‘Come on,’ Pallo called back, sounding not much bothered even though the rope was snapping behind him wildly. ‘It can hold us all. Don’t waste t—’
‘There you are at last,’ Kassien said. He was facing away from them, into the shadows near one of the shut doors. ‘I know she is your daughter. I would not let harm come to her.’
‘Who are you talking to?’ Istar demanded.
‘I knew you would return.’
Pentar’s arm shot out and grabbed Istar just as she was starting forward. Was her father still here, somewhere …?
‘You can save us all,’ Kassien said.
‘Your father’s dead,’ Pentar said in her ear. ‘Let me deal with this. Go with Pallo.’
‘Who’s he talking to, then? Kassien!’ This last was a whisper, for a hollow space of fear had opened in her gut.
‘Go with Pallo. I’ll see.’ Pentar, his face full of fear and simultaneous anger at that fear, went after Kassien. He walked through the mad carnival of moving darkness and light as if balanced on the bowsprit of a ship in high seas.
‘Come on!’ Pallo insisted. She couldn’t see him any more, but the rope was still flying out of the light, which was itself still jerking all over the place.
‘This place is crazy,’ she whispered, just as the hissing localized itself in the spot where Kassien was – or where he seemed to be. Istar only got a glimpse of him every few seconds, and she couldn’t be sure whether he was staying in the same place and she was moving or whether it was the other way around. Everything was blackness exploding with sudden light and collapsing to blackness again. She could hear booted feet growing rapidly louder, their rhythm thundering in the passage beyond Kassien. Pentar heard it too. He turned and looked at her and the light flashed across his face as he mouthed the word, ‘Go.’
The light stopped, fixed itself on the door from which they’d come. Kassien walked over to the door with Pentar behind him. The footsteps crescendoed and suddenly stopped. Echoes died away. There was a sound of someone knocking on the door; a quotidian sound that was civilized and chilling in this otherworldly context.
‘Let us in,’ said a soft voice from beyond the door.
‘No,’ Istar mouthed, unable to make sound. At the same time, Pentar moved to stay Kassien’s hand, which was moving towards the door. Kassien turned and slapped Pentar back with the flat of his sword. Before Pentar could recover, Kassien had shot back the bolt of the door.
‘Istar! Kassien! Come on!’ Pallo was calling for them, not merely shouting, but screaming from out of the light, which had stalled again.
The door opened and a horde of Pharician soldiers rushed in, overcoming Pentar and Kassien in a heartbeat. Istar got her sword out, trying to position herself behind some scaffolding for protection; but Pallo’s voice reached her from the light-filled shaft.
‘Don’t fight. There are too many. I can see them all from up here. Come on.’
Istar grabbed the rope. She looked back for Kassien and glimpsed his fur cloak among the dark Pharician uniforms; then the rope was tugged from above and she was pulled off the ground. Everything went still. She was climbing, shutting her eyes against the light. There was no more movement, no more noise.
Pallo was dragging her on to a ledge of some kind. He ripped the length of rope up after her, and they looked down on the cavern they’d just left. From this vantage, the entire complex of chambers they had just come from was transparent, and whenever the light tore past, the train of soldiers could not only be seen swirling around the chamber, but filling every sinuosity of the island around and beneath; for the light now revealed the island to be as riddled with holes as wormwood. Where the light rippled over it, the island seemed made of glass.
At first Kassien and Pentar could not be seen, for the chamber below was full of Pharicians, but within minutes they dispersed to the edges of the room. The light stilled, shining straight down the shaft, where directly below them lay the dismembered remains of a man. There was a bearskin cloak, wrung and twisted, tangled about the legs; the rest of the body had been hacked up and was pure red. Other fallen bodies lay nearby, most of them Pharician. There was no sign of Pentar.
From out of the metal nets and wires stepped a dark-cloaked, slender figure holding some sort of Glass. Istar strained to see the object more clearly as the figure moved directly beneath her and Pallo. They looked down on the top of his head as he approached the bearskin cloak and stood over it.
Istar spat.
The figure raised his head and Istar saw that it was a Sekk – but it had no eyes. It raised the Glass before its face.
