Shanakan (The Fourth Age of Shanakan Book 1) (34 page)

“How long have I been here?” he asked.

“Four hours. I was worried, and the evening meal is prepared.”

He realised that he was hungry, even ravenous.

“That is enough for today, then,” he said. “I will come back to the tents with you.”

His limbs felt stiff when he stood from so much stillness, and he walked in silence back to the promised meal. He ate with Jud and no other, from the same bowl. He was sure that this was no guarantee of safety among the Shan, and his host told him as much, but it was the Shan way; a gesture of trust.

“Tell me, Cal Serhan, if it does not conflict with your endeavour,” Jud said. “What is it that you do in this valley?”

He weighed up the risk, and found it slight. If the Faer Karan knew that he was here they would know at once what interested him, and if they knew that he was Rin’s death mate there would be no hiding his aims.

“The Faer Karan arrived here,” he said. “I have confirmed this. I am trying to determine how.”

The Shan gazed at him, and he was reminded by those strange eyes just how different the Shan were.

“You can do this?” Jud asked.

“It has been a long time, and there may not be enough of the magic remaining here, but I can sense some things, and it may be possible to learn enough to be useful. It is the way in which Rin’s gift has made me different.”

“We have no magic,” the Shan said. “We cannot touch it, no matter how we try, and we are forever at the mercy of those that wield it. Is it true that you have sworn to protect us?”

No. Not sworn. Rin asked me to do so as the price of her gift, but I was in no state to swear, and so I have not.

But you will
.

“If I have not so sworn, then I do so now, Seer Jud. If it is within my power I will protect the Shan, or at least provide them with the means to defend themselves.”

“That sounds like a barbed promise, Cal Serhan. We are not warriors.”

“I will do what is within my power, Seer. I can promise no more.”

They continued to talk, continued to eat, and the food was very good. He was beginning to like Seer Jud.

*              *              *              *

It was about mid day on his second day in the valley, and already he was beginning to realise that several more trips would be necessary. He had assembled enough fragments of the ancient spell to guess at its size and complexity, and he knew that he had only a very small part. He had only one more day after this before he must return to White Rock or be missed.

He was already tired. The concentration drained him, and his shoulders ached from so much sitting still. Taking a break seemed a good idea, so he rested, eyes still closed, but put his back against a rock and soaked up the sun, allowing his mind to wander aimlessly. It was pleasant.

He must have dozed off, because when he awoke it was with a start, and there was shouting coming from the Shan camp. It sounded urgent and had a note of panic, so he stood and looked in that direction. There were a great deal more of the Shan about than he remembered; dozens of them. He saw something that looked like a weapon in a Shan hand, and felt apprehension. The Shan that had travelled with him had not been armed, and even frowned at his insistence on bearing a weapon.

He walked towards the camp, and after a few paces began to run. There was something going on up there that looked decidedly hostile.

As he got closer he could see that Jud’s servants were all on their knees, and that thirty of forty roughly dressed Shan were in the process of looting the camp. He stopped about ten paces from the nearest tent and called out.

“Seer Jud, what is taking place here?”

A lot of the looters stopped and looked at him. One of them, who seemed a little better dressed than the others, and carried a short sword, took a couple of steps towards Serhan, waved his sword and shouted at him. He couldn’t understand what the Shan said, but it was apparent that it expected him to yield.

“Cal Serhan, they do not speak your tongue, but you must yield to them.” It was Jud. Serhan could see him now, kneeling with the others. One of the looters gestured at him when he spoke, and the Seer cringed.

“Why?” he asked. His hand was resting on the hilt of his sword.

“They will kill you if you do not.”

“I do not think so, Seer Jud.”

Seeing that Jud could speak to him they dragged him out from among his fellows and shouted at him.

“They demand that you yield, Cal Serhan,” the terrified Shan said.

“Who are they? I thought your people didn’t carry weapons.”

“They are the Kastan Delor, wild people who live in the hills. It is unusual to see them so far south. If we yield they will just take our food and leave us unharmed.”

