The Aware (The Isles of Glory Book 1) (24 page)

‘Morthred? Dunmagic?’

‘Lots of rumours
after
the fact. I once dug out some of the historical records on the period prior to the inundation, and there was some vague references to dunmagic use in the Dustels. Nothing much. Morthred was a name coined after the event, not before. It means “red death” in island argot and people called him that because they said he was responsible. I’m sorry now I didn’t poke around in the records a bit more.’

I should have wondered about his scholarship and where he’d had access to those kind of records, but he pulled a rueful face and shrugged, and all my logical thought fled in the face of his charm. My heart beat a little faster, but there was nothing I could do about it right then.

###

There was still a lingering smell of dunmagic about as I went down the stairs, sword in hand, to the privy a few minutes later. Everywhere I looked there were stale traces of angry redness to confuse my Awareness. It clung to the stair, glowed dully in the doorways, rotted around the chair and table legs in the taproom.

There was a group of Keepers, sitting at the table near the kitchen door having a late breakfast. They were casually dressed; not a chasuble in sight. In the face of so much dunmagic their sylvmagic seemed wholly subdued. One of them I recognised: she had been at the sylv girls’ school at the same time as I had, but she did not react when our eyes met, so I let my gaze drift on as I walked through to the yard.

Coming back a few minutes later, I ran into Janko just inside the doorway. He was his familiar salivating self, only now when I looked at him he did not seem pitiable, but obscene.

And he thought I was still unaware of who he was. I knew I might never have such an opportunity again.

My sword was out and plunging at his chest, almost before I gave a thought to what I was doing.

I would have succeeded in the murder—and changed the course of history—but for one of those perverse acts of fate that occur sometimes to throw even the best plans out of kilter. The cookboy, staggering under an armful of seaweed for the stove, chose that moment to enter the room behind me. As he brushed past, his view obscured by his burden, he joggled my arm and the lunge that should have skewered Janko through the heart merely removed two fingers from his left hand.

A number of things then happened at once. Janko let out a murderous yell and hurled a dunspell at my face. It didn’t harm me, of course, but it exploded in my eyes in a foul shower of bloody light and sent me instinctively cringing back, gagging. The cookboy shrieked and threw the seaweed all over us in his panic. Real blood from Janko’s hand sprayed into my face, and just when I should have been embarking on a follow-through attack, I had to spend time wiping it from my eyes. The innkeeper was in the kitchen doorway yelling: ‘Janko, what the piss-arse hell is going on?’ Janko did not answer; he was too busy warding off my next attack with another explosion of power. Then I had company. The whole contingent from the Keeper table joined me.

I thought they had come to help. I thought they were Keepers from the
Keeper Fair
. I thought Janko was going to die. I thought I was about to become the Glory Isles’ new hero…

But they weren’t from the
Keeper Fair
.

They were dunmagickers. Subverted sylvtalents.

The shock of it—to see those tall golden people with dunmagic playing over their skins. To see the malevolence in those beautiful violet eyes, to see their hunger for my pain.
Dunmagic Keeper sylvs
! It was as if the sun had failed to rise…

I fought. Dear God, how I fought. I grabbed up a chair in one hand and positioned myself against the wall. Janko, of course, kept out of the way and left it all to his acolytes. They came at me with their swords and their Keeper training and their hate. And somewhere at the back of those glowing eyes I saw traces of what they had once been; it was as Flame had hinted…there was indeed a part of them that knew what they had been, and behind the hate there was black horror.

I had rarely had so little relish for a fight.

I warded off the first flurry of lunges with the chair, and then managed to kill one of my attackers with a quick thrust made through the chair legs. They showed no signs of distress at her death, but they were more cautious after that. They took it in turns, two at a time, to come at me in a series of fast slashing attacks, one immediately following another, knowing that sooner or later my concentration would flag when I tired. These weren’t untrained street louts like Teffel and his ilk—these men and women had probably graduated from The Hub Academy and they knew how to fight in tandem. There are some odds that are just too great. I let out a bellow for Tor.

One of the Keepers used a chair to batter at mine; I managed to open up a deep disabling gash on his arm, but I lost the chair. Without it, I knew I was going to lose.

Then, just when I thought I was dead, the game changed again. Tor came down the stairs in a roaring fury, swinging a sword like an avenging angel, and lopped off a head in a remarkable two-handed stroke that had me wondering if he also had a Calmenter blade. It wasn’t a bad effort for someone who had—at least over the past week—shown a marked reluctance to wear a sword, let alone use one.

