The Aware (The Isles of Glory Book 1) (29 page)

I thrashed around to scare the demons off, but I knew I would soon exhaust myself doing that. In the end, I started to collect the creatures, stuffing them into the sleeve of the jacket I had unintentionally removed from the guard. I tied a knot in the bottom of one sleeve, and every time I caught one of the beasts, I stuffed it down through the armhole and gripped the sleeve so it couldn’t get out again. I wasn’t quick enough to snare all of them in time; several managed to wriggle under my clothing and settle on to my back. Every second that passed before I could prise them off was unmitigated hell. Still, by the time the sea was washing around my ankles, I had a sleeve full of the things—and no idea of what I was going to do next. There were still more of them and even if the hole dried out entirely, it wouldn’t worry them. They could move across rock as fast as through water, and they homed in on cuts like a trained Fen Island lurger hunting swamp shrimps.

I thought of trying to throw them, one by one, out of the hole, but if I missed, then they’d just fall back in. And even if I did get them on to the lip of the hole, they might very well have wriggled back in.

Finally, when part of the bottom of the hole became dry at low tide, I knew I had the solution to my problem. I found a loose stone and used it smash the blood-demons, one by one, into little pieces against the rocky floor of my prison. I’d never before found such satisfaction in killing as I did then.

Once most of the water had gone, I set about clearing the place of the creatures altogether. I overturned rocks, searched the pools, looked under the lumps of seaweed and found, as well as blood-demons, the remains of at least two people, probably more. There were bones everywhere, bleached white by sun and sea.

In the end, though, I was fairly certain that I had cleared the area of the bastards. When I sat very still for a time in a final attempt to lure any lurking ones out into the open, I was unmolested. Only after that did I feel free to look at other things. I examined the sides of the hole and attempted to climb out, but not even a ghemph could have got up that sheer face. It was slimy and as smooth as eelskin, no cracks, no crannies, quite impossible to grip. Worse still, there was an overhang at the top.

I hadn’t done much else when my jailers, two of them, arrived back with food and water. They looked down on me without compassion. One of them yelled, ‘Morthred wants to know how you like the blood-demons?’

I didn’t reply.

‘He also wants to tell you that your Cirkasian friend is enjoying her task!’

My heart beat faster but I didn’t move.

Two bundles, both well wrapped in a tangle of dried seaweed so that they didn’t split when they hit the bottom, came tumbling down to splat into wet sand. Their job done, the guards disappeared. I tried not to think about what they had said.

There was a drinkskin of water, most of which I drank immediately. I needed it badly by then. There were also the staples of Gorthan Spit: dried fish, shrimp paste and cooked seaweed. As a meal, I’d had better. I ate more sparingly than I had drunk.

I had barely finished when I heard another sound from above. I looked up and saw Eylsa peering over the rim of the hole. She drew back her lips in what she probably imagined was a grin; she was trying to show me how glad she was to see me in a way that she thought I would recognise, but she made a bad job of it. Smiles did not come naturally to ghemphic faces. Still, I had never been so happy to see the ugly flat features of her breed before.

I smiled back and raised a hand in salute.

‘There was someone guarding you back there, did you know?’ she asked. I hadn’t, but I supposed it made sense. Morthred wasn’t going to let me sit out in the open without someone around to make sure no one found me. ‘I’m afraid I’ve killed him,’ she continued. ‘It’s odd how easy it is when you’re a ghemph—he didn’t expect it, you see. And humans always forget about the claws… That’s two people I’ve killed in two days.’

I didn’t know what to say.

‘I’ll have to fetch a rope,’ she added. ‘I’ll be back!’

‘Wait!’ I shouted up at her. ‘Don’t go back to Creed! Get away while you can—’

She grinned some more and was gone.

‘
Shit!
Eylsa!’ I yelled after her, but she didn’t come back. I just had to hope that she wasn’t going back to Creed. What if she did, and was caught? Much better that she circle around back to the Docks and get some rope from there, than risk her neck again in Creed. I could wait.

Then I started to torment myself, thinking about Tor. What if I was wrong? What if…?
Don’t think about it, you fool.

