by Ian Irvine
“How did she know you had the key?”
“It’s mentioned in the Tale of the Mirror. She swore she was going to destroy me, and this is her revenge.”
“How long before she arrives?”
He mentally traced the route. “Even a council courier, changing horses several times a day, couldn’t do it in less than eight days. So for Thandiwe at least ten.”
“And she left the megaliths, what, eight days ago? She could get here soon. You’d better find Rulke’s papers first.”
“I’ll get started.”
“And I’ll keep watch and take the key back the moment she enters.”
“Be careful! She’s a dangerous woman.”
Karan’s green eyes glittered. “Not as dangerous as I am, when someone of mine has been wronged.”
“You speak as though I’m your possession,” said Llian.
“And don’t you forget it!”
He smiled ruefully. “Am I also your plaything?”
“There’s every possibility – if you behave yourself.”
78
I MUST WARN YOU
When Ifoli entered Snoat’s oval reading room carrying a note, he gained the impression that she was afraid of him. Her fear did not bother him, though he was irked that she showed it.
Despite her exemplary service he would have got rid of her had there been anyone to replace her, but he no longer found it easy to recruit the best. It could not be because of his wealth and power, which had grown considerably since the catastrophe at the place whose name he had erased from the map. It must be because he was maimed, repulsive and an object of derision.
“Is that message from Rasper?” he said. Even his voice had lost its former honeyed perfection. These days it was grating and monotonous; he lacked the strength of will to speak properly.
“A subordinate,” said Ifoli. “Rasper is dead and all but one of his men.”
“How?” cried Snoat, shocked. “And where?”
“He tracked Llian and the youth, Wilm, to Carcharon, a ruin in the mountains west of Tolryme.”
“I know where Carcharon is. Why did they go there?”
“The message does not say,” said Ifoli. “Though Shand, Karan and Ussarine arrived only hours later, following Unick.”
“Why did Unick go to Carcharon?” said Snoat.
Realising that he was rubbing his scarred chin through the silken mask that covered his nose and the lower half of his face, he dropped his hand to his side.
“Rasper’s man did not know,” said Ifoli.
“Take a guess.”
“Unick went there because his devices—”
“My devices!” snapped Snoat.
“Your devices told him the summon stone was there.”
“There is no summon stone! It, and the Merdrun invasion, are a fantasy concocted by my enemies to try and unite the west against me.”
Ifoli went perfectly still. “I believe it, Cumulus.”
He made a dismissive gesture, both crude and clumsy. His decline was humiliating and someone had to pay.
“Rasper’s man has recovered the Command device,” said Ifoli. “He’s sending it by skeet the moment the bird returns to him. You’ll have it by dinnertime.”
“Without the Origin and Identity devices, it’ll be severely limited. Have my artisans made copies yet?”
“Yes, but they can’t get them to work.”
Snoat cursed. Using profanity was another illustration of his decline, but he no longer cared. “Tell me about Unick.”
“He’s utterly debased now; he left a trail of ruin all the way across the mountains.”
“He’ll soon drink himself to death,” said Snoat carelessly.
“I must warn you, Cumulus—”
“You already have,” he snapped. “Don’t mention it again.”
“I have a duty of care.”
“Enough!” he roared.
She nodded stiffly and stepped back to her place, her salmon-pink kimono rustling. Snoat flushed. He, who had always prided himself on his mastery of self, had so lost control as to shout at her. What was happening to him?
“What about Thandiwe?” he said in a deliberately flat voice.
“After splitting with Llian she headed south in the direction of Flumen, with four of your horses. She has not been seen since and you have few spies in those lands. It will take time to find her.”
“Put more spies to work.”
“Yes, Cumulus.”
“But never lose sight of my first objective – my collection of the Great Tales must be complete. Find Llian and get his manuscript back.”
“And then?”
“I want his mummified head spiked on my bedpost.” He turned away to adjust the mask. “What progress on… the other matter?”
He meant restoration mancery to give him back his perfect nose and chin, and the three fingers so burned that they’d had to be amputated.
“Slow,” said Ifoli. “Such mancery has been done before, though the results have rarely been ideal. However there are illusionists who—”
“I don’t want the illusion of perfection. It’s not for the world, it’s for me.”
He dissembled. It mattered a great deal that the world saw him as a perfect specimen, but it mattered more that he be one in his own eyes. Presently he was maimed and it could not be endured.
“It may take a greater power than old human mancers have ever used before, even such mancers as have taken renewal.”
“The Command device will give me power; all I need are the restoration spells. Find them!”
She shivered, and again he felt she was afraid. Not of him, but of it.
“To the war,” said Snoat.
“Sith won’t be easy to take.”
“The allies only have five thousand men, and they’re led by a geriatric librarian.” He snorted, then had to wipe his eroded nose, another humiliation. “I have three armies and my fleet is big enough to carry any one of them. Send one army south to besiege Sith. Embark another to take Vilikshathûr from the sea, then sail upriver to attack Sith from the east.”
“It… will be done,” said Ifoli.
