A Shadow on the Glass (17 page)

But she’d only taken a few steps before a shiver went up
her spine; a chill, even though she was standing in bright sunlight. Karan stopped but her talent told her nothing. It might have been nothing. The talent could be unreliable, sometimes capricious, as it had often been in her mother’s family.

Brilliant or mad are the house of Fyrn
. How often had she heard that in her childhood? Not least about her mother Vuula, a lyrist of genius who had abandoned her instrument for that disgraceful liaison with Karan’s father. After Galliad’s death Vuula had lost her mind completely. And of Basunez too, her grandsire of twenty-odd generations back. He had been brilliant and mad too, first making the fortune of his house, then squandering it on a succession of conceits, not least the absurdity of Carcharon, that extraordinary, extravagant construction, half-fastness, half-folly, set on the highest pinnacle of a barren, frigid and windswept ridge in the mountains beyond Gothryme. All the necessities for existence had to be carried there on the backs of laborers. There he had lived and there he had died: mad; lonely; alone.

The sun came though the trees on her face, as she crossed through a patch of reeds and found firm mud beside the channel. What was that? The note died on her lips. She froze.

The long head turned slowly. Reeds rushed across his lensshaped field of vision and there she was, a smear against the white of a dead tree. A momentary surprise—surely this filthy wretch could not be the thief he had pursued for so long? She barely came up to his shoulder. She was trembling, mesmerized by him. Her curly red hair, bright as a flame, stood on end and stirred in the breeze, a sight he found unpleasant. Her knees were small, her ankles slender,
her fingers long and tapering; her bones could not be seen through the skin. Hideous creature!

Idlis got out of the boat, not taking his eyes off her, as though his will was enough to keep her there. He stepped carefully onto the shore; his limbs moved in jerky arcs. There was a long-handled battle axe in his belt—broad curving blades and a spike between.

“Who are you?” She spoke in a dismal voice.

“I am Whelm,” the man replied. “Idlis is my name.” His speech might have been filtered through a mouthful of tar. His face was like his axe: arching sharp nose, narrow chin, hard slit of a mouth, black eyes.

Karan trembled. Terror has taken away her courage, he thought. His long arms reached out, the bony fingers spread to grip the pathetic thing.

But she was no longer there. She moved more quickly than his blinkered eyes could follow, easily avoided the flailing arms, and catching at his gray cold shanks, wrenched his legs from under him. Idlis felt terror for the first time in his life—she could have held him down till he suffocated. But she did not While he cleared the mud from his eyes, supporting himself on the prow of the boat, she leapt into the channel and swam with violent strokes beyond his sight.

Idlis waded out into the channel, washed clean the eye shields and called to the other Whelm. His planar face showed nothing, but a student of the Whelm would have noted that his movements were more fluid, as though fury had lubricated his rough joints, and every aspect of his motion showed his rage, his humiliation and his malice.

That was just the beginning of her nightmare. Wading through mud and reeds, every touch reminded her of the texture of his skin. It had been rubbery, like something dead. And over and again her talent revisited the image that Yggur
had threatened her with: the tongue of a dead dog sliding up her backbone. Her earlier optimism was revealed to be foolish pride, her previous successes just blind good fortune. Her fortune had turned now. The day dragged on and with every hour she felt more driven, more inadequate, more hopeless.

On she fled, through a swamp forest that was endless, ever the same. It consisted solely of sard trees, giants with bulbous bases sprouting multiple trunks. The pale layered bark, soft as a child’s skin, hung down in sheets long enough to form a writing scroll. There had been several bark scrolls in Yggur’s library, she recalled. Far above, the strap leaves filtered sunlight to silver.

If she could just get to Lake Neid, food, clean clothing and the guide awaited her. In her mind she made the rancid cheese and stale bread into a banquet; the depraved smuggler became a savior. Maybe, against hope, Maigraith would be there as well. Even Maigraith could be forgiven for so manipulating her, if only she were waiting.

