The Aware (The Isles of Glory Book 1)

by Larke, Glenda

  I turned away as her fair head bent towards him and he spoke to her. I didn’t need to understand the language to see that this wasn’t a moment for a third person.

  There was a crash nearby as a burning house collapsed in on itself. I looked out once more, and found the street clear. ‘Come on,’ I said.

  Flame and I crawled out through the gap in the wall, Ruarth fluttered out behind us and we all headed for the beach; in the confusion, no one took any notice of us.

  I took Flame to the boat and left her in Ransom’s care. When I told the Holdheir I wasn’t coming back to the ship, he shrugged indifferently; it was one of the Keepers who pointed out what I already knew: ‘The Syr-Councillor will resume the bombardment of the village as soon as he sees the Cirkasian is safe.’

  I nodded. ‘I wouldn’t have expected anything else of him.’ My sarcasm was probably lost on the man; those Keeper sylvs all thought Duthrick could do no wrong.

  TWENTY-FOUR

  No sooner had I returned to Creed, than the situation changed yet again. Morthred’s acolytes had managed to find their master and they were now pulling him out from under the wreckage that had trapped him. And he wasn’t hurt. In fact, by the way he was seething at his dunmagickers, it seemed that he’d had to do most of his own rescuing, using his own powers.

  Hidden behind some rubble, I watched from a distance. He stood up, rather shakily, and some trembling slaves brushed off the shell dust that covered him. He was already barking orders and dunmagic billowed forth in his rage. I couldn’t help feeling that the bastard had divine protection.

  I kept out of sight and debated what to do.

  I listened as he shouted at those around him. One of the ex-sylvs had apparently pointed out the Keeper ships and explained that it seemed they were to blame. Not surprisingly, Morthred put the damage down to some kind of sylvmagic, although (like me) he really ought have known better. As I have said before, sylvmagic has no destructive power.

  I have to admit that he had the situation summed up in an instant. He spent a moment looking at the ships, frowning, while I wondered—heart in mouth—whether he had regained enough power to simply blast them out of the water. After all, this was the dunmaster who had sunk the Dustel Islands under the Deep-Sea. But perhaps he remembered the result of that, because he turned away and began to give orders for Creed to be abandoned. It seemed he was cutting his losses. I waited to hear if he mentioned Tor or Flame or me, but we were apparently not on his list of priorities. He ordered slaves to pack up the things he viewed as valuable, and in the midst of all that chaos, I saw some women rolling up bolts of Yebaan silk inside Mekaté wool carpets, and others carrying a carved sea chest inlaid with mother-of-pearl. When a jewellery box was dropped, a cascade of whale-ivory necklaces strung with amber spilled out.

  While the packing was being done, Morthred sent several dunmagickers to scout out the perimeters of the village, to find out what opposition was hidden in the dunes, and he told several others to find a way to get to Gorthan Docks so that they could place spells on a couple of ship’s captains. The man didn’t bother to ask or pay for what he wanted: he took. He needed transport, and he would get it his way. Or he would try. Whether the dunmagickers would be able to pass the sylvs gathered in the dunes was another matter.

  I didn’t hear any more; Morthred moved away into one of the buildings.

  I dithered, wondering how in all the islands I was going to find Tor. I couldn’t home in on him the way I had done with Flame.

  After a little thought, I decided that the best method would be the most direct. I hid the two swords, then singled out one of the real dunmagickers, one I couldn’t remember having seen before, and approached him with the same subservient sidle that the slaves always used. ‘Syr-dunmaster sir, the Syr-master has told me to see if the Stragglerman, the one with Awareness, is still alive, but I don’t know where he is…’

  The dunmagicker didn’t even glance at me. I was a slave, and not worthy of attention. He gave a dry laugh. ‘You’ll be lucky to find him—he was trussed up in the torture room.’ He indicated the remains of the building behind us and walked on.

  I retrieved the swords and went to investigate. In the end, it wasn’t difficult to find Tor. It was only the upper part of the building that had collapsed. The underground part, where he had been, was almost undamaged. I slipped in through one of the ground level windows and dropped down into the torture room. Tor was stretched out on the table, his arms and legs bound in leather thongs, but someone was there before me, working on his bonds.

