Authors: Jude Fisher
He spends many lonely days in the tower room, surveying the world he once regarded as his own through his complicated device of crystals and levers and clever reflecting glass, and is by turns perturbed and exhausted by what he sees. He turns the levers to show him the barren Northern Isles, but other than the appearance of the odd sea-monster (only to be expected, given the sudden unnatural influx of magic back into the world) finds nothing particularly surprising – people fishing; people fighting; people birthing and dying in much the same way as they have always done in their pathetic little existences.
In the Southern Empire, he searches for the Rosa Eldi, in vain. Instead, after much random casting about, he finds his hapless apprentice engaged in some bungled attempt at sorcery for a man who looks as if he might very soon lose his temper. Here he stays for some time, watching.
At least he has located the damned cat.
But even the sight of Virelai attempting to use the magic he has stolen fails to keep his interest for long. Listlessly, he seeks again for the woman, the perfect one, but although he trails the length and breadth of the Southern Empire, which is surely the only place a woman of such perverse refinements is likely truly to be appreciated, he can find no sign of her: except for the little incidents of magic that appear to have seeped out into the fabric of the world in a variety of warped and bizarre manifestations. By swinging the crystals to and fro without any deliberate pattern he comes upon wells and watercourses in the deep south of the world that once were pure and potable and have now become poisoned by the ingress of heavy metals ejected from veins in the earth far, far below; he finds streams in which fish have developed legs; birds which have suddenly grown teeth and turned upon their own; feral chickens which have escaped the barnyard and have scurried out into the woodlands and meadows. He comes upon other oddities and phenomena which pique his curiosity for a little while, then he resumes his search for the Rose of the World, trawling once more through the towns and cities of Istria.
Yet again, it seems, the people of the south are in preparation for another war, its people angry and unfocused, preferring to turn their attentions outside their own lives to rail against their northern neighbours for yet another imagined slight. Something to do – if his mouth-reading is accurate – with a barbarian king’s rejection of a swan. A piffling matter, clearly; as is usually the way with the seed of such disturbances. He remembers the immolation of two entire clans in the Northern Isles after a bloodfeud caused by one drunken man pissing on some piece of ground designated as ‘sacred’ by some other idiot. As if the fools had the least idea of what the word ‘sacred’ really meant: for if they did, it would hardly be small squares of hallowed turf that concerned them, oh no!
Bored with the southerners’ narrow rages and inhumanity, he shifts his view to the nomads – those wandering souls he had so easily displaced from their own lands and set about their random excursions – and finds little ant-lines of them trekking across the great wastelands, carefully skirting the cities wherein might lie renewed persecution and cruelty. It appears that the fervour which has the southerners in its grip once more has prompted a hatred of strangers and a fear of even the smallest magics, or indeed anything not immediately comprehensible to the dullest mind. He sighs. It was ever thus. Magicians and their kind were always distrusted: he had had to be rather more forceful with his own people when he had dwelled in the world than he might otherwise have chosen. A taste of pain, a terrible glimpse of what might be, was always one way to bring them back into line; the focused hatred of a third party another, even more effective, method.
He deploys the pulley system and brings one small caravan of yeka into closer focus. A young woman sits the leading yeka, her hair and skin an indeterminate reddish colour which suggests some miscegenation. She has light-coloured eyes, too, unlike most of her people. But the lad who sits beside her is one of the travelling folk through and through: dark-haired, black-eyed, lean-featured. He scans the rest of the troupe and notices that there looks to be no flesh to spare between them: they are a skinny bunch, all bones and sharp lines, stringy muscles and sagging breasts. Times have been hard for these folk. They have no unharnessed beasts left to them: an unlikely scenario, given inevitable lameness and the need for the rotation of mounts. They must surely have lost a number of the beasts along the way; had them stolen, he’d wager. (If such a thing were feasible – even when he lived in Elda, there had been few so stupid as to take a bet with a magician. Although one or two had been arrogant enough to try . . .)
Following this line of thought, he swings the crystals far to the south, deep into the mountains, to the foot of the Red Peak. There, he finds more evidence of disturbance, and this time a chill runs through him, making his skin creep into gooseflesh. Little chasms and vents have appeared in the flanks of the great mountain itself, revealing the blood of the world within, all red and boiling. Directly over its cap the most profound aperture of them all is gusting out clouds of fouled yellow vapour, vapour which, even as he watches, kills a bird stone dead as it foolishly takes a course through the mist, so that one moment it is gliding effortlessly through the evening air on wide, powerful wings and the next is tumbling senseless end over end to disappear silently into the mountain’s maw.
