Havenstar

by Glenda Larke

  Keris, paralysed with fear, felt the thud of her heart in her chest and thought she might die of terror. She looked down at the arm that still held her. It blended in with the background…

  ‘Quirk!’

  She collapsed against him, and he clutched at her to prevent her fall even as he tried not to touch her skin, knowing that would hurt her. ‘It’s all right,’ he said. ‘It’s all over now.’

  ‘Oh Maker—Quirk! I’ve never been so glad to see anyone before in my whole life.’

  His face turned an even darker blue. ‘Er, well, thanks. Um, Keris, your—’ He made an embarrassed gesture at her shirt even as his eyes were fixed on a point above her head and she realised her breasts were bare. Blushing, she pulled the edges of the cloth together and tied them. ‘Are you hurt?’ he asked, pulling at an ear and avoiding meeting her gaze.

  ‘No. I mean, except for a few cuts and bruises. Are you?’

  He shook his head. ‘I stood still, right at the beginning, and those beasts just didn’t see me. Then, when nothing was looking my way, I took off. I know that wasn’t very brave, but I’ve never said I was brave.’ He sounded lost and lonely. ‘I don’t know the first thing about fighting. Once my father saw I had no ley, he could never be bothered to teach me.’

  She took a deep breath. ‘You saved my life just then.’

  ‘Er, well, at no risk to my own. Where are the others? Meldor was in the lead ahead of me but I didn’t see what happened to him.’

  ‘The Master Guide is hurt. How badly I don’t know. I never saw any of others at all. Corrian was in front of me, but when we were attacked she had just turned a corner and was out of sight. Davron Storre and Scow were behind me at the time. I have to look for Storre.’

  She stepped back into the passage and looked back the way she had come. Her heart flipped over. She was facing five openings, and had no idea which one she had come through. She whispered, ‘I don’t know how to go back.’

  ‘Nor do I. Come to think of it, I don’t have the first idea of how to go on, either. Keris, we have no food, nothing. Can you get us out of here?’

  She paused and took another deep breath. She smelled the ley ahead of them, felt the seductive pull of it. ‘Yes, I think so.’ She took another reluctant look behind. If she tried to retrace her steps… How would she ever find Davron again?

  Benighted Chaos, if the water rises, he could drown, she thought. If he isn’t dead already. I can’t leave him like that. I can’t go on abandoning people just because it suits my convenience.

  ‘I’ve got to go back for Davron,’ she said.

  He accepted the implications of her statement. ‘But how do we get to him?’

  She looked at the five branches to the passage, but water had already washed away any tracks Stockwood may have made.

  ‘There are the Wild back there somewhere,’ he said.

  They may have eaten him by now. No, they wouldn’t do that. They think he serves the Unmaker. ‘You don’t have to come with me,’ she said.

  He gave her a look laden with meaning. ‘If you think I’m letting you out of my sight, your brains are tainted. I think we ought to get out of here and let Davron look after himself—he’s the guide, after all—but if you’re going back, then so am I. I’m far too scared to stay here alone, or to go on alone.’

  They tried. She put her back to the pull of the ley and searched the way she had come. They never found the gap she had leapt, nor the bodies of the two Wild Stockwood had killed, nor any of the others.

  Finally it was Quirk who called a halt. ‘It’s getting dark,’ he said. ‘I think we should try to get out of here. We have no light, nothing.’ He stared at her, his slitted eyes now wide with fright. ‘The Wild…at night...’

  She nodded miserably, turned and followed the thread that pulled her onwards. Ley. It was calling, and she answered the call, even as she feared.

  ~~~~~~~

  They broke free of the Sponge at sundown. Emerging from an entrance at the base of the barrier on the southern side, they found themselves overlooking the Valley of the Flow.

  Vaguely Keris took in the camp a few hundred paces away, not theirs but someone else’s, vaguely she saw the Flow, the colours of the Wide as it snaked across the valley floor… But it was the eruption of ley that drew all her senses. The place where four ley lines converged, snarled, combined in a tangle and poured upwards into a perpetual mushroom cloud of colour and power and movement. She looked and feared and felt its tug pulling her, enticing her to approach, asking her to immolate herself on its pyre.

  ‘What’s the matter?’ the Chameleon asked, worried. ‘Keris, what is it?’

  ‘Ah sweet Creation, Quirk, can’t you see any of that?’

  He stared in the direction she gazed and shook his head. ‘Mist. Whirling mist. That’s all.’

  She whispered, ‘It’s the Fist. The Snarled Fist. Ley-life, Quirk, it’s huge.’