  It was an old man, painfully thin, with a blue-tinged cadaverous face that hinted at the imminence of his death, and a beard that looked like frayed sun-bleached rope. He was shabbily dressed in black, smelled bad, and although he wasn’t wearing the chain and pendant of the Menod, I thought that must be his allegiance.

  ‘Alain,’ I said. I might have known that the patriarch wouldn’t stay hidden once the Keepers started flattening Creed.

  He nodded, his smile strained. ‘And you must be Blaze. You are very much as I imagined you. Ah, you have a sword. Can you cut these bonds? I have been unable to untie them.’

  I approached the table reluctantly, knowing I was afraid to see what they had done to Tor.

  But he was grinning at me, that rare grin that lit his face and showed me that he could still laugh at life, that he wasn’t always weighed down with the seriousness of it all. ‘Ah, love, maybe you can tell us both what in heaven’s name is happening? Alain here maintains that this is God’s punishment for dunmagic evil; my thoughts are more prosaic. I feel that the God does not usually indulge Himself with such abrupt expressions of disapproval, as much as He would probably like to.’

  I explained briefly as I cut the leather and Tor rolled off the table. He took it almost casually, and he made the same connections that I had. ‘So that explains the Keeper interest in the Castlemaid, eh? And I see you’ve brought my sword. Good. You’d better tell me some other time just why you look like you’ve been shipwrecked.’ He touched my cheek in tender concern. ‘Where’s Flame?’

  ‘With the Keepers. But Eylsa’s dead, as you probably saw.’

  I didn’t get any further. There was a far off rumble, and a second later the ground shook nearby. Duthrick hadn’t waited very long before restarting his bombardment. He’d delayed until he’d seen Flame, but he’d obviously put no great faith in my ability to produce the Castlemaid.

  ‘Let’s get out of here,’ Tor suggested equably.

  We pushed Alain out of the window ahead of us and once outside, we scuttled away towards the edge of the village. ‘If we leave Creed through the dunes, we may be shot by Duthrick’s archers,’ I warned, shouting. The noise of the guns was distant enough, but the village was full of screaming people, falling masonry, thuds—I felt the whole world had gone mad. ‘Shall we swim to the Keeper Fair?’ I asked.

  ‘I’d never make it—’ Alain began. I glanced back at him, and then, suddenly, he wasn’t there any more. He was cartwheeling through the air, tossed by something unseen, a ragdoll. A split second later Tor and I were flung backwards by a blast of air and dust, as helpless as butterflies in a winter’s gale. For a moment I stayed where I was on the ground, winded, paralysed with shock. It was Tor who ran to Alain, who knelt at his side, who took the old man’s hand as he looked up with surprise etched in every wrinkle of his face.

  ‘He’s dead,’ Tor said blankly. ‘Just like that.’ He turned distressed eyes to me. ‘What sort of weapon is this, Blaze?’ He didn’t expect an answer; he wasn’t wanting technicalities, but a reason, and he knew I had none to give.

  I staggered to my feet, trying not to look at Alain. It sickened me. He didn’t have any legs any more. He didn’t have anything left below the pelvis.

  ‘We’ve got to get out of here,’ I said.

  ‘I want to say the prayer for the dead, for Alain.’

  I was incredulous. ‘Tor, the world is breaking into dust around us, and
you want to pray?’

  ‘It would mean a lot to him,’ he said simply.

  ‘Tor—he’s dead!’

  ‘Blaze, there was a time when Alain and I were very close. I must do this for him.’

  I threw up my hands. ‘God preserve me from idiots!’ I wanted to be angry, but I kept on seeing myself with Eylsa’s body in my arms. I know now that humans are never rational where death is concerned; it is the time when we come face to face with our own fragile mortality…

  I peered around the corner of the nearest building and looked into hell. The bombardment of Creed was crushing it. People were dying: slaves (many of them still so young), dunmagickers, ex-sylvs. When I looked behind me, out towards the sand dunes, I could see slaves running, carrying baggage, only to be cut down under crossbow fire. Sylv silver arced along the dunes in lacy curtains between twisting ward pillars of silver-blue. I thought I caught a glimpse of Morthred blasting dunmagic at one of the wards. Crimson met silver and intermingled in a clash of light and sparks; I could not tell if the ward succumbed or not. I glanced out over the ocean: the two ships, confident of the lack of retaliation, had actually moved in closer to shore. They were raining their death on us, not caring who it was they killed.

