by Tim Stead
“These two,” the man said, pointing at the guardsmen, “will stay behind and help us solve the mystery.”
Outside again, it seemed as though a small part of the burden had been lifted from her. For a day or two at least she could put aside her pursuit and worry about nothing but herself.
“Where are you staying?”
“On the ship.” She answered before she could think about it, and wished that she hadn’t. It was a poor answer.
“Clever,” said Ella. “No need to waste time looking for an inn, but it must be small and uncomfortable. Why don’t you stay with us? We have plenty of room in the house, and I’m sure father would like to meet you. He has a great interest in foreign lands and new tales.”
Felice was taken aback. “That is very kind,” she said.
“Not at all. It will be a change to have somebody to talk to other than my brother.” She grinned again. “I’ll have somebody pick up your bags from the ship. Which one was it?”
“The Bright Star.”
So it was agreed, and Felice found herself walking up the hill to Morningside, past grander and grander houses until they arrived at the very top where the Saine house looked out over the whole city, its gates guarded by a private militia, surrounded by gardens and orchards in much the same way that Jem’s house had been, but this being Samara it was bigger in every way.
* * * *
The next two days were easy. Felice allowed them to take care of her, and this they did with style. She ate more than she knew was possible, and there were many things on the table in the Saine house that she had never seen before, so even eating was an education. She gained weight, and strength returned quickly. It seemed yet again that she had landed in a lucky place.
She found the family quite charming, but their easy manner reminder her of her own house, and her own family, and so she felt melancholy, and often she would sit alone in the gardens, thinking of East Scar, remembering Todric. At such times she was usually disturbed by Ella, who would seek her out and insist that she come and see some new thing, try some new drink or food. It was as though the girl had an instinct for unhappiness and its relief.
On one occasion they talked about Kane. Felice was curious as to how such a powerful soldier had come to be her servant.
“Bondsman,” Ella corrected. “He is a bondsman, which is similar to a slave, I suppose, but it is a sentence for a crime.”
“What crime?”
“It is a long story, but he endangered Calaine, and as a result the King gave his life to me. I accepted. It is an ancient law. I can release him at any time, or I can kill him,” and she grinned as she said this, “legally, anyway.”
“So you own him?”
“Sort of. I think of it as a mutually beneficial arrangement. If Kane asked me to release him, I probably would, but he does not.”
As at Jem’s house she found a favoured spot in the garden, and borrowed books, wilfully ignoring her host’s reluctance to lend them. She would sit beneath a nut tree in a shady corner and read the words of long departed wise men. Some of the books were very old, but mostly she read volumes that were copies of copies of copies; words that had bequeathed themselves through generations of careful scribes within this very house. She began to believe that Tarlyn Saine was the possessor of the greatest library in the world, and all saved by him and his forebears. There were books here that she had never heard of, great works from before the Faer Karan. In a way she wished that word would never come from the house of law so that she would have time to read them all, but on the third day word did come, and it came in the person of Sam Hekman, the very man that they had spoken to on the first day.
“Felice?”
She was reading again, and recognised Ella’s voice. She sensed a tension in the single word.
“What is it?” she asked, putting down her book.
“Sam’s here. He has news.”
She felt a shiver run through her. Would it be now? Would she see him again? She stood and walked back into the house with Ella, passing through a great white arch and up broad stairs onto a balcony where they ate breakfast. Sam Hekman was there, looking even thinner and smaller in these opulent surroundings. He held a single sheet of paper which he gripped with both hands. He looked nervous.
“Ima,” he said when he saw her. “We have completed our investigations.”
It was obvious at once that the news was not good, not what she wanted to hear. Hekman did not meet her gaze.
“And?”
“We are certain that he left the city several days before you arrived. He answered the call.”
“What does that mean?”
“The call. The call from White Rock for candidates to attend the village of Woodside.”
“Candidates for what?”
Ells stepped in. “You were ill for a week in Pek. I think it happened then, but I am still surprised that people did not mention it to you. Maybe they thought that you already knew.”
“What?” Felice felt frustration rising again, like anger.
“The Lord Serhan has asked for those who imagine themselves suitable to present themselves at the village of Woodside in White Rock’s domains. Those who are deemed most acceptable will be trained as Mages.”
“Karnack has gone to White Rock?”
“Yes, Ima. We found witnesses who had seen him on wagons heading that way seven days ago. His friends confirm that he talked about it and expressed a desire to go. By now he is half way there, unless something has befallen him. It is a dangerous road, and bandits often strike at wagons from the fringes of the Great River Marsh.”
“I must leave at once.” Urgency was reborn. Yet again justice was slipping away, this time to the north, and she was determined not to let Karnack escape.
“There is no hurry, Felice,” Ella said. “The choosing will take more than a month. So many have gone, and nothing will be decided until the end, so you have weeks in which to get there; plenty of time. Besides which, you are still weak, and a few days more rest and good food will fortify you for the journey.”
