The Aware (The Isles of Glory Book 1) (30 page)

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

Uncle,

I did examine the ‘bouget’ she refers to here. It is exactly as she described it: a tattoo inlaid with gold. The gold is flexible so that it does not hinder hand movements, and it must therefore be paper thin. Paradoxically, it does not seem to have worn away. (Remember, she is stating that it was done some fifty years or more earlier!) If she is telling the truth about how she came by it—which I doubt—then how can it be real gold? Yet it must be, surely, for it was not tarnished. I did ask if we could scrape away a sample for testing, but she refused in a way that made me think it would be unwise to ask a second time.

Shor iso Fabold

Dated this day 1/1
st
Darkmoon /1793

The morning brought still more horror.

I had wondered at the relative absence of blood-demons during the night; only one had fastened itself to me and I’d quickly got rid of that.

In the morning the absence was explained.

Eylsa’s body rolled in the swell nearby, and her face had been eaten away. What was left of her head was covered in blood-demons.

Even in death, she had kept me safe.

###

The tide was going out. By mid-morning, when Ruarth came back, I was standing knee deep. I knew the moment I saw him that something was wrong; there was an urgency to the way he flew. I held out my arm and he alighted, already crying out his agitation.

I interrupted, naming the worst possible thing I could think of: ‘Morthred discovered her subversion was a sham.’

He nodded.

‘
Damn him to the Trench
.’ I thought of Tor, sightless, tongueless, maimed—for real, this time. I thought of what Morthred might do to Flame. The first thing he would do, in fact: put another spell of subversion into her body. ‘He’s done it to her again,’ I said, my voice no more than a whisper.

He nodded. He was shivering, in shock.

Not again.
‘When? Just now?’

He nodded again. His claws dug into my arm, communicating his fear, his grief.

‘Tor?’ My tongue felt thick.

He shrugged. He didn’t know.

I knew what I had to do. ‘Listen, Ruarth, Eylsa’s dead. I’m going to try to get out of here by myself, through the tunnel where the water comes in, but I may not make it. You will have to fly to Duthrick and get him to attack today.’ I was already tearing a patch out of my shirt. I ripped open my finger on a piece of shell I rummaged from the sand beneath my feet and I wrote a message in blood on the cloth:
URGNT ATTCK TDAY.
Then I found myself frowning. Duthrick would never act on a note like that alone, just at my request, without any reason given. I squeezed some more blood out and added TO SAVE CSTLEMD and I signed it in the way I had always signed my personal communications to him: ‘B’ . ‘We’ll just have to hope that Duthrick still has enough faith in my judgement, and that he still trusts me enough to take notice of this. Take it and go, Ruarth. If you can’t find Duthrick, give it to anyone on the
Keeper Fair
.’

He took the cloth in both claws and I threw him into the air.

He disappeared and I readied for my dive.

I emptied both drinkskins— the one Eylsa had given me and the original one from the guards—and filled them with air, recorking them tightly. I made a cord with material torn from the guard’s coat, and tied it to each drinkskin so that I could hang them around my neck. Then I breathed deeply a number of times, and dived into the mouth of the tunnel, dragging the drinkskins with me.

The first part was easy enough. The drinkskins were buoyant, but the tunnel roof stopped them from floating away. There was room enough for me to swim, and there was light.

A little further in, the horror began. The tunnel narrowed and my body blocked off the light from behind. The light ahead was so far away it was nothing more than a murky suggestion in the darkness. I dribbled air out of my mouth and the bubbles bounced against the rock above me. I had no room to swim properly so I pulled myself along, grasping at the roof and floor. I had some help from the wash of the tide, but there was also an occasional surge of a wave that wanted to take me the opposite way.

And the tunnel thinned still further.

I was running out of air. The rock was closing in on me. I reached a narrow point and had to squeeze my body through, arms and air bladders first, then head. My hips stuck. I needed air. I eased the cork out of the first of the drinkskins and took the opening into my mouth. The sweetness of the breath I inhaled was heaven. I breathed back into the bladder: the air was too precious to waste. I was going to have to reuse it until it was too stale to be of any benefit.

