Darksong

by Isobelle Carmody

  ‘What … what is it? Are you hurt?’ Anyi demanded, alarm now diluting his indignation.

  Glynn shook her head and then slipped to her knees. ‘Just need to … to rest a moment. Then we … have to … have to get away from here.’

  ‘But Feyt …’

  ‘Knew this would happen,’ Glynn said, and heard the words slur. ‘Intended it.’

  ‘Why did she not tell me, if she told you?’ Anyi demanded, sounding angry and hurt. No, not sounding those things. She was feeling his emotions. A blackness fluttered a warning at the edges of her vision, and she realised that she was close to unconsciousness. ‘Anyi … Not … much time. Get me … out of sight. When I wake … I will … will take us to the Shadowman …’

  ‘When you wake? But what do you mean? What has happened …’

  The world spun away.

  There was a wrenching feeling and Glynn found herself dreaming of two women from her world. The smaller of the women lay in bed looking pale and washed out.

  ‘I don’t know what’s the matter with me, Faye. I feel so stupidly weak.’

  ‘You’re ill, Tabby darling,’ said the bigger woman gently. She touched the other tenderly on the cheek and Glynn’s feinna senses were almost overwhelmed by a wave of love and fear. ‘You just need to get well. Don’t think of anything else.’

  ‘Yes,’ Tabby said kindly, and Glynn felt her compassion for the other woman, but no fear in spite of what she instinctively understood about her illness.

  She is dying, Glynn murmured. To her surprise, the big woman in the dream stiffened and looked about as if she had heard the murmured words.

  ‘Who is there?’

  Glynn slid from this dream into another of an old man in some sort of uniform, soaking his feet in a bowl of water. His eyes were dull and his mouth slack.

  ‘Maybe it would be better if all beautiful things did not exist, so that we could be content. They only hurt us …’ His words were in a foreign language, and yet she understood them.

  Then she was on a boat with a man and a woman. The woman looked angry and distressed. ‘I can’t believe you mean to do this, Lex. This is not what we do, for Christ’s sake. We’re supposed to be about protecting these animals, not exploiting them.’

  The man gave her a cool look. ‘Tagging a thing like this is a chance in a million. The money we will make for catching it will fund our research for a year. And what is this thing but a freak of nature anyway? It probably wouldn’t find a mate the way it is.’

  ‘It has a right to be free.’

  ‘I’m not going to kill the fucking thing, Clare!’ the man said angrily. ‘It will live a lot longer in captivity than in the wild.’

  ‘I can’t believe I’m hearing these lame-arse rationalisations from you! Who the hell are you anyway? You’re sure as shit not the Alex I married.’

  ‘Clare. Don’t overreact. This is one whale.’

  ‘Drop dead, Alex,’ the woman said, turning away to hide the tears blurring her eyes.

  Glynn woke. She was somewhere dark and surrounded by the vividly horrid smell of rotting vegetables. The odour was infinitely enriched by her renewed feinna senses, which no longer seemed to need invoking. She retched until she had vomited up all of the food she had eaten that day, and then she wiped her mouth and tried to shut down her sense of smell. She found that she could do it by the same will that she had once used to invoke her feinna senses. Despite everything she was struck by the irony that she must now invoke humanity in herself.

  She became aware that Anyi was babbling at her. She actually had to make herself want to understand his words. ‘Thank the Horn you have woken. What happened? Are you all right now?’

  ‘I’m fine. I think,’ Glynn said, suddenly wondering if Feyt or Alene had told Anyi about her relationship with the feinna. She supposed not, given that she had told them she no longer possessed more than a shadow of her feinna abilities. As it turned out, she had been wrong, and somehow, Feyt had guessed or at least suspected it enough to try sending her own emotions to Glynn.

  She gathered her wits. ‘What happened? I threw up because it smells so bad here. Why is it so dark?’

  ‘It is night,’ Anyi said, ‘You fainted hours and hours ago. I truly thought you were dying. Why did not Feyt tell me that she knew she would be taken, if she told you?’

