The Aware (The Isles of Glory Book 1) (27 page)

I interrupted. ‘You used to blame the Keepers for the ills of the world; now you seem to be blaming the magic itself. Make up your mind, Tor. What
is
to blame here?’

‘Well…both. You can’t separate the two. However, you can’t blame nonsylv Keepers for anything; they are just innocent pawns who suffer from Keeper sylv arrogance just as much as people from other islandoms do. And it’s not just Keeper sylvs alone who misuse their power; all sylvs do, but there really aren’t all that many non-Keeper ones. A few thousand I suppose, scattered throughout all the islands—not as many as there are ghemphs even. Deep down, I really think we Awarefolk should aim for the end of all magic, not just dunmagic. It does more harm than good. It is certainly what has made the Keeper Isles and its rulers what they are.’

I noted that he didn’t have any suggestions as to just how we would rid the world of something sylvs were born with—it seemed to me you may as well decide to rid the world of big noses, say, or buck teeth. I said, ‘I’ve never seen Flame misuse her power. And I think this is where I should begin listing all the good things that have been done using sylvpower: the healing, the illusory dramatic arts—’

‘Yes, yes, we know. But now that we know sylvtalent can also be subverted to dunmagic, can we be so complacent about it? There have been so many sylvtalents disappearing over the past year, only to reappear as dunmagickers.’

Alain gave a grunt of assent. ‘He’s right, Blaze. Besides, sylvmagic is power, and of latter years it seems to have become power without responsibility, power with a very dubious morality; an evil thing. At other times, it is misused in a frivolous way: I have seen sylvs change the colour of their eyes to match their costumes! They fritter away their powers on such silliness, even as sylv healing is withheld from those who cannot afford to pay for it. And now, the very existence of sylvmagic is putting the whole of the Isles of Glory in danger because a dunmagicker is subverting every sylvtalent he comes across. We would be better off without it.’

Eylsa, who had not said a word so far, now stopped her scraping at my yoke and gave voice to my earlier thought, ‘But how can you possibly aim for an end to all magic? No one knows how to rid the Isles of dunmagic—sylvs have been trying for generations!—let alone rid the Isles of sylvmagic.’

‘Perhaps if teaching the talented how to use their powers was made illegal—’ Alain suggested.

I was scornful. ‘And drive it underground? Anyway, they’d never agree to that in the Keeper Isles.’

Such conversations went on for hours, but of course we resolved nothing. I do remember Tor saying towards the end that, if he ever got out of this oblivion and free of Morthred, he was going to devote the rest of his life to finding a way to curb Keeper power and ridding the Isles of
all
magic. I thought it was a dream and said so.

Mind you, I
had
altered my view. There had been a time when I would have considered the very thought of curbing Keeper power not only impractical, but unjust. True, I’d never liked Duthrick, but I had admired sylvs since I’d first laid eyes on them around The Hub. And now, although I wasn’t quite as adamantly anti-Keeper and anti-sylvmagic as Tor and Alain were, what had happened on Gorthan Spit up to that point had certainly wrought a change in my attitudes.

Tor, of course, had been aiming for such a change almost from the moment he had first met me—and desired me. He was a far-sighted man, Tor Ryder.

And we all know now just who was right in the long run. That gutter-born cynic, Blaze Halfbreed, was not nearly as perceptive as she liked to think.

Letter from T. iso Tramin, Lecturer (Second Class), Mithodis Academy of Historical Studies, Yamindaton Crossways, Kells, to Researcher (Special Class) S. iso Fabold, National Department of Exploration, Federal Ministry of Trade, Kells.

