Second Sight: Second Tale of the Lifesong

by Greg Hamerton

  “Eyrians!” came a distant shout from the ridge-top. “I will find you!” It was Jek. “The wastelands are not big enough you from me to hide! You will for Eitan pay! You will for Kal pay!”

  That was when Bevn got really scared. He didn’t doubt Jek would follow them. He didn’t want to think about how he was going to escape from the Lûk cutter when the wind began to blow again. They left clear tracks in the sand whenever they crossed the soft patches. For now all they could do was run.

  He suddenly remembered the crab-like creature; he hadn’t seen it for some time. All he could see was the huge open expanses of mottled sands, and the ridge they had come from. The Lûk were running for their sand-crafts, back toward their camp. Bevn couldn’t tell if there was a breeze or not; he didn’t think so. He kept aiming for where he had seen the distant forest, keeping the setting sun on his left. Captain Jek had said it was only half a day away on the cutter, so if they ran all night and into the morning, they might get close. That was all he could hope for.

  It was the longest night of his life.

  Gabrielle kept pace with him. Soon she was running ahead of him with her hand on his shirt. Then she was dragging him on, forcing him to run. She wouldn’t let him stop for water, she wouldn’t let him rest. The light faded from the sky, and the moon came up, only adding to the silver of the sands with its pale illumination. It was no problem to find their way at night on the wastes. In some ways it was easier than during the day, because they didn’t have to squint against the glare. Every now and again, as they crested a hillock or rise, they would catch a clearer glimpse of the darkness in the distance that was the forest. The golden sphere of the Kingsrim’s influence ghosted with them over the ground, vanishing when they crossed dead grey earth, returning when they struck out over silver. But the crown was made a stupid size, just too large to wedge tightly on his head. As he jogged along, it slipped down to rest on top of his ears, and he had to keep on pushing it back up. It rubbed a raw patch on his forehead, then it really began to hurt.

  Bevn’s feet burned in his boots. He could feel blisters grinding away into his soft skin.

  Gabrielle just slapped him when he began to whimper. He tried to ignore the sting of his tears.

  After what seemed like hours, Gabrielle let him stop for a watering break. She told him to have only a few sips, but when she turned aside he gulped down all of his drinking-bladder. She said nothing, but took one of her blades out of its sheath. They went on. His stomach soon cramped from running on so much water. He felt a prick against his neck and hobbled on. He felt the prick again. He ran.

  She had a steady lope which ate up the leagues with apparent ease. He tried to copy her motion, but the long strides put more pressure on his blistered toes, and he soon developed cramps in his calves as well. He supposed she had learnt to run so well from living in Ravenscroft all those years, moving up and down the long pass from Fendwarrow to the Shadowcasters’ secret keep. She was a terribly good runner, but he was a royal prince, and he had always travelled in a coach. His father had insisted on filling his days with studies of stupid laws or complicated systems of commerce, not sword-fighting or tumbling or steal-and-run that the other boys his age got to play. Then for the last few months he’d been in Ravenscroft, staying close to the Darkmaster. His body just wasn’t ready for this torture, it wasn’t built for loping, not so fast, not for so long. He just wanted to fall over and lie still. He began to stumble on every hundredth step, then every fiftieth, then every tenth.

  “But I can’t any more, Gabrielle, I can’t!” he cried.

  “You will.”

  “But my arm is still bleeding! I’m getting faint! I’m going to die!” It wasn’t bleeding, the wound had formed a crust, but in the dark she wouldn’t be able to see the difference. The sleeve of his shirt was well-stained.

  “You’ll run until your feet bleed as well,” Gabrielle hissed. “You got us into this mess. You will not expose my life again.”

