Sorcery Rising (3 page)

Bëte the cat emerged from the Master’s chamber and watched Virelai retreat down the long corridor. She hovered for a moment beside the tray, sniffed at the covered dish and recoiled with a sneeze.

The only witnesses the next morning to Virelai’s departure were the terns that frequented the bay beneath Sanctuary, and a single storm petrel, the light of the brassy winter sun lending its wings an oily iridescence. The petrel flew on, uninterested in the drama that was being played out below: it had many miles of berg-strewn ocean to cross on its long journey. The terns, though, were curious as to the nature of the large wooden chest the cloaked figure was manhandling into a single-masted sloop that looked perilously close to overturning. They dipped and wheeled in expectation of a tidbit or two. Bëte the cat, swaddled unceremoniously in a blanket laced with leather ties, lay motionless save for the flick of her eyes as she watched the flash of their plumage, their bright black eyes, their pretty red beaks: so close but so infuriatingly inaccessible.

Virelai, having eventually succeeded in his battle to stow his oversized cargo, boarded the little vessel himself, untied and shoved off from the natural breakwater, and rowed inexpertly out into the ocean, followed by the birds, distracted from their search for food, in a stream of white. Once out of the shelter of the icewall, the chop of the waves made the boat roll alarmingly. The cat, splashed with freezing seawater, mewed piteously. Virelai missed his stroke; cursed, shipped his oars and after a certain amount of fiddling around, managed to put up the sail. For some moments the sail hung as slack as a turkey’s wattle. Then, a little breeze bellied the fabric and began to drive the sloop slowly, inexorably, back to shore, until the prow, its painted eye staring blindly ahead, bumped the ice of its home, and the seabirds shrieked their derision. Virelai put his head in his hands. He was a fool, a fool, a fool: he could not even sail a tiny boat.
Idiot
, his inner voice chided him.
Use the magic!
A wind spell: it was a simple thing, but even so his memory had deserted him. Digging in his bag he pulled out a small notebook and riffled through its pages. Then he unbound the cat’s head from the swaddling, and made a short incantation. Bëte fixed him with an unforgiving eye, then made a choking cough. The sail went slack, then swelled on its opposite side. The terns, caught unawares by the sudden change in wind direction, banked to correct their coverts. The sloop sailed smoothly out into the ocean.

Virelai shaded his vision against the rising sun and watched as it delineated the deceptive curves and rises of the place he had regarded all his life as his home. To the untutored eye, it might have been no more than the usual vast jumble of ice you would expect to find in such an arctic region: great blocks and floes that had been piled one atop the other by a thousand ocean storms, ice that had been carved into bizarre and unlikely shapes by wicked seawinds; all bleak and wild and uninhabitable by any except the seabirds and narwhal. But to the mage’s apprentice Sanctuary revealed itself in all its sorcerous glory. Where a shady cornice met a cliff of ice, Virelai, narrowing his eyes, saw how the curving wall of the great hall met the stern face of the eastern tower; where higgledy-piggledy blocks lay as if scattered by the hand of a god, he noted how elegant stairways twined up from the statuettes and balustrades of a formal garden that to another might offer nothing but the unrelieved whiteness of an untouched snowfield. Spires and pillars, columns and masonry, all perfectly proportioned and crafted; cold white surfaces now limned in dawn-golds and pinks by the romantic sun.

The Master had brought his exacting eye to bear on every detail of his ice-realm. Nothing here was natural: nothing occurred by chance. Virelai wondered if he had viewed it from this very point, perhaps even from this very boat, when he had conceived Sanctuary’s form.

How it or he had come to be here, and for what purpose, Virelai had no idea: but he meant to find out. Turning away from the island of ice, he set a course south, to where the world began.

PART

ONE

One

Sacrilege

K
atla Aransen stared out across the prow of the
Fulmar’s Gift
as it ploughed through the grey waves, the foam from the ship’s passage spraying back into her face and wetting her long red hair, but Katla did not care. It was her first long voyage and they had been at sea these past two weeks, but she was nineteen years old and hungry for the world: she could not bear to miss a moment of it.

Behind her, she could hear the great greased-wool sail cracking and roaring in the stiff wind, the wind that carried away her father’s voice as he shouted orders to the crew. Many of them, she knew, would be hunkered down amidships amongst the cargo and sea-chests, trying to stay warm around the tub-fire. A sudden hissing signalled the start of preparations for the evening meal: they stored their meat in leather buckets full of seawater till it tasted more of brine than anything else, and cooking it by putting it directly onto the embers was the only way to make it palatable.