“I have not finished here yet. We need the food. Tell them that they must yield to me.”

“I will not.”

Serhan walked forwards, his sword coming out of its sheath. A couple of the wild Shan took a step back. Not so fearsome as all that, then. He pointed the sword at their leader.

“Yield,” he said.

The leader asked Jud a question, which the Seer answered very apologetically. The leader of the Kastan Delor laughed and made a remark to his followers. They laughed, too. He spoke to Jud again.

“He says that the Kastan Delor have never yielded. They are not afraid of one man, even one as large as you.”

“Seer Jud, I do not want to kill any of them, but I cannot have my work interrupted. Tell them that I wish them no harm.”

“In that case he suggests that you put your long sword away.”

Serhan looked around him for a solution, and he saw it in the camp. He did not fear them. They had the strength of children, and he wore Gerique’s ring that would not let a blade break his skin.

“Tell them to throw me the wooden pole that supports your tent, Seer Jud.”

The looters were amused by this, and it started quite a discussion amongst them. Eventually one of them fetched the pole and threw it to him, probably out of curiosity to see what he would do with it. The pole was stout, and had strength, and it was light enough to wield.

“Now tell them that I will fight any ten of them with just this stick. If they lose they must leave the camp and all its food intact, all its people unharmed, and tell them who I am.”

Jud spoke for some time, and at first there was laughter, and then the faces of the Kastan Delor became grave.

“They want to know if Gerique will destroy them if they kill you. Say yes, Cal Serhan.”

“He will not. It is a private matter of honour between myself and the Kastan Delor. Tell them that, Seer Jud.”

There was general nodding among the wild Shan, and even before Jud confirmed it he knew that he had a deal, and that they would honour it. These were not bandits, at least not in their own eyes. They had a warrior code, and despised the rest of the Shan for lacking one.

“They accept your offer. This is foolishness. How can you defeat ten of them?”

He sheathed his sword and twirled the pole a couple of times to get the feel of it while the leader picked out ten of his people. They lined up opposite him, swords drawn, eyes full of intent.

Serhan drew back a few paces. He wanted them to come at him, to keep them in single file as much as possible. They obliged almost at once, coming after him in a rush that split the quick from the slow. To increase the effect he stepped to the side, and met the first Shan to arrive with a swinging stick. The sword came up to parry the blow, but met nothing. Serhan stopped the stick as it swung and drove the end into his attacker’s gut. The effect was satisfying, and he quickly swept his opponents sword out of the way and brought the other end of his staff down on the second attacker’s head. Again the Shan’s sword lifted to parry and he simply kicked this one in the gut.

He was forced to retreat before the remaining eight, and circled round to his left, back towards the camp, moving as quickly as he could. The enthusiastic Shan were bunched together, and he dropped his shoulders and swept. Most of them jumped, but one didn’t see it coming and went down like a felled tree.

Seven left.

He judged them to be keen, but not particularly skilled. He tried the first trick again, and again they separated, allowing him to pick off another two. He could hear the leader shouting at his Shan, urging them on. It was the last thing that they needed. They were tiring, and as they tired they lost what little defensive inclination that they’d had to start with. He was able to avoid their blows with his superior reach and speed, and knock them down one at a time. In a few minutes it was over.

He walked back to the camp, spinning the stick in his hands. The leader of the Shan looked crestfallen, but waited for Serhan to approach. He said something to Jud.

“He says you are a great warrior,” Jud translated.

“Tell him that his soldiers were brave.”

The Shan nodded when the words were spoken to him, and appeared a little happier.

“Now ask him if he will sit with me and drink a cup of wine. Warriors should be brothers if there is no cause between them.”

Again it was translated, and the Shan seemed even happier with this. He agreed to drink a cup of wine, and shouted orders to his followers, who reluctantly put back what they had taken from the camp. By this stage Jud felt secure enough to get up off his knees.

“That was a remarkable victory,” Jud said to him. “One against so many.”

