by Ian Irvine
“Why would Unick want to harm her?” said Llian.
“He’s a monster!”
“No, there’s got to be more to it. He must see some kind of a threat in her.”
“How could Aviel be a threat?”
“I don’t know. But Unick left Pem-Y-Rum the same time we did,” said Llian, walking around the fire and thinking aloud, “and he took spare horses. It’s a week’s ride from there to Casyme, via the Tullin path. Less if he rides his horses into the ground, though parts of the path are so steep that riding is no quicker than walking.”
“He could get to Casyme in another four days.”
“He might.”
“And we’re further away than he was when he left,” Wilm said dismally. “We’ll never catch him.”
“The mountains narrow rapidly as you go north,” said Llian. “It’s only a four-day crossing from here by the old path. Then we can race south to Casyme in another day.”
“That’s still a day too late.”
“If we ride a couple of hours longer each day, we might make up the difference. Come on.”
They stuffed their gear into the saddlebags, mounted and ate breakfast as they went.
“But what are we going to do if… when we get there?” said Wilm. “He’s a great brute of a man.”
“He’s also a middle-aged drunk with the trembles. You’re young and fast, and you’ve got one of Mendark’s lucky swords. At the rate you’ve been practising, you’ll be a master swordsman by then.”
Wilm laughed hollowly. “What if he goes for you?”
“I’ll talk him to death! Take heart, Wilm; we’ll beat him, I know we will.”
But Wilm knew they would not.
64
A WHIFF OF BURNED BONES
According to Shand’s almanack, the eclipse of the blood moon would begin around half past eight tonight, and it would be over by a quarter to ten. The Eureka Graveolence had to be mixed at the full of the moon, though the almanack was silent on how long that would last. Aviel thought it might only be a few minutes. She would have to work fast, and accurately, for there would be no chance to try again.
She made everything ready, packed her bag with food, clothing and other necessities, plus a hammer to smash the summon stone as Malien’s letter had instructed, and a metal flask containing a pint of oil so she could burn the fragments to ash.
She put her entire wealth, four silver tars and five copper grints, in her wallet and asked Demoy to make Thistle ready – the horse had found his way back to the stables a week previously. She was not looking forward to riding him again, though at least his quirks were familiar.
What else? To deal with unknown dangers she might need to blend a scent potion on the way. Aviel had once made a belt with many small loops, each sized to hold a phial. She filled phials with all the common scents, plus several uncommon ones and a couple that were rare or dangerous, and made sure they were all stoppered tightly and secure in their loops.
Darkness had fallen hours ago and the moon was rising. Not long to go. She checked in case her horrible sisters were creeping up to throw stones at the workshop or fill her water barrel with manure, but all was clear. The moon was just beginning to turn ruddy. A snail seemed to glide down her spine.
She went back inside, slipped the bolt and extinguished all the lamps but one, which she turned down so there was just enough light to see what she was doing. The potion making must not be interrupted. She drew the curtains, save the one on the upper part of the eastern window. She needed to check the moon constantly as the time approached.
Ooo-ooo-ooo-ooo.
The nightjar – not a good beginning. Aviel stood the nine phials on the bench in the order that she had to use them and checked the labels. She could do nothing about ill omens or her intrinsic bad luck, but she could eliminate simple mistakes.
She yawned, rubbed her eyes and laid her head on her arms. So tired. Her eyes closed for a second. She snapped them open and stood up.
She stared at the phials, her eyes unfocused, her mind on the coming journey. Assuming the Eureka Graveolence didn’t go terribly wrong and splatter her all over the workshop, it would point her to the source of the drumming – the summon stone. Then, unless a miracle happened and Shand turned up, it was up to her to go there and try to destroy it.
Aviel shuddered. She hated leaving her workshop, and her previous dash on Thistle had taught her how dangerous the open road was for someone who could not run away. This would be a far longer trip – how long she did not know – with great danger at the end of it and no one to help her.
Ooo-ooo-ooo-ooo.
Why was the oil in the fourth phial a pale yellow? It should be colourless. She checked the label. It was correct but the oil wasn’t. She took a careful sniff – mustard oil. It had nothing to do with the Eureka Graveolence; it was one of the phials that should have been in her belt. Despite all the care she had taken, she had mislabelled it.
She went through her belt, found the scent that should have been the fourth of her nine – the foul gas from a rotten death adder’s egg – relabelled it and checked the nine again, twice, to be sure. Using mustard oil would have been a disastrous mistake.
Aviel glanced up through the window. The moon was full and ruddy all over. She’d already wasted a minute. Go!
She panicked, reached for the first phial and her trembling hand knocked it over. Aviel forced herself to stop and recite a list of herbs backwards to calm herself – yucca, wormwood, vervain, valerian… She picked the phial up and clamped an empty phial – the one in which the Eureka Graveolence would be blended – to a stand so she could not knock it over.
After selecting an eye dropper from a tray of them, she twisted out the bung of the first phial, drew some up in the eye dropper and dripped exactly seven drops into the tenth phial. She returned the rest to the first phial, capped it, then with a fresh eye dropper took one single drop of the second scent, the putrescent one she had extracted from the de-hairing sludge. All that effort and danger for one drop!
