‘Are you truly here?’ he demanded.
‘Yes,’ Jilseth said through gritted teeth. ‘Where’s Aritane?’
‘I haven’t seen her since they took us from the valley above Wrede.’ Corrain found his own jaw clenching as he recalled the fierce debates over her likely fate which he’d had with himself in the darkness.
She had said that she had been exiled on pain of death. But she was one of their own. Surely the sheltya would have read her recollections and seen her remorse. Surely they would have seen the pressing threats which had convinced her to risk returning.
‘Can’t you scry for her?’ he demanded. ‘Can’t some Suthyfer wizard?’
‘We’ve tried,’ Jilseth snapped. The flame at her fingertip swelled to illuminate the entire cave. ‘Where’s the door?’
‘There isn’t one, not that I can find,’ Corrain amended.
Once he was convinced that this prison was no aetheric illusion, he had searched every hand’s breadth of the wall from the undulating curve where it joined the floor to as high as he could reach.
Jilseth looked at him. ‘You’re not dead of hunger and thirst and you haven’t soiled this place—’
‘They come and go when I’m asleep,’ Corrain said curtly.
He had tried to stay awake, ready to challenge anyone coming to see how he fared. It had been appallingly difficult with the darkness lulling him to sleep. He had searched the cavern for some pebble to sit on, willing to suffer the discomfort for the sake of wakefulness. He hadn’t found any such thing and both ewer and chamber pot were made of metal so he hadn’t been able to break those for helpful shards.
Jilseth forced a smile. ‘My magic will find us a way out.’
‘What day is it?’ Corrain demanded. ‘What’s happened in Col? What news do you have of Halferan?’
‘It’s the fourteenth day of For-Spring,’ Jilseth replied swiftly, ‘and Hadrumal is beset by Soluran wizards who are unmaking our defences against the Jagai fleet while their adepts attack any mages trying to restore them. These sheltya must help us—’
‘The fourteenth...’ Had he truly lost count of the days so badly?
‘Lady Zurenne continues to prosper and there’s no sign that our enemies have the least interest in her or her children.’ Jilseth was running the fingertips of her unwounded hand lightly over the smooth rock wall. ‘You may yet see Halferan take command of renewed trade with the Aldabreshi, in Caladhria at least.’
‘What about Hosh?’ Surely that simple question should win him an intelligible answer.
‘Hosh is restored and returned.’ Jilseth frowned at the pale grey stone.
Before Corrain could ask anything further, she stepped into the solid wall as easily as if it was a fog bank.
The mageflame went with her, leaving Corrain in crushing darkness. He hammered on the rock with bare fists, yelling, incoherent with rage and terror.
‘I’m sorry!’ Jilseth reappeared with the same swiftness and laid her unwounded hand on Corrain’s arm.
He saw the remorse in her eyes. Before he could protest that he was no child afraid of snuffing his night candle, she stepped back into the wall and took his arm with her into the solid rock. Corrain struggled to pull himself free. For all he achieved, his hand could have been fixed within the rock like one of those ancient ferns sold in Duryea. Worse, Jilseth was dragging him forward with the strength of a team of horses.
He tried to brace himself with his free hand but his arm sank into the wall up to the elbow. His boots skidded on the cave floor before his feet were inexorably drawn into the stone. His chest pressed painfully hard against the rock before it yielded. Now the wall rasped his unshaven cheek, leaving his skin raw. Pain enveloped him. Every breath was agony, as though he had cracked every one of his ribs.
Corrain closed his eyes, futile though the gesture was. Memory overwhelmed him.
Living on Caladhria’s shore, riding the high-banked coast road with pastures on one side and salt marshes on the other, most Halferan men had seen a deer caught in a slough of quicksand. There was no better warning for them to take the utmost care if they ever ventured into the trackless maze of salt-thorn thickets and intertwined streams.
When he had been guard captain, Corrain had once led the pursuit of a man who had killed his brother in a fit of drunken rage. Hunting hounds brought from Taw Ricks had tracked the fugitive into the marshes. Corrain had hand-picked his most experienced men to accompany himself and the kennel master.