Dated this day 47/1
st
Double/1793

Thank you, Fabold, for letting me see these papers before publishing, and before what promises to be yet another fascinating presentation to the Society. I did so enjoy your first talk on the Isles of Glory. Don’t be upset by some of the harsh remarks made by the old-school ethnographers who prefer looking at bones to hearing oral history! These fuddy-duddies will have to move over for the new schools of thought…

And what a fascinating subject you found for your first set of interviews! An extraordinary woman. May I say that your admiration for this old dame of the Dustels came through in every word. It is, however, just as well you censored some of what she wrote! The delicate ears of the ladies in the audience would have burned red had they been privy to all that went on in your conversations with the formidable firebrand. I sometimes think it was a mistake to allow the ladies to sit in on the Society’s public meetings… But I digress.

Of course, you are right in what you surmise in the note you sent over with the papers. The Kells moved out of the Contranshan Plains from the year 302 to the year 719, in successive waves. This exodus was prompted by two factors: the need for arable well-watered land as the Contranshan Plains became progressively drier; and the opportunity provided when explorers opened up the passes across the Picard Mountains. The fertile, well-watered Picard coastal areas beyond were ideal for agrarian settlement; the fact that these numerous coastal valleys and off-shore islands were already inhabited by sea-going peoples of Picard did not, I’m afraid, count for much with our unpleasantly aggressive ancestors.

Because the Plains-born Kells were more technologically advanced, with better weapons (both the long bow and the crossbow had already been invented), and because they had horses and knew how to ride them, the coastal peoples—with none of these advantages—had little chance of resistance. Many of them laid down their arms and ended up as serfs. Over many, many generations the differences between original inhabitant and invader blurred, and if you ask someone like me who was born in Lower Picard, I can’t for the life of me tell you whether my ancestors were Kells or Picards.

I am afraid that I am totally unaware of any stories about Picards who fled overseas and ended up half a world away in the Glory Isles. It seems a little far-fetched… When I say they were sea-faring people, it was more that they plied the coast, fishing mainly, and that they conducted some sea-trade between the different estuarine ports. They were not ocean-going explorers.

It is probably true, though, that there were many different racial or ethnic groupings among the Picards. Early Kellish commentaries seem to indicate that the people of one Picard coastal valley were often quite culturally and linguistically different from the next, and that the differences were sometimes accentuated by physical variations.

You ask about the words ‘Kelvan’ and ‘Kelvish’. They do occur in one early Kellish work of literature,
The Annals of Tyn Weswinter
. They seem to have been used interchangeably with Kells and Kellish. Coincidence? I don’t know.

There are some other facts which would back the case for believing that Glory Isles people came from Picard. Firstly, the scattering of words familiar to us appear to crop up in your Isles of Glory. Our present Kellish language is a meld of the original Contranshan Plains’ Kellish, which dominates, and Picard languages and dialects. If your theory is correct, then the language of the Glory Isles could well be an amalgamation of the original Picard tongues. We would therefore have many words in common, as you note in your letter to be the case. Secondly, there are indeed some place names which seem familiar… Mekaté, for example. There is a Makatay in Valley Picard—I was born there! In truth, migrating peoples often give place names to their new homes that echo the places they have left behind.

And so, although it seems amazing that people using small fishing boats, which was all that was available to them, should have launched themselves on to the Solwitch Current and travelled across the Vast Sea, I am, reluctantly, coming to believe it. I shall write a paper on the matter.

But who in the hell were these ghemphs? And where are they now?

Do send me some more of these interviews. I am fascinated!

Yours,

Treff iso Tramin

P.S. Who was that stunning beauty on your arm at the presentation? If that’s the attention you field ethnographers get, I am going to change my profession! I spoke to her briefly afterwards, in the company of her parents, of course, and had the impression that she secretly admired Blaze’s independent soul. She’s not one of these outrageously liberated women who believes in female franchise, is she?

It seemed to take about three days, as far as we could judge the passage of time, for Eylsa to whittle down my yoke enough for us to try to slip it through the bands. Even that wasn’t an easy job; I had to ram one end of the pole against the wall, again and again, until finally it began to shift and the others could pull it free. It would be nice to say that with the removal of the yoke the relief was immense; in actual fact I was in agony. Alain tried to massage some normality back into my shoulders and arms, doing his best to dodge the sores that had been rubbed there, but I was in excruciating pain from cramp and tortured muscles for hours.