  The night itself seemed to grow hard around Bevn. The moon cut a scar in the polished marble of the night sky, the pinpricks of the stars were frozen in their place, and the darkness on the horizon that was the forest waited but didn’t move any closer. Only the ground passed by, it bashed up at his feet, hammering at him like the implacable face of a mallet wielded by Ravenscroft’s best, bludgeoning upon his poor delicate soles until it felt as if all the flesh had been bruised to a pulp, one mass of liquid blisters, and he was running on the naked bones. He began to whimper despite the slaps, and soon Gabrielle stopped hitting him and just drove him on from behind with her blade. He fled like a pitiful wretch before her fury. He was too tired to feel angry, too tired to feel shame. He wished he would die so the nightmare would stop, but he didn’t, and it carried on and on.

  Later they encountered a field of boulders, strange misshapen lumps of rock which crouched beneath the moonlight like mute robbers waiting for their prey. They had been formed into almost lifelike shapes by the wind of ages. As Bevn ran by the first of them he thought of the monster the Lûk had become, and he wondered how rocklike the rocks really were. Some were as white and polished as the Lûk-creature had been, while some were larger and more fearsome. But Gabrielle threaded a path through them, and after a while he was too frightened to care. Things skittered around the walls of his imagination, and the night became a phantasmagoria of fear.

  16. THE BEAST AND BEAUTY

  “Ah, sorrow; ah, regret!

  The seeds we sow shape the harvest we get.”—Zarost

  Upon a time in the Three Kingdoms, when the spring buds were bursting with eager dreams, and the bright sun drove flocks of clouds across the unspoilt canvas of breathless blue, Ametheus came to Kingsmeet, alone, but not unbidden.

  It was considered a beautiful place in those days, the jewel on the crest of a sceptre, the gilded pinnacle of the many peaks of Moralese endeavour. It was the capital of the ordered realms, and as such was not given to the throb and stain of commerce seen in Maddock and Chagrim. Kingsmeet was reserved for governance, for the rulers of the spreading state. Highest among these rulers were the wizards, men who made the rules others enforced, although the common folk believed it was the king’s will they obeyed. Those who thought in this way had not paid close enough attention to the written histories of Oldenworld, for there it could be seen that kings were replaced at will, as were queens, lords and ladies. Barons were as dispensable as frosted glass goblets.

  Wizards, on the other hand, were never replaced. They perfected their art of control from within the hallowed halls of the college, in the heart of pristine Kingsmeet, in the district known as Northing Torr. Around here their influence was tangible. Order could be seen in the regular geometry of the tall clustered columns. It could be seen in the latticed veins of gold in the walls, and in the braided bronze and copper worked into the stalks of the spritelights lining the sweeping stitchstone roads. Order could be seen in the great shining road, the slipway, which caught the northern edge of the city like a loop stitch, joining Kingsmeet to Wrynn, to Thren Fernigan, even to Ygris, in the cold northernmost peninsula of Koraman.

  Ametheus had avoided the slipway. He distrusted the slick patterns woven through the thickened air above it, the way they pushed things ahead in the relentlessly swift current. He could guess why it had been built. It was a lure. When people used such a wonder, they came to love it, to rely on it, to need it, and then they were bound to support the system which maintained it; they were bound to support the state. It was just another one of the many seductions of Order: the sweets the wizards offered to draw attention away from the freedoms they stole. People didn’t care to notice how the power flowed into that college at the end of the street; into, not out of.

  He was scared, more scared than he’d ever been before, because he was facing a test of faith and there had been little in his life to make him have faith. Perhaps that was why he was prepared to try, just this once.

  He had to enter that sinister buildin
g, to find the one hidden inside. He had to enter the Wizard’s College.

  The curves upon the building looked to have been measured to within a hair’s breadth to ensure that a precise geometric progression was represented in their grand lines. The wide stairs leading upward from the clean forecourt were perfectly spaced; the great arched doorway was an exact replica of the curved outline of the building above. Even Ametheus had to admit it was beautiful.

  But to Ametheus, the beauty had a sharp edge. For he was ugly, a monster, an atrocity, and every example of perfection cut him like a knife. He would never be as beautiful as the men who walked the streets, their fair faces shining with health, their young eyes holding the clearness of the spring sky. He would never be as refined and as delicate as the women, who glided by as gracefully as swans on the tranquil glistening surfaces that made up the walkways, across lawns like pools of green glass, pathways of polished stone, trees that grew in perfect symmetrical forms.

