by Glenda Larke
Portron drew in a deep breath. ‘No, I don’t think he is. And it’s my belief there’s a simple answer. Without the pilgrimage, few would come to the Unstable. A handful of couriers, traders, adventurers, that’s all. The Unstable would become wholly the Unmaker’s realm. Lord Carasma would grow in strength, ultimately strong enough to destroy all stability. The presence of pilgrims, ordinary people worshipping the Maker, curbs the Unmaker’s power. Each of us brings a little piece of Order and the Maker with us when we come. We are stronger than we know and we weaken him, and that’s why the Maker bade us undertake the Pilgrimage. It’s the only explanation that makes any sense.’
And it did make sense, of a sort. She lapsed into silence to consider it. Portron chatted on, somehow changing the subject to an involved reminiscence of how he had fallen off the roof of the Drumlin Chantry House in a thunderstorm.
Keris heard none of it.
~~~~~~~
Chapter Eight
And I say unto you, beware the Ley, for ley is a force of the universe that can unmake the created, remould the flesh and lie in the hand of Lord Carasma as a thread to be a noose for humankind. Yet remember too that the Maker is loving, and so within the heart of that which wreaks devastation can be found the hope of salvation for the wise.
—Generations II: 3: 3 & 4
Davron Storre led them to the top of a small ridge that evening, and it was there he called a halt for the night. Keris looked around the place with an odd sense of familiarity. She recognised it, for all that she had never been there before. Piers had always used it as a triangulation point when mapping the area. Baraine of Valmair, predictably, protested about its exposed position and the meagreness of the amount of water that trickled out of the spring on its slopes. Nor would he accept Davron’s tersely given reason for the choice, ‘It’s safe.’
When he began to question Davron’s ability to lead a fellowship, and the guide turned a gaze on him that was as black as pitch, Keris stepped in without really thinking. ‘It’s a fixed feature,’ she said. ‘That’s any place impervious to ley change, or nearly so. It’s as safe a haven as can be found anywhere in the Unstable.’
Baraine stared scornfully at her. ‘How in Creation could you know that?’
She deliberately misunderstood him. ‘Because we’re leaving footprints.’ The others looked down. It was true: there were footmarks and hoof prints everywhere.
Quirk looked up in quick interest. ‘I’ve heard of them! There are other places like this in different parts of the Unstable. Most halts are built on fixed features. The funny thing about them is that they’re almost always a similar size, and although the Unstable eats away at the edges, they are almost always straight-sided. Queer, huh?’ Then, when he saw that everyone had transferred their attention to him, he started to blush and subsided, pulling uncomfortably at the neck of his shirt. Hurriedly he turned away to fetch his tent and the others drifted off to unload their pack animals.
As Keris began to unbuckle her own packs, she found Davron regarding her steadily over Tousson’s back. She had the sense that for the first time he was actually seeing her, as a person, a personality. A woman, not a child. A thinking human being, not a faceless entity he was guiding. ‘Kaylen’s map shop,’ he said. ‘You were serving in Kaylen’s map shop.’
He had finally recognised her. She nodded.
He continued to regard her. His expression was strange, as if he was having to rummage around for the right words to say. Finally one side of his mouth quirked up in a lop-sided expression that wasn’t quite a smile. ‘Ah—,’ he said, ‘—I won’t tell if you don’t.’
She stared. ‘Pardon?’
‘I won’t tell anyone you stole the horses if you don’t tell anyone that cats don’t like me.’
She was speechless for a moment. How did he know? Then: he couldn’t; he was guessing. Perhaps he had no idea she was Piers’ daughter; perhaps he thought she was a shop assistant who’d taken the opportunity provided by Piers’ death to steal the horses. She blushed furiously.
‘Bull’s-eye,’ he murmured.
‘Why don’t cats like you?’ she blurted.
‘I tie sticks to their tails when no one’s looking.’
She stared, trying to fathom through the nonsense what he really wanted. It should have all been a joke, but she knew it wasn’t. Her cat had been terrified, and he really didn’t want anyone to know. Once again she felt his shame. It was agony for him to have this conversation, and she had no idea why. ‘You’ll have to try and curb the desire next time,’ she said, hardly aware if she was making sense. The conversation was absurd, but somehow the undercurrents ran deep and dark.
