Soulvine 03 A Bright and Terrible Sword (16 page)

Forbidden by whom? Why? Did that include me?

Rawnie said, ‘My pet mouse! Tickles! He was in my pack and John let him go!’

‘I never did,’ John said.

‘Yes, you did! You
did
, or Tickles would still be here!’

Leo said, somewhere between amusement and disgust, ‘Well, stop crying. We’ll get you another pet. How would you like a … a baby curlew?’

‘It would fly away!’

‘Then … a kitten?’

Rawnie stopped crying. Her face brightened so quickly that suspicion took me: had the tears been an act? No, she had genuinely wanted her mouse. But now that it was gone, little schemer that she was, she seized the opportunity to endear herself to Leo. And under her adoring and hopeful gaze he visibly expanded, like bread dough rising on warm air. He was the hero of the moment, even if the next moment he might execute us all.

‘A kitten!’ Rawnie breathed. ‘Oh, could I? Where would you get a kitten?’

‘I’ll get it,’ Leo said. ‘But no more screaming, there’s a good child. And Charlotte and John, no more fisticuffs.’ He swaggered off, having restored order to the Fiefdom of the Wagon Bed. His back turned, Rawnie stopped beaming and gazed after him thoughtfully.

I wanted to be alone, to think about what the web woman had told me. Since I could not be alone, I did the next best thing and feigned sleep. But Charlotte and Rawnie’s whispered conversation kept me from my thoughts.

‘Do you think he’ll really get me a kitten?’

‘I don’t know, Rawnie.’ Charlotte sounded close to tears.

‘There might be cats at Galtryf.’

‘How did you know we’re going to Galtryf?’

‘I listen,’ Rawnie said scornfully. ‘I learn things. Galtryf is a big, old, scary place. The bad
hisafs
there will torture Roger. Papa is there and they think they can make him help them, but I know that he would never do anything
bad, so they’re wrong about that. And everybody here is afraid of somebody’s sword.’

No response. Then Charlotte said in a strangled voice, ‘Never mention that again.’

‘Which part?’

‘Any of it, but I mean the … the last thing.’

‘The sword? Whose sword is it?’

‘You will heed me,’ Charlotte said in an entirely different voice, so firm and menacing that it silenced even Rawnie. For a moment.

‘Piss-pots!’ she finally said. ‘I’m not afraid of anybody’s sword. All it can do is kill me dead, and then Papa would come and get me from the other side.’

A low despairing groan from Charlotte, who nonetheless did not correct her daughter. Charlotte, if not Rawnie, evidently knew that you could not cheat death for long.

Although that cheat was exactly what Soulvine Moor was trying to do.

No one else spoke that night. Perhaps they slept, perhaps not. I did not.

‘
The bad hisafs there will torture Roger
.’

What was the sword?

‘
Your son is our last hope, because Galtryf is winning this war
.’

Would my father join Soulvine Moor if the Brotherhood threatened to torture Charlotte and Rawnie? I did not know him, did not understand his mind. And Rawnie, for all her precocious plotting and listening, was blind where he was concerned. She thought him a hero, out of one of Leo’s plays.

‘
Galtryf is the shadow of The Queendom
.’

Shadows and swords. Alysse had spoken to me of the sword. And three years ago, when I had brought the Blue army back from the Country of the Dead, something
bright and terrible had roared out of the sky. It lasted only a small piece of a second, but my telling of it had made Alysse gasp. Alysse, who never showed any emotion towards me except impatience! She had called it ‘the sword’ but I had seen no weapon, merely glimpsed blinding light and heard wordless sound. The Dead awaited the sword, Alysse said. She had not said why. But none of this seemed of use to me now.

‘
Soul arts grow and change, Roger Kilbourne, like all the rest of life. All may yet change when your son is born
.’

But he was already born, or so the little princess in faraway Glory had told me, and nothing had changed. I was still captive, headed for pain and death. Infants were still sent into trance, neither living nor dead, their life force sucked away. Circles of the Dead were still being sucked into vortexes of watchers from Soulvine Moor. The breach in the wall between the living and dead – in the image of the
hisafs
– grew wider and wider. Or – in the image of the web women – the web of being grew more pulled, torn, misshapen. Nothing had changed.

