A Shadow on the Glass (66 page)

The door opposite was abruptly flung open and the tall woman he had seen two nights ago—Vartila no doubt—appeared in the doorway, fully dressed but with feet bare, bent low in a coughing fit.

Looking up she caught sight of Llian through the smoke and said hoarsely, “Gend, is that you? What is happening? Are we afire?” Then, realizing that she was speaking to an intruder, her face became a mask.

She threw out an arm at him, her mouth working silently. Llian leapt at her with his shoulder and knocked her back wards into the room. She disappeared in the smoke and there was a crash as though she had brought down a cupboard. Syllables hissed out of the dark: alien, incomprehensible. A tingle ran up the back of his legs.

He jumped backwards through the door and slammed it shut, cutting off the sound in his ears, though it continued in side his head, growing deeper and slower until it resembled the croak of an old frog. A figure appeared in the hall in front of him; Llian struck the man in the throat with his fist and ran past.

The croak in his mind had grown to a dull rumble, the tingle in his legs became a sharp, spreading ache. Each foot step was a shock of pain. He was dimly aware of a dull glow seeping through the cracks in the hot floorboards. The hall ended in a closed door. Beyond was the windowless back room where Karan was held.

Someone shouted behind him. He turned, a jolt of agony shot up his spine and his legs and arms went numb for a second. Vartila appeared out of the smoke, arm still out stretched.

Llian smashed the oil lamp down on the floor in front of her.
Whoooomph!
A curtain of fire seared across the hall. He unbolted Karan’s door and leapt through into the dim room, slammed the door and in a frenzy piled the shabby furniture
in a heap behind it—wooden table, chests, washstand. The air was much clearer inside.

A harsh chuckle came from the far corner of the room. Karan was sitting half-upright on the wooden bed, supporting herself on an elbow. Her eyes were hollow, luminous; one cheek bore an irregular purple bruise. She was laughing. She held out her hand to him.

“Dear Llian. I knew that it was you. You should say, ‘I’ve come to rescue you.’”

Llian leapt across the room and fell to his knees beside her. They embraced awkwardly. Flames roared outside the door. There was shouting, but it died away. The numbness began to disappear from his legs.

“I was sure you were dead. There was so much blood.”

“Little of it mine, fortunately.”

Karan sat there for a moment, her chin resting on Llian’s shoulder, then disengaged herself and said, still smiling, “I
do not
wish to appear ungrateful, particularly since you’ve come all this way for me, but you
have
set fire to the house and barricaded the door, and if you look around you’ll see that the room has no window. Do you have a plan?”

“Through the floor,” said Llian. “The boards are old and rotten. We can escape under the house while they are saving themselves. They won’t even know.” He pulled out his knife, inserted the blade between two boards at the corner of the room and prised. The blade snapped off at the hilt. Llian hurled the useless thing away, looking around wildly for a tool.

“The washstand,” Karan whispered urgently. “It’s iron.”

Llian regarded it doubtfully. Karan hobbled over to the piled furniture and dragged the washstand awkwardly to the middle of the floor. “Here, this board is already split. You’ll have to do it,” she croaked. “I can’t use this hand.” Her wrist was red and swollen. She saw him looking at it.

“They did not bother to bandage it after,” she said.

A chill went over Llian at her words, and he saw that the laughter was just a glaze over her terrible hurts. He turned away, staring vacantly at the barricaded door, full of urges to smash and maim. Smoke was beginning to ooze around the edges and a dark scorch was growing in the center of the door.

“Llian,” she called again.

The washstand had a thick iron base. Llian heaved it above his head and brought it down on the nearest floor board with great force. The board shattered into splinters. He smashed the next one in the same way, cast the wash-stand to one side and kicked the broken pieces down the hole. Smoke gushed into the room. The hole was nearly a pace long and twice as wide as his head. He worked his way down into it.

“Hold on to my cloak and follow me.”

Karan looked dubiously at the belching hole, then back at the door, which had begun to smolder. She took a deep breath, then nodded.

Beneath the house the air was stiflingly hot and smoky, and toward the front the smoke glowed red. As they crawled away from the hole a crash came from behind. The door or perhaps the wall had fallen in. In an instant the whole room was ablaze. A blast of heat came through the hole behind them, searing Karan’s bare toes. She clung to Llian’s cloak in a daze, jerking herself forward each time he moved, eyes running, lungs burning, head throbbing where once she crashed into a projecting brick. Above them the floor was now too hot to touch.

Finally they emerged at the back of the house. Llian had chosen a place where a thorny bush, neglected, had grown tall, and into it they crept gratefully, Karan so weary and weak that Llian had to support her.

He peered out. The whole right side of the house was ablaze and flames were leaping from the roof, but the back of the yard was yet in darkness. There was no one about, al though shouts could be heard from the front He took Karan under the arms and, half-carrying, half-dragging her, made his way across the back of the yard, through a tumbledown fence and up the far side of the house next door. They found shelter in a hedge. He wrapped his cloak around her and Karan sank down among the leaf litter, while Llian went out on to the street and mingled with the crowd that had gathered to watch the burning.

