by Jude Fisher
This time, the nausea was unstoppable. Vomit burst out of Saro’s mouth and down the flank of the horse, spattered onto the decaying stonework, where his stomach’s acids would surely react with the excoriating air and bring yet more rot to this damned and evil place, replete with its tortured ghosts and traumatised memories, with the violence and fanaticism which had made Jetra the great rotten heart of the Southern Empire, its foul reality belied by the grace and serenity of its towering minarets, its crenellated walls, its age-old carvings.
They turned another dark corner, then rough hands grabbed Saro and, swearing at the mess he had made, threw him down onto the floor. He hit the polished stone hard and threw out a hand to save his head.
Death and stink. A man being gutted while another sat watching, taking notes.
Saro groaned in agony and rolled away, fetching up beside a wall rank with dripping water. The wall told him other stories: a woman raped by guards when she brought bread and ham for her imprisoned husband; a Footloose man bleeding slowly to death from a stab-wound to the groin; terrified nomad children listening to the screams of their loved ones in the cells beyond; a thousand untimely, undeserved deaths.
Silently, Saro Vingo began to cry. He was crying still when a familiar voice hailed him.
‘The wanderer returns!’
Saro’s head came up with a snap. Even though he knew what to expect, the reality was still a shock. His brother, Tanto Vingo, loomed over him, as repulsively bloated and moonlike as he remembered; but dressed now in the most tasteless opulence that Jetra’s ostentatious tailors could provide. His tunic – a confection of rose and purple watered silk, worn over contrasting hose in luminescent green – was wrapped around with great swags of leather and worked metal, though you could hardly call it ‘belted’, since there was nothing to distinguish the region above from that below the cinctures. A boned collar in lurid, striated purple stood straight up from his shoulders like the angry threat-display of some vast frilled lizard. Massive rings of silver studded with jewels weighed down every finger and a great amethyst caged in silver drew down the lobe of Tanto’s left ear so that the jewel swung pendulously just above his shoulder. His bald head shone with sweat although he had obviously expended no effort in getting here, a fact attested to by the presence of two richly dressed servants with dark circles staining their otherwise immaculate silk livery who must have carried his wheeled chair to this dank and steamy place.
The soldiers who had risked their lives bringing him here waited in the shadows, watching silently.
When Tanto smiled at him in a horrible parody of welcome, Saro noted with a certain satisfaction that his brother had lost yet another tooth from those rotting gums since the last time he had seen him. He stared down at the slimy floor again, since doing so was infinitely preferable to looking at that mocking, predatory grin.
Annoyed that his captive was not being suitably appreciative of his new finery and status, or rising to the bait, Tanto shot out a hand and grabbed Saro by the chin, wrenching his head upright. At the sight of his tear-streaked face, Tanto leered delightedly. ‘Weeping for your lost freedom, eh, brother? Or for fear of what may now befall you?’
Saro held his gaze determinedly, jaws clamped rigid, and said nothing, although fleeting glimpses of Tanto’s recent vile excesses flickered in rapid succession through his head.
Tanto quirked an eyebrow.‘Not speaking to me? How rude. To leave without even a farewell, too: not very brotherly, brother. Our poor father was so beside himself at the thought of his youngest son disgracing our family – such cowardice and ingratitude, to desert from the glorious position in the army that Lord Tycho bestowed upon you and flee from the castle in the middle of the night, like the sneak-thief you are –’ he wagged a finger chidingly in Saro’s face – ‘having stolen his finest horse, the one he had promised to the Lord of Forent, who is, by the way, also much displeased – that he renounced all his standing, and has pledged himself to the cause, joining the army as a rankless man.’
Poor Father, Saro thought, his heart sinking, seeing clearly how Tanto had manipulated the situation. ‘And our uncle?’ he asked quietly.
Tanto waved a dismissive hand. ‘Dead.’
‘Dead?’ Saro experienced a shock of surprise, then of grief. The man who might be his true father was gone from the world. He was truly, terribly alone.
Tanto’s grin widened. ‘You can’t trust Jetran cuisine,’ he said softly. ‘All those herbs and spices. A cook has to be very careful when checking his ingredients. Nomad herb-sellers are always seeking to find new ways to undermine the regime . . .’
