Darksong

by Isobelle Carmody

  She yawned and decided that the best and most sensible thing she could do now would be to sleep soundly, regenerating her energies and healing naturally. She had the feeling that she would need all of her wits and strength in the coming days.

  She slid into sleep and into a bittersweet dream of the memory garden. To her dismay there were now great melting gaps. She found the pebble path and went along it, dreading what might have happened to the Unykorn mural.

  All at once, she had the conviction that she was not alone.

  She turned with a rush of gladness, thinking to see the feinna, but to her amazement, Solen stood there wearing an expression of complete bewilderment.

  ‘Glynna?’ he said doubtfully, then he looked about in puzzlement. ‘What is this place? And your clothes …’

  Glynn glanced down and found that she was wearing her favourite jeans and T-shirt. ‘I … You’re dreaming,’ she stammered. ‘I mean, I’m dreaming. Of you.’

  He stepped towards her, eyes softening to lavender. ‘Dream or not, I will hold you and perhaps this time you will not vanish like smoke in my arms.’

  Glynn fended him off though her body yearned to go unresisting into that offered and longed-for embrace. For suddenly she realised that Solen was right. The memory garden was not a dream and so perhaps they were again in real communication. Though she could not imagine how he had entered an imaginary construct inside her mind she realised that she had the chance to tell him things that he needed to know.

  ‘Solen, listen to me. I think you are right in thinking this is not a dream, although we are dreaming in a way. This place is sort of like a permanent dream in my mind. The feinna helped me make it. Do you … has the baker told you that I came there?’

  His face lit up. ‘No. I felt … I thought …’ He shook his head. ‘When I heard that you had been taken by green legionnaires, I feared the worst and I have been making arrangements to come after you. But are you free now? And how?’

  ‘I am not free. I am a prisoner aboard one of three ships that are to travel tomorrow to Vespi and then on to Iridom carrying Coralyn and Kalide, the Draaka delegation, Unys and Kerd and Fulig.’

  ‘Tomorrow! No!’ he groaned. She could not bear his despair and suddenly the hands that had begun fending him off rested flat against his thin shirt. She could feel the heat of his skin beneath her palms and wondered how it would feel if there were no cloth. She felt her cheeks flame and tried to step back but Solen laid his own hands over hers, pressing them against him.

  ‘My love …’ he whispered.

  ‘Oh …’ Glynn murmured and then could not remember what she had begun to say.

  Solen slid her hands under his up to the long brown column of his neck and she felt the beat of his blood against her palm. Then he kissed first one of her palms and then the other. The moist heat of his lips made her ache. Then he left her hands and let his own trace her body from shoulders to hips, as if he was trying to imprint the shape of her into his fingertips. At last he drew her against him. Glynn could hardly breath though he held her lightly. Her blood raged and churned inside her, and she could feel the answering hammering of Solen’s heart against her breasts. For a moment all thought was consumed in longing to have nothing between them to hold them apart. Not clothes. Not skin.

  But she wrenched herself back. Managed to gasp, ‘Solen, wait …’

  ‘I have waited long enough,’ he growled. His lips were against her temple and the words seemed to enter her skull.

  Wait no more, her blood cried out to him, but she took a deep ragged breath and reminded herself that she must not squander this precious moment of communication on passion. ‘Solen. Please. If you love me, then listen to me. I don’t know if we can do this once I am out to sea. On my own world, it was always said that magic could not work over water and maybe this is a kind of magic.’

  Her wild babble stopped him but his eyes remained soft with desire. ‘I will listen, but let me hold you as we speak. If you could only know how I have wanted you. If only I had not let you go from me, and now if I cannot get to you in time …’

  ‘Solen, it’s too late for that. Everything that has happened is my own fault. I was a fool not to leave the ship with you as soon as we got here. I told myself the quickest way into the palace to see Alene was to stay with the Draaka. I thought I was being sensible but in reality I was frightened of what you made me feel.’

  ‘You a coward? Never!’

  ‘I was frightened because I thought I would have to leave you to go back to my own world,’ Glynn continued doggedly. ‘I believed that it would be more painful for both of us if we … If we saw one another again and then had to part.’

