Darkfall

by Isobelle Carmody

  And then he was gone, striding away into the shadows.

  Glynn stared after him, thinking of a small boy exiled from his mother and his home. She went inside and was headed for Bayard’s room when she heard the draakira’s familiar voice. She stopped indecisively outside the door, wondering whether to go and get the key or wait.

  ‘… if it is true,’ Bayard was saying.

  ‘Of course it is true. That cold bitch, Maeve, would die before speaking a lie for she values honour above her flesh.’

  There was enough emotion in her voice to draw Glynn closer to the door.

  ‘… sent a servant instead of coming herself with the message. So a lie could be spoken.’

  ‘No. Her sort would regard the servant’s honour as an extension of her own. Besides, why tell a lie that could be so easily disproved? If she sent a message that someone tried to assassinate Tarsin, that is what she believes. The question is, who attempted it, and why?’

  Glynn blinked. An assassination attempt had been made on the Holder of Keltor? Did this mean their travel plans had changed?

  ‘Tarsin has made himself enough enemies,’ the Prime pointed out. ‘Anyone could have sent poisoned wine.’

  ‘Perhaps, but golden cirul is not easily obtainable. It would have to have been obtained here on Fomhika.’ The Draaka sounded thoughtful. ‘Poverin looked shattered enough when he repeated the words conveyed to him by Maeve’s servant. Almost too shattered, for one would think the death would have answered his prayers.’

  ‘Perhaps what you saw in his face was disappointment that Tarsin had survived the attempt,’ Bayard murmured. ‘Interesting that a visiting Sheannite visionweaver with soulweaving tendencies stopped him from drinking the poison. I wonder why Alene did not prevent the murder attempt.’

  ‘Perhaps she did not choose to stop what would have solved a lot of problems for Darkfall …’ the Draaka said. ‘What a delicious thought. She must be most unpopular. How fortuitous that we will arrive in the aftermath of such a scandal.’

  Glynn heard footsteps behind her and quickly knocked on the door. She was too close to it to do anything else without incurring suspicion.

  The Prime looked out at her.

  ‘Excuse me,’ Glynn said meekly. ‘I heard the voice of draakira Bayard and I need … I mean … our room is locked.’

  ‘Wait.’ The Draaka’s voice was as smooth as cream, but with a deeper thread of authority. ‘That is the girl who brought the darklin? Bring her to me.’

  Glynn caught an unmistakable and inexplicable flare of alarm in the Prime’s eyes as she ushered Glynn into the room, and that was as odd as anything that had happened in the long day.

  The room took her breath away, for the floor was almost entirely covered in thick, red-dyed skins, while richly variegated wall hangings, patterned in red and black, hung over stone walls.

  Seated on a silk-draped couch, heavy lines stretched either side of her nose, the Draaka looked older than she had at a distance. Approaching, Glynn knew that she ought to be more afraid, but having already faced near-abduction and the possibility of death that night, she was too drained to feel anything deeply.

  She bowed. ‘Lady.’

  ‘Bayard tells me you are useful to her,’ the Draaka said. Unbidden Glynn had a memory of the Draaka offering to kill the Unraveller. And that other rapacious voice: Feed me!

  ‘When the feinna births its young,’ she continued, ‘Bayard tells me you desire to be released from our service.’

  Glynn nodded. ‘I have a sister who is ill and I wish to take care of her. That is why I brought the darklin to you in the first place. I wanted to return to her.’

  Bayard looked surprised, but said, ‘She is Fomhikan, as I told you, and she has made no trouble here. Did you send word to your sister? I did not forbid that.’

  ‘She is on Ramidan,’ Glynn said. ‘I do not know why, or how she fares, nor even if she is still alive.’ The absolute truth of these words came out in her starkness of tone, and the Draaka’s eyes widened fractionally.

  ‘Why did you leave your sister if she was ill?’

  ‘It was a mistake.’

  The Draaka tapped a long nail on the edge of the seat, her forehead knotted. ‘You said the darklin accidentally orientated on you. What did you weave?’