The bands now dangled from the manacles still around my wrists but I wasn’t going to complain; those remaining irons were nothing compared to that hellish yoke.

Eylsa’s claws must have been ragged and aching by then, but she never said anything. In fact no sooner was I free, than she turned her attention to Tor’s pole.

Poor Tor. He had more days to endure, trussed up like that, not knowing all the while if we were going to get him free in time to make some sort of escape, or if Morthred would send for us first to find out what had happened to Flame. I know it was always in my mind that, if Flame had still been under than dunspell of subversion, she would have been fawning at Morthred’s feet by now. When she hadn’t turned up on schedule, what action had he taken? I’d thought he would haul me up out of there to find out what was going on, but no one came near us except to deliver the food. Then it occurred to me that perhaps not as much time had gone by as we had first thought. We had no way of telling.

Tor must surely have had the same thoughts, but he remained as calm as a rock-pool in the sun. Nothing ruffled his temper. He must have been in terrible pain, yet he could still joke about his situation. I had the same thoughts again and again: he was a very special person. I didn’t deserve him. Which made me about the luckiest halfbreed on all the islandoms…

We did discuss the idea that I should escape first, of course, and then return with tools to free Tor, but the risk of being caught was high. Rightly or wrongly, we decided that Tor and I had to make our escape together for the best chance of success.

I tried to help release him from the yoke. While Eylsa worked on one end, I did a bit at the other, using the edge of a band from my pole to rub away at the wood, but in the dark I was never sure how much I was achieving.

We talked a lot about just how we were going to effect our escape from the oblivion, tossing ideas around like children toss the shell of a dead horseshoe crab in a game of catch. Just how was it going to be possible to get out of the trapdoor, way above our heads, right in the middle of the room? Alain insisted that however we did it, he was to be left behind. He was too sick, he said, to escape anywhere. In our hearts we knew he was right: his presence would have hindered us too much. If we were successful, we would come back for him. If we weren’t, well, he wouldn’t be much worse off than he was just then.

After Tor was free we waited another day or so for him to recover, then we put the final plan we had agreed upon into operation. We waited until food and water had been delivered, then I climbed into a sitting position on Tor’s shoulders and felt for the trapdoor, but, as we had expected, it was too high. The others passed one of the poles up to me and I pushed upwards with that. The pole hit the ceiling, and with a little bit of manoeuvring I managed to push the trapdoor open with it; the fools had been so confident of our helplessness they hadn’t bothered to keep it bolted. Opening it made no difference to the darkness, though.

I positioned the top end of the pole against one corner of the trapdoor and steadied the other end against my shoulder, bracing it as firmly as I could. The rest was up to Eylsa. She sheathed her claws and climbed up Tor and then on to my shoulders, where she supported herself for a moment by leaning on the pole. Poor Tor; with only minor help from Alain, he had to bear the weight of us all. It was fortunate that he was such a large man and that ghemphs are light-framed. Eylsa mounted the pole, using her claws this time. A few seconds later her whisper came back through the darkness; she had made it. She pulled the pole away from me and I jumped down. Tor collapsed in relief. I think both of us were shocked to realise how weak our imprisonment had made us.

Our original intention was that I should then try to follow Eylsa. If I stood up on Tor’s shoulders and she reached down to help me, it should have been possible. However, when we tried it, Tor wobbled so much I couldn’t get my balance—we were both hampered by the fact that our legs were still closely shackled. In the darkness, Eylsa could not find my outstretched hand and in the end we gave up. After some discussion it was agreed that Eylsa wait for the guard to bring the food, knock him out and then we could use his rope to climb out of our prison.

Eylsa, rather unhappily I thought, closed the trapdoor on us.

