Darksong

by Isobelle Carmody

  ‘Your bribe,’ Duran mocked. ‘Fortunately for us, if he returns to shore he will break Edict for a second time, and this time by his own decision.’

  ‘You are wrong,’ the captain said triumphantly. ‘I boarded this ship with the permission of the shipmaster in the course of my lawful duty, and the ship departed without fair warning. Therefore he must return me and my men to the shore.’

  ‘He speaks true,’ the shipmaster said. ‘The ship code is clear on this matter.’

  Duran sighed. ‘Then I am afraid, Captain, that you will have to make your own way to shore.’ She nodded, and without further ado the two myrmidons lifted the swearing legionnaire captain and threw him effortlessly overboard. The other conscious legionnaires began to curse and struggle as they were dragged to the edge of the ship and thrown overboard, too, kicking and screeching their fury.

  ‘The rest are unconscious,’ Virat reported.

  ‘Then they are in no state to make any demands,’ Duran said. ‘Take them below and lock them in the hold.’ She turned back to the Vespian shipmaster. ‘Now, Sirrah. What do you propose to do now that there is no one aboard demanding to be put ashore.’

  ‘If the anchor breaks, I will keep the ship from the shoals and ward off the silfifor the sake of my crew, Myrmidon, but I will not wavespeak the ship for you. Not to Myrmidor nor Vespi nor anywhere else,’ Barat announced smugly. ‘I fear you will soon regret your rough treatment of the legionnaires for another ship will no doubt be dispatched to come after us.’

  ‘You speak of duty,’ Bleyd snarled, striding across the deck in front of Barat, and coming to stand in front of the timber alcove where Ember stood with Soonkar and Hella. ‘Would you call it your duty to hand over to her enemies one who bears the face of the beloved of the Firstborn? For her enemies are also the enemies of Darkfall.’ With these words, he dropped his blade, and dragged the veil from Ember’s face. At this very instant, in one of those random perfect moments of timing, Kalinda rose above the horizon and Ember’s red-gold hair flamed in the red light that bared her naked face and eyes to everyone on deck.

  There was a profound silence and Duran and the other myrmidon looked no less pole-axed than the shipmaster and his crew.

  ‘It is true! She does look like Shenavyre!’ one of the latter cried.

  ‘But by the Horn! Look at her! Look at her eyes!’ Gorick cried. ‘What does it mean that one eye is silverblinded?’

  ‘There is only one answer to that.’ Duran spoke in a low, intense voice, and her face was pale with wonder and reverence as she came to stand before Ember. ‘Remember the signs? A stranger, half blind and crowned in flame …’

  ‘Who sings the deathsong …’ Hella whispered, having edged around to see what everyone else was gaping at.

  ‘Are you trying to say that she is …’ Barat stammered.

  But Duran had dropped to her knees, and was now staring up into Ember’s eyes with a fierce joy. ‘Hail Unraveller!’ she said. ‘You have come at last to free the Firstmade.’

  segue …

  The watcher felt the fury of the Chaos spirit ripple across the Void, touching upon all worlds, when the myrmidon chieftain named the red-haired Ember, Unraveller. That naming and the radiance of the certainty of the one who had spoken it instantly drew the eye of the Chaos spirit away from the other sister, upon whom it had begin to focus in spite of all the wards against it. This was exactly as Lanalor had foreseen, and the watcher remembered how it had amused the bitter, sardonic man that the weak sister should hide and shield her stronger twin.

  Given all that had gone amiss, it was a miracle that the red-haired woman had almost reached Darkfall. Now would the Unraveller have her chance to free the Unykorn. If she succeeded, the Unykorn would be free and Lanalor’s vow to long-dead Shenavyre upheld. Whereupon Lanalor, having won his wager with the Chaos spirit, was to have his soul reunited with his flesh. So the Chaos spirit had sworn.

  Of course it had intended that this reunion would happen in the Void, and it had not said that Lanalor would then be released. That had never been its intention.

