Darkfall

by Isobelle Carmody

  ‘Bleyd?’

  There was no movement. Tiptoeing across the room, she knelt and reached out to the hunched figure. ‘Bleyd … It’s me, Ember.’

  The shape moaned and stirred. ‘Ember?’ His voice sounded cracked and his throat hoarse but it was Bleyd’s voice all right. He flung one hand up to protect his eyes from the light.

  ‘I’ve come to help you,’ she whispered.

  He struggled to sit, and she stifled a gasp of horror at the sight of his battered features. The handsome Fomhikan was almost unrecognisable. His lips were swollen and misshapen, crusted with blood. One eye was puffed completely shut and his face was a motley patchwork of bruises and cuts. His shirt was stiff and black with what could only be blood, and one arm was wrapped up in a clump of filthy rag. Unwrapping it only part way was enough for Ember to smell the sickening stench of infection.

  ‘It probably looks far worse than it is …’ Bleyd rasped indifferently, pulling the rags back in place.

  ‘I’ve come to get you out,’ Ember said, when she could make herself speak.

  His lips twisted into a painful smile. ‘You?’

  She ignored his incredulity and stifled her own. ‘Yes, me. Unless you have some other plan.’

  His smile faded. ‘It is dangerous for you to come here …’

  ‘You think I haven’t figured that out by now?’ Ember asked. ‘Come on,’ she urged. ‘You’ve got to help me. We only have to get to the steps on our own.’

  ‘What … what of the legionnaires, or have you bewitched them as you bewitched me?’ Bleyd grunted, trying to heave himself to his feet. Ember had no strength for an answer by the time she had him on his feet. They staggered out of the cell, with the Fomhikan stifling moans of pain. In the light Ember could see that something had been done to his legs, and she felt her gorge rise into her throat. Only Bleyd’s fear at the sight of the guards, and the pity she felt for him, gave her the courage to drive him past them.

  ‘It’s all right … they’re … they’re drugged,’ she panted.

  They passed the little knot of green-clad legionnaires in silence. It seemed to take forever to get to the steps and Ember almost wept to find the stairwell was empty.

  Where was the help the manbeast had promised?

  She looked helplessly at the tall Fomhikan slouched half-fainting against the wall. Then she gritted her teeth, and made him lean on her. ‘Come on, we have to keep going.’

  Slowly they began the long climb up. As they passed the hypnotised legionnaires, Ember wondered fearfully how long their trances would last. If they woke now …

  She stopped to rest when they reached an alcove, trembling with muscle strain and unable to imagine how she was going to manage the rest of the stairs.

  ‘So!’ said a voice from above, sounding amused. ‘What is this then? An escape?’

  With a plummeting heart, Ember looked up at the grinning emissary, Asa. ‘It was fortunate I thought to check on the visionweaver’s safety.’ He came slowly down the steps drawing a long-bladed knife from his belt.

  Bleyd chose that moment to faint dead away. Ember tried to hold him but he was too heavy and she sagged to her knees under his weight. It was all she could do to stop him tumbling back down the stairs.

  ‘Liar,’ she gasped at Asa, despair making her unexpectedly furious. ‘You came to check we were safely dead!’

  His smile faded. ‘Now I wonder how you know that. Unless that mask you wear so prettily hides a crescent of moons!’

  The emissary grabbed her by one arm and dragged her to her feet, flicking off veil and mask with the end of his knife. Seeing her unmarked cheek, his eyes moved to hers, then widened in disbelief.

  ‘You … your eye. You are silverblind in one eye! But that is impossible. Unless …’

  Ember snatched back her veil and, at the same moment, Feyt sprang down the stairs behind Asa and hammered her elbow into the emissary’s head. He fell with a creaking sound, releasing Ember who was shaking from head to toe.

  ‘That was too close for comfort,’ the myrmidon said. She looked down at Bleyd wonderingly. ‘I have never visioned in my life but, wide awake in the apartment, I was commanded to come here. I thought I was going mad but I came. What has been happening here? How …’

  She stopped abruptly and reached down to haul the unconscious Bleyd onto her shoulders in a fireman’s hold. ‘I am a fool. The vision said there would be no time for questions. Someone will come to see what is happening. There is no time for me to summon the Shadowman now. There is only one thing for it. Bleyd must go with you on the Stormsong. He needs prolonged healing in any case, by the look of him. We have no choice, for your escape is the only part of the plan in place. The carriage waits and so does Revel.’