He sits back now, his hands shaking. Is there anything he can do to avert the likely disaster to come? he wonders. Perhaps a hundred years ago, when he felt stronger and more confident of his powers, more in love with the possibilities of his future than he does now, he might have gathered his energies and his remaining magic and set sail for the south; exacted revenge upon his erring servant and taken back the cat by force, then made swift passage into that wilderness, there to reinforce the ancient spells and bindings he had put in place. From the perspective of great age and weariness, it seems a monumental task, too great a venture to undertake. But if he does not . . .
He puts his head in his hands. For the first time in two hundred years the greatest mage the world has ever seen, Rahe the Magnificent, as he liked to term himself in the days of his prime, puts his head in his hands and weeps.
Thirteen
Ghosts
‘Ha!’
The Lord of Forent’s hawkish face was alive with triumph. He flourished a roll of parchment at Tycho Issian. The unmistakable green-and-red knotted ribbon denoting that the missive had come direct from the Duke of Cera himself fluttered discarded to the floor of the tiled bathchamber. In the midst of the room, chest-deep in a tub filled with a foaming mess of chopped brome and ramsons, sat the Lord of Cantara. The old woman who was tending to Tycho – a bent crone by the look of her, even swaddled as she was in the most traditional of slave sabatkas in the coarsest black hessian – took one look at Rui Finco and scuttled from the room as if her life depended on it.
‘Phew!’ Rui wafted a hand in front of his nose. ‘What in Falla’s name has the old bag been adding to your treatment now?’
‘Wild garlic,’ Tycho answered plaintively, reaching for a length of bleached linen that was hanging just out of his reach. The tub rocked dangerously. Little rivulets of pale green water spilled over the side, followed by a watery salad of crushed leaves.
The Lord of Forent stepped carefully over this noxious puddle, caught up the fabric and handed it to Tycho. The agreement he had made with the crone was that if all else failed to cool the southern lord’s insatiable ardour, she was in some other way to ensure that Tycho was rendered entirely undesirable to even the lowest whore, let alone the fastidious women of Rui’s seraglio. Steeped as he was in the vile liquid, he was likely to stink of the ramsons she had added to his bath for many days to come.
The Lord of Cantara stepped out of the tub and wrapped himself carefully in the cloth, but no matter how he tried to conceal the fact it was eminently clear to Rui that none of the crone’s other remedies had had any ameliorating effect on the man’s condition: his erection remained as recalcitrant as ever. Rui could not help but grin: if they did not launch their war effort on the north and recover the nomad whore soon, the man was likely to explode.
‘Still no surcease, my lord?’ he asked courteously.
Tycho regarded him with slitted eyes and wound the linen tighter. ‘No,’ he said shortly. He surveyed the scroll the Lord of Forent still grasped. ‘What’s in the letter?’
‘My lord Lodono, Duke of Cera and the Lords Dystra, by divine edict joint heads of the Ruling Council, do summon together all the nobles of Istria for a Council gathering, to be held on the day after full moon next in the Grand Hall of the Dawn Castle in the Eternal City of Jetra,’ Rui intoned with great pomp and ceremony, without unrolling the parchment. ‘Or some such nonsense. It’s particularly interesting, I think, that they should be holding this so-called “gathering” in Jetra though, don’t you think?’
Tycho frowned. ‘To honour the Swan?’
‘It must surely be a council of war.’ The Lord of Forent scanned the contents of the scroll once more. ‘Though it does not actually say so. Why else hold it in the home city of the Dystras and their beauteous sacrifice, so despicably scorned by the barbarian king?’ He looked up again and his eyes glinted. ‘And you, my lord, are singled out for special mention.’
‘I am?’ He was surprised. The Duke of Cera had hardly deigned to speak to him before; for while Lodono could trace his ancestry back to the glorious days of the Hundred Day War, in which his family had routed and massacred every clan dwelling in the rich foothills of the Skarn Mountains down to the smallest child, he, Tycho Issian, could not even tell civilised company the true name and nature of his own father. He snatched the parchment from the Lord of Forent’s hand and read aloud:
‘“To Lord Tycho Issian, who husbands so well the city of Cantara, we extend a particular welcome in this time of his grievous loss.”’
He paled.
‘What grievous loss?’ He looked wildly about him, suddenly terrified that his shameful lust for the Rosa Eldi had been spied out. Then he realised what was meant. ‘Ah – no – Selen . . . Have they word of my daughter? Is it worse than I feared? Have they perhaps found her broken body washed up on some desolate shore?’
