by Glenda Larke
~~~~~~~
The two of them were left standing in the ley. It was no longer purple, but blue, a soft pleasant blue.
He turned to her, his voice urgent. ‘Keris, there is one chance. Just one, but the price comes high.’
She nodded, unnaturally calm. ‘Go on.’
‘I can teach you to drink in the ley. You know the price, but ley does heal, used in the right way.’
She held up her hands. ‘These?’
He expected bitterness; instead he saw irony mixed with the pain. He had an unwanted vision then, of Alyss. Alyss turning, pity and horror mingled, from a diseased beggar in the rutted streets of Edgeloss, beckoning a servant to dispense coins. Maker, how could I ever have thought the gilt was gold? ‘It’s only a possibility. It may not work. You may take on the ley and achieve nothing—’
‘You can’t—?’ she began, and stopped.
‘We both know what happens when I touch you,’ he said gently. ‘I could not heal anyone. And I doubt that even Meldor could do much with something so…severe. But you might, from within. If you tackle it now, before the change hardens with time.’ He looked down at her hands without flinching, and then raised dark eyes to her face. ‘What you decide, you must decide for yourself. I love you, Keris. And I will love you no matter what your hands look like.’
He saw the ache, the longing, in her eyes, and knew they were a reflection of his own. It tore at him, this inability to hold her. To touch her skin. Gently he reached out and pulled her into his arms, careful—so very careful—not to touch her with his bare body, careful not to hold her too tightly because his hands would sear her through her clothing. Gently he allowed his lips to graze her hair. ‘I love you,’ he repeated, ‘but I can offer you nothing. Not home, nor wealth, nor safety, nor a future that has anything in it but death and pain. I can’t even offer you myself. All I can say is that I don’t care an urchin’s curse what your hands look like. I only care that you do what is best for yourself.’
Carefully, she drew away from him. ‘One question first, before I decide. Who does Meldor serve?’
He hesitated slightly before answering. ‘His dream,’ he said. ‘He serves first and foremost his dream. He believes his dream to be Maker-inspired.’
He expected her to ask what the dream was; instead, she asked, ‘Do you believe it is?’
‘I don’t know. But I think his dream is better than Chantry’s reality. Or this,’ he added waving a hand at their surroundings.
‘Then show me,’ she said. ‘Show me how to take in the ley.’
And so he showed her. He showed her how to tease out the gentle blue, to spiral it upwards out of the body of the ley, using just the power of her mind to call it. ‘Want it,’ he said, ‘just want it. Bring it to you, like a tendril of smoke drawn into your lungs when you breathe…’
He showed her how to absorb power as a lizard soaks up the warmth of sunlight; he showed her how to drink in ley and fill her body spaces with its pulsing strength; he showed her how to bring it into herself with every breath. ‘Feel it,’ he said, ‘feel it entering you…’
And slowly, slowly, she pulled the power into herself, into her body. Slowly she absorbed it. ‘Think of yourself as a sponge,’ he said, ‘full of empty spaces. Think of being able to fill those spaces with ley. Breathe it in, Keris. Absorb it through the skin. Soak it up. Inhale it. Assimilate it. Feel it run in your veins, in your blood. Feel it course through your body…’
She pulled the power into herself, and sent it through her body to her hands. Slowly, gradually, her right hand filled out. The fingers swelled and straightened, and responded…
It took time, and concentration, and she had to do it alone. I can’t even touch her, he thought, as he watched the agonising process that was giving her back her dexterity. Giving her back her touch and sensitivity… As the nerves lived again the pain was renewed. She paled, shook, bit through her lip trying to contain the agony within, hugging it to her, turning it deep, but there was still nothing he could do.
And there was nothing he could do when she collapsed, exhausted. Too much time had passed and she was too weak. He cradled her, carefully, and wept for her courage, and for what she had lost. Her left hand was still an ugly colour; it was wrinkled, gnarled—the hand of an old arthritic woman. The fingers were unnaturally thin, almost claw-like, the knuckles were deformed, the hand curled at rest like an eagle’s foot—but at least it lived. It was usable. The right hand she had worked at more: it was warm and soft and supple. Normal.