The odds were a little better then.

I fought on, concentrating on defence, blocking and blocking again as they lunged and slashed. There was no elegance, no finesse; it was sheer hard work and strength; a fast, brutal fight that we would probably eventually lose, in spite of our skill and experience, because there were more of them.

Tor disabled another, a woman, and we were down to four opponents, plus Janko. I was vaguely aware of the innkeeper dancing around the room in a frenzy of worry, pleading with us not to break anything more, and would we
please
take the fight outside? Occasionally he added an agonised entreaty to Janko to tell him what the Great Trench was going on. Janko ignored him and shouted something about not killing either of us; he wanted us alive, turd-damn it, and then we had more company—more of his subverted sylvs—and it was all over.

I was lying on my stomach on the floor, my sword taken from me, a foot planted firmly in the small of my back to stop me rising while my hands and feet were tied with a piece of fish netting. It hurt. Somewhere off to my left, Tor was receiving similar treatment. I made a quick review of the damage: a raw graze along my cheek where I’d been hit by a chair leg, a cut across the back of my right hand that hurt like the sting of a devilfish but which didn’t seem to be bleeding too copiously, a badly bruised side where I’d caught a blow from the flat (fortunately) of a blade. I’d live. Long enough to wish I hadn’t, I supposed.

Once thoroughly trussed, I was rolled over on to my back. I felt like a king crab with its claws tied. Janko looked down at me, and for the first time I saw him as he truly was. No leer. The eyes that met mine were intelligent, and totally cold. The face was as twisted as ever, but the dribble was gone; and it was his good side I noticed now, not the deformed. It was the face of a handsome man, but one who had never been touched by compassion for anyone. Worse still was the icy hate that seethed there especially for me. He would have personally ripped me apart, piece by piece, if he’d thought that was the worst punishment he could offer me.

‘This time,’ he said, ‘you won’t escape. And you won’t die either. Remember that.’ The voice—that of a well-educated, well-bred man—was the one I’d heard when I’d been staked out on the sand, not the one I associated with whining Janko the waiter. He touched my face with his boot, digging the toe into the graze. A petty, pointless torture, except for its promise of a grim future for me. Then he crouched down, so that his face was close to mine. ‘You are going to wish you had never crossed me. Do you know what people used to call me, Blaze Halfbreed? Morthred the Mad. But they mistook: I was never mad. Everything I ever did was calculated, just as everything that will be done to you will be planned. To the last details. Remember that too.’

I looked away from him—and my heart almost stopped. From where I lay I could see the top of the stairs, and Flame was there, leaning weakly on the railing. Even as I watched, her outline blurred as she made herself indistinct. Sylvs couldn’t quite render themselves invisible, but they could make themselves difficult to see. How she managed it in her weakened state I had no idea. I dragged my eyes away.

And my terror deepened with every thought.
She would go to Duthrick
. I almost groaned. She had suffered so much to conceal the Castlemaid’s whereabouts. I couldn’t bear that she would reveal it for me.

As for Tor, I didn’t even want to think about what was in store for him.

We were carried out of the inn, passing the innkeeper on the way. His eyes were as large and as round as setu pieces and his chin wobbled in fear. Janko-Morthred, perhaps in revenge for some past maltreatment, lashed out with a dunspell as he passed and the hapless man writhed on the ground, screaming. I caught a glimpse of red welts across his face and a smashed and bloodied nose. He might not have agreed, but I thought he had escaped lightly.

Unbidden, the memory of Niamor’s death returned to me.

To put it mildly, we were fish caught in a netful of trouble.

###

They took us to their village by sea-pony, strapped beside each other, head and legs dangling on either side of the beast, as if we were sacks of dried fish. My bonds were too tight, my head bumped against the animal’s segmented carapace. The only good thing was that they had tied us so that our heads were almost together.

As we passed through the streets of the town, pedestrians gaped at us, their marketing momentarily forgotten. One or two people did ask our Keeper guards what we had done, but they weren’t given a reply and no one protested. It took a brave man to question Keeper sylvs, and the inhabitants of the Docks were not renowned for either their bravery or their neighbourly concern. They shrugged and got on with their business.

I edged closer to Tor so that my lips were almost against his neck. ‘Since when have you owned a Calmenter blade?’ I asked in a whisper.

‘Since I was that Calment Minor rebel with more youth than good sense,’ he replied. ‘Why in all the islands do you want to know that?’

I didn’t want to know that at all, of course; what I really wanted to know was why someone who owned a Calmenter blade never wore the damn thing. I wanted to know why a man who had once been the Lance of Calment had changed so much—but I didn’t know how to ask the question.