‘Get out of the light!’ Pallo hissed. ‘Hurry!’
He pulled her away from the edge and the light went out. Below, they could hear the footsteps of the Sekk Master stalking back and forth under the shaft.
Istar went limp. There wasn’t enough strength in her body to permit her to sob. She lay with tears trickling sideways across her face, her fingers twitching sometimes with unreleased battle electricity. Pallo nudged her. ‘Istar. Get up. We can’t stay here.’
It had gone strangely quiet. It was warm here, and the air smelled different. She wondered if Pallo really knew where they were.
‘Star.’
No. Not Kassien. Not after everything.
‘Star. Get up.’ Someone was tugging her arm.
It was the unreality that she couldn’t take. If she held his head in her lap and his eyes went sightless and his throat rattled, then it would be all right. Well, it wouldn’t be all right, but she’d be able to accept it better than this. She lurched to her feet, wishing she were drunk but she was only tired.
‘Right,’ she said. ‘What now?’
The Moon and Ice
Keras was slightly friendlier the next day. He wasn’t sure how much she remembered about last night, but she fed him breakfast and suggested he help her clear out one of the sheds, so she would have a dry place to put the hay when she took it in.
It was strange, but he didn’t feel alone around Keras. She was bristly as hell and took offence about a thousand times during the course of the day, but none of it was serious. He watched her work two of the younger horses and thought them formidable; but Ice was nowhere to be seen all day. Tarquin wondered if she had sent him away out of fear that he would try to steal the stallion. He would have been tempted, if he really had somewhere to go. But his noble ideas about riding to the rescue of Jai Khalar had been replaced by a more pragmatic selfishness. He was sick of futile quests.
In the twilight after supper they walked over to the river.
‘Is today the longest day of the year?’ Keras asked. ‘Or tomorrow?’
Everything reminded him of Jai Pendu.
‘I don’t know,’ he said. They were near the place where Tarquin had forded the day before, only now the light from the west was horizontal on the water, making it a mirror. In the distance a white horse moved in the grass, just on the periphery of Tarquin’s vision. Before his eyes could follow the movement, the scene of the river and the plains and the mountains beyond had become something quite different.
Where the trees had been there was now a polished sky flown with tarnished cloud. The river spread to become an ocean. He could still smell the horses and the smoke from Keras’s fire, but he could see a moon-bright path on the water, stretching and receding over a great distance of dark ocean and then, just on the point of disappearing, reaching three towers whose outline he would never forget.
Keras touched his shoulder. ‘You can’t go there,’ she said.
Startled, he turned. ‘Can you see it?’
‘Yes, but if you walked on that path you would not be able to come back. It’s never the same road twice.’
‘The White Road,’ Tarquin said. He shuddered. ‘Sometimes I … see things. I thought for a moment it was following me. But you see it. too. Why is it here?’
Keras laughed condescendingly. ‘You thought it was following you? No, no; you may have stumbled o
n it before, but it belongs to Ice.’
His mouth fell open. Ice was ambling through the field beyond the river, apparently without purpose. Was this the horse that had erupted from the fabric of the Road? Keras said, ‘Come, let’s go in,’ and when he looked again, the vision of the White Road was gone.
‘Keras,’ he said. ‘You must tell me what is going on here. How can Ice call the White Road?’
She turned to face him squarely. ‘No, I think it is you who ought to tell me what is going on here, Tarquin the Free. I am not afraid of you, or your reputation, or your madness or your Knowledge.’
‘Let’s go inside,’ he said. ‘I may as well tell you. I don’t know why I’ve never told anyone before.’
And he did. He told her everything, omitting nothing – spilling out every detail of an event that was burned into his mind with more clarity than events that had happened only days ago. He told her of Chyko and his Company; of Ysse and their unusual relationship; of the horror of Jai Pendu. She put food in front of him while he was talking, but he didn’t eat it. She ate hers slowly, as if mesmerized, her eyes never leaving his face. After a few minutes she put down her knife, the meal forgotten.