‘
The bad hisafs there will torture Roger
.’

I lay awake for hours, but when I finally slept, I had a plan. It was not much of a plan but, facing agonizing death, anything is better than nothing.

Perhaps.

Or so I hoped.

I made myself wake before dawn. There had been no dreams. Over a large hill to the southeast the sky had begun to pale, a chill grey like an icy sea, although the day promised to be warm and fair. Today we would arrive at Galtryf. I had not much time.

Pulling myself to the limit of my chain, I peered over the side of the wagon. The moor curs were there, just beyond shooting reach of the Soulviners’
guns
, or what
I thought was their reach. Did the animals know that, or was it coincidence? I had no idea how intelligent moor curs might be. Yesterday I might not have been able to see them all, but at least this morning my vision was again clear. The headache was not as bad, either.

Two – no, three moor curs. Did they travel in packs, then? How aggressive were they? Not that it mattered; I had little choice. These were waiting until the wagons moved on, to scavenge the bones and intestines of last night’s roasted rabbits, plus whatever else we had left. I picked a cur, stared at it, and made pictures out of mind and will.

A well. It extended deep below me, but only a metre of curving brick wall above. I was wedged against the stone, my back braced on one side, my feet and hand holding my body in place. From below came the scent of water, above was grey dawn sky and the sudden song of a bird. All was pictured in as much clarity and detail as I could manage. I climbed, inching my body upward. One tiny bit closer to the top, then another, and always with the act of will that I had used in crossing over …

Darkness, cold, dirt choking my mouth—

No! Not the grave! Climb upward, upward, out of the well, cross over into the moor cur—

The grave disappeared. So did the well. Instead the world suddenly became black-and-white-and-grey, and infinitely strange. The air was layered in scents, richer than the dull sights, except when something moved – there, the flash of a curlew taking wing, and something in the distance was falling—

The falling thing was me. My body hit the wagon bed with a thud that woke John. He glared at me, rose to his knees to survey the camp, found nothing amiss. Instantly he went back to sleep.

I lay on the rough wood, Charlotte and Rawnie snoring
softly at the other end of the wagon, and I squeezed my eyes shut in gratitude. I had done it. For just a moment, I had entered the mind of the moor cur and left my body behind. If I could do it with a moor cur, then perhaps I could do it with a rat, a bird. I could not escape death in Galtryf, but now at least I could escape the pain of torture. The Brotherhood would kill my body. But now they could not force me to talk, as men have always been forced under great and continuous pain to tell their secrets. When the pain became too great, I would cross over into any creature available, and so would not babble of Maggie and my son. I would not betray them. Nor would I tell Soulvine anything that would aid them in their war.

But I must be able to sustain the crossing longer than a moment. I must practise.

Again I rose to my knees, this time wedging myself in the corner of the wagon in such a way that my body would not fall. The moor curs were still there. I didn’t know why I could do this – it should not have been possible. My father’s dogs had all been animals born in, and sent from, the Country of the Dead.

‘
Soul arts grow and change, Roger
.’ The web woman had thought me ‘nothing unusual’ – but I had known web women to be mistaken before. The well, the climb upward, the act of will, and again I crossed into the moor cur. Of all the strange sensations I had known on both sides of the grave, this was the strangest. I was the moor cur, and I was Roger Kilbourne. All I could see, hear, smell – and how keen were both hearing and smell! – came to me as the moor cur received them. And yet I knew I was a man, too. A man inhabiting an animal, but not bodily. My body stayed tranced in the wagon, as I used to leave it tranced when I crossed through the grave.

I made the moor cur turn its head. It did, without resistance or protest. Was its own will thus gone? No, for I sensed its fright at my presence, but it was fright muffled and ineffective, as if a fly buzzed beneath a pile of blankets.

A second moor cur approached me – us? it? – and sniffed. Had it sensed that I was somehow different? Apparently not, for the female stood beside me, her body relaxed. Was this my mate? I tried to reach the moor cur’s own mind – to reach beneath the blankets – and immediately found myself back in the wagon.

Pain throughout my whole body
. Weakness, gut-twisting hurt … I reached for the side of the wagon, to hang on to it, and my arms were too feeble to hold it. I did not have even enough strength to cry out.