“You are sure about the time? A month?”
“At least.”
She turned to Sam Hekman, who had stood silently through this exchange.
“Thank you, law master,” she said. “Thank you for all your efforts.”
“I regret that the result was not better, Ima.”
“The truth is the truth. If he is gone to White Rock then he is gone, and nothing that you or I could have done would make a difference. I will follow him, even to the house of the Mage Lord himself.”
Hekman left, and Ella drew Felice out onto the balcony, sat her down among the flowers.
“I will arrange everything,” she said. “I know all the traders, and I am sure that we can find a train of wagons heading for White Rock within a few days. Just relax, eat, prepare yourself. I will tell you when I have made the arrangements.”
“I do not know why you are so kind to me, Karana, but I am grateful.”
“It is our way. Who knows? One day you may be able to do us a great favour, and when I ask it of you, you will remember that we were kind, and look favourably on our request.”
“If there was anything less likely it would be impossible,” Felice smiled.
8. Caravan
They walked to the wagons together. This departure reminded her of another, many weeks ago. It had been cold then, but now it was hot. The sun was up, well up in the sky and beating down with unrestrained enthusiasm. In Samara, it seemed, journeys started when everyone was around to see them.
“You will be careful?” Ella insisted.
“I will, as far as it is possible.” Felice eyed the wagons with a critical eye. They were built differently from her father’s, but they looked sound enough, and she knew traders well enough to judge the men who loaded and drove them. Everything seemed well.
They embraced, and that, too, was a surprise to Felice. She felt honoured by Ella’s friendship, and by the
time that her new friend had lavished on her. It was an odd experience to be sought out and though of as good company, but she had to admit that Ella managed to bring out the best of her moods, and in her company Felice felt, if not exactly witty, then at least able to speak passably well about things.
“I hope we will see you in Samara again,” Ella said. Again it was the right thing to say, softening the blow of departure. She would miss this place, these people.
“And if you are ever in East Scar, you will be welcome at our house,” she replied.
The wagons were mustering in a yard outside a warehouse on the northern edge of the city. Beyond the gates Felice could see nothing but a grassy plain sweeping away to the north, punctuated by small clusters of trees that provided shelter for white buildings, farms she supposed, that peeked out from their green veils, offering at least the illusion of mystery. To the east there was a rise in the land that became cliffs behind the district of Morningside.
“This is where it happened,” Ella said, her voice hushed with memory.
“The battle? Samara Plain?”
“Yes. See that rise over there, the one with a cairn of rocks built on it. That’s where Serhan stood, and the army was to the north, having come down off the high ground to the north east.” She pointed again. “The camp was there, on the rise to the west, just above the river. It was well fortified enough, we were quite safe, but the Saratans were too numerous for the White Rock guard to come out and meet them, and the city would have fallen.”
“Lucky you were not in the city.”
“No. He knew everything beforehand. He knew the Saratans would come, and when. We didn’t think so. He arranged for us to be there with the troops and safe. I think he was angry with us, with the King and the guild. They showed him no respect. They didn’t believe he’d done what he’d done, thought that he was taking advantage of the unexplained departure of the Faer Karan.”
“So what happened?”
“He played games. The soldiers were willing to fight, even outnumbered, but he said no. The King was prepared to go out with just the handful of men he’d brought, but Serhan pointed out that it was suicide, and the city would fall anyway. He made them all see that the city was lost. It was me that asked him to defend the city. I don’t know why I believed in him, but I did, and I don’t really know if he would have gone out if he had not been asked, but I asked, and he went out.” She shivered. “I had no idea he was that powerful. I thought he would use some trick, but he just told them to go home, and they charged him – two thousand men charging one man. He obliterated them.”
“He killed them?”
“It’s not the right word. There was nothing left, afterwards. Nobody has ever found a trace of the army, not a bone, a shoe, a sword, a belt buckle.”
They looked at the plain together, and for Felice it now took on a sinister aspect, like a trap, lying in wait for the unwary traveller, its very dullness a source of unease. Somewhere out there two thousand men, everything they were, everything they could ever be, had simply vanished, and at the will of a single man. Yet it had ended the war. It had even banished the idea of war.
Shouting behind them brought them back to the wagons and the warehouse. Everything was loaded, and the wagon master was doing the last checks, calling for all those travelling to take their seats for a final count. Felice climbed to her designated seat in the back of one of the wagons among bales of cloth. It was a comfortable spot.
“Safe journey,” Ella called up, and the wagons began to move. Felice soon lost sight of her friend, standing and waving in the emptying courtyard, blinking in the dust as the wagons filed out onto the road.
She lay back against the bales of cloth and looked at her fellow passengers. Unlike her father’s wagons, these seemed to carry people as a matter of course, and the wagon not only held a good stock of trade goods, but herself and two children. They were about fourteen and ten years old, she guessed, the boy being the older. They were quite well dressed, so not poor, though poor children would not have been able to afford to ride. At least they seemed quiet and well behaved, and they had been polite to the drover.