“Do not translate this, Seer Jud, but I am faster and stronger, and they have little skill. If they had been more formidable there were other techniques I could have used. The victory was never in doubt.”

“Why did you choose to fight them with a stick?”

“It is the first weapon that I was taught to use, and it’s hard to kill with it. All ten of the Shan that I fought are still alive. If I had killed them how well disposed do you suppose their leader would be?”

“Not at all.”

“So you see my point. And now I shall make him my ally.”

They sat together, Serhan, Jud and the leader of the Kastan Delor, whose name was Jat, and they talked. Jat was the leader of this band only, and they had come south to hunt because they had been hungry. Their usual hunting grounds were not as productive as they had been. They had stumbled upon the Shan camp and seen it as easy pickings, which it would have been if not for Serhan.

When he learned that their hunting had not been very successful, even here, he asked Jud if they had enough food to feed the band without having to leave early. They did, and he asked Jud to do so. Jat was delighted.

The band stayed with the camp that evening and left the following morning. Jat and Serhan parted on the best of terms, clasping hands and promising friendship. This was a good thing, because Serhan expected to be back in the area several times, and could now count on the support of the local Kastan Delor, who he was sure had no contact with the Faer Karan at all.

He had another reason, too. In a way the Kastan Delor were exactly what he had been looking for.

It was late at night, sitting in his study at White Rock that Serhan realised the truth. He had been back to the valley of arrival twice, and on each occasion he had been more successful than the last, accumulating, by his own reckoning, more than nine tenths of the great spell that had been enacted there.

Each time he had visited he had made a point of contacting Jat, and bringing gifts and food. Jat and his people lived a simple life, and were quick to make judgements. Serhan was now their friend and ally, and he could detect no reservations in their trust.

What had thrown him off the solution at first was the complexity. He had never before heard of a spell that was enacted with more than one voice. This spell used five, and he did not like to think how that was possible. It was a feat of timing that astonished him, and yet it was so. Once he had stumbled upon its plural nature, the spell began to make sense. He was able to tease each voice from among the others, and then fit them back together again, seeing what the combined effect of it had been. The process took days, and because he felt unsafe putting anything on paper, he had to work entirely in his head.

And there it was.

He did not have the whole thing, but he had enough to see what was going on; what the intent had been. It was a disaster. He finally understood why Corderan and the other great mages of four hundred years past had been unable to fight the Faer Karan, unable even to do them harm. It was because the Faer Karan were not really there.

It was a bald fact. The Faer Karan did not exist in the same sense that the Shan or men existed in this world. Their physical bodies were absent.

The spell that he unravelled was a projection. The bodies of the Faer Karan remained in their own world, a place very different from this, and the thing that was projected was their will, and a certain amount of presence. It explained their ability to shape-shift, their form was just a matter of conscious desire, but that was no help to Serhan.

It was like solving a puzzle, something really difficult taking years of work, only to find that you had taken just one step in the real game. There were hints in the spell that he had deciphered, but there was no clear starting point. There was no apparent way that he could harm the Faer Karan in their own world.

The most difficult aspect was the different passage of time. The Faer Karan world was clearly a much slower one, so that a week spent there would be a year, or even a decade in his own world. It was hostile, too. From what he had glimpsed it was a harsh place where a man would survive just a few minutes – if that. Even if there was a way that he could go there, he would certainly die before he could strike at them.

In winning the game he had discovered that the prize was despair.

Do not give up.

“I have been here before, Rin. I have changed the world, and it is not so bad.”

You know that it is wrong.

“What is wrong? If people can live their lives in peace, follow their trade, raise their families, then what is wrong? It is only the ambitious who suffer – the ones that want power.”

It was an old refrain, from the happy times with Mai when he had not felt the need for change, when life was so very good. Now it was a bitter, hollow justification. He sensed that Rin was right. There was something about being ruled by the Faer Karan, or by any other species, that tasted bad, and the Faer Karan, particularly, were about as bad as it could get. They valued human life, human happiness, human achievement only in so far as it served them. There was no empathy or love for their human subjects. A farmer felt more for a beef cow than Gerique felt for Serhan or Grand.