A warm hand on her shoulder. She spun around, to find her twin brother, Fent, beside her. His long red fringe was plastered to his face; the rest he had bound up with thongs to stop it whipping into his eyes.

‘Listen to this, small sister,’ he said teasingly, bracing himself against the gunwale with a knee, ‘and tell me what you think.’ He pulled from his tunic a length of twine that had been knotted at intervals in the complicated Eyran fashion that served both as memory aid and language. Moving his fingers nimbly up and down the knots he began to declaim:

He wrapped the twine around his hand and into a loop and folded it carefully back into his tunic before looking to his twin for approval.

‘You repeated “moon”,’ Katla said with a grin, and watched Fent’s brows knot in consternation. ‘And I’m not sure about “Rockfallers”, either.’

‘I couldn’t fit “the Rockfall clan” in,’ Fent said crossly. ‘It wouldn’t scan.’

‘I’d stick to swordplay, if I were you, brother. Leave the song-making to Erno.’ Their cousin, Erno Hamson, for all his skill at weapons, was at heart a quiet and serious young man, and he was currently conveniently out of earshot.

‘As if you’d know a well-made verse from your ar— Ow! What?’ Her fingers were suddenly tight about his biceps, digging into his skin even through the sturdy leather of his jerkin.

‘Land: I can feel it.’

Fent stared at her, his pale eyes mocking. ‘You can
feel
land?’

Katla nodded. ‘There’s rock ahead. My fingers are tingling.’

Fent laughed. ‘I swear you are a troll’s get, sister. What is it with you and rock? If you’re not climbing it, you’re divining it from the depths of the whale’s path! We’re miles north of Istria yet: Father reckoned on landfall at first light.’

But Katla was shrouding her eyes with her hand, gazing intently at where a dark smear lay between sea and sky on the horizon. ‘There—’

‘A cloud.’

‘I’m sure it’s not . . .’

There were clouds aplenty, piled up above the horizon in great lumps and towers, strewn about the upper reaches of the sky, which was darkening already and streaked with red, the sun having lost its daily battle with encroaching night: a blood-sky, as Erno would term it.

A shrill cry broke into their reverie. Above them, suddenly, a white bird veered past the ship, banking sharply. Fent watched it go, his mouth a round ‘o’ of surprise. ‘A gull,’ he said, like a simple child. ‘That was a shore gull.’

Katla squeezed his arm. ‘See?’

And now the outline on the horizon was becoming clearer by the minute; not a cloud-bank, after all, but solid land – a long, dark plateau, bordered to the west by higher land misting away into the distance.

‘The Moonfell Plain.’

She could hear the delight in her father’s voice without even having to see his face; even so, she turned around at once, eyes alight with excitement, seeking his attention. ‘Land, Father: I saw it first.’

‘And sensed it before that,’ Fent muttered, clearly put out.

Aran Aranson grinned, revealing sharp white teeth amid weather-darkened skin and a close black beard barely touched by grey.

Ahead of them, the dark shape began to resolve itself further so that tiny dots of colour against the stark black gradually revealed themselves to be brightly-hued pavilions, the more vivid pinpricks of light between them as campfires. As they sailed into the sound they could see a whole host of other vessels bobbing quietly at anchor off the shore. ‘Istria: can’t you smell it? That’s the smell of a foreign land, Katla; that’s the smell of the Southern Empire.’

All Katla could smell was salt and sea and the sweat of bodies that had lived for a half-month in close quarters without fresh water to spare for washing, but she wouldn’t say so.

‘A foreign land . . .’ she whispered, awed.

‘Aye, and a load of bastard Istrians,’ Fent said under his breath.

He didn’t need a knotted string for that one. Yet how his father could be so blithe at the sight of the old enemy’s land, he could not understand. He turned to make further comment, but Aran was already calling for the rowers as he ran back along the deck, nimbly skirting the boxes of cargo, the cook-fire, the startled crew. With a dark look at Katla, Fent followed his father and took up his oar-place with the others.

Katla watched as the great striped sail was taken down and furled as they came into the shallower waters. All over the ship, men leapt to their tasks. She saw her father take his customary position at the steerboard to guide them in through the reefs and the long, grey breakers and turned her face back to the new land.

The Moonfell Plain.

A place from legend.