I was still stuck. I kicked desperately; pushed against the rock behind with my feet. I moved a shade forward—and wedged myself even tighter. In a panic, I tried to move backwards, and couldn’t. I was trapped. The panic swelled. I didn’t want to die like this, to be eaten by blood-demons…

I tried twisting sideways. I clawed at the rock with my fingertips, tearing my skin. I pushed and pulled and squirmed. And I remained stuck. Sailors believe hell must be like that: dark and cold and lonely and fearful, without the promise of hope; they call it the Great Trench below, filled only with darkness and the unimaginable.

When the air in the first bag was gone, I switched to the other, postponing death by a breath or two, as unwilling as ever to admit that I was defeated.

Then pain ripped through me, a shocking, unexpected agony so great that it took a moment for me to pinpoint its place: my ankles, both of them—blood-demons settling into the ulcers that constant exposure to sea water had reopened. I couldn’t stand the horror of it, being eaten alive, being digested by their disgusting acids, being unable to reach back and tear them from me. My frantic struggles were irrational, but my frenzy brought success. I popped out into the wider part of the passage. The pain didn’t end. It went on and on and I still couldn’t twist back to get at the cause; the passage was nowhere wide enough. It bored straight on, too narrow to allow me to swim freely, and the light ahead was still dim and distant. I knew I didn’t have enough air to make that swim, but I started anyway, driven on by pain, desperate to get somewhere where I could rip those creatures from my feet.

The pain defeated me. I don’t know if the air in the second bladder was even finished when I lost it; I was beyond rationality, beyond anything but panic. I opened my mouth to scream—and took in air.

Water surged, bumping me against the roof. I gulped and swallowed some. Again I wanted to scream, again I breathed air. There were pockets of air, air that had been caught in wave turbulence at the entrance, then forced back along the passage by the tide. I twisted over on to my back, pressed my nose to the roof and breathed long deep, steady breaths.

Rationality returned. I scraped my feet along the tunnel walls until I tore the blood-demons free. Without the pain I could think. I rolled over again and set off for the light, pulling myself along, feeling for more hollows in the roof where there were air pockets. I knew then that I would make it.

To shoot up to the surface, to be in the light and air again should have been heaven, but the first thing that happened to me was that I was flung against the cliff by an incoming wave. The tide might have been on its way out, but the waves weren’t. I could breathe, but I was in danger of being battered to death. I did the one thing that could save me—I went back down under the water. I dived and caught the undertow out beyond the breaking of the waves.

When I emerged again, I still wasn’t far enough out. I dived once more and this time angled myself across the waves instead of directly into them. The next time I came up, I was out of danger. I had also picked up another blood-demon. I rid myself of that by stuffing it inside the pocket of my tunic, and started a long, tough swim back towards Creed.

I was tired. I hadn’t slept in well over twenty-four hours; I seemed to have been battling waves, blood-demons and my own grief and terrors for as long as I could remember. I might live, but perhaps the man I loved was being torn to pieces, perhaps the woman I cared for was being turned into something irrevocably evil. My message to Duthrick, my escape, this infernal swim: everything I was doing might be too late…

When Ruarth found me I was just beginning to swim in towards the beach close to Creed.

I trod water as I spoke to him. ‘Did you find Duthrick?’

He fluttered around, nodding. He made some odd movements, and it took me a moment to realise that he was trying to show me something. At first I couldn’t see what it was, but when I drifted up on the crest of a swell, I saw it. There were two ships under sail, the first just about to make anchor opposite Creed, a little way further up the coast. ‘Keepers?’ I asked.

He nodded.

Two
ships. So that was what Duthrick had been waiting for—reinforcements. Not another one of the Awarefolk, but another ship. And the right combination of tide and current that would enable ships to leave the harbour at Gorthan Docks once more.

I started swimming again, this time towards the nearest of the ships.

###

I had never heard such a noise. Never.

It wasn’t like thunder, although that was the closest thing I could think of to describe it. It was as if the air itself was being rent apart from sky to ground. It was a sound so loud that it could be
felt
. It hurt my ears. I felt the shock of it through the water. It was the loudest thing I had ever heard, and the most unnatural. And yet I couldn’t believe it could be man-made. I thought it was some sort of divine intervention—I was almost ready to convert to the Menod, to believe than somehow Alain had called up God himself to vent His anger.

