The Aware (The Isles of Glory Book 1) (21 page)

When the ship sailed for The Hub, I was on board.

I went back to Duthrick, who was now a Councillor, but I was a hardened and more determined and tougher person. I expected, at the very most, for him to offer me little more than I had before. I expected him to look on me as merely an Aware henchwoman working in exchange for my keep and the chance not to be hounded from place to place as a noncitizen with no rights. I was prepared to fight for more than that.

To my amazement, we hadn’t exchanged more than a few words before I realised he was as desperate as I was: he needed me. He wasn’t wearing the smug I knew-you’d-be-back expression I’d expected; instead he was polite and smiled way too much. I sensed that, for once, I was the fiddler crab with the bigger claw in the confrontation … It was some time before I realised what had happened: Duthrick had earned his reputation for acuity and success because he’d had me to help him, me and my Awareness. On the strength of his successes, he had been able to win one of the elected Councillor posts—only to find that he was fast losing his ability to succeed at the tasks he was given now that he didn’t have a tame Awarewoman to help out.

In the end I had promise of regular pay, tacit permission to live in The Hub, and the promise that twenty years of service would buy me citizenship. I had sold my soul to the Keepers for the next twenty years…

I was just fifteen years old.

Letter from Researcher (Special Class) S. iso Fabold, National Department of Exploration, to Masterman M. iso Kipswon, President of the National Society for the Scientific, Anthropological and Ethnographical Study of non-Kellish Peoples.

Dated this day 43/1
st
Double/1793.

Dear Uncle,

Thank you for your kind words after the presentation. I was not certain whether it was well received, as it generated such heated discussion—but you are right. Such debate can only be good for the Society and the future of ethnographical studies…

Did I tell you that Lecturer Vescon iso Mattin approached me afterwards to say how shocked he was that I had made such an unprincipled hussy as Blaze Halfbreed the subject of my studies?! It just goes to show that there are still Kellish scientists who do not understand the true function of a field anthropologist. Little does he know how much I left out about the sexual mores of Blaze and Flame! One of the disadvantages of having ladies in the audience: one has to be so much more circumspect.

Do tell Aunt Rosris that I appreciated her kindness to me, as always. I am sending her a separate note to this affect, and do tell her that I found Miss Anyara to be an exceptional young lady. It is gratifying to meet one of the feminine gender with such a lively mind and a deep interest in ethnography. If she was shocked by the subject of my talk, she certainly did not show it, although she admitted afterwards that she found the idea that a woman would talk to a man about her life in such a frank way quite disconcerting.

I have undertaken to visit her and the Teron family next weekend at their country estate, not far from here.

I remain,

Your obedient nephew,

Shor iso Fabold

So there, you know a little more about me. It’s odd: I haven’t spoken of that part of my life for years, and now that I have, it is to someone who disbelieves half of what I tell him. Oh, don’t apologise. It really doesn’t matter. I find I am quite enjoying the reminiscence.

Anyway, to return to Gorthan Spit. I’d just left Duthrick to heal Flame while I went to find Niamor… It was only when I was on my way downstairs that I remembered I didn’t have the first idea of where the Quillerman would be. Then I started to worry: why hadn’t he been in touch with me? Over two days had passed, and I’d heard nothing.

I passed though the taproom, noting the group of silent Keepers sitting at a table; doubtless Duthrick’s bodyguards. On seeing me come down alone, one of them hurried for the stairs to check that his master was safe. I smiled sourly, acknowledging that at least Duthrick wasn’t fool enough to venture out alone. I glanced around to see if Tunn was well enough to be working, but it was Janko who was doing all the serving. He leered when he saw me—I seemed to stimulate that reaction in him just as the sight of food starts a dog dribbling—and I ignored him.

It was only once I was out in the street again that I began to feel puzzled. There had been something that wasn’t quite as it had been. Something about Janko. His feet—I tried to visualise the change, but I couldn’t catch hold of it. It didn’t seem important so I made a mental note to take a good look at his feet next time, then went on towards the docks.

I decided to try Niamor’s old place first, just on the off-chance that he had not moved.

It wasn’t a totally uneventful walk; a stroll in Gorthan Docks rarely was. A few hundred paces from the inn I was propositioned by a rather fleshy young man with no earlobe tattoo. He was drunk and I suspected that what he proposed was more wishful thinking than practical possibility. It was likely that he bore a brand like mine on his shoulder. I declined his offer and he promptly slumped down against a wall and went to sleep. If he did have the money he’d offered me, it would be missing by morning.

A little further on I had to make a detour to avoid a fight that involved ten or fifteen people wielding diverse weapons, all set to murder each other over some trivial matter, no doubt.

