Wild Magic (41 page)

‘She makes me
burn
.’ Tycho clenched his fists, ground them both against his groin, forcing down the protuberance there. Then he approached the table at such speed that Virelai flinched away; but all the Lord of Cantara did was to grip him by the shoulders and, lowering his voice, croak out: ‘I do not think . . . I do not think she is entirely human, the Rosa Eldi. I believe she is touched by the divine. And so, you see, I must have her. I must save her soul. It is my sacred duty.’

Now, he forced Virelai to sit before him and unveil the stone. The sorcerer did this nervously; not only because the lord’s erection was pressed uncomfortably against his back, but also because he was concerned about Tycho making comment about the state of his hands. Where Alisha had applied her ointment, the skin was certainly holding together better than it had; but it was still an odd shade of grey and even candlelight could not conceal that fact to any with eyes to see. He had put on some gloves, but in order to scry it was necessary to make direct contact with the crystal. Reluctantly, he peeled them off, but the Lord of Cantara did not even blink, made no comment at all. The grip on his shoulders remained steady; and almost as if the lord’s obsessive need drove the scrying using Virelai as its conduit, the great stone rendered up the Rosa Eldi with insulting ease.

There she was, smiling with that strange, bemused smile he had so often seen on her face since she had fled him, in some great hall whose walls were adorned with ancient tapestries and decked with weaponry – barbed spears and crossed axes, sheaves of swords fanning as if for mere decoration; halberds and pikes – all fixed within manageable height as if to provide the occupants with an instant armoury in time of surprise attack. Amid the ugliness that surrounded her, the Rosa Eldi was pale and perfect, as graceful as a lily, as radiant as a safflower. Virelai breathed a sigh of relief: at least they had come upon her in a public place, fully clothed and deporting herself in a seemly manner, rather than cavorting naked with the dark and rampant king, as had always seemed to be the case whenever he searched the crystal for her before now.

As if the mere sight of the Rose of the World was a balm upon his torment, the Lord of Cantara relaxed his grip upon Virelai’s shoulders. Then: ‘Ah,’ he said, in a great release of breath. ‘
There
she is. There
she
is!’

A crowd of folk were gathered around her, dozens of them, all pressing close to pay their court. They were all arrayed in rich clothing and fine jewellery: a riot of colour and baubles that flashed in the light of the sconces and the flames roaring high in the hearths.
So much fire
, Virelai thought. To his mind, it was a hellish scene, but the lord behind him whispered in awe: ‘See, see— She is Falla rising from the fires of the Holy Mountain.

‘She is magnificent. Ah . . .’

The crowd knotted, wheeled, flowed like a sea; and then there was the barbarian king, Ravn Asharson, moving with easy grace through his courtiers towards his wife, his long hair shining beneath his silver circlet, the mass of his wolfskin cloak emphasising the muscular set of his shoulders. As if beguiled by him, the crystal followed his every step, revolving so that where before it had offered a view of his back, now it aligned itself with the Rose of the World, so that all that could be seen was the Eyran king as he processed through his people, his proud face, the firelight burnishing his eyes and cheekbones; the fierceness of his smile.

‘Damn the thing!’ Tycho growled. ‘Bring her back: I don’t want to see him, that vile whelp! Show me the Rosa Eldi.’

With every atom of his will, Virelai fought the crystal away from its fixation upon the Stallion of the North until at last it veered crazily sideways; unhelpfully refusing him, even then, the Rose of the World, but offering in her stead the view of a quiet chamber, simply furnished, in which a dark-haired girl sat upon a low settle playing a game of knucklebones with a homely-looking woman engaged in picking her teeth with a sharpened stick while waiting for her partner to cast the bones.

The Lord of Cantara hissed; and at that moment the Altean contingent entered the room, headed by Favio Vingo, pushing his eldest son before him in a bizarre wheeled contraption. The older man’s face was taut with antipathy for the southern lord, but the boy’s eyes burned with fervour.

‘My lord,’ Tanto began, ‘they said we might find you here. I have an idea for a great sphere in which several of the Footloose might be burned together . . .’

Tycho did not even glance away from the crystal to greet his visitors.

