Havenstar

by Glenda Larke

  ‘Then will you at least believe the cliff face you’re intending to descend is dangerous? That overhang broke off, remember. The whole face is friable.’

  Davron ignored him.

  Scow’s worry deepened. ‘Ley-fire, but I wish Meldor were here. Dav, we have a fellowship that’s been split in two, and we’re in the half that has no pack animals, no food, very little water and no tents. Somewhere not far away there’s a Minion that’s just lost his manta ray pet and he’ll be aching for someone’s blood. We need your guidance.’

  Davron stopped what he was doing and turned to face Scow. He took a deep breath. ‘Sammy, she heard what you said. She heard and she cut the rope. For me. Do you understand that? And so now I’m going to do this for her. And you are perfectly capable of looking after the fellowship for as long as it takes me to do this.’

  ‘Dav, if she hadn’t cut it, you’d both be dead. Damn it all, another breath and you would have plunged down with the overhang when it went. She sacrificed her life for you—and now you want to throw your life away, and it’s hardly going to do any good. She’s dead, Davron.’

  ‘I would know if she were.’

  ‘What makes you think that? What makes you think you had some sort of rapport with her that would tell you the moment her life snuffed out? You couldn’t even tell when she was hurting while she was alive!’

  Without warning, Davron’s fist shot out and caught Scow in the centre of the chin. Taken by surprise, Scow overbalanced and landed heavily on his rear.

  Portron and Quirk, who had been listening with leaden faces, helped him up. Scow, rubbing his jaw, watched as Davron turned away without a word and walked to the cliff edge. The guide stood for a moment, looking down, then he swung himself over the rim.

  ‘Disorder damn it!’ said Scow.

  Portron knelt on one knee and began the ritual of Reverence, hands fluttering and head bobbing in the required gestures to indicate his subservience as a petitioner.

  Corrian, who had also been following the whole conversation, gave a snort of disgust. ‘You wasted your time there, young man,’ she said to Scow. ‘Master Davron lost his wits when he lost his heart. There ain’t nothing like the idiocy of a man who’s thinking with his emotions, or his privates for that matter, instead of his head.’

  This statement was greeted with a startled silence. Scow, remembering the beauty and sweetness of Alyss of Tower-and-Fleury, was disbelieving. Quirk looked puzzled, but it was Portron whose reaction was the most extreme. His head jerked around, ritual forgotten, and the expression on his face was one of appalled horror.

  Scow finally stirred himself, choosing to ignore Corrian’s words altogether. ‘Quirk, can you sneak up on to those rocks somewhere and keep guard? I’m worried the owner of that pet might decide to wreak some revenge. Chantor, now that you’ve finished your kinesis, would you hobble the horses?’ He turned hesitantly towards the canyon’s edge. ‘I—I want to see how he manages.’

  Wordlessly they watched him go.

  ~~~~~~~

  ‘Margraf—’ Heldiss the Heron scratched the back of one unnaturally long and thin leg with the claw-like toes of the other, as he often did when he was agitated. ‘Someone is climbing down the cliff face.’

  ‘Davron,’ Meldor said with certainty. ‘The poor romantic fool. First Alyss, now her.’ He sounded more resigned than annoyed. ‘Why, Heldiss, is it that I am surrounded by people who lack vision?’ The question was rhetorical and he didn’t wait for the Unbound man to comment. ‘How soon can you have a new bridge across?’

  ‘If we had the materials it could be done in a day. But we don’t have enough rope, and we don’t have any boards. We’ll have to order both. It’d be quicker for you to go around rather than wait. There’s another bridge to the east as you know. I’ll send some of my men with you.’ He glanced across to the other side of the canyon. ‘They’ll need some of their supplies over there—with some archery and what rope we have we can rig up a pulley system to get necessities over to them. The rest can go with you.’

  Meldor nodded his acceptance. ‘I’ll write a note for Scow that you can send across. I’ll leave as soon as your men are ready.’

  Heldiss’s bird-like eyes widened in surprise. ‘You won’t wait to see what happens to him?’ Forgetting Meldor’s sightlessness, he made an explanatory gesture with his hand towards Davron, still inching his way downwards.

  The blind man shrugged. ‘I do not waste my energies on what I cannot change, Heldiss. Davron will either live or die, and I shall find out which soon enough.’

  ‘I thought he was a friend of yours!’

  With unerring accuracy, Meldor reached out a hand and laid it on the Heron’s bony shoulder. ‘Heldiss, you’ve known me a great many years, yet you still do not know me. I have no time for friendships. You know my vision, I think. You have family in Havenstar, I know. Would you have me linger to weep over a friend, or would you have me turn my back and go on, remembering that there may come a time when I would turn my back on you, if circumstances dictated it?’

  Heldiss hesitated before replying, but only briefly. ‘I would have you go on, Margraf,’ he whispered. ‘I have children who need a future.’

  Meldor nodded. He had never doubted the answer.

