The Rose of the World (7 page)

Aran Aranson felt his knees give way. He sank to the ground as if the last of his strength had failed him now that his objective was attained. It was Urse who demanded, ‘What sort of man are you that you appear to us in this bizarre manner, rather than striding out on your own two feet?’

At this, Aran called to the giant, ‘What are you saying?’ And even as he asked this, the image came clearly to his mind of the woman he had glimpsed at the Allfair the last summer, the one sitting quietly behind the mapmaker’s stall, with a sheet of shining hair and those hypnotic sea-green eyes, full of come-hither promise. Blood rushed to several chilled and forgotten parts of his anatomy. His pulse quickened. Embarrassed in case his discomfiture should suddenly show itself, he turned away from the apparition to confront Urse One-Ear, his face contorted. ‘How can you be so unmannerly to such a gracious lady?’

Urse laughed, showing his snaggle teeth. ‘Lady? This is no lady. The ice must have blinded you. It is a venerable old man who seems to be carrying a world of trouble on his shoulders.’ He frowned. ‘But even if your eyes were mistaken, surely your ears can tell the difference between the cracked and reedy voice of a greybeard and a lady’s soft tones?’

Aran felt the lust which had infused his veins turning to blind fury. He took a step towards the giant, his hands balled. ‘Put down my son and put up your fists, Urse One-Ear; and I shall even up your features for your insulting behaviour!’

‘No!’

This word of command flew through the air between them to hang like an invisible shield, and to Aran Aranson it was a mellifluous pleading which could not help but melt his anger, while to Urse it was an order he had no choice but to obey.

As unmoving as the frozen landscape around them, the two men stood facing each other, while the third lay slumped and insensate. The Master hovered around this tableau, scratching his beard. Both men were supposed to be visited by the same image – that of the most alluring of women: the Rosa Eldi, Rose of the World, whose gaze could fell a man with desire and bind him to her will. He shook his head. Was it his age, or the long sleep he had endured which was diminishing his powers so? With both men rendered temporarily inert as stone, the Master cancelled the flying glamour and came down to the ground with a thud, his knees buckling with the sudden impact. Even such simple magics were becoming problematic. Something in the potion Virelai had administered must have drastically weakened his abilities if it took such effort to maintain a miserably basic deception. What if the effects were progressive? What if his capabilities should deteriorate further? He shuddered. He should never have filled the damned cat with his spellcraft; but how could he ever have guessed that his inept apprentice should have the gall and the wit to carry out such an audacious plan? He cursed again his lack of foresight and judgement, that he had created his own downfall. Had he bothered to scry his own future just once, he might have averted the disaster which had befallen him, would never have had to resort to such convoluted means of regaining what should never in the first place have been lost.

The Master shook his head, and his grey, unkempt locks tumbled about his shoulders in just the fashion Urse One-Ear had so truly perceived. He walked between the two still figures and peered up into the big man’s mangled face. Even bowed beneath the weight of the boy, this monster towered over him.

He was no beauty, and probably never would have been even had the grim accident which had befallen him never taken the ear and made such a hash of his cheek and jaw. The Master smiled with satisfaction. The Giant, without a doubt.

He turned his attention to the man called Aran Aranson. This man looked like one of the heroes of old, Rahe thought, with his sharp cheekbones and sunken, fanatical eyes; with his tangled black hair, his grey-shot beard and jutting chin; his single great eyebrow running in a furious dark line across a forehead as dark as seasoned oak. Even the salt-stained sealskins and ratty furs could not disguise his athletic build; and even the ravages of the journey which had brought him from the relative comforts of his island farm to this fabled land – through the worst of the world’s elemental forces, through weeks of poor fare and bad sleep, through exhaustion, fear and despair – could not extinguish the fire that burned within him: a fire fuelled by ambition, a craving for wild experience, for things and places unseen by other men. Rahe could smell it on him like a glamour. He sniffed. A vague scent of musk and cinnamon came to him, even though it was so cold that even the stink of a rotting beast or a frightened man’s sweat left little trace.