His father exiled; Uncle Fabel poisoned. And clearly he was to be the next of the Vingo clan to be expunged.
‘So you see, my dear Saro,’ Tanto said, bending his head so close that Saro was treated to a noxious whiff of decay, ‘now you must bow to me as head of this family; for not only are the family estates all mine, but the Lord of Cantara has discovered ancient statutes and entitlements in the Great Library here and has declared me Lord of Altea, with a stipend from the Treasury.
‘So you may now address me not as “brothe” but as “my lord”.’
He waited expectantly, but Saro continued to stare at him with stony loathing, refusing to be drawn.
Blood suffused Tanto’s cheeks. ‘My lord,’ he prompted.
Reaching down beside the wheeled chair, he unclipped one of several devices arrayed there and came up again with a wicked-looking switch. He examined this item with fond care, weighed it in his hand, then began to beat its ornate head rhythmically upon the other palm.
‘My lord,’ he prompted yet again, his black eyes glinting.
It was, he reasoned in that split-second of madness, a test of the extent of his brother’s new-found power; whether he would act on his violent impulses here, in the clear view not only of his paid servants (who were, it was true, hardly likely to raise any objection if they were at all well acquainted with Tanto’s temper) but also of the soldiers who had been paid so handsomely by Tycho Issian to bring him to this place.
‘You murderous bastard!’
The accompanying gobbet of spittle struck Tanto’s face with a satisfying smack, rolled slowly down the cheek and dropped wetly into the corner of the frilled collar, staining the silk there an angry red, and coming to rest inextricably against the rolls of white flesh which had once been his brother’s neck.
The blow which followed this rather sad act of defiance came as no surprise in fact; only in the amount of force which the supposed invalid had managed to put behind it. The switch cracked across Saro’s face, broke his nose and shattered the bone beneath his right orbit. Half a knuckle-length further and he’d have lost the eye. When he cried out, gristle and bone moved disconcertingly. Blood spurted.
Tanto wiped the gory end of the switch deliberately on the nearest servant’s sleeve, leaving thick red stripes across the pale-blue silk, then returned the weapon to its place in the rack at his side. Leaning back in his chair, he indicated his brother with the merest tilt of his chin.‘Strip him,’ he ordered the soldiers, then sat back in his wheeled chair with his legs out and his arms crossed like a lordling waiting impatiently for the entertainments to begin.
‘Virelai?’ She blinked and refocused, blinked again, stared hard. Familiar pale blue eyes framed by curtains of white hair stared back at her, pupils as small as pinpricks through a sunlit sky into the infinite darkness of space beyond.
‘It is me, yes.’
‘But how—? You were . . .’
‘Dead?’
‘I thought so, yes; you were . . .’ Alisha sought for a description which would not shock; failed to find anything that was not an entire lie, and gave up all attempts at diplomacy. ‘You were – you appeared . . . gone from the world . . . your limbs were stiff, your skin chalky-grey.’
She watched his face as he absorbed this. Shock engulfed him, blind and terrible. Then his gaze skittered from her face to the hand lying curled in
her lap, still clutching the moodstone. His head shot up and he searched her eyes urgently.
‘Yes,’ she said, though he had asked no question aloud. ‘I touched you with it. I think I did.’
Virelai took hold of her hand and peeled her fingers away from the pendant, which despite its recent work had returned to its normal dull colour, apparently as innocuous as a sleeping mouse. He stared down at the mysterious artefact, his brow wrinkled, deep lines of repulsion gouging a course from his nose to the corners of his downturned mouth. She had never seen his face so alive before, so expressive: she had once thought him the most serene man in the world, but he had undergone many changes since those lost days. Then, without a word, he pushed her hand and its burden fiercely away from him and stared wildly into the distance. His eyes had changed colour, she noted with curiosity, from the distant pallor of a fifth-moon sky to the moody grey of a mountain storm. As distraction, she busied herself with tucking the pendant away inside her belt-pouch, and when she looked up again it was to see one of his hands unconsciously rising to spread itself across the place above his heart.
‘I understand this no more than you do,’ she said at last. ‘I saw Saro Vingo use this very stone to take lives . . . ever since the Goddess empowered it. At the Allfair, and then down by . . . the river.’
