Keeper of the Keys

by Janny Wurts

  Wind ruffled the spanker. Slack canvas slammed taut, and, lacking the balancing force of the jib to hold her hove to, Callinde sheared ahead. Only one refuge remained where Thienz could not follow; undersized forelimbs hampered them from swimming without their heads immersed, and their gills did not function in salt water. With a short gasp of fear, Jaric caught the jib sheet on Callinde's lee side. He flipped it overboard. Then, in full view of the demons, he leapt the other rail and dived.

  As he struck the water he heard a wail from the Thienz. Their dismay touched his mind like dream-sense; they had expected the weak, indecisive boy Emien recalled from Elrinfaer, not a strapping young man who threw knives. Their mistake would not be repeated. Even as sea water closed over the boy's head, the demons relayed their discovery to colleagues at Shadowfane.

  Callinde gathered way. Jaric swam under the keel and surfaced to leeward. His hands scrabbled frantically over planks. If he missed the sheet line he had thrown, his boat would sail past, and demons would have him at their mercy. Jaric thrashed, felt rope snake past his shoulder. He grabbed and clung. The jerk as the plies whipped taut stripped the callus from his palm, but he dared not cry out. Aware that Callinde would swing and jibe against the drag of his weight on the line, Jaric thrust his dagger between his teeth.

  He hauled himself in hand over hand. Foam swirled to his chin, slapped his face, and set him choking. Jaric struggled for breath, and felt a mental stab as Thienz sought his mind. He ducked fast, sucked salt water around his blade on the chance that demons might think him drowning. All the while his hands stayed busy on the line. Fighting the drag of the water, Jaric hauled himself alongside Callinde, then kicked and hoisted himself up to the jib sheet block.

  Over the rail he glimpsed Thienz beginning to board. Callinde swung, delaying them; her spanker flapped sullenly as her sternpost crossed the wind. Jaric dangled with his feet in the sea. Hanging from his hands, he worked aft along the thwart while the yard carved an arc across the stars. Callinde balanced between port tack and starboard, then jerked as the enemy entered her cockpit. Jaric caught the knife from his teeth. Waiting with his mind locked on images of darkness and sea water, he felt the boat turn further. Wind blew cold on his cheek. Then air filled the spanker with a thunderous flap of canvas. The boy yanked himself up, reached over the thwart with a desperate heave, and slashed the spanker sheet at the block.

  The boom swung across the cockpit with killing speed, smashing the Thienz where they stood. Darts showered in the moonlight, to fall rattling amid floorboards and a flailing mass of demon-flesh. Jaric jammed his knife between the thwarts. He hauled himself bodily on board and, with the breath burning in stressed lungs, plunged across the cockpit. Barring his heart against mercy, he stabbed and cut throats until the last, toad-fingered hand fell limp.

  At the end, he leaned gasping against the stern seat. Blood streaked his arms to the shoulder, and his tunic dripped sea-water dyed red. Pilotless, Callinde jibed again; the shadow of her sail scythed across the deck, then passed, exposing carnage drenched in moonlight. Overtaken by horror at the killing his hand had engineered, Jaric cried out. He doubled up over the rail and retched until his stomach emptied. His nausea took a long time to subside. When at last he raised his head, he saw that the demon ship drifted aimlessly. No helmsman took her tiller to resume chase.

  Yet Jaric dared not assume all the Thienz lay dead. Callinde wallowed over the swells, littered with corpses and the silvery needles of spilled darts; she could not sail until cut lines were spliced and set right. Jaric pushed himself to his feet. With shaking hands he set about the task of lashing the spanker boom and clearing his decks of the dead.

  XV

  Stalkers

  Morning came in a wash of copper and gold, with Callinde sailing briskly on a southwest heading. Jaric crouched over the helm, both eyes gritty from sleeplessness, and his fingertips raw from splicing lines. The attack and its aftermath had left him spent, and though at dawn he had grappled to the Thienz vessel and boarded to make certain none of his enemies remained, empty decks failed to reassure him. The demons would be back. Jaric dared not rest until Callinde was well away from her present position.

  The breeze slackened as the day warmed. Jaric set about the repeated task of lashing the helm, then shook the last reef from the main and changed to the larger headsail. Then he fetched a biscuit from his dwindling stock of supplies and munched while he made a restless survey of the horizon.

