The Rose of the World (48 page)

‘I shall. Oh, I shall. But first, my rose, I must avenge your honour.’ He held his hand out to her and she took it and stood. Fire ran up his arm, took burning root in his heart. He guided her to the figure bound to the mast and watched as she viewed the man with complete dispassion.

‘Behold this so-called king,’ he declared. ‘Revealed as the wretch he truly is.’

At this, Ravn Asharson’s head came up slowly. His vision was glazed, his mouth agape in agony. At last, he managed to focus on the fact that two figures were standing before him. One he could not see properly, for its bright visage hurt his eyes. So he turned his attention to the other, began to frame words. ‘It is me . . . you fool. Wearing the sorcerer’s illusion still . . .’ He tried to swivel his head to search for the pale man, but they had bound him too well.

The Lord of Cantara regarded him with loathing. ‘You disgust me! Have you no shame, no honour?’

For a moment, it seemed the man’s face flickered and blurred and seemed to subtly change; then he was Ravn Asharson again. Dark eyes fixed themselves mournfully on the woman at Tycho Issian’s side.

‘Ask her,’ he groaned. ‘She knows the truth.’

The Lord of Cantara turned to the Rosa Eldi. ‘Is this the man who stole you away?’

‘Ah yes,’ she breathed. ‘That is him, the thief.’

‘Please,’ whispered Rui Finco, the blood loss making him close to fainting. ‘Look at me: you saw through the magic, you said it – tell him, for Falla’s sake—’

With a bellow of rage, Tycho Issian leapt at him. ‘How dare you look at her so?’ Gouging fingers buried themselves in the bound man’s face. There was a squelching sound, a terrible cry, then clear liquid spurted.

‘By Falla, how well can you see now?’ Tycho Issian howled. He held out two vile objects, making a triumphant circuit around the maimed figure, oblivious to the disgust of his crew, who backed away as if to distance themselves from this sacrilegious act. It was not so many generations since the Istrians had had a ruler of their own, an emperor, a man of royal blood, ordained by the gods. To see a man of rank thus treated went against every notion of chivalry their ancestors had owned and passed down to them. The Goddess would surely strike down the man who did such deeds in her name.

But Tycho Issian was beside himself now, almost dancing with glee. ‘Can you see the error of your ways?’ he taunted, waving the gory eyeballs in front of the blinded man. ‘No? Have you nothing more to say; no apology to make to this rose you have so foully plucked?’ He looked down at the revolting things he held in his hands, then tossed them out into the sea.

‘I . . . am . . . not . . . the . . . King of . . . Eyra . . .’ the figure panted, tears of blood streaking his once-handsome face.

‘No,’ hissed his enemy. ‘You are a worm, a rutting worm who has dared to defile my rose.’

‘My lord,’ the chirurgeon intervened. ‘Enough—’

‘Enough?’

‘He is dying, my lord. Let him leave this world with some grace—’

This last suggestion was cut brutally short. Tycho Issian stabbed the impertinent doctor once through the throat, kicked his jerking body aside, and buried his tainted blade in the torso of the chained man, ripping downward with all his might. With a hot gush, the man’s intestines flooded out onto the deck, rope after glistening rope of them, and then the mad lord cast his sword aside and gripped them with his own hands, hauling, cursing, his feet slipping in all the blood and viscera.

A woman started to wail in the background; rain began to fall. Pale light shafted down through the clagging clouds to illuminate what was left of the Lord of Forent as the sorcerer’s illusion failed at last. But without his eyes and with his face covered in a sheet of blood, not even his own mother would have been able to tell the difference between Rui Finco, and her other son, Ravn Asharson, now standing on the foredeck of
Sur’s Raven
, gazing in horror at the apparition twenty yards ahead of him.

He had just given the order to his helmsman to ram the enemy flagship when the waters erupted beneath them, and, after three hundred years of confinement in the seithers’ bonds which chained it to the seabed beneath the towers, the Nemesis finally arose . . .

Rahe fell back into the stern of the vessel, exhausted and grimacing. He clutched his withered ribs and rolled from side to side, wheezing.