Tears sprung again to her eyes and she swallowed a sob loudly. It took a while before she was able to compose herself sufficiently to speak again, but the sorcerer said nothing and made no attempt to console her, seeming locked in his own thoughts. After what felt a long pause, she continued:
‘There are . . . legends about moodstones that can revive the dying. In the olden days, when the magic was strong in the world. But I have never heard of a stone which could revive—’
‘The dead?’ Virelai finished grimly.
The word hung uncomfortably between them until it could no longer be ignored.
She nodded unhappily. ‘It is a killing stone. It brings death, not life. How can a deathstone do what this has done to you?’
Virelai looked away from her, saying nothing. He took his hand from his chest, flexed the fingers and sat staring at it as though it was the most remarkable thing in the world. Which, perhaps, it was.
In what seemed to her a conciliatory gesture, Alisha took it between her own. It was cool – Virelai’s skin was always cool, dry and smooth as polished wood – but it was not as cool as it had been when they had lain together on those long, hot afternoons in her wagon, and holding him had been such a pleasure when she herself was sticky with sweat. She turned it over, examined it more closely, then looked up, eyes wide. ‘It’s—’
‘New?’ he supplied. He flexed it again, stared unhappily at the unfamiliar elasticity of the skin, the bright colour, the healthy texture. Then he bent and scrabbled at the hem of his robe, turning his ankle this way and that. ‘This was the worst leg,’ he said, almost to himself. Compulsively, he ran a palm over the shin, then around the back of the calf. ‘There was a hole coming here,’ he added on a note of rising panic. ‘Where’s the hole gone? The skin was flaking away there . . .’
Leaning forward suddenly, Alisha pushed the hair aside from the temple which had sustained the terrible wound. The skin was smooth and unpuckered. Confused, her hands transferred themselves to the other side of his head, ruffled his hair until it stood out like a haystack, then sat back on her heels, making a complex, hieratic sign in the air. ‘It is a miracle,’ she breathed. ‘The work of the Goddess herself. She who is all-powerful, all-forgiving. She who is Love. Her power flows through the world again, praise be, praise be.’
Virelai frowned. ‘The Rosa Eldi? Why would she help me? I never did anything but hold her captive and abuse her. I sold her to all those men . . .’
‘Love knows no bounds.’
‘I cannot believe that!’ Virelai cried, sounding suddenly as wilful as a child. ‘I do not believe the stone did this. I cannot believe it. It must have been that the sun warmed me. I was just stunned. A horse had kicked me, I remember that: I felt the shape, the size of its very hoof. It must have just knocked me out for a bit. I – I drifted for a while, and I came round when you called my name. Yes, that must be the way of it. I was dozing, and in shock . . .’
‘You know very well that is not the truth,’ Alisha said angrily. ‘You know it but you won’t admit it.’ She pushed herself to her feet in one swift, furious motion. ‘But there’s something I can do to make you believe.’
She turned and began to march away from him across the battlefield, stepping over the outstretched limbs of corpses, skirting pools of blood, arrow-stuck horses.
‘Where are you going?’ Virelai called after her, but she did not answer. ‘What are you doing?’ Then, with growing dread, he watched as she went down on her knees beside a hulking dark shape, then cowered back as shocking white light blazed suddenly, brighter than any sun. ‘No!’ he shrieked. ‘No, don’t!’
Then he began to run, as far and as fast as he could away from the unnatural thing that Alisha Skylark was doing, stumbling and crying out as he went, tears streaming down his face and his heart thundering. He did not stop until the sun went in and hid the terrible strangeness of the world from his sight, until the moon came up, and he was more lost than he had ever been.
Nine
Foreign shores
She dreamed of being on the ocean at the height of a storm, an elating dream of high seas and crashing waves, of wind-borne foam which skimmed off the tops of the churning breakers and stung the skin. Land birds called distantly in the air above her, their cries evocative of a cat’s mewing, or a baby’s wail. Air and water; water and air. It was like a dream of flying, only colder and wetter. In fact, she considered, half in and half out of this voyaging mirage, it really wasn’t very pleasant at all. What had started as a sensation of freedom and speed became, with increased focus on detail, a dream of constriction and discomfort.
