Vergence (54 page)

“So he pays a little more for the land than he would have lent to Khet'Tuk,” Ebryn said. “And he has a debt slave, and no doubt Brack feels he owes a favour for disposing of a rival—”

Addae nodded. “Yes, my friend. This is what I see in this Phar Salsa's eyes.”

Ebryn stopped, half turning to go back, his face flushed. As Addae had calmed down, it seemed anger had grown inside him.

“I can free him. I'll free all of them. I was told Vittore didn't allow slavery here, but what difference is there between that and what Salsa is doing?”

Addae put a restraining hand on Ebryn's arm. A white robed man a few yards behind had stopped when they turned, looking directly at them with a startled expression. He wore the clothing of a Genestuer order administrator, and seemed oddly familiar to Ebryn. He made a half-hearted effort at looking around, as if he'd paused to wait for someone, before hitching up his clothes and hurrying away.

“Who was that?” Ebryn asked.

“That one has followed us from near the guild of the lenders.”

“You knew he was following us?”

“Yes, my friend, he has not the skill for concealing himself. It may be he wore such clothing to better pass amongst us at the claws, yet it is a poor choice for streets on this side of the great road.”

The Hunchback

O
N EACH OF HIS TURNS,
Fla moved his piece with feverish speed, barely paying attention to the state of the board, his good eye focused unblinkingly on Hoi Helha. The old man fidgeted, fumbling with his pieces when it came to his turn, staring at Fla as if transfixed.

As they played, Fla questioned him, dragging a piece of history out as he planned each move, interrogating Hoi about Ben-gan. What happened in the early days of Vergence? Where had the sky-wood they'd found for the world-ships come from? Fla sat facing Hoi across one of the tables in the entrance to the inner library, his hood pulled forward to cover the left hand side of his face, leaving only his good eye visible.

Hoi's eyes traced the visible side of Fla's face compulsively. There'd been a moment when Hoi seemed to see something there, a kind of recognition, his gaze darting between Fla's eyes and dark greasy hair with a burgeoning horror visible on his features. Strange, Fla thought, as the worst side of his face was covered.

Hoi's fear was palpable. A thin line of sweat gathered on his forehead as they started the second game, and he gripped his defeated pieces spasmodically. Initially, Hoi had been delighted when Fla joined him to play gulls. By the start of the second game Hoi barely whispered his answers.

“Tell me,” Fla said, jumping his solitary wyvern over two of Hoi's gulls. “was he ageing before he found the sky-wood in Syvylar?”

“I did not see. I was just born at that time.”

“But you asked, didn't you? You found out,” Fla said.

Hoi lowered his head. “Yes—”

“Tell me.”

“They say he no longer aged after Syvylar. He's barely changed my entire life.”

Fla leant forward. “But he grew older before that?”

“It is said he did. But you must understand, his people … like the Senesellans—”

Fla thought furiously, trying to recall what he knew of Syvylar. What little he remembered concerned the nature of the valuable wood found there; extracted from sky forests, it would not fall — as buoyant in air as in water, and essential for building craft to navigate the between.

What else had Ben-gan discovered, when he'd been there? Some secret to immortality, perhaps, but in his mind Fla could see light from Tranquillity celebrations reflected off undamaged sevyric manacles, lying on a table where moments before Ben-gan had worn them.

And with the thought, he felt a sudden tickle of fear. An indwelling binding able to shape a host must be substantially ephemeral, from an ephemeral realm, and by their nature such places were short-lived. The ephemeral Ben-gan used might already be lost to time.

Fla reached out and gripped Hoi's arm. “Are there books? You have records for Syvylar?”

“Nothing—” Hoi said, but his eyes flicked towards a break in the shelves.

Hoi tried to pull away, but Fla's urgency lent him strength, dragging the old man upright and hauling him towards the gap he'd glanced at. Fla's own body shook with the effort. His joints felt dislocated, ruptured, torn. But he kept Hoi upright, shoving him through the narrow avenues. When Hoi grabbed at a shelf, Fla struck his hand with the edge of his staff, and when Hoi stumbled to the floor, Fla heaved him back to his feet and forced him forward.

“Here,” Hoi said eventually.

The old man collapsed, whimpering. Fla ignored him, already feverishly searching the rows of books, fingers fumbling at the bindings, struggling to pull the tightly packed works free from their places on the shelves. His body was drenched in sweat from the effort, skin prickling, stomach revolting, as he pushed against waves of pain.

Volumes tumbled to the floor, falling in loose uneven piles, and Fla scrabbled amongst them with sweat-slick hands. His cheeks were suddenly wet with tears of frustration, the snuffling noises from Hoi an infuriating distraction.

“Go … go away, before I hurt you,” Fla screamed at him.

Fla turned back to the shelves, with bile in his throat. How could he find what he was looking for here, with noise and the risk of interruption?

Fla folded the tome in his hands using words and technique learnt from Orim, first one at a time — then full rows, until the entire book case was nearly empty. He would go somewhere quiet to find what he needed.

Fla left Hoi, lying forgotten in the alcove, with a look of base terror on his face.

Fla lurched into his underground home, almost welcoming the familiar cold, mouldering walls. He worked his way through the outer chambers, cluttered with now empty cages, the crypts and floor fouled with the putrefied droppings from a dozen kinds of creature.

