Havenstar

by Glenda Larke

  ‘Hardly more than a handful of coppers. Just enough to tip a stable boy or two and buy me a meal or two between the kinesis chain and home. Nothing more.’

  ‘Come now, any shrewd-nosed mapmaker is going to travel with a little stash for emergencies, right? Don’t take me for some newly-tainted lad who doesn’t know his way about the Unstable and who’s never met an Unstabler. I know what’s what. You have more than a few coppers hidden about you.’

  ‘Well, three silvers and a gold. That’s all. And yes, I’d part with them to own a trompleri map, but you must know it’s worth more than that.’

  ‘I’ll take the coins and your nag for it.’

  ‘My pack-horse?’

  ‘No, your mount.’

  He was genuinely dismayed. ‘That mare and I have been together a long time. We’ve been through a lot. Besides, it’s a crossings-horse. Ley-lit Unstablers don’t take kindly to other folk having them.’

  ‘There’s no law agin it. That’s my deal. And it’s a generous one. Take it or leave it.’

  ‘I ask myself the reason for your, er, generosity.’

  ‘Don’t be daft. You don’t need me to spell it out. I’m in need of cash and a mount. My nag took a tumble and is as lame as an old man’s pecker. I’ll give her to you, if you want.’

  He was silent, thinking. The map was obviously stolen. He’d never be able to admit to ownership of it, or resell it. The fact that the Mantis was in a hurry to rid himself of it also seemed to indicate the real owner was only a step behind him.

  But Piers’ hands itched to hold it, his mind begged to analyse it, his mapmaker’s soul longed to solve its mysteries…

  ‘All right,’ he said. ‘I’ll buy it. And I’ll take your lame nag. Come back in half an hour and I’ll have the money and the papers ready for you.’

  ~~~~~~~

  By the time the Mantis returned, Piers had retrieved his money from its hiding place and had the horse’s ownership scrip ready. Wordlessly, he handed them over and received the map and another horse scrip in return. As he checked the skin to make sure it was the same one he had first seen, he said casually, ‘Don’t think to divert your followers to me, Mantis. I’m too wily to be taken like that. This map disappears the moment you leave this room. They wouldn’t find it on me, and then they’d still be after you, madder than before.’

  ‘I don’t have the dribbling tongue of a betrayer,’ the Mantis said indignantly. ‘No one’ll ever hear aught from me, even if they ask.’

  ‘Look after my horse. If ever you want to sell her back to me, send word to Kibbleberry. Her name’s Ygraine.’

  ‘A high-falutin’ handle, that.’ Legend—or was it history?—said that there had once been a great Margravine of Malinawar called Ygraine. She was said to have led an invasion into Yedron with particularly nasty results for the Yedronese monarch of the time, simply because she’d thought herself insulted. The Mantis evidently did not think much of the choice of name, but he said, ‘I’ll take care of her. She’s my passage out of here.’ He tucked away the paper and the money, nodded briefly, and let himself out.

  Piers hardly noticed his going. Instead he pored over his acquisition, revelling in the beauty and workmanship, touching it with reverent fingers, already looking forward to the moment when he would share his awe, his joy, with Keris. And Thirl, of course.

  Reluctantly, he secreted it away in the hiding place he used for valuables when travelling. He was hoping that he would have another one or two visitors, people wanting to buy his maps this time, and he did not want anyone to see this purchase.

  Within the next hour he made four sales of maps roughly updated with the latest information, then—just as he was about to spread his bedroll out on the straw mattress and turn in for the night—there was another knock at the door. As before, the habit of a lifetime made him pick up one of his knives and caution made him ask the visitor to identify himself, but he was tired and he didn’t notice the emanations that might have warned him what waited for him on the other side of the door.

  The name given in reply meant nothing, but he thought he recognised the voice of one of the chambermaids and unbarred the door anyway. After all, no one really expected to be attacked inside a halt. Certainly no one expected to confront one of the Minions of Chaos within its walls, especially not when there were kinesis devotions being performed in the common room to ward off just such evils. And most of all no one would have dreamed of seeing one of the Wild…

  Yet no sooner had he lifted the bar than the door was flung open with immense force, catching him across the chest and arm. His knife went flying and before he could utter a sound he was flattened by his attacker and two clawed hands the size of dinner plates were around his throat, squeezing, crushing his windpipe. It happened so fast—and his assailant was so unnaturally strong—that he never had a chance.

  Even as he struggled, even as he battered at the thickened nose and gouged at the yellow eyes, he glimpsed the Minion standing with folded arms behind her pet. He saw her blood-soaked nails tapping impatiently on her bloodied forearms, and knew he was going to die. His only thought was one of surprise it was all going to end this way, in the relative safety of a halt, and not out there in the Unstable somewhere as he had always thought.

