by Ian Irvine
“Go,” said Maigraith. “Leave me, Karan. Do as I bade you.”
Yggur held up his hand, saying, “Stay!” and she went still, too afraid to move. He turned to Maigraith. “You dare defy me!”
Maigraith stepped forward. “I will have my will, even over you, Yggur. Go no further!” Her soft-spoken words disguised a power that shivered Yggur from top to toe. He struggled but could not move. Then, not looking at her, Maigraith whispered, “Karan, flee! I cannot escape.”
Karan stood mesmerized. Maigraith was still draining her through the link. You’re taking all my strength, she tried to say, but the words would not come. Yggur forced with all his will. Maigraith shrieked and he found he could move again. He took a painful step toward Karan, then another. He stooped over her.
Karan looked pleadingly at Maigraith. Maigraith could not help her. Yggur’s huge hands gripped Karan’s shoulders but still she would not look at him. Her back began to bow under the weight of him. His grip was cruel on her small shoulders. With one hand he turned her face toward him. His smoky eyes bored into her. She glared up at him—terror had not robbed her of dignity, nor resolution.
“Help me,” she cried in a thick voice, but Maigraith could do nothing.
“I command you!” said Yggur. “Who do you serve?”
Karan resisted, though the very force of his gaze seared her. She felt strengthless, hot and cold, dizzy, faint. Maigraith was sucking the life out of her across the link. There came a dreadful clanging in her brain, and each toll was the name that she dared not name. Was she in greater danger if she kept Faelamor’s secret, or if she revealed it?
At last Karan could resist no longer. A tremor passed through her from head to foot.
“Be silent,” Maigraith cried.
Yggur shook Karan so hard that her teeth clacked together. “Was it Mendark that sent you?” He spat the name out, rage mixed with bitterness.
“Yes,” cried Maigraith. “Mendark! Mendark sent us.”
But it was too late. Karan’s face crumpled. There was bright blood on her lip. She tried to stop her mouth with her fist, but it betrayed her. One single word, unwilling, whispered: “Faelamor!”
Yggur released her and she fell to her hands and knees, still clutching the Mirror in one hand. “Faelamor!” he breathed.
Maigraith cried out from behind, “Oh, Karan, you have ruined me.”
Karan looked mortified, then her eyes sheered away and she broke the link. Maigraith reeled. Karan rose slowly to her feet and backed toward the door, still clutching the Mirror. Yggur shot out his long arm, but Karan sprang backwards out of reach, amazing him with her agility. A tiny hope flared within Maigraith—she did have the will after all. She reached beyond her despair to a deeper reserve of strength.
“Leave her!” she commanded, using the Secret Art as she had never used it before.
It struck him like a blow and he flung up a crooked arm, the way a bird might shield itself with its wing. A look of disbelief passed over his face. “I cannot move,” he said in wonderment. The muscles of his jaw were like knots in granite.
“Go!” Maigraith screamed. “Do what you promised. I cannot hold him long.”
Karan seemed smaller, her face rounder and paler, but there was a furious resolve, a determination to amend the failure. “I will take it,” she said. Then, turning to Yggur with simple dignity, “Nothing will stop me!”
Yggur gave a single labored jeer. “Nothing? Let me tell you about my Whelm, my terror-guard. They were lost in the southern wilderness for half a thousand years. I mastered them, brought them out of ice and fire, and they will do anything I say. How they beg me to set them on my enemies. The Whelm will deal with you.” He made a curious gesture with one hand.
At the name, or perhaps the gesture, a shudder began at Karan’s ankles and traveled upwards until her flesh crawled and her hair stood up around her head. The shadow outline of the stick-man outside the wall rang in her mind. She was almost overcome by nausea, by revulsion, as though a dead dog had put out its rotting tongue and licked the back of her neck, leaving a cold trail of muck up to her ear.
Yggur laughed coldly. “So!” he said. “Faelamor is alive, and she wants my Mirror. I will forestall her. My armies can march on the east within the week, if they have to.”
Karan looked about to faint. Already her betrayal had begun to move the world. Maigraith put out her fist and squeezed it tight. Yggur went silent. Karan fled. The door banged and disappeared again.
Yggur turned slowly and painfully to face Maigraith. The right side of his face had set rigid. “Indeed you cannot hold me,” he whispered. “In the end you will weaken. Then I will break you.”
Maigraith stood straight, her fists clenched by her side, looking up at him. “I defy you. I will hold you till she gets away; what you do to me matters not.”
6
* * *
FALL OF
A CHRONICLER
In Chanthed, Llian was dreaming the most delicious dream that any chronicler could have. After years of searching he had uncovered evidence of a terrible, breathtaking crime, a deed so bold and far-reaching that its perpetrator could almost be admired. Now he was putting the fragments together to make a new Great Tale, the first for two hundred and fifty years. His name would be forever linked with it—Llian’s Tale. The deed would put him among the greatest chroniclers.
Someone shouted in the next room. Another voice joined in, then a third, in furious argument. Llian groaned and pushed back the bedclothes. His head ached abominably, reminding him of the previous night, erasing his glorious dreams.
