Darkfall

by Isobelle Carmody

  Bayard tried to work on the scrolls, but before long she gave up and decided that they may as well settle themselves. Glad she had never suffered from motion sickness of any kind, Glynn trailed along behind carrying the still-sleeping feinna and her clothes. The room was very small and lacked even a tiny window, being another level down under the deck from the salon, and presumably below the waterline. Glynn made a heap out of pillows and gently put the sleeping feinna on them. The little animal did not stir. She mentioned this to Bayard with some concern.

  ‘Its sleep is not caused by being on the ship,’ Bayard assured her. ‘It is part of the pregnancy.’

  ‘How do you know?’ Glynn enquired.

  Bayard looked puzzled, then interested. ‘That is a good question. I do not know how I know. It must be that I have absorbed some of its innate knowledge along the link. I just know that the bouts of sleep enable the feinna to store energy for the birthing. Now I am going to sleep and I suggest you do the same.’

  Bayard swallowed a pale, pinkish liquid from a small bottle and offered it to Glynn. ‘It is a harmless sleeping draught and will keep you from being disturbed by feinna visions.’

  ‘I would rather not have any more drugs,’ she said frankly, then nodded at the feinna. ‘Besides, what if it started while we were both unconscious …’

  ‘As you wish. But you need not worry just yet about the birthing. I will know when the time is near.’

  As she readied herself for bed, Glynn sat on the feinna’s cushions and stroked the little animal’s supine form. She wanted to be free of the link that bound her to the creature, obviously, but she could not help knowing that the fear and need which she had projected when she was lost under the flagstones of the haven, and which had summoned the feinna to her aid, had probably caused the deeper linking, so in a sense it was her own fault. The animal had saved her life and surely that created a link of obligation as binding as the other linking. Even if she could, she would not leave now until the feinna had its babies. She did not know what help she could give, but she must give what she was able.

  Until it was over she could make no real decisions about her own course. She must see how things transpired.

  She glanced at the draakira, wanting to confess that she had no skills in birthing, but the older woman was already asleep. The muted lantern-light showed that she was sweating profusely in the stuffy cabin and, even sleeping, she looked ill. Glynn thought of her father saying seasickness was an illness with two distinct phases: the first, where you feared you would die, and the second, where you feared you wouldn’t.

  Smiling a little, she stretched herself out on her own bed and almost at once she slept.

  And dreamed.

  It was a muddled dream; a mad hotch-potch of her world and Keltor. At one point she was frying onions on top of a barbecue, clad in her Keltan clothes. It was terribly hot. People kept coming up and asking what she thought she was doing.

  ‘Why are you getting involved?’ a woman asked her.

  ‘It doesn’t mean anything. It was pure chance …’ Glynn said.

  ‘Each thing has its song to sing,’ the woman remarked, then suddenly Glynn was much younger, sitting on a bus with her father. They passed a field choked with weeds. There was a single horse in the field, a poor scrawny thing with withered shanks and ribs showing.

  ‘Look,’ Glynn said softly to her father.

  ‘Whoever is responsible for this should be shot,’ he said, staring angrily back at the emaciated horse. ‘We will call the police when we get off the bus. People should not forget their responsibilities.’

  Glynn felt vaguely frightened by the way her father had said that. ‘What will happen to the horse?’

  ‘It will die if nothing is done. Perhaps it is already too late.’ He lifted a hand, palm outwards. Glynn shrank away, horrified to see it was covered in blood. Ignoring her cry, her father reached out and smeared blood on to her cheek.

  She recoiled into another dream where she was watching two policemen in uniform. They did not seem to be aware of her.

  ‘You have to deal with it,’ the older man said to the younger. He had a heavy form and drooping jowls, and his voice was deep like her father’s had been. A gravel voice, which she had inherited.

  ‘But what do I do, is the thing? I can’t just say nothing. He’ll lie and then they’ll ask me.’

  ‘Do what you can,’ someone whispered, and Glynn turned to find she was now sitting beside Ember’s bed in the circular room of the darklin vision. As before, the sheet moving at her sister’s throat was the only indication that she lived.