  ~~~~~~~

  Davron climbed on. The cliff was friable and treacherous, he knew that. He was not unskilled at rock-climbing; it had been part of his training on the Storre Domain, and he’d had cause to use the skill on occasion in the Unstable. But never before had he climbed with a ley line below, a line that showed itself from time to time through a cloaking mist, turgid purple tangles like the obscene coils of a giant’s disembowelled entrails. Never before had he climbed knowing that the Unmaker was below him, waiting. Never before had he climbed feeling the way he did now. Ice-cold. With knowledge inside him that he did not want. Keris—

  Scow was right. Why would he know if she lived or died? He felt nothing of her, neither her presence nor her death. Nothing. The knotted agony in him was nothing new; he’d felt that the day Alyss had taken his children from him. He felt it every time he returned to Tower-and-Fleury and caught a tantalising glimpse of his daughter at play.

  He climbed on and tied the pain deeper into his unconscious. What was the use of letting it surface? Mirrin, his daughter, was lost to him forever. Staven, his son, would be unknown to him forever. And Keris—even if she was alive—could never be his, no matter that she loved him enough to come to him in the night, loved him enough to have cut through the rope that tied her to life. His touch on her skin could only waken pain. He could offer her nothing, except perhaps death in the final call from Lord Carasma.

  Despairing thoughts needled him: What honour have you now, Davron of Storre? You who once believed that a Trician had a responsibility to serve his stability and his people with rectitude and purity of spirit? A duty to serve the Maker with faith and fortitude? What price your honour now, Davron of Storre! A mapmaker’s daughter has served with more integrity and more courage, while you remain bondsman to the Unmaker because you haven’t the courage to die…

  He could let go, drop into the ley, meet death and end it all.

  He looked down and shuddered. He didn’t want to die. He didn’t want to condemn his children to future tainting. And what of Keris? What if she were alive, and Carasma had her? He climbed on. And remembered his first few weeks as a bondsman to Carasma. Remembered the times when he had come closest to taking his own life, or ending it in some reckless attack on a Minion or a Minion’s pet. It had been Meldor who’d stopped him then. ‘No, Davron,’ he’d said. ‘Alive, you will be my advantage against the Unmaker. When Carasma learns who I am, and what I plan, he will decide to use you against me, against Havenstar. You will be his weapon.’

  ‘And how will that be to your advantage?’ Davron had asked.

  Meldor had smiled, a cold, humourless smile. ‘He will not bother to forge another weapon when he thinks he already has one in place. You and I
must never be parted, Davron of Storre, for in you I will know my enemy, and an enemy that is known can be defeated. A weapon that is understood can be used against its wielder. One day I shall use you against Carasma of Chaos.’

  And now— Now Davron no longer knew whether he stayed alive because Meldor decreed it, or because he was selfish enough to want to live, to want his children to live untainted.