They found the murderer struggling in the mire. There had been no way to reach him without risking more and innocent lives. Corrain had stood and watched the man slowly being sucked deeper and deeper so that he could bear witness to Lord Halferan that Talagrin had administered such justice rather than Raeponin’s assize and the gallows. He hadn’t spoken a word, ignoring the man’s piteous cries before the slickness finally closed over his head. There had been no point in offering hope where there was none to be had.
While he had felt no remorse, Corrain had dreamed more than once of such a death in the season that followed. He had woken amid sweat-soaked sheets, struggling against the burden of the mud clinging to every limb. He had tasted the harshness of salt water and sand filling his eyes and nose. He gasped with relief to find that he was free of the choking mud sliding into his mouth and down his throat, stifling every breath—
He was standing in a passage, little different from the cave they had left but for the torchlight beyond the curve of the walls and the promise of freedom in the draft.
Jilseth turned her face towards it. ‘I cannot tell how they are keeping the air fresh so deep underground.’
‘Have you any idea of the torment you just inflicted on this man?’ a woman asked, incredulous.
‘Worse than being left alone in the darkness with no way out?’ Jilseth retorted, clearly startled.
Corrain opened his eyes. ‘Aritane?’
The blonde woman looked at him warily. ‘How do you know my name?’
Corrain blinked in the dim light. Now he doubted his own eyes. This woman was tall and while he thought he recognised her twilight blue eyes and her features, her blonde hair had been cropped shorter than the stubble on his own chin. Then he looked a third time. ‘It is you.’
‘My name is Aritane,’ she confirmed guardedly. ‘Now come with me. Sheltya have granted you an audience.’
However different she looked, her voice convinced Corrain. ‘What have you told them? What have they said?’
She looked down at his hand on her grey sleeve, momentarily disbelieving. An instant later, Corrain found his hand hanging by his side with no memory of having released her.
‘You are a lowlander so ignorant of our customs. Know that it is forbidden to lay hands upon any sheltya.’ Though she didn’t raise her voice, her rebuke was implacable.
‘Don’t you know him?’ Jilseth raised both hands, beseeching. Corrain noticed that the mageflame no longer burned at her fingertip. ‘Don’t you remember me? We met in Suthyfer?’
The shaven headed woman frowned, curious. ‘Where is Suthyfer?’
‘Death or worse.’ Now Corrain realised what that meant.
Aritane looked concerned. ‘You need not fear execution of body or mind for merely trespassing in the high peaks. Account for yourselves honestly and openly and you will be sent on your way unharmed.’
‘On our way?’ Corrain stared at her.
Aritane didn’t seem to notice anything amiss. ‘Follow me.’
As the Mountain woman walked away Corrain glanced at Jilseth. ‘Do you want to try some other way to escape? I don’t think that would be wise.’
‘No,’ she agreed tersely. ‘In any case, I came to see these sheltya.’
Not to rescue him. Corrain told himself he shouldn’t have expected it, even as her words cut him to the marrow.
As he gestured for her to take the lead, his hand strayed to his hip but there was no reassuring weight of a blade there.
The pas
sage curved steadily without forking or offering any opening into another cavern. Bracketed torches burned without smoke or flickering.
‘Do you know which way we’re going?’ he asked Jilseth, low voiced.
‘Upwards and eastwards,’ she murmured, ‘however that may help us.’
As Corrain was forced to acknowledge the truth of that, the passageway took an abrupt turn and broadened into a vast cave. High above, the roof was lost in darkness while torches shone against glistening walls of pale stone which seemed to have flowed like water before freezing into rippling draperies and hanging fringes.
A double handful of figures in hooded grey robes stood in a loose circle in the centre of the unfurnished cave. Jilseth halted and Corrain stopped a pace behind her. Aritane, or the woman who had once been Aritane, retreated, to stand at the entrance with her head bowed.
‘Good day to you.’ Jilseth inclined her head as courteously as any baron addressing the Caladhrian parliament. ‘Do I have the honour of addressing your council?’
