Isles of the Forsaken

by Ives Gilman, Carolyn

  From his books on Adaina myth, Nathaway knew that the Great Bear was part of their creation story. “The people on Rusk say the Great Bear’s skull is on their island. There’s another one on Vill. Is this the real one?” He had intended the remark jokingly, but something was caught in his throat, and the words came out in a hoarse whisper. He coughed.

  “They are all the real one,” Spaeth said. “They are all the same place.”

  She was gazing intently ahead of her, as if searching for something. At last she seemed to find what she wanted. “Follow me closely,” she said. “If you can, put your feet where I put mine.”

  She started up the hill by a winding route, sometimes doubling back on her own path, sometimes circling up in spirals. When they finally got to the top, Nathaway found himself facing the circle of stones where he had first met Spaeth four days before.

  “So this is where we are!” he exclaimed, puzzled at his own disorientation. “I should have recognized the spot.”

  “You saw it only by day,” Spaeth answered, as if that should make any difference.

  They were at the highest point of the island, and an unimpeded view opened up on all sides. Far past the grass hills he could see the glimmer of the moonlit sea, dwarfing the tiny spot of land they stood on. Not a light showed as far as vision reached, except from above.

  After turning completely around once, Spaeth sat on the grass outside the ring of stones, facing south. She opened her leather bag and drew out a long wooden box. Inlaid on its cover were two intertwined ovals in opalescent mother-of pearl. Spaeth opened the lid and took out a long-stemmed pipe with a curiously carved stone bowl. She filled it from a cloth sack, then spread a piece of leather on the grass and laid out flint, steel, punk, and splints to light it. As she knelt to begin the process by striking a spark, Nathaway took a box of sulphur matches from his pocket and offered them to her. She hesitated a moment, then shrugged and took them.

  She lit the pipe, took a few puffs, then gestured Nathaway to sit on the ground next to her. She handed him the pipe.

  “You must smoke it too.”

  “Why?” he demanded suspiciously.

  “It is an herb,” she answered. “It brings out the mood.”

  Grudgingly following her instructions, Nathaway drew in the fragrant smoke. It had a calming but clarifying effect, and it was quite some time before either of them spoke again. Nathaway sat trying to think of a strategy to engage her in debate, but as he smoked the urgency faded. At last he said, “What sort of magic can you work? Make trees sprout from a box, or eggs appear in your hand?” He knew such tricks from the magicians who performed in Fluminos salons.

  “I am going to try to catch the attention of the world.”

  “What?”

  For a moment she seemed to consider whether to ignore him or go on. At last she said, “Back in the days of Alta, there was consciousness in everything. Even the stones were aware. Nowadays it’s not so true. But there are still ways to wake the world. It is a matter of mood. You have to have a strong mood. We call it mora.”

  All he could think was that she intended a kind of séance. “Will you summon spirits?” he asked.

  She stared at him a moment, then said, “Yes. That’s what I’m going to do.”

  When he handed back the pipe she sat smoking it in short puffs. Slowly he realized she was angry. “What’s the matter?” he asked.

  Her tone was dark with enmity. “You come blundering in here as if the balances were not resting on a pinhead. You have no idea how fragile this world of ours is. There is a war going on! For centuries, we Lashnura have been saving the Isles from destruction through cleverness and sacrifice. We have given our lives and freedom to make sure neither side has the upper hand. Now, if you keep acting as you have, you will upset everything.”

  “Who is at war?” Nathaway asked.

  “The Adaina call them the Mundua and the Ashwin.”

  He had read of them. “The spirits of the sea and the spirits of the air,” he said.

  “Some people call them the powers of imbalance. The powers of balance are what we Lashnura serve.”

  An inspiration struck him. “So do we! We call it justice. It’s what all our law is based on. That is why we have come to the Forsakens—to right the balance. You see, we have a lot in common.”

  “I don’t think we are talking of the same thing,” she said.