It had taken hours, it seemed, to make camp. By the time they had unshipped the two skiffs and put in to shore, the Navigator’s Star was shining brightly in the sky. Lying on the strangely still ground, tired to the bone, Katla had been unable to sleep for the sheer novelty of it all. She’d heard about the Allfair for as long as she could remember – all the lads’ tales of horse-fights and boulder-throwing and swordplay; the gossip, the trading stories, the marriage-makings, the lists of extravagant-sounding names and internecine political allegiances. And she’d seen with her own eyes the intricate silver jewellery her father brought back for her mother when trading had gone well for him: and the monstrous, shaggy yeka-hides that covered their beds at home in the winter months – but this was her first Allfair and she could not wait for it to begin.

Wrapped in a sealskin with the pelt turned to the inside for warmth, she peered over the snoring bodies towards the distant campfires of the fairground and gazed again in awe at the great rock that rose steeply from the plain, illuminated by the flickering light.
That was what she had felt, all those miles out at sea
, she knew it now, twisting around to stare at its massive presence. It must be, she realised with a little thrill of excitement, Sur’s Castle: hallowed ground. It was here – according to her folk, the Eyrans, the people of the north – where their god Sur had first taken his rest (having fallen from the Moon onto the surface of Elda) and surveyed his new domain. And having contemplated the whole great vista and found it sadly wanting, he had waded into the sea, thinking that by following the track of the moonbeams on the waves he might somehow find his way back home.
The Moon-path
, Katla thought, remembering Fent’s verse.
Poor Sur, lost and lonely in an empty land
. The god had marched right across the northern ocean, skimming stones on his way to take his mind off the numbing cold (and of such great size were the stones that he cast about him that they formed the islands and skerries of Eyra) until at last he had disappeared into the fogs at the edge of the world of Elda. There, resigned to the fact that he would never find his way back home, he had raised a great stronghold beneath the waves, deep down on the ocean bed. This, the Eyrans called ‘the Great Howe’, or sometimes ‘the Great Hall’. Lost sailors shared the long table there with Sur, it was said: and once one member of your clan had drowned and gone to the Howe, it was well known others would soon follow.

Katla had heard that the Istrians had a different tale to tell. They had no love of the sea, and did not believe even in the existence of Sur, an appalling heresy in itself. Instead, they prayed to some fire-deity, a creature – a woman – rumoured to have come walking naked out of a volcano in the Golden Mountains, unscathed by the lava, leading a great cat on a silver chain. Falla the Merciful – that’s what they called her: a misnomer if ever there was one, since in her name the southerners burned unbelievers and wrongdoers by the thousand, sacrifices to appease her and hold at bay the molten heart of the world.

Sur’s Castle. Her fingers began to itch. She’d go and look at it first thing the next morning: there would surely be a route by which she could climb to the top. Fighting and jewellery and monster-skins –
and
a new rock to climb: truly the Allfair was a wondrous event, to encompass such diversity.

She lay there, smiling at this thought, until she became drowsy. When at last she closed her eyes, she dreamed that she could feel the pull of the great rock deep inside her, as if it was somehow a part of the Navigator’s Star and she nothing but a lodestone, drawn to it through a dark sea.

At first light the next morning, Katla kicked off the sealskin and crept away from the camp like a fox from the coop. In this area of the shoreline, no one else stirred. Up the shore she went, as fast as she could, the loose black ashy ground loud beneath her feet. In the shadow of Sur’s Castle, she stared up. The great rock reared over her, enveloping her in its chill shadow, seeming higher, suddenly, from here – and steeper, too – than her first assessment of it from the beach. Dark clouds had gathered above it, promising rain: she’d have to be quick. Her stomach fluttered and her heart gave a little thump: a familiar reaction before she attempted a climb, but a useful one, she’d found: anxiety tended to sharpen her concentration. Above her stretched a vertical chock-filled fissure – the most obvious line of ascent as far as she could see. It looked wide enough in places to jam a knee for balance, narrowing down to a crack that should accommodate a fist above the halfway mark. On either side of the line, little rugosities could clearly be seen where the crystals in them caught the early light:
useful footholds
, Katla thought. She reached up and found her first handhold: a jagged flake just inside the crack. It felt cold and a hole damp beneath her fingers: sharp, too, but solid. As she took hold of it, a line of energy ran through her hand and jolted up her arm. For Katia, this had become a familiar sensation: this magical connection with rock and stone and the minerals they bore. She waited until the burst of energy had charged through her chest and up into her head, waited for the disorientating buzz to die away, and then gave herself to the rock. Letting the hold take her weight, she swung a foot up into the crack.