Finally he told her of Night, and the way the horse had risen out of its shadow on the White Road. ‘I think that horse saved me from Night,’ he said. ‘It’s hard to be sure, but it’s almost as if I was led here – don’t you see that, Keras? I need the White Road.’
He stopped talking and suddenly began eating voraciously. Why had he told her all this? There was no way she was giving him the horse. He had kept silent for so long, and to people who had so much more right and reason to know – like Ysse, and Istar, and even Lerien – why now did he speak to her?
Keras filled his cup and pushed it towards him. Her eyes were slow and dark, lashes half-lowered.
‘I don’t know how Ice does it,’ she reflected. ‘Jai Pendu sounds a terrible place. I would not want to go there.’
‘If I go back, Night will probably take me. Nearly it has done so already, more than once. I will become like them, like my Company. I will be used to lead that army into Jai Pendu and out of the world.’
‘It sounds as though it will be your doom.’
‘It is my doom.’
She leaned across the table and took his hands. Her fingers were small and strong. ‘You must not go. Stay here for a time if you like.’
He shook his head automatically.
‘Why not?’ she said. ‘Start again. You are not as old as you make yourself out to be.’
He shook his head again. He found he couldn’t look at her. ‘There are reasons why I have remained alone. I dedicated my life to training men for war, when I was not waging it myself. It would have meant a compromise to take a mate, for we do not now live under the ancient Clan laws which lead every man to protect his own family. My family had become everyone. If I had a home, children, then I would ever concern myself with them. And all my attention had to be given to my men, my task – the affairs of Ysse’s country. I could not live divided.’
‘By your own admission it is a long time since you were in command of men,’ Keras remarked.
‘Not long enough to forget,’ he said. ‘Nor will it ever be. For eighteen years I have lived as one dead – for I should have been taken with all the others. I should not be alive. And what can a dead man offer to a woman? What can a dead man offer to his sons? Even I ignored Chyko’s brat, Istar. I would not taint her with my failure.’
‘Your life means nothing to you, then?’
‘Nothing.’
‘You are a fool,’ she said. ‘Pass the salt.’
He did. Her brow was wrinkled with annoyance. She shook salt violently across her food and chewed noisily, all the while fidgeting in her seat like an impatient child. He watched her jaws work, their action sharpening the line of her fierce cheekbones and tightening the tendons on her neck.
‘Are you that good, then? That Ysse would have you train her soldiers? Did they not come from their Clans well-skilled already? It is said in my country that in those days every man in Everien knew how to fight because of the monsters that came down out of the mountains.’
‘They knew how to fight with their traditional Clan weapons. And some of them knew other weapons, secret techniques taught only in their families. They did not know how to fight as a group, and that was what was needed to stand against the Sekk. It was a kind of warfare entirely new to our people. I was the one who had to make it work. And for that I was given an elite cadre of warriors, to shape to Ysse’s purpose. But I lost them.’
‘Perhaps it was meant to be. Perhaps we each have a destiny, and this was yours. Not all things are within your power, Tarquin the Free.’
‘That I know well. But tonight … tonight Jai Pendu will be on its way, and your horse can open the way to get there.’
‘So you can ride it to doom in Jai Pendu? Better you should walk.’
‘You are impossible, Keras.’
‘Thank you.’
She was so calm; and he was tired, tired with the exertion of years. Tired in the wake of so many secrets that, in the end, he couldn’t keep.
‘You bring much drama,’ she said with a yawn, and parting the curtain looked outside. ‘It is almost the full moon. The dogs will howl tonight; but don’t be troubled. I’ve tied them up.’
She stood up and turned, then pulled the shirt over her head. She turned sloe eyes on him over her shoulder and he swallowed hard.
‘I’ll be back in a minute,’ he said gruffly, and left her snickering to herself.
The dogs, he thought, stumbling to the privy through the clouded moonlight outside, sounded more ferocious than Keras herself. He peered into the forest, knowing he must get moving and wondering if he could find his way back to the ford in the dark. Wondering whether he could get a horse across it before the dogs caught him. Wondering if Keras had ever killed anyone. And concluding, ultimately, that he was too tired to do anything bold tonight. He wanted to sleep.
