Darkfall

by Isobelle Carmody

  She woke first to the pounding of her head and then to the parched dryness of her throat and mouth. Then she realised she could hear torrential rain falling. The air felt clammy with dampness. The moment she moved, the pain in her hand eclipsed all other thoughts. The wound had stuck to the sheets and she peeled the cloth away, bit by devastating bit. Dressing was dreadful but she managed it with numerous rests. She felt weak and sick.

  The draakira who opened the cell door regarded her with shock, and then with a suspicion that made it clear she had been taught to recognise withdrawal symptoms.

  Glynn just held out her hand like a bear offering its paw. The woman glanced at it automatically, and then she stopped and came warily closer. The oozing blister looked revolting. ‘Your hand must have got infected. I thought you had …’ She looked up at Glynn, again suspicious. ‘Have you vomited?’

  Glynn stared at her, then shook her head slowly with the most moronic expression she could muster, and the woman visibly relaxed. ‘You must have scraped the blister off in the night. Did you do that? Scrape off the blister?’ She spoke loudly, as if Glynn were deaf.

  Glynn just stared at her, blinking slowly. She was thinking of Teesa’s son, Baltic, and how he had behaved.

  ‘Come on. I had better take you to the Prime and she will prescribe something,’ she said.

  Any medication the Prime gave her was likely to contain the drug she had spent a night of agony purging from her system. Glynn mumbled in a dull slow voice, ‘Prime said use salve.’ She groped for the salve and began to apply it.

  ‘The Prime said to take you to Bayard yet I do not see you cleaning up after any animal with that hand.’

  Glynn’s heart began to pound. Looking after animals sounded promisingly like working outside. She must not let this opportunity slip by, but she could not think of what to do.

  ‘I will go and speak with the Prime,’ the draakira decided. ‘Come along.’

  Glynn obeyed, inwardly cursing the woman. The draakira’s absence at breakfast made it a simple matter to move food from her plate onto the plates of the men either side of her. They seemed oblivious to the addition. Glynn doubted she could have kept anything down if she had eaten. She could still feel her stomach and muscles quaking; tiny spasms, but she would endure them because the worst of it was over. Surreptitiously she pinched her cheeks hard to bring the blood to them, thinking that if she felt like death warmed up, she obviously looked like it.

  The draakira returned and, following her, Glynn’s heart plummeted in despair as they moved in the direction of the Prime’s rooms. But the draakira took her through a different door and into a corridor she had not entered before. She was puzzled to hear the sound of the rain so deeply inside the haven when merely closing her cell door behind her had cut off the sound of it.

  They came into a long series of rooms opening into one another through identical, squared arches. Each possessed a great skylight set into the roof, which reminded Glynn of the cavern chimneys. In one room rain fell through open sections in the skylight into a round pool below, explaining why the sound of rain was so audible. But even in the following rooms where the skylights were sealed, rain thundering on the cloudy glass produced an incredible din.

  The walls, from ceiling to floor, consisted of round pigeon-holes filled with scrolls. There were literally thousands of them tied with different-coloured knots of leather. Since scrolls were the Keltan answer to books, this was obviously an extensive library.

  The draakira tried to say something to her, but her words were drowned out by the noise. Grimacing, she indicated that they were to enter a small door which Glynn had imagined was a storage cupboard. It was surprisingly heavy to open and she was startled when a cloud of hot, dry air rushed out.

  It was dark inside, but when her eyes adjusted, she saw that there were small hearth fires all along the walls of the low, long room they had entered. The floor space was so crammed with tables piled with scrolls that only one person could fit between them at a time, and men and women of all ages, dressed uniformly in white tunics with sleeves pushed up, were bent over scrolls, reading or writing on them, while others conferred softly with one another. As far as Glynn could see, there was no printing done on Keltor. Scrolls were all hand-written.

  These must be the Draaka’s tame scholars, Glynn realised. The red bands around their arms proclaimed them to be followers of the Draaka, but not converts in the same way as the draakira were.