‘Lowlander customs and titles have no place here.’ The speaker put back his hood to reveal a shaven head and those eerily darkened eyelids.
Corrain recognised that sardonic contempt. He wondered how to warn Jilseth without drawing the bastard’s attention.
A second man tugged at his hood, letting it fall to his shoulders. ‘For your current purposes, you may think of us as you would Hadrumal’s most eminent mages.’
He didn’t look particularly eminent to Corrain; small boned and short even for a Mountain Man, his white hair worn away by age to a few wisps around his ears while one hand hung slack by his side, gently shaking with some palsy.
His voice was calm and confident though and Corrain recognised him for the man who had assured him the cave prison was real.
Did these hoods conceal the other adepts who had riffled through his memories? Who had scoured Aritane’s head clean of all that had made her the woman she had once been?
Too late, he remembered how little scruple these people showed when it came to intruding on someone else’s thoughts.
A woman lowered her hood to stare critically at him. ‘We do not use true magic for our own amusement.’
‘Please.’ Jilseth raised her hand. ‘Time is of the essence. The wizards of Hadrumal are beset by Solura’s wizards and adepts from three Houses of Sanctuary. If we don’t surrender a store of ensorcelled artefacts, they will strip away our defences and leave us open to attack by countless mercenaries and Archipelagan swordsmen.’
‘We have counted the Jagai ships.’ Torchlight struck the white-gold sheen of stubble on the woman’s head.
‘Then you know what we face.’ Jilseth looked her in the eye. ‘Do you understand what is at stake? Generations of wizardly lore will be lost or stolen away if you do not help us withstand these aetheric assaults so we can defend ourselves.’
‘There can be no question of their own adepts defying Soluran Artifice,’ the old man declared with absolute certainty,
Corrain saw his gaze shift towards the great cave’s entrance. There could be no doubt that these sheltya had stripped every last scrap of knowledge about aetheric magic in Suthyfer and Col from Aritane’s memory.
Another woman lowered her hood to speak; so thin-faced that her darkened eyes looked like a skull’s empty sockets. She was of an age to be Aritane’s mother though Corrain recalled that sheltya vows forbade them children.
‘What is that to us?’ Her question was genuine, not rhetorical flourish, though her tone clearly assumed there could be no sufficient answer.
‘You fear the loss of your lore.’ The first man sneered at Jilseth. ‘True knowledge cannot be destroyed and it’s of no concern to us if your charlatans’ secrets are mislaid.’
She ignored him in favour of addressing the older woman. ‘A blade is neither good nor evil. Such judgements only apply when such a tool is used. A knife can slit an innocent’s throat or save a man’s life in the wilderness. So it is with knowledge, such as Trydek’s magic.’
Corrain recognised the first Archmage’s name. Now he wanted to know why these sheltya now stood as still as the stone icicles on the walls, even those still hidden beneath their concealing hoods.
The tense silence lengthened. The old man spoke first.
‘Will you let us read your thoughts and memories? Then we may fully understand the peril which you face and what Hadrumal’s fall might mean for these mountains.’
He sounded so matter-of-fact that he might have been asking her to pass him a chapbook to read with his ale in some tavern.
Corrain saw Jilseth’s unease but her trepidation didn’t convince him that she truly understood the violation she was being asked to endure. Before he could speak, the hostile man shook his head, mocking.
‘You ask for our help and yet you will not trust us. Very well, keep your secrets. They are of no interest to us.’
He glanced from side to side and the two women nodded. The elder lifted her hood to shroud her face again.
Corrain saw Jilseth’s eyes narrow. She folded her hands behind her back, squaring her shoulders.
‘Search my mind if you must.’
Only Corrain could see how tightly she interlaced her fingers, deliberately pressing on those seared wounds. Why inflict such pain on herself?
Before he could find a reason, she collapsed. Corrain sprang forward. Even so, he was barely in time to save her from a bruising fall onto the stone floor. As he hugged her to his chest, she hung in his arms, dead weight.
At least she was still breathing. Corrain lowered her to the floor. Straightening her sprawling legs, he looked up at the sheltya. ‘What—?’