She focused on working to a careful rhythm and shaking the potion phial in the correct way and the correct number of times each time, and continued until only the ninth scent remained.
The nightjar called again. Ooo-ooo-ooo-ooo.
The moon was starting to eclipse; she could see the faintest shadow on the upper right. Aviel drew up the ninth oil in a clean eye dropper and caught an unpleasant whiff of the skull bone she had stolen and burned after violating an unknown person’s grave. Her first step on the path to darkness.
Her arm trembled. She steadied it and carefully released ten drops onto a dry part of the inside wall of the phial, then watched the thick oil ooze down.
Not ten, you fool! Nine drops!
Aviel squirted the rest of the oil back into the phial it came from, then put the tip of the eye dropper into the oozing oil on the wall of the Eureka Graveolence phial, and drew up a quantity. But how to make sure there were nine drops in the phial? She released all she had drawn up save for the last, hanging drop, removed the dropper and shook the phial.
The Eureka Graveolence was made. But would it work?
Never sniff a scent potion directly.
Scent potions could never be perfectly duplicated since the strength of each scent could vary according to its source ingredients. One time a scent potion might be ineffective, yet the next time it was made the same amount could be an overdose. With her free hand she wafted some of the potion towards her, then stoppered the phial and took a careful sniff.
Bang!
Her limbs convulsed so violently that she shot backwards off her stool, cracking her head on the bench behind her. Pain shrieked through her skull. Choking sounds were coming from her throat and her heels were drumming on the floorboards. The lamp went out. Through the window the moon grew huge, as if it were toppling out of the sky right at her. It burst into shards and everything went black.
Aviel could see again, though her field of vision
was spinning like a compass needle: mountains with tips of snow; a ruined mill of black stone in a mountain forest; an undulating landscape, brown and withered; a neglected manor with a green slate roof and walls of pink granite; an orchard with hardly any fruit; an escarpment. Then a series of barren hills rising steeply to a rocky horn on which stood a bizarre half-ruined tower built of violet-coloured rock.
The drumming sounded so loudly that it deafened her, and the tower wobbled as if it were made of rubber. Something slid off the bench behind her and landed on her forehead. A glass stopper.
Aviel groaned. Lights flashed before her eyes and she saw the ruined tower again. Was that where the summon stone lay? She could not tell, though she was sure of the direction, north-north-east. But how far? Five miles or fifty? Or five hundred?
She got up, rubbing her bruised forehead and the back of her head, picked up the stool and relit the lantern. The moon was still red, though just a thin crescent now, almost completely eclipsed. She had been out for some time.
Aviel checked the scent potion, which was safely stoppered. She tied a piece of thread around it so she could identify it in the dark if she needed to, wrapped it in a scrap of cloth for extra protection and jammed it into the last belt loop.
She tidied up the workshop, carefully washed out the eye droppers and left them to drain. Everything was ready. Time for bed. She would leave at dawn.
Aviel woke to a disgusting smell in her nostrils, the same reek she had detected several nights ago when she had realised that someone evil had become aware of her existence. But this was different, worse.
He was after her.
Was he in the workshop? She hurled herself out of bed and lit a lamp. The door was still bolted; she was alone. She tried to tell herself that it was just a waking nightmare but knew it wasn’t. How had he discovered her? Was it because she had used the scent potion to locate the summon stone? Was it fighting back?
How close was he? She could not tell, and there was nowhere she could hide, no one to protect her. Her only hope was to get to the stone and destroy it before he caught her. Aviel dressed in the warmest clothes she had, checked her list three times, carried her gear to the stables and packed it into Thistle’s saddlebags.
She collected the grimoire, locked the workshop and let herself into Shand’s house. She thought the run-down manor with the green slate roof and the pink granite walls was probably Gothryme, where Llian lived. It made sense; she knew from the Histories, and bits she had read of his Great Tale recently, that strange and uncanny things had happened in the mountains behind Gothryme.
Aviel checked Shand’s wall map and made a sketch map of the back way from Casyme to Gothryme. Remembering how easily she had become lost last time, she marked the distances to important intersections and landmarks on her map.
She left Malien’s second letter in the middle of the kitchen table and scribbled, “Gone after it, Aviel,” on the letter. She also did a sketch of the broken tower she had seen in the night, though she could not imagine it would tell Shand anything.
She had planned to put the grimoire back where she had found it, but instead Aviel returned to the stables, wrapped it carefully and tucked it into her saddlebag. It might be the only defence she had. She mounted, waved to the silent stable boy and rode out.
She would head for Gothryme. Perhaps she could get food and shelter there, since she was a traveller and had news, old though it was, of Llian. Then she would use the Eureka Graveolence again. If the source was close it should be easier to locate.
It was good to have a plan. She turned Thistle onto the back road and nudged him into a steady pace.
Then the waking nightmare came back.
65
IT’S HIM! IT’S HIM!
Aviel was hopelessly lost and there was only one way to get back on track, though she was reluctant to try the scent potion again just yet. Her stomach muscles still ached, and when she stretched she felt a sharp pain to the left of her belly button, as if she had torn something there.