When he went inside, she was under the blanket, eyes half-closed. Her clothes were folded neatly on a chair. She stretched a bare arm towards him.
He put out the last candle and got into the bed with her.
‘What’s this?’ she asked, touching the vial of Freeze that he wore on a thong around his neck. For a moment he hesitated; this might be a way to get access to the horse without Keras’s knowing it. He had kept it all these years without using it. Maybe this was the time.
‘Nothing,’ he said, resisting the idea for some reason. ‘Don’t touch it.’
Her bed was rough. Stuffing poked through the cloth in places, which was itself little better than burlap; but because the whole operation smelled of her musk, and because he had been sleeping on the ground for many nights, it was paradise. Similarly – and maybe it was just deprivation but he didn’t care – Keras proved sweeter than he would have guessed on first impression. She was smallish but took his full weight readily; he could feel her soft breaths accelerating against his chest. Her skin was grimy. She drove up to meet him and he moved into her, trying to go slowly and savour the experience, but she forced him to accelerate, drawing him in and goading him on until he was beyond himself, spiralling into brightness.
Afterwards he felt like a felled tree. She was sucking his fingers. He opened his eyes in the starlight and saw the liquid gleam of hers looking back at him. She was still keen. Very.
Sleep. He wanted it. And yet. In the whispers and idle touching that ensued, he had begun to see how he might get the moon down after all. He began to tease her with his tongue and fingers.
‘I know what you’re doing and it won’t work,’ she said suddenly, and then drew a ragged breath in spite of herself; he had parted her legs decisively and hooked her knees over his shoulders.
‘Go to sleep, then,’ he suggested.
‘I’m not tired.’
She certainly was not. Tarquin muffled a yawn of his own and got on with his pers
uasion. He made a pillow of her thigh and used his tongue in a desultory, noncommittal fashion. He was half-asleep, but she was on a knife edge. Her breathing grew fast and desperate, but every time she began to climax, he stopped. She began to sweat and tremble, and then to plead.
‘Maybe I should stop,’ he whispered. ‘Because I can’t give you what you want without some kind of fair exchange.’
‘Don’t stop!’ she begged.
He stopped.
‘It’s only a horse,’ he reminded her, stretching one arm down her legs and the other up her torso. He drew his fingers along the sole of her foot.
She thrashed, seized his other hand and brought it to her mouth. She took the flesh below his thumb between her teeth and tugged.
He winced. ‘Be nice, Keras.’
‘Please.’
‘Say it. Say, Ice, Tarquin …’ He slid his tongue inside her and she made inarticulate sounds. ‘… two words.’
Finally she said, ‘You can have Chaser. The chestnut I was riding.’
He sighed, and the muscles of her legs tightened spasmodically. A tendon pressed sharply against his cheekbone. ‘Close, but I need Ice,’ he chided.
‘She’s a great horse,’ Keras cried. ‘The best I have.’
‘Except for one.’ He picked a hair from between his teeth.
‘It’s for your own good.’ She squirmed against him. ‘Believe me.’
‘All right,’ he murmured. ‘I’ll take it.’ He came up for air. She had thrown off the blanket and her arms were flung over her head, covering her face. She was panting, and in the pellucid light her flesh swayed like lilies on waves. He thought about taking her again but knew if he did, he would probably sleep all night and most of the next day. So he fulfilled his end of the bargain, and when he was finished with her, she was still as twilight.
While she was asleep he stole Ice.
It proved to be one of the more ill-advised of a lifetime’s bad decisions. Ice seemed determined to kill him – if not by actual violence, then by fear and especially shock – for the horse was reassuringly placid at first. Tarquin was sex-dazed and smug, or he would have been more suspicious of the calm way the stallion meandered across the field, swishing his tail, and chewed some oats Tarquin offered. The animal lowered his head obligingly for the bridle, even though Keras had used no rope or tack of any kind. Tarquin figured he needed all the help he could get, so he cinched up the saddle twice to be sure it wouldn’t slip, checked the stirrup leathers, and fastened a martingale just to be safe. All the while the horse sighed and blinked, patently bored. Tarquin threw on the loaded saddlebags and mounted.
The Company of Glass Page 42