I was barely a hundred paces from the first of the now anchored ships, the
Keeper Fair
. They were both encased in webs of sylv warding: blue-spun threads and panes of silver-shimmer connected the undulating ward pillars that stretched from the mast top to waterline. I saw puffs of smoke all along the landward side of both ships. The smoke appeared to come from some kind of metal tubes sticking out of the vessels—tubes that hadn’t been there last time I had seen the ship—and a moment later I heard that awful sound again…

I swam on, almost out of my mind with exhaustion and fear.

Duthrick was on the deck when I clambered up the rope netting they let down for me. He gaped when he saw who it was they had fished out of the water. He didn’t notice Ruarth, who perched himself unobtrusively on the rigging above.

I stood there in a growing pool of water and looked at those horrible things that had made—and were still making—all the noise. There was an acrid smell in the air that was almost as bad as dunmagic… I knew then that this was what the Keepers had been protecting so assiduously in the ship’s holds.

‘Syr-sylv,’ I said, my voice hoarse, ‘what is this?’

He gave a superior sort of smile. ‘Look,’ he said. ‘Look, Blaze—at Creed.’

I looked. There was another roar of sound, another flash of flame, more smoke, more smell. The deck reverberated beneath my feet. I wanted to run away, to hide, but I did as Duthrick asked. I looked at Creed. And saw the wall of a dwelling
burst.
When the dust and smoke had cleared away, I could see the black gape of a hole—a hole larger than a man—in what had been the wall.

I felt the blood leave my face. I had to clutch the railing to keep myself from falling. I didn’t understand a thing. But the connection between the tubes on the ships, the hideous sound they made and the hole in the wall was clear. These tubes were throwing things at Creed just as a bow sends an arrow, but these projectiles moved so fast I couldn’t even see them. More than that, when they landed they seemed to do a disproportionate amount of damage.

I’d never felt so utterly at a loss. Tor and Alain and Flame were still there somewhere, and I didn’t know how to save them.

I turned to Duthrick. ‘
Sylvmagic?
Sylv powers should not be used to kill!’

He was still smug. ‘It’s not magic. Anyone could do this, were they taught what to use and how to use it.’

‘Stop it!’

‘Stop it? You asked for our attack today! You’ll have to tell me about that bird some time, by the way. A Dustel, I assume? I’ve heard of such… Anyway, I assumed you had a good motive for your request.’

I hunted around for a reason that would stop him. ‘Flame is in there. She is your one lead to the whereabouts of the Castlemaid. She alone knows—and she does know; I’m sure of that. In fact,’ I added, improvising, ‘there is a good chance that the Castlemaid is in Creed right at this moment.’

‘You have proof of that?’

‘I’d bet my life on it.’

‘Flame told me she would deliver the Castlemaid if I saved you, you know.’

Shit!
‘You agreed?’

‘No. She insisted I attack immediately, but we weren’t ready. Besides, I was sure she was lying. If she knew where the Castlemaid was, she would have said so before. No woman would have her arm cut off rather than give up that information.’

That’s what you think, you cruddy bastard, I thought. Flame’s worth ten of you… ‘Trust me, Duthrick,’ I said. ‘The Castlemaid is in Creed.’

The look he gave me was heavy with suspicion, not trust. ‘If I halt the attack, I lose the element of surprise. The dunmagicker might escape.’

‘You have the land routes guarded?’

‘Of course. With archers. And wards. They were already in place; we’d planned an assault at dawn tomorrow anyway. Blaze, you had better have a good reason for telling me to change the time of the attack. And an even better one for wanting it to stop.’

‘I didn’t know you were going to—to
—disintegrate
the village! And Flame and the Castlemaid along with it! Look, Duthrick, what are you worrying about? Even if the dunmagicker escapes this—this bombardment, he will run into your guards.’ That is, i
f he doesn’t slip past them, blurring himself with dunmagic, if he doesn’t flatten the wards with dunmagic…
The trouble was, Duthrick knew the possibilities as well as I did. Which was why he was standing off the coast, hurling his whatever-they-were at Creed. He’d already lost too many sylvs to this dunmagicker; he didn’t want to lose more. ‘Give me a boat to shore, and an hour and I’ll bring Flame off for you. And if I find the Castlemaid, I’ll bring her as well. One hour without shooting from the moment my foot touches the shore, Duthrick.’