Rui shook his head. ‘Do not panic, my friend. I smell politics at work here, rather than disaster. Make the sorcerer scry for you if it puts your mind at rest. It seems to me that the Council may think to use you as a rallying point for the people, to work on their sympathy with a touching tale of abduction and horror . . .’ He paused, musing. ‘Or maybe, just maybe, our tactics have worked rather better than we had thought and public opinion is forcing their hand, for I cannot believe the old guard would welcome war anew. There must surely be considerable unrest to cause them to call us all away from our duties at such short notice. “The day after full moon next” – that’s barely a week away. We shall have to make swift provision for the journey.’ He clapped the Lord of Cantara hard on the back, leaving a sharply defined handprint on the other man’s bare shoulder. ‘Fine news, eh Tycho? Get ready to preach and rant in every market square on the way south to fan the flames. Better ask the crone to prepare you a new tincture that won’t drive the crowds away!’
‘Harder, boy, harder. Put some muscle into it!’
‘Oh, for the Lady’s sake!’
Saro Vingo hit the ground of the practice field with a thud, sending a little cloud of red dust spiralling into the air. Captain Galo Bastido stood over him, grinning maniacally out of his lopsided, broken-nosed face, his vast fists wrapped around the gigantic wooden sword with which Saro had just been thwacked. His arms ached; his shoulders ached; his head ached. And now his shins had added their own protests to his body’s general groan of complaint: they had been out on the field for well over an hour and a half without halt, and in all that time Saro had done little more than land a few glancing blows on his opponent. Quite the opposite was the case with the captain. The Bastard sweeping his legs from under him in this last ignominious fashion had been the latest degradation in a long sequence of humiliations that seemed designed to prove to the men watching – his father, his uncle and a visiting group of horse-traders – that the younger Vingo son would never have the strength, skill or guts to make up for the tragic lost promise of the elder; and that instead of passing the title of captain of the Altean militia to this pathetic specimen, Galo Bastido should reclaim the prestigious (and remunerative) role he regarded as his by right.
Saro reached for the sword he had dropped and used it to lever himself wearily to his feet.
‘Again!’ the Bastard called, and took up his stance.
Saro looked to his father for respite, but Favio stared at him stonily; indeed, appeared to be looking right through him to the enclosure beyond where the finest of the Vingo bloodstock cropped contentedly at the only green grass for miles in any direction. Saro knew this to be the case: he had last year helped to dig the irrigation system which kept it watered while the rest of the land parched in the late autumn sun. Tanto, of course, had not been expected to engage in such menial labour: he had spent the baking afternoons while Saro hacked at the rocky ground with pickaxe and spade riding one of the geldings over to the neighbouring estate and seducing their newest acquisition, a slavegirl purported to have spent time in the seraglio at Forent, and therefore a most accomplished and imaginative courtesan; or at least, that was how Tanto had reported the use of his time. Saro had had his doubts even then as to the veracity of his brother’s lurid tales of conquest. Now, after weeks of being subjected to the filthiest corners of Tanto’s memory and imagination, which entities appeared to be almost indistinguishable, Saro was becoming convinced that the tales his brother had told of those sultry afternoons had been very edited indeed.
Tanto was seated now in the contraption that Favio and Fabel had commissioned for his use: a long, wickerwork chair with two small cartwheels attached in which the invalid would be able to propel himself along the flatter pathways surrounding the villa. That had been the idea, anyway; but Tanto had made no great effort to be self-sufficient, but had instead insisted on having two servants follow the chair at all times to lift it down steps or over thresholds, or even to push the vehicle along if he could no longer be bothered to do it for himself. A lever at either side brought the chair to rest and anchored it firmly; and if Tanto was overcome with exhaustion from all this exertion, another lever allowed the back of the chair to tilt until the thing had become a perfectly comfortable bed-on-wheels. Favio had worked on the design for long hours, sketching on parchment with goose quills and expensive inks, before handing over his plans to a man in Altea town who specialised in the construction of horse-drawn racing carts. It had cost the family a small fortune they simply did not have: Saro had heard his father and uncle arguing into the small hours about the grievous nature of the family’s finances. The deal for Night’s Harbinger, their finest horse, had fallen through, and no one seemed to be buying much at the moment anyway. There was too much uncertainty in the air, too much talk of war for anyone to be committing their capital to breeding programmes or such frivolities as racing; but Favio had been insistent about the need to provide his beloved son with his own means of transport around the grounds. ‘It will do him a power of good to regain a little independence, you’ll see.’