He strove for lightness. ‘Oh, I will, I will.’
‘Your secret’s safe with me then,’ she said, but her flippancy was forced.
He sketched a kinesis of thanks and turned away, but not before she had seen the beginnings of a flush creep up his neck.
Oh Creation, she thought, what was all that about?
~~~~~~~
As she erected her tent, she covertly watched not Davron, but Meldor. The blind man fascinated her. It was hard to accept that there was nothing more to his skills than sharpened hearing, smell and touch. As Scow aided him by pitching his tent and preparing food, Meldor reached for things with unerring accuracy. During the day’s ride he had not needed much guidance either. His abilities were uncanny, a match for the magic of his personality. Davron may have been the guide, but sometimes she felt that it was Meldor who was the leader. He exuded a calm confidence, a sense of contentment that was almost contagious. He had an old-world courtesy, the kind supposedly the hallmark of Tricians. It served him well. He could be friendly with a man like Quirk and not seem condescending, yet he could command respect from Baraine. If he made a suggestion to someone, they followed it as if it had been an order.
During the course of the day it had become clear to her that he was not just a member of the fellowship, he was part of the trio who’d travelled together for some time: Davron, Scow and Meldor. The implications of that were intriguing, but she couldn’t seem to make any sense of the combination, and that worried her.
Once the animals were tethered for the evening and the camp was fully erected—not without incident for Graval Hurg managed to tear a hole in Quirk’s tent with a clumsy swing of a peg mallet—Scow called for two volunteers to descend the ridge on the other side to collect some fodder for the horses. The last time he and Davron had passed this way, he explained, there had been some tubers growing there which made excellent animal food.
Graval and Portron declined, saying they were too tired; Corrian, with a disgusted look at Graval, remarked that it was a job for the young’uns; and Baraine did not even deign to reply. Quirk and Keris exchanged a glance and said they would go if Scow accompanied them.
They took Tousson, Keris’s packhorse, to carry the fodder back, but they themselves went on foot. It was a short scramble down the ridge to sheltering trees and at first Scow confidently led the way. Ten minutes into the forest, however, they abruptly came upon a steep-sided gully cutting across the route they were taking.
Scow grimaced. ‘This wasn’t here last time we came this way. It must have moved.’
He hesitated, glancing up and down the gully. The short, twisted trees clutched at the eroded slopes with a tangle of roots that writhed into the soil like living worms attempting to drag themselves entirely beneath the ground. Above, branches drooped, heavy with blood-red blossom and clumps of glossy brown wrigglers that crawled in and out of the flowers. The air was foetid, gravid with expectation, almost as if awaiting an explosion of violence.
‘Ley,’ Keris whispered, and was sure of it. The gully was drenched with the unnatural.
Quirk cleared his throat. ‘I don’t think I like this place much,’ he said, his voice suddenly high-pitched. ‘Are those tree-roots moving?’
‘Yes,’ she said tersely. What was it Portron had said? You feel it corroding the earth b
eneath your feet. That was it exactly.
Still Scow hesitated, assessing the need for fodder against the dangers of crossing the gully. ‘I think we had better go back,’ he said. He turned on his heel and then staggered, almost falling. He’d stepped into some kind of hole.
Keris blinked, puzzled, as she’d seen no hole there a moment before. Scow moaned and clutched at his leg. The earth seemed to have closed in around it. His calf was half-buried.
‘What is it?’ Keris asked, still not aware that anything was terribly wrong.
His face greyed with shock and pain. ‘Something’s got hold of me!’ He sat down heavily, still grasping his leg.
She and Quirk knelt beside him. ‘Midden and Maker,’ Quirk muttered. ‘It looks like something is trying to swallow him!’
A white ring of bone or shell encircled Scow’s leg. Keris touched it tentatively with a finger; it was rock hard and unyielding. Not even a knife blade could have fitted between it and Scow’s flesh. If it was the mouth of something, then the rest of the animal was buried in the soil. She scrabbled with her fingers around his leg, brushing away the dirt. Just beneath the surface was something hard and impenetrable and ivory white. It radiated out flat in all directions. She and Quirk were kneeling on top of it. They exchanged glances and edged away from Scow.
‘Can—can we pull you out?’ she asked.
