Darksong

by Isobelle Carmody

  It had offered a simple bargain, on the surface. The use of his soul for the portal, and the loss of it if the Unraveller failed. But in truth, the Chaos spirit desired Lanalor’s living soul and his body, for with them it would have the means to step from the Void and act on its own behalf. That was why it had agreed to Lanalor’s terms. That was why Lanalor made sure that his body was caught up seemingly incidentally in their bargain. It was bait. But that bait must not be eaten, for it would have the means to destroy Keltor, and if it could manifest on Keltor, then so would it have the power to manifest upon all worlds. That had been the discovery of Ronaall.

  Alyda had guessed much of Lanalor’s plans, that was evident from her journals, and indeed he had relied upon her wit to provide the information and clues that would someday be needed, but even she had not guessed it all. Or if she had, she had never written of it. That would be like her. To know and yet to have no need to state her knowledge. The watcher, though its emotions were like the itch an amputee feels in an absent limb, nevertheless felt a pang of longing for Alyda’s cool, ferocious intelligence.

  It turned its thoughts forcibly back to the man, Wind, and again wondered how much the disembodied spirit really knew. More than the watcher who had been Lanalor, the man had assured it, and Ronaall saw no reason to doubt it, but did that also mean that he knew all that the watcher knew, or simply more than it knew? The difference was subtle but significant. The watcher was inclined to think the man knew everything, for he had spoken of protecting the girl, Glynn; of hiding her from the Chaos spirit. That was the deepest clue, for why protect her if he did not know what she was to his plans?

  It came suddenly to the watcher that it might be Wind’s love for his pupil that had given him a glimpse of her future. Any mystic would immediately see that her life had been touched and tampered with, and her spirit shaped and even stunted. Wind might easily have begun merely by wondering about the girl …

  Unable to bear its own apprehensions, the manbeast that had been Lanalor segued.

  It was drawn to an old man whose music had triggered the crossing of the Unraveller and Soulsaver to Keltor. The man’s mind was heavy with sorrow. Life was dimming in his form but he did not fear that. It was his belief that he had failed his son, who had departed for the mainland, which gnawed at him and would not allow him the solace of a calm heart.

  ‘If I had been a greater musician, more important, my son would not have left. He would have been proud of me.’

  His son had laughed over breakfast that final morning before he left the house. A sound filled with joy and contempt. The old man had often laughed in scorn at his grandfather who had taught him the song of the horse and the woman. A family tradition, he had been told and, because he could play music, it had fallen to him to be the repository of this archaic tradition. But his laughter had never been so cruel. He had, in his deepest heart, respected the stubborn old man and even the fanciful tradition that bound generation to generation, though of course he had not believed the story of a god bestowing the song on his ancestor. His grandfather had believed in it, though, whereas he had thought it a myth and had said so.

  ‘That is not a true story.’

  His grandfather had only said with a dignity that had struck him even then, ‘Just because a thing does not exist, does not mean it is a lie. Sometimes it is better to behave as if a beautiful thing is true, even if it is not. Is not that faith?’

  The old man sighed and realised that by this reasoning he ought to believe that his son had not meant his light, heartless farewell. But he could not do it. Self-deception had never struck him as anything more than a kind of stupidity.

  He played the song again, falteringly, thinking how much he loved it. He could never pinpoint the moment when he realised what the song meant to him. Perhaps it had been when his son was born. Now, not far from death, he could almost believe it had been the gift of a god.

  Even so the Song flickered and guttered in the music like a dying candle, as the old man wavered between despair and faith. The watcher, realising that it endured the same struggle, segued blindly …

  22

  Lanalor went on a journey, in the final days of creating his portal,

  to the place where Shenavyre had been born.

  He sought out her brothers and gave to them for their own daughters,

  the gifts rejected by their sister.

  LEGENDSONG OF THE UNYKORN

  Glynn was wearily scrubbing the tiles of the communal bathing room, having already made the beds. Her punishment for her clumsiness in allowing the pelflyt to escape had been a long list of drudgery, but she was almost at the end of it.

  She sighed and sat back on her haunches, thinking that, one way or another, she had done more physical work on Keltor than she had ever done in her own world. Her mind strove instinctively to reach the feinna, as it had done intermittently since the little animal had lapsed into unconsciousness. She did not expect any response other than a terse offering of status from the voice of the feinna link, but to her delight, the feinna link announced dispassionately that the youngling was sleeping peacefully at last, no longer hovering on the edge of death. Glynn was blinded by a rush of hot tears. She bent her head and scrubbed to hide them, and her joy, for she had spent the whole day with the distinct feeling of being watched. Her feinna senses did not concur, insisting that there was no one within smelling distance, but the human unease persisted strongly enough that she had been careful to behave only as if she was what she pretended to be; a servitor being punished.