‘Don’t show them that we care about each other,’ he said.

I gave the faintest of nods in return. He was right. There was no point in giving Janko—no,
Morthred
—an added lever he could use to cause us pain. I thought it likely, however, that the dunmaster already knew of our friendship. The man had lived and worked alongside us for days, after all, and he hadn’t done it for the fun of serving tables.

We bumped along uncomfortably. My cheek bled and the blood seeped into my eye, but there was nothing I could do about it. I kept my eyes open: I needed to see if Flame would send a Dustel after us. She did, of course; a whole flock of them. I soon saw them, fluttering along down low among the murram grass. The problem was I couldn’t figure out how I was going to let them know that there was something I needed to say. As it turned out, I need not have worried; Ruarth Windrider had already thought of that. At least, I
was fairly sure it was him. He came flying in from behind the sea-pony, so sneakily that even I didn’t see him until he was perched on the back of the beast, not far from my face.

I said in a quick whisper, ‘Janko admitted he was Morthred. Be careful—he’ll know you for what you are.
And don’t let Flame bargain with Duthrick for his help
—he’ll give it anyway.’ I hoped I was right about that. I didn’t have any illusions about Duthrick’s sense of public duty or his affection for me, but we did know he was intending some sort of attack on the dunmagickers.

The Dustel nodded and slipped away.

Tor said in my ear in a voice full of sadness rather than fear, ‘Ah, love…I wish it hadn’t come to this.’

So did I. And it was all my own sodding fault.

My previous glimpse of the village of Creed had also been from the back of a sea-pony. This time I was considerably less comfortable and a great deal more fearful; the whole place reeked with dun power, and wherever I looked, there were flickers of red and scarlet and crimson. The village faced a beach and was sheltered by a semicircle of dunes. On the western edge, just beyond the last of the houses, the rocky area (the scab on the back of the Gorthan Spit sand-eel) began, sloping upwards at first, then levelling off into an undulating plateau of no great elevation. On the seaward side, this plateau ended abruptly in a sheer wall that plunged straight into the sea. I’d once seen all this from the deck of a ship, but it wasn’t what interested me now. It was the village itself, the houses.

In the four months or so that they had been there, Morthred and his cohorts had changed the rickety huddle of huts that had been a cockle-farming village, as I recalled from my earlier visits to the Spit, into a settlement that would have been worthy of a high-class suburb in The Hub. There were several streets paved with crushed blue shell and lined with white houses. At first glance I thought the buildings were constructed of some sort of white stone, but when I had a close look later I saw that it wasn’t stone at all. The blocks had been quarried all right, but quarried from the millions of tiny white seashells that had accumulated and become cemented, over hundreds of years, into a textured solid mass along some of the Gorthan Spit coastline. In the sunshine, the flat-roofed houses were a glare of white pristine beauty; aesthetically, a vast improvement on normal Gorthan Spit architecture. I wondered why no one on the Spit had thought of using shell blocks before. I supposed it was just that no one had ever been quite as innovative as Morthred the Mad.

I was to discover that being innovative was a talent of his. There were a lot of things I saw in Creed that I’d never seen before.

I’d never seen people look the way they did there. They didn’t seem human, none of them. Walking dead would have been a better way to describe many—most. At first I thought some were ghemphs because they seemed to be hairless and greyish; later I discovered it was just that their hair had fallen out and their skin had discoloured after the months of poor treatment and starvation. Their heads all seemed huge, but perhaps that was just because their bodies were so emaciated. Skin was like parchment over an empty framework of bone…were they men or women? I couldn’t tell. Most had probably been inhabitants of the original village before Morthred came along. One of them may have been the girlfriend Niamor had mentioned. Now they were just slaves, to be used and discarded if they were no longer useful.

They were chained with dunmagic. It danced over their bodies in an almost pretty crimson colour, draining their desire to escape, or their will to defy. Even more chilling was the fact that although there were some children in the village, not one of them was under about ten; nor were there any elderly people. This had been a settlement of cockle farmers and their families once, people like Niamor’s girlfriend. Now only the strong remained.

The second kind of people in Creed were just as pitiable, but in a different way: the subverted sylvtalents. They weren’t all Keepers. I saw tattoos from Breth and Mekaté and the Spatts as well—in fact, from most of the islandoms. They weren’t starved or ill-dressed or ill-treated and they themselves were as vicious and as cruel as Morthred himself, yet it tore my heart to see them. I could read their doomed struggle in their eyes. They could never be sylvs again and they knew it. Their new evil side rejoiced, but the inner flicker of what they had been stared out at us in despair and horror, unable to conquer the evil, begging for release, for death. Part of me wanted to kill them all, to put them out of their misery. Part of me wondered if, presented with the opportunity, I’d ever be ruthless enough. Niamor’s death still haunted me.