Damn you, Carasma, he thought. You don’t have it all your own way. There are some things we can win.
~~~~~~~
Chapter Twenty-Four
Should we say obey, and expect obedience, if we cannot also give hope? Perhaps we have cast too many shadows in the path of the faithful, and framed too few doorways of light.
—From the early writings of Kt Edion
When Meldor rode into the camp three days after the fall of the bridge, he drew up his horse alongside Keris, singling her out with unerring accuracy. For a moment he sat absolutely still, not speaking, then he slid from his horse and said with a disbelieving murmur. ‘Ley, Keris?’ And smiled.
She knew why he smiled. He thought ley would help her to find the secret of trompleri. Bitterness bubbled up.
A moment later, though, the smile disappeared. ‘But there’s something else, isn’t there? I smell…the Unmaker’s touch.’
Wordlessly she held out her left hand to him. He took it in his, felt its harsh irregularities, its knobbed crenellations, then dropped it as if it burned him. He made an imperious gesture towards her right hand, so she gave him that as well. His smile returned. ‘Ah. Thank the Maker for that at least.’
The bitterness spilled over. All that ever mattered to him was how effectively those around him could serve his plans. He was glad her right hand was still usable so that she could draw her maps, probably even inwardly pleased that her left was deformed and ugly because that was doubtless enough to make her one of the excluded, ensuring she would have nowhere else to go.
‘You and I need to talk,’ she snapped.
He nodded, as calm as ever. As in control. ‘I agree.’ He continued to smile. ‘But let me settle in first, eh?’ He sniffed the air around him and sensed Davron’s presence. ‘Davron? Everything all right?’
‘Yes. We made do. We moved south to the nearest water. This is Garret’s Lake.’
‘Yes, Heldiss’s men said we’d find you here.’ He turned back to Keris. ‘I brought another tent for you, and a packhorse. You can ride Tousson from now on.’
‘What made you think I’d be in any condition to need a mount, or indeed, be alive?’
‘I didn’t know for sure. But the Unmaker was in the ley line and where Carasma is, the unexpected tends to happen.’
Her anger at his casualness saturated her, but then he swept it all away with his next words, uttered with a gentle, sincere conviction in that beautiful voice of his. ‘And you: you are a brightly burning star, Keris Kaylen. Your light enters my darkness. You are strong and not easily killed. No, I did not expect you to die when you fell.’ He turned smoothly away to greet the others. To Davron he said, ‘It was bravely done. But foolish. You never learn, my friend.’ Then, for Scow, ‘And it was you who finally got them both out of the Deep, I suppose. We all have to rely on you for the practical details.’
She could not help her smile. It was true. It had been Scow who had brought first her, then Davron, up the cliff face. He had salvaged sufficient rope from the downed bridge to reach the bottom of the canyon, and had rigged up a winch at the top so they could be safely hauled up. She’d been puzzled by the wary way that the two men had greeted one another at the top. Davron, looking sheepishly embarrassed, had flushed and then mumbled an apology. Scow had been no less discomforted, remarking that there were times when he was delighted to have made a prime ass of himself and this was one of them. Then he too had grinned, rubbed his jaw, and
said meaningfully, ‘But one of these days, my friend, when you are not looking—’
‘What’s all that about then?’ she’d asked, but she’d received no satisfactory reply.
The three days that followed, while they’d been waiting for Meldor and the pack animals, were both difficult and joyous for her and Davron. Their desire for one another was a throbbing, desperate yearning that they could not satisfy. Normal passion, normal needs had to be denied, buried, ignored. Yet the deeper they hid what they felt, the greater the tension that bound them. Sometimes she felt she wanted to lash out, scream at the world, cry her defiance. She was caught in torment, and there was no solution. There never would be a solution.
During those three days, Portron spent most of the time glowering at them, and would have interrupted their time together if they’d tolerated interruption. Davron thought he was jealous, but Keris knew it was not that. The chantor just thought to protect her; why was not so clear.