With a sure hand he plundered the warmth beneath Aran’s sealskin jerkin. Between the skin – warm, hairy, the heartbeat a slow, sure pulsing thud – and the linen tunic the Eyran wore beneath the outer layers, Rahe found what he was seeking. Sealed in a soft leather pouch tied closed with a knotted thong was a roll of parchment, creased and flaking from overuse. With fingers trembling as much from fury as anticipation, Rahe unrolled this artefact, clutching it between fingerpads gone white from applied pressure as any effect of the cold.

It was elegantly done, this so-called map, he had to admit. At first glance it looked authentic – accurate and carefully drawn by someone who knew the outlines of the coasts familiar to the seafaring men of the Northern Isles – and had been expertly antiqued by a touch of the Ageing spell he had himself stowed in Bëte, having no immediate use for it himself. That was the musk – he would recognise that wretched creature’s odour anywhere. The spice smell he put down to the maker’s own signature: rot-sweet and musty.

He traced the swathe of white space in the northernmost quarter of the map with the invented word ‘isenfeld’ scrawled across it in his faithless apprentice’s best calligraphy hand. ‘Icefields’ indeed – or rather ‘ice’ plus an old word for ‘pastures’, but in a tongue so ancient no such concept could possibly have existed, for in those days there had been no kingdom of ice in this world, no floes and bergs, no uncrossable ocean: those failures of climate had come much later to Elda, when the care of the world had been neglected, allowing it to fall into the disrepair which had allowed him to create this hidden island, indicated by the traitor’s hand beneath the heart of a gorgeously drawn windrose in the far right-hand corner, a word beginning ‘Sanct—’.

The Master’s lip curled. Virelai. The little runt! The ignominy of the situation was unbearable: the greatest mage in the world of Elda laid low by one of his own spells, stolen and applied by his lowly and despised apprentice.

He clutched the map tighter, felt the greed and uncertainty eat into him. Visions of yellow metal, of glinting ores flashed behind the orbits of his eyes. Gold! Ah yes: he had glimpsed it before, but now he saw clearly. Gold: that was the draw. Sanctuary’s fabled treasure halls. Virelai had promised the adventurers gold to sail through unknown horrors to Sanctuary. He could imagine the scene at the Allfair, all the greedy shipowners crowding around – or, no – Virelai would have to have seen them one by one, have to have made each man feel special, singled out for glory. Entrusted with a secret mission, which no other must know about for fear of them beating him to the prize.
All you need to do is remove the old man, help yourselves to his treasures, a simple task
. Remove the old man.

The Master laughed, and the sound ricocheted off the ice to echo crazily around them, the sound of a thousand madmen enjoying a fine jest.
Poor Virelai
, he thought, for the first time feeling a tinge of pity:
he must have believed the whole story about the geas and the demons, or he would surely have killed me himself!
It was a fine jest indeed, a jest he had himself made possible and engendered. And so Virelai, in fear for his worthless, non-existent life had created – and rather well – these fake maps and promised wealth beyond measure to the men who would take on flood and storm, ice and terror, in return for murdering a weak and weapon-less old man and stealing his gold!

The only gold in all of Sanctuary was buried deep in the tunnels on the stronghold: tiny outcroppings of the stuff, glittering away in the seams of rock exposed in those dark corridors, a stuff as worthless as Virelai’s putrid soul – iron pyrites: fool’s gold; and here before him the very fool who had survived every pitfall thrown in his way for the privilege of helping himself to a heap of sham ore.

When first he had deduced the magic of the maps, it had made him furious and vengeful; but now the Master laughed with every breath of air in his lungs: a massive, whole-hearted laugh that shattered icicles a thousand feet away and felled seabirds drifting on thermals high above the cliffs. Men were such stupid, faithless creatures: show them a glimpse of easy wealth and they would bargain body and soul, wife and child and lifelong comrades to its lure. His own dreams had been greater by far, and his achievements dwarfed their petty imaginations as a snowbear dwarfs an ant.