The third group of people were genuine dunmagickers. They gathered around as the sea-ponies came to a halt, doubtless to see what Morthred had dragged home. Judging by their tattoos, it was clear they came from all over the Isles of Glory. I think there were about fifteen of them. Their presence surprised me; Morthred had apparently done what no other dunmaster had ever done: he had
united
a group of dunmagickers. They were usually much more solitary. Even the dunmagickers’ enclave on Fis that I had helped to destroy a few years earlier had been leaderless, a much looser association of dunmagickers than this.

When I thought of the amount of power Morthred had accumulated in one place, I shuddered.

Tor’s thoughts ran on similar lines. ‘So
much
of it,
’
he muttered when no one was looking. But he sounded interested as much as frightened. He was intrigued, as if dunmagickers and their power presented an intellectual problem to be solved. ‘Morthred must be aiming for control of the whole of the Isles of Glory. Otherwise, why so many of them?’ He was right. My heart bottomed like a sunken ship.

Dunmagic chains had no effect on us, of course, so our chains were real. We were removed from the sea-pony and each of us had our feet shackled first, ankles so close together that we could do no more than shuffle. Then we each had a heavy pole, a palm-width in diameter, placed across our shoulders so that it extended more than an arm’s length on either side. Our arms were forced behind the pole and our wrists fastened, also by means of shackles, towards the ends of it—so that we became ungainly top-heavy creatures with our arms outstretched and useless. It was excruciatingly uncomfortable.

Once we were thus disabled we were taken to a room and confronted with Morthred. He was not alone: Domino was there, reclining uncomfortably on a litter, and the look he directed at us was ferocious with hate. I almost groaned. Why in all the islands had I stopped Tor from killing the bastard? We were going to regret our magnanimity.

Morthred was seated and surrounded by subverted sylvtalents; his bodyguards, I supposed. His chair, a large one draped with an ornate cloth, was on a raised platform. The whole arrangement was a makeshift imitation of the Keeperlord’s audience room back in The Hub, not to mention several other Islandlord throne rooms I’d visited on Keeper business at one time or another. It left me with no doubt as to how Morthred saw himself.

I had been constantly having to quell my desire to vomit ever since we’d arrived in the village: that terrible smell of dunmagic in such concentrations was almost more than I could bear. Now, in the presence of Morthred and so many other dunmagickers, it had an intensity which was physically painful. It dug, claw-like, into my body.

I forced myself to face him.

He had changed again. His left hand, now missing two fingers, was straighter than it had been when I had first seen him. The stumps were already largely healed, although it had only been a matter of hours since I’d lopped off the fingers. He was growing stronger by the hour.

And then I saw what was hanging on the wall above his head: two Calmenter swords. One, which I suspected was Tor’s, was bare and still fouled with blood. Mine had been replaced in its scabbard and hung from a hook as though it was an ornament. He had intended it as an insult, I knew, but I found the gesture childish. I was not so easily roused to fruitless anger; I was just glad that I now knew where the weapon was. Hope died hard in me.

He smiled when he saw where my eyes had gone.

‘Blaze,’ he said. ‘Keeper-servile. One of the Aware. Halfbreed. Who lied to my servant Domino. All reasons to see you punished, and punished you will be. Eternally punished—at least until you die of old age. Don’t look to death for release, halfbreed.’ He turned his head slightly, without taking his eyes from mine. ‘You hear that, Domino? She is not to die of her ill treatment: she is just to
want
to die.’

‘I hear, Syr-master.’

He turned back to me. ‘Domino is a trifle incapacitated, as you can see. Doubtless he will see to it that one of the causes of this pain has reason to feel pain in return.’ He transferred his attention to Tor. ‘You, I believe, are Tor Ryder of the Stragglers. Another of the Aware. I don’t know why you decided to involve yourself in my affairs, but it is a decision you will live to regret.’ He nodded at one of the Keeper dunmagickers who had brought us in. ‘Have both put in the oblivion until Domino is well enough to deal with them personally. Perhaps the Cirkasian can share with you the, er,
joys
of dealing with them, Dom, when she arrives; that would be a nice touch, I think.’