This, then, was the cost. This was what had weakened the
hisaf
I had found in the Country of the Dead, nearly dead himself. This was what Macon and Dick had risked to cross into the dogs guarding Leo’s wagons. This was the cost to the
hisafs
inhabiting Shadow and Shep and the other grey dogs that had rescued me time and again. I had not known. And I had crossed into the cur only briefly. Would practice make the return any easier?

There was only one way to know.

When the weakness and dizziness had passed, I tried again. This time I was not thrust out of the beast but instead chose the time to return, which was when I saw the first man stirring near the embers of last night’s fire. The eastern sky blazed pink and gold. I crossed back into myself.

‘Roger’s sick!’

Rawnie, the first awake in the wagon. Her cry roused Charlotte and John. I slumped in my corner and believed I was dying. It would be better than this. A blaze of pain,
like standing in a fire. I could not move my arms or legs. I could not force words past my throat.

‘Roger?’ A cool hand on my forehead: Charlotte. ‘Why, you are burning with fever! Did you eat something bad last night?’

I could not answer. Nothing on my body worked. My bladder let go.

‘Faauughhh – he wet himself!’ Rawnie said. ‘Roger, you stink.’

I was glad to faint.

Nonetheless, I did it again. And again.

All that day, I practised. Whenever I felt strong enough to pull myself up on the side of the wagon, I leaned over it and pretended to retch. Each time there was some creature to cross into: a rabbit, a vole. Each time I crossed, my body collapsed into insensibility. Each time I returned, I was weak as an infant, not able to so much as lift my head.

‘He needs a healer,’ Charlotte said.

‘There are healers at Galtryf.’ Leo’s voice, full of rage. ‘He had best not die before we arrive there!’

If I could have, I would have smiled. Leo wanted me alive so he could kill me.

Someone pried open one of my eyelids. Rawnie. ‘Roger, are you still breathing?’

‘Leave him be, Rawnie!’

‘I just want to know if he still breathes!’

I breathed. I felt strength ebb and flow in my body. I felt pain and relief from pain. I saw the sun climb high in a blue sky and sink again, until shadows were long and the moon appeared, once again waxing towards full. And I practised.

I saw the world as a rabbit sees it, alive at ground level with a thousand rustlings and scents. I crossed into a
deer, seen fleetingly as it leaped a small swift brook and dashed away. I crossed into a swallow soaring above the wagon and became so dizzy with the strangeness of flight that I had to return to my body before I fell out of the sky.

In the evening I was too weak to leave the wagon and sit beside the fire. Charlotte tended me, putting crumbs of food into my mouth, holding the waterbag so I could drink. She stripped and washed my body, and I was too depleted to be shamed by her ministrations. That night I fell into sleep like a man tumbling off a high cliff and striking solid rock below.

Into such insensibility it seemed that no dreams could penetrate. But one did, although it came as
grey and blurry as if my vision were still affected by the blow from Leo’s gun. A figure, small, flickering – was it waving its arms? Yes. Somehow I sensed it was a girl, a child – oh, no, no …

Katharine, the little sister I had murdered?

But it was not. Colour flickered in and then out of the dream, reducing it to the grey tones of my sight as a moor cur. But the colour had been purple, and the girl waving her arms was little Princess Stephanie. She was crying
.

‘
Roger—’ Her voice came as from a great distance, which was true in life but never before in my dreams. Barely could I hear her. ‘She … is … almost … ready
.’

‘
Who?’ I shouted back across that unbridgeable distance. But I was not a web woman; I could not at will bridge the gulf between dreams. Stephanie did not answer me. More arm waving and then another voice, one I knew well, without body but as clear as if she stood at my elbow. Mother Chilton
.

‘
Where do they go?’ Mother Chilton asked, in the tone she had always taken with me: acerbic, slightly impatient, constantly reminding me of my shortcomings and failures
.

‘
Where do who go?’ I shouted back
, but both of them had
gone, the crying princess and the disembodied voice. I woke.

The sun had already risen. The camp bustled around the wagon. I could sit up without pain, although I still felt weak. And in mid-morning, we came at last to Galtryf.

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