Sorcery Rising (22 page)

Great days
, Aran thought,
and now we are reduced to diplomacy and deal-making with the old enemy
. How he longed to set out on a great quest again. He touched the map beneath his tunic, like a talisman, and stepped forward.

‘I have a request to make of you, sire.’ He bowed his head with all the deference due a liegeman to his king.

Ravn regarded the top of Aran’s dark head. ‘Out with it, then, Westlander. Tell me what it is you would ask of me.’

Aran looked askance at the other men present. ‘It is a private matter, my lord.’

‘These are my most trusted advisers: surely you can speak your suit before them?’

Aran looked uncomfortable.

Ravn grinned. ‘Perhaps it is something too personal for an audience.’ He turned to his lords. ‘Go and fetch wine, lads: my throat feels like the bed of a dried-up lake! Go to Sorva Flatnose’s stall and make sure he gives you his best cask of stallion’s blood: he’ll swear he has no such thing, but you’ll find he’s got it stashed there somewhere: I heard him boasting to Foril Senson. And if he demands payment, remind him he still owes me duty for his last two shipments. It’ll be a big cask, if I know Sorva: it’ll likely take the three of you to carry it!’

The three lords exchanged glances. None of them looked entirely happy with their chore. Stormway gave Aran his hardest stare and Southeye groaned as he rose from the table; but Egg Forstson clapped the Westlander on the back and wished him luck.

‘He doesn’t say a lot,’ he said over Aran’s head to the King, ‘but what he does say is usually worth listening to. The keenest edges whistle least.’

When they had gone, Ravn motioned Aran to a settle and regarded the man curiously. He thought he might have encountered Aran Aranson once before: at the court at Halbo when he had first taken his throne and the lords and landowners had all come to pledge their loyalty. If this was the man, he’d thought him dour, hard and dour, looking ill at ease in his fine clothes, out of place amidst the luxuries and merrymaking; but all the same, impressive, in his own way. One of the old breed, though he was not an old man. He recalled that his father had spoken highly of him.

‘So what is this secret request, Aran Aranson?’

After a moment’s hesitation, during which he searched for the words that would convey his desire, and failed entirely, Aran reached into his tunic and withdrew the map, as if it had the power to speak where he had none. Unrolling it with infinite care, he spread it over the other charts that papered the table. Then he took up four of the stones the men had been using to weight down the corners and shifted them to his own map so that it lay as flat as he could make it. His fingers traced the outlines of the landmasses lovingly. He knew each line, marked reef, each indentation of the coast, by heart now: he had spent his last three nights awake, a lit candle for illumination, going over and over every beautifully-drawn detail – the windrose, the decorated margins, the navigation points and projections.

The King looked on boredly. Yet another map. He was sick of the sight of them all. The only map he was interested in was the one that would finally chart a passage through the Ravenway and into the Far West.
But perhaps
, he mused,
if he were to take the wife they wanted for him and got himself a swift heir, he’d be able to join the expedition force himself
. . .

Aran looked up expectantly and was shocked to see the glaze in the other man’s eye. ‘I got it from a nomad map-seller,’ he said quickly, trying to catch Ravn’s interest. ‘It is a most wondrous thing. See here—’ he indicated the outline of an island ‘—Whale Holm, most accurately drawn. And here—’ he moved his finger south and east ‘—your capital, sire: Halbo.’

The King bent to peer at the mark on the map. ‘Ah, yes,’ he said listlessly. ‘Though it appears to be spelled wrongly.’

Aran stared at the familiar letters. The map-maker had put a cross through the ‘o’, but that seemed to be all that was unusual about it. He said nothing. ‘And up here, sire—’ his fingers flew to the top of the map, amidst the words ‘Isenfelt’ and the repeated mantra ‘ise’, and then swept to the right ‘—look at this extraordinary windrose.’

‘Very nice work,’ the King said flatly. ‘Most accomplished, I’m sure. Why are you showing me this, Aranson? Can’t you see I have plenty of maps of my own?’

‘Look more closely, sire,’ Aran insisted. His finger touched the word inside the directional legend. ‘There, lord.’

‘
Sanctuarii
,’ the King read. He looked up. ‘Sanctuary?’

‘Yes, sire.’

