Farlander (23 page)

He paused for a moment’s thought. ‘But we must never make this business of ours personal. Otherwise, we become something more than a simple force of motion. We become part of the cycle itself. If I were to be killed in vendetta, another R
shun would take my place, and then another, and another still, until the same vendetta was concluded for the patron and our obligations fulfilled. And then it would be finished. We wear no seal and we seek no revenge for ourselves. That way, we break the cycle.’

The old man finished with a long pull on the gourd. He wiped his lips, gave Nico a light shove. ‘Understand?’

Nico’s head was swimming, and not just from the drink. His thoughts were confused. Khosians understood vendetta; they felt it in their bones and knew its impulse like a fish knows to swim. Their sagas were full of bloody murder and revenge, and those characters who sought retribution were always the heroes of the story.

He nodded, even though he was a good deal uncertain.

‘Good. Then you have learned the most valuable lesson of all.’

A burning ember spat clear of the fire. The sound caused Nico to jump. He watched the ember as it glowed on the grass between his bare feet, fading slowly to greyness. He accepted another pull of the gourd. Illusory or not, it was good to feel warm inside. He suspected he was already a little drunk, and decided that it was no terrible thing after all. In fact he felt cheered, and somewhat lightened of his many burdens. He settled back once more to take in the night sky.

The stars were bright up here in the mountains, the brightest of them almost pulsating in their brilliance. When Nico swung his head from far left all the way to far right, he could follow the milky sweep of the Great Wheel across the heavens; when he looked downwards from the Wheel, off to the right of the fire, he could see his two favourite constellations studding the blackness – the Mistress, with the stars composing her hand holding those of her broken mirror; and beside and above her the Great Fool, the Sage of the World, posturing with his faithful meerkat at his feet, four small glimmers in a jiggling line – his only companion at the end, when he gave up the celestial throne to wander the world and to bring the teachings of the Dao.

A meteor streaked overhead, followed almost instantly by another. To the east, a comet trailed a finger of light across the heavens. Nico breathed it all in, and felt at peace.

It was a peace interrupted, however, by the sound of Ash chuckling quietly to himself in the firelight.

Nico ignored him, thinking him drunk beyond sense. But the old man continued to chuckle.

‘What amuses you?’ Nico finally demanded, his words slurred.

Ash rocked back and forth, trying to contain himself, but a glance at Nico’s expression only made him worse. He pointed the gourd in Nico’s direction, tried to say something around his mirth, but had to try again.

‘All is lost!’ he cried in mocking mimicry of Nico’s young voice.

Nico scowled, the blood rushing to his cheeks. The last thing he wished to be reminded of was the airship battle and the moment he had almost broken down. Such shame was something he needed to keep buried.

He opened his mouth to shut the old man up with some sharpened words of his own, but Ash pointed at him as he did so, and seemed to know what he was going to say, and it only made him laugh harder.

Perhaps it was the Cheem Fire, or perhaps it was the glint in the old man’s eyes, without malice or condescension, for Nico suddenly found himself caught up in the man’s humour, seeing the funny side of it without shame. Before he knew it he was laughing too, rocking back and forth like the old farlander, both of them howling like fools until the tears ran freely down their cheeks.

‘All is lost!’ Ash called out again, and they were beside themselves with their roars, holding their sides as the flames lit or shadowed their cackling faces, and the stars blazed within hand’s reach just overhead.

‘
All is lost!
’ they cried out into the night.

CHAPTER NINE

‘What is it?’

‘A bush.’

‘I can see that, but what’s so special about it?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Well, why are we just standing here staring at it?’

They were, too – just standing there staring down at a small green bush beside the gurgling of a mountain stream. It was early morning, the sun overly bright in their eyes. Nico had a horrible pounding in his head from the night before.

‘Have you ever seen a bush like this before, Nico?’

‘I’m not sure.’

‘Then look closer. Look at its berries.’

Nico looked closer. The berries were small, oily black. They were patterned with curious white markings that looked a little like skulls. ‘No, I don’t think so.’

‘No, you have not. There are only a few of these bushes on the entire island of Cheem. They were brought here from Zanzahar, and there all the way from the Isles of Sky.’

Nico listened without much patience. His stomach was dangerously afloat this morning, and he wanted only to lie down and curl up for the rest of the day. If this was how Cheem Fire felt the morning after, then he vowed never to drink the foul stuff again.

‘My memory, Nico,’ said Ash, as he dropped to his knees before the shrub. He plucked two berries from the same branch and dropped them into his battered tin cup. Nico watched him, in expectation of more. The old man sighed, paused in what he was doing.

‘When we first came here to Cheem to found our order,’ he began, ‘we did so because there were many older sects already established in these mountains. Religious orders in remote places, where seekers would come to retreat from the world of men. Few other people live here. It is a wilderness, where it is easy to lose oneself.