  He climbed on.

  ~~~~~~~

  Keris fell silently, but she heard Davron’s anguished denial rend the air after her. She heard it and knew that he loved her. It is enough, she thought.

  No, that was a lie. It wasn’t enough. She wanted to live…

  She hit the first of the ley mists, now drowsily lifting from the boiling below. And she slowed. The canyon walls that had been feeding past her so fast they had seemed only a blur, now showed their rough details. She was drifting down, a feather on the air. And then the thought hit her: not a feather. A fruit plucked and dropped into the hands of the Unmaker. Only he could have drawn on the power of the ley to slow her fall and save her life. Relief, barely begun, drowned under an even greater fear than that of merely dying.

  She landed on her feet and fell, jarred to her knees. The ugly puce of the ley twisted around her feet and thighs, anchoring her there. He had planned it that way, of course, to humiliate her.

  He sat on a raised seat—an edifice rather than a chair, with massive feet and arms and back, a throne strewn with animal skins still attached to lifeless heads and clawed feet, all matted with dried blood. Ygraine was among them. Carasma lounged back in his chair, insolently and nakedly at ease, arrogant in his assumed nobility.

  ‘Maid Keris Kaylen,’ he purred.

  She had to swallow before she could talk. ‘Yes.’

  ‘You had Deverli’s maps all the time, didn’t you?’

  She didn’t answer. In her terror, she could not. To gain time she began to unwind what was left of the rope from around her body. Anything to avoid looking at him.

  ‘Now I’ve had time to consider, I can see that it is the only explanation that makes sense. And you gave yourself away, when you spoke to me of wanting to be a trompleri maker. What could make you dream of that, unless you had seen such a map?’

  She nodded, knowing herself too frightened to try to deny it. ‘There was only one,’ she said in a whisper, because that was all she could manage. ‘It was delivered to me with my father’s things.’

  ‘So Cissi Woodrug missed it, eh? She will be punished for that.’ He continued to contemplate her with a gaze rich with meaning. He enjoyed her fear, no matter how well she contained it, and his smile carried terror into her heart. ‘Where is it?’

  ‘I destroyed it.’ He will never believe me!

  But he did. Somehow he burrowed inside her head and lurked there, sorting through her replies for the truth. With a flash of unwelcome intuition—or was it his personal promise?—she knew if she lied, she would die.

  ‘Ah,’ he said. ‘The flash of ley in your tent last night?’

  ‘Yes. I burned it.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because I was afraid you were sending your Minions to look for it, and it would be found… I—I didn’t know it would flare up like that.’

  ‘And did you show it to your friends?’

  ‘No.’

  He digested that, leaning his chin on a propped hand. He glowed with health and strength and beauty, and all of it was terrible. The health was parasitic, the strength brutal, the beauty merciless. ‘So. You have seen a trompleri map. And studied it. And you—foolish child—have told me that you have ached to emulate the mapmakers who made such things… I cannot risk that you succeed.’

  She knelt motionless at his feet, tasting the bitterness in her mouth. Get on with it, you sodding monster—

  He smiled as if he had read her thought. ‘Joy,’ he said with a deliberate malice, ‘is in the length of time that suffering lasts. Why else do you think your Master Guide still wanders the Unstable? For the same reason, I shall not kill you. Yet.’ He gestured with a hand and a wisp of ley the size of a small melon detached itself from the twists at her feet. He spun his fingers and the ley, obedient, twirled in the air, concentrating as it did so. Its colour changed: it grew darker, more magenta, more tangled with anger. When it was reduced to the size of a large apple, he flicked it over towards her saying, ‘Take it in your hands.’

  Fear swelled inside her, jagged on the maliciousness of his smile, and threatened to tear her apart.

  ‘Take it,’ he said softly.

  She could no more have resisted his insistence than she could have spread wings and flown away. She reached out with both hands and plucked the ball from the air.

  For one brilliant moment of light she felt nothing. Then her hands gripped convulsively and she began to scream.

  She was still screaming when Davron found her, an aeon later.

  ~~~~~~~

  The screams started when Davron was barely a quarter of the way down the cliff wall.

  The depth of their pain painted horrors in his mind. He clung for a minute, gathering himself around with courage, reforging his strength, then climbed on towards the sound. She was alive, and he had thought her dead even as he told himself otherwise, so one part of him rejoiced in the sound of her pain, one part of him wanted it to go on and on, for while it lasted he knew she lived still… The rest of him turned inwards, refusing to hear, refusing to know because if he accepted the reality of her agony he would lose his hold on rationality.