79
A WAR OF HONOUR
“What the blazes is that doing here?” Llian said to himself. He had been searching Alcifer for Rulke’s papers for days, without success, or indeed any sign that he had ever been here. Until now.
It was an eighteen-foot-high statue of Rulke – a nude carved from a single block of granite – on a broad stepped platform in the middle of a vast but otherwise empty chamber. His stone eyes were fixed on the opposite wall, which was covered in intricately embossed silver. Llian studied the embossing, realising that it was writing in the secret Charon script, a few paragraphs repeated over and over. It called to him but without the key it was unreadable.
He turned back to the statue. It was a good likeness and brilliantly finished, not an easy thing to do in such a hard and crystalline stone. As he was walking around it, wondering who had put it there, Llian saw that it showed the huge gash in Rulke’s side that had killed him ten years ago. Or was it some older injury from his immensely long life? No, the wound matched Llian’s memory of the fatal moment.
Given that the statue would have taken years to carve and polish, it could not have been here more than seven years. But who had commissioned it and brought it all this way? It would have been a major undertaking, for there was no granite near Alcifer. Only a wealthy patron could have done so, yet Rulke had been a much-reviled figure, still widely known as the Great Betrayer.
Surely only another Charon would erect a statue to him, but Yalkara and the other handful who had survived had gone back to the void to die. Then who, and how, and why?
Llian was still circling the platform when Maigraith’s ring tingled and a rainbow of colours outlined a foot-wide oval at the base. The colours faded and so did the oval. Llian poked its middle with the toe of his boot and a concealed hatch, well matched to the rest of t
he stone platform, swung out.
Inside was a sheaf of copper leaves, each the size of a sheet of paper and held together with a broad ribbon made from beaten platinum. And they were written in the common script, in wine-red ink.
Every hair stood up on Llian’s head. Was this this the breakthrough he had been looking for ever since leaving Gothryme?
Karan was hidden in the shadows above the north gate of Alcifer, waiting for Thandiwe, and she was looking forward to the confrontation. How dare Thandiwe try to seduce Llian? How dare she rob him? Karan indulged in little fantasies of revenge.
Llian slipped in beside her, holding some copper sheets. His face was flushed and his eyes were shining. “Look what I found. And I can read them.”
“Are they the lost Histories of the Charon?” said Karan.
“No, they’d fill volumes. And they’re in the secret Charon script that no one can read without Rulke’s key.”
Karan glanced out the window at the track winding down from the mountains behind Alcifer. Thandiwe could not be far away. “I’m going to enjoy taking it from that curly-haired strumpet.”
“She fights dirty,” said Llian. “Don’t go near her on your own.”
That was exactly what Karan planned to do. This was between her and Thandiwe, woman to woman. Besides, she did not want Llian to see her fighting over him – it was undignified and was bound to go to his head, which was already overly swollen.
Nonetheless, she was anxious. Thandiwe was big and fit, and Karan was small. She would be at a disadvantage in any fair fight, not that she was planning one. She knew how to fight dirty too. She flicked through the copper sheets.
“Where did you find them?”
He told her. “It wasn’t difficult. Clearly, they were meant to be found. And they’re in Rulke’s handwriting.”
“Who put the statue there?”
“I don’t know. I’m not sure it matters.”
“I’m sure it does,” said Karan. “Does he mention the summon stone?”
“Not a word, but lots about the Merdrun and where they came from.”
“Anything that’ll help us to beat them?”
“Possibly.”
“I wonder why they’re written in the common script?” said Karan.
“I suppose, since the Charon were heading for extinction, the secret didn’t matter any more.”
“What secret?”
“For thousands of years the Charon and the Merdrun fought a civil war right across the void.”
“A civil war?”
“The most savage creatures they faced in the void weren’t the myriads of ever-changing beasts, as we’ve always been told, but their mirror-selves, created at the dawn of their exile.”
“The Charon were originally called Mariem,” said Karan, recalling a story she had not thought about in years, “and they came from Tallallame.”
“They shared Tallallame with the Faellem,” said Llian, slipping into his teller’s voice, “who came to fear the Mariem’s rapidly advancing civilisation. The Faellem used mass illusions to lead them through a portal, making them think they were going to another beautiful world, but the Faellem’s real intention was genocide.
“The Mariem were trapped in the void with no hope of escape, because the Faellem had sealed the portal behind them. Within a month, their millions were reduced a hundredfold. It’s the most monstrous crime in the history of the Three Worlds.”
“And still shaping the worlds to this day.”
“Then the Mariem took a new name, Charon, and a new leader, Stermin.”
“Never heard of him,” said Karan, turning away to scan the track again.
“But here’s the vital part.” Llian looked down at the copper sheets. “‘Stermin was a flawed man, and after their betrayal he became obsessed with the nature and the power of evil. He saw it everywhere, even in the most innocent of acts, and set out to test his people’s moral fitness.’”
“This isn’t going to end well,” Karan murmured.