  ~~~~~~~

  Chapter Two

  And no more did the lands beyond the sea send their sailors; nor yet did the Margravate of Malinawar see its own sails return on the wind, decks piled high with the fragrant oils of Premantra and the golden cloth of Brazis. No more did the caravans come from Yedron and Bellisthron and the lands behind Beyond. All about was Ley. All about was unstable, and Humankind feared to cross. Malinawar was as eight rafts afloat on a storm-soaked ocean, and none knew the way to swim.

  —The Rending I: 7: 8-11

  On the outskirts of Kibbleberry village a party of Tricians rode past the mapmaker’s shop at a brisk trot: six women and five men, guarded by twenty of the Defenders and followed by a baggage train of servants and kinesis-chantors. The Tricians might have been clad in the normal brown and gray of the unencoloured, but their clothes were of the finest deer leathers, soft linens and plush goat wool; the domain-symbols they wore around their necks were of gold, some even studded with jewel-stones although it was doubtful Chantry would have approved of that. The Defenders, all of them as noble as those they guarded, were lavishly accoutred and armed.

  In the shop, Keris Kaylen laid her work aside to watch them pass. Even the servants are better dressed and mounted than anyone in Kibbleberry, she thought. She felt no envy. Tricians and their retinue were as remote from her as the forests of the Eighth Stability, even though fellowships such as this one passed along the road often enough. She’d never spoken to one of their number and had no reason to think she ever would; none of them ever stopped. If they had needed a map, the purchase would have been done long since through an intermediary. Tricians rarely made commercial transactions themselves.

  These were bound for the Unstable, yet they seemed happy, laughing and joking and flirting and never thinking about the dangers ahead once they crossed the kinesis chain. They were young, they were beautiful, they seemed carefree—yet Keris would not have changed places with any of them. Too many of these same young men would lose their lives one day as Defenders; too many of those young women would raise their children alone, only to see their sons die or be tainted in the Unstable just as their husbands had been. The very word ‘Trician’ was derived from some longer and more ancient expression supposed to have meant ‘of my father’s arming.’ Tricians were born to bear arms, or to marry those who did, just as their parents had. It was not a life Keris envied.

  Better, she thought, to be a canny ley-lit mapmaker like her father, who was scornful of noisy young Tricians and their arms and their delicately-bred horses. ‘In the Unstable they and their chantors just attract trouble,’ he had remarked once. ‘Better to be solitary. Wiser to be quietly elusive, than to be challenging. Never take your pilgrimage
with a guide that hires Defenders, Keri. It means the fellow doesn’t know his job.’

  One of the young men saw her looking out of the shop door and winked. The girl next to him giggled and said something that made him laugh, then they were all gone from her sight. With a shrug, Keris lowered her eyes once more to her work. None of them mattered.

  And then her head jerked up again as she realised what she had just seen—beyond the road, beyond the fields and the wood. Or rather what she had not seen.

  There was a line of mountains beyond the stab, and on a clear day it was possible to see the whole range from the shop. Keris had been able to name all the main peaks since she was just four years old: the Jag, the Oven, the Shadow…the Axe Head…the Snood and the Wimple. All told, they were the Impassables. And now the Axe Head was missing. For three days they’d all been hidden by cloud, but now that the weather had cleared—

  In a daze she slipped off her stool and went to stand in the doorway, to stare. It was true. It really had gone. There was the range, there were all the other peaks, but the Axe Head had vanished. There was a space on the skyline that gaped vacantly like the cavity left by a pulled tooth.