His lips tilted up in an ironical twist that told her whatever held him gripped far too tight for tugging to make any difference.
‘I know what it is,’ Quirk said, his face sick with shock. ‘It’s a bilee. My father told me about them…’ He looked up at Scow and his words trailed away.
She stood and kicked at the creature; nothing happened. She tried bouncing up and down on it. It never budged. Kneeling again, she began scraping more earth away, wanting to find out the size of the thing, or if it had some vulnerable place.
‘That won’t do any good,’ Scow said from between gritted teeth. ‘I’ve heard of bilees too. They’re huge. Larger than that tainted horse of mine. Shelled, with just the one mouth opening. They lie in wait, buried in the soil. They are of the Wild…’ He shuddered. ‘You can’t kill them. You can’t break them open. You can’t force them open. You can’t do a damn thing to them that makes one breath of difference.’
Quirk cast an anxious glance behind into the gully and then looked back at Scow. ‘My father said, um, bile juices. Acidic. They digest prey, bit by bit. The mouth sucks more in as they finish with what they’ve got—’
Aghast, she snapped, ‘Unmaker take you, shut up!’
‘Go for Davron and Meldor,’ Scow said, ‘and make it quick. Tell them to bring the axe.’
‘I’ll go,’ Quirk said hurriedly.
‘Take Tousson,’ she told him and watched him fumbling as he mounted up. ‘Is it—hurting, Scow?’ She knew it was a stupid question the moment she asked it, but her thoughts were mired in horror.
His cavernous mouth gave a lop-sided smile. ‘I can bear it. It’s got to eat through my boot first.’
Embarrassed, she realised he was trying to comfort her.
He shrugged, resigned. ‘There’s only one way to free yourself from a bilee alive.’ He glanced down at his leg.
Tell them to bring an axe. She felt the blood leave her head and was glad she was not standing. ‘My father lost a leg to one of the Wild,’ she said finally, unable to halt the words she heard herself saying. ‘It never stopped him from doing anything—’
His long tongue lolled out and she thought, incredulous, that he was able to be amused by her graceless attempts to find something to say that might be of use. ‘Ah, lass, let’s talk of something else, eh?’ He was sweating now, and his large hands were gripping his leg so tightly the skin below was whitening. ‘And let’s hope that that young man finds his way back to the ridge, and can then guide Davron back here.’ He glanced upwards. Beyond the canopy of leaves overhead, the sky was darkening.
She looked at the nearest of the dwarf trees along the gully edge, remembering the masses of wrigglers squirming in and out of the flowers. She could no longer see them, but their stench permeated the air, or perhaps it was the reek of the trumpet-shaped blossoms themselves that smelled. The place was corrupt, unclean. It was more than just the stink of putrefaction, it was the odour of…wrongness. She felt nauseated.
‘It wasn’t far back to camp,’ she said. ‘Quirk could hardly get lost.’
‘He could put his leg into another one of these,’ he replied, nodding towards the bilee.
‘No. Don’t even think it. Anyway, he was riding Tousson.’
‘He reminds me of myself.’ His face was ashen now. ‘Before I was tainted. Full of fears. I was a farm boy, you know. Just a simple lad, anxious to get the pilgrimage over and done with so I could go home and never leave again.’ The words were flowing out, streaming away from him as he tried not to succumb to the pain that ate into his foot. ‘I never wanted to go on a pilgrimage. I was scared. Chaos-blamed terrified. My lass was there with me—Tilly, her name. A lot like you, I suppose. Nothing much to look at, but as good a kid as ever breathed. Kind, gentle, loving. Loved animals. Had freckles across her nose and a laugh like a new-born donkey. I’d known her all my life, pulled her pigtails and pushed her into the village pond when we were kids. And suddenly there she was, smiling at me and I couldn’t pull my eyes away… I could hardly believe that she wanted me. Me, Sammy Scowbridge.
‘It was the first ley line that got me. The guide tried to rescue me, but the Unmaker is not so easily thwarted. Ley-life, the pain, Keris—the pain.’
She didn’t know whether he meant what he was feeling now, or what he’d felt then. Perhaps both. She reached out to put her hand on his bare arm even though it was an inadequate gesture. His skin burned her fingers and she jerked away. Untouchable. Stupid. Of course he was untouchable.