Her map said that it was forty miles from Casyme to Gothryme, a couple of days’ ride at her slow pace, but even in daylight she struggled to reconcile the lines on the paper with the landscape she was passing through.
There were no towns or villages here, no farmers to ask for directions, and somehow she had taken a wrong turning. It was late afternoon and the track was taking her up a ridge through tall, dripping forest.
How could this be right? The track did not appear to have been used in weeks. She stopped at a little cascade, where Thistle drank noisily, deposited an enormous amount of manure on the bank and cropped the grass. She urged him up to the top of the ridge and dismounted, wincing.
Her bottom was bruised all over and the insides of her thighs were chafed again. She looked left and right and up, though she could only see ridges, rising ever higher, and hints of snow on the tops of the highest.
Aviel consulted her map again but it was hard to focus on the lines; having had so little sleep last night, she was exhausted. Was there any point going on? She made mistakes when she was tired and her bad luck was always worse. It was after four in the afternoon now, and the sun had passed behind the mountains ages ago. Better find a safe campsite and get a fire going. She still felt shivery whenever she thought about what had happened in the night, and that stinking brute coming after her.
Through the trees she glimpsed the ruins of a mill, its rotting waterwheel still in place. It would be good to have walls around her again, even broken ones. She limped across to Thistle, took hold of the saddle and tried to lift her good foot into the stirrup. Pain speared through her ankle and her thigh muscles gave way; she could not raise her foot high enough. She tried again but was too low by a foot.
Tears of frustration sprang into her eyes. She wiped them on her sleeve, cursing her turned ankle and the miserable luck that had plagued her all her life.
“We’ll just have to walk, Thistle. That’ll be nice, won’t it?”
Thistle turned his long head, looked her in the eye and snorted.
Aviel looped the reins around her fist. They crossed a cascade. The light was fading; it was getting cold and a ground mist was rising. She glanced to her left and saw the wheel again and the broken black walls behind it. And she recognised it – she had seen it after sniffing the graveolence. Had it led her here? If so, why?
“Home, sweet home, Thistle!”
Thistle whinnied; his eye was huge and the white was showing all around.
“It’s all right,” she said, stroking his neck. “We’re safe here.”
The ground mist rose in a series of wraith shapes. A chilly breeze twisted and coiled, then drifted the shapes towards her. She passed through one and it chilled her to her aching bones.
The mill loomed up. It had been built over the stream on the wall that dammed it, and the dam still stood. The stone walls were covered in moss as high as her head, and the mill was dank and unwelcoming, but it was the best shelter she was going to get. Aviel tied Thistle on a long lead so he could crop the grass and reach the water, and went in through a broken archway.
The mill had once been two storeys, but its roof had fallen in and the wood of the upper floor had rotted away except for a couple of beams festooned with wraith-like fungal growths. The ground was littered with decayed timbers and broken roof slates. Parts of the far wall had collapsed, leaving a series of ragged stone stumps like scattered teeth in a black jawbone.
Home sweet home indeed! She found some dry boards in the lee of the left-hand wall and used a little bag of tinder she had brought with her to light a fire.
It sputtered and shot sparks at her, and the smoke hung low between the walls. It had an unpleasant smell; the boards had been painted with wood tar to preserve them, and Aviel started to feel nauseous. She sniffed some oil of orange blossom, which helped, then took a blazing board outside to look for more dry wood. She found none; everything was sodden, and now it began to rain.
Thoro
ughly dispirited, she ate a lump of hard cheese, found a dry corner, put out the reeking fire and lay down in her sleeping pouch with her cloak wrapped around her. But though she was utterly exhausted, Aviel could not get to sleep.
With her hammer and her pint of oil, smashing the summon stone and burning the fragments should be easy enough. But she had to think of all the ways it could go wrong. The stone might be in a place that was dangerous to get to, or it might be protected in some way.
She was too tired. She closed her eyes and tried to put everything out of mind, and finally slipped into a troubled sleep.
The purple-faced man made his drunken way east across the mountains. He rode the last of his horses to death, abandoned it in the middle of the road and continued in a grunting lurch, swilling from a flask until it was empty then smashing it to pieces on the road, wrenching another from his saddlebags and continuing. Once, when his agony broke through the numbing effects of the drink, he screamed until blood ran from his nose.
He met an old man driving a cart and singing an offensively merry tune. He leaped onto the cart and threw the old man off on his head, cursing him for being happy in so wretched a world. The drunk turned the cart around and ran over the old man, then flogged the old horse into a gallop until it collapsed. He ate nothing and did not stop, day or night.
The rampage went on, one mindless brutality after another until the drunk crested the range of mountains separating the dry lands to the west from wealthy Iagador. There he stopped, took a fragment of dusty glass out of his pocket and sniffed it. He pointed a brass tube with two red crystals on its end to the left, then the right, his eyes blazing, then settled on a direction and staggered on. He had to stop her before she ruined everything.
Aviel screamed and threw herself out of the sleeping pouch. The stench had congealed in her nostrils, a reek so offensive that it made the Eureka Graveolence seem like a cleansing aroma.
“It’s him!” she gasped. “It’s him.”