He had thought that cracking this spell would give him a key, a lever, some way of fighting his masters. Now as he looked at the task ahead he knew that it would take years to solve, if he could solve it at all; and he didn’t have years. Ever since the first confrontation with Gerique, when Rin had lied to save him, he had known that the Faer Karani no longer trusted him. It was questionable whether he ever had. Trust was not a Faer Karan quality. Yet since that time he had felt a pressure to do things quickly, as though time were somehow being counted off, and the days of his life reeled in. His grief at the loss of Mai, a pain that he still felt and still weakened him, had blunted that sense of urgency, perhaps for too long.

There is nobody else.

It was the argument that he could not counter. If Cal Serhan did not battle the Faer Karan, who would?

He set aside as much time as he could to work on it, even though he worked with a constant sense of futility. He took breaks from White Rock and travelled to distant unpopulated places where he could cast new spells, discover more about the thin but impenetrable membranes that separated the worlds from each other, but the secrets were reluctant to give themselves up to him, and his knowledge grew slowly.

It was many days after his deciphering of the spell that he was summoned to Gerique’s chambers. He went with a sense of fatalism. He never knew the reason for a summons. Perhaps time had run out.

Gerique was reading, as he usually was. Serhan studied him for a moment. He had perfected the technique of capturing an image and then looking away, allowing him to study what he had seen while seeming to only glance. The Faer Karani was as sleek and black as ever. Even in stillness he was graceful, almost posed. Serhan wondered what he really looked like, back on the world where his physical body existed. He remembered that he had once thought his master was beautiful, the most graceful thing he had ever seen. Not now. This was a sham, a pretending at grace. The creature that read books in this room was a half thing. It lacked any of the qualities that made men worthy, being a concoction of power, intelligence, selfishness and ambition.

“My lord, you sent for me.”

Gerique turned his great head. The yellow eyes stared.

“Yes,” he said, and closed the book carefully. “I think that you have failed me, Cal Serhan.”

“It has not been my intention, my lord.”

“Perhaps not, but it is time to clarify things. You have been following the road well enough on your own, but you have yet to take the next step, and I grow impatient.”

The next step? It meant nothing to him.

“My lord, I need your help. Teach me how I may serve you better.”

Gerique said nothing for a while, but looked out of the window at the spectacular views towards the snow capped mountains and the stretched green of the plains that lay before them. There was a definite wistfulness in his demeanour, Serhan thought, as though he were reliving some other time in some other place. It made him wonder for a moment where the Faer Karan had been before they came to this world.

“Do you know what a god is, Cal Serhan?”

“I do not know the word, my lord.”

“I did not think that you did. This world is ignorant of such things, but I will tell you. A god is mighty, having power over nature and the fortunes of men, and in the right order of the world is an object of worship. Gods are immortal, and the existence of Man, Shan, and all things are attributable to their actions and their continued good will.”

Serhan was silent. If this was the next step, then he wanted nothing to do with it. Gerique wanted to be this thing, this object of worship? He was no more a god than Serhan himself.

“I am a god,” Gerique said. “All the Faer Karan are gods, and the people will build temples and worship their gods.”

He could not think of anything to say. Something inside him wanted to laugh, but looking at Gerique he could see that the Faer Karani was serious. It was nonsense, but somehow he expected the idea to be promoted, accepted by the people of the world.

“My lord, I do not know where to begin – how to begin.”

“I will guide you. The first step is to build a temple in my honour. It will need to be a grand building, to impress the people with my power. You will consult and bring me designs. I will judge them. My temple must be the greatest building of all, the grandest, the most inspiring. Do you understand?”

“My lord, I will do my best.”