  He knew that he did not belong in Kingsmeet. It was plain to see—almost every trace of Chaos had been eliminated from the city—hunted, eradicated. And he was born to Chaos, he was born of Chaos. There could not be a worse place for him to come to, and yet here he was, drawn by a message that had been sent to him alone.

  His heart beat wildly in his chest.

  He paced slowly toward the keen-edged steps leading up to the hollow door of the college, being careful to avoid the people passing him in the street. He wore his cloak of omnium brother Seus had devised, a blend of pure conflict that collected all the visible colours into one fabric, so that it was not white, but every colour at once, a tearfully intense distortion from which all eyes would turn, a colour most minds would not recognise and would therefore discard from their image of reality, choosing the known over the unknown, the sane over the inexplicable.

  Selective disbelief, brother Seus called it. People didn’t see what they weren’t ready to see. It had proved to be effective, but it still made Ethan nervous to be so close to the citizens of Kingsmeet with nothing but a cloak to protect him from their stares. Even more worrying was the prospect of facing the wizards he’d find within the college. They worked with essence, they might sense the disturbance of his cloak, and they might realise he was there even though they might not be able to see him.

  He’d worried about that a hundred times already and had already decided to take the risk. All he had to do was place one foot in front of the other and let his body take him there.

  Only he and Seus were awake. Brother Amyar was asleep, kept unconscious by their mutual agreement. Their raging sibling could not be allowed to become aware of where they were, he would not understand. Amyar harboured too much hatred at the past, for all that the wizards had done. They would not be able to control him, and the slim chance of the secret meeting would be lost. For this to work they must set aside the hatred to make place for hope.

  Hope. It was such a sweet and unfamiliar emotion that he couldn’t think clearly around it.

  Somebody in Oldenworld actually cared about him. He knew that because she’d said so, and she had closed her message with a bloodseal. Nobody would do that unless their word was true.

  Annah. She was different to all the others, just like him, and yet she was a wizard.

  Ethan watched the stairs pass by under his heels, and suddenly couldn’t bear to be at the back. He knew Seus would take care, but he was too excited to see where they were going. For a time their attention became shared as he gathered vitality from his brother, and as he did so he saw the hand reaching out for his head. He ducked and slipped underneath the junior wizard’s probing grasp. He almost lost his balance because of his heavy deformity, but he caught himself and lurched into the open doorway. With his backward-seeing eye he saw the puzzled wizard turn to a uniformed guard beside the door.

  “Did you see that?”

  “What? Nothing. I didn’t see nothing!”

  “There was something there, I’m telling you, sirrah!”

  “Where, guv’nor?”

  “It came past…it went…somewhere…” The wizard indicated vaguely after the fleeing brothers. The doorman at his side stared but saw nothing. The wizard raised his hands to probe with magic, but his gaze slipped aside, diverted by the omnium cloak, and his aim went wide.

  Ametheus ran, thankful that the plush purple carpet absorbed the sound of his hurrying feet. He followed the directions Annah had given him, deeper into the forbidding majesty of the college—off the first corridor, down a narrow flight of stairs, past an open-sided room containing shelves and shelves of books, down another flight of stairs and through an iron archway into a quiet and bare passage with a rune-scribed floor. Spritebulbs glowed on the walls. There was nobody around, which seemed strange. He had expected all levels of the college to be filled with eager acolytes.

  Despite the lack of people or pursuit, Ethan felt more and more apprehensive. There was too much Order here. It pressed upon him like the sides of a narrowing trap. There was Order blended into the Energy-figure that warmed the floor, there was Order in the subtle Matter-spell which moved air through the corridor with an even flow. There was no way to avoid his mounting fear except to turn around and flee, but he could not do that, not until he had met with her, not until he knew.

  He came to a wide doorway set across the corner of a bend, heavily adorned with incised designs. The thick door was ajar, and above a heavy steel bolt was a triangular golden plate, adorned with a single red jewel, and with a dark sigil upon it. ANG. Her name, her sign, he recognised it from the message—Annah Nerine Good.