  A slave collapsed at my feet, blood trickling down his face. I stood there, shaking, outraged. It was the slaves who were suffering the most. Caught in dunmagic spells, they had no sense of self-preservation. They wouldn’t even take shelter, but worked on, trying to do what they had been ordered to do. I felt impotent. I wanted to fight—but I didn’t know who to battle.

  Then Tor was at my side again, still ignoring the danger, seeing only the carnage. ‘God damn them,’ he said softly. ‘God damn them all.’ I wasn’t sure whether he meant the Keepers or the dunmagickers; perhaps he meant both. He bent down to the slave at my feet. Then he began to drag the man into the shelter of a nearby wall. ‘Blaze,’ he said, ‘I can’t leave. These people don’t have anyone to help them. Some of them are bleeding to death for the want of a little attention—they never hurt anyone.’

  I wanted to scream at him: They aren’t our business! Hadn’t we been through enough? I wanted to rest. I was sick of it all.

  He didn’t even seem to notice my hesitation. He had shoved his sword through his belt and now he moved on to another slave, a woman sprawled in the middle of the street with her tattered skirt rucked up over her head. Silence—of a kind—suddenly cloaked us. The rumble of the cannon guns ceased, along with the corresponding crunch of buildings being hit. The screaming faded and stopped. There was a crackle of flames nearby, a low moaning from a nearby house, the heart-rending whimpering of a girl—that was all. Tor didn’t seem to notice the change. ‘Blaze, do you know where we can find some water?’

  ‘I’ll get some,’ I said numbly. I didn’t want to stay. I didn’t have Tor’s compassion. I’d been surrounded by the poor and downtrodden all my life and I’d learned that if you wanted to survive you had to fight, not stay and be a martyr. I didn’t want to die in this madhouse of death and dunmagic. And yet I couldn’t leave. Not when Tor was still there.

  And so I stayed.

  I never did get his water to him, though. I found a well, filled a bucket and was on my way back when I came face to face with Morthred and several subverted Keeper sylvs. Morthred was unarmed, but the Keepers weren’t. Morthred couldn’t believe it was me at first. When he did, he was so enraged he forgot I had Awareness and flung a spell at me. It was a horrible thing, alive with malevolence. It shattered harmlessly against my shoulder, but I felt its evil. When he realised his mistake, he waved his ex-sylvs on to me and I was fighting for my life in a savage clash of sword on sword, a furious onslaught of cut and thrust that was going to exhaust me if it went on too long. It was all I could do to parry and parry again.

  It was really Morthred who won the fight for me. Almost insane with anger, he kept on throwing his spells into the fray, as if he could wear down the protection my Awareness gave me; instead, he confused and weakened the ex-sylvs when some of the dunmagic rebounded from me onto them. When they faltered I moved in and killed them as cleanly as I could.

  Then I turned back to Morthred and what I saw in his face shook me even more. I recognised there the beginnings of the kind of thing that he must have unleashed on the Dustels: his face glowed red with power, but the power was warped with madness and, as yet, only in its infancy. It had been a diabolical insanity that had made the impossible possible a hundred years before; left alone I knew he would one day have recourse to that kind of power again.

  I went for him with my sword, but he was too quick for me. A passing slave was coerced with a spell and the man threw himself between me and Morthred, clawing insanely at me with his hands, trying to rip the flesh from my body with his fingers alone. I tried to ward him off with my blade, but he had been maddened by the spell. When I accidentally slashed his arm he hardly seemed to notice. He fell to the ground and attacked me with his teeth. I kicked him, hard, under the chin, and he was out of it. But it made no difference—that man was followed by another, sucked in by the magic, drawn to death on my blade. And all the while, Morthred watched, dashing this way and that, shouting encouragement to the men, and women, he lured to me. He knew what he was doing. He could have coerced twenty of them to fall on me at the same time so that I was overwhelmed by numbers alone, but he didn’t want it that way. Even in the middle of the bedlam that was Creed just then, he wanted me to suffer. He knew I hated what I was doing. He saw the desperate ways I tried to avoid killing and maiming—and he laughed.