  The sea stretched empty, except for the saffron-dyed sails of a fishing boat out of Innishari. Yesterday the presence of other craft would have been a welcome reassurance that Callinde did not fare alone upon the ocean, but now any boat might carry enemies. Jaric lost his appetite. To sail the empty south reaches with no more weapon than a rigging knife suddenly seemed a fool's errand. If he were killed or taken, the Keys to Elrinfaer and Anskiere's wards over the Mharg would become a fearful liability to Keithland. The boy tossed his crust overboard for the fish to finish, then freed the steering oar and brought his boat about. His search for the Isle of the Vaere must wait. The level in Callinde's water casks was getting low anyway. Since Westisle lay four days' sail due north, Jaric decided to visit the markets there. Perhaps by trading every belonging he could spare, he might arm himself well enough to repel boarders.

  But his plan lasted no longer than the span of a still afternoon. The wind died to a breath, and the waves rolled, varnished by calm. Stopped dead in the water by the caprice of the weather, Jaric cursed, and longed for Taen, and finally exhausted himself with worry. He shipped the steering oar in frustration. Curled in the slanting shadow of the headsail, he slept with his head on crossed wrists.

  He woke in the silver chill of twilight. Early stars pricked the zenith, the sea an expanse of darkened indigo beneath. Jaric rose and stretched the stiffness from his limbs. He splashed seawater on his neck and face to relieve the sting of sunburn, then stepped to the bow and leaned on the headstay to reconnoitre. South, the boundary of water and sky met in a line unbroken by any sign of life; but to the north, between Callinde and the direction of Westisle, spread the pen-stroke silhouettes of nine masts.

  Jaric's skin prickled warning. No fishermen he ever saw would drop canvas in a calm and risk missing the first change in the wind. Occasionally the Kielmark's vessels used such a ploy to conceal themselves in the dazzle of sunlight reflected on water. But only the most inept of pirates would sail in fishing smacks and sloops, far from the wealth of the trade routes. What bore down from the north could only be Thienz drawn by the death-dreams of last night's slain.

  Jaric shut his eyes to forestall panic. He resisted the first, overwhelming impulse to spring headlong for the steering oar. The compulsions of Thienz travelled poorly over water and at present Callinde lay distant enough to keep him beyond reach of demon manipulation. Jaric forced himself to think rationally. He must wait until dark to put about. Then the stalkers from Shadowfane might not see his boat change heading, and if luck blessed him with wind, Callinde might flee beyond the horizon before morning.

  But the waiting proved painfully difficult. Jaric paced and sweated as the sun lowered, the last rays staining Callinde's sails bloody red. The afterglow faded slowly from the sky, and with it went sight of the masts which loomed to the north. Jaric assumed the stern seat in cover of darkness. Sweating in icy fear, he took up the steering oar and sculled Callinde around. No breath of air steadied her keel on the new course, an easterly heading he hoped would enable him to tack and make port in Harborside on Skane's Edge. The presence of the Thienz made landfall there all the more necessary; his mug now scuffed bottom when he dipped into his cask for a drink. If the enemy kept him at sea after his stores ran out, thirst and starvation might kill him without the inconvenience of a fight.

  Left no task in the calm but to battle his own apprehension, Jaric stared north until his eyes stung. His vigil was lonely, a solitude more relentless than any but a sailor could know. Nothing met his search but night
-dark waves, broken by the occasional sparkle of phosphorescence where schools of fish disturbed the surface. The dark had swallowed his enemies. No means remained to determine whether the drift carried their boats near or farther off. Every noise made Jaric start, even the slat of Callinde's gear as she wallowed windless in the swell. By the time the constellations turned to show the harvester overhead at midnight, the boy's nerves were sawed raw. Light would have helped. But the glow of the masthead lantern would mark his position like a beacon, and very likely draw the demons to try a mind-probe to bind him. Recalling Corley's evasive action with flame when Thienz had meddled with his thoughts, Jaric fetched the lamp from a locker. He cleaned and trimmed the wick by touch, then made certain the reservoir was filled with oil. As a final precaution, he dug deep in the aft locker and removed a cask of oakum, a mix of pitch and fibre used by shipwrights to caulk the seams between planking. At need, the stuff would burn mightily; to set such a fire on shipboard would be an act of extreme desperation, but better Callinde were destroyed than to let demons kill him for the Keys. Jaric wedged the cask beneath the stern seat with a muttered apology to the shade of Mathieson Keldric. Then he sat with striker and rigging knife near to hand, and thought of Taen between fervent prayers for breeze.