I sat down with a sigh. The tide showed no sign of turning yet. I remembered that in double moon months sometimes there was only one tide a day; sometimes four. This looked like being the former. I sighed again. That meant I would have to spend most of the night in the water, fending off blood-demons in the dark; I didn’t have the slightest doubt that the incoming tide would bring a fresh batch of the little horrors.

I looked over at the far corner of the hole, where it dipped down on the seaward side—where the water was forced in as the tide rose. That part had never dried out; there was a deep pool there still. Presumably under there somewhere was a tunnel that led out to the sea. I tried to visualise how far it was to the open water. And I wondered about the width of the tunnel.

I picked up the drinkskin and looked at it closely. It was made from the swim bladder of a seacow; it was absolutely water tight. The bag part of it narrowed to a funnel, and this had been tightly corked.

I looked back at the pool, and decided to go for a swim, or more accurately, a dive. I found the exit to the sea: here at least it was large enough for a person to enter. The water inside was surging to and fro in response to the movement of waves on the seaward side. I swam in a little way to find that it narrowed quite soon until it was more like a pipe. It was still large enough for a person, but if I entered that narrow part, I’d never be able to turn around. I’d be committed…the sea or nothing. And I had an idea that the swim was too far for one lungful of air, always assuming that the tunnel was wide enough for me to fit through all the way to the end. Once out in the ocean, there was the danger of being beaten to death against the rock face, and if I survived that, it would be a long swim to a beach.

All of which made the tunnel a last resort escape.

I came out of the pool and went to sit in the sun to dry out. I felt sticky with salt and wondered just how anyone could live this kind of existence for six weeks. My clothes would stiffen in the sun, and rub my skin. I wondered if it wasn’t better to take them off altogether. I had just decided that if Eylsa did not come back to rescue me that day, that’s what I would do, when I realised I had company again.

Ruarth.

He flew in and sat on a rock beside me.

‘You tell Flame,’ I said coldly, ‘that if—
if—
we get out of this alive, I am going to personally strangle her with both hands. Get that? You tell her!’

He just looked at me. He was a mess. He hadn’t preened himself for some time. His feathers were as droopy and as listless as the way he stood there, just looking. I sighed and said, more kindly, ‘But then I don’t suppose she’s listening to you any more than she’d listen to me, eh?’

He shook his head and then launched into an excited babble.

I interrupted. ‘I can guess what you’re trying to say. And there’s no need to explain—I know
exactly
what she’s done, the hard-eyed Cirkasian bint, and when I lay my hands on her…’ I sighed and looked at him. ‘Thanks for finding me, anyway. Is there anything else you need to tell me?’

He nodded.

I thought for a moment about what he might think I needed to know. ‘Flame went to see the Keepers after we were taken?’

Another nod.

‘And they confirmed they are intending to attack Creed?’

Another nod.

‘Good. Now I need to know when. Today?’

He shook his head and held up a foot with two claws extended.

‘In two days time?’ I asked, praying he didn’t mean in two weeks. ‘The day after tomorrow?’

He nodded again.

I wished it would be sooner. What the hell was Duthrick up to, taking so long about it? Was he hoping that Janko-Morthred was going to turn up at
The Drunken Plaice
and he could be dealt with there when he wasn’t backed by a village full of subverted sylvs and fellow dunmagickers? But surely Duthrick would have figured out why Morthred had bothered with a waiter’s guise in the first place: it was an ideal way to keep an eye on newcomers to Gorthan Docks. Anyone who was anybody would sooner or later arrive at
The Drunken Plaice.
Morthred, killing time until the full return of his powers, had wanted to know what was happening throughout the Isles—what better place to wait than an inn? But once everyone knew he was a dunmagicker, his disguise was of no more use. Surely Duthrick, having spoken to Flame, would realise that Morthred wasn’t going to go back.

Then I had another thought: maybe it was my disappearance that was the problem. Duthrick had said he needed my Awareness; perhaps seeing that I was gone, he was going to wait until he could find another one of the Awarefolk to replace me. Now that would be the ultimate irony—the sort of thing that had happened too many times in my life for me to be surprised.