  She whirled from the door, wanting to run inside to tell someone, but then stopped. There was only her mother, and it would be better if she was not bothered. Not now. Keris sighed. Not for the first time, she wished her father was home.

  And then she remembered the roof-mender at work returfing part of the barn roof. He wasn’t a learned or particularly knowledgeable man, but at least he was somebody to tell. She left the shop to go to the barn, walking around the outside of the house so as not to disturb her mother. She found Articus Medrop arranging cut turf on his hod at the foot of his ladder.

  ‘Master Medrop—’ she began, but he didn’t let her finish.

  ‘Good turf I’ve got you, look.’ He showed her some, waggling it at her. He was all lean muscle: arms, shanks and calves, even his face tautly sinewed. ‘You tell your Dad when he comes home. This came from Jeckitt’s top field, and it’s full of snow bells and mauves. Your roof’ll be a picture next spring. Had Carasma’s own job trying to persuade the Rule Office to let me cut it, I can tell you!’

  She interrupted. ‘Master Medrop, have you seen the Axe Head?’

  He looked at her imperturbably. ‘Oh aye. That I have. Or not seen it, more like. It’s gone.’ He bent to stack more turf on the hod. ‘Best forgotten now, lass.’

  ‘Forgotten? How can one forget a mountain?’

  ‘Easy. It’s gone, hasn’t it? ’Twas far away, and never did concern us even when it was there. Beyond Order, the Impassables. As long as stability lives—and it will if we live right—why worry your head about it? Lass, it’s better you concern yourself with that there roof beam in the barn. Won’t last more than another year or two, and all my returfing ain’t going to repair a beam that’s about to crumble.’

  She allowed herself to be diverted. ‘We did plant a replacement tree about five years back, but the Rule Office says we have to wait until that one’s been growing ten years before we can cut another for the beam. And we’ve had our name down for a lightning-struck tree, or a wind-felled one, but the list of people waiting is an ell long. It’ll be years before we get a beam.’ It was a sore point with her father, who thought the Rule Office ought to be more flexible about allowing wood to be imported from the Unstable.

  Articus grunted. ‘They won’t like it if the roof of your barn falls in. That’ud make a change to the landscape, and what then? I’ll mention the state of the beam to the Office. Mayhap they’ll reconsider.’

  She thanked him and went back to the shop, but couldn’t resist another glance up at the snow-dredged peaks of the mountains. They’d always seemed so unchangeable, so impervious to everything, even time. She couldn’t recall ever seeing any alterations to their outlines, yet perhaps it had been an unreal expectation to assume they would never change. After all, they no longer seemed to resemble the objects they were named after… Snoods were the accepted way for a married woman to contain her hair at the back of her head, but no snood she had ever seen resembled the Snood Mountain of the Impassables. If anything it looked more like a chantor’s tricorne. And the Wimple bore no resemblance to the obligatory headgear of widows either.

  For the first time, she wondered just how many changes there’d been in the thousand years since the Rending, but it was not an idea that she wanted to dwell on.

  With one last lingering glance at the new silhouette of the Impassables, she returned to her stool and her work.

  It was warm for the first day of summer. Sometimes, there in the First Stability in the shadow of the mountains, the season’s warmth came late, but that year it promised to be otherwise. Sunlight shafted in through the open door of the shop to warm the cat where it dozed in a furry ball on the floor near a pile of vellum squares. The breeze that nudged a scroll of parchment along the counter top was pleasantly balmy.

  Lightly dressed, with her arms bare and her skirt immodestly hitched up, a habit which might have prompted the Trician’s wink, she enjoyed the feel of the sun on her legs as she laboured over a master chart.