I almost felt relief. I’d thought I’d have to face something like the blood-demons again; an oblivion seemed almost a luxury in comparison, especially when it didn’t include solitary confinement. I didn’t know then that there are different kinds of agonies.

I don’t know whether you have yet come across an oblivion on your travels? They were an invention of a Barbicanlord of Xolchas Stacks some generations ago, I believe. It’s a room, or a dungeon, or a hole in the ground—any place in which all light and external sound is blocked out so that the prisoner confined within has no idea of the time of day. Such a prisoner is supplied with food and water, irregular amounts at irregular intervals, so that he can never judge the passing of time and never know for sure when he will next be fed. That much I knew. What I didn’t know was just how terrible such a place can be.

Our oblivion was an underground room, built, I believe, of shell blocks (although I never did see them). We were taken first into a darkened room that was lit only by the most meagre of candles placed close to the door. There was a large trapdoor in the centre of the floor. A rope was looped around me and I was lowered through the trapdoor into the oblivion below. It was so dark there I could see nothing, not even how far it was down to the floor. Once I was standing the rope was pulled away. Tor followed me, there was a sound as the trapdoor was closed and we were left in a darkness that was so intense I felt that I could have sliced it with a knife.

I stood stock still, suddenly aware of how diabolical our punishment was to be, shackled and spread-eagled as we were. We could not touch each other, could not hold each other. We had no way of adjusting our clothes when we needed to rid ourselves of our own body wastes. We could not even scratch when we itched…

Then I realised that, although the darkness was absolute, the silence wasn’t. There was someone else—or something else—there. I heard the faintest of rustles and barely perceptible breathing.

‘We’re not alone,’ Tor said unnecessarily.

‘No.’ The voice that replied was male, and frail. ‘There are two of us here.’ A hacking cough came at us out of the darkness.

‘Who are you?’ I asked.

‘Dear God—a woman?’

I nodded, forgetting no one could see. ‘My name is Blaze—’ I began and then stopped. Why give information that wasn’t needed? For once I would be judged by who I really was, not by my halfbreed looks and lack of ear tattoo.

Tor spoke into the silence: ‘And I’m Tor Ryder of the Stragglers.’

More coughing, and then, ‘I’m Alain Jentel, Syr-aware Menod patriarch from the Spatts. I believe I know you, Tor Ryder.’ His tone, rich with irony, seemed to hint that he actually knew Tor quite well.

There was a long silence before Tor’s dry reply. ‘Yes, we have met. I’m sorry to know that you are here, Alain. I had heard of your disappearance.’

The frail voice quavered. ‘Dear boy, how long ago was that?’

Dear boy?

Tor cleared his throat. ‘Some three months, I believe. We are ten days into the second double-moon month.’

‘Ah. It—it has seemed longer…’

Tor, I knew, was very upset. I could read it in his voice and I was intrigued. Usually he was too self-contained to show emotion so openly.

‘And your companion?’ I asked the unseen Alain.

‘You may call me Eylsa.’ The second voice that came out of the darkness puzzled me for a moment. I could not pin it down as masculine or feminine. And I thought I had heard it somewhere before. There was a hint of laughter in it as it added, ‘And I believe we also have met, Syr-aware Blaze Halfbreed.’

So much for no one knowing my halfbreed status. But at least whoever it was had added a courtesy Syr title. ‘We have?’ And then I knew. ‘The
ghemph?’

‘At your service.’

‘How did…? What happened?’

Had I thought about it, I probably wouldn’t have asked the question; one didn’t expect to have a normal conversation with a ghemph. However, in this case the answer came back readily enough: ‘The dunmagicker, ah, took exception to my presence on Gorthan Spit.’

‘But—why?’

Once again the reply came unhesitatingly. ‘I was sent to find Morthred by my people, Syr-aware. By all the ghemphs in the Isles of Glory. To find out what was happening. We had all heard tales about this dunmaster subverting sylvtalents and the matter was of some indirect concern to us. Should dunmagickers control the Isles of Glory, for example, it would be unwise to assume that we would continue to live in a state of relative peace and prosperity, as we now do. It seemed provident to assess the situation, to ascertain if this Morthred was of some threat to our security. Morthred, alas, took exception to my asking questions.’

I felt a rising desire to burst into hysterical laughter. The first time in my life that I had heard a ghemph actually say more than a word or two, and it had to sound as long-winded and as convoluted as an official proclamation. But then this ghemph was different. It had once told me that some people did not require symbols… ‘I think,’ I said finally, ‘that you may have decided that he is indeed a threat to your security.’