Karan still couldn’t believe that Maigraith had allowed herself to be taken. She was normally so strong and singleminded. But as soon as she had looked at the Mirror she was captivated, as if what she saw there outweighed her duty to her mistress, or even her own safety. Even more staggering was how she had reacted to Yggur. Maigraith, who to Karan’s knowledge had never looked at any man, seemed to have felt empathy for him.

Three days to Neid. But that was from Fiz Gorgo. Since then the Whelm had driven her the other way, deeper into their environment. It must be further now. Water and mud had been her existence for more than a week. Her feet seemed to be rotting in her boots.

Sometimes the Whelm were closer, sometimes further
back, but always there. She could not rid herself of them, no matter how she tried.

She took off her boots and trousers, the better to swim. She swam up tiny creeks and across bottomless lakes; across still ponds the color of tea, leaving no trace. They soon found her again.

She crawled through bogs, parting each rush with care, replacing it carefully once she had passed. In clinging mud she stood still as a shag, then moved a few lean spans before stopping still again. The mud was thick and sticky, clinging to her boots in layers that made it difficult to walk, though several times she stepped without warning into mire as soft and slippery as jelly and sank instantly to her hips. This muck sucked so powerfully that it could take ten minutes to get free; once she lost her boots in it and it took half an hour to dig mem out again. And all day she watched the snakes skimming across the surface of the marsh, admiring their economical grace and their venom.

Now she stirred. The ooze sucked at her feet. Every movement sent tickling bubbles up her legs, bubbles that popped on the surface, releasing a gas foul as rotting eggs.

Suddenly she felt weak: dizzy and sick. Something was wrong; the water moved strangely about her legs; her feet were numb. She slipped and fell; brown water washed over her face. It took an effort of will just to come to her feet again, and her heart was pounding. She dragged herself out of the water onto an island of mud, looked down and almost vomited with disgust.

Her legs were thickly clustered with leeches. Dozens of mem dangled from the soft skin at the back of her knees, as many again on her feet and ankles; they clung to her thighs, her calves, even between her toes. Already they were purple and swollen, many as big as her thumb. Threads of blood ran down her legs from a myriad of little punctures. She gripped
the largest, revolted by the pulpy feel, and tried to pull it off. It would not come—it was surprisingly tough, but eventually broke in an explosion of blood and hung down behind her knee like a burst balloon.

Salt or fire would make them let go. But she had no salt and could not risk fire. So many bites, they were sure to get infected. Her sensitive side explored that possibility, dragging herself on gangrenous legs, black and bloated…

There was a shout across the channel, an answering shout behind. Karan slid off the bank into the water. The marsh whirled; even in the cold water her skin burned. The leeches wavered back and forth as she moved, tugging gently at her skin, then she was inside a pocket of reeds. Looking back she saw her marks on the shore, and blood as well.

That day was the worst that she could imagine. The Whelm quartered the area, calling to one another all around. Too dizzy to stand, Karan clung to the reeds for support while the leeches bled her life away. The blood in the water brought more of them—one time she ran her hand down her thigh and felt hundreds, and then she was sick, retching silently and miserably into the water.

The air was thick with mud flies, tiny green flies that bit like a hot wire and left welts on the skin that throbbed for days. They crept into her ears, her nose, beneath tightly buttoned cuffs and even into her thick and mud-caked hair. In desperation she smeared her face and neck with stinking mud, but still they burrowed through her hair and clothing until no part of her remained unbitten.

Then
they
were near again. She could see the Whelm across the channel, searching the mud islands one by one. As she watched them she felt, with indescribable horror, something big slide across her foot. Its skin had a slippery texture; it undulated around her ankle, over the toes of her other foot. Thick as her calf it seemed, as long as her leg.

Idlis was only a few paces away. She dared not move. Was it an eel, or a snake? It touched her toes, a gentle tugging of the skin. It was between her ankles, tugging again, the slippery skin caressing her calves, her knees, tweaking, nibbling; then with a flick of its tail, prickling the back of her knee, it was gone.