  Glynn had anticipated this question. ‘I saw my sister in a bed, ill.’

  The Draaka rose and took up an ornate jug that stood on a small table, pouring two glasses of a greenish liquid. Glynn noticed a light shaped like a flower suspended from the roof; an exquisite thing woven of gems and small fragments of bubbled glass.

  The Draaka offered one of the glasses to Glynn.

  ‘What is it?’

  The older woman burst out laughing. ‘You jest, of course.’

  Glynn smiled weakly and took the tiny glass, hoping it wasn’t poisoned.

  The Draaka sipped from the other glass and, perforce, Glynn drank. The green liquid was heavy, but tart and refreshing. She felt immediately more relaxed.

  Be careful, Wind whispered. Beware the crocodile that smiles.

  ‘A good brew,’ the Draaka approved, refilling both glasses though they were not yet empty. ‘What is your name?’

  ‘I am Glynn.’

  ‘It does not sound Fomhikan.’

  Glynn said nothing, since it did not seem to be a question. ‘Where did you get the darklin?’ A sudden sharpness in the honeyed tones.

  ‘I found it in the minescrape. I was trying to get enough coin to travel …’ Glynn was startled to find she was beginning to slur her words. Careful, she thought.

  The Draaka laughed. ‘I thought myrmidons had a great appetite for cirul …’

  ‘But I’m … not a myrmi … myrmidon,’ Glynn mumbled, her tongue thick in her mouth.

  ‘But you are for Darkfall, are you not?’

  ‘I don … don’t care about Darkfall. I … only care about my sis … sister an … an the feinna …’ The green fog in Glynn’s brain cleared for a moment and she felt a pang of alarm because she could feel the events of the evening rising to her mouth, and she had sworn to Duran that she would say nothing. She set the glass of green cirul firmly on the edge of a table.

  ‘Bayard believes that your link with the feinna will enable you to help it to bear its younglings alive, using the husbanding skills you learned on an aspi farm.’

  ‘I … will try,’ Glynn said, forcing herself not to go on and say she had no idea what an aspi was, and had never been on a farm on Fomhika.

  The Draaka yawned and looked bored. ‘I had felt some concern about this girl, but you are right. She is no danger to us. Remove her now. I am weary and I want to sleep before the ceremony of consecration.’

  Bayard tugged on Glynn’s arm and she let herself be led from the room, wondering distantly what had been in the cirul. She had the feeling the Draaka had not had her mind on the interrogation; had toyed with her absently as a cat with a dead mouse, thinking her no great sport. Glynn was thankful, for if pressed, she had the feeling she would have told everything about Duran and Argon white cloak, and Donard and Nema and Hella and Solen.

  Solen again. ‘Why?’ she whispered to the image that rose in her mind of his dark hair and purple eyes. ‘Why did you have to die? Why didn’t you fight?’

  ‘Sleep,’ Bayard said. ‘I must prepare for the ceremony.’

  Glynn slept.

  Just before dawn she woke from the now familiar nightmare of the trap and the dead He-feinna to find Bayard undressing. The draakira’s eyes were dilated completely in the lantern-light, and a hectic colour stained her cheeks; a residue of whatever hallucinogenic she took to become the voice of the Chaos spirit for the Draaka.

  ‘You have been to the Fomhikan haven?’

  Bayard laughed exultantly. ‘Oh yes, and what a place it was. Magnificent! Behind the altar was a glass mosaic – they know about beauty here, truly. The ceremony went very deep this time. Perhaps deeper than ever. Tonight the Draaka told me the V
oid spirit spoke through me of the future. Of war and the fall of the misty isle, and of the rise of our order and a glorious new age.’

  ‘War?’ Glynn shivered. How could Bayard speak of war with such elation?

  ‘A war to cleanse Keltor,’ Bayard said. She threw off her overdress and stretched out fully clothed on her bed, instructing Glynn to waken her early. In moments she was asleep and snoring.