It occurred to me that ghemphs had a long history of non-aggression towards humans, and I wondered aloud whether she would really be able to bring herself to attack whoever it was that brought us the food. Tor groped for me in the darkness and put an arm around my shoulders to give a squeeze of reassurance. Alain said, ‘Have faith. The cause is a just one, and God will help her.’

I felt Tor tighten, as though the words annoyed him, but he didn’t say anything. I thought cynically that what Alain had said was typical of the Menod; when they had made up their minds that they were right, they were sure that God was on their side and no amount of defeat and tragedy would change their thinking. You had to admire the sheer stubbornness of their faith, if nothing else.

I was so sure that Tor also found Alain’s certainty exasperating, that I was startled when he said, ‘Would you give us your blessing, Syr-patriarch?’ His request was formal and sincere, but still I couldn’t believe that he thought a Menod blessing would make one whit of difference to our success. I guessed he must have requested it more for Alain’s sake than ours. It would give the patriarch comfort to know that we, and our enterprise, had been blessed. Alain was the one who would have to sit in this hellish place and do nothing more than wait…

Tor pulled me down beside him so that Alain could place his hands on our heads. ‘In the name of the gentle one, God the Creator, we ask for a blessing…’ he began. I can’t remember exactly how it went; such prayers always bored me. They still do. I recall that it was long, and that while Alain made a convoluted plea for divine intervention and salvation, I reflected on what a hypocrite I was. Still, if Tor thought it was going to help Alain, I was willing to go along with it. It did occur to me, though, that Alain was no fool: he must have known how I felt.

Those last few hours were hell. I felt all the frustration of a lobster trapped in a wickerpot. Tor, of course, seemed perfectly relaxed. He chatted and joked with Alain as though we were all sitting calmly in some tavern in the Stragglers. We were lucky, I suppose. It could have been several days before more food was delivered, but I rather think it was only a matter of hours later that the trapdoor was thrown open and the rope came snaking down. Ordinarily we were supposed to attach the drinkskin so that it could be pulled up and refilled, but before any of us could move, something heavy came hurtling down after the rope, to hit the floor with a rather nasty thud. Luckily the three of us had been sitting back around the edges of the room.

Alain groped with his hands to see what had fallen. ‘Oh, merciful God,’ he said.

This was followed by an anguished whisper from Eylsa, above us. ‘Great whirlstorms… I didn’t mean… That was the guard! I didn’t know he’d fall in when I hit him. I couldn’t really see—the light hurt my eyes—’

‘Bring the candle to the edge of the trapdoor,’ Tor told her calmly.

A single flame high above our heads was hardly Gorthan Spit at midday, yet it had us all blinking in pain. Alain bent over the man. ‘He’s dead.’ He sounded bleak.

I looked up to the ghemph. ‘Don’t worry about it. It’s a subverted sylv, not a slave.’ I’d seen the sylv colours under the red dunmagic, both beginning to fade in death. I turned my attention to searching the body for anything we could use.

Alain glared at me. ‘He was human, and his death is deserving of your regret.’

‘No,’ I said harshly. ‘He was better dead.’ I added inanely, ‘And if he were himself, he would tell you that. —Confound it, he wasn’t carrying anything useful.’

Alain looked shocked at my callousness. ‘How can you think of that now?’ he asked and bent his head to murmur the prayers for the deceased; something I’ve always thought was a totally useless procedure. Even if there was a heaven, the man’s soul was either there or it wasn’t; no prayers from the living could possibly change its destination.

‘Is the rope tied?’ Tor asked.

‘I’m doing it now,’ Eylsa replied. ‘I just hope it’s strong enough to hold you.’

‘You go first,’ Tor said to me and I did as he asked. Once again my weakness shocked me. A simple rope climb, that would once have been child’s play, had become an effort.

Tor didn’t follow immediately. He stayed to say something to Alain and then the two men embraced. Not for the first time I had the feeling that the patriarch and the Stragglerman knew each other better than either of them had ever said.