  ‘It iz too late. You have lozt,’ Bayard gloated in her sinister Chaos spirit voice.

  ‘No,’ Wind whispered and she turned again to find them both in white costumes in his immaculate dojo, practising the kata.

  ‘Losing or winning a battle can depend entirely on whether you can keep hope or not. Winning happens in the mind, sometimes before a single blow is struck.’

  Glynn woke with a start, heart pounding. The lantern was a mere bluish glow, its oil reservoir having almost run dry. The cabin was so airless she felt as if she were being slowly suffocated. Rising, she poured herself a drink of water with hands that trembled, and drank thirstily. She added some oil to the lamp and checked on the feinna and Bayard. They were both sleeping soundly.

  Determined to get some fresh air, she backed quietly into the passage, dimly illuminated by a lantern hung by the steps leading up to the deck. There was no way of telling how late it was, for there was no natural light at this level.

  A man walking with his head down bumped into her and she jumped guiltily. From his rough clothing, he was a shipson. ‘Your pardon,’ he said, and passed her, going up the steps.

  Glynn followed more slowly and, reaching the salon level, was relieved to find there were only three draakira playing cards. They looked considerably the worse for cirul. No longer worried about being stopped, she climbed the steps to the deck, hoping that this state of affairs would continue for the whole trip. She had been very much afraid of being interrogated by the Draaka or the Prime about Fomhika, given that it was supposed to be her home island. Perhaps they had simply forgotten in the rush of their own affairs.

  Opening the trapdoor to the deck, Glynn was blinded by bright sunlight. The dark clouds that had filled the sky on their departure from Acantha had disappeared and the sky was lilac blue. Kalinda glittered on calm water unbroken by a single wave.

  Most surprising of all, the air was warm.

  Glynn felt a strong sense of deja vu, for Kalinda had shone like this the first day she had stepped on the deck of the Waverider and, though smaller, this ship was very similar in design to the other. She had the eerie feeling that if she turned her head suddenly, she would see Solen going below to prepare for the landing on Acantha, and Argon white cloak striding grim-faced along the deck.

  How long ago that now seemed. She had no idea where Argon had gone, and Solen was dead. Despite her certainty that the depth of her reaction to Solen’s death arose from his resemblance to Wind, she marvelled bleakly at the impact of it. Every time she thought she had found the bottom of it, there was another level. Perhaps it was natural for her to be affected so strongly, given that Solen had saved her from the sea only to die in it himself.

  Almost a death by proxy.

  In a now familiar shift, her thoughts moved to Hella. She had promised the Acanthan girl that they would go together from Acantha. Hella must have waited with Lev, her hopes slowly dwindling. If only she had told the girl where she was going and what she intended. Her only consolation was that Hella might have followed her into danger had she known where Glynn had meant to go.

  Glynn could only hope that, when she had not appeared, Hella went to Nema. The old woman would have been able to protect her, or at least help her leave Acantha. Of course, Glynn had no way of knowing what had happened to the girl. Nor was she ever likely to know.

  Sighing, she looked across the d
eck to where Colwyn knelt on his platform, directing the course of the vessel by interacting directly with the sea currents, and manipulating them to move the vessel in whichever direction he wanted. The crew clustered about were like reserve tanks of energy. Colwyn would also be smothering the wave vibrations made by the movement of the ship through the waves to prevent the silfi from rising. She had gathered a good deal of the specifics of wavespeaking by listening to the Draaka’s people talk on the way to the launch point on the Acanthan surface. Their biggest fear certainly was of silfi. The marine creatures sounded as if they were some sort of gigantic sea snakes, ferocious as sharks and with several layers of teeth. They were, Glynn had guessed, the main reason for the Vespian monopoly of sea travel. Other Keltans could use ships with sails if they had thought of it, but the silfi would have destroyed them. Only wavespeakers could alter the vibrations set up in the water by their ships, rendering them invisible to the creatures.