Ravn laughed. ‘Fairytales for children! The last resting place of King Rahay and his cat!

Aran bowed his head. ‘Yes, sire.’

Ravn thumped his leg with delight. ‘And you have the map to the magician’s secret land?’

Aran looked up, hope gleaming in his eye. ‘Yes, sire.’ He thought for a moment. ‘Also, this—’ he dug into his tunic pocket and fished out the lump of metal the map-seller had given him. It glittered in his hand, brazen and gaudy in the noon light. It felt weightier than he remembered, too; heavy and urgent.

The King stared at it, then took it gingerly from the Westlander’s grip. It seemed to vibrate in his hand like a live thing. Ravn frowned; tried to concentrate.

Without the gold in his possession, Aran felt suddenly dislocated, at a loss. He watched Ravn hold it up to the light, squint at it; weigh it in his palm. Then he handed it back, almost reluctantly. A pained expression crossed his face. ‘Pretty enough,’ he said at last. ‘But a treasure only to those who wish to believe in it.’

Gripping his little piece of treasure once more, Aran felt charged with energy. Fury churned inside him, but he kept his face still and unreadable. Without the King’s support he could never raise the funds he needed. He stowed the ingot carefully in his tunic pocket. ‘I would ask you for a ship, sire. To make the passage. I would dedicate the region to you, once I set foot upon it, claim it in your name. King Ravn’s Land.’

‘And bring me all its treasures?’

‘Aye, sire, that too.’

Ravn laughed. ‘A ship, in exchange for a cargo of shining rock?’

‘Gold, sire,’ Aran said mulishly.

The man was so adamant: it would be easy to be carried along by his fervour. Ravn brought to mind the royal sceptre, remembered how the ancient artefact seemed freighted with magic in his grasp on the occasion of his crowning. He’d been drunk with funeral wines and barely steady on his feet; but even so, he recalled how the sceptre had had a lustre of a different order, like a piece of the sun held in the hands. The ingot, though had made him feel suddenly imbued with power . . . He felt his certainty waver, but only for the briefest moment. A king must be resolute in what he believes and show no indecision. Brushing the pebbles from the map’s corners, he rolled the thing up roughly and thrust it back at Aran Aranson.

‘Give up this foolish idea, man. Join my expedition to the Far West instead. At least we know it exists! And in the meanwhile, enjoy the Fair. Are you trading?’

‘Sardonyx, sire.’

‘Good, good.’

Aran watched the King’s eyes lose focus again, as if he were terminally stupefied. ‘So,’ he said at last, rather stiffly, feeling the rage and disappointment welling up inside him. ‘I’ll take my leave, sire.’

Ravn’s head came up. He saw the desperation in the other man’s eyes and smiled. ‘Not so fast, Aran Aranson. Now that you have had the benefit of my wisdom, at least do me the courtesy of giving me your own good judgement.’

Aran stopped in his tracks, the old fury rising.

‘Who do you think I should take to wife, man? It’s a tedious business, this political marriage thing, and the women they offer me are all so dull. Moreover, it seems everyone who holds a view has an axe to grind.’

‘I have neither view, nor axe.’

Ravn shrugged. ‘You must have some thought, surely?’

There was a commotion outside the tent, the shuffling of feet and muffled voices as if someone were trying to manoeuvre something awkward through a narrow space. The Lords Stormway, Southeye and Forstson had returned, it seemed, with a cask as big as an ox.

King Ravn leapt up, filled with sudden energy. ‘My stallion’s blood! Excellent!’

The lords manhandled the cask with difficulty through the tent’s opening, where it thudded onto the ground with such force that the table bounced, and all the charts and maps – no longer carefully anchored by their stones – cascaded onto the floor with a clatter. Southeye, who owned many of them – charts made in his grandfather’s day and earlier – fell to his knees and began to gather them frantically.

Aran, seeing his chance to leave in the midst of this chaos, took it, stepping round the monstrous cask and past the lords, and headed for the doorway without making his farewells.

‘Which one shall I choose, Westlander?’ the King called at his departing back. ‘Shall I take a good northern girl or a strange southern one?’

‘Take a troll to wife, for all I care,’ came Aran Aranson’s reply, low but entirely audible, as he disappeared through the door-flap.