  ‘But it’s night. Revel won’t cast off in the dark.’

  ‘It is close to morning. Kalinda will be rising by the time you are aboard the Stormsong. And there is a trail marked already for tomorrow in the forest, though not yet with Bleyd’s scent.’ Feyt ripped a strip of cloth from the Fomhikan’s ragged clothes, and stuffed it in her pocket.

  ‘What about Anyi?’

  ‘I will take care of the boy. He will be just as happy, I think, that his brother is away from Ramidan.’

  Ember followed the amazon up the remaining steps and down a dim back hall she had never seen before. It came out into a moonlit lane smelling of refuse. The smell was coming from the only carriage in the street. A rubbish wagon.

  Oh, Cinderella, Ember thought with a bizarre flash of humour.

  ‘Quick now,’ Feyt urged. ‘Put on the veil.’

  As they approached the odorous carriage, a thickset man stepped out of the shadows.

  ‘This is earlier than planned,’ he rumbled.

  ‘It is, but need has no clock attached to it.’

  The man grunted and lifted the tarpaulin under the garbage, revealing a hollowed gap. ‘Not much room. I thought there was to be only one.’

  ‘They will manage,’ Feyt said and slid Bleyd in with the other man’s help. Then the driver took his seat. ‘It will be a tight fit, but not for long. And Ember, keep the veil on until you get to Myrmidor.’

  ‘Asa saw me …’ she stopped and looked at the cart driver.

  ‘I will deal with Asa. Ask for Duran when you get to Myrmidor and tell her everything. I hope we meet again. I think you would have a story to tell about this night, worthy of a good flask of cirul.’

  She helped Ember into the narrow space.

  ‘Feyt … this morning you said if I asked something of you …’

  ‘I would do it. Yes. What is it you would have me do?’

  ‘Do you remember the blonde girl I saw fall from a cliff in my vision?’

  Feyt was frowning. ‘I have sent out enquiries but I told you …’

  ‘She is my sister. Her name is Glynn. Glynna, and I think … I think I was looking for her when I swam into the waves and ended up here. I think she came here before me.’

  Feyt’s eyes registered shock. ‘Your sister! But how …? No, there is no time for this. I will seek her. If she is alive and on Keltor, I will find her. I swear it. Now go!’

  She threw the flap of canvas over them and shouted to the driver to go on. The cart drew away with a jerk. It smelled of animal manure and rotten vegetables, and Bleyd lay like the dead, stinking of a different kind of rot, but Ember rested her head gratefully on the fouled boards.

  Glynn, she thought.

  It was not all that had been forgotten, but it was something, and a very great something. Perhaps the brightest thing, for still there was a secret, heavy and hidden inside her, waiting to be released and this name rested against it somehow, balancing it. Glynna. Astonishingly, Ember slept until they had reached the harbour and the rough cobbles of the pier road rattling under the wheels woke her.

  Revel herself threw back the tarp covering them, sterner-faced than Ember remembered. The shipmistress surveyed Bleyd but waved away Ember’s explanations and summoned two o
f her crew to carry him aboard. The Stormsong’s yellow mast pennants fluttered wildly in the stiff wind blowing in from the sea. Kalinda had yet to rise, but the horizon glowed promisingly. It was almost dawn. Brusquely Revel told her to get below and stay out of sight.

  Ember’s last sight of Ramidan was of the rubbish cart rumbling back along the pier road to the citadel.

  In the tiny cabin Bleyd was laid unconscious on the only bed. When the shipsons departed, Ember perched beside him, trying to encompass all that had happened.

  Her eyes fell on the a’luwtha next to a bag propped in the corner. Feyt must have sent them down earlier.