  Her tone silenced him a while. At last he said, “Do you have to shed blood to work your magic?”

  “No,” she said curtly. “This has nothing to do with dhota.”

  “But I thought—”

  She cut him short. “It is almost time.” She tapped the ashes out of the pipe and refilled it. “Finish this bowl of weed, and we will start.”

  They waited as Nathaway continued to smoke. Spaeth seemed totally unconscious of him now, staring away to the south. He took the opportunity to study her. She looked older than his first impression, less innocent and more commanding. She sat slim and straight, like a woman of silver condensed from the moonlight. Her skin shone soft. He wanted to touch it. He tried to marshal his thoughts, but only found himself remembering the invitation she had made four days ago, in this very place. Had she felt attracted to him? It gave him a heady feeling. She could not have wanted him for the sake of his status, like women in Fluminos. Out here, closed off from the world, there was no possibility of scandal or blackmail. No one would ever know. He wondered if she had entirely given up.

  Presently she began a soft, low humming. As he listened idly, the tuneless chant crept into the cracks between his thoughts, becoming a background to them all, like the same frame repeated endlessly in a gallery of pictures. Without ever having listened, he knew her chant by heart. Two notes, pause, three notes, pause, two notes, repeat. He did not even notice when his own thoughts disappeared from his mind, leaving him open and unencumbered.

  Suddenly the music stopped. Nathaway straightened and opened his eyes. He felt strangely rested, and wondered how much time had passed. He turned to ask Spaeth if he had been asleep; but she was looking at him with a strangely appraising smile. Somehow, he realized, she had gotten behind his guard, removed the defences of his mind, and for a short time controlled him. He felt indignant. Yet what could he accuse her of? Hypnotism? He did not even believe in what he felt she had done.

  He looked away. She ought not to taunt a man when she was totally at his mercy, he thought. It would be so easy for him to reach out and pin her back on the grass, to press his tongue between her lips, to lower his body down on

  hers. . . .

  Shocked at finding thoughts so unlike himself erupting from his brain, he stood up. He could no longer bear the thought of being so close to Spaeth.

  “Stop!” she cried out. “Where are you going?”

  “Away,” he said unclearly, his mouth stiff and awkward. But before he could move, Spaeth had grasped his arm and pulled him down with a surprising strength. “Listen!” she whispered.

  The scene before him had changed. Not a detail of the hillside was different, but the space seemed to have grown larger, as if viewed through a lens. His senses had become painfully acute: he could pick out every individual blade of grass down the hillside. He was keenly conscious of the unnatural stillness that had persisted ever since they had come to the hill. He felt suspended in a limbo world where there was neither movement, breath, nor death.

  At his side, Spaeth began to sing again, but now there was an urgency to the four-note pattern, a summons. A chill trickled down his spine. He strained to hear over the persistent crooning of the song and the discordant pounding of his blood. At last, on the edge of hearing, he sensed the sympathetic notes of the sea far below them in the night. A soft, answering whisper from behind his back made his skin prickle.

  “Don’t look!” Spaeth warned. “J
ust listen.”

  The stones at his back were ringing, singing to the sea. Second by second the sound grew and blended with the wind, until he could recognize the very notes of Spaeth’s song. A sense of terrible desolation shook him. The song was hollow, inhuman. He had no business hearing it.

  “Speak, Inning!” Spaeth’s voice lashed him with derision. He looked up as in a dream, to see that she was standing above him with a night-wild triumph. There were no longer any stars behind her head. “Go on,” she taunted, “argue to me now about justice.”

  He opened his mouth to speak, but all he could do was sing the notes of the wind’s song. His head was a bell of glass, a crystal ringing with the organ tones of the air around him.

  “Go on, preach to the wind!” Spaeth’s voice cut against the flow of the sound, scarring his consciousness. “Tell the night about reason and law!”