  There was an air of intense activity in the place, despite little movement and near-silence. Opening the thick door had let in the yammering of the rain, yet no one had even looked up. The room was dim because, other than the glow from the fires, the only light was supplied by banks of candles on some of the tables. All activity in the darkish antechamber was concentrated around these and the scholars reminded her of moths flying and fluttering about it.

  The grey-haired draakira, Bayard, came bustling out of the shadows at the back of the room. The fur-stole animal was still looped around her neck, its head and paws again dangling down as if it were dead.

  ‘Bayard, the Prime says you can have this one. She has worked for a Fomhikan aspi-breeder …’

  ‘I was here when she came in,’ Bayard interrupted. ‘What can the Prime be thinking of to send her here to me? I cannot have a drone in here stumbling about.’

  ‘She …’ the other draakira began, but a loud discussion broke out between two scholars, drowning out the two women’s voices.

  To Glynn’s amazement, the stole creature suddenly lifted its head and stared at her as intently as it had done the day of her arrival. All the fires in the dark room converged in the creature’s gleaming eyes. She found that she was holding her breath in apprehension.

  ‘We will see about this,’ Bayard was saying. ‘I will speak to the Draaka this evening.’

  The draakira shrugged and told Glynn she was to remain with Bayard and do as she was told. Bayard thrust a rush broom into her hands, grumbling under her breath. The animal around her neck had resumed its former languid position.

  ‘Sweep, and be careful,’ she said.

  Glynn swept, grateful for the darkness and the simplicity of the make-work she had been given. The room was so hot that in no time sweat was running down her body, underneath her tunic and trousers. She told herself the exertion would clear the last of the drug from her system but she was so weak that, before long, she began to feel dizzy. Fortunately Bayard had vanished and the moth-scholars were so preoccupied with their research that, from time to time, she could lean against a wall or shelf to rest unnoticed.

  Slowly she worked her way round the whole room until she had finished. Bayard had reappeared, but seemed to have forgotten her existence, so Glynn went quietly to the darkest corner and sat down on a little low stool by one of the fires. Her skin felt clammy and what she wanted more than anything else was to sleep for a thousand years.

  Watching while Bayard and a group of her scholars became very excited about one of the scrolls, Glynn managed to fall into a sitting doze from which she awoke slightly refreshed and determined to find some way to take control of the situation.

  No more feeling sorry for herself and cursing her stupidity, she vowed. Gathering herself, she set the broom aside and went to ask Bayard what else she was to do. The elderly draakira looked at her blankly, as if trying to remember who she was. Then her face cleared, and she frowned. ‘You look pale. You had better eat.’

  Glynn’s heart sank, but when she was installed at a bench among several scholars eating the same food, she knew it could not be drugged.

  ‘What use does the Prime imagine I will have for a great giant of a girl who rode aspi, my pet? Eh? I need helpers who can think and make decisions. Not mindless drones.’ She appeared to be addressing the animal on her shoulder.

  Glynn was not hungry, but she forced herself to eat some bread. It tasted very bland, no doubt because everything else she had eaten in the haven had been highly spiced to hide the taste
of the drug.

  Bayard had turned aside to speak to one of the scholars, and once again the animal she carried unwound itself sufficiently to study Glynn. Its eyes reminded her of a seal’s – darkly liquid and full of intelligence – but physically it was more like a mink, with its sharp little teeth and claws.

  On impulse she took up a sliver of cheese from her plate and held it out. Immediately the animal reached out, gouged off a small piece and ate it.

  Bayard shouted at someone to be careful and hurried to the nearest table, bearing the animal away with her.

  As no one was looking, Glynn thrust what remained of the bread into her pocket, aware that this might well be her only untainted food for a while. It was a pity Bayard seemed so determined to get rid of her, because the older draakira seemed liberal and inattentive, which would help when Glynn made her break. Unfortunately she didn’t see any way to encourage the old draakira to keep her, without revealing she was not under the influence of the drug.

  As she gazed around the room, however, a plan formed in her mind.