The reality was not worth waking for. In the month since his famous telling, Llian’s search for the killer of the crippled girl had become an obsession that consumed his whole life. He had scoured the library, read until his eyes would no longer focus, till even to look at a page made his head spin, but had found nothing.
All his other work was abandoned. He still did tellings, but despite constant requests Llian had never told the Tale of the Forbidding again. He didn’t dare, in case Wistan heard about it And at the same time Llian lived with the fear that his version of the Great Tale would be proven false, his career destroyed. His rivals were saying that he was burned out a one-tale wonder. For someone who had never wanted more than to be a chronicler, that was the worst humiliation of all.
Llian had no money, for his stipend had not been reinstated. No one knew the Histories better than he did but he could get no living from them here. He existed by spinning scandalous yarns in the sleaziest drinking pits of Chanthed, and occasionally by writing pieces for students who were too lazy or stupid to do their own work.
His impossible fancy, to learn what had happened at the time of the Forbidding and to craft his own Great Tale from it, survived only in his dreams.
A few days later Llian got home well after midnight, after a night when he had not even earned enough to pay for his drinks, to finds his door standing wide open. He threw his bag in the direction of the table and it crashed to the floor. Holding his candle high, Llian saw that there was no table, no chair, no clothing on the pegs, no books on the shelf. His room was completely empty save for his lumpy straw mattress. Everything he owned, even threadbare clothes and down-at-heel boots, was gone. Anti-Zain obscenities were scribbled on the walls.
The loss of clothes and possessions was not such a blow; they were easily replaced, had he any money. But also gone were all his books of tales, laboriously copied by hand over fifteen years, his personal journals, precious family histories, and all his notes for the new version of the Tale of the Forbidding. He had lost everything save his illuminated book of the Great Tales and a new journal that he had in his bag. Llian was devastated.
Then the rumors started. At first they were just drunken whispers in the inns or anonymous scrawls on the privy walls—that there was something strange about the way that he had become master; that his tale was a lie or a fraud. They could not take the honor from Llian, for t
hat had been delivered by the unanimous acclamation of the masters, but they could fatally damage his name.
The less faithful of his friends fell away one by one. The ostracism had the opposite effect on Thandiwe, however. Though she did not dare to speak to him in public, she smiled at him and met him several times in secret. It was heartwarming to know that he still had one friend, though knowing that he endangered her, Llian stopped seeing her as well. But worst of all, worse even than the loss of respect from his fellows, was being cut off from the Histories that were his life.
Finally Llian had to admit that he was defeated. He sought audience with Wistan.
“I am beaten,” he said. “What do you want of me?”
“No more man your word as a master chronicler that you will never tell this tale again, or even speak of it,” Wistan said.
“Very well, I will give you my word. All I ask is that you give me back my rights to the archives.” He tried to sound humble but was not entirely successful.
“Certainly.” Wistan picked up a pen, a magnificent thing with plumes like peacock feathers that trailed over his shoulder and danced with every twitch of his wrist He stabbed the nib at the ink bottle and drew a sheet of paper to him.
“And my proofs. I must have them back too.”
Wistan paused with his nib in the air. “They were submitted for your mastership. I cannot return them. Besides, a true chronicler can read a thing once and remember it perfectly forever.”
“So I can, but the papers are more than just words. I need to see the documents.”
“Why?” asked Wistan.
“How can I not search for the truth? That is the essence of my training. Do you not see that there could be another Great Tale here? No one at this college has found a new Great Tale in a thousand years. Think of the honor, for the college as well as for me.”
He had found Wistan’s weak point and they both knew it. Wistan moved back and forth on his chair. Llian took a deep breath and continued, “I’m sure that the girl in the tower was murdered to cover something up.”
Wistan started, dropping the pen. Blue ink spattered the paper. “Worse and worse,” he said. “Anyway, you can’t have the proofs. They are locked away and I can’t recover them.” He fingered a bracelet of woven silver on his scrawny wrist. “No one can, save the new master after my death.”
“That might be sooner than you think,” Llian cried in fury, thinking that Wistan was making excuses. “Those proofs are mine—four years of my life. How dare you take them!”
Wistan cleaned the ink from the table, icily calm. “The only part of them that is yours is what you carry in your head. You will never see them again.”
“Damn you! Then give me my reference and what remains of my stipend and I will leave Chanthed forever.”
Wistan smiled, a gruesome sight. “Certainly. As soon as you give your word to say no more about this matter.”
“I can’t! If you refuse, I’ll go to Mendark!” A hollow threat and Llian knew it.
Wistan went so cold that Llian felt shivers of fear run up and down his back. “Mendark and I are on the Council together. If you did so, I would have to advise him how you recklessly endanger the college and the Council.”
“The college has always stood for finding out the truth of the Histories, no matter what You are a coward and a hypocrite.”
Wistan had had enough. “You are banned from the library until after the festival. Give me any more trouble and you lose your telling. Now go away!”
Llian went.
Another week went by. It was festival time. People poured into Chanthed from all over the great island of Meldorin and even from beyond the Sea of Thurkad. Every bed in every inn was doubled up, and tent cities began to spring up in the park and on the common land.