  ~~~~~~~

  Chapter Seventeen

  Men who would escape their fate are as eggs in the hands of a blind juggler.

  —saying of the old Margravate of Malinawar

  The camp belonged to a trader called Tom the Cheap and his half dozen tainted staff. He’d come up from the south and intended to cross the Sponge the next day. Keris knew him, but he didn’t recognise Pier’s daughter and she didn’t enlighten him. To her annoyance, he seemed smugly pleased Davron Storre’s fellowship had been attacked by the Wild, and made no attempt to conceal the sentiment.

  ‘They’re less likely to want to get their filthy teeth into us, if they’ve ’et a couple of you lot,’ he explained. There was no malice in the remark, but he evidently had no particular love for other people and took their tragedies in his stride.

  Keris, relieved, saw that Scow and Corrian and Portron were already there, sharing the trader’s camp. The chantor came bustling over, full of concern. ‘Ah, lass, you’re a sight for anxious eyes to behold! And right sincerely it is that I’ve been performing kinesis dedicated to your safety. Are you hurt?’

  She shook her head. ‘What of you?’

  ‘Scow got us out of the Sponge,’ he said, nodding towards the tainted man, who grinned at her with his usual animal smile. ‘With the Maker’s grace, of course. And our horses turned up on their own. I think your Ygraine led them out. That monster of Scow’s found his own way out later.’

  ‘The others?’ she asked. ‘Davron? Meldor?’

  ‘No sign of them yet. And Corrian’s pack mule is missing too.’

  Corrian glowered at them. ‘I broke m’best pipe. And the replacement’s in me packs. Now what the midden am I supposed to do without me pipes and weed?’

  Everyone refrained from remarking that she seemed to be doing quite well. She had her teeth clamped hard on the stem of a new pipe bought from Tom, and she’d stuffed it with his best pipeweed. Apparently her money had been on her person, not in her packs.

  Keris turned to Scow. ‘Did you see what happened to Meldor?’

  ‘He yelled at me to get Corrian and Quirk and the chantor out of there. I couldn’t see Quirk, but I found Corrian and Portron. Meldor went back down the passage to find you and Davron. We grabbed Meldor’s pack crossings-horse and it led us out.’

  ‘You just left Meldor?’

  He gave Keris a stolid look. ‘When I get a direct order, I obey it. Meldor and Davron can look after themselves a lot better than I can. And now you’d better erect your tent. Do you mind sharing with Corrian tonight? If her mule doesn’t turn up she has no where to sleep.’

  ‘Only if she promises not to smoke her confounded pipe inside the tent.’

  ‘Upstart,’ Corrian muttered. ‘Dunno what the young are comin’ to these days. No respect for their elders.’

  Keris erected her tent and then gratefully accepted a plate of stew from Portron. ‘The trader says he’ll have his Unbound guard the camp tonight,’ the chantor said cheerfully, ‘which means we can get a good night’s rest.’

