The Rose of the World (25 page)

‘The Lady is the key,’ Tycho said sharply. ‘Without her, the rest means nothing. If we take the Rose of the World and kill her consort, the North will fall to us. I know it.’

Plutario silently cursed his stupid mouth. ‘Of course, my lord, of course. What know I of such matters? I am only a simple . . .’ he struggled for a useful description; failed. ‘Man,’ he finished lamely.

‘Indeed,’ the Lord of Cantara said distractedly. ‘Indeed.’ He paced the chamber, hands clasped behind his back. ‘Armies and herds of yeka and a thousand ships will avail us nothing. All I need is a little magic.’ He swivelled on his heel, fixed the cringing conjurer with a gleaming eye. ‘Surely that’s not too much to ask?’

‘No, my lord. Let me consult the alignments in my star-charts again to determine the optimum hour for such a venture . . .’

Tycho Issian fixed him with a look so venomous that Plutario felt his knees go to water. After a pause which was pregnant with malice, the Lord of Cantara said quietly, ‘We shall expect a full demonstration of your skills tomorrow night, alignment or no alignment. Or I shall give you into the hands of Tanto Vingo for use in one of his experiments. From the look of you, you should burn long and slow, like tallow.’

Alisha’s crystal had proved to be worth its burdensome weight. As if it had decided to adopt its new protector, it showed Virelai to a recent kill by desert cats – some large unidentifiable rodent left mauled and half-eaten among the rocks beneath a stand of flame-trees – and allowed him to channel a fire through its quartz heart with which to cook the thing. He had never been so ravenous. Or rather, he corrected his thought, he had never been ravenous at all. It was a delicious sensation, tearing into the seared flesh with his stomach rumbling away in anticipation of the feast, feeling the meat juices bursting on his tongue, dribbling out of his mouth. No sooner had he finished his meal than he remembered Alisha’s and the nomads’ refusal to eat the flesh of any other creature and felt abruptly ashamed. But he told himself that he had not caused the death of the creature he ate, and without it he might be near death himself, and by such persuasions soothed his qualms, though the memory of the delicious taste of the meat, so different to the wasted, sorcerous things the Master had magicked into existence to sustain them on Sanctuary, revisited him tauntingly for hours and days to come.

The seeing-stone also showed him to an old well in which a battered leather bucket hung from a tattered rope and the water tasted fresh and sweet; it offered him landmarks he might guide himself by; and as the sun began to dip into a blood-red sky, it led him within sight of the Eternal City.

Here, the crystal became stubborn, refusing to allow any glimpse of what might await him inside those rosy sandstone walls. Instead, it offered the deeply unsettling view of Rahe, Lord of Sanctuary, leaving his arctic stronghold with a dark man in a small vessel. Virelai watched this bizarre tableau with an icy hand around his heart. In his head he could hear the terns wailing their mournful cries, the distant roar of unseen waves. He remembered his own escape from the ice realm; and the circumstances in which he had left his erstwhile guardian. He recalled Rahe’s towering rages and his awesome powers, and in his head a single phrase repeated itself, over and over, a mantra, a warning, a harbinger of doom:

The Master is returning to the world . . .

He was coming back to Elda. He was coming to find his erring apprentice and exact his revenge, and with some strange man in tow who looked tough enough to twist Virelai’s head right off his shoulders.

Virelai took trembling hands off the crystal and tried to think.
What if it is not true-sight? Just a possible future, something that may never happen?
It was a tempting evasion, but he knew, from the buzzing in his bones caused by the contact with the stone, that such was not the case.

His immediate instinct was to flee south, to disappear into the desert, to make for the hills where he had been born, and hope to escape his fate. But that way lay Alisha and the deathstone and whatever horrors she awoke with it. He did not think he was strong enough in his mind to witness the raising of the dead. Although he might use the stone against the old man . . . But even as he considered this he knew he could never do it: in the presence of the mage he would become again the terrified child he used to be. And if the stone came to the Master’s hands, he would surely be obliterated.

But if he ran away now, fled to save his own skin, what would become of Saro Vingo?

He rolled the seeing-stone into the spill of cloth, confined it with a viciously tight knot and kept on walking north.