  All I could think of was that while Tor was saving lives, I was taking them.

  And then I noticed Morthred’s hand, his left hand. The three fingers he had were curled into a deformed twist, yet a moment before they had been straight. I sought to make sense of that, even while I fought off his slaves. What did the old stories say about Morthred the Mad? He had over-extended himself, used too much power and thus been hopelessly weakened. And I had myself thought that it was the uncontrolled release of his own power that had deformed him, twisted his body…just as those three fingers were now gnarled. He was weakening himself.

  The idea that came to me was born of desperation and exhaustion. I was killing people who didn’t deserve to die, and I couldn’t stand it any more. ‘Why are you doing this?’ I shouted at him. ‘It’s not me who’s destroying your village and your people! It’s the Keepers out there!’ I pointed to where the Keeper ships were now silhouettes against the darkening sea of evening. The bombardment had not resumed, but I didn’t draw his attention to that. ‘Why don’t you turn your dunmagic on them? Or are you so weak that you can’t sink a couple of ships? You, who once sank the Dustel islands under Deep-Sea? What’s the matter with you, Morthred? I thought you were supposed to be the greatest of all dunmasters!’ And so on. That kind of taunting drivel wouldn’t have worked with anyone with the slightest sense, but Morthred wasn’t sensible. Clever, yes. Cunning, yes. Sensible, no, not when he saw all he’d worked for slipping away between his fingers. Not when he saw the sylvs he had worked so hard to subvert dying around him. His madness controlled him now.

  He did what I suggested. He shouted for another couple of ex-sylvs to attack me, then turned from me to fling what he had at the Keeper ships.

  And I went cold. What if the Keepers didn’t have the ships properly warded? They were warded, I knew that. I could see the filigree of sylv blue that stretched from mast top to waterline, but what if it wasn’t enough? What if I was wrong about just how much power Morthred had at his disposal? If I had miscalculated, then Flame and the Keepers could very well die. The fact that three fingers had reverted to their previously deformed state was hardly overwhelming evidence that Morthred had over-extended himself by his profligate use of power. I was gambling with other people’s lives. If I’d had more time to think, I would never have provoked him. I would never have risked killing so many people, Flame among them, on the basis of so little evidence.
I wake up sometimes at night even now, in a cold sweat, just thinking about the chance I took. And wondering: did I do it just to save myself? Perhaps. I don’t know. When you’re scared and tired…

  I didn’t see all that happened. I was still fighting. But I saw enough: the swell of red-brown that brightened to crimson, the way the colour enveloped Morthred, then the stream of foul, stinking light that ripped from him and shot across the water towards the ships like wind-driven flames in a forest fire. He was doing what no ordinary dunmagicker or sylvtalent could do: sending his magic away from his immediate vicinity, attacking from a distance. In growing horror, I watched and remembered that it had been a week’s sail from one end of the Dustels to the other, and he had submerged all of them at once…

  Distracted, I was slightly wounded in the arm by one of the ex-sylvs and had to drag my eyes away from the Keeper ships back to my own fight. I killed one of my opponents and concentrated on the other, telling myself that unlike the slaves, these ex-sylvs were better dead.

  This last man was a fine swordsman and only the advantage of a Calmenter sword kept me alive. He attacked in quick bursts, then disengaged when I managed to parry, so that the fight was a series of short engagements. Each attack was different, and sooner or later he was going to find one that I didn’t know how to counter. I was tiring badly by then.

  But luck ran against him; he stumbled over the body of one of the slaves I had killed. It was all the advantage I needed to slip under his guard and send the blade into his heart.

  I looked back at Morthred—and found him gone.

  I ran down the middle of the street. It was almost dark but I could see him. He was a reddish silhouette against the darkness of the buildings, a scuttling figure that dragged a lame leg and dripped the blood-coloured remains of his spell behind him like the slime-trail of a sea-pony. I pounded after him.