  ‘Is your own world so wondrous that you would choose it over what is between us? Or is it that you have a lover there?’

  Glynn looked into his eyes. ‘I once loved a man there, Solen, but he was not my lover, for I was a child. And he is dead now. I would have gone back only for my sister, because I swore to take care of her until the end. But I have learned that it is impossible to go back to my world, and in any case, there is no need. Anyi told me that the visionweaver who saved Tarsin’s life is my sister.’

  ‘What! He did not tell me about your sister, but then I had only a few moments with him.’ Solen said. ‘But is it possible? I have never heard of two strangers crossing in the same period.’

  ‘Neither had Alene nor any of the soulweavers, but it happened. Probably it has something to do with the Unraveller. But listen, this is important. Coralyn and Kalide were talking about my sister and the Fomhikan Bleyd. She said they are on Iridom and even now being hunted. The authorities there actually had Duran as a captive but she escaped.’

  ‘Duran! On Iridom? And why would she go there? And why would Bleyd go there, or your sister?’

  ‘I guess Duran went there because of the Unraveller.’

  ‘The Unraveller is upon Iridom as well?’

  ‘He travelled with my sister and the Fomhikan from Ramidan. But you asked why they went to Iridom? Coralyn or Kalide said that they had been betrayed to the authorities by the shipmistress who had taken them from here, and in my darklin vision the Chaos spirit had used minds open to it to send them to Iridom. Maybe that was what happened and all of them are trapped there now because an Edict bell was sounded. That is where these ships will go after Vespi. Coralyn doesn’t believe in the Unraveller but she is going to convince the Draaka that he is on Iridom.’

  ‘You go there for your sister?’

  ‘I don’t really have any choice, but I want to go to her.’

  ‘And what of your fears for the Unraveller?’

  ‘You and everyone else keeps telling me that the worst thing to do with a prophecy is to try not to let it happen.’ She searched her mind to see if there was anything she had forgotten to mention. ‘Did you hear that Feyt was taken?’

  ‘I did. I meant to rescue her at the same time as you.’ He shook his head and his eyes were bleak. ‘It is strange, but I was so certain that you … that Kalide was torturing you and that you were dying …’

  Glynn looked down at her hands and realised that her injuries had not translated into the memory garden. Quickly she began to outline Coralyn’s plans for her, not wanting him to learn the truth and suffer by it.

  ‘She lies as she breathes. She will give you to the Draaka.’

  ‘Don’t worry. I don’t put any faith in her promises and I don’t plan to betray anyone. Not even some poor drugged fool. I will escape on Iridom and I will find Ember!’

  ‘I do not know why, but somehow I believe you. Glynn, you have the courage for anything,’ Solen said, and his grip on her hands tightened. He would have drawn her to him, but she pulled her hands gently from his grip and shook her head.

  ‘It’s not courage. You’d do the same if it were Hella or Flay who needed you.’

  Solen sighed. ‘I would but … I cannot believe that what we feel must be set aside without our even being able to fight for it.’
>
  ‘Sometimes the hardest thing is not to fight,’ Glynn said softly, and realised she was quoting Wind yet again.

  ‘A hard truth,’ Solen said.

  ‘I love you, Solen, and that is a better truth,’ Glynn said, and the potent starkness of such words made the Acanthan draw a long hissing breath.

  He ran both hands over his face and through his hair before letting them fall to his sides. ‘So this is farewell again,’ he said, and he stepped towards her and gathered her roughly into his arms. It hurt. Yet this time, Glynn slid her arms about his waist and held him as tightly, committing the feel of him to her memory. Because this might be all there ever was.

  ‘Kiss me,’ Solen commanded, and she lifted her lips to his and for a long obliterating moment there was nothing but light and fire and a dream of falling. Then he pulled away and, half-dazed with yearning and passion, Glynn looked up at him and saw that he was fading. ‘I am waking,’ he murmured.

  ‘Oh no!’