  Glynn looked over at the feinna and found it was awake and staring at her. Her own fears appeared to be mirrored in the creature’s face. As she climbed into her bed she pulled back her covers and patted the place beside her. The feinna waddled over and leapt lightly on to the bed despite its bulging stomach. Glynn curled her fingers round its belly and pulled the feinna gently against her own body, wanting to be comforted as much as to give it. The little animal wriggled higher, turned and laid its head on Glynn’s arm. Its great dark eyes, gleaming in the light from the lantern Bayard had forgotten to extinguish, seemed to ask a question of her.

  ‘Oh, little one,’ Glynn murmured sadly. ‘I am the last one you should look to for answers.’

  segue …

  The watcher withdrew pondering the bonding between the girl and the feinna. Like the link that had grown between the world of the Unraveller and the world of Keltor, it was impossible, yet it had happened. Perhaps there was something that could be learned from it. The feinna needed the girl who had needed the feinna, and a link of love had been born of these needs. It was the same with the other woman and her cat, and with the two women.

  Was this what lay between the worlds: the cause of the expectancy it sensed in the web of connections: a need waiting to be answered?

  But if the linking was the result of an undischarged debt caused by the summoning of the Unraveller, how would it be repaid? Was it that something must be given back before the worlds could proceed on their own courses? And if so, what? The world of Keltor needed the Unraveller, but what need had the Unraveller’s world of Keltor?

  The watcher sensed that the link between the girl and the feinna held the answer, yet the girl, who was more woman now than child, could be observed only obliquely through those around her, and even this was dangerous for it might draw the attention of the Chaos spirit.

  It returned to the Unraveller’s world, and was drawn to a man within whom there was a fading trace of the Song …

  The machine made a wheezing sound, and the man could not help himself breathing in the same mindless rhythm. Tum-hah, tum-hah, tum-hah. He glanced up and down the silent ward to distract himself. He felt the fingers of the comatose woman twitch in his and he looked into her slack, powdery face. There was no sign of waking, of course. The movements were purely involuntary now, they said. It was just a matter of time. He liked to think that she was dreaming one last long dream, and that the convulsive twitches were dim physical echoes of her adventures. They said not; no rapid eye movements; no twitches of the eyeball. But how did they know someone in extremis did not dream undetectably?

  He pictured her dancing. It was hard to imagine his mother dancing with his silent obese father. But they had won ballroom dancing competitions when they were young. His father had died from a heart seizure when he was five. His clearest memories were of the two of them, he and his mother, alone together. Only after he had left home, did she seem to grow old.

  Then there had been a minor heart attack and a stroke. She had lived with them for a while, but Ruth had loathed it and so had the twins. His mother had talked too much, and left things about and shouted at visitors. When she became incontinent, Ruth put her foot down, saying it was time they considered some sort of a home.

  He didn’t remember discussing it, but a decision was made. The day they had taken her, they told her they were all going on an outing. She had grumbled happily until the car turned in at a sign saying Tall Pines. She had become very still, reminding him of an old dog they had taken to be put down. About a block from the veterinary hospital, the dog had seemed to know what lay ahead, and had developed that same stillness.

  A smiling nurse showed them the room and Ruth exclaimed falsely at how big and airy it was, and how pretty. The boys stoically ate the grapes out of the welcoming fruit bowl. When they left, she was still sitting on the bed and staring vacantly at her knotted hands.

  ‘Don’t you worry,’ the nurse had said comfortingly. ‘It feels like you are abandoning her, I know. But this is the best thing. She’ll come round. You’ll see.’

  But she hadn’t. He knew her ferocious strength of will, and had not been surprised. Nonetheless they had visited once a week until she had the second stroke and fell into a coma. Ruth had refused to bring the boys then, saying it was too depressing and asking what point there would be in it when his mother had neither spoken to them nor acknowledged their appearance on any occasion since she had entered the home.

  Since we put her there, he had wanted to say, but had not.

  He came alone after that. Once a fortnight late in the afternoon after band rehearsals on his day off, ears still ringing and the smell of beer and smoke in his hair. The home did not have set visiting times for terminally ill patients, because they were seldom overwhelmed with visitors, so he could come whenever he liked. He told Ruth this was the most convenient time. She said she did not see why he should go at all, but that no doubt his conventional upbringing required him to be a dutiful son.