  Her last syllable was drowned by a peal of wind tuned to the timbre of her voice. She looked up, her triumph drained in an instant. He realized she was afraid.

  Mutely he reached out a hand toward her. She ignored him, preoccupied by something in the distance. He summoned all his strength and concentration to say her name.

  She turned to him, her face waxy. “You took the risk in coming with me. I cannot help you any more.”

  Again the wind echoed her tone, and she flinched. She turned away, and for a moment he thought she was going to leave him alone. He gave a terrified, animal cry. She hesitated, then turned back with an angry exclamation and took his wrist, jerking him to his feet. It was easy to do, for he was light as a fish in a sea of sound. “Hide in the eye!” she shouted, and started up the hill.

  He began to follow her, but stopped in confusion. He stood on a chalky white slope, grassless and smooth with wind and age. It curved away into a distance lost in the inky fog. With a shock he realized that what he had taken for a hillside was in reality a vast, undulating field of bone; and what he had taken for an island was the bleached skull of an enormous creature, lying slain in the sea. He looked to Spaeth in wonder, but she was already halfway up the slope to the eyehole that stared up into the blank heavens.

  The bone was slick and clammy underfoot. The ridge before him seemed impossibly sheer. He tried to gain a toehold on the smooth surface, but his boot slipped and he fell back. Again he tried, only to slide farther down. He clutched with aching fingers at the bony slope, not daring to look down. Spaeth was far ahead, disappearing up the hill into the fog. He wanted to call her back, but could not make his voice work. Then it occurred to him that his boots were weighting him down. Frantically he tore them off and leaped forward on bare feet.

  When he reached the edge of the eyepit, Spaeth was gone. The socket held a darkness dense as liquid. He could not bring himself to step over the edge. As he hesitated, a sucking wind pulled him back. He fell full-length on the bony ground, clutching the orbital ridge as the wind mouthed his body. Pulling against that terrible suction, he edged forward until he hung over the pit. Without allowing himself to think, he threw himself in.

  What he landed on he never knew. He lay on his back staring up out of the cavity. The air was cold; he could see his breath. Beyond his hiding place rang the desolate song of the wind, and his bones responded. He struggled not to hear, pressing his hands over his ears and shouting to drown the sound out. He felt he must give way when suddenly the sound grew faint. He looked up to find Spaeth bending over him, her hands covering his ears. She had lent him the brief strength not to hear.

  But her face was worn and pale. “Are there gods that protect Innings?” she asked.

  “Some of us believe—” he began; but it was too much effort to speak.

  “Then pray to them,” she said.

  Desperately he wanted to escape from this nightmare, to waken and find himself back in his own world; he saw in her eyes that she wished the same.

  “What is happening?” he said.

  “I don’t know. We must wait to see if anything finds us here.”

  “What sort of thing?”

  “Don’t talk. Don’t even think. They can smell thoughts. Just pray.”

  She drew away, and he felt part of him draw away with her. He was left attenuated, spun thin and fragile, as if he were all eye. She had stolen all but his power to witness.

  As Spaeth stepped back, there was a cold breath of air, and on the edge of the pit above them appeared a condensation of blackness against the black sky. For a moment Nathaway thought it was a large block of stone; then he realized it was breathing. Spaeth flinched when she saw it. A heavy tread jarred the air, and a second shadow appeared on the lip of the pit. Then a third. They were trapped.

  Spaeth crouched like an animal at bay. Panic rippled over Nathaway’s skin, for he knew his safety depended on her. With a jolt, her last words came back to him. “Pray,” she had said. He knew no prayers. He had never needed a god before. Now, haltingly, he began to say words, jumbled and desperate at first, a confession of his own smallness against the immensity of the world.