  Glynn’s mind suddenly released a vivid memory of the moment before she had been sucked under the sour waves and drawn to Keltor, and she forced herself to go on scrubbing as she allowed the memory to swell and fill her mind, willing it to reveal the exact means of her journey to Keltor.

  She had been in the water and she had become mysteriously numb, she remembered. She had looked back to shore, willing Ember to realise that something was wrong and run for help. Instead, Ember had entered the water.

  The shock of remembering this made Glynn momentarily dizzy, and she swayed.

  Ember had entered the water!

  How hadn’t she remembered that before, and how could Ember do such a thing? Ember was so lacking in strength that she rarely swam and never when there were waves, for the gentlest swell might unbalance her. Even if she had feared that Glynn was drowning, Ember would have known perfectly well that she could no more swim the distance between them than fly. Unless she had become confused about how far Glynn had gone out because her partial blindness made it difficult to judge distance.

  Glynn dismissed this possibility because Ember always erred on the side of caution in any such judgement.

  Forcing herself to picture those last moments in her own world again, Glynn searched for a visual clue that might explain why Ember would have made such a dangerously pointless gesture as coming after her. She could think of nothing and found herself wondering darkly if the gesture had not been an impulse to suicide.

  Then another thought came to Glynn.

  What if seeing Glynn apparently drowning had actually awakened Ember from her frozen emotional state, overriding her awareness of her own limitations? Glynn could not believe that she mattered enough to Ember, who had barely reacted to the horrific accidental death of their parents. But there had been a time when Ember had loved her. They had loved one another with a fierce reciprocity that perhaps only twins can achieve. But that had been in the days of early childhood, before death and illness had come to stay like unwanted but persistent guests. At the time, love had seemed inviolable and unshakable, and her own troubles had revolved around her awareness that her mother did not like her.

  So, what if that potent childhood love had been awakened when Ember saw her strong, healthy twin sister apparently in the process of drowning? What if Ember, in the grip of awakened affection, had gone after her? What a dreadful irony it would be if her own apparent death had resurrected Ember emotionally, o
nly to bring about her actual death! Glynn found that, ultimately, she could not believe it. If Ember had died she would know. Therefore if Ember had entered the water, she must have turned back in time. That made sense. The icy water would have shocked her wits to life and she would have turned back and gone for help. Glynn pictured her hurrying – she never ran – to the nearest house or cafe with its windows lit up, her red hair flying behind her like a flag. She would have explained what had happened and the locals would have come out in force to search for Glynn, leaving Ember to be wrapped in blankets.

  Insistently, the image of Ember in a pale bed arose again, and Glynn found herself thinking of her impulsive wish as she had dived into the moonlit water that, for once, Ember would forget that she was dying. The thought that this wish might have been granted sent a chill shuddering through her, and yet she had been told so in her dreams.

  Except people didn’t lose their memories because someone wished it. In fact she had never heard of anyone actually losing their memory in reality. It was a literary plot device rather than a real danger. She used that device herself to explain her overwhelming ignorance of Keltor. She didn’t know anyone in the world who really had lost their memory other than accident victims who lost maybe a few minutes of time. Besides, what kind of weird coincidence would it be for her to have faked amnesia while Ember had actually suffered it?

  The notion of coincidence stopped her cold, for wasn’t that the way their lives had worked, hers and Ember’s? Ever mirroring and twinning one another? Glynn’s inability to hear music was a strange negative reflection of Ember’s incredible musical talent; Ember’s physical frailty a reversal of Glynn’s athleticism.

  If Ember had amnesia and had been washed back to shore half drowned, no one would know about the time bomb inside her head. The tumour would begin to grow once the drugs in her system had gone, though it would be days, even weeks before headaches and dizziness turned into the savage bouts of pain and blackouts that would suggest that something was seriously wrong. To begin with it might even be thought that her symptoms were the result of losing a sister by drowning. Even if they called Harrison Bonn, he would have nothing to offer because Ember had refused to let him know about her illness. Eventually Ember would be taken to hospital and there would be tests, but it would take time before the tests detected the truth. By then, it might be too late.

  ‘She can’t have amnesia,’ Glynn whispered, clenching her teeth so hard that her jaw ached. But she could not get it out of her head that she had actually wished that Ember would forget she was sick before crossing to Keltor. Wished on a star …

  Her vision blurred with fresh tears and she forced herself to scrub a new section of the floor lest she wear a hole in the tiles.

  Without warning, she found herself kneeling on the dark wooden tiles of another bathing room, but there was only one bath in it and it was occupied by Solen. His broad, naked shoulders rose towards the edge of the bath, glistening wet, his head tilted back against the rim. His eyes were closed so that black lashes made sooty half circles against his cheeks. She was close enough to reach out and touch him, and the thought made her gasp.

  Solen’s eyes flew open and the vision dissolved.

  She had to force herself to get to her feet calmly and empty the filthy water down a drain hole, although the sense of being watched had suddenly evaporated. She glanced into the mirror on the wall, and saw excitement in her own eyes rising from her certainty that she had really seen Solen for a moment. And he had heard her, she was sure of it.