At Niamor’s place the vagrants were cluttering up the entrance again, their pitiful belongings clutched tight to their chests even in sleep. They ignored my banging on the downstairs door. No one answered from inside, but it didn’t matter much as the door wasn’t locked anyhow. I went in, groping in the darkness, feeling my way upstairs to the entrance of Niamor’s apartment. Even before I reached it, I could feel the dunmagic. I was glad I had warned Niamor.

His door wasn’t locked either.

I pushed it open and the wave of foetid badness hit me, making me recoil instinctively.

Then I heard faint sounds of movement: a soft rustle, a grunt. There was something alive in the darkness beyond the main room.

Dunmagic flickered aimlessly across the floor and furniture. By its light I found a lamp and fumbled in my belt pouch for a handflint. It seemed an age before I had it lit and was targeted by its yellow glow.

There appeared to be nothing untoward—and no one—in that first room. I carried the lamp into the next. I had my sword out in the other hand, and walked on the balls of my feet, ready for anything. The next room was Niamor’s bedroom.

At first glance there seemed to be nothing wrong. Nothing was disturbed. The smell, however, was vile; a stench of rottenness that was so strong it teared my eyes and rasped my throat as I inhaled.

And then I saw the cause.

Niamor was there, lying on the bed. Another victim of a magic so foul it ought to have been shunned into extinction by every living creature…

He was alive, if that can be called living. The only thing recognisable about him was the gold ‘Q’ in his earlobe, and that was because there was a small section of skin surrounding the tattoo that was clear and uninfected. The rest of him was a swollen mass of green rottenness, so engorged with corruption that his arms and legs and neck were mired in gross rolls of it. His agony was a tangible thing, streaking out to meet me, slamming into me with the power to take my breath.

‘Oh God—’ My gasped words were an appeal to a being I really didn’t believe in.

I knelt by his side and laid a hand on his bloated cheek. He had once been so handsome. My hand shook. I wanted to do something, end this, make it all go away, stop his pain; I wanted to stop
my
pain. The grief hurt—badly. First Tunn, now Niamor.
Because of me
.

It took all my control just to speak in a whisper. ‘Niamor, it’s me. Blaze.’

He looked at me with smudged, hopeless eyes framed by lids so swollen he could barely lever them apart. ‘Kill me,’ he said. I only heard him because my face was so close to his lips.

‘Yes.’ I swallowed. He was already long beyond saving. ‘Who is he, Niamor?’

He tried to tell me, but I couldn’t understand the sounds that came from his distorted throat. His eyes left me to look into the main room.

I guessed at what he was trying to say. ‘On the desk?’

There was the faintest of nods.

‘Is there anyone I should inform? Any message?’

This time there was a slight movement of negation. Thirty-five or so years of living, and he had no one to care whether he lived or died. The tragedy of that touched me; it was too much mine. Outcasts, making the best of our world. Yet in the end we died alone…

I said, ‘I’ll make you a promise, Niamor—one day I’ll kill him, for you.’

I could barely hear his whispered, ‘Yes.’ I bent my head to hear him better. ‘Firebrand…a pity.’ There was the tiniest upturn of his lips that could have been a regretful smile. Under different circumstances, we would have had time to be friends. He hadn’t deserved this.

I kept my voice and my hand steady only with an effort. ‘Now Niamor?’

His mouth formed the assent, but this time there was no sound. I kissed his cheek and the foulness of his decay seared my lips. His neck was so bloated I couldn’t find the right place to stop his arterial blood flow and render him unconscious. I had to kill him while his eyes still looked at me, begging, reproachful… It was almost beyond my capacity.

I put the tip of my sword against his breast and thrust it in at an upward angle, hard, so that it would slip under his lowest rib and enter his heart. Then I twisted it. He arched, bursting over-stretched skin, spilling green rottenness, and died.

I withdrew the blade, wiped it clean and didn’t look at him again. I couldn’t. I vomited over the mat and lurched towards the main room. I was staggering, drunk on horror and pain, as I turned to his desk. I huddled into the chair, my head in my hands, the smell of death in my nostrils.

I have been forced to kill two people in my life whose deaths have seared me, and the memories of those deaths have continued to ravage me through the years. Niamor’s was the first. Even now I sometimes wake in the night, sweating, and the smell of that room is as strong in my nostrils as it was then…

It was a long time before I could bring my revulsion under control enough to enable me to look at the papers scattered on the desk.

I blessed those Menod patriarchs who had instructed me in the rudiments of reading, then aroused in me a passion for the written word that had made me interested enough to read anything I could get my hands on. I had no problem with Niamor’s precise script.

The first sheet was a rough plan of the taproom of
The
Drunken Plaice
, with all the tables and chairs sketched in. Beside most of the chairs there was a name. Some of them I recognised: Niamor himself, Sickle, Flame, Tor, Noviss, and Blaze. This was how everyone had been seated at lunch that first day, and one of these people must be the dunmaster.