  Subtly the scene before him changed. His sense of time was lost, but it seemed as if he could discern some movement. In slow flashes it came to him that Spaeth was dancing. He wanted to stop her, to cry out the urgency of the situation. But her dance had caught the attention of the dark watchers. As her movement took on a circular pattern, they began to follow her. In the flickering light, her shadow danced behind her against the walls of their refuge. Faster they all began to spin, until Nathaway was dizzy with watching them. A vortex began to form in the centre; the current tugged at his life-force, a black magnet attracting all energy to itself. Desperately he fought to keep his heart beating, his mind functioning against that gravitation of energy to the centre.

  Suddenly an explosion that had once been a woman swooped into the vortex and erupted upward. The shadows above met it, and Nathaway was blinded by a detonation of the darkness. He had no time to turn away or shield himself. As he lost his hold and fell, his mind grasped onto the only conviction in reach: he still wanted to live.

  6

  Fugitives

  Harg was deep asleep the next morning when the door crashed back against the wall so hard that dust filtered down from the rafters. Before he could quite struggle awake, four marines pushed into the house, armed for police duty: clubs, handcuffs, and pistols. They scanned the darkened room and saw Harg, then went straight for him. Two of them dragged him roughly from bed, then shoved him across the room and through the door, out into the cold morning air, wearing only the shorts he had been sleeping in.

  Two of the marines held his arms, and another stood watch. Without any preamble, the fourth marine, the one whose nose Harg had bloodied, struck him in the mouth so hard that Harg’s jaw nearly came unhinged. This was followed by a blow to the other side of his face that left white spots dancing before Harg’s vision.

  The third blow, to his stomach, buckled Harg’s legs, and they let him sink to the ground. Gasping for breath, his mind still careening, he crouched on all fours in the dirt. He could make no sense of what was going on.

  “Where is Justice Talley?” the marine demanded.

  Harg gaped at him, speechless. One of the others raised his truncheon, so Harg yelled, “I don’t know!”

  “You threatened him the other day.”

  “What?” Harg said, sounding nearly as stupid as he felt.

  “Come on, you piece of brown. He came here last night. What happened then?”

  “I never saw him,” Harg said. The marine behind him brought the truncheon down on his bare back. “I swear to you, I was here all night. He was never here.”

  The door behind them banged and Tway came flying out into the yard, an old coat wrapped hastily around her nightgown. Fearlessly, she thrust herself between the marines and knelt on the ground beside Harg, putting an arm around his shoulders. “Four agai
nst one?” she shouted at them. “Is that your idea of a fair fight?”

  The marines stepped back. She went on furiously, “He was in the house all night. I was here. He did nothing but talk and sleep. We would have known.”

  All around the landing, the doors of other houses had started opening, and people were collecting to see what was going on. Strobe had come out of the house, and was frowning darkly, his massive arms crossed on his chest. Unwilling to continue with so many witnesses, the marine said to Harg, “If we find out you’re lying . . .”

  They marched off noisily in a thuggish clump. Harg’s lip had started bleeding profusely, and Tway pressed a piece of cloth into his hand to stanch it. “Here, come inside. I’ll give you something cold to put on that.”

  She led him back in while Strobe stayed outside to talk to the neighbours. Once he had a cold, wet cloth pressed to his face and the bleeding had slowed, Harg said, “What the bloody hell were they talking about?”

  Grimly, Tway said, “You men were so wound up in your conspiracies last night, you didn’t know what was going on outside. Probably everyone in the neighbourhood could have answered their question.”

  “So the asswipes decided to beat on the one person who didn’t know a thing.” He paused to spit some blood into an empty beer glass by his chair, then looked up at her. “Justice Talley? The Inning?”

  In a low, tense voice, she said, “Last night, the elders asked Spaeth to give dhota for Jory.”

  This news sent a shock of alarm through Harg. He grasped Tway’s arm hard. “She didn’t do it, did she?” The thought of her, so beautiful and graceful, drooling and twitching with Jory’s injury, was more painful than the beating.

  “Well, they brought her to him, and of course you know what happened when she saw him. She wanted to do it.”