In the end I gave up trying to outguess Duthrick.

I continued my questioning of the Dustel. ‘What time is the attack planned for? Um, dawn?’ Right first time.

I thought about what information I should pass on. In the end I told Ruarth about Eylsa and added, ‘Now, I need to know what I should do if I do get out of this place today. I need to know where Flame and Tor are. Uh—do you know what Morthred is making Flame do to Tor today?’

He shook his head.

I told him. If it was possible for a bird to blanch, then he did. I asked if he had seen Flame that day.

He shook his head again.

‘Damn. Then I’ll just wait for the ghemph and see what she says.’

Ruarth burst into a flurry of chatter and movement which meant absolutely nothing to me. I looked at him in frustration. Then he hopped down to the sand at my feet and began to write with his beak. The letters were badly formed and then scuffed about by his own feet, but I managed to make out ‘I go Creed find Tor.’

‘Well, all right. But be very, very careful Ruarth. Tor is probably out of your reach for the time being, down in the torture chamber with Flame and Domino. Or somewhere recovering from what she is supposed to do to him.’

He nodded.

‘And Ruarth, try to get her out of there.’

He didn’t acknowledge that. He spread his wings in a brilliant gleam of blue and was gone.

I wondered how he had found me. If he hadn’t seen Tor, then I thought that the most likely way was that he had overheard some dunmagicker mention my predicament; even so, it was clever of him to have discovered me so soon. That was one of the few things I knew for certain where Ruarth Windrider was concerned: he was bright. Otherwise, he was a mystery to me.

I trusted him, but I didn’t have a clear picture of his character. How could I form an impression when I couldn’t understand what he said to me, when everything had to be interpreted through Flame, who loved him? I couldn’t even tell what he was thinking by his facial expression: he didn’t have one! Nor could I imagine what it was like to be a human trapped in a bird’s body, to have been
born
a bird.

In addition, as far as I was concerned, the kind of love Flame and Ruarth had for one another was incomprehensible. How could anyone fall in love with someone who bore a different form? Yet those two were in love in the real sense of that expression, in every way except the physical one. I had often been touched by Ruarth’s concern for Flame; and there had been times when he seemed humanlike in his love, but there were other times—while eating flies, for example—when he seemed wholly avian and I had no empathy with him at all, and found it hard to imagine how Flame not only empathised, but loved.

One day, I promised myself, I would learn the Dustel’s language. Then perhaps I would understand why a beauty like Flame loved a man who was a bird small enough to hold in her hand.

The water was beginning to swirl back into the hole by the time Eylsa came back. I’d be lying if I said I hadn’t been hoping she would return quickly and get me out of there. The whole idea of spending a night in those waters was enough to raise the hairs on the back of my neck. In the dark, one couldn’t see the blood-demons…

The only trouble was that she didn’t come back to free me; she came back a prisoner. I never did discover exactly how or where they had captured her, but I suspect that a guard sent out to relieve the one she had killed may have seen and caught her. She had no experience with my kind of life: the sneaking around, the thinking ahead, taking care to look after one’s own skin before all else…

When I saw her, she was standing on the top of the hole between two dunmagickers—genuine ones. One of them called out to me, grinning. ‘Thought you were going to be rescued, did you? Too bad, halfbreed!’ And then, with breathtaking callousness, he pushed her over the edge.

With some desperate idea of catching her I leapt up and lunged forward, but I was too late. There was just a finger-width of water covering the rock on which she fell; no more than that.

I will never forget the sound her body made when it hit the rocks.

I knelt beside her. ‘Eylsa —?’

She had landed face down. There was blood everywhere. I gently untied the bag she wore on her back and laid it aside. I was too scared to roll her over; I was afraid of hurting her, afraid to see what she had broken.

Above me a mocking voice called down: ‘Thought you’d like the company, halfbreed!’ I didn’t bother to look up.

She was alive. She moved her head a little and groaned.

‘Eylsa —?’

She moved again and then spoke. ‘Blaze?’

‘Yes. I’m here. How badly are you hurt? Can you move at all?’