  Alarmed at the thought of hours passing, Glynn sat up, and grimaced to find that she had put her hand in something slimy. ‘Where are we?’

  ‘In a public refuse alcove,’ Anyi said apologetically. ‘I could not drag you any further. I fear that I have … hurt my leg again.’ Glynn could see the tracks of tears in the dirt on his face, and the boy sounded at the end of his tether. She reached out and took his hand.

  ‘Look, Anyi, just so you know, Feyt didn’t tell me what she planned, any more than she told you. I guessed it. Remember when she asked me if I could recall what Solen said about how to find him? I think she was telling me in advance that I would have to get us both there.’

  ‘But what about her? I ought to have announced myself and helped her, but you were unconscious and I could not leave you.’

  ‘Feyt said to go on no matter what happened at the gate,’ Glynn said firmly, though she too worried about what had happened to the myrmidon. ‘The sooner we get to the Shadowman’s people the sooner they can send a message to tell Alene about Feyt. How bad is your leg?’

  ‘I do not think I can walk,’ Anyi said. Tears continued to streak the dirt on his face, but they were silent and he made no effort to brush them away because he did not know that she could see them.

  ‘That’s what I was afraid of. Look, I could carry you, but I am afraid that would make us conspicuous and slow. Can you bear to wait here while I go for help?’

  ‘Yes,’ Anyi gulped immediately, though his emotions were a turmoil of fear and doubt.

  ‘You have great courage,’ Glynn said, and was astounded to find herself gathered into the boy’s thin arms and kissed clumsily. Unwarned because the boy had obviously not known what he would do, she allowed the embrace for a moment out of pity and then gently disentangled herself. ‘I’d better go.’

  ‘Wait,’ Anyi said. ‘I want to tell you … in case everything goes wrong.’

  Glynn was horrified to imagine that he might be about to declare love for her or some such thing. ‘There is no time for …’

  ‘Listen’, Anyi said and this time there was real authority in his voice. ‘Alene did not want you told but you have a right to know, no matter what knowing causes.’

  ‘Anyi you mustn’t …’

  ‘Glynn, the woman who saved Tarsin is a stranger and I believe that she is the sister you seek.’

  ‘Ember is the visionweaver?’ Glynn felt something rush through her – heat or cold or fear; realisation? Had she known this all along, somewhere deep inside herself? Wasn’t it even obvious?

  ‘I guessed that she was a stranger before anyone told me,’ Anyi said. ‘She knew so little, you see. But she was not … not this bleak, cold woman you describe. And you are wrong about her not caring about you. Feyt told me that when she smuggled Ember and Bleyd aboard the ship for Vespi, she spoke of you. You see she had lost all memory of who she had been upon her own world, although she knew herself to be a stranger here. But when she was helping to get my brother from the cells, something happened to make her remember that she had a sister whose name was Glynn. She had actually seen a vision of you, but she did not know who it was until then. That’s how Alene and the others knew your name. She begged Feyt to find you and send you after her.’

  ‘Ember had a vision about me?’ Glynn stammered.

  ‘About you and other things. Sometimes it happens that strangers get soulweaving tendencies when they cross to Keltor. That’s what Alene told me once, anyhow.’

  ‘I take it she has gone to Darkfall?’

  ‘Yes,’ Anyi said. ‘She must surely be there by now.’

  ‘But … why didn’t Alene tell me the visi
onweaver was Ember?’ Glynn asked.

  There was silence, and now she felt his confusion and unease. ‘I … can not answer this one question, Glynn, but believe me when I tell you that there was no ill intent in Alene or the myrmidons when they chose to keep silent. And no ill intent in my silence now. Only concern for you and for … for your sister.’

  ‘I don’t understand,’ Glynn said flatly, anger beginning to curl in her belly. Because Anyi was right, she should have been told, and she could not help wondering if Alene had known about her being on Keltor before Ember had left Ramidan, and had chosen to say nothing. But what possible reason could there be for their secrecy?

  ‘Please do not make me regret telling you as much as I have done,’ Anyi said softly. ‘I told you because I believe you have a right to know, and you must now do what you intended to do and go to Darkfall.’