  She dipped a fine-haired brush into a pot of paint and hesitated briefly before dabbing colour on to the oblong sheet of parchment pinned to the mapboard in front of her. The hesitation was an ingrained ritual, something she did without real thought, in deference to her father. He disliked her adding colour to maps, and had only accepted the idea after she’d shown they sold better that way. His acceptance had not stopped him from muttering things about new-fangled ideas and silly feminine frivolities, utterances which had induced a sense of guilt in her every time she loaded her brush with vegetable dye—hence her pause.

  Yet when her brush did move on to tinge the trees of Taggart’s Wood with green, the colour added life to the ink work already done. Under the strokes the map began to live, and she was careful not to allow her desire to turn a chart into a work of art interfere with the map’s technical accuracy. She was not a mapmaker’s daughter for nothing.

  The cat near the door snuffled and stirred uneasily. Keris worked on, thinking often of that awful gap in the mountains, more occasionally of her mother and her brother—unhappy, worrying thoughts. Mostly though, she concentrated on the picture taking shape in front of her. The First Stability, nestling in the foothills of the Impassables—darn it, she would have to blank out the Axe Head later—oval in shape with its numerous towns and villages and one large city, Drumlin. On the other side of the River Flow, the Second Stability, smaller, perfectly round and much flatter. And somewhere in between, the Wanderer, but she would not put that in yet. Not until her father came home with the Bitch’s new coordinates.

  Her brush moved on to the Third Stability, the border chaotic where it followed the contours of a more rugged landscape…

  It was the cat that broke her concentration. It raised its head from the flagstoned floor, ears pricked, and miaowed. Outside Keris heard the sounds of riders turning in from the road that passed by the front door. She glanced up in time to see four horses, stolid plough animals with two riders between them, coming into the side yard. She began to clean her brush. She’d made it herself from cat hair, and was not about to leave it to dry stiff with paint while she attended to customers.

  The cat, named Yerrie for reasons long forgotten, stood, stretched elegantly and jumped up on to the counter top. She patted its head absently and moved the map she had been working onto the shelf out of sight. She pulled her skirt down and quickly ran her fingers through her hair in an attempt to tidy it. Having reached the age of full majority that summer, she was of pilgrimage age, but was ruefully aware that to those who visited the shop she appeared younger. Her figure was more boyish than womanly and she’d resigned herself to the knowledge it would probably stay that way until she’d borne children. Worse still, her nondescript brown hair streaked unevenly into half a dozen indeterminate shades, and her skin freckled in the sun, a combination
that made her appear more hoydenish than mature.

  There was nothing pretty about her face, she knew. Her pale grey eyes were unremarkable, although they could tinge blue on bright days, or darken to slate in winter, as leaden as snow-laden skies. Her nose was too long, her mouth too wide and her chin too solid for beauty, while her hands were too large and her feet too long for grace—but for all that, she was more ordinary than ugly. She was, in fact, the kind of woman men passed in the street without giving a second glance, failing to note any possibility of passion or intelligence or character simply because the face and the figure promised only banality.

  She regretted the lack of beauty, but never dwelt on it; she’d never had any reason to do so. Her entire sexual experience consisted of deterring one or two pimply village youths from thrusting a hand down her blouse on the odd occasion when they’d seen an opportunity in the cold dark of a winter’s afternoon. If this was what being a woman meant, she saw little advantage in possessing an attractiveness that would only give her more such problems.

  However, as she watched the young woman of about her own age slide down from her horse into the waiting hold of her companion, she did wish she looked a little older. People listened more when they thought a person was old enough to have experience.

  Newly weds, she thought, wanting to get their pilgrimage over and done with before they settle down to raise a family. She’d seen many such.

  They came into the shop together, more than a little anxious, tired and dusty and in need of a bath and rest.

  ‘Greetings,’ the man said, making an appropriate kinesis with his hand moving from forehead to mouth. ‘We were advised we’d need a map of the First Stability, and that this was the place to come. Is the mapmaker here?’

  She shook her head as she returned the kinesis, hiding a momentary irritation. ‘I’m sorry, no.’ And his son’s not here either, as he should be. But I am, and what’s the matter with me? ‘Can I help? You are pilgrims?’