Far more unsettling than the chantor’s fussing was the land’s upheaval. Numerous whirlwinds danced across the earth, sucking up the loose soil and dust and anything else in their path. They scribbled dust patterns in the sky, darkened the light with their brown clouds of debris, spun part of the world into the oblivion of space. They left denuded swathes slashed across the ground wherever they’d been, they scoured the land clean or furrowed it deep as they erased the world.
‘Chaos hell-winds, in truth,’ Portron muttered, and shook his head in sorrow.
The disintegration of the land around them frightened Keris, and the constant proximity of Davron made her feel like a street urchin with her nose pressed against the baker’s shop window, seeing the wares displayed, but never having enough money to partake of more than a visual feast. She was not sorry when Meldor arrived to put an end to their waiting.
That evening, after a supper of stewed dried meat mixed with slices of dried yam and dried riverweed peas that everyone shared, she was once more invited into the spaciousness of the blind man’s tent. This time Scow stayed, as well as Davron.
‘I’ve made some punch,’ Scow told her, handing her a mug of spiced wine. ‘To celebrate our reunion.’
‘And your safe rescue,’ Meldor added, raising his own mug in her direction. ‘I’m sorry about your maiming, Keris. I’d like to know the whole story. What did the Unmaker hope to gain? Did he realise that I had asked you to be my mapmaker to replace Deverli?’
‘Yes, I think so. He wanted to stop me being of any use to you. I’ll tell you everything I know, which is a lot more than you think, in exchange for more truth from you.’
‘Ah. And what is it that you know?’ he asked, probing.
‘How to make a trompleri map, for a start.’
She sat, imperturbable, sipping her wine, enjoying the stir that statement prompted. Davron’s face flashed with hope, Meldor lost some of his normal regality as he spluttered a little over his warmed wine and Scow sucked in his vast cheeks and then held his hands to the flames of the stove as if he was suddenly feeling the cold.
‘And what is it you want to know?’ Meldor asked.
‘All the things you haven’t told me. Where you are bound. What your plans are, in general at least. Why you are called Margraf. If I help you, this has got to be a partnership.’
Meldor nodded in Davron’s direction, amused. ‘All right. You’ll have the information you seek; my word on it. And now, how do you make a trompleri map?’
She folded her arms and sat back. ‘First, I have a confession. I had one of Deverli’s missing trompleri maps. It was delivered to me with Piers’ things.’ The startled silence that greeted this pronouncement was all she could have hoped for. She added calmly, ‘I’m afraid it doesn’t exist anymore, though. I burned it. That was what disintegrated my tent.’
Even Meldor, usually so unruffled by events, was horrified. ‘You destroyed it? But why?’
‘Because I was afraid. My father died because of that map.’
‘But you do know how to reproduce it?’ Meldor’s tone was sharp.
‘As soon as you told me that ley was power, and not innately evil, I guessed. Before that, I made the same mistake that everyone seems to have made, even Carasma. You all thought there must be some sort of mysterious innate skill within the mapmaker, as you find within water diviners. Either that or some sort of magic possessed by a particularly talented maker of maps. But that’s not so. Any ordinary mapmaker can do it.’ She waved her mug towards Scow. ‘This punch is really good.’ He acknowledged her compliment with a kinesis of thanks.
She continued, ‘During our crossing of the Dancer, some mineral salts of the kind I use for making inks were scooped up into my quiver, quite by accident. Not knowing where they came from, I kept them. When I did realize their origins, my first reaction was to throw them out, but by then I had already been carrying them around for several weeks. I decided that if they hadn’t hurt me by then, they were unlikely to do so, so I kept them. Then, when Meldor said ley was power, well, how better to make a trompleri map than to use something impregnated with ley? I thought it was worth a try. And sure enough…’
‘You drew a trompleri map?’ Davron was grinning at her.