Aran Aranson shipped his oars and regarded the old man with some alarm. Was he dying? He looked as if he was suffering some kind of excruciating attack. Aran did not understand what had been happening around him: one moment they had been sailing blithely across the ocean, skimming the waves so that his oarstrokes seemed a mere adjunct to the magical propulsion emanating from the man he had learned to call ‘Rahay’, or ‘the Master’; then the smoke-filled haze above the cliffs of Halbo had come into view and the old man had started cursing and swearing and beating the boat with his bare fists, apparently furious. Some time after this excess of temper had finally subsided, Rahe had closed his eyes and begun a lot of muttering in a language Aran could not follow at all, a muttering which was sometimes accompanied by arm-waving and stamping feet and sometimes rose in volume to a bellow which made him clamp his hands over his ears.

Now the old man opened his eyes and grinned maniacally at the one he had dubbed ‘the Fool’, his paroxysms of laughter giving way at last to a series of guffaws and an expression of utter craftiness.

‘What?’ asked Aran bitterly. ‘What is so funny?’ He was irritated that the old man was not dying; that he was enjoying himself quite so much seemed an affront, to him and the world in general. Somewhere under that pall of smoke, the men of Halbo were dying; the women, too, most like.

‘She has no idea how to control it!’ the Master chuckled. ‘She thinks it is her friend, her pet – but she has loosed a monster!’

‘What monster?’

‘The Nemesis! Oh, folk have made up all sorts of stories about the thing that is reputed to lurk beneath the waters of Halbo’s harbour, but they don’t know the half of it.’ He paused, suddenly delighted. ‘The half of it – oh, I am so witty, ha ha!’

Aran Aranson knotted his fingers in his hair. It was as much as he could do not to belt the old man. ‘Half of
what
?’

Rahe cocked his head. He looked, Aran thought, with that mane of white hair and those cold, pale eyes like Old Ma Hallasen’s goat. Then he remembered that Old Ma was in truth Old Ma no longer, and that was not a comforting thought either. ‘Ah, I forget how little you know, my fool. When the world was made, the gods gave it a threefold protector: the Warrior, the Woman and the Beast. When they are together, they are more than the sum of their parts – the Three who are More – but separated they are less than their singularities; and I managed to break them further apart still so that they could do me no harm. As a man may split an acorn with an axe-blow, so I split the Woman and the Warrior from themselves, body from soul, anima from animus; and the most brutish aspect of the Beast I banished here, chained with spells in Halbo’s sea.

‘The cat now wanders the desertlands, disconsolate; but its bestial self is rampaging monstrously free among Halbo’s invaders and defenders. Oh, the carnage it must be causing! I cannot wait to see the chaos.’

Aran frowned. This was all too metaphysical for him. Never a particularly superstitious man, he had no liking for such abstract and fanciful meanderings. ‘I have heard the myths of the beast of Halbo, trapped in a great cage of iron locked by seither’s spells, but I had always thought such stories to be symbolic of the harbour’s chainwall,’ he said slowly. ‘But now you are telling me that the creature actually exists?’

‘Ah, yes,’ the mage said cheerfully. ‘And it has spawned offspring, too, for its appetites are mighty, albeit with lesser beasts which can slip through the bars of its cage.’

Painful memories of his son Halli’s death at sea assailed Aran now: they had said that wreck was caused by a sea monster; though that had been far away from the mainland. He shut the thought away, for it burned like gall. ‘Then who may have the power to loose such a beast?’ he asked, bemused. ‘Who is this “she” of whom you speak?’

Rahe looked at him as if he were half-witted; then remembered he was only a mortal, and one without a hint of magic in his blood. ‘The Rosa Eldi, my boy. She who was once the goddess of this world.’

Aran’s brows drew together in a single black line across his forehead. The Rose of the World. The woman their king had taken to wife at the ill-fated Allfair last year. But she was a nomad, a mere Footloose woman . . . wasn’t she? He remembered abruptly the glimpse of a green eye and a white hand on the coat of a black cat behind the mapmaker’s stall, and the way his heart had been set racing as he left that place with the scrap of parchment promising treasure and adventure clutched so tightly to his chest. Then he remembered how Ravn Asharson had been so entranced by that strange, pale woman that he would give no mind to saving his daughter Katla from the fires of their enemy. If this was a goddess, the response she demanded from the men around her was little short of tawdry: who could love or respect such a being?

He made the sign of Sur’s anchor, in case he prompted that god to strike him down once for even entertaining the possibility of there being a rival deity.

‘And she has set this monster free?’ he said, his voice full of disbelief.

‘It seems she has tried, indeed, for her magic is in the air. But she is not strong enough yet: and so I have given her a little help.’ He dropped Aran Aranson a conspiratorial wink.