I put a hand on Eylsa’s arm. She was trembling. ‘Don’t let it bother you.’

‘It is one of our strictest rules—no human may be harmed by any action of ours.’

‘Dunmagickers,’ I said practically, ‘are not human. They certainly do not practice humanity. Not even subverted sylv dunmagickers. The man he was has been long dead.’ I reached down to help Tor up through the trapdoor. ‘That man did not choose to be a dunmagicker, it’s true, but he was no less evil than Morthred for all that. You have put him out of his misery, Eylsa. You did him a favour.’

Tor, now standing beside me, nodded in agreement. ‘She’s right.’

‘Great Trench below!’ I exclaimed, getting a good look at him for the first time in days. He looked awful—bruised, dirty, wretched—and I’d never seen him with the beginnings of a beard before. ‘You look like one of those Breth Island hermits!’

‘Probably smell like one too. Mind you, you should take a look at yourself some time.’ He grinned at me. ‘God, it’s good to be out of that place!’ He bent down to lower the food and water, and the candle, through the trapdoor. When we’d finished, Tor knelt at the edge of the hole and looked down on Alain’s upturned face. ‘Goodbye, my friend. One of us shall be back for you.’

The frail voice came echoing up: ‘And may God walk with you, lad. With you all.’

Tor closed the trapdoor and we were once more in the dark.

‘Somehow,’ I said softly, ‘I have the feeling that Syr-patriarch Alain Jentel doesn’t altogether approve of me.’

I sensed Tor’s grin. ‘You’re too godless for him, my love. And he thinks you’re a bad influence on me.’ He shrugged. ‘It’s a failing of most patriarchs, alas. They are so damned good themselves that they manage to make us lesser mortals feel like eternal sinners without a hope of getting even a peek in heaven’s door. —Come, let’s get out of here.’

We felt our way across to the door and opened it up. There was light outside, dim daylight filtering in through windows somewhere ahead. We were playing it by ear from there on; we had no plan. It was just as well, because anything we’d contemplated would never have eventuated anyway.

We crept (Tor and I didn’t have much choice about creeping, since we were still shackled about the ankles) down the passageway looking and smelling like three slum-dwelling rats. The room at the end was a torture chamber of some kind, built mostly underground, with the windows high up just under the ceiling. It was filled with all the despicable paraphernalia of torture, but there was no one there. At one end there was an open-hearth fireplace—at the moment unused—built at waist level, with a large chimney above. ‘The bastards,’ Tor muttered, looking around. ‘The utter bastards.’ He picked up a hammer and chisel. ‘Maybe we can remove these damn irons,’ he said. ‘Come here, Blaze, and let’s have a try.’ I was only too happy to oblige. It took us a while, but eventually both of us were free of our manacles and shackles.

The relief was enormous. I began to feel human again as I flexed my arms and legs, feeling at last the returning strength.

‘Weapons,’ I said and picked up a pair of long-handled pincers. Their purpose was probably to take hot coals out of the fire. Tor, with a little less enthusiasm, helped himself to something that looked like a cross between a roasting spit and a sword, and held on to the hammer as well. Eylsa looked with distaste at everything that was available, then went over to the fireplace where there were several long-handled pokers and morosely picked up one. She didn’t say anything; in fact being free seemed to have put an end to her loquacity.

I was still looking for something more useful than the pincers when the door swung open—not the one we had come through, but one on the other side of the room, and we were fairly caught.

I felt we were all frozen, like tadpoles caught in pond ice after a sudden cold snap. Although I suppose it didn’t take more than several seconds before the room exploded into action, in that brief moment of stillness, I was aware of so much.

The first person into the room was Flame.

I felt as if I’d been hit in the throat and punched in the stomach at one and the same time.
Flame!
Morthred
did
have her. Why?
How?
She was as good as dead. No, worse.
Shit!