  She stare
d at him, wondering at his tone, and finally realised Portron was hoping Davron and Meldor never appeared. She said nothing, but knew she wouldn’t sleep until she saw that Davron was safe. But he’s not safe, she thought. How can he be safe? He was unconscious, lying there on the floor, and the water was coming in. Maybe he was already dead. Stockwood was huge, and the beast had trampled him. She ate her food stoically, even cleaning the last of the gravy from the plate with a piece of damper bread that Corrian had baked in the ashes of the fire. But she tasted none of it.

  ~~~~~~~

  Corrian did not share Keris’s tent after all. Tom the Cheap was happy to share his bed with a leathery old woman, once she had convinced him she was not tainted. He had questioned that anyone so unattractive could possibly be that way naturally. This insult Corrian took in her stride, remarking loudly as she made her way to his tent that all pussies looked alike in the dark. Portron drew in an indignant breath and stalked off to bed and, predictably, Quirk blushed. A few minutes later he too went off to his tent, leaving Scow and Keris by the dying embers of the fire.

  ‘I saw what happened to Davron,’ she said without preamble, and described what she’d seen. ‘Even if he was just temporarily unconscious, Stockwood galloped right over him.’ She stopped, unable to go on.

  ‘Meldor will find him.’

  ‘Meldor’s blind. The Wild might tear him to pieces.’

  ‘He is not defenceless.’

  ‘Oh stop it, Scow,’ she said irritably. ‘You’re just as worried as I am.’

  He grimaced, tongue lolling out. ‘I guess so. But I can’t go back for them; I’d never find the way. And Meldor is stronger than you realise.’

  She poked a stick idly at the ashes around the edges of the fire. ‘He uses ley,’ she said. ‘That’s it, isn’t it? Somehow he uses ley to see. To replace the sense he lost, or at least to enhance those he still has.’

  Scow said nothing.

  ‘And that’s why he thinks he can fight the Unmaker, because he knows how to use ley. He ignores the strictures of Chantry. He thinks he can bend the ley to his bidding without himself being corrupted.’ She paused. ‘He’s mad. As mad as Davron Storre. No one can fight the Unmaker except by creating Order.’

  ‘Ah yes. The rigidity of Order and the Rule. The inflexibility that allows no variations, nothing unusual. That expels the blind and crippled, that sends us out into the Unstable to be tainted in the first place. Is that the kind of life you believe in, Keris?’

  ‘What else is there?’ she whispered. ‘You want the truth? I hate it. I always have. All my life I’ve wanted to break free. I wanted to be a mapmaker. I wanted to wear trousers. I wanted to ride into the Unstable with my father. I wanted not to go to Chantry on rest days. I wanted to argue with the mentor in Chantry school. I wanted to read books that never mentioned the damned Rule. Ley-life, I wanted a hundred different things! I loathed Chantry. I despised their laws and their spying. I detested their pettiness and their sanctimonious ways. But I never fought them. Not really. Oh, I might have been a little cheeky, but that was all.

  ‘You see, in my heart I believed—no, I believe—that without Order, Chaos comes. That’s a truth, Scow. We all have to make sacrifices. For some, it’s harder than others, I know. But that’s not the fault of Chantry, or the Rule. It’s the Unmaker who has done this to us…’ She continued to poke around in the ashes. ‘I’ve come with you all, but deep inside me I feel I’ve committed a terrible sin. I’ve come with you for half a dozen reasons—and most of them are selfish. Basically, I think I’m a very selfish person.’ She unearthed some of the wood from the fire and pushed it back into the flames. ‘What sort of wood is this?’

  ‘Not wood at all,’ he said absently. ‘Tom the Cheap hacked a few chunks off the Sponge.’ He threw several more pieces on to the dying fire where they flamed blue, and then began to whittle at another piece with his knife. ‘I don’t think I’ll be able to sleep tonight.’

  ‘Me neither.’ They sat for a while in silence, until she took note of the knife he was using. ‘That’s an unusual blade. Why is it so shiny?’

  ‘It’s the kind of steel it’s made of, I think. Meldor gave it to me. He thinks it probably comes from the times before the Rending, when people knew how to make such marvellous things.’

  ‘That old? But that’s a thousand years!’ She thought of the metal caddy back in the mapmaker’s shop in Kibbleberry. ‘Is it possible for something to be so old?’

  ‘Well, no one knows how to make metal like this now. Mind you, I don’t think it could have been used continuously for a thousand years. It would have been worn away by the sharpening. And I think the handle has been replaced, maybe even several times.’