  He looked around suspiciously, but nobody was lurking in the passageways.

  He reached out his hand to push the door further inward, but hesitated. What if someone else was with her? He strained to hear if there were voices within. She had specified the time he should come, but he had no way of knowing if he was standing in that exact moment or not. He didn’t measure his days the way the wizards did, he could not. There was no exactness to his life, no ‘now’. Ethan spanned the area between the latest past that Amyar saw and the earliest future of Seus. The ‘now’ was a space centred on Ethan’s slowly expanding influence over his brothers, an awareness, not a moment. How could he tell which sliver of his own awareness was the one Annah had wanted to meet him in? His brain throbbed with confusion. He could feel a headache coming on.

  Waiting would bring no more certainty. He didn’t need certainty. He needed what Annah had offered. If it was true: hope and friendship.

  He pushed against the heavy door, as gently as his clumsy strength would allow. It eased back soundlessly. He stood poised, ready to flee, but nothing threatened him. Just a bluish metal wall, rivet-studded, curving gradually inward so that it obscured any view of the room itself. The bluish metal puzzled him. He wondered if it was a magical alloy, like rippled steel. He didn’t like the new metals they forged in Moral Kingdom. They were too highly refined and difficult to change, too ordered and resistant to be natural.

  A small sound drew his attention forward—the soft scrape of a file, a puff of breath, as if someone had blown upon something to clear it, then the file again, rasping. She was working on something.

  She was in there: Annah. He tiptoed forward, and entered her chamber.

  She was as strangely beautiful as he’d expected her to be: painfully slender, but sprung like a willow sapling, with a pert nose and windblown auburn hair that was shot with grey, despite her youth. She had a dark full-length garment made of strips of fabric plaited tightly around the contours of her body. Her shoulders were bare but her arms were covered.

  Annah hadn’t looked up from her work at the small forge or indicated that she had noticed his entrance, so he moved closer, keeping the cloak of omnium gripped tightly around him.

  Something silvery, like magnesia, was brushed on the skin above her eyes. Light metal hoops dangled from her ears and a bright stud glinted on the side of her nose. The pierced adornment was strange for a woma
n of Kingsmeet, but the more he looked at her the more he realised how different she was to the others. Her expression was melancholic and vulnerable, so unlike the aloof crispness of most of the women he’d seen in the capital, but then he’d not seen many women in their chambers. Maybe they all looked sad and pensive when they were there.

  She must like metal, Ethan decided, for she wore a wide studded bluish collar and similar bands on her wrists—a similar alloy to the one in the walls, he realised. Annah was working on a chalice, twisting a band of silver around a band of gold to adorn the rim then drawing absently on a pool of essence and casting brief bursts of flame into the pattern. A flame caught on the edge of her dress, and she slapped it out. That mistake alone told Ametheus that she wasn’t a true Order-wizard. Order didn’t tolerate random fires and imprecision. She rasped at the rough edges of the chalice with a small file.

  Annah looked how he felt: lonely.

  She had said that they might be friends.

  He looked again at what Annah was making again. Silver and gold—chaos and order twisted together. The hope swelled in his chest, driving his doubts and suspicions away. She was delightful. It was worth being there just to feel the hope, that blessed feeling of space inside his cramped heart.

  She set the half-finished chalice aside, and went to her desk, where she began to work on a manuscript. Unfinished projects lay scattered upon her desk. He watched her for some time, just watching her write, watching the hand that had set those beautiful words upon the face of the sun, just for him. The messenger-spell had passed upward on one ray and came back down on another. It had a chaotic pulse he’d never expected to feel from any spell, other than his own. It had travelled too fast to be a constricted Order-spell, and its aim was too tangled in the riotous fire of the sun to have survived as an Energy or Matter manipulation. It was too inaccurate to satisfy the rules of the Order-wizards. Its pattern was pure innovation, its message was pure risk, its presence pure Chaos.