  Wind answered in the dark before dawn, but weather came with it, blotting the summer sky with sheets of low-flying cloud. For once not cursing the threat of moisture in the air, Jaric hardened his lines. Callinde's sails banged taut. She gathered way, driving forward into the swell. Spray shot from her bow, and sternward her wake trailed a comet tail of phosphorescence. Her young helmsman leaned into his oar and smiled with fierce exhilaration. Rain would hide him; if he rigged the spare sail with a catch basin, run-off could replenish his cask. Stormy weather might lend him resource to thwart both thirst and the Thienz.

  Yet fortune granted only small favours. The clouds lowered and spilled thick, misty drizzle, and the wind slacked to the barest hint of breeze. Jaric hunched over the steering oar. More wet seemed to trickle down his neck than ran off the spare canvas to fill his catch basin.

  By dawn barely enough air moved to fill Callinde's sails, and beyond ten yards, the waves lay swallowed in drifts of featureless grey. The possibility that Thienz might lurk unseen at any quarter of the compass preyed upon Jaric's thoughts, wore at his spirit until he was angered enough to want to shout and cry by turns. Instead, he lashed Callinde on course, fetched out whetstone and rigging knife, and returned to his post at the helm. With the oar clamped in one elbow, he resorted to Corley's habit of sharpening steel to pass the hours.

  Day brightened over Callinde's yard. Still the mist did not lift. It mantled waters the grey on grey of dull metal, and damped the shear of steel across stone as Jaric whetted his blade. He continued long after the edge was keen, just to keep his fingers busy; but as the morning progressed, that remedy was not enough. The fog swirled ghost-shapes around his boat and strung jewelled droplets on his lashes. He blinked them away, yet in time this seemed too much effort. His eyes grew heavy. His hands stopped the motion of whetstone and blade, while his mind strayed unnoticed across the borders of waking, into dream ...

  * * *

  Waves and the dull red of Callinde's sails lost colour, became the whiteness of snowfall in Seitforest. Jaric failed to arouse at the transition, wrought as it was by the touch of the enemy upon his mind. Cold and stillness lulled him. His senses knew nothing but the slow spin of flakes whispering through bare branches, the soundless settling of snow into hollows. In time the leaf-patterned forest floor became featureless as spread linen. Even the creeks froze and drifted over, the trickle of water over rock silenced until the season's distant changing. Winter bound the land, and Jaric, into tranced peace. His body assumed the numbness of extreme cold, and his mind became lost in ice-white landscape. Enspelled by dreams, he did not feel his fingers loosen, or hear the clatter as his knife fell to Callinde's floorboards. Nor did he notice when his arm slipped from the steering oar. Callinde lost way, her sails slatting fretfully aloft. Beaded with droplets from the mist, the compass needle wandered in circles as his boat drifted rudderless over the waves.

  And the dream-cold deepened. Knife-keen, it pierced the very mantle of the soil and touched the trees to the roots, freezing the dormant life within. Boughs bent, burdened under cruel shackles of snow. Wood gone brittle with chill snapped, eerily soundless in the wintry air; frost chewed through the bark like acid, and ice crystals prised and pressured, and burst the fastness of stone. Soon the whiteness ruled supreme. Sprawled like a corpse against Callinde's thwart, Jaric felt no pain. He knew no alarm, no sorrow, no feeling at all, even as the cold penetrated his body and reached to stop his heart.

  Near the end another sound intruded. Faint with distance, and sweetly brittle in the still air, the chime of goat bells penetrated the Thienz-wrought tomb of cold. Sluggish with trance, Jaric fumbled after the source. The white which blanketed his vision thinned slightly, and insubstantial as ghost-image overtop he saw a hillside patched with wildflowers and heather. The land was rough, torn in places by weathered spurs of granite. There a black-haired girl sat amid a milling herd of brown goats. The vision of her was indistinct, as if viewed through the shallows of a running stream. But her warning rang clear as the bells through the winter chill which gripped him.