The next sheet I looked at listed the same names in no particular order. Every single one of them had been crossed out. Beside most of them there were notations of some sort, usually indicating the length of time the person had been on Gorthan Spit.
‘Houch the Hulk,’
I read,
‘Slaver, Breth, been coming Gorthan S. 18 yrs. Tom Gessler, fishmonger, Gorthan D. resident 6 yrs. Tor Ryder, Stragglers, profession unknown, 1 week, on trader from Keeper Isles.’
And so on. There wasn’t a single person who matched the criteria I wanted: an arrival on Gorthan Spit that coincided with the beginnings of the dunmagic troubles. Yet Niamor, dying and in agony, had indicated the desk. He had expected something on these papers to mean something to me. The answer was there somewhere, if only I could see it.

Half an hour later I did. And when I did, I wished I hadn’t.

###

I left for the inn in a hurry. I didn’t even ransack Niamor’s room to take whatever he had of value. Perhaps I wouldn’t have done that anyway; the manner of his death had scored me deep, and I might never have been able to bring myself to stay there longer than I did. Later, when the horror had faded, I regretted my haste to be gone. I could always have done with more money and I don’t think he would have minded. Besides, I have nothing to remember him by, nothing but my memory of the way he looked before he died…and that’s a memory I never wanted.

Anyway, I left his things for the scavengers and strode off to the inn, my heart beating uncomfortably fast. Fear was beginning to replace the revulsion within me as I thought this through. Somehow I didn’t think that Niamor had been killed because he knew the identity of the dunmaster, for how could the dunmaster have guessed Niamor knew? And if he had guessed he would have searched the Quillerman’s rooms, destroyed his papers—but that hadn’t happened.

In fact, I didn’t even think the dunmaster had been in his rooms. All those traces of dunspell colour had not been left by him; they had spilled from the excess within Niamor’s body. The bastard had probably placed his dunspell without Niamor even being aware it had been done, while he was in a bar somewhere, or walking down a street. Niamor had probably just felt a little sick, returned to his rooms, and by the time he’d realised just what had been done to him, he’d been too ill to move.

And why? I thought I knew: Niamor had died simply because the dunmaster was playing with us—with me, with Ransom and Flame, perhaps with Tor (for now that I knew the identity of the dunmaster, I had little reason to believe he was unaware of Tor’s involvement) and indirectly, with Duthrick, too. We represented all the things he would hate most: the Menod, sylvs, Awarefolk, a Keeper agent, the Keeper Council. The dunmaster enjoyed seeing us squirm on his hook. Enjoyed having us know that anyone who helped us was doomed. What was it Flame had said about Morthred?
He prefers to keep his victims alive.
We were his real victims; Niamor merely a tool to hurt us. To hurt me.
Morthred.
I felt sick.

###

The innkeeper was serving in the taproom, in a foul temper because he hadn’t seen Tunn for three days and now Janko had disappeared—again. It seemed Janko was not renowned for his reliability. Duthrick’s Keeper bodyguards were still there, still coldly sober and still sending suspicious looks my way.

I ignored them, asked mine host for some swillie, and while he was filling the mug from the barrel, I inquired how long Janko had been working for him. ‘How in all the islands should I know?’ came the bad-tempered reply. ‘A few months, I guess. Too frigging long. That palsied cripple’s
never
here when he should be.’

I realised then what had been different about Janko’s foot. I felt even sicker. I gulped down the drink, which I really needed, and went on up to Flame’s room.

Flame, it seemed, was entertaining guests, even though it must have been two in the morning by then. Her room seemed full of people: Duthrick was still there and Tor and Ransom had joined him. A rather unkempt and sleepy Dustel, presumably Ruarth Windrider, was perched on the inner window sill. I glanced at Flame who smiled wanly in my direction and I saw to my relief how much better she was. She might have been tired and weak, but her colour was normal. I flickered my eyes towards Ruarth, then looked at Duthrick and returned my glance to her. My unspoken message was barely discernible, yet she caught it; she might not have understood the full implications of my worry, but she saw straight away that I was concerned that Duthrick might know Ruarth was sentient. She gave a faint shake of her head and I allowed her to see the relief in my eyes. I wanted her to appreciate how important I thought it was that Duthrick did not know about Ruarth, and I blessed the ease with which we seemed to be able to communicate without words.

I turned my attention back to the others. Duthrick was bristling irately, as tense as a beached pufferfish, although not everyone could have read the signals as well as I did. He stood rigidly straight, the arch of his eyebrows almost hitting his hairline, his eyes now the cloudy indigo colour of an angered sea-star. Ransom was flushed red and his fists were clenched. Ruarth had his head cocked so that one deep blue eye stared at the Syr-sylv. Tor was leaning against the window sill next to the Dustel, arms folded, a cynical smile playing at the edges of his mouth but never quite breaking out. He at least looked composed—until he noticed the expression on my face.