  ‘Fear not, Glynna-vyre. I will not let worlds or the Chaos spirit or even the Unraveller himself keep us apart. Where you go, I will follow. Even if it were to your world or any other! I swear it on my soul.’

  segue …

  The watcher shuddered with the power of the oath that pushed it across the Void and to the Unraveller’s world. To its dismay it was again within the nexus that was the hospice for the dying. The youth had gone and the boy slept on unchanging. The male nurse now stood by him, looking down. He straightened the sheet unnecessarily, mourning the child and wondering about the red-haired youth who had come to sit with him.

  He sighed and then continued his rounds, coming eventually to the man whom the other nurse had dubbed The Sleeping Prince. Certainly there was something princely about his dark, narrow features and arched brows, and the proud curl of his lips. No one actually knew how long he had been in a coma and it was only the machines that kept him alive. It seemed there was no family to request that the machines be switched off, and so, by law, he must be maintained until his body died. He had been here since before any of the current staff of the home had begun their employment. Once, it had come to the nurse in a dream that the man had been there before the hospice was built, and that it had in fact been built to house him.

  The thought came to him now and he thought it was because of the way the man had never seemed to have aged. Thinking of his nickname, the nurse found himself wondering if any of the other nurses had ever given into temptation and kissed him to see if that would wake him. He smiled at his whimsy. Then his smile faded as he reflected that it was possible that the man had been in a coma since he was as young as the newest inmate of the home, the child they now named the Shadow. A chilly and yet fitting name.

  ‘What a strange place this is with sick shadows and sleeping princes and battered angels …’ he murmured to himself. ‘Not like a real place at all but like a sort of storage room for life where things wait and also are discarded.’ He dismissed his whimsy and went soft-footed to the small room where the musician sat again with his elderly mother. His clothing and the music case meant that he had come straight from a gig.

  ‘How is she?’ the nurse asked.

  ‘She seems peaceful enough,’ the musician said without irony. He was grateful for the pretence that this was a normal sickbed with a patient who would wake, but tonight his mind was not on his mother or her slow death. He was thinking about the offer Harrison Bonn had made, and wondering why he had hesitated before accepting. Had, in fact, almost refused the offer of a lifetime.

  He had his copy of the contract for the first gig in his pocket and as the nurse turned away he felt for it. The paper crackled invitingly, but he did not take it out.

  ‘Three weeks to the Night of the Comet charity concert,’ he murmured in the confiding tone he used to speak to his mother. She said nothing, of course. The words felt ominous, though he had read enough about the Third World Credit Company to admire the idea of it. The concert was a good cause, so why did he feel as if he had sold his soul to the devil in signing Harrison Bonn’s contract.

  ‘This is what I wanted,’ he added and heard the question in his voice.

  The watcher segued …

  34

  The world is littered with unfinished visions,

  and is not life such a vision?

  and is not the finishing of any thing a little death?

  SONGS OF DANAE

  ‘Wake, Unraveller,’ a voice called. Ember opened her eyes and found herself in pitch darkness. She was startled. The ship must have tethered hours ago, unless something had gone wrong and they had not been permitted to land.

  ‘Can you light the lantern?’ she called, and she sat up, moving very slowly and deliberately because pain was running through her like fine wire and any movement made her head feel as if it would shatter like glass at any moment. By the time she was upright, she was close to vomiting. Clearly the lirium had worn off.

  She heard a step at the bedside. ‘You wish the lantern to be lit, Lady?’ It was Hella, and there was bewilderment in her voice.

  ‘It is only that it’s so dark,’ Ember said apologetically, supposing she must have been sleeping in a chair.

  ‘But Lady, the light of Kalinda is full on your face. Can you not see it?’ Hella stammered.

  Ember blinked and became aware of the warmth on her cheeks. She blinked again and, this time, inside her, dark Ember shrieked with laughter. Oh we see, don’t we! she shrilled. Now we see!

  ‘Are you … well?’ Hella asked.

  ‘No I am not! Get Soonkar,’ Ember croaked, fighting terror.

  Darkfall! dark Ember cawed. Isn’t that what happens? Those who see visions come to Darkfall and are blinded by truth!

  Ember groaned. ‘Not this,’ she whispered. Dimly she heard the sound of the door slamming behind the gemeller and the sound of her boots drumming up the steps to the deck.