  Slowly and with a feeling of uttermost inevitability, Ember took up the instrument and placed it gently in her lap. Soon now, if all went well, Revel would cast off and, at the end of this journey, whatever pain she might be called upon to endure, there was hope and healing. The shadow of her forgotten self hovered insistently. Ember knew there was darkness in it waiting to be unleashed. But now there was a name to set against the fear it roused, and the name was like a talisman.

  Glynna.

  ‘Let us go from this shore before the Edict bell rings, and I will play and let the ghosts come to rest,’ Ember vowed to whatever powers ruled this world, and rested her long fingers on the strings in readiness.

  segue …

  The watcher was exhausted. It had intervened, and this had diminished it badly. And there would be a deeper price to pay. There was, it seemed, always a price to pay. But for now at least, the girl was safe.

  Yet the Void was so violently disturbed by its intervention and by the events of the preceding days on Keltor, that all of the possible futures were fusing and reshaping. There was no telling what they would reveal, when the Void settled. It must wait and see.

  It segued to the Unraveller’s world, and here too there were omens flying freely. Matters were in flux. People sleeping dreamed of comets and flying horses and red-haired goddesses. People dreamed Chaos and the Song. More than enough evidence that the worlds now existed in symbiosis. Like the blonde girl and the feinna. To let the world of the Unraveller fall into Chaos would doom Keltor to the same fate. But how could the world of the Unraveller be saved?

  Two birds flew in the dusk, dark claws on the face of a yellow moon that had just risen above the horizon.

  Far below, they flickered for an instant in the smooth shining eyes of a blind baby beneath an open window. Catching some unexpected movement from the corner of his eye, the father looked into his son’s face. Twin reflected moons lay passive as pools in the child’s eyes, but the man remained convinced that he had seen something. He could imagine what the doctor would say, and usually this would have been enough to restore the dragging hopelessness that they lived under these days.

  But quite suddenly he made up his mind that they would, after all, seek a second opinion. He felt lighter at once and decided it was better to hope, even when there was no hope. He was smiling as he called his wife’s name.

  The watcher withdrew, understanding suddenly and with breathtaking simplicity what was needed by this world. Not the Firstmade, but the thing that the Firstmade had brought: wonder, beauty, a reason to hope. A transcendent symbol to waken them to their dreams.

  33

  The world is full of unfinished visioncloths.

  OLD SHEANNITE PROVERB

  ‘You know,’ Solen said, ‘it is told that Ranouf of Vespi could wavespeak a ship so that it would remain in the eye of a storming until it died of exhaustion around him, so great was his skill.’

  Glynn gazed at the isle of Ramidan and its strange red-tinted cliff city, trying to discern if it was the crimson dawn that gave it that ominous bloody hue.

  ‘I wonder what happened to him in the end …’

  Solen shot her a look. ‘Ranouf? No one knows.’

  ‘Do you think he killed himself?’

  Solen shrugged gracefully. ‘Perhaps he courted death until his luck ran out. But from the stories, I do not think he would have been coward enough to kill himself.’

  That caught her attention. ‘You think that choosing to die is cowardice?’ She was thinking of the feinna. There had not been any lack of courage in that tortured little beast.

  He knew what was in her thoughts, so close had the past night brought them. ‘The feinna had no choice,’ he said. ‘She fought nature by forging an unnatural link with the draakira to save her babies. The way she died was natural to her species. But it is different for people. For us, suicide is surrender.’

  ‘Don’t you think there might be times when surrender is the best thing to do? The only thing?’ Now, tangentially, Glynn was thinking of Ember and wondering how her sister’s stoical wait for death would be viewed by the Acanthan. Would he call that fighting or surrendering?

  She noticed a ship pull away from the pier and squinted to make out its name, but it was too far away.

  Solen stared down at Glynn intently, his coat flapping in the sharp breeze which was all that remained of the wild storming that had driven them from the Turin Straits to the isle of Ramidan in record time. She seemed to him, in this soft dawn light, as golden as Kalinda and very fair.

  With difficulty he brought his thoughts to bear on her question, though it was not truly a question. ‘Perhaps there are times when it seems there is no alternative to surrender, but while we breathe, there is hope. It takes courage to hope though.’

  While there is breath in you, you would fight with a courage you do not even seem to understand is in you, he thought, but did not say.