‘Of sorts. It wasn’t a very good effort, because I had to mix the salts with non-ley ingredients, with the result that the contouring was not obvious. But it was there. Presumably if all the ingredients could be taken from a ley line—’
Scow gaped. ‘It’s as simple as that?’
‘Well, it’s hardly a simple matter to dig around in a ley line looking for ochre and sienna and all the other pigments I’d need to make a proper map. To have a full range of colour, and it would have to be colour, I think, I’d really need things which might be difficult to find in a ley line. Like tannin and madder root and indigo.’
‘Deverli must have done it somehow. Or found substitutes within the line,’ Davron said thoughtfully. ‘Mind you, he was just the sort of devil-may-care fellow who would enjoy digging about in the Wanderer, and laugh about it afterwards.’
‘I’ve another confession,’ she continued. ‘Because I didn’t altogether trust you all, I wrote down instructions on how to make a trompleri map and sent it to all the other master mapmakers I knew of. Gawen the Courier took the letters for me.’
Once again they all stared at her.
‘You gave the information away?’ Scow asked, obviously staggered.
‘Yes.’
‘You could have made a fortune, you know,’ Davron said. He sounded more amused than surprised.
‘You mean, sold them the information?’ she asked. ‘It never occurred to me! Trompleri maps will save countless lives. Save countless people from tainting. On a trompleri map it’s possible to track Minions and their pets and the Wild. Or study the ley lines. Crossings would be so much easier. You could see what the weather is like. Or the whirlwinds. You could see where other Unstablers were, and what happens to them. The more trompleri maps that are made and sold, the better for us all. It’s not something to make us all rich.’
‘It was never our intention to make a monetary profit out of trompleri maps.’ There was mild rebuke in Meldor’s tone. ‘However, I don’t know that you’ve done the right thing, though, for all that. Remember that a trompleri map can work both ways. If Unstabler bandits got hold of them, then they would know where the fellowships are, how many people they contain and how best they could be ambushed. If the Minions got hold of them, they would have the same information. A trompleri map would be a weapon against us, against all decent people, when it’s in the hands of the wrong person.’
She was crestfallen and said in a small voice. ‘I guess I never thought of that.’
‘Never mind. I’ll write to all the mapmakers myself, warning them of the problem.’ His eyes gleamed. ‘Perhaps it is time for Kt Edion to be resurrected—they will take more notice of something that is signed by a Knight of Chantry.’
There was an ironic twist to Davron’s mouth. ‘You w
ould have made a good Hedrin-chantor, Meldor. Cynical.’
‘Some of the mapmakers probably won’t want to make trompleri maps at all, not when it means searching for the ingredients in ley lines,’ Keris said. ‘Anyway, let’s get back to my side of our bargain. Why are you called Margraf? Where are we going really? Is there a Havenstar? Do you—’
Meldor held up his hand. ‘Do you swear that you will keep the information to yourself?’
‘Certainly, as long as no one is injured by my silence.’
Davron gave an amused smile. ‘A fair amendment, Meldor.’
‘Very well. What was first? The Margraf title? It’s not one I claim, but I am the founder of Havenstar and its leader, insofar as it has one. So people call me the Margrave. They like traditions, so I acquiesce, but titles mean little to me. As I have told you, I am not a Trician—and anyway, in Havenstar Trician blood means nothing. In fact, the only aristocracy in Havenstar are the ley-lit, as you will find out.’
‘What is Havenstar? Where is it?’
‘It’s south of the Graven. What is it? It is an enclave for the excluded, including the tainted. That’s all. It is stable there, and safe, yet there is no Order, no Rule and no kinesis chain surrounding it.’
It was her turn to stare. ‘How is that possible?’
‘You’ll see. We are taking you there. That’s where your mapmaker’s shop is.’
‘Stability without Order? How? Sorcery?’ The word jerked out of her involuntarily.
Meldor laughed. ‘No, no sorcery, I assure you. It’s more like—well the closest thing I can think of are the fixed features, I suppose, although it’s not quite the same.’
‘If it’s safe, yet it doesn’t kill the tainted, then why don’t all the excluded go there?’