  Oh it had thought itself so clever, for the gaining of Lanalor’s soul and flesh within the Void was the sole reason it had risked providing Lanalor with the power to build his portal. Lanalor’s flesh and his scoured spirit would provide a vessel by which means the Chaos spirit could enter the made world. First it would destroy Keltor, because it was beloved of the Unykorn, then it would travel to the other worlds, for all worlds were linked ultimately, one to the other, as surely as threads in a great tapestry. If the Unraveller came and failed to free the Unykorn, the result would be the same.

  Of course it had not intended that the Unraveller should ever be allowed to free the Unykorn, for that would make its conquest of the worlds more difficult.

  And yet, she was within a day of it, and there was no possibility of stopping her. Now it would have to fight her openly, within the Void, and all of its colossal energies would be bent upon the Unraveller. Could the Unraveller succeed against such an adversary? It was possible. Just. In one future only, in a decade of endless possibilities of the future, Lanalor had seen the Unraveller succeed in freeing the Firstmade. In all other visions it had seen through all the ages of its twilight existence, the watcher, too, had seen only one vision in which the Unykorn flew free. One.

  Lanalor had gambled his soul for that one chance, and then Ronaall had done in secret all it dared to increase the odds of that future coming to pass. But once the Unraveller began her battle with the Chaos spirit for the Firstborn, it could not help her.

  The paradox was that Lanalor had sold his soul into purgatory and risked its loss so that the Unraveller could try to free the Unykorn, but the secret aims of the Chaos spirit had forced it then to use the Unraveller as bait and a shield for the presence and activities of her sister. So much effort had gone into suppressing the bright spirit of the blonde girl, in order to make her invisible to the Chaos spirit. All paths that might have let her reach her true potential had been quenched and distorted, and yet even so, she had come to shine with a dangerous brightness in the short time she had been on Keltor. It had hidden her with such magic as it had possessed, but of course in cloaking her from the Chaos spirit, it had hidden her from itself as well. And from all the wise, as Alene soulweaver had observed. Therefore the watcher, who had once been Lanalor, and who was now the manbeast Ronaall, had not the slightest notion if this blonde girl had even a single hope of succeeding at the strange and impossible task that it had laid out for her.

  But if she failed, then it must play its darkest hand.

  The body of Lanalor must be destroyed. The sliver of soul sustaining it and Ronaall would fly to the Void and the Chaos spirit would understand everything that Lanalor had seen and planned. It would rend his soul and extinguish it. The darkest end. But the Chaos spirit would remain within the Void and, perhaps, the Firstmade would fly free. Lanalor would accept the snuffing out of his soul, for such an end.

  It drifted for a time and was again drawn to the nexus, where Lanalor’s flesh lay. The magnetism of the nexus was growing. If the Chaos spirit had not been otherwise occupied, it would have felt it. The watcher found the red-haired boy sleeping nearby, slumped between a chair and the bed where the unconscious child lay.

  Someone approached.

  ‘Hello, you must be Sean Holland. I’ve been hearing about you. I think you must be our most frequent visitor lately.’

  Sean started violently, having fallen into a light doze. He had begun to dream immediately, the way he seemed to so often just lately. Strange, compelling dreams which were hard to shake from his waking mind and which seemed subtly to be colouring his vision of his own world. Somehow it was his visits to this place doing it to him. The voice was masculine and Sean thought it must be a doctor, but the uniform was that of a nurse. Sean looked into eyes that were very kind but deeply shadowed with fatigue.

  ‘I … yes. I’m Sean,’ the youth said. He looked around, wo
ndering what time it was.

  ‘It’s about ten,’ the nurse said reading his confusion.

  Sean supposed he had seen such expressions many times before on the face of visitors to this place of endless sleep and silent demise. How could he bear to work here, the youth wondered. ‘I didn’t mean to stay so long but …’ he glanced at the bed.