  When Bayard returned, Glynn said, ‘Scrolls.’

  ‘Yes, scrolls,’ Bayard agreed absently. She looked around, obviously trying to think of something harmless for her to do.

  ‘Read scrolls,’ Glynn said.

  ‘Yes, you read …’ Bayard stopped and her eyes met Glynn’s for the first time. ‘Read scrolls? You mean, you can read scrolls?’

  ‘Read,’ Glynn said in the same flat, disinterested tones and nodded. She dared not show enthusiasm or any cleverness, lest the draakira guess she was not drugged.

  Bayard bit her lip, then snatched up a scroll and held it to the candlelight. ‘Read for me. Read.’

  Glynn took the scroll and smoothed it out, squinting in the dim light to make out the ornate lettering. She began to read in a flat hesitant monotone, and could only pray that reading was not actually impossible under the influence of the drug.

  ‘Lastmade and least perfect … were the two-legged … human folk …’ she said jerkily, then stopped.

  ‘Read the entire passage,’ Bayard commanded.

  ‘… humans were formed … in the dying strains of the Song, so there is an … incompleteness in them … The Song was saddened and so gave the Lastmade the power to complete their own Making. So it is that the … least of the Songborn contains the potential of the Song itself for Making … And the Song bade the Lastmade meditate upon the … Firstmade, that they might aspire to such completeness …’

  ‘Amazing,’ Bayard said when Glynn stopped reading. ‘Still, an idiot cipher is no use to me.’ She moved to stroke the animal around her neck, but it unravelled itself and slid like a snake onto Glynn’s table. There it coiled elegantly where it had landed, its eyes going from Glynn’s face to the last crumb of cheese on her plate. Without thinking, she offered it and the animal took it from her.

  As the paw brushed against her palm, Glynn had a sudden, startlingly vivid mental image of the creature covered in blood, and fighting savagely against a steel hunter’s trap. She could not help herself flinching. Apparently the older woman did not notice, for she gathered up the animal and restored it to her neck, before calmly instructing Glynn to take up a cloth and dust the tables.

  Sitting down to the supper table that evening, Glynn found herself thinking of the animal. Bayard had said nothing about the odd incident, but she had told the draakira collecting Glynn that she had one or two tasks that ‘the drone’ might perform the following day. Glynn was convinced that this change of heart was the result of the odd incident with the draakira’s pet. Her musings were interrupted when the food was brought to the dining-room table. The servitor carrying the tureen of stew was followed by two draakira. Glynn realised with horror that she had no choice but to eat because the draakira sat down.

  She pretended to be falling asleep after she had eaten as little as she dared, and the minute the door to her cell closed, she stuck her fingers down her throat, inducing herself to vomit up the contents of her stomach into the waste bucket. Revolting though it was, she scooped the mess out of the bucket and through the high window as she had done before.

  Washing her hands and face in freezing water, she began to feel groggy. She had absorbed some of the drug again but could only hope it was too little to have much of an effect. When the spasms came some hours later, they were slight and she counted herself lucky. She lay awake trying to find a way out of her dilemma, and finally fell into an exhausted sleep near morning.

  She dreamed she was a seal caught in a plastic bag under the sea, twisting and writhing, and then she was Bayard’s pet caught in a steel trap. She yowled and bucked, almost mad with the need to be free. The pain of being trapped was somehow other than the pain of the metal teeth biting into her leg. Let me go, she thought fiercely. Free me!

  When morning came, her resolve to get away from the haven had grown to purposeful determination, and she refused to be disheartened by the fact that she had no clear plan of escape.

  ‘Lose hope and you will lose,’ she told herself firmly as she smoothed salve on her injured hand.

  She made herself do some gentle bending and warming-up exercises, being careful of her hand. It was a long time since she had done martial arts and the dream-Wind had been right about her stiffness. Yet as she concentrated on the movements of the kata, her body remembered the grave delicate grace of the dance.