  Perhaps your sight is the price you will pay for this healing! dark Ember taunted slyly and Ember’s terror abated for a moment as she was struck by the thought that if dark Ember was insane that meant she was insane. Or part of her. She was appalled to hear a mad little jabber of laughter dribble from her mouth.

  Boots thundered downward and the door slammed open. ‘What is it?’ Soonkar asked, coming to take her hand.

  Ember felt immediately calmer hearing that deep voice, and feeling the dwarf’s big, rough hand encompass hers. ‘I … I can’t see, Soonkar,’ she whispered. ‘I … The doctors said I would go blind just before the end. Maybe it has come.’

  ‘Do not despair. We will reach Myrmidor within the hour,’ Soonkar said, pulling her into a bear-like embrace. He tilted her face up and Ember felt the warmth of his breath on her cheeks, but the stygian blackness leered at her like the maw of a great beast.

  ‘I … I’m scared … Soonkar, if I go blind it … will be irrevocable. Even if I reach Signe in time, I will ever after be blind.’

  There was a strange silence. ‘All soulweavers are blind and they do not count it a loss,’ he said. ‘The important thing is that you live.’

  Ember pulled from the comfort of his embrace and the movement sent pain shooting through her temples and down her spine. She moaned and fell back against the pillows. Then she saw a flash of milky light and the halfman’s impossibly handsome face came swimming into focus, ruddy in the dusklight.

  ‘Oh God! It’s all right. I can see again. It’s not too late. Oh Soonkar! I can see!’

  He hugged her and this time she hugged him back and wept. More boots sounded on the steps and Duran came running through the open door, her face contorted with anxiety. ‘What has happened to the Unraveller?’

  ‘Don’t … don’t call me that,’ Ember said, sniffing. ‘I am not the Unraveller, whatever you think. I am only a stranger and if I don’t get to Darkfall soon, I will be a blind stranger, if not a dead one.’

  ‘I think there is not truly much time for her,’ Soonkar told the myrmidon.

  Duran lo
oked as if someone had struck her. ‘But how can it be that …’ She shook her head. ‘I will go and see if Barat can wavespeak any faster and when we are closer to shore, I will signal to ensure that a carriage and a white cloak are waiting to carry the Unraveller to the Darkfall landing.’

  ‘Do that,’ Soonkar said tersely.

  The amazon turned on her heel and left, closing the door behind her, and Soonkar took Ember’s chin in his hand and turned her face to him. ‘There will be time enough,’ he said. ‘I promise you.’

  Ember looked into his grey-flecked blue eyes and felt oddly reassured. He pressed her gently back into the pillows and rummaged about in alcoves and drawers until he found a phial of pale yellow powder. Ember watched him tip a little of it into a glass of water, which he brought to her and bade her drink. ‘It is not lirium but it will help.’

  Ember took the glass with a feeling of intense weariness. How much of her life had she spent taking medications which only deadened the pain, and only for a time. Was it possible that it was really all about to be made right? She drank, and gave the glass back to Soonkar, and a fleeting vision came to her of the brightness in the myrmidon chieftain’s face when she had named Ember the Unraveller.

  ‘Perhaps now is the time to decide if you wish to be the shipmaster who caused the Unraveller to die, or the shipmaster who bore the Unraveller to her sacred destiny,’ she had said to Barat.

  White as salt, the shipmaster had stammered that it was his duty to take the Unraveller to Myrmidor, where she could be transferred to Darkfall and instructed in her quest to free the Firstmade. Ember had tried to dispute the amazon’s fabulous claims but Soonkar had hustled her below deck.

  ‘No matter what you believe, it would be better not to voice your doubts to Barat,’ he had said. ‘At least, not until we are safely upon Myrmidor.’

  ‘You don’t understand,’ Ember had cried. ‘He will take us to Myrmidor only because he believes –’

  ‘– that you are the Unraveller. Yes. And do you see that this is not the time to deny that belief?’ Soonkar had booted open the cabin door and helped her to lie down on a narrow bed constructed against the wall. ‘Rest. There is little of the lirium left, but I’m afraid a good deal of it has spilled into my pocket. Yet it will help.’ He had given her the paper twist of dark powder and a glass of water and she had taken them gratefully.