  The nurse nodded, understanding. There was something about the hospice that made time seem less important. He often had the feeling when coming to work that he was entering a place where the normal laws of time did not operate. Seeing the boy’s questioning looks, he said, ‘He didn’t wake I suppose. They rarely do. But you know what I think? I think that the people here are dreaming of their lives. Sometimes the air feels so thick with dreams …’ He hadn’t meant to say that and it occurred to him that he had been doing that a lot lately; saying things without thinking them through first. Maybe he needed a holiday. His sister said he did. You’re so vague these days, she had said in her sharp way. There is more to life than that waiting room for a morgue where you work.

  Dead Wait, the police called it.

  ‘I don’t think he had too many good times,’ Sean said.

  The nurse had to fight for a moment to remember what they had been talking about. Then he felt a pang of shame and looked at the child curled in the bed. ‘No, I suppose not.’ He looked across at the youth, suddenly struck by his beauty. He felt an idiotic urge to comment on it. But he said, ‘He had you didn’t he? That was something good.’

  Sean smiled shyly. ‘I didn’t know him very well. But maybe …’ He stopped and the nurse thought how conversations here were always broken up with thoughts and silences, ending abruptly.

  ‘Would you like some coffee, or hot chocolate?’ the nurse said gently. ‘You look exhausted.’

  ‘I am. I … I wonder why?’

  The nurse knew why. Each night he went home drained. He said, ‘The chocolate will pick you up a bit. I’ll bring it, but you can help yourself next time. I guess you will be coming again.’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Sean said.

  He didn’t really know why he was here again, or why he kept coming back. Ever since he had learned about the accident, he had felt an urge to see the Shadow. He had stopped going to school altogether and his mother had given up pleading with him. Other than the night when Shadow had come to sleep over, they hardly communicated. He felt far from her because she seemed so unaware of all the darkness and despair of the world. Uncaring in her ignorance, like most people. Something in her mindless cleaning of their little house depressed him deeply. He had begun spending more time with Billy, although a part of him had been repelled by the handsome dark-haired youth with his clever sneering mouth. Yet Billy was aware, and somehow that had come to be important. Sometimes Sean wondered if his father had been aware, and that was why he had turned out as he had.

  He had felt himself drifting towards the alliance that Billy seemed to want, which would be sealed if he took part in the crime the older youth was hatching. Then the glue-sniffing incident had happened. Some time before that, only a few weeks, Billy had announced one day that the Shadow was flawed and would crack under pressure. This had been only two nights after the boy stayed over at Sean’s house and Sean felt that there was some connection, though he could not think what it could be. Billy could hardly be jealous of the boy’s liking for him. Yet Billy had pushed at the boy subtly from that night on. Pressing on the hurt bits in him with delicate and precise cruelty. It had been a work of art, and the boy’s glue-sniffing episode had seemed like the logical result of his natural despair – the crack that Billy had predicted.

  And yet would anything have happened if Billy had left him alone? If Sean had not asked him to stay?

  Billy had not wanted him to visit the boy and he had let himself be dissuaded to begin with. Then one day he had woken, half drunk from his dreams, and had found himself at the hospital almost as if he had gone there under post-hypnotic suggestion. They had told him that the boy had been shifted to the hospice some days earlier. One look at the place had told him that this was where people came to die. Something had gone dark in him for a moment at the mental image of the Shadow being carried in here, so small and still, and he had wanted to turn back, and go with Billy on one of his legendary midnight rampages, smashing and destroying things. But something would not allow it; maybe the voice inside that told him that he should have opposed Billy; that he was as guilty as Billy because he had not fought him.

  He frowned, thinking fight was a strange word to use. Fight. As if they were enemies. He shivered.

  But sitting by the bedside of the unconscious Shadow that first time, and holding his thin burning fingers, he discovered that there was a sombre solace in the intense silence of this place. He could imagine himself returning and sitting again, drinking hot chocolate and smiling at the nurses who would nod to him in a friendly, companionable way. I could share their burden, he thought, and then was bemused by what he could mean by such a thought. What burden could the two nurses he had met, with their sad, gentle, exhausted eyes, be carrying? He shivered and refused to think further of this. It seemed too weird.