  It was warm enough for Glynn to believe Fomhika might be semi-tropical, as she had been told, though she had no idea how the weather could be so radically different between two islands only days apart. Judging from the position of Kalinda, Glynn reckoned she must have slept for about three hours. There was still a stiff breeze despite the warmth, and a burst of wind threw up spray into her face. She gasped at the coldness, and licked the moisture from her lips, before remembering about the bittermute algae. The weather was too rough for it to accumulate, but she did not want to take any chances. She spat hastily and rubbed her sleeve across her lips.

  ‘I thought you might have succumbed at last to wavesickness and lost me my bet,’ Colwyn said with an amused smile, coming up to stand beside her.

  ‘Bet?’

  He grinned. ‘My crew do not believe that someone without Vespian blood can last an entire trip without trembling at the sight of the waves, or falling sick or complaining about how dreadful it is to be out on the waves. I wonder if your immunity would last you through the Turin Straits,’ he said.

  Colwyn’s eyes went to the horizon and his smile faded. ‘It is a dangerous season for silfi this year. They are more restive than I have ever known them.’ He turned suddenly to stare into Glynn’s face. ‘You have an odd way of speaking for a Fomhikan.’

  Forcibly reminded that she must be more careful about her accent, Glynn made herself smile. ‘How much longer before we reach Fomhika?’

  ‘We Vespians believe that to name a time of arrival is to court the wrath of the wavespirits, on whose goodwill we rely.’

  ‘Do you believe that?’

  His expression was wry. ‘Let us say that a wise man does not yearn for the blackwind.’ He glanced out to sea again and Glynn reflected that there was a world of difference between Colwyn and Carick, the shipmaster of the Waverider. Colwyn seemed more flexible, although he had been very formal and correct with the Draaka. As if reading her mind, he turned to ask if she was a follower of the Priestess, but before she could respond, a distracted look came over his features and he peered out to sea.

  All at once he looked alarmed. He turned and sprinted for his platform, shouting, ‘Silfi rising!’

  Simultaneously the deck pitched violently, throwing Glynn against the thick timber railing that ran around the edge of the boat. One of Colwyn’s crew cried to her to get back. ‘Silfi have an unpleasant habit of leaping up and dragging the unwary into the water.’

  Glynn stared at him with horror, uncertain whether or not he was serious. She had once seen a movie in which an enraged whale reduced a ship to splintered driftwood, drowning all of its occupants. ‘Will … will they attack the ship?’

  He gave her an odd look. ‘Of course not. If it came to that, we would use culva.’

  ‘Oh,’ Glynn murmured, mystified, and trying not to look it.

  Colwyn was now standing balanced on his platform, hands held out before him like a sleepwalker. Glynn wondered that he could keep his footing.

  ‘Do you want me to bring the culva, Col?’ a shipdaughter cried.

  ‘Get it, but don’t uncap the barrel.’ Colwyn staggered backwards as the ship bucked and skewed sideways. ‘There are only two. I think I can deal with them.’

  ‘What’s happening?’ Glynn asked the man who had warned her back from the edge. She was probably asking too many questions but if she was going to be killed by some otherworld Loch Ness monster, she wanted to know why.

  ‘Colwyn means to try to calm the brain fibres of the silfi so they will sink again,’ the man said, his eyes on his shipmaster. ‘Only the strongest wavespeakers have this ability and it will save us the expense of replacing the culva.’

  The ship lurched again, sliding down a wave and into a trough.

  ‘We use it as seldom as possible,’ the man was saying, as calmly as if they were conversing in a garden. ‘The profit of an entire journey can be lost in replenishing the store from the Iridomi.’

  ‘But how did they find us?’ Glynn asked. ‘I thought Colwyn was keeping them away.’

  ‘He was. The creatures blundered into us by chance and their brain fibres were set in motion by the contact.’

  The ship was butted sideways so Glynn was again thrown against the edge of the ship. Here, she caught her first terrifying glimpse of the silfi.

  It was twice as long as the ship and thick as two elephants at its widest point; big enough to crush the ship in its mouth! But in form it was little more than an enormous gelid slug with pale bulging eyes on stalks like a snail’s, and a gaping maw filled with jagged teeth.