  Then it struck her how she had seen him and her cheeks flamed with embarrassment at the thought of spying on him in his bath like some lecherous schoolgirl. She put her cold hands against her cheeks to cool them, feeling amazed at the hot weight of desire evoked by the memory of Solen’s nakedness. She had secretly believed that the capacity for desire had died with Wind, who had first aroused that which he had so gently and frequently refused, saying she was not ready to be loved as a woman. She had felt herself to be very much a woman but now she understood that Wind had been right in refusing to make love to her. She had been a child in a woman’s body, and her desire had been a mere forerunner of true desire. Maybe that was how she had been able to become resigned to waiting until she was older, thinking him old-fashioned.

  The bleak thought slipped into her mind that perhaps he had refused her also because he understood the powerful impulse to suicide that was in him. She had read somewhere once that people who committed suicide thought about it and visualised it a long time before they did it. Even years before. He had been too sensitive not to be aware that making love to her would deepen the horror of his death. She wondered sadly if it would have been better if she had been a woman to whom he could have made love and confided his fears and deepest thoughts.

  Could I have saved him if I had been a woman? she wondered.

  The thought was unanswerable but the darkness of it filled her with a longing to be held by Solen and comforted by his strength. The longing had no reaching power though, for the vision she had experienced had already consumed her energy. That, as much as anything, was what made her sure it was a vision rather than a daydream. As usual, after using the feinna part of her mind in this way, she felt drained and slightly shaken. She must find some way to exercise her feinna abilities to see if she could not gain better control of them, and more endurance.

  Catching sight of herself in the mirror, she thought how imperceptibly womanhood had come to her. She remembered looking at herself in the mirror on Acantha after Hella’s skilful artistry had transformed her into a beautiful stranger. But that had been only the beginning of growth. She had been brought to the brink of womanhood by Keltor and by her growing feelings for Solen, but in the end the tragedy and beauty surrounding the birth bond with the feinna-He had completed her growth. Self-awareness, love, pain; they were the fires that had burnished her. Those experiences had matured her; had allowed her to grow. They were the bounty of her time on Keltor, a flowering of her self, and an enlarging. Would she wish never to have met Solen or Lev or the myrmidons or Alene, if it would restore her to her own world and to Ember? She shivered at the way her mind seemed to be balancing her love for Solen and for the feinna against her love for Ember.

  Suddenly, Glynn’s senses registered that the feinna was waking. Instantly sobered, she switched out the light to the bathing room, making her way along the passage towards her room.

  Welcome littlebrotherling, she sent tenderly when she could sense the feinna’s groping awareness, edged with puzzled apprehension. She coaxed it awake gently, sending waves of love and reassurance to it. Fortunately there was no real effort required because of the link that made a nonsense of the distance between them.

  When she sensed that it was beginning to become alarmed at the scents and malevolence of the thoughts about it, she sent a strong assurance. Fearnot. My heart and mind are with you and I am seeking a way to free us both.

  Wherewherewhere? the feinna sent, and she sensed that it was opening its eyes. A mindshriek of keening terror sliced into Glynn’s thoughts and she fell bonelessly to her knees, pressing her hands to the floor and fighting the obliterating shrilling of distress to send a firm image of herself holding it in her arms tenderly and stroking it.

  Calmcalm littlebrotherling, Glynn sent over and over. What is wrongpainhurting?

  See, the feinna sent and Glynn felt an immense pull, then, once again, she was within the feinna physically, looking out of its eyes. At once, she saw the reason for the little animal’s hysteria. Kalide’s face was pressed against the bars of its cage and there was ravaged madness lurking in the irradiated blue eyes above a mouth that was a twist of devouring sadism. The smell boiling off him was hideous; the stench of something dead and putrefying.

  It is the smell of cruelty, Glynn’s feinna senses told her. Then she understood that what had terrified the feinna was Kalide’s sadism; the clear longing in his eyes to inflict harm.

  Lookaway.
Donot let the foul manthing hold youreyes. Yourfear feeds his sickness, she sent. But the feinna was too mesmerised by fear to withdraw. Glynn gently forced herself more deeply into the feinna’s mind, interposing her will. Her feeling of being human began to blur as she all but merged with the feinna. Her senses seemed to sharpen and the world came into such perfect focus that it seemed as if she had only ever seen blurred images as a human. At the same time, her reasoning impulse faded and her memory seemed to alter so that her senses focused intensely on the moment and both past and future faded. In some strange, almost hallucinatory way, she was the feinna, being watched by a dangerous manthing with bestial eyes and corrupt appetites. But she was still human at some level and from this dim persona came a surge of contempt for anyone who would get pleasure out of frightening or hurting something weaker. This broke the rigid terror that held the feinna’s body in stasis. It snarled and hissed at the manthing, who reared back in shock.