  Glynn took several deep breaths and let anger wash through and out of her. Anyi was right. No matter why Alene and the myrmidons had not told her about Ember, they had been sending her to Darkfall where she would find her. ‘All right. I don’t understand but I’m glad you told me.’ She rose. ‘I’ll go now. I will be back as soon as I can.’

  30

  When the blackwind blows, take shelter.

  OLD VESPIAN PROVERB

  Half an hour later, Glynn was making her way along a wide, prosperous-looking street when a group of people surged from a building, laughing and chattering. She slowed down to stay out of the circles of light cast by the servitors’ lanterns.

  ‘Damn Fulig,’ one of the men said. ‘I wagered ten hacoin that he would disinherit Kerd.’

  ‘He may yet,’ a woman cackled. ‘He has until the ceremony tomorrow night to state an objection. He might choose the moment of greatest humiliation.’

  ‘It is the girl that his boy will take to his bed, not the stepmother.’

  Someone made another comment, which Glynn did not hear, and it was met by howls of coarse laughter, but her attention had wandered to a mask sign against the wall, indicating that the next street would bring her to the mask-makers’ district. She had asked a servitor where one might have a good mask made upon Ramidan and had been given directions thus far, but now she must locate the street that Solen had named. Although her other powers had been returned, she could not seem to gain any sense of the Acanthan’s presence within the city. She had not yet tried to reach him with her mind, partly because this would drain her energy, but more because she feared to learn that she was incapable of it. Of all her feinna abilities, other than the feinna link itself, it was her ability to communicate mind to mind with Solen that she valued most. It would be bitter to find that all of her feinna abilities had somehow been restored to her except this one.

  As soon as the group in front of her had gone out of sight, Glynn sped up, keeping to the shadows but striving to look hasty rather than furtive. Her biggest worry was that she would bump into legionnaires – who would surely wonder at her filthy, bedraggled state – because if anything happened to her, Anyi would be helpless. She wanted desperately to think about what Anyi had told her about Ember being the visionweaver who had saved Tarsin and then disappeared, but common sense and her training urged her to forget everything for the moment except getting safely to where she must go, if for no other reason than that she owed it to Anyi for telling her the truth.

  It took her another twenty minutes to find a painted hide sign announcing Mask-maker’s Lane, and she was taken aback to find it bustling with activity. Almost every shopfront was hung with great bunches of masks leering and weeping and offering a thousand other prefabricated expressions to passersby. People were wandering arm in arm from shop to shop, peering in or touching masks. From their attire she guessed that most of them were servitors or poorer people. The masks on display were not as fine as the ones Glynn had seen worn within the citadel palace, and she wondered if they were replaced in daylight hours by finer ware to appeal to browsing nobles. No doubt within the shops there would be displays of exquisite masks in cases, and a fine embroidered seat where a customer might sit and sip cirul while having a mask designed to fit the exact configurations of a face. That, at least, was how Hella had once described a mask-maker’s establishment.

  Glynn approached a pair of young women giggling over a lewd masculine mask. ‘Pardon me, do you know of a place called Gia Square?’ she asked, being careful with her accent, though the reek of cirul on the pair told her they were unlikely to care how she spoke.

  ‘Down that way. Two streets.’

  ‘Three,’ her friend corrected, and then they looked at one another and began to laugh in drunken hysteria.

  Glynn thanked them for their help and continued on, taking care to look in windows and finger masks as if she were browsing like everyone else, for she had spotted a pair of green legionnaires standing in the doorway of a shop and talking to a fat, scowling man. Then, with a rush of joy, she saw a small scribed sign on the edge of a building, announcing the Street of the Face-shapers. She had not passed through Gia Square, but no doubt this street ran into it at the far end. Her heart began to thump at the realisation that in a very short time she would see Solen. And it came to her with joy that she would be able to tell him that not only was it impossible for her to return to her own world, it was no longer necessary, because her own sister was the mysterious visionweaver.