  ‘Ah. Not so big. We are fortunate it is a young one …’ the shipdaughter muttered, securing a small barrel with a loop of rope.

  Glynn gaped at her incredulously. If this was a baby, how large was a full-grown silfi?

  The other rose to the surface and the two leviathans thrashed about for what seemed to be hours but, under Colwyn’s control, they did not make contact with the ship again. Gradually their movements lost momentum.

  When at last they disappeared, the young shipmaster literally staggered down from his platform, grey with fatigue. He took a long draught from a skin containing some liquid that appeared to restore his colour, then returned to his post.

  On the following day they reached Fomhika. The weather had grown progressively hotter and the sea so still as to be glasslike. Glynn ventured on deck to admire the spectacular sunset created by strong sunlight against ragged edges and whorls at the tail end of what Colwyn said was the storming they had narrowly missed. The sea reflected the dusk sky like a cauldron of molten rainbows all swirled together and it was only gradually that she realised the ship was approaching a long, low, green island with pale-gold beaches. Rising up out of the sea, it looked like a mythical paradise.

  Even as she wondered why she had not heard the hammering that denoted the sighting of land, one of the crew began beating out a tattoo on the mast. The passengers emerged from below deck to witness the approach as Colwyn brought the ship into a calm bay. They were making for the furthest of three long piers stretched out like slender fingers into the water of the wide bay. All three piers were overgrown with a dark lustrous creeper. There were several other ships tied up at the piers, and one which had just pulled away, tacking hard into the wind and coming in their direction.

  The township was built on a slope, rising up from the beach into a natural amphitheatre. The settlement was segmented into horizontal strips by a single road running in long, flat zigzags up from the shore to the apex of the hill. From what could be seen under the weight of greenery that seemed to shroud everything with ferocious thoroughness, the buildings appeared to be made of pale stone or adobe. Higher still, above the town, more hills rose, their flat tops covered in a rippling golden crop.

  The Draaka came on deck with the Prime, who regarded the island sourly. From the corner of her eye Glynn saw the Draaka’s gaze come to rest on her and suppressed a shiver. She must not forget she was constantly in danger of revealing she was a stranger, especially here, where she was suppo
sed to be at home. She would have to be doubly on her guard.

  Bayard came to stand beside her, peering out shortsightedly at Fomhika. ‘Land,’ she said with heartfelt relief. Then her face changed. ‘Well, I wonder what he has been doing here …’

  Glynn followed her gaze to the ship coming towards them. Its pennants and flags were painted black and even though it was not yet close enough to see much else, there was an air of neglect about it.

  ‘The Nightwhisper,’ Bayard said avidly. She glanced at Glynn and took in her puzzlement. ‘You have not heard the story of Ranouf and the Nightwhisper?’

  Glynn gave a half-shrug.

  ‘Ranouf was to be the next chieftain of Vespi but he broke the ship code. His brother became the current chieftain …’

  ‘Ranouf is the shipmaster of that?’ Glynn nodded at the bleak black ship, thinking they went in for exiling in a big way on Keltor. Argon white cloak had been exiled on Eron isle, men were not allowed on Darkfall, and now this Ranouf had been exiled.

  ‘Ranouf was shipmaster of the Nightwhisper,’ Bayard corrected her. ‘It is run these days by a ruffian called Sharayde. Of course it has nothing to do with Vespi now. It is a lone renegade, fulfilling any task that brings coin. It is said Sharayde has a heart as black as his ship’s pennants. No decent person steps aboard the Nightwhisper except to arrange some foul deed.’

  ‘What happened to him? Ranouf, I mean.’

  ‘No one knows. Probably Sharayde killed him.’

  ‘How did he break the ship code?’

  Bayard frowned. ‘He abandoned his scheduled course for love of a woman. He should have considered the end result of his actions. But he was a man and men seldom think beyond their bodies when they fancy themselves in love. It was not the fault of the woman involved that he lost everything.’

  Glynn was struck by the harshness of the draakira’s judgment. Was it enough to think only of the end result? You could only do what was right now, and hope the result would be positive, even while you accepted that it was out of your control.