“‘On an uninhabited little world called Cinnabar,’” Llian read, “‘Stermin forged sky-fallen metal and cut naturally empowered stone to make the Gates of Good and Evil that split the Mariem into Charon and Merdrun, and began the civil war that raged the length and breadth of the limitless void for more than 10,000 years.
“‘He created two huge linked doorways, side by side – the Azure and Crimson Gates – to sort the Charon into those who were worthy and those who were not. But secretly! He told them nothing, save to choose a gate.
“‘The Crimson Gate was enchanted to offer a person’s greatest desire, yet weaken their self-control, while the Azure Gate was the opposite – it was ennobling. Many people resisted the lure of the Crimson Gate, perhaps sensing something wrong. But those could not resist it emerged with the stigmata of evil burned into their forehead, stigmata that even their children were born with—’”
“The tattoo the Merdrun wear,” said Karan.
“‘—and Stermin cast them out. The stigmatised ones so were outraged at being called evil when they had done nothing to deserve it that Merdrax, their leader, named them Merdrun and swore eternal revenge.’”
Llian turned another leaf, the thin copper making a small crinkling sound, and read on.
“‘He cut a cube from the keystone of the Crimson Gate, hung it around his neck as the sign of his authority and led his people deep into the void, where he and his successors reshaped them to fit the stigmata. They slew every child born without it, and all who failed to live up to it, thus embedding the darkness in their bloodlines and proving Stermin right after all. By naming them evil, he had created a greater evil than he could ever have imagined – the Merdrun were a dark mirror to we Charon, and henceforth dedicated their lives to wiping us out. It was the only way Stermin’s insult could be erased.
“‘He died in the first battle, using the Merdrun as proof of his thesis and quite unable to see his own part in it. Far from the Gates of Good and Evil saving his people, they were the means of our destruction.’”
“I’d have thought they’d be evenly matched,” said Karan.
Llian continued: “‘No outrage or depravity was forbidden to the Merdrun, while we Charon still fought according to the old rules. War raged across the void and down the aeons, and the Merdrun ground us down until we were almost extinct. Our only hope was to disappear to a place where we would never be found – a real world separate from the void.’”
“Why was it kept secret all this time?”
He put down the copper sheets. “We know that the handful of surviving Charon, led by Rulke, vanished from the void and took Aachan, and afterwards parts of Santhenar, but they were surrounded by enemies who were far more numerous – the Aachim, Faellem and us old humans. Had the Charon’s enemies known about the Merdrun, Rulke feared they would seek them out and tell them where his people were hiding.”
“Is that what Alcifer was really for?” said Karan. “To defend the last of Rulke’s people?”
“I don’t know,” said Llian.
“But the Merdrun found them anyway.”
“Yes, but they couldn’t get through the Forbidding that, back then, sealed off the Three Worlds from the void. That’s where Rulke’s note ends,” said Llian, “but this is what I think happened. About twelve hundred years ago, the Merdrun managed to send the summon stone through a flaw in the Forbidding to Santhenar.”
“Twelve hundred years ago! Then it couldn’t have anything to do with my ancestors.” Her father hadn’t been an evil man after all; perhaps he had just been warped by the stone, as Benie had been.
“No. The summon stone was meant to create chaos, via the drumming, and the Merdrun planned to take Santhenar and wipe the Charon out.”
“What went wrong?”
“They couldn’t wake the stone, and eventually they took the desperate step of remotely gifting power to a young adept on Santhenar, so he could do it for them.”
“And that adept was Men
dark,” said Karan.
“They chose him because he was both brilliant and ruthless, and assumed he was infinitely corruptible. But after he had renewed his life a number of times, Mendark realised he was being used. He set out to find out who was doing it and stop them.”
“But he failed.”
“The summon stone was waking by itself by then, but he didn’t know how to destroy it. He had come close to the secret of mancery but hadn’t solved it either. In the end, I think he realised that there was only thing to do – sacrifice himself.”
“How would that help?”
“When a great mancer dies, immense power is released. Mendark used it to freeze the summon stone until a way could be found to destroy it.”
“Why did it unfreeze and the drumming start?”
“I don’t know.”
“Did you find the answer to the most important question?”
“The Merdrun’s single weakness? No.”
“Then no one knows it except Sulien,” said Karan. “And I sent her out of reach.”
80
I CAN KILL YOU IN ONE SECOND
Eleven o’clock and Maigraith was keeping watch on the north gate, as she had for days. She was not yet ready to take Karan and Llian on; there were too many unanswered questions. Who had created the great statue of Rulke? Why was Karan watching the gate? Who was she expecting?
She wasn’t here now; she had left an hour ago with Llian. Maigraith turned back to the track. Her Charon heritage meant that she had little need of sleep and she planned to watch all night. Whoever was coming, she was going to get to them first.
And half an hour later a tall woman appeared, riding a weary grey mare and leading another. Maigraith recognised her at once – Thandiwe Moorn. What was she doing here? Causing trouble, no doubt.
Maigraith went down to the north gate and peered through a spy hole. Even covered in dust and exhausted, Thandiwe was a striking woman. She dismounted wearily and led the horses to a watering trough.