  Billy wouldn’t like it that he had come at all, let alone that he had come back. Five times now, he had been here. The thought of Billy’s displeasure was like a chilly knife against his neck, and he frowned at the image because it was so melodramatic.

  There was a slight sound and he looked around. A man carrying an instrument case was passing in the corridor, his face abstracted. He glanced blindly into the room and Sean saw that he had the same sad, kind eyes as the nurses.

  I could be here with them, he thought.

  This is not for you …

  He shuddered at the voice and wondered if he was actually losing his mind. It would explain a lot. The smell of chocolate came to him and he reached for the mug on the bedside table and was about to sip from it, when it occurred to him to wonder when the nurse had brought the drink. Then he drank, thinking that this seemed to be the sort of place where things could happen out of order. A drink could be brought before it was made …

  You see? He senses the truth of this place. The watcher was startled to hear the disembodied voice of Wind inside its mind. Do not think this nexus is your doing. What you did here was as much a response to this place as the coming of this bright youth. Seek wisdom in humility, Ronaall …

  How much do you know?

  I know all of your names and I know that you did here a thing which could have been possible nowhere else, no matter what power you had amassed. I know that you are arrogant even in your shame. Do not imagine that the wrong you did was yours alone. Yet you must strive to right the wrong you did. The outcome is less important than your intention to do right. Yearnings and dreams shape the worlds, not the outcomes of actions, which none may predict. In seeking to right a wrong, your yearning is bright with the Song and so the tapestry of all things is brightened.

  Is not the important thing that the Firstmade be freed?

  What is important is that the Firstmade once touched this place and opened a gateway to dreams …

  The voice faded but the watcher remained for a time, watching the youth watch the boy. Then it drifted to another room where a man’s body lay, dreaming the manbeast that was all that remained of his soul.

  The watcher segued …

  33

  Sometimes one must lose in order to win …

  OLD SHEANNITE PROVERB

  ‘She has a fractured rib. Perhaps two,’ the white cloak told Tarsin’s body servitor. ‘There is nothing that can be done other than binding them, and I would not advise it. I have accelerated their healing, of course. The burns are ugly, but they will heal as long as they are kept clean. I have drawn the immediate pain from them, but when it comes again, give her the grey pills. One at a time and no more than three in a day. I can do little for her face. It looks bad, but there is nothing that time will not heal. The cut on her forehead was already sewn
but it was a barbarous job and I …’

  Glynn ceased to listen to the white cloak cataloguing the treatments he had administered, though she was grateful enough for the attentions of the little man. He was rather better at his job than the white cloak that Kalide had summoned at the behest of his mother. Although perhaps, in fairness, the woman would have done a better job if she had been less frightened of the hovering Kalide with his threats and imprecations.

  Her anger swelled at the thought of the Iridomi. ‘Bastard …’ she muttered and the two men looked at her. She closed her eyes and lay still and soon they began to speak again, leaving Glynn to wonder if the betrothal ceremony had finished.

  She had the feeling it had not been long in progress when she had been bundled in by Kalide and Coralyn to face Tarsin.

  Coralyn and Kalide had stood by the whole time as she was taken from her bed, bathed and dressed, painted and brushed. She might have been a robot or a potato for all the notice they took of her. Of course they imagined that she was still saturated with tranquillisers and sleep drugs, otherwise they would never have spoken so freely in front of her.

  The conversation between them had been by turns enlightening and shattering. It had begun with Kalide complaining that Glynn was being dressed in such finery, given that she was nothing more than a servitor. He had emanated a barely constrained hunger to smash and rend her; to finish what he had begun.

  ‘One does not present something to a Holder meanly wrapped unless offence is intended,’ Coralyn had answered coldly. ‘Besides, better they should notice the trappings than the cuts and bruises, which no one will imagine would come from a carriage accident. Now calm yourself. Tarsin is in an ill mood and it would not be well for our plans to founder on the eve of their fruition because you angered him.’