It was eight days at least, this journey. She would have to pass the time as best she could, and now she closed her eyes, drew a cloth over her head to protect her from the sun and dozed, thinking of other journeys, and the motion of the wagon rocked her roughly to sleep.
* * * *
The boy was called Tann. He was sensible and conversed well for a child, and so they became friends of a sort. The girl, Pasha, was too shy, and rarely joined in, though she always answered when spoken to directly and seemed bright enough. They were travelling north to join their father, who was a guardsman, an officer, serving at White Rock. He had been part of the Ocean’s Gate guard, but after a great battle between Serhan and Ocean’s Gate he had taken up the offer of a position with the White Rock guard, as had many others.
Their drover, Barker, was less pleasant company. He was a short, thick set man of about forty years, grey, unshaven to the point of a straggling beard, and generally reluctant to wash. He left them every night to eat and drink with the other drovers, and often came back drunk to snore and grunt for the rest of the night on the wide seat of the wagon where he slept. He made it clear from the start of the journey that he had no desire to talk with his passengers. They were just cargo to him.
At least Felice did not have to cook. There was a general pot from which they all fed, and the man responsible did a fair job. The food was always edible, and sometimes quite tasty, though it was always some sort of stew. When they passed through villages and small towns Felice would try to buy fruit from the farmers, and this she shared with the children, who thanked her politely.
The road itself cut east just outside Samara, taking them through a pass between great and darkly forested hills, and then swinging north towards a bridge that crossed the Great North River. It took them three days to reach the bridge, one of the few man-built structures that the Faer Karan had seen fit to maintain outside the fortresses they had taken as their own. It was an impressive structure, at least seventy-five yards long, resting on five mighty stone pillars that rose out of the water. They supported huge iron bound wooden beams which in turn underpinned the planking of the bridge. The wagons rumbled across its span as the sun was setting, and made camp on the other side in a thin grove of trees. There was a smell about the place, faintly rotten, that Felice detected, blowing to them on a gentle easterly breeze.
“It’s the swamp,” Barker said, seeing her sniff the air. He nodded to the east. “Twenty miles of it between here and Stone Island, and no way through it.” This was the longest speech he had ever made in her hearing, and she nodded politely.
“No way at all?” she asked.
“To the south – the guard know it – but here people go in and never come out.”
Ella had told her about the marsh, shown it to her on a map, but she had known about it since childhood. It was the place where the Ghost Road disappeared, and children in the Scar were brought up on tales if its mist shrouded menace. She knew that beyond the marsh, and beyond Stone Island there lay the White Mountain River, and if she could follow that up stream it would take her home in just a few days, but the marsh spread north until it sucked at the foot of the mountains that held Far Delve – yet another fortress. There was no safe passage.
This was the most isolated part of their journey. In another day they would cross yet another bridge and the good land would widen out into forest and farmland again, leaving the marsh to the east, but just here, for the best part of a day they would travel between the river on one side and the marsh on the other. There were places where the safe land was up to a mile wide, but it was all wild country, damp and unpleasant, and good men did not linger here.
That evening she built a fire close to their wagon and the children joined her, sitting around it while she swapped tales with Tann. The day had been hot, but the damp air made them feel cold an
d the fire banished the chill. When they tired they lay down on three sides of the embers and slept.
It the morning there was a thick mist all about the camp, drifting in from the invisible marsh, and it brought with it an unpleasant, rich smell of corruption. The air seemed dead. Sound faded quickly and the wagons were prepared almost in silence. Nobody felt like talking.
Felice did the small tasks that she had to do and then curled up in her usual place among the bales of cloth. The children sat nearby, looking out to where the marsh hid in the mist, exhaling its evil breath over them.
“Do strange things live in the marsh?” Tann asked.
“Frogs, eels, fish I suppose,” Felice answered.
Tann looked doubtful. “There are so many tales of ghosts and such,” he said. “Monsters and evil things.”
Felice chuckled. “All that was evil in this world was banished by the Mage Lord. The only monsters now are men. Even the Shan fear us.”
“Do you think that there are such things as ghosts?”
“I do not know. It is possible, but if so then they do not have power over us, other than what we allow, and if they are such that they must hide in so dismal a place, then why should we, who live in the light of day, fear them?”
Tann nodded. “You are wise,” he said.
“Wisdom is relative, Tann, as you will learn. I am older than you. That may make me seem wise.”
Now the boy shook his head. “No. I have talked to many older people, and what you say has meaning. You do not just tell us things are so because they are so, as so many do.”
She ruffled Tann’s hair. “Do not forget that, Tann, and one day you, too, will seem wise.”
They began the day’s journey, rolling smoothly along a good road, but the mist did not lift. If anything it grew thicker with the advancing hours and after they had stopped for lunch the wagon master had the drovers rig lights on the rear of each wagon to make it easier for the one behind to see.