  'Jaric, the Thienz have set a dream-spell on you! Jaric!'

  But the whiteness rendered the words as sound without meaning, a disturbance that floundered and died into silence. The girl's image dissipated, and the hillside with its cloak of heather and fern dimmed to wispy shadows. Before long the void devoured them entirely. Thienz-bound, Jaric drifted reasonless as a stone.

  Yet the presence of the Dreamweaver did not entirely fade. With all her skills, Taen gathered herself and struck out against the cocoon that demons had woven around the awareness of Ivainson Jaric. Her urgency prised like a knife, and this time broke through.

  Jaric roused. The workings of his mind and body felt swathed in a tide of whiteness and he could not orient. Uncertain whether the presence he remembered was a temptation of demons designed to weaken him, or illusion born of longing and his own imagination, he murmured Taen's name.

  Her answer brought raw-edged fear. 'Jaric, you must break free!' At last allowed foothold in his conscious mind, she spun dream-sense and attacked. The demon's prison shivered before the impact of her powers. Taen struck again, utterly exhausting her strength. Unable to maintain contact, her touch faded, even as the barrier of numbness which threatened the life of Ivain's heir weakened and suddenly collapsed.

  Cold needled wakened senses with an onslaught of terrible pain. Jaric recoiled. Ripped by agony into full remembrance of Callinde, the ocean, and the fishing boats laden with enemies determined to take his life, he doubled over in the stern seat. His brow cracked unwittingly into the steering oar. His howl of shock and surprise was torn away by wind, and he roused fully at last, brought around by the maddened thrash of canvas. The weather had changed, totally. Mist had given way to clouds and driving rain. Water streamed in streaks off sails and spars, while Callinde pitched over white-capped waves, her lines lashing untended through her blocks. Panting like a distance runner to regain the air his slowed lungs had neglected, Jaric made no move to remedy his lapse of seamanship. He reached instinctively to rub his bruised forehead, then stopped to stare at his hands. The flesh was barely cool to the touch. Yet to the eye the skin was mottled purple-white, as if exposed to extreme cold. The inner ache and the agony of returning circulation were quite real, and the effects wrung Jaric to dizziness. The illusion of winter that Thienz had used to ensnare his mind had apparently afflicted his body with all the effects of frostbite.

  The implications terrified, that Thienz he could not see might bind the human mind with visions potent enough to kill. Jaric stuffed his aching fingers under the tail of his tunic, but more than cold touched his heart. His search for the Isle of the Vaere had nearly ended here, adrift on th
e lonely ocean. Ivain's inheritance and Taen's hope of life might have been wasted before his potential could be challenged by the Cycle of Fire. Frightened to action, Jaric rose upon shaky legs. Since the machinations of the Thienz did not carry efficiently across water, the demons who had tried murder would not be far off.

  Shivering and alone, the heir of Ivain Firelord sprang forward and hardened Callinde's slackened lines. As his boat rounded, her sails punched taut by the wind, he bounded back to the steering oar and strained every muscle in his arms resetting his interrupted course. He shied from thinking of Taen, whose need had inspired him to seek the Vaere, and whose intervention had certainly spared his life. He dared not consider the headache which tormented him, nor the lingering ache of frost that gnawed at his fingers and toes. He bound all his resources to sailing, and the north-northwesterly heading that would see him safe to Skane's Edge.

  The squall came on suddenly. Between one gust and the next a downpour lashed the waters, flattening the wave crests and kicking up spray in opaque white sheets. Jaric sailed by his compass, his hands clenched fast to the steering oar, for the storm left him blind. No visibility remained to show whether he sailed towards freedom or the heart of the demon fleet; and as the wind shifted round to the north, he fought the buck of the swell. Clinging to the helm, he drove Callinde's bow windward to the limit of her sturdy design. Then the squall passed. The skies hung moiled and black, and the sea foamed angry spray beneath. Jaric squinted through the spray which sheeted off the bowsprit, but no trace of mast, sail, or spar marred the waters ahead. Storm still curtained the sternward horizon, hiding any presence of Thienz pursuit. Since Jaric saw no sign of the demon fleet, he concluded he must have drifted past their location in the calm, and only Taen's intervention and the cover of the fog had spared him. Afraid to leave the helm even for a drink of water, he sailed, while nightfall darkened around him.