  He had not told her that he felt it was not only his duty to visit her, but his right and his desire and a matter of honour. He would have felt embarrassed even to say to his clever, ugly wife that he loved his mother and wanted to visit her. He thought how odd that was. He had spoken of love quite naturally when he was a boy. But he had been happy then, and somehow lighter. Maybe it was easier to talk of love when you were a child.

  Was it simply age that brought this strange numbness to the soul and heart? When his sons were born, he had held them and wept as if his heart would break for the beauty of it. Now he watched them at breakfast discussing the school curriculum with Ruth, and felt nothing but a deep fatigue.

  His sons, and he felt nothing for them. Or for Ruth.

  ‘You are so intense,’ she had laughed half crossly on their first date, batting his hands away and straightening her skirt. ‘Nothing matters that much.’

  But it did. Or it had. Without any discernible reason, though, it had ceased to matter. Intensity had slipped away from him along with his passion for Ruth and his joy in the boys, in his friends, in his music.

  He thought of his mother bringing him, week after week, to piano lessons she could ill afford. One morning he had told her he did not want to go any more. She had stopped the car and turned to look at him so seriously he had been frightened of what she would say. He remembered her words vividly.

  ‘You have music in you, but more importantly you have passion, and the two together are a gift from heaven. You owe a duty to such a gift.’ Then she had started the car and he had gone to his lesson without another word between them.

  Such hopes she had for him, and what was he? An ill-paid history teacher and a member of an amateur jazz band. He did not blame his mother for his mediocrity and wondered if she had blamed him.

  A nurse approached unheard by the older man. The watcher shifted into the young man and found itself immersed in the Song.

  The young man was thinking that he had seen the bald guy sitting with the old woman before, in the oddly barren mid-week afternoons. He was glad because so many of the people lay there for weeks and months unvisited, some with the green-edged Do Not Revive slips in their files.

  At the beginning of his nursing career he had wanted to work in hospitals, which he had expected to be full of blood and pain and need. He had not known if he would be strong enough for it. But it was a training stint in the terminal unit, where life seemed to lie greyly in abeyance, that he found hardest to bear.

  He could vividly recall the day he had made the decision to leave the cutting edge of hospital nursing and
move into long-term care of terminal patients. A red-haired girl had been brought into the hospital several weeks earlier to be monitored as the specialists went through the painful process of trying to find some treatment that would prevent a massive tumour in her brain growing any further. Their efforts had caused the girl dreadful pain, but one day he came on duty to be told they had finally managed to stabilise the tumour. He had gone to congratulate her, and had discovered that, free of the distortions of pain, she was remarkably fair.

  She had turned to look at him, and he had been appalled to see in her eyes that she had given up life, though she was not dead. That empty, beautiful face crystallised his feeling that there was something terribly wrong with the world. The edges of it showed in her, and in these people no one cared about, dying their neat accepting deaths, unvisited and unmourned. This was where healing was most truly needed. Not the miraculous restoral of lire to those who must die, but the healing of that grey hopelessness; that void.

  He did not know how such a healing could be accomplished, but to work anywhere else would be too much like joining the ranks of the unseeing and uncaring. So he quit the hospital and had come here.

  He did not believe life was about mere happiness. It was about finding meaning and purpose and it was about giving something back. He did not know what he could give, other than the fact that he cared. The bald guy cared too. The nurse felt them to be comrades, as in a film he had once watched where unseen angels in suits drifted among people, hearing the lives of mortals as snatches of whispered thought. No one saw them, but they saw one another. They were immortal and they saw everything. They were witnesses. The nurse regarded himself and the bald man as witnesses, too.

  The bald man glanced around.

  ‘Hi,’ the nurse said softly. ‘How’s the patient tonight?’

  Stupid question, but what else could you say? It was just words anyway, to show some sort of solidarity. He unhitched the kidney bag and rigged a fresh one.