Nine

Deals

I
t was early evening by the time the Vingo brothers found their way to the blade-stall, though they had set out some hours before. Tanto had been diverted by jewellery and clothes stalls, by innumerable stands selling araque, spiced wines and nuts baked into cakes that made you oddly lightheaded, and finally by a group of exotic dancers travelling with the nomads, but purporting to come from the southern desert tribes (and everyone knew the strange practices they specialised in). Wearing nothing but a thousand thin strips of cunningly tied leather, which they invited onlookers (for a small consideration) to untie and unwind as they spun and leapt like dervishes, these hard-muscled, hard-eyed women had mesmerised Tanto for the last hour, and Saro was getting seriously infuriated. Added to which, he had found that walking through crowds now carried its own difficulties. He had bumped against one man’s shoulder, and been assailed by a sudden terrible anxiety about his ailing wife’s health; another man, watching the desert women, had brushed his arm, and from him Saro had learned the lewdest possible thoughts of what might be done with a naked dancer, some strips of leather and a group of men. Saro had stepped aside briskly, feeling filthy himself, only to be nudged by another man feeling wretchedly nauseous. At last, exhausted by these unwished-for intrusions, he had pulled Tanto away by the arm.

‘The swordplay starts at quarter-sun tomorrow: do you want to get your dagger or not? Besides which, if you spend any more on the dancers you’ll have nothing left to spend.’

Tanto shrugged him off angrily. ‘If I’m soon to be wedded I deserve a bit of entertainment first.’

‘But I thought you wanted this marriage?’

‘I
want
the castle. I
want
the title. I
want
to be my own man at last. And if I have to marry some lord’s tight-arsed daughter to get it all, I will. What I
don’t
want is my prissy little brother making my ears ache in the middle of a crowd.’

Saro sighed, tempted to turn around and head for the family pavilion and leave Tanto to stagger drunkenly round the fairground on his own for the rest of the night. But the truth of it was, he’d be glad to see big brother wed and off the estate, and the sooner the better, for the sake of himself, the slaves, the cats, the horses, the surrounding wildlife . . .

‘We passed a blade-stall back there and on the left, between the sheepskin-seller and the ropemaker.’

And so here they were now, peering over the shoulders of a number of customers clustered around a stall offering a large array of beautifully-crafted weapons shown off to their best advantage against a cloth of rich blue velvet. It was the velvet, in fact, that had first caught Tanto’s eye. It was the girl behind the stall who had caught Saro’s.

She was tall and wiry, with bare arms in which each muscle was clearly defined as she lifted the weapons and passed them, pommel-first, to interested buyers. Her face, downcast as she pointed out the intricate inlays and forged patterns in the blades, was mobile and intelligent; her nose was long, her cheekbones sharp and her eyebrows like the wings of a kestrel – tawny-dark, and up-tilted. But that hair! It was as red as the embers in a dying fire, but a fire that had been carelessly kicked over and trampled by a dozen feet. Locks of it fell this way and that, and much of it stood on end, as if someone had taken the sheep-shears to her. It was the hair of a kitchen-lad, a stablehand: a street urchin. And the tunic she wore – grubby boiled leather mottled with foodstains and seasalt, and clearly both too short in the leg and too tight under the arms – served only to emphasise the image of chaos. Who would employ such a creature to show such expensive wares? The weapons were clearly of the finest order: even from where he stood, Saro could tell from the way the would-be customers handled them that the swords were perfectly weighted, the daggers deadly sharp. And yet she spoke with some authority, and clearly knew enough to answer the keen questions that came her way. She bent to retrieve a carved wooden scabbard from a box on the ground, and Saro was treated to a view of smooth, tanned thigh that had his heart beating like a trapped rabbit’s. As she straightened up again, she caught him staring. Their eyes met – hers mocking and with a hint of laughter in them that suggested she knew his thoughts entirely – and he felt his own go wide. Something about this girl, something nagged at him. He searched those grey-blue eyes for a clue, but now she was talking to a huge man at the other end at the stall about the knotwork that had been incorporated into the design of the sword he was interested in. It was shorter and broader than a Forent blade, heavier than a southern sabre, and in the man’s big, scarred hands it looked entirely lethal.

Saro leaned closer to catch their words.