Tanto was not to be put off, however. Shrugging his father away and setting his own hands to the wheels, he brought the chair in tight to the table so that he could see what it was that was so absorbing the Lord of Cantara. ‘Ah,’ he exclaimed delightedly. ‘Crystal-gazing: how entertaining. What is it you seek?’

He craned over the table towards the stone and seemed for a moment mazed by its sliding lights and odd perspectives. Then his jaw dropped open.

‘Selen,’ he breathed.

It was, in truth. Even as he spoke her name, Tycho Issian’s daughter raised her head from the game, and a small line appeared between her eyebrows as if she was concentrating hard, or was listening for a distant voice. Tanto almost launched himself over the table to take hold of the seeing-stone; then remembered in the nick of time that he was supposed to be an invalid and subsided into the chair.

‘My daughter!’ cried the Lord of Cantara. ‘So she was stolen by Eyran brigands indeed!’

Now, as if with a mind of its own, and unheedful of Virelai’s impotent grasp of hands and will upon it, the crystal veered away again, until with a sickening lurch it offered a set of entirely new perspectives. The first was that of a gloved hand pushing open a stable door in the dark; then they were back in the firelit regions of the Great Hall of Halbo Castle, far up in the vaulted ceiling above the new Queen of Eyra, so that the viewers found themselves staring vertiginously down upon the crown of her head. It was a deceptive angle; but even so, Virelai could tell something was not right, was out of true: for him, the image blurred and flickered. There was magic at work here: powerful magic.

‘Falla’s tits!’ Tanto suddenly exclaimed loudly; but so shocked was he by the view of the Rosa Eldi now offered to him that the pious Lord of Cantara did not even notice the blasphemy. ‘He didn’t waste his time: she’s been well and truly plugged—’

Tycho was blinking rapidly as if he could not believe his eyes. Then: ‘She is with child!’ he wailed. ‘The cur has got my love with child—’

All but Virelai could see clearly that the Rose of the World’s belly was distended in a powerful curve away from that spear-straight spine, made all the more prominent by the softly clinging wool of her white gown. Ravn Asharson approached her, kissed her rapturously on both cheeks and then full on the mouth, and his right hand spread itself proprietorially across that lush swell.

By Virelai’s ear, there was a great howl of noise. Then the table went over, and the howl was joined by the sound of the crystal striking the floor with massive force and shattering into a million fragments.

The sound of the breaking crystal reverberated through the castle walls; it echoed through the passages and stairways; fled out into the night. Down in the kennels, the dogs milled about in distress, their tails clamped between their legs; feral cats bolted through the courtyards; geese lifted from the surface of Jetra’s Lake, shocked from sleep. In the Star Chamber, Lord Rui Finco – engaged in an absorbing argument about siege tactics with Lord Prionan – lifted his head and winced at the sudden jag of pain that lanced through him; some men cried out sharply, then wondered why they had done so; while others stared wildly around as if disorientated. Hesto Greving dropped the goblet of Golden Spice he had been nursing this past hour as if burned; then stared with dismay at the glistening pool that gathered around his feet, and despite the ache in his bones found himself calculating the waste: thirty-two cantari at least, though he had drunk maybe a half of the cup’s volume.

Farther away, a woman crossed a wagon to quiet her son, who had woken, weeping, from a nightmare; and farther yet, an old man cursed in fury as his view of that part of the world darkened and died.

In the gloom of the stables, Saro Vingo clutched his hands to the stone that hung around his neck, while all around him the horses whickered and stamped in alarm, but even the thick fabric of the gloves he had taken to wearing by day and night to keep the world at bay failed to staunch the flow of fiery light which struck out across the beams, the girders and the stalls, limning the occupants in a sunset haze. The moodstone shone through his fingers, so that even through the wool he could glimpse the blur of bone within and he caught his breath in panic, recalling that fateful day at the Allfair, the falling bodies, eyes rolled up to white. If he touched any living thing while the stone blazed, they too would surely perish. It seemed the horses understood this for themselves: they backed edgily away, bumping into one another until they were pressed against the stalls and had nowhere else to go. Then, as suddenly as it had visited, the weird light died, pitching the stables into an even deeper obscurity than there had been before.

Saro stowed the necklace with a beating heart. Then, moving along the stalls more by touch than by sight, he made his way to where Night’s Harbinger was tethered. The stallion backed away from him, its feet kicking up the ground-straw, its nostrils expelling air in great plosive bursts.

