Havenstar (35 page)

She stepped
back into the passage and looked back the way she had come. Her
heart flipped over. She was facing five openings, and had no idea
which one she had come through. She whispered, ‘I don’t know how to
go back.’

‘Nor do I.
Come to think of it, I don’t have the first idea of how to go on,
either. Keris, we have no food, nothing. Can you get us out of
here?’

She paused and
took another deep breath. She smelled the ley ahead of them, felt
the seductive pull of it. ‘Yes, I think so.’ She took another
reluctant look behind. If she tried to retrace her steps… How would
she ever find Davron again?

Benighted
Chaos, if the water rises, he could drown
, she thought.
If
he isn’t dead already. I can’t leave him like that. I can’t go on
abandoning people just because it suits my convenience.

‘I’ve got to
go back for Davron,’ she said.

He accepted
the implications of her statement. ‘But how do we get to him?’

She looked at
the five branches to the passage, but water had already washed away
any tracks Stockwood may have made.

‘There are the
Wild back there somewhere,’ he said.

They may
have eaten him by now. No, they wouldn’t do that. They think he
serves the Unmaker.
‘You don’t have to come with me,’ she
said.

He gave her a
look laden with meaning. ‘If you think I’m letting you out of my
sight, your brains are tainted. I think we ought to get out of here
and let Davron look after himself—he’s the guide, after all—but if
you’re going back, then so am I. I’m far too scared to stay here
alone, or to go on alone.’

They tried.
She put her back to the pull of the ley and searched the way she
had come. They never found the gap she had leapt, nor the bodies of
the two Wild Stockwood had killed, nor any of the others.

Finally it was
Quirk who called a halt. ‘It’s getting dark,’ he said. ‘I think we
should try to get out of here. We have no light, nothing.’ He
stared at her, his slitted eyes now wide with fright. ‘The Wild…at
night...’

She nodded
miserably, turned and followed the thread that pulled her onwards.
Ley.
It was calling, and she answered the call, even as she
feared.

~~~~~~~

They broke
free of the Sponge at sundown. Emerging from an entrance at the
base of the barrier on the southern side, they found themselves
overlooking the Valley of the Flow.

Vaguely Keris
took in the camp a few hundred paces away, not theirs but someone
else’s, vaguely she saw the Flow, the colours of the Wide as it
snaked across the valley floor… But it was the eruption of ley that
drew all her senses. The place where four ley lines converged,
snarled, combined in a tangle and poured upwards into a perpetual
mushroom cloud of colour and power and movement. She looked and
feared and felt its tug pulling her, enticing her to approach,
asking her to immolate herself on its pyre.

‘What’s the
matter?’ the Chameleon asked, worried. ‘Keris, what is it?’

‘Ah sweet
Creation, Quirk, can’t you see
any
of that?’

He stared in
the direction she gazed and shook his head. ‘Mist. Whirling mist.
That’s all.’

She whispered,
‘It’s the Fist. The Snarled Fist. Ley-life, Quirk, it’s
huge
.’

~~~~~~~

Men who would
escape their fate are as eggs in the hands of a blind juggler.

—saying of the
old Margravate of Malinawar

The camp
belonged to a trader called Tom the Cheap and his half dozen
tainted staff. He’d come up from the south and intended to cross
the Sponge the next day. Keris knew him, but he didn’t recognise
Pier’s daughter and she didn’t enlighten him. To her annoyance, he
seemed smugly pleased Davron Storre’s fellowship had been attacked
by the Wild, and made no attempt to conceal the sentiment.

‘They’re less
likely to want to get their filthy teeth into us, if they’ve ’et a
couple of you lot,’ he explained. There was no malice in the
remark, but he evidently had no particular love for other people
and took their tragedies in his stride.

Keris,
relieved, saw that Scow and Corrian and Portron were already there,
sharing the trader’s camp. The chantor came bustling over, full of
concern. ‘Ah, lass, you’re a sight for anxious eyes to behold! And
right sincerely it is that I’ve been performing kinesis dedicated
to your safety. Are you hurt?’

She shook her
head. ‘What of you?’

‘Scow got us
out of the Sponge,’ he said, nodding towards the tainted man, who
grinned at her with his usual animal smile. ‘With the Maker’s
grace, of course. And our horses turned up on their own. I think
your Ygraine led them out. That monster of Scow’s found his own way
out later.’

