes it?’
Davron asked as the scouts reined in a moment later.
‘It goes, with
the Maker’s grace,’ came the not very encouraging reply.
‘With the
Maker’s grace, Brecon,’ Meldor returned. ‘Good to hear that eastern
twang of yours again. But tell me, why aren’t you further out? We
saw no patrols on the way in.’ His voice was carefully neutral, as
if he did not want to scold until he knew if the scouts had a
reason for not being where he had thought to find them.
The blacksmith
was deferential, but not obsequious. ‘Margraf, welcome home.’ He
was a muscled man riding a tainted six-legged animal. He had purple
skin and ears that flopped to his shoulders. His non-tainted son,
although he wore the dun-coloured clothes of the unencoloured, also
wore an ostentatious ring of gold set with a large rough-cut red
stone. He inclined his head even though Meldor could not see
him.
‘Bad news, I
fear,’ his father was saying. ‘We don’t ride out too far anymore;
it’s too dangerous. Avian pets scout for us, and we are subject to
Minion attack if we venture too far.’
‘They’ve found
Havenstar.’ Meldor’s quick frown said it all.
‘I’m afraid
so. None have penetrated our defences so far, but we dare not
spread ourselves too thin further out. Their numbers are building
up, too.’
Meldor sighed.
‘It had to happen sooner or later. I just wish it had been a little
later. However, we’re getting reinforcements, as you’ve doubtless
noticed, Brecon. I have asked the Havenbrethren to come home. Any
sign of the Unmaker?’
‘No, thanks
be.’
‘Ride on,
then.’ Meldor nodded his thanks, and the two men sketched a kinesis
and rode away.
‘The son, he
was wearing a ring and he’s not Chantry,’ Quirk said in wonderment.
‘Did you see that, Keris?’
‘And why
should he not?’ Scow asked.
‘This place is
going to take some getting used to,’ the Chameleon said, bemused,
and his eye mounds rolled sideways—one to the left and the other to
the right—in humorous self-mockery. ‘Ley-life, when a blacksmith’s
son waves a ring with a stone the size of a garlic clove under my
nose, I feel weak in the knees, as if the land is going to
disintegrate under my feet just with the wicked sin of it all.’ He
grinned at her. ‘Isn’t it wonderful?’
Corrian
chuckled wickedly. ‘Aye, that it is. I do believe the place has
possibilities.’
‘No rings,
though, at least not for you two, I’m afraid,’ Davron said.
‘Although you’re welcome to wear any other form of jewellery.’
‘And why no
rings, when I’ve always hankered to wear summat on my fingers that
could knock the teeth down a snooty Trician’s gorge?’ Corrian
asked.
‘Because rings
are worn in Havenstar as a sign of being ley-lit.’
‘And where is
Havenstar?’ Keris asked, looking around.
‘Everything
you see sandwiched between the Riven and the Writhe is Havenstar.
Look beyond the ley line,’ Scow replied.
She stood up
in her stirrups to see better, but was frustrated by the coloured
mists drifting over the Writhe.
‘Never mind,’
said Davron. ‘We’ll ride on to the bridge not far ahead, and we’ll
cross the line there. We have twelve bridges in and out of
Havenstar because we don’t ask the ley-unlit, like Corrian here, to
risk tainting unnecessarily.’
‘More than
that,’ Meldor added. ‘I came to the conclusion that ley-crossings
can eventually be felt by the Unmaker. I thought bridges might help
us maintain our secrecy.’
Half an hour
later, they were greeting the guards at the nearest bridge. Meldor
and Davron were quickly recognised and saluted with kinesis
gestures of welcome and respect. As they rode on over the Writhe
into another world, Corrian poked her tongue out.
Keris stared,
speechless.
The land
sparkled. Shone. Every particle of soil gleamed with fiery colour,
every blade of grass was lambent in its greenness, every bush and
every tree seemed to move with opaline life. ‘Merciful Maker!’ she
said at last in appalled disbelief. ‘You have soaked the land with
ley!’
‘That’s
right,’ Meldor agreed with complacent satisfaction.
‘How can
anyone ever get used to that?’ she asked, more to herself than to
anyone else. Was it possible to become accustomed to being
constantly surrounded by a ley-saturated land, to being constantly
aware that colours moved within a solid object?
Quirk halted
beside Keris on the other side of the bridge and slid off his
horse. ‘Tell me what you see,’ he begged. ‘I don’t see anything
special. It’s just like a stability, any stability to me, although
I’ll admit I don’t feel sick the way I did when we crossed through
the Fifth.’
For a moment
she was at a loss, aware they were all listening to her. Davron was
the only one who would know if she adequately answered the
question, for only he could see ley.
She chose her
words carefully. ‘It’s as you see it, a land with copses of trees
and meadows and woods, a farm over there with a mosaic of fields;
it’s all that. But there is more. More inlaid into it, woven
through it, embroidered on it. Imagine—imagine that this world you
see is also strewn with iridescent opal dust. That everything is
luminescent with effervescent bubbles. No, that’s not quite right.
It’s not just flashes of colour that I see when I look, it’s
flashes of—of life. The colour moves, as if Havenstar has a soul,
and she has drawn back her veil so that you can glimpse her heart.’
She paused. ‘When you say that ley is merely power that binds the
world together, I have to believe you, Meldor, but what I see tells
me that ley is more than that. I used to fear it; but here I see
the touch of the Maker. It’s the—the flash of a kingfisher’s blue,
the cider-gold sparkle of sun on water, the misty ring around a
moon, the dimpled laughter of a baby. It’s all the things that make
you want to bend your knee and thank the Maker from your heart for
all of That Which Was Created.’ She looked across at the Chameleon.
‘I hope that answers your question.’
There was
silence, then Meldor said, and his voice was torn with grief and
pride, ‘Thank you. Thank you for being the first person who has
made me see Havenstar.’
‘But I still
don’t understand,’ she said. ‘You have soaked the land with ley
somehow, I can see that, but how does that make it safe? Why isn’t
it just another kind of unstable?’
‘The Unstable
is unsafe because it has ley on it, but none within it. Ley lines
are unsafe because they have too much ley. All we did was take some
of the ley from the lines and put it back into the land. The result
is Havenstar, a safe place, semi-stable, yet not hostile to the
tainted because it is not created with the rigidity of Order, nor
constructed with the unforgiving uniformity of the Rule.’