The priests were calling the eleventh observance as he approached the city, their wailing song floating through the still air like a charm upon the land. It was a prayer designed to soothe the faithful, a plea for the Goddess’s mercy and blessing as they went to their beds; but now that Virelai knew the identity of the One to whom it was dedicated, it gave him no comfort at all. He entered the orchards which bordered the southern edge of the city, but at this season the trees were empty of fruit, their leaves dropped to form a thick carpet which rustled as he walked. The last time he had come this way had been with the Beast, huge as a mountain cat, its eyes lambent in the darkness, and he had been sorely afraid of it. He had used the voice of command to compel Saro to accompany him south and at the time had felt no compunction at doing so. Now, his conscience struck him hard. Had he left the boy to his own devices and forsaken his own wild stratagems, Falo and the other nomads would most likely have made it to the safety of the mountains, Alisha would not be running mad with the deathstone, and Saro would be wherever he was headed on a black stallion charged with natural energy, rather than the creature out of nightmare which last he had seen galloping south with empty, soulless eyes. He had no plan for how he would find Saro, let alone save him and flee the city; but rather than allow despair and cowardice to set in before he had even made an attempt, he pushed his doubts and fears away with a force of will he had never owned before.

There were no guards on the walls and the postern gate, miraculously, was open. Virelai slipped unseen into the city he had sworn never to set foot in again. He had no idea where they might have taken his friend, but he found himself treading carefully up the back stairs towards the quarters Tycho Issian had occupied when he was last in Jetra. They were empty and in disarray. Virelai’s spirits leapt: perhaps the Lord of Cantara had left the Eternal City; and perhaps he had taken Saro with him, north to Forent maybe, where Rui Finco would be overseeing their war plans.

In which case the vision the crystal had shown him was false after all. A tremendous sensation of relief came over him: even though it would mean a long hard journey on foot and a postponed crisis rather than an immediate one, at least he would not have to see his friend tortured.

He had no sooner thought this than a terrible cry rang out, echoing down the corridors. His heart jumped erratically The cry came again, shrill and piercing; the cry of a wounded animal?

He flattened himself against the ancient stone wall and was disturbed to feel it vibrate beneath his palms and back. When the scream came again, he knew, with some part of himself to which he had never previously had access, exactly where it had come from.

Suddenly, volitionlessly, he found his feet carrying him towards the sound. Down two flights of stairs they took him, around a corner, past a suite of rooms in which the Vingo clan had resided during the council meeting. These, too, lay empty and abandoned, the furniture overturned, the finer artefacts gone from within, as if ransacked by some marauding host. Had enemies come this far south? He shook his head as if answering an unseen question: that was surely impossible in the short span of time which had elapsed. A riot then, an uprising of the people? But he had seen how the populace had responded to Tycho Issian’s orations in market square and city hall, wildly applauding his words and cheering his every sentiment. Perhaps the Lord of Cantara had staged a coup, and cast the established lords out of Jetra? Virelai was not a worldly man, in any sense of the word. He did not understand politics, had no experience of war, civil or otherwise; the chaos he encountered as he traversed the castle was unsettling. What was clear was that something strange and threatening had taken place in this city since the last time he had been here, when all had been elegance, order and perfection.

The cry came again, more of a moan now. It was followed by loud voices then a slamming door and the sounds of footsteps hurrying down the corridors in the opposite direction to where he stood with his heart hammering. Virelai waited, then pushed himself around the corner. There were three doors ahead of him. The first he tried was locked, the brass handle cold. The second opened onto a empty chamber stacked with sheet-draped furniture. The third door showed a strip of light along its bottom edge, and the sound of soft keening emanated from it. Bending down, Virelai looked cautiously through the keyhole but could see nothing. Nothing, that is, except a large room with tables covered in scrolls and parchments, many of which appeared disarranged. A dozen candles burned raggedly from sconces around the walls: their guttering flames and the erratic play of light they generated were all that moved. Virelai frowned. Then he dropped to his knees and peered through the gap beneath the door.

An eye stared back at him.

It was a pale eye, grey-green of iris, the white shot through with a crazing of red. It did not belong to Saro Vingo. For a moment, Virelai thought himself to be looking at the glazed orb of a dead man; then the eye blinked. He scrambled to his feet, prepared to run away, but instead his hand wrapped itself around the brass handle and he found himself stepping into the room.