He thought of his snowbear now as he examined the third member of this rag-tag expedition. It had been one of his better simulacra, he thought, though he had never meant it to take the boy’s hand. Madman though he was, the lad would surely require two to do the job he had in mind for him. That was the trouble with the already-living: they still carried some spark of self-will with them that might show itself at some inopportune moment, triggered by some long-buried natural instinct. It really was most inconvenient that the bear had reacted in such a way. He pondered on this for a few moments, lifting the boy’s sealskin hood away from his flaming red hair, perusing the ice-pale skin and delicate features beneath, peeling the stained and frozen wrappings from the cauterised stump. Near death, but still a flame of life burned brightly at his core. The remarkable thing about these poor, frail beings was that they were unable to perceive the futility of their tiny existences, they struggled to survive in even the most unpromising circumstances. They endured – what? thirty, forty, sixty years, if they were lucky enough not to succumb to sickness or bad weather, lack of food or violence. They barely had time to scratch the surface of the world before being taken back into it to nourish the next round of living things. And yet still they clung to that tiny, useless scrap of life force, as if their existences were in some unfathomable way significant, meaningful, valuable.

The Master shook his head. He had come such a long way from his own origins that it was hard to empathise with the destiny of such as these.

The Madman, the Giant and the Fool.

He lifted his spell of stillness and watched as the Giant and the Fool stepped puzzledly back from one another. Then he shed his glamour and allowed the one to see him as in truth he was – as the other had already perceived him – as a man aged beyond all realms of possibility, with iron-grey hair which flowed in tangles over his shoulders and down his back, a beard stained with all manner of fluids and food-stuffs, dressed in a long blue robe with a ragged hem, and a pair of tapestried slippers through the toe of one of which protruded a horny nail as yellow as a ram’s eye.

‘Come with me,’ he said, cocking a finger at them, and the warmth of his tone belied the magical command which he embedded in the words. Even as he spoke, they found their feet shuffling toward him, and all other thoughts fleeing their heads. ‘Come into my home and warm your bones, for it is as cold as sin out here. Come with me into Sanctuary and you shall eat your fill of the juiciest meats and the sweetest pastries, and drink mulled wine and strong ales.’

And so Aran Aranson, erstwhile Master of Rockfall, his sole surviving son Fent Aranson, and Urse One-Ear of Tam Fox’s mumming troupe followed the strange figure who had appeared before them in the midst of the wilderness through a surreal garden of ice, replete with sculpted statues and towering white pillars, elegant curving stairways and frozen lakes, into the confines of the stronghold of ice at the top of the world known in legend as Sanctuary.

Six

The Heir to the Northern Isles

‘Such eyes: did you ever see such eyes?’

The King of Eyra peered wonderingly into the crib, then turned to regard his lady wife as she sat on the edge of their bed after her evening bath, one slim white shoulder slipping seductively out of her gleaming ermine-trimmed robe.

‘I swear they are purple. Such a colour I have never seen in any child of our line; though the line of the brow is surely kingly. And he watches me so steadily, so boldly: he is surely a warrior born. He is a marvel, my love, a marvel! And so are you.’

Ravn Asharson’s own flint-grey eyes were alight with fervour, but it was a fervour born of pride as a parent, rather than out of desire for her. Once more, the Rosa Eldi felt a little cold shiver inside her. Ravn’s intense involvement with the child drew his attention away from her, and thus she felt less loved. The Queen of the Northern Isles shifted her position an iota and the robe dropped lower, revealing the curve of one glorious breast to remind him of his priorities.

‘He is certainly a very lusty and noisy babe.’

She could barely stifle the edge that came into her voice. The baby seemed to command Ravn Asharson’s adoration more than she did even when she exerted her will upon him. She never should have withdrawn the blanket of sorcery in which she had wrapped the King of Eyra all these long months. It had started as an experiment designed to test the extent of his love for her, and for a while nothing had seemed to change: he remained obsessed, his eyes seeking her when he could not be near her, his hands upon her whenever he was. But once the child was born, everything was different. If she had thought the behaviour Ravn had displayed towards her before the birth was love, seeing the way he was with the child had made her reassess her whole world. Perhaps it was the way his expression changed when he looked upon little Wulf; as if someone had lit a sconce behind his eyes so that the hard planes of his face softened and affection shone out of him. Seeing him like that caused her physical pain: pain of loss, pain of abandonment. Power, which had seemed to be flooding back to her, now ebbed away.