  She mused, ‘When I was little, I used to wish I lived back in the days of the Margravate of Malinawar, when ships used to cross the oceans. I would dream about the sea. Water stretching out as far as the eye could see, but it’s hard to imagine. What colour do you think it would have been? Brown, like the Flow? Thick and green, like the Gebbish River back home? Or perhaps tea-coloured, like the Warbuss, where it flows through Taggart’s Wood.’

  ‘One day you’ll be able to ride to the sea again, and see for yourself. In your lifetime.’

  ‘Do you really believe that?’

  ‘Yes, yes I do. You don’t know Meldor as I do. I love Davron as a friend, a brother—but Meldor? I would follow Meldor to the other side of the Waste if he asked it of me. He will do what he says: free us all.’

  ‘That’s ridiculous. A dream, a foolish dream. Like mine, of seeing the ocean.’

  ‘Keris, if we don’t free ourselves, who will do it for us? Chantry? Their only answer is failing. The kinesis chain has retreated in half a dozen places over the past few years. You’ll see that when you approach the Fifth. With each passing year, the areas of stability grow smaller. The Eighth is in danger of being cut in two. The truth is that Chantry and the Rule are not keeping Chaos at bay anymore. And they certainly have no idea of ever regaining back what has been lost. No one has had that idea before. No one has even considered casting the Unmaker down and reclaiming what was ours, until Meldor. Meldor has a dream, and such a dream is worth fighting for.’

  ‘If it was possible, wouldn’t the Maker have done it before now?’

  ‘Read the Holy Books, Keris. Chaos was brought to Malinawar because some of humankind supported Carasma the Unmaker. It’s our belief that only humankind can defeat what they themselves brought about by their folly. All the clues are there, in the writings. We have ignored them too long, misinterpreted what was written, insisted that things were allegories when what was written was the literal truth. The Maker gave us the answers through His Prophets and His Scribes and His Knights, but we chose not to listen.’

  She stared at him and was silent.

  He looked up from his whittling to see why she hadn’t replied. ‘Do I surprise you?’

  ‘You astound me.’

  ‘They are Meldor’s words, of course, but I have come to agree that he is right.’

  ‘But you sound more like a chantor—’

  ‘Oh no, never that. Chantry uses the Holy Books to justify stability and lack of change. Meldor tells us to study them with a view to finding out how the world can be altered, how the Unmaker can be defeated. Meldor is a deeply religious man, but his views are not those of Chantry.’

  She was appalled by the hint in his words. ‘There can only be one religion. One way. To even think anything else—’ The ultimate heresy. The only crime, except being born Unbred, that was punishable by death.

  ‘He will explain it to you better. Ask him.’ He grinned at her, rather like a large friendly dog.

  She looked away, out towards the Sponge, now a black outline against a starlit sky. ‘If he’s alive.’

  ‘He will live. He has not yet fulfilled his destiny. And your trompleri maps will be part of the plan, you’ll see.’ He held up the piece of the Sponge he’d been carving. He had created a rough representati
on of Stockwood, horns and all. ‘It would be a terrible irony, would it not, if my oversized hack has killed Davron…’ His hand tightened on the carving for a moment, as if he wanted to crush it, then he tossed it into the fire and watched it burn.

  She stood up, restless, and turned to look at the Snarled Fist. She’d been aware of it ever since she had emerged from the Sponge, aware of it out of the corner of her eye, on the edge of her consciousness, but after her initial gaze she’d avoided looking at it directly. It was too overpowering. Too compelling. Too downright dangerous. Now she forced herself to look, forced herself to absorb its reality and face its power.

  Below her the Wide flowed through the night like a broad river of churning light. Beyond it, somewhere out in the darkness, was the true river known as the Flow, while to her right, streaming through the Sponge one after another, came the maelstrom of the fickle Wanderer, and the narrow ribbon of the Dancer. Their confluence with the Wide was a clash of force, a vortex that sent power and colour upwards into a perpetual mushroom cloud of roiling purple and livid billows. It created its own light; it glowed and sparked and flared and flickered, sometimes like playful lightning, sometimes with the ferocity of brushfire, sometimes as cold and eerie as foxfire.

  The Snarled Fist, feared and avoided by all Unstablers, and there it was within an hour’s ride of where she stood…

  ‘It pulls me,’ she murmured. ‘I feel it all the time. Like a restlessness inside me.’ Like that moment in the ley line when I wanted Davron to love me— ‘I feel as if I want to walk into it.’ She trembled.

  Scow watched her face, not the ley. ‘I cannot see it. I cannot feel it. It does nothing to me.’ He shrugged. ‘Meldor exults in ley, you know, but Davron is more cautious.’