She was silent so long, I would have thought her unconscious if I hadn’t seen that she was making some attempt to move. Finally she said, ‘My face hurts. My arm is broken. I hurt inside. Help me on to my back, Blaze.’

I did so, gently rolling her over. Then I saw the extent of the damage. Her nose was broken and bloodied, her teeth smashed, her arm was crooked, but none of that alarmed me as much as her laboured breathing and the bright frothiness of the blood that oozed out of her mouth. Her ribs had gone through her lungs. God only knows how she managed to speak.

I looked up in rage and hate. The rim of the blowhole was deserted.

‘I’m sorry,’ she said.

She
was sorry! ‘Oh, Eylsa. It doesn’t matter. The Keepers will be here the day after tomorrow. Someone will pull me out of here eventually. I can wait.’

She nodded faintly. ‘I hurt, Blaze.’

‘Yes, I know.’ She would read my tone, I knew. I was telling her she was going to die. I knew what the froth at her mouth meant, the strangeness of the sound of her breathing; even Garrowyn Gilfeather and his Mekaté medications could not mend that kind of injury. A sylv might have healed the damage, but only if they acted immediately.

Her next words told me that she understood and wanted me to know what was important while she could still talk. ‘Alain—I moved him. I found a ladder… Seemed wise. He’s hiding—a store shed—on the right as you…enter Creed…from the south.’

It was difficult to follow her; her speech was distorted. I wiped blood from her mouth. ‘I understand. That was a good idea. When they knew we had escaped, they might have taken it out on him. But where did you go? One moment you were there with us, then you weren’t.’

‘Forgive…not brave. Can’t fight. Chimney…to the roof. They hadn’t seen…me.’

I thought back to the torture room and the wide chimney above the fireplace. I nodded. ‘You were sensible. You couldn’t have changed what happened.’

‘Wish I could.’

‘Don’t talk if it hurts, Eylsa.’ I was kneeling beside her, wanting to take her in my arms but afraid to do so, knowing it would hurt her. Instead I held her hand.

‘Want to. So much to…say. Looked for you everywhere. Couldn’t find. Then heard slaves talking…followed guards…found you.’ She clutched my hand tight. ‘Friend.’

‘Yes. Always.’

‘Not just Eylsa. We are one. All of us. The pod.’

I didn’t understand that at all, but I nodded anyway.

‘Want to give…you…something. Raise…my…head…’

I wrapped the bag she had brought inside the guard’s coat and, very gently, put the bundle under her head. Her breathing eased a little when she was raised. ‘Want to…mark…your palm.’

I had no idea of the significance of that, but I asked softly, ‘How?’

‘With my claws…’

I nodded and put my right hand by her feet. I forbore from mentioning that another cut was going to cause me problems with blood-demons. It was obviously important to her, so I acquiesced. This was the way they did the ear tattoos, I knew—using their claws. I hadn’t known, though, just how razor sharp those talons were until they sliced into my palm, leaving a thin trail of blood. Even as I watched, I saw that there was a liquid that dripped through the hollow groove in the centre of the claw, so that each time she pricked me, a drop was left behind, mingling with my blood, seeping into the cut. She was in pain, dying, yet she moved her toe—just one—with precision and complete control until she had completed the pattern she wanted. It looked like a curled ‘M’ with a horizontal line behind it.

‘That’s a bouget…symbol…water vessel…my people. Place your palm in my blood.’

I did as she asked. I put my hand face down in the blood that had come from her mouth and now covered her neck. Our blood mingled. The wound tingled like bubbles were breaking in the cut.

‘My name…is Mayeen. Remember it.’

‘Your spirit name?’

She nodded. ‘Show your palm…to my people…if you need their help…’

I was moved. I kissed her cheek. ‘Mayeen,’ I said, ‘I thank you.’

She spoke only once more. A few minutes later, when she reached up to touch my left earlobe, she said, ‘I wish I could have…’

‘It doesn’t matter,’ I said, and for the first time in my life, it really didn’t. ‘It has been a privilege to know you, Mayeen.’

She didn’t speak again, but she was a long time dying.