‘The others?’
she asked. ‘Davron? Meldor?’

‘No sign of
them yet. And Corrian’s pack mule is missing too.’

Corrian
glowered at them. ‘I broke m’best pipe. And the replacement’s in me
packs. Now what the midden am I supposed to do without me pipes and
weed?’

Everyone
refrained from remarking that she seemed to be doing quite well.
She had her teeth clamped hard on the stem of a new pipe bought
from Tom, and she’d stuffed it with his best pipeweed. Apparently
her money had been on her person, not in her packs.

Keris turned
to Scow. ‘Did you see what happened to Meldor?’

‘He yelled at
me to get Corrian and Quirk and the chantor out of there. I
couldn’t see Quirk, but I found Corrian and Portron. Meldor went
back down the passage to find you and Davron. We grabbed Meldor’s
pack crossings-horse and it led us out.’

‘You just left
Meldor?’

He gave Keris
a stolid look. ‘When I get a direct order, I obey it. Meldor and
Davron can look after themselves a lot better than I can. And now
you’d better erect your tent. Do you mind sharing with Corrian
tonight? If her mule doesn’t turn up she has no where to
sleep.’

‘Only if she
promises not to smoke her confounded pipe inside the tent.’

‘Upstart,’
Corrian muttered. ‘Dunno what the young are comin’ to these days.
No respect for their elders.’

Keris erected
her tent and then gratefully accepted a plate of stew from Portron.
‘The trader says he’ll have his Unbound guard the camp tonight,’
the chantor said cheerfully, ‘which means we can get a good night’s
rest.’