It was a fraud. The scale of it was shocking. Gerique wanted to enshrine his own name, his own being as the creator and maintainer of the world. If he succeeded he would be impregnable. That was the reason, of course. Being all powerful, wielding the might of the other Faer Karan was not enough for Gerique. He wanted unquestioning obedience, worship, the entrenchment of the idea that to speak against him, to question his will, was to go against the order of nature.

This was the greatest evil that Serhan had ever known. He was taking away the free and mortal world and locking it up in a box called god. Such an idea meant that everything, the clear air and the fresh water, the sunlight and the rain would belong, by right, to Gerique.

“I see that the idea troubles you.”

“It is a very… broad idea, my lord.”

“Broader than you think, but what troubles you is that it is not true, yes?”

“It is not my place to say, my lord.”

“But you want to. You know that it is a lie. I thought that you would appreciate such a grand falsehood, but I can’t really take the credit for it. It’s a human idea.”

Serhan shook his head. He had no idea what Gerique was talking about.

“You think that you are clever, that I am fooled by your pretence, that I do not know your secrets. I know everything. I created Brial, your erstwhile master. I sent him into exile to make his weapons and send them over the hills to attack me. I know about your magic spells, and even that you have gained others since you came here. I know that you killed the man called Gris, that you used a black door to do so. That was a surprise, actually.”

“My lord…” Serhan felt cold. Just how much did Gerique really know?

“Brial has made things interesting, but his time is past. You and the one that you killed in Sorocaba were the best that he created, and you are no match for the Faer Karan. You will continue to serve me. The way that you have managed my domain has been imaginative. You have achieved my goals and at the same time you have brought my greatest critic to a new low. Brial made you a useful tool, and I have made good use of you.

“Now go, and prepare a plan for my temple. Come back when it is ready.”

Gerique turned his back, opened his book.

Serhan stood there for perhaps half a minute, then turned on his heel and left, walking back to his chambers.

He used me.

Yes, but all was done of your free will. The usage was mutual.

Rin, he used me.

Yes.

Brial used me. Gerique used me. Even Mai used me. I have been used for the ends of others for the whole of my life. I have been played like a musical instrument, danced like a stringed puppet.

Are you ashamed of what you have done?

Yes. So much of it has been wrong.

And so much right. You have saved lives, made lives better. Inspired a generation of men to expect justice again.

I have killed for the wrong reasons. I have misjudged so many things, and now I have prepared a collar for the eternal slavery of men.

So what will you do now, Cal Serhan?

I will not build his temple. I will leave White Rock, teach people what I know. Eventually men will rise again.

You think this will surprise Gerique?

No. You are right. He is trying to make me into another Brial, someone to provide him with sport. I will not do that.

So what will you do now, Cal Serhan?

I cannot even kill myself. Anything I do, Gerique wins.

There is still one thing that you can do that he will not expect, that means that you win.

What is that?

You can defeat him.

It is impossible.

You do not have to kill him to defeat him.

Then how? Do you know something? Tell me.

I am you, Cal Serhan. You know what I know. I do not know the way, but I am prepared to believe that there is one.

But you think there is a way?

You know more than Corderan ever did. You know the Faer Karan as no other has done, and Gerique is too confident.

Then I will try to find a way, but it must be quick. I cannot allow this to happen.

“Cal, are you talking to yourself?”

Cora approached him. He had walked as far as the courtyard, was a few paces from the flight of stairs that led up to his chambers.

“Thinking aloud,” he replied.

“You are so full of secrets that you are beginning to leak,” she said, half smiling and half concerned. “You seem troubled.”

“He is going to steal everything,” he said, suddenly finding a need to speak.

“Who? Gerique? He already owns everything.”

“He plans to steal the sun and the rain, the wind and the water, even the good dark earth.”

“How? They cannot be owned.”

“He will steal men’s minds. I must not let him do it, Cora. I must stop him for the sake of the widows and orphans.”

“You’re not making sense.”

“I have killed so many, Cora, but I found out today that theft can be a greater crime than murder. To destroy a man’s life is a terrible thing, but how much worse to steal it and use it to clothe yourself.”