Jilseth rolled onto her side. She hadn’t recovered her wits; her eyes were still tightly closed. Her back arched and her arms tensed, hands clawed. Tremors racked her from head to toe.
Corrain recalled an old guardsman, Brish, from Fitrel’s days as sergeant, who’d fallen off his horse and cracked his skull, so the apothecary had said. He’d seemed to recover, until the seizures had started, before an apoplexy had finally killed him.
Jilseth’s head drummed on the cave’s floor. Corrain saw blood smear her cheek as the unforgiving stone scraped her ear raw. He tore off his jerkin to force the cloth beneath her head.
‘What are you doing?’ he shouted at the sheltya.
‘She invited us into her thoughts. The more she fights against us, the more she will suffer.’
The barely veiled satisfaction in the sardonic man’s words made Corrain want to punch the swine’s teeth out through the back of his head. But he would have to leave Jilseth to do that and still more brutal convulsions were now wracking her. He was struggling to keep his jerkin cushioning her head.
‘She cannot help but resist us.’ The old man shook his head regretfully.
‘These charlatans always panic when they are cut off from their sorcery,’ the sardonic man said smugly.
One of the hooded figures said something sharp in the Mountain tongue. Another faceless grey-robed figure answered. If Corrain couldn’t understand what they said, he could at least hear their consternation.
Jilseth was whimpering, her lips bloodied. Had she bitten her tongue? Corrain recalled bitter argument in the barrack hall over forcing a spoon into Brish’s mouth to stop him choking on his tongue. The poor bastard had broken four teeth on the cursed thing.
Corrain seized Jilseth’s shoulders and forced her forwards as a spasm threw her onto her back. He could at least keep her face down to stop her drowning in her own blood.
Her arms and legs thrashed wildly. He would never have believed that such a slightly built woman could prove so strong. She could have no sense of what she was doing, he was sure of that. Her out-flung hand smacked so hard against the floor that Corrain was sure he heard a bone crack.
The sheltya stood in their loose circle, conversing in their incomprehensible tongue. Corrain guessed that some argument was developing but Jilseth’s whimpers rose to a t
hin keening, so despairing that hair rose like hackles on his neck.
He gathered her to him in a crushing embrace. If she was lost in some sheltya wrought nightmare, perhaps in some way beyond conscious thought, she might feel that reassurance. Hadn’t Hosh, when the boy had so nearly died of that fever?
‘Enough!’
As the old man spoke, Jilseth went limp. Corrain laid her gently down on his jerkin and rolled her head to one side to save her from choking on bloody drool.
‘You are free to go.’
He looked at the golden-haired sheltya woman.
‘We have debated your fate and conclude that you and your people are of no interest to the mountains.’ The man who had been so hostile lifted up his hood to hide his face.
‘You may leave this place and she may go on her way when she has returned to her senses. We will not help Hadrumal’s wizards.’ The sheltya woman raised her hood.
Now only the old man with the palsied hand remained with his head uncovered.
‘You think I would leave her here?’ Corrain didn’t care if this old man was the least deserving of his anger.
‘No,’ the old man said calmly.
Corrain carefully withdrew his jerkin from beneath Jilseth’s head and put it on. After a moment’s consideration, he squatted and lifted her up. Draping her over one shoulder like a sack of grain wasn’t overly dignified but he didn’t know how far they might have to go to find shelter.
‘Are you casting us out into the wilderness without any gear?’ he challenged the old man. ‘Can you convince yourselves that’s not murder if you don’t see our blood on your hands?’
None of the hooded figures reacted. After a long moment, the old man, nodded. ‘Wait on the mountainside and I will bring your gear.’
‘Which way do we go?’ Corrain was in no mood to be put to any tests.
The old man gestured. ‘That way.’
Corrain nodded. That could suffice for a farewell because nothing would induce him to thank these callous bastards.
The old man smiled. ‘Among the Mountain Men, the insult you should use is “son of his own grandfather.”’
Defiant Peaks (The Hadrumal Crisis) Page 45