Dark guardians he'd summoned, following Orim's last visit, retreated to hidden spaces as he approached, and glutinous wards reformed behind him. He sat on the inscribed stone throne at the far end of the main chamber with a groan, the muscles in his legs and back cramping with fatigue. Exhaustion from two full days without sleep, and sparse food, threatened to overwhelm him.

The first book yielded nothing. And the next. And the one which followed that. He ripped out pages in frustration and threw them across the room, abandoning the mangled shells of outer covers and crumpled scraps in a growing pile near his feet. When the dim purple-blue were-light stuttered, he replaced it.

Daylight had drifted into darkness outside, and half the books lay scattered across the floor before Fla found his first clue. A bound servitor crouched in front of him, like some bloated sculpture of smooth polished dark bronze, supporting the open volume in multiple arms.

Fla reread the section carefully. It concerned the properties of a specific kind of heartwood ephemeral, with instructions for binding to imbue a vessel with resilience and longevity. The secret lay not in the main text, but in a faded note scribbled in the margin.

Fla leant forward, ignoring sharp twinges from his legs, breathing fast with excitement. He saw two comments, the first mentioning the effects of indwelling binding of a heartwood ephemeral in a living host.

The second had been written in old Volanian, right to left in faded ink above the first comment, and completed in a formal hand. Most of the message meant nothing to him, but he did recognise two of the ideograms. One symbolised joining and the other denoted the concepts of adaptation, morphing, blending.

Fla sat back as the ideas cascaded through his mind, sifting possibilities, seeing relationships in the forms described in the writing. The annotations suggested binding heartwood ephemerals within living hosts, gifting longevity and resilience. The second annotation suggested a double binding, the second serving as an accent to the first — subtly changing the outcome. He ran through the implications, trying to imagine the results.

Would a pure heartwood binding lead to longevity, but at the expense of endless torpor and rigidity of mind and body? A second binding to compensate, something to add vitality, flexibility, the capacity for change? He'd never heard of a double binding to anything, let alone a living creature. The relationship could not be inimical, the two ephemeral would need to blend naturally, the two related — somehow complementary and compensatory, opposites drawn from the same root.

Could this be Ben-gan's secret? The accenting of the second ephemeral, allowing him to change his form just enough to remove the sevyric bindings? And if the shape-shifting ephemeral were dominant, and the heartwood an accent for stability — what then could he achieve? A body no longer bent, a face like Muro's?

Fla knew with a certainty he had the answer. Sashael lay like a precious jewel visible on the other side of a cage grill, just out of reach. All he needed was the identity of the second ephemeral. He returned to the book with a renewed sense of urgency, fatigue held at bay by hope, and a single desperate desire.

As morning approached, he found it: another neat annotation in old Volanian at the foot of a page drew his attention and forced him to reread the preceding paragraph. And there it was, an elliptical reference to a bundlewisp — an incorporeal protean ephemeral.

Fla laughed out loud. As common as weeds in a farmer's garden, nearly as welcome, and entirely disregarded. As valuable as gold to a few, but you probably couldn't give them away. Resilient through adaptation — the shared characteristic which would allow it to co-exist with heartwood.

How to test this?

Fla's good eye swept over the empty cages, and he cursed himself. A summoning would not hold an ephemeral, and in a fit of sentiment he'd released his own small menagerie.

He worked urgently, flinging empty cages into a corner, sweeping loose pieces of paper, and other materials into piles. He rifled through old manuscripts, seeking out guides for the containment, and control, of the ephemerals he needed. The arboreal heartwood would be tricky to lure away from its abode, but its nature was easier to contain. Bundlewisps were a half mercurial substance, half blade-sharp instinct — difficult to fetch, and fiendishly hard to hold.

Darkness came and went, as he laboured, ignoring the tormented protests of his body, drinking little and neither eating nor sleeping. His servitors, driven into alternating paroxysms of indecision and frenetic activity by his insistence, slowly assembled what he needed: dark earth, with wood and living plants for the heartwood. A small basin of clear water followed, and a shallow bowl of quicksilver.

Fla had long known he possessed an extraordinary, even unique, affinity with certain taxa of ephemeral. He'd safely summoned and commanded them, keeping them in servitude for great periods of time, but with the ones he sought now, he would have no such advantage. And so the work must be completed painstakingly, with the closest attention to details.

By the third attempt, Fla suspected something was amiss. By the fourth, he felt certain.

He'd successfully summoned dozens of powerful ephemeral, many fiendishly clever and deadly, and all obeyed him. Minor ephemeral in his taxa had become habitual, requiring little effort, and he'd experimented with binding many into living creatures.

The results were often unpleasant, frequently messy, as the ephemerals he could command reacted in strange ways with their hosts. But after a few early failures, every binding he'd attempted had finished with some degree of success.

Blending the heartwood ephemeral with the bundlewisp created a strange mix, like flowing bright green oil. When he stepped into it, he felt nothing, and they flowed off him like water running over a stone. Nothing he did would force the indwelling binding to take hold, and in a rage he dismissed them.

Fla's servitors scattered as he went from room to room, striking everything in sight with his staff. Fatigue threatened to overwhelm him, but reserves of molten frustration and desire pushed him onwards.

After a while he calmed a little and made his way back to his stash of reference books, borrowed from the great library over the years, and never returned.