The sun went down. The mud flies disappeared and the Whelm, by some miracle, were moving away. Or were they just waiting for her to move? How did they track her anyway? She recalled Maigraith’s warning:
being sensitive, you must be specially careful of the Whelm
. There had not been time to find out what she had meant. Could they find her because of her talent? She might shut it off, if she knew how, but that would be cutting off the only thing that kept her ahead of them. Karan resolved to wring all emotion out of her life, to feel nothing, to care about nothing but getting to Neid. Let them try and track her then!

Maybe it was not her they tracked but the Mirror. The temptation to drop it into the mire was very strong. No, surely it could not be enchanted, else they would not have lost her again. Anyway, she would not take the easy way out.

The twilight lingered. Mosquitoes came out. They were not as bad as the mud flies, but it added to the torment. She stood in the water and tried to practice stoicism. Something stung her on the eyelid, a pain like a needle prick. Don’t react! she told herself as her eyelid swelled. Endure the pain!

When it was nearly dark Karan came cautiously out of the swamp and inspected herself. All the leeches were gone and most of their bites had stopped bleeding. She took the eel as an omen; not everything was against her. Don’t feel that too deeply either!

Two days had gone by, since fleeing Yggur’s library. She was further away from Lake Neid than she had been this
morning. There was no possibility of making the rendezvous with Maigraith, even if she had escaped.

With a twinge of guilt Karan realized that she had given no thought to Maigraith’s plight. From this distance she could not remake the link to find out if she had escaped, but Karan knew in her heart that Maigraith had not.

In her pack was a little soapstone jar of ointment she’d brought all the way from Gothryme. It eased the pain of the bites and the stings but still they became infected, and all that interminable night she huddled in the rushes, burning, then freezing, then burning again. She could feel the thin blood rushing through her veins and it roared in her ears like a waterfall.

Eventually morning came, but it brought only more torment. The exhilaration of her escape was erased from her mind. Now she kept on her boots and socks even when swimming, and bound her trousers tightly at the ankles, yet still the leeches found a way in.

The Whelm drove her east into the deep slough, a slower and more perilous path than the way she’d gone to Fiz Gorgo. They were more at home than she in this country, and the cold did not bother them, nor the leeches. It took all her bushcraft and all her cunning, and what assistance her talent gave her, to keep ahead of them.

The next day was like the one before, and so was the day after, and the day after that If it was not the cold or the foul of the swamp, it was the mud flies, the leeches, the mosquitoes, or the other biting, sucking or creeping things; or all of them together. In the brief moments that nothing else troubled her it was the utter weariness, the hunger, the filth, and being wet day and night.

The infected leech bites spread some slow toxin and on the third morning she woke to find her legs as swollen and
shapeless as sausages. Moving was agony, yet walk she must (or rather, wade and swim), almost a league that day, and her mind retreated from the pain and the pursuit into a little bright knot at the back of her head. Her food was gone, so she cut channels through the bark of a sard tree and caught the sweet sap in her mug. It did not ease her hunger but it kept her going, though after drinking it she felt slightly dizzy, mildly intoxicated.

Karan dared not sleep. Several times a day she dozed, where she could find a secure hiding place, and once while standing up. She was so weary that she could not tell where the dreams left off and the waking began, save that her dreams were more vivid and more real. Once she dreamed of the Whelm, four of them sitting together on a log. She could not see their faces, just the thin heads under their cowls, but they all sat as if listening to something. The dream shivered her awake. Listening for her? Could they sense her from her dream emotions?

The chase had become a long hallucination with no beginning and only one possible end. She was so terrified that she could no longer weep. Her self had contracted to a single urge—she must get to Neid (though she could scarcely remember why)—and to a single fear, even greater than her fear of the Whelm: that madness was taking her as it had her mother.