  And when he finally stepped down into the ley, perhaps he was indeed not wholly sane.

  The Unmaker still lounged on his throne, at ease, more so now that he’d had the solace of another’s agony so delightfully played before him. Yet he was also weary. Much was drained from him, because he had tampered with one of the Maker’s followers. Order always strove to reassert itself; to impose disorder was draining, to impose it on one who worshipped the Maker was doubly draining. When Davron strode through the ley to Keris and knocked the ball from her hands with the stock of his whip, Carasma did nothing but smile lazily.

  Davron stared in shock at Keris’s hands.

  For a moment the rage that welled in him was a bare breath away from madness—but if there was one thing that he knew, and knew well, it was control. The slightest of shudders shivered his frame, then he edged his right hand away from the knife at his belt.

  Keris no longer screamed. She stood trembling, crying, holding her hands out at arm’s length as if to repudiate them. Davron ached to take her in his arms, to hold her, to stroke her hair, to whisper words of comfort in her ears…

  He could do none of it. He was untouchable.

  Her hands were dried up claws. Carasma had been unable to taint her because she was ley-lit, unable to unmake her or kill her because she was the Maker’s, so he had wrought as he could. He had desiccated her hands. He had drawn all juices from her flesh below each wrist. He had mummified part of a living body.

  She could not bend her fingers, nor move any part of her hands. Brown skin stretched over bone, like sun-dried hide on a desert-seared carcass. She stared at the ghastly skeletal things she now carried and then looked at the Unmaker.

  ‘So that you will never draw a trompleri map,’ he said.

  ~~~~~~~

  The pain had ceased even before Davron knocked away the burning ball of ley. There had been nothing left in her fingers to give her pain, yet she’d gone on screaming, unable to stop, unable to think, until she was separated from the source of her maiming.

  Even then she’d stood in shock, unable to deal with the sight of her useless hands, wanting both to hide them from Davron, and to throw herself into his arms. She did neither. She stood and looked down at her hands and tried to convince herself they were hers. They were eroded dead wood at the end of her wrists, artificial things without touch or feeling or movement. She looked up at Davron and swallowed the last of her sobs.

  And then Carasma told he
r he had done it so that she would never draw a trompleri map. And her mind started working again. She thought, incredulous, He doesn’t know I already how the maps are made! He doesn’t even know the secret of their making. Hysteria bubbled through her. He had destroyed her hands, thinking he could stop her, and she’d already thwarted him with the letters Gawen carried. She wanted to laugh, but did not; the irony was too painful. She was eternally maimed, hideously deformed, condemned now to live out her life in the Unstable because of her maiming—and all because Carasma thought she needed her hands to discover how to make a trompleri map. It was her tragedy, and it was unspeakably funny.

  Lord Carasma looked past her to Davron. ‘You have a remarkable propensity to try my patience, Storre,’ he said.

  ‘It’s mutual.’

  ‘You may tell Edion that I know who he is now. And what he is doing. And I think perhaps you know what your task will be, don’t you Master Guide?’

  Davron nodded. ‘Doubtless you will tell me the exact moment and the exact details when the time comes, but I have always assumed that I knew what it was to be.’ In truth, it had been Meldor’s assumption, but Davron wanted to show Carasma strength, not uncertainty.

  ‘I shall include your new lady in with the package.’

  Davron’s eyes dilated, blackness into blackness. The Unmaker laughed. ‘It will add…spice, to the moment. For us both.’ He turned his golden eyes back to Keris. ‘It will be his hand that snuffs out your life, lady.’

  ‘I doubt you can insist on that,’ Davron said with a careless shrug. ‘She is the Maker’s. Besides, there is no need for her to stay by my side. And I am contracted for but one task, remember?’

  ‘Ask her, guide. Ask her where she will be when the time comes. She is no Alyss of Tower-and-Fleury. And what has she to live for now away from you? She will be excluded, yet has been rendered useless by what I have wrought with her flesh. Ask her—’ He was laughing, and laughing, he faded away.