‘But that was not enough to hide our order from notice. We feared that if a R
shun were ever caught, he might betray the whereabouts of our monastery, and put us all at risk. So our own memories of its location were . . .
altered
. Buried deep. The Seer at Sato knows the techniques for achieving that.’ Ash began to pulp the berries with a broken twig, carefully and slowly, paying full attention to the task.

‘When I use the juice of this berry, it will unlock the memories that have been hidden from me. It will show me the way.’

Ash spat into the tin cup, then held it out to Nico for him to do the same. Nico frowned, then leaned forward and spat into the cup. Ash stirred the pulped mess some more. ‘If I fail to prepare it correctly,’ he confessed cheerily, ‘it can be fatal.’

He motioned for Nico to kneel at his side. At first Nico hesitated, wondering what the old man was getting him into now. He knelt anyway. The end of the twig emerged from the cup, and Ash lifted it towards Nico’s forehead, whereupon he pulled back sharply.

‘Stay fast, boy.’

‘Why must
I
take it?’

‘So
you
will not remember the way.’

Ash dabbed the concoction against Nico’s forehead, humming something beneath his breath. He then applied the same ointment to his own skin.

‘Now what?’ asked Nico, as the old man was washing out his cup. Already, the blue stain on his forehead had dried to red.

‘Relax. Take it easy. It comes on slow.’

So Nico relaxed. In fact, he curled up into a ball and promptly fell asleep.

*

The dreams came upon him like black tar oozing up through the ground. They enveloped him, slowly but inevitably, squeezing into his pores and up into his head until his mind was oozing like tar as well.

In these dreams he seemed to be fully awake, at times. It was twilight, his master leading them, seated on the mules, as they plodded through silvery forests where even the breeze could stir no sound or motion. The sky looked grey and washed-out above their heads, and it seemed lower than normal, almost crushing them. Clouds chased across it, tinged blue by the sister moons which swung across the sky much higher and faster than they should have done. Nico watched them for a time, the moons behind the clouds, one white and one blue, as some element of time pulsed through him, infinite and endless and circular, and before he realized it, the clouds and the moons were gone and it was daylight, though a watery-thin daylight in which the night still hovered. They were walking their mules across a steep rocky valley, Ash singing something simple and foreign at the top of his lungs, the echoes of it bounding off the slopes of shale and coming back at them, creating a harmony like no other he had heard before.

Nico was crying, for some reason, as they huddled around a tiny fire of pitiful twigs in a cave that smelled of bat droppings and algae. Ash was crying too, sobbing about the family he had lost so many years before, his beloved wife and his young son; and at the sight of it Nico couldn’t help himself, his own sobs turning suddenly to laughter, and Ash was growing angry at him, shouting in that alien tongue again, more like growling than words – but that only made Nico worse, and he was pointing at the old farlander’s increasing wrath and shouting, ‘
All is lost! All is lost!
’ at the old man, until Ash made a grab for him, but tipped forward instead and fell and rolled across the fire – so the flames were smothered dead – and did not get up.

But no, that wasn’t right, for it was raining, and they were slipping in mud as they hauled the mules up a slope running with streams of icy water, and the clouds were so low and dark it was impossible to tell what time of day it was, and there ahead of them roared a great waterfall wreathed in mist, and they were soaked to the bone by the fine spray of it, drawing closer and closer to that crashing cascade of water by way of a terrible path that wound along a thousand-foot ravine. They walked straight through the falls, and emerged into a tunnel glowing eerily green with lichen furring its walls, the old man shouting something reassuring amid all the noise, though too loud to hear him, the constant crash of water shaking his stomach loose, and his mind, even.

And then he was dreaming for sure, for he was no longer in the mountains of Cheem at all, but on a great rolling grassland that seemed to go on forever beneath a sun that arched overhead shallow and pale. A solitary bird wheeled in the sky. Flies hovered in clouds just above the grasses, but no animals could be seen on the land, no sounds of life could be heard. In a blink night fell. The twin moons shone overhead. He was looking down upon a man curled up beneath a scrubby tree, wrapped in animal skins, sound asleep. The man wasn’t alone. Shapes were moving silently towards him. What little Nico could see of them, they were shapes made from nightmares, for they looked like insects, spiders or ants perhaps – though huge in size. Each seemed the size of a mule, and scuttled rather than ran.

It was a dream, Nico realized, but unlike any he had ever experienced. He did not seem to be within this dream – rather, he was hovering in some disembodied form, witnessing the nightmare of another. Something else was strange about it, too, for he seemed to know this man, even though he could barely make out his face in the darkness.

Suddenly Nico was yelling at the familiar stranger to wake up, to gather his weapons and defend himself; but without effect, for no sound would come from his mouth. He yelled even louder, began screaming even, as the shadows converged on the sleeping shape. But the only thing to stir was a slight breeze, the rustling of a few leaves on the tree under which he slept.

A seed pod detached itself from an otherwise bare branch. Possibly it was the very last seed on the tree. Its wings caught the air and it spun slowly earthwards, before, it settled right on the sleeping man’s cheek.