  The lane that she had entered was narrow, with fewer people, and only one or two shops lit up. None offered cheap wares out front, which suggested they aimed at a somewhat higher clientele than the shops in the streets she had passed through already. She soon found the bakery that Solen had mentioned and, although it was dark and obviously closed for business, there was a light in the rear and also a light in the window of the mask-maker’s establishment above. A small elegant sign revealed that the entrance to the upper part of the building was through the bakery.

  Glynn hesitated then tried the handle. It opened and she slipped inside closing the door behind her. The warmth and the tantalising scent of fresh-baked bread told her that the bakery was preparing for the following day’s trade. There was no sign of a door or stairs which would obviously lead up to the mask-maker’s rooms, so Glynn went to the counter and rang the bell.

  There was a moment of silence, then a man appeared from the rear, followed by two women, like enough to be sisters.

  ‘We are closed,’ he growled, and Glynn noticed that he carried a stout length of stick.

  ‘I do not wish to cause you any trouble,’ she said politely, lifting her hands slightly to show that she carried no weapons. ‘I thought this place a mask-maker’s establishment, but things are not always called by their true names.’

  Some of the belligerence went out of the man’s expression. Even so he said, ‘I doubt that the mask-maker will want to see one who smells as bad as you do. Clover is very particular.’

  ‘I have a message from a friend of hers,’ Glynn temporised desperately.

  The man and the women were still for several beats, then the man said, ‘Lilla, go up and tell Clover there is a woman to see her. Your name?’ Now he sounded businesslike, though he still looked wary.

  ‘My name is Glynn, but she will not know it.’

  ‘The name of your mutual friend then?’

  Now it was Glynn’s turn to hesitate. ‘Donard of Fomhika.’

  The man began to scowl. ‘That is strange, for why would Donard of Fomhika give you a message when he could just as easily have brought it himself when he came this afternoon?’

  Glynn’s mouth dried. ‘Please, I must see Solen. It is urgent … It concerns the missing mermod.’ She was taking a terrible risk, but she couldn’t let them turn her away. She had to hope that she was right in assuming that they must cleave to Darkfall if they were connected to the Shadowman.

  ‘I say let Clover decide what we should do with a woman who comes in looking as this one does and ranting about such matters as these, which are no business of the common folk,’ the second wo
man said carefully. ‘No doubt she will summon the legionnaires herself.’

  ‘No doubt,’ the man said, and to Glynn’s intense relief, he gestured at the woman and she disappeared back into the interior of the shop. Several long and uncomfortable moments later, they all heard footsteps and Glynn turned to see the woman returning, followed by, of all people, Donard.

  ‘So! It is you and again you are caught out in lies,’ Donard said grimly. Glynn’s heart almost failed her, but all at once the blond Fomhikan burst out laughing. ‘Fortunately, I am here to save you from yourself.’

  The other three relaxed visibly. ‘You know her then? She is safe?’ the woman who had brought him asked sharply.

  ‘Be calm, Lilla. This is the young woman that Solen had us out looking for yesterday from dawn to dusk, and whom he seeks even now in the wilderness. We assumed that you were trapped outside because of the legionnaires infesting the gates and tramping through the wilderness.’

  ‘I was,’ Glynn said, and heard her own weariness. ‘But you say Solen has left the city? I need to see him.’

  Donard beamed at her. ‘Having heard him speak of you, I would say he shares your need.’ Glynn’s face burned, but her heart swelled at his implication. ‘He will return soon. Aside from wanting to find you, he would be glad to know why there are so many green legionnaires roaming about watching the gates.’ Donard became serious. ‘But Lilla said you spoke of my little brother. He is ill up in the palace we are told.’

  ‘He is not ill nor is he in the palace,’ Glynn said, shamed that she had taken so long to speak of Anyi. ‘He is the reason I could not meet Solen as we had agreed. You see, he was taken prisoner by green legionnaires after he was caught spying on Coralyn and Kalide. They put him in a cell, and left a note to send Feyt off to the soulweaver’s hut after him. Then yesterday, they took him out into the wilderness to kill him, except that he escaped and ran into me.’