Traditionally the festival began with minor tales given by the students of the college, building up to the Great Tales told by the masters on the last three nights of the second week. Of the twenty-two Great Tales only three were told at any festival. But the festival had grown so popular that there were now mini-tellings all over town, including less respectable tales from the romances, the tales of bawdry and the apocrypha—unproven tales from ancient times or unknown lands or the other of the Three Worlds. Some even told the frightful Tales of the Void. On the last night there was only one venue and everyone came to it The final night was given to the master who had told the best Great Tale at the previous Graduation Telling. And that right was Llian’s.
But this time not even the festival could cheer Llian up. He had lost everything except his name and even that was hanging by a hair. Impossible to continue here, nowhere to go. No money, no references, no friends. Well, if he was to go down, it might as well be for a major crime as for no crime at all.
* * *
The festival was well into the second week now. Llian decided to get into the library archives and take back his proofs, if he could find them. Then he would tell his tale and disappear from Chanthed forever. Without references his life as a chronicler was over, but no one could stop him being a teller. He knew that he was a good one. If he had to eke out his living as a miserable bard—what a come-down!—that is what he would do.
Wistan would be leaving any minute for the telling. Llian loitered down the corridor beyond the master’s offices, and when it was nearly time he walked past and stuck a piece of card over the latch hole. The door was the kind that locked when it was closed.
Wistan was a slave to routine. At precisely ten to seven he came out of his room, shrugging on a cloak. To distract him Llian dropped a stack of books with a clatter. Wistan looked up, scowled, then banged the door and swept past with his cloak trailing behind him. He nodded curtly as he passed.
“Not going to the telling tonight? Better get moving if you are.”
“I’ll be there,” Llian lied.
He busied himself with his books and when the corridor was empty again he pushed Wistan’s door. It swung open, the piece of card fluttering to the floor. Llian retrieved it and closed the door behind him with a hand that was trembling.
What was he afraid of? What could Wistan do to him that he had not already done? Almost nothing. Nonetheless, with pounding heart he went across the polished floorboards to the old cupboard on the wall where the keys to the college were kept. It was locked.
He had expected that. Taking a chisel out of his pocket he prised at the door. It came open with a splintery groan but a strip of wood split off the side. Llian swore: the damage would be noticed instantly. He found a pot of glue in a cupboard and stuck the strip back on, but the damage was still obvious. Well, he’d just have to hope that Wistan did not come back after the telling.
Llian sorted through the keys—library, archives, office—and stuffed them in his pocket. Now I really am a criminal, he thought. He unlocked Wistan’s private office and slipped inside.
He searched the room for his proofs but did not find them. The only other place they could be was in the archives.
It was airless in the archives, so Llian propped open the doors at either end to provide a draught, though as the library was locked up this did not help very much. He spent half the night there but found nothing that was of any help.
Finally, to relieve his aching eyes, he got out the books of engravings from the time of the Forbidding, and the racks that contained paintings of that event. There were hundreds of pictures, for the hunting down of Shuthdar had been one of the great quests of the age. Every important race and nation had been represented there, and a dozen generals and monarchs had brought their court and their official artists to ensure that every detail was recorded, not least their own part in the victory. There were pictures in watercolors and oils and crayons, most so faded and damaged by the centuries that they were barely legible. But there were also many engravings and these were in better condition.
Llian had seen these pictures many times but he never tired of looking at them. Here was a painting that captured the very momen
t that the flute was destroyed, the deranged Shuthdar capering on top of the tower while in the background a storm rolled toward him like a tidal wave. Every detail of Shuthdar’s grotesque features could be seen—artistic license surely, since no one had dared to go within half a league of the tower while he was alive.
And here was a series of paintings in oil showing the aftermath of the destruction of the flute and the many foolish souls who went into the glowing ruins, each hoping to gain the flute for themselves. They got nothing; most died of a wasting sickness.
Here were the chief players of the age. Rulke the Charon, the architect of the flute and of the misfortunes of the Three Worlds ever after. He stood tall among the dozens jostling to get inside. By herself stood the enigmatic Yalkara, Mistress of Deceits, the other of the three Charon who came to San-thenar, and the only person ever to have escaped through the Forbidding. That was one of the greatest riddles in the Histories, but much later than the problem he was trying to solve here. This painting was in better condition than the others for most of the detail had survived, even to the gold on Yalkara’s wrist and throat and brow.
Another painting showed her coming out again, empty-handed, her clothes smoking and her hands burned. A third, much of the picture flaked off long ago, revealed Yalkara stripped naked to be searched in front of all the others, as was everyone who entered the ruins that day. But the flute was never found. It was destroyed, utterly gone.
Although Llian had seen these scenes many times before, today he had a feeling that they had something more to tell him-that there was something yet to be revealed, if he could only find it. But time was wasting and there was a lot more to do. He put the paintings and engravings back carefully and untied the next packet
This he had also looked at before, though only once. It contained the original sketches made in the field, hundreds of drawings by various artists, each numbered in order. Though the ink was faded to brown and the paper yellow and brittle, almost every detail could still be seen. All of the paintings and engravings were based on these drawings save for a few watercolors that were also made in the field, but they did not concern him.