###

I sat on a rock with the water swirling around my ankles and Eylsa’s body in my arms, stupidly reluctant to release her to the rising water. She was dead, what did it matter what happened to her body? But it did. It mattered like hell.

I still couldn’t understand what had made her give me the gift of her name. What had I ever done for her? It was she who had helped me; freeing me from the yoke and then dying in an attempt to rescue me. All I had done was to treat her exactly the way I would have treated anyone else in similar circumstances. I had liked her, it’s true, but as she died she made me special to her. I felt inadequate, less than I should have been. Someone had died for me, someone whose kind I had once despised, and now all I had once cared for—the search for citizenship, the wealth, the security—seemed petty. What did any of it matter? I would have given it all to have Eylsa whole and well. The life of a ghemph was suddenly worth more than all my ambitions.

###

I was still sitting there when Morthred came. He wasn’t alone: Flame was with him, and so was Tor.

I had eyes only for Tor. He was supported, or rather dragged by two armed subverted sylvs and he was naked and shackled, hand and foot. There were several other guards as well; Morthred evidently enjoyed overdoing the security measures these days. They pushed Tor to the edge of the hole so that I could see him.

I didn’t move. I sat where I was, up to my waist in water, still holding Eylsa, but I couldn’t take my eyes off him. He stared sightlessly outwards, not looking down at me. I could see what Flame had created: eyeless sockets, bloodied mouth, mutilated manhood—but I saw it all as a sylvmagic haze blurring the reality. Only then did I know just how much I had worried that she wouldn’t be able to do it, that his mutilation would be real. Only then did I acknowledge that one part of me had feared Morthred really had subverted her a second time.

I don’t think I heard the mocking torments they yelled down at me; if I did, I don’t remember them now. I don’t even remember seeing them any more; I, who had once not known what it was to weep, was crying too hard.

Then they went away and left me there.

###

What had made Flame do such an insanely dangerous thing? To follow us voluntarily into Morthred’s lair, pretending his dunmagic spell and her arm had never been removed, pretending his spell really had subverted her? To step voluntarily into the purgatory of an existence at Morthred’s side, to be abused by him as he willed? One mistake, one false move and she would doom herself—not to death, but to an even worse kind of perverted, degrading slavery. Her magic was enough to make him see and feel the arm, but it wasn’t enough for her to pick something up with it. The deception wouldn’t have been an easy one to maintain and one tiny slip was all that was needed for Morthred to guess that her left arm was not real. And if he realised that, he would guess why it had been removed and he would know that she lied, that her subversion was a sham.

I remembered the dunmagic that played over her—Morthred’s traces on her skin. I remembered the way she’d flinched when he mentioned the night. No, it wasn’t purgatory, she was living in hell already. A volunteer in hell.
And she had known what he would want of her
…

He had already raped her once before. Even if he never guessed at her deception, she had known she would suffer.

She was a paradox: sometimes made of marlin horn, hard and unbreakable; sometimes as soft and as vulnerable as fish spawn tossed in the tide. She could do something so brave it gave me spine-crawls just to think of it; but she couldn’t harden herself to the violations of her body. She didn’t have my shell. I sensed she couldn’t have done it at all if Ruarth hadn’t been there to support her: she couldn’t stand alone the way I could.

I looked down at Eylsa again.

And I didn’t know what I had done to deserve such friends. I still don’t.

I released the ghemph into the water.

###

I plucked Eylsa’s bag out of the sea as it floated past and opened it up; she had brought me food and water and a rope. I forced myself to eat and drink; I needed my strength to face the night ahead. The rope was useless—there was nothing around the rim of the hole that I could lasso so that I could haul myself up. And doubtless there was now another guard on duty up there somewhere as well.

As I dropped the rope into the water, I caught sight of the mark that Eylsa had etched on my palm. My eyes widened; it had healed already, and there was nothing normal about the scar it had left. It was gold. It shone like the flash of a carp leaping into the sunlight.

You have noticed it, of course. It’s still there—see?—just as beautiful as it was that first day. Her gift to me—the bouget, the symbol of her people—and, as I was to discover, a mark that was to ensure me the unquestioning support of all ghemphs from the Calments to the Spatts. A mark bought with her dying blood.