He did not seem to notice her reaction. ‘When I crawled to my feet, on the other side of the ley line, I looked for Tilly. To see if she was all right. And she was looking at me. Such a look. Pain, grief, tearing grief, horror. And worst of all, the revulsion. The overwhelming revulsion she couldn’t hide.’ He shuddered, and tears slipped down his huge cheeks.
‘How long ago was that?’
‘Five years. Just five years. Hard to believe, eh? I’m only twenty-five. Sometimes I feel a hundred.’
‘Was Davron Storre the guide?’
He shook his head. ‘Oh no. Davron wasn’t a guide then. Although I did meet him shortly after I was tainted…’
‘Not a guide then? I would have thought he’d been a guide longer than five years!’ Davron Storre, he seemed so competent. He reminded her of Piers sometimes, the way he moved with an easy grace but never relaxed for a moment, as if he saw and heard and sensed things that others missed. The tautness of him…
‘He’s only twenty-nine.’
She sat back on her heels, staring. She’d thought Davron closer to forty. ‘Only twenty-nine?’ What could have etched an extra ten years of pain and living into his face? What awful catastrophe had turned a young man into someone with a gaze like his?
Scow gave no explanation and she knew he never would. It was Davron’s story, not his. ‘It’s a hard place, the Unstable,’ was all he said.
‘You don’t seem at all like an overly-nervous farm boy now,’ she said, and then blushed. ‘Oh, Chaos, that didn’t come out quite the way I meant it.’
She saw the tilt of his lips even in the dimness. ‘I know you weren’t making snide remarks about my present, er, imposing physiognomy. Keris, when you lose everything you ever had, what is there left to fear? As for the—what shall I call it? Assurance? A man can’t move in the company of men like Davron and Meldor, and not have a little polish rub off on him. I’ve changed more in five years than most people change in a lifetime.’ He released his leg for a moment to touch her, as if he wanted to reassure himself of something. She resisted the impulse to snatch her hand away from the fire of his fingers. ‘You�
�re ley-lit, aren’t you?’ he asked, removing his hand.
‘I don’t know. Maybe. How can you tell?’
‘You feel this place, in a way I can’t. I can see what it is, but you—your skin crawls just to be here because tainted ley is strong here. It’s what is known as a ley-mire. A place where the breaking of the world is at its most active and recent. A place inhabited by the worst of the Wild, and the oldest of the Minions. It bears the touch of the Unmaker, and you feel it into the deep of your bones. And the touch of my hand burns you, because of the tainted ley in me.’
‘Oh.’ She hadn’t hidden the pain of his touch as well as she’d thought.
‘That’s the tragedy of the Unbound,’ he said. ‘Davron and I have been together five years. He saved my sanity, my life. And I believe I helped him. We love one another as deeply as friends can, yet he cannot endure my touch for more than a moment or two. He has to steel himself just to place a hand on my shoulder. We are as brothers, but he must sit on the other side of the campfire. He is my closest friend, but I cannot hug him. Pity the tainted, Keris. The ley-unlit turn from us in revulsion because they cannot understand. The ley-lit feel our tragedy for they can see our humanity beneath the cloaking evil, but they must reject us because their sensitivity cannot endure the presence of Chaos, of unbinding, that lives within us. Davron and I travel together, but we walk apart.’
She understood now the strange gesture with which the two men had greeted one another. A fleeting touch was all Davron could tolerate. ‘Have you—have you heard of a place called Havenstar?’ she asked.
He gave a short bark of laughter. ‘Where wizards cure the Unbound with magic? Don’t believe the tales, Keris. There is no cure for my, um, condition. If ever the Unmaker was destroyed and Order restored to the Unstable, we tainted would die. Order would kill us within a month or two. We are already unnatural and there is no way back…none. I shall live and die in this flesh. I am a man, with all a man’s desires and feelings, but I wear the guise of a monster and must toughen myself to bear the look in other men’s eyes. In a woman’s eyes. We tainted have only one another in the end.’ He looked straight at her and she knew he was telling her he’d seen the way she’d felt when she had first met him. Revulsion, pity, compassion, fascination, he had seen it all, and despised it for what it was even as he understood it. Then he smiled again, as if to tell her that he knew she now saw him differently.