‘Sshh, there: be calm, boy.’

His reaching hand found the horse’s sweating neck and he ran his palm down the vibrant flesh, feeling the stallion’s pulse ticking quickly beneath his fingers; feeling, too, its nervousness at the unknown force which had disturbed it. He half-expected the beast to rear up at the touch but, ever contrary, Night’s Harbinger quieted. Even before the stallion moved, Saro could feel the massy weight of its head in the air above him; then the bay was nuzzling at him, searching for horse-nuts as if nothing at all out of the ordinary had occurred.

Slipping the halter easily over the stallion’s head, Saro led him quietly out into the deserted stable-yard, looped the rope around a fence post there and went back in for the bridle and saddle. Finding the bay’s saddle amongst the hundred others there in the pitch dark would, for anyone else, have proved impossible without a guiding light; but for once the old nomad’s gift proved an advantage. He took off the gloves and ran his hands swiftly over the polished leather, letting the images thus released sweep over him like a warm and fragrant breeze. For fractions of seconds at a time he ‘saw’ a fat man with close black eyes, a tall lad in blue; a woman, straight-backed with her black hair a flag in the wind – an ancient saddle this, then; for no Istrian woman for a hundred years and more would have been permitted to straddle a horse in such an unseemly fashion. He sensed conflicts, and moved his hands swiftly away. One saddle offered him the image of a spear-struck man gripping desperately to the cantle, before sliding away beneath a ruck of combatants. He saw boys barely large enough to sit astride any creature, let alone a full-grown Tilsen horse, racing like demons across a wind-blown strand; he saw a column of men stretching as far as the eye could see, pennants fluttering from lances held aloft; and then, bizarrely, he was inside himself twice over so that his consciousness seemed to blur and shimmer; and a man came at him on a dappled grey beast. It was such a vivid memory that in this time, here and now, Saro found himself ducking away, just as he had tried to do at the Allfair. He took his hands off the leather before it could remind him of the gutting pain of the Eyran rider’s fist under his ribs; then put his gloves back on, picked the saddle up and carried it out into the night.

The empathy was stronger now every day. Even the most mundane household objects awoke and gave up their stories to him at the merest touch. He had no defence against it: all he could do was to order his life as simply as possible, and wear the gloves whenever he was able. He had bided his time with difficulty till this night, for he seemed forever in the company of the Lords of Forent and Cantara, who insisted always on including him in their plans, and that fact combined with the matter of sharing a sleeping-chamber with Tanto had made it impossible to slip away before now. Ever since he had been visited by the harrowing vision of the mayhem that might one day be unleashed by Tycho Issian channelling the power of the moodstone, he had barely been able to eat or sleep. Since the day on which they had arrived, when the tale, pale man with the cold hand and the dead soul had touched him in Jetra’s great hall and he had seen wild comprehension flare in the man’s almost-colourless eyes at the power of the artefact he wore, he had lived in constant fear that the creature would report that information back to his master. Once the Lord of Cantara discovered the nature of the moodstone, Saro sensed he would stop at nothing to acquire it. The urbane, elegant man he had met at the Allfair had become another order of being entirely in the intervening months: he seemed driven by some inner fervour, some wild, distorting passion which made his eyes burn and his every gesture abrupt and impatient. And Saro had heard him speak about the northerners in terms he could not reconcile with his own few experiences, and with a hatred that went far beyond any root in their two peoples’ ancient, conflicted history. And the role he had outlined for Saro to play in this drama – one of treachery, deceit and cold murder – was unimaginable.

The need to escape drove him with a terrible, slow urgency. It made him careful in every movement he made, set all his senses to full alert. He saddled the horse, tightened the girth, then tied the small sack of his provisions and necessities across the bay’s shoulder. Then he threw back his head and took a deep breath. Up above, the constellations were as bright as he had ever seen them, the sky as black and vast as all the world. The Northern Cross stood in the zenith, its seven subsidiary stars dancing irregular attendance on the most luminous star of all, the one the Eyrans called the Navigator’s Star, and here in the South they called Falla’s Eye. How typical, he thought then, for the first time, that the northerners should view their world as so benevolent that it would provide them with guidance and aid, rather than inflict upon them an ever-watchful, ever-judging presence.