Two seconds later, Katla Aransen came fully awake and found herself tied to a mast in the teeth of a gale. In the space of maybe three seconds she observed four things: firstly, and somewhat significantly, there were rocks looming large and far too close. Waves were booming broadside against the hull so that the ship’s timbers creaked with all the gusto they could muster. The crew were scattered around the deck in varying degrees of uselessness, looking terrified out of their wits. And lastly, and rather worryingly, the foremast was gone, leaving a splinter of rotten wood and a flapping tail of canvas slapping the planks wetly like a dying eel.
‘Sur’s nuts!’ she cursed. It was all very well to have survived killing the ship’s captain and attempting a bid for freedom, but to die like this – bound up (yet again, she thought with rising annoyance) with a length of thick, hairy rope around her arms and waist to the only other mast still in operation, subjected to the sight of a load of landlubber incompetents making an exceedingly poor job of steering this leaky old barrel, was ignominy indeed.
She turned her head and watched with fascinated horror as a huge wave surged in over the stern and the tillerman abandoned his post with a shriek and ran down the ship with his hands in the air, as if surrendering to some watery foe.
‘Hell’s teeth!’ She turned back in consternation, seeing those big black rocks getting much too close for comfort, and started yelling with all the volume her constricted lungs could manage, ‘Hey! You – someone – for god’s sake – steer this bloody thing!’
Her words fell into a momentary lapse in the storm’s concentration and several heads turned to see who might be shouting at them in some high-pitched foreign tongue.
Katla strained against her bonds, cursing and swearing and spitting like a trapped feral cat. If she was trying to attract attention to her conscious state, she succeeded. Seconds later, Baranguet appeared beside her, whip in hand – as if that was of any use in the current circumstances other than for dissuading the cowardly from jumping overboard and taking their chances with the sea. His oily black head came up to her
shoulder, but he still contrived to leer up at her as if at this precise moment he held every scrap of power over her future in this world. She hated that.
‘Let me loose!’ she demanded in the Old Tongue, glaring at him.
The whipman laughed. ‘And why should I do that, little hellion?’
‘Because someone needs to steer the damn ship.’
Baranguet’s sneer of a laugh turned by comic degrees into an expression of panic as he darted a glance past his captive’s shoulder and took in the absence at the stern, their wavering course and free-flying rudder.
He uttered a long, loud and probably obscene expletive in Istrian which Katla at once committed to memory for future use in the southern continent, if they ever made it that far. Then he fled down the deck and started laying about a man in a striped tunic with the many-thonged whip, its snaking lashes making contact with audible cracks on the cowering crewman’s hunched back. On and on Baranguet whipped the tillerman; but all that happened was that the deserter hunched lower and lower until at last he collapsed on the deck with a spreading red stain all down his back.
‘Oh, very constructive,’ Katla muttered, rolling her eyes. She tossed her head to get the wet hair out of her eyes and appraised the rapidly approaching coastline with dismay.
Baranguet gave the now-unconscious tillerman a final kick, then glared around at the rest of his hopeless crew. Clearly, Katla thought, they had either lied through their teeth to take their place on board; or the man who had engaged them had got his priorities all wrong. Fighters they might have been; sailors they were not. No one seemed ready to take responsibility for the rudder: those the whipman shouted at scuttled off to some other self-appointed task and tried to look suitably busy. She watched one man trying to coil a line until he had produced a single indivisible knot out of it; two others began to bail enthusiastically with a half-barrel itself so leaky that as much water as they scooped up spilled through its rotten staves and redeposited itself whence it had come. Another man did something with the sail above her so that one corner of it drooped drastically, then the wind grabbed hold of it and snatched the line out of his hands. The sail billowed, then emptied itself of air. The ship, entirely at the mercy of the elements now, slewed dangerously. Meanwhile, the rope, heavy with seawater and full of momentum, whipped across the deck and clouted a tall man in a prissy uniform tunic so hard across the shoulders that he staggered and fell against another man with cropped grey hair and both forearms notched with deliberate-looking scars, knocking him flat. This man hurled the other off him, then leapt to his feet and began to pummel him with a pair of meaty fists until Baranguet intervened with a shriek of fury and his whip.