  Glynn sensed something flowing from him as heat and fire. But she was thinking of Ember, pale but for the flame of her hair. She hadn’t tried to kill herself, but wasn’t there a kind of weakness in her embrace of death?

  The tiny He-feinna uttered a mewling noise, and Glynn looked down to find it staring up at her with its mother’s liquid seal-eyes.

  ‘The feinna had to die, yet it resisted death long enough to help its child live,’ Solen said, and there was a break in his voice that moved Glynn.

  Like Solen, she had been deeply affected by the birthing. It had also stripped something away between them. Having shared that extraordinary night of storms and death and, in the midst of it, this one precious birth, they could never quite be ordinary together. More was born last night than the He-feinna, Glynn thought.

  Her eyes blurred anew at the memory of Bayard’s sudden, shocking death, and of the two dead feinna dropped into the sea with their mother while the storm faded about them. They could have waited to reach land, but somehow it had been fitting. In this new wordless way, they had both known that.

  She had passed the little He-feinna to its mother, and its eyes had shown a brief radiance before they clouded and the soul-spar flew where its mate’s had gone, and Bayard’s. Weeping bitterly, for she had not known this would come, Glynn had swaddled the tiny He-feinna and held it to her breasts, still not understanding what she had done to make it live.

  She knew exactly what had happened in one way; it was just that there were no words to fit the experience. No human words.

  ‘Those born who must tread strange and dangerous paths are given gifts to aid them by the gods,’ Wind had said once.

  Glynn shivered, wondering what the future held now.

  She would have to explain Bayard’s death when the Draaka woke. She was free of them now, though. They would not dare to drug or bind her with so many witnesses on hand.

  There was still a link to be taken into account, but the link she had with the He-feinna was not like the one that had existed between its mother and Bayard. That link had changed the feinna, maiming and altering the creature’s spirit in some unnatural way. The link between Glynn and the He-feinna was not a mating link, but something else altogether that had been shaped by the dead She-feinna and had changed Glynn; changed her in ways she could not yet even begin to comprehend.

  Changed her forever, she suspected.

  Not the He-feinna; only herself
. But maimed was not the right word, because rather than feeling unnatural and crippled as the feinna had felt after linking with Bayard, the gnawing emptiness that had haunted Glynn was stilled. Not a maiming, but a completion of her.

  She thought of a passage she had read in Bayard’s scrolls. Humans had an emptiness in them, one of the scholars had written, or perhaps they were quoting Lanalor or his sister. There had been a name for the emptiness but she could not remember what it was. The scribe had gone on to say that the aim of humanity had been to find a way to fill the emptiness. The Song directed them to seek completion.

  If the object of humanity was to be completed, then she had come very close. And if she had been searching for something unknowable, as Wind had always believed, then the arrow of her spirit had found its mark in this world; found it in the link with the He-feinna, and in what she felt for Solen.

  For he was part of it, that much was evident.

  This morning after the sea burial when they had stood quietly together, he had said, ‘I spoke as I did at the wing hall because I wanted Jurass to believe that I cared nothing for you or Hella. To keep you both from danger.’

  Glynn had nodded gently, understanding that this was an apology if she needed one. She didn’t.

  Then some while later, ‘Donard said you wept when you told him I had died.’

  A day ago, she would have denied it and turned her face away.

  She looked at Solen, letting him see, from her face and eyes, what the thought of his death had meant. But she did not say the words and, as if a pact had been made to that effect, neither did he.

  It was not the time for it. But it would come. That, too, was unsaid between them.

  She had not told him yet that she was a stranger, yet she would, as soon as she disentangled herself from the Draaka. She would tell him and take the help she knew he would offer. But, for now, it was best to leave things as they were.

  For there was Ember to be considered. If there was any emptiness left in her, Ember was at the heart of it.

  The gold-sailed Waterdancer carried them gracefully over the crests of the waves towards the long stone pier, and through the sea mist Glynn could see the rambling multi-layered city constructed on and within the variegated cliffs. The rest of the island appeared to be a dense wilderness and flat, save for a single blunt jutting thumb of a hill in the central region of the land mass. Highreach Bluff, Solen had named it.