The Rockfall man digested this slowly. Then: ‘Why would you do that?’ he asked.

‘A little chaos can only help our cause, my boy.’

Freezing, blood-tinged water cascaded over them all. In the stern, Virelai screamed and clung to the gunwale as if his life depended on it, which was indeed the case. Selen Issian, her previous life slipping back to her in unpleasant little starts and flashes of memory, curled herself protectively about the only thing that still mattered in her world, and sought for the will to survive this new ordeal. Her father, Tycho Issian, wrapped one arm around the Rosa Eldi – who was, it seemed, too stunned by the sight of the terrible thing she had raised from the deep to object to this manhandling – and the other around the mast, crushing them both against the body of the dead man. Meanwhile, the captain of the vessel, Haro Orbia, caught hold of the massive mastfish and moulded himself around it, muttering prayers to the Lady of Fire.

Others were neither so fortunate nor so galvanised by terror.

Two of the big Galian mercenaries, who had been gawping at the monster with expressions of the utmost horror and the slow-wittedness of their inbred lineage, tumbled like mannequins dropped by a bored child and fell, shrieking, over the side and into the sea. Erol Bardson, riveted for long seconds by the sight of the royal ship bearing down upon them with his king and chief enemy at its prow, failed to recognise this new danger until it was upon him. As the deck tilted violently, he grasped desperately at a length of chain which hurtled past but only succeeded in diverting its passage so that it whacked into his face, rendering him half-insensible. By the time he had regained his senses sufficiently to review his situation, it was far too late. One moment he had left the deck and was airborne and everything was dreamlike, slow, surreal; the next, he was staring into what appeared to be a vast dark cave half full of water, weed and unidentifiably chewed dead things, a cave fringed with scimitar-like shards of pale bone, and time speeded up horribly so that he did not even have the opportunity to wonder what would happen to his pretty ward Finna, his wife or his home, before the sword-sharp teeth of the Nemesis pierced him in a dozen places, back and front, and his life was extinguished.

If there had been tumult and confusion before, now there was pandemonium. Centuries-old enmity was forgotten in the face of common threat. Vessels beyond the immediate range of the monster turned tail and fled for the safety of the quays, or for the open sea. Those in its path slewed and stalled as men abandoned their posts and dived overboard. Some climbed the mast for a better view and hung gibbering from the yardarm, transfixed by the sight of this thing which was neither whale nor shark nor anything they had ever encountered in this world before, even in the worst of their night terrors!

The flukes of the beast’s great tail thrashed the water and broke apart two skiffs which had desperately rowed away from its snapping jaws. Broken men and splintered wood shot into the air and then vanished beneath the bloody, frothing spume of its wake. When it rounded on one of the Istrian ships, many of the crew jumped overboard on the lee side, while their braver comrades smashed oars and spears against the monster’s giant slablike head. All this achieved was to add new wounds to the myriad scars etched across the beast’s blunt muzzle, scars gained from eons of battering itself against the spellbound bars of its cage; and to enrage it further. Rising out of the water, the Nemesis balanced precariously on its vast tail and hind fins to tower sixty feet in the air over the terrified crew, blotting out the sky and all light and hope; then it crashed down with murderous intent into the centre of the
Southern Wayfarer
. The beautifully crafted vessel, made from whippy green unseasoned oak that would flex and curve with the running seas and high rollers of the Northern Ocean, could offer no resistance to such a direct onslaught. With a dreadful groan, the timbers broke and scattered, while the keel, the chained rowers and two dozen men of Istria were carried down into the dark waters beneath the creature’s bulk.

After that, the Nemesis did not rise again; and none knew its movements. Was it lurking, gathering its energies for another frenzied attack; had it been fatally injured by the wreckage of the
Southern Wayfarer,
or was it grazing the seabed far below them, feasting on the sumptuous pickings scattered across reefs and outcrops, tangled in the kelp beds, washed into sea caves and grottoes?

The northern king’s flagship had been carried away from its quarry in the backwash from the monster’s dive. It smashed against the
Maid of Ixta
and sent her rocking and reeling into her sister ship, the
Lady of Cera
, which rolled dangerously, losing several members of her crew to the brine; then with dextrous handling from the steersman, the
Sur’s Raven
ploughed through a patch of blessedly open water and came to rest alongside the old
Troll of Narth,
whose blackwood strakes had seen worse battles than this in its hundred-and-thirty-year history.