She stared at
him, wondering at his tone, and finally realised Portron was hoping
Davron and Meldor never appeared. She said nothing, but knew she
wouldn’t sleep until she saw that Davron was safe.
But he’s not
safe,
she thought.
How can he be safe? He was unconscious,
lying there on the floor, and the water was coming in. Maybe he was
already dead. Stockwood was huge, and the beast had trampled
him
. She ate her food stoically, even cleaning the last of the
gravy from the plate with a piece of damper bread that Corrian had
baked in the ashes of the fire. But she tasted none of it.

~~~~~~~

Corrian did
not share Keris’s tent after all. Tom the Cheap was happy to share
his bed with a leathery old woman, once she had convinced him she
was not tainted. He had questioned that anyone so unattractive
could possibly be that way naturally. This insult Corrian took in
her stride, remarking loudly as she made her way to his tent that
all pussies looked alike in the dark. Portron drew in an indignant
breath and stalked off to bed and, predictably, Quirk blushed. A
few minutes later he too went off to his tent, leaving Scow and
Keris by the dying embers of the fire.

‘I saw what
happened to Davron,’ she said without preamble, and described what
she’d seen. ‘Even if he was just temporarily unconscious, Stockwood
galloped right over him.’ She stopped, unable to go on.

‘Meldor will
find him.’

‘Meldor’s
blind. The Wild might tear him to pieces.’

‘He is not
defenceless.’

‘Oh stop it,
Scow,’ she said irritably. ‘You’re just as worried as I am.’

He grimaced,
tongue lolling out. ‘I guess so. But I can’t go back for them; I’d
never find the way. And Meldor is stronger than you realise.’

She poked a
stick idly at the ashes around the edges of the fire. ‘He uses
ley,’ she said. ‘That’s it, isn’t it? Somehow he uses ley to see.
To replace the sense he lost, or at least to enhance those he still
has.’

Scow said
nothing.

‘And that’s
why he thinks he can fight the Unmaker, because he knows how to use
ley. He ignores the strictures of Chantry. He thinks he can bend
the ley to his bidding without himself being corrupted.’ She
paused. ‘He’s mad. As mad as Davron Storre. No one can fight the
Unmaker except by creating Order.’

‘Ah yes. The
rigidity of Order and the Rule. The inflexibility that allows no
variations, nothing unusual. That expels the blind and crippled,
that sends us out into the Unstable to be tainted in the first
place. Is that the kind of life you believe in, Keris?’

‘What else is
there?’ she whispered. ‘You want the truth? I hate it. I always
have. All my life I’ve wanted to break free. I wanted to be a
mapmaker. I wanted to wear trousers. I wanted to ride into the
Unstable with my father. I wanted not to go to Chantry on rest
days. I wanted to argue with the mentor in Chantry school. I wanted
to read books that never mentioned the damned Rule. Ley-life, I
wanted a hundred different things! I loathed Chantry. I despised
their laws and their spying. I detested their pettiness and their
sanctimonious ways. But I never fought them. Not really. Oh, I
might have been a little cheeky, but that was all.

‘You see, in
my heart I believed—no, I
believe
—that without Order, Chaos
comes. That’s a truth, Scow. We all have to make sacrifices. For
some, it’s harder than others, I know. But that’s not the fault of
Chantry, or the Rule. It’s the Unmaker who has done this to us…’
She continued to poke around in the ashes. ‘I’ve come with you all,
but deep inside me I feel I’ve committed a terrible sin. I’ve come
with you for half a dozen reasons—and most of them are selfish.
Basically, I think I’m a very selfish person.’ She unearthed some
of the wood from the fire and pushed it back into the flames. ‘What
sort of wood is this?’

‘Not wood at
all,’ he said absently. ‘Tom the Cheap hacked a few chunks off the
Sponge.’ He threw several more pieces on to the dying fire where
they flamed blue, and then began to whittle at another piece with
his knife. ‘I don’t think I’ll be able to sleep tonight.’

‘Me neither.’
They sat for a while in silence, until she took note of the knife
he was using. ‘That’s an unusual blade. Why is it so shiny?’

‘It’s the kind
of steel it’s made of, I think. Meldor gave it to me. He thinks it
probably comes from the times before the Rending, when people knew
how to make such marvellous things.’

‘That old? But
that’s a thousand years!’ She thought of the metal caddy back in
the mapmaker’s shop in Kibbleberry. ‘Is it possible for something
to be so old?’

‘Well, no one
knows how to make metal like this now. Mind you, I don’t think it
could have been used continuously for a thousand years. It would
have been worn away by the sharpening. And I think the handle has
been replaced, maybe even several times.’

She mused,
‘When I was little, I used to wish I lived back in the days of the
Margravate of Malinawar, when ships used to cross the oceans. I
would dream about the sea. Water stretching out as far as the eye
could see, but it’s hard to imagine. What colour do you think it
would have been? Brown, like the Flow? Thick and green, like the
Gebbish River back home? Or perhaps tea-coloured, like the Warbuss,
where it flows through Taggart’s Wood.’

‘One day
you’ll be able to ride to the sea again, and see for yourself. In
your lifetime.’

‘Do you really
believe that?’

‘Yes, yes I
do. You don’t know Meldor as I do. I love Davron as a friend, a
brother—but Meldor? I would follow Meldor to the other side of the
Waste if he asked it of me. He will do what he says: free us
all.’

‘That’s
ridiculous. A dream, a foolish dream. Like mine, of seeing the
ocean.’

‘Keris, if we
don’t free ourselves, who will do it for us? Chantry? Their only
answer is failing. The kinesis chain has retreated in half a dozen
places over the past few years. You’ll see that when you approach
the Fifth. With each passing year, the areas of stability grow
smaller. The Eighth is in danger of being cut in two. The truth is
that Chantry and the Rule are not keeping Chaos at bay anymore. And
they certainly have no idea of ever regaining back what has been
lost. No one has had that idea before. No one has even considered
casting the Unmaker down and reclaiming what was ours, until
Meldor. Meldor has a dream, and such a dream is worth fighting
for.’

‘If it was
possible, wouldn’t the Maker have done it before now?’

‘Read the Holy
Books, Keris. Chaos was brought to Malinawar because some of
humankind supported Carasma the Unmaker. It’s our belief that only
humankind can defeat what they themselves brought about by their
folly. All the clues are there, in the writings. We have ignored
them too long, misinterpreted what was written, insisted that
things were allegories when what was written was the literal truth.
The Maker gave us the answers through His Prophets and His Scribes
and His Knights, but we chose not to listen.’

She stared at
him and was silent.

He looked up
from his whittling to see why she hadn’t replied. ‘Do I surprise
you?’

‘You astound
me.’

‘They are
Meldor’s words, of course, but I have come to agree that he is
right.’