The man was lying on the floor with his head twisted sideways and his legs splayed out. His face was bruised and puffy and there was blood in his hair and spattered around him. One of his arms lay at a unnatural angle to his body. At the sight of Virelai, he had become silent; now the air between them filled with expectancy, but the sorcerer did not know what to say. After a few seconds he ventured, ‘Are you all right?’ which was idiotic but at least showed he meant no harm.

The eye blinked furiously. ‘Hardly.’

‘Can you move?’

The body began an awful shuffling motion and eventually levered itself onto one side, the broken arm flopping uselessly. More effort followed, and eventually the figure sat up, revealing itself as a man in his middle years with a balding head and a lot of pink flesh. One eye was closed, the lid swollen purple; the other stared at Virelai, now kneeling at his side, and then at the wrapped crystal, with suspicion.

‘Who are you?’ the man asked.

‘No one, really,’ said Virelai, unwilling to offer his identity up too easily. ‘I was looking for a friend of mine. Who are you?’

‘My name is Plutario Falco. Some called me “the Magnificent”.’ He laughed, coughed and spat out a tooth, which he regarded mournfully. ‘Not very magnificent now. Not that I ever was, really. It was all just tricks, you see. My lord of Cantara set me a task, which I failed miserably. You can see the results of his fury for yourself. They’ll hand me over to the Tormentor tomorrow.’

‘The Tormentor?’

The man gave Virelai a broken smile, then tossed the tooth onto the floor. ‘Where have you been these last weeks?’ he asked. ‘Not in Jetra, that’s for certain. Tycho’s pet – Tanto Vingo, the cripple from Altea – has the run of the whole city, now that all the other nobles have gone north and the Dystras are on their deathbeds.’

Virelai shuddered. Tanto Vingo. He remembered the sluglike white-faced boy with his burning-coal eyes full of calculation and pent fury, so different to the mild, open regard of his younger sibling, being wheeled about the castle in a great wicker throne. He recalled, too, the tales of the slaves, overheard in whispered conversations, tales of cruelty and temper; and he remembered how Bëte, with the instinctive understanding of an animal, had avoided him assiduously.

‘And what of his brother, Saro Vingo?’ he asked with dawning dread.

Plutario grimaced. ‘Down in the Miseria,’ he said. ‘Poor lad. Dragged him in out of the desert, I’d heard, where he’d been stupid enough to run away and join a nomad band rather than fight for his country; but when Tycho Issian’s got hold of the exchequer and there’s a bounty on your head, there’s not too much chance for escape. They say they’ll punish him for desertion and that there’s no love lost between the brothers. I dare say I’ll be making the lad’s acquaintance for a brief while, before we both succumb to Tanto’s pleasure.’ He shifted his weight, wincing at the pain that shot up his arm. ‘You don’t have a knife, or something sharp, do you?’ he asked a moment later.

The sorcerer shook his head.

‘Pity. Be better to do away with myself quickly and quietly before they give me over to that monster.’

Virelai looked appalled. ‘You can’t take your own life. Surely nothing can be so bad that it would drive you to do that . . .’ The words trailed away, for even as he said it he knew it wasn’t true. Suddenly he was brought back to a time in Sanctuary’s ice tower when Rahe had shown him the world that lay beyond, how the mage had shown him man’s cruelty to man all over Elda – the rapes, the burnings, beatings and torture. Whole villages overrun by soldiers, slaves whipped under a merciless sun, a man stretched on a flaming rack. Nomads being stoned by angry mobs, cast into huge pyres. Men nailed to great wooden frames and left to die in agony. And it came to him with a sudden, terrible comprehension that the sights the Master had afforded him on that fateful day had been not a simple view of the depredations which were taking place at that time, but a window into the future, this future. The old man had tried to warn him; but he had ignored the mage’s words and had followed a course of action which had set off a sequence of events leading to the very horrors the world was now facing.

Sanctuary I named this place, and sanctuary it is. You should thank me for bringing you here and saving you from all that greed and horror . . . It all decays and falls away, boy: life, love, magic. There’s nothing worth saving in the end . . .