There were three people in the front yard of the house, and as Llian watched two more leapt through the front door, dragging a third between them. One was Vartila. The crowd murmured but made no offer of help.

That’s all accounted for, Llian thought, turning back, save the one they had carried onto the boat. By the time he returned Karan was standing up. He retrieved the bag of clothing from beneath the hedge, gave her his arm and they walked slowly back through the narrow streets of Name to the waterfront. They were out of sight of the house when they heard a crash, and flame leapt briefly above the rooftops. The roof had fallen in.

“With luck they won’t discover our absence until the morning,” said Llian. “We must be gone from Name by then.”

Karan gave him an enquiring look.

“I found the fellow that she got the boat from. He will take us.”

It was still well short of dawn when they reached Pender’s hovel. Llian pounded on the door. After a minute they saw a light moving about inside, and a woman’s voice called. “Who’s there? What do you want?”

“Wake Pender! Open the door! We need his boat!”

The light disappeared. A minute passed. The light re turned. Pender’s voice, a mixture of fear and defiance, came through the door. “Go away! Come back in the morning!”

“Pender! I am Garntor,” said Llian. “Remember our bar gain. Open the door at once. Hurry! You are in danger too.”

Silence.

“Hurry!” Llian called again. “The Whelm are coming. We must flee at once.”

The bar scraped against the door and it was opened a crack, then fully. Pender stood there, bare-legged, unshaven, his stomach straining at the waist of his nightgown.

Llian pushed through the doorway. Pender fell back in alarm, his hands upraised.

“Don’t be afraid,” said Llian, pulling silver tars from the pouch that Wistan had given him so long ago. “I keep
my
bargains.”

Pender took the coins, the look of relief on his face almost comical.

“Now I need your help once more. You must take us down the river to Sith right away.”

At the mention of Sith, Karan, who had been standing be hind him, moved out into the light and began to speak. Llian laid his hand on her arm and squeezed; she stopped at once. Pender stared at the pale and filthy pair. Karan, bruised, blistered and barefoot, holding a badly swollen wrist. Llian’s face was covered in soot and dust and on one side his hair was singed back almost to the scalp.

Pender pointed at Karan. “She was dead. I saw her,” he quavered. “What are you? Necroturges? Mancers? You don’t need my help. Go away!”

“You must; already you are in trouble. You must flee at once.”

Pender turned and went heavily into the other room. A
woman appeared in the doorway. She was small and thin with glossy black hair to her shoulders, a narrow arching nose and gray eyes. She wore a faded shift with blue flowers embroidered across the shoulders. Her feet were bare on the earth floor of the hut. Llian strode over to her. She looked anxiously up at him but did not draw back.

“What do you want of us?” she asked, in a sibilant accent.

“We are all in danger from these Whelm—the ones who hired your boat three nights past. They are hunting us, and neither are
you
safe, now.”

The woman looked around the hut. “We have nothing here anyway!” She considered for a moment. “Name is a cold, unfriendly place and I won’t miss it. We will take you. The fee is five silver tars: two for the journey and three for the trouble you have caused us.”

Llian gave her the money. She walked into the other room.

“Get the boat,” they heard her say to Pender. “We leave in half an hour.”

She came back out again, smiled and held out a hand. “My name is Hassien.” Her accent made it sound like
Hassssien
.

She disappeared back into the other room. Pender came sullenly by and went out the front door.

“We have to talk,” Karan said in his ear. ‘To go to Sith may not be best, now. Besides, there is the matter of the Mirror.”

Llian regarded her complacently. “Then let us talk, but later. We must be away before dawn. First let me bind your wrist again.”

By the time the job was done and Karan had dressed her self, Pender was running the boat down the slips in the dark ness. Karan waited in the shadows by the river bank,
shadows that were broken only by the light of a distant street lamp. It was a dark, cloudy night. Llian went back to the house and found Hassien coming down the path with two small children.

“Is there else to fetch?” he asked her.

Hassien shook her head, the light from the window be hind glistering on her hair. “We have little and it is all in the boat.” He turned and walked with her.

“Get in,” said Pender in a sour tone. Hassien laid the children down on a blanket at the bow and sat beside them. Even in the faint light Karan looked wan. She stumbled and fell against Llian as she tried to climb in, clinging to his arm for a moment to steady herself.

Pender untied the rope; Hassien pushed the boat away from the shore with an oar and slowly they drifted into the current. Pender dropped the steering oar into place, spat over the side in the direction of Name and directed the vessel away from the projecting wharves toward the flow. The street lamps along the waterfront drifted backwards, developed haloes, disappeared. The skiff entered the fog lying in midstream and vanished.

Dawn came, a cold gray light creeping across the sky. The fog broke into patches and suddenly it was gone. Karan stirred, pulling the cloak up around her neck. Llian was staring straight down the river, lost in his thoughts. His brown hair was frizzy on one side from the fire, gray with ash and dust; his pale brown eyes were bloodshot; his face, hands and clothes smudged with soot. Karan elbowed him. He turned to her with a smile.

“Ah, yes, you wanted to talk about something.”