  ‘An opportunity will come …’ she whispered to herself, over and over, like a mantra, or a wish, stretching, turning, spinning.

  segue …

  The watcher allowed the spinning dance to send it in an arc between worlds that mocked the path of the comet. Through the Void it spun to the Unraveller’s world, and into a room where sourness rose up to the base of a woman’s throat then receded; an ebb and flow of illness in which she swam groping for her name – Sylvie.

  Sylvie looked at another woman seated on the edge of the bed, and was overcome with a feeling of terror and renewed dizziness though it was unclear if one caused the other or merely preceded it.

  ‘It’s the drug,’ the woman said. ‘It makes you sick but you’ll be right in a bit. Resisting it makes the effect worse.’ There was both knowledge in her voice and compassion.

  Resisting what? Sylvie asked herself. Them or life or the drug? The advice seemed relevant in all cases. Go with the tide, she thought, as she had thought the night before because she had been afraid of what might happen if she resisted. She glanced at her watch and found it was almost midday.

  She gulped and turned to face the other, who was older than her voice had sounded. There were thick pouches of flesh under green-blue eyes, which seemed ancient and beautiful and dead all at once. Her lips were as full and sensual as if they had been kissed to their swollen state and Sylvie wondered if her own would look like that after a while. She was wearing a T-shirt across which was emblazoned a glittering comet, and the words, Will you be there when I come?

  ‘I’m Mace,’ the woman said. ‘It’s not my real name.’

  ‘I’m Sylvie,’ Sylvie said, and found herself absurdly offering her hand.

  Mace proffered her own. ‘Once I had some acid and I thought there was some sort of invasion. I looked out the window and saw hundreds and hundreds of soldiers marching. The walls shook and the bed vibrated. Some of the soldiers had wings and they were flying in formation.’ Mace offered this as she had offered her own hand – limply and kindly.

  ‘I left my husband and son this morning,’ Sylvie said flatly.

  Mace blinked opal eyes.

  ‘I couldn’t go on with it. Marriage and a washing machine and cooking the dinner and all that. Our next-door neighbours died in a car crash. Both of them gone just like that. I kept thinking how it could happen to us and I got so scared. What is love next to that? I loved him but he didn’t understand that love didn’t stop me being scared.’

  Again Mace nodded. ‘That’s the way it goes. Love and then the grey comes. It’s not their fault they aren
’t what we dream. I suppose we aren’t what they dream either. No one’s to blame.’

  ‘My mother said I was selfish when I tried to tell her. I said, “I’m dying.’ She said, “You’re so selfish.” ’

  ‘She was dying, too,’ Mace observed.

  ‘He asked me what I wanted and I just couldn’t say. He said: “What did you expect?” He sounded so tired.’ The words were spewing out of her, and she knew they could make no sense, but Mace seemed not to mind. ‘Did you run away?’

  Mace winked grotesquely in a face that was clearly made for stillness. ‘I thought I was running to. Some of us think that, but it’s all the same. Running like rats in a maze. Trouble is there’s nowhere to run.’

  Sylvie bowed her head.

  Mace shifted on her haunches. ‘It’s not a bad life. It’s not a lie at least. The rest of it is. Cinderella and happy-ever-after and justice and all that. We know the truth here at least. We’re behind the scenes.’

  ‘I wish …’ Sylvie began, then stopped because she discovered there was nothing she could wish for.

  ‘Well,’ Mace said, and rose in a scented whisper of lace and nylon. ‘Welcome to the underworld.’

  … the watcher segued, drawn by something utterly unexpected shaping itself and already sending tremors through both worlds and the web connecting them.

  20

  Seeing that nothing in the world made by the Song

  could be more fair to Shenavyre than the Unykorn,

  Lanalor delved into the very nature of life’s Making

  and sang a twisting of the Song

  to create a thing that had not been –

  a black flower which, eaten, would bestow sweetest ecstasy.

  This he offered to Shenavyre,

  but she shrank from the unnatural blossom,

  and stroked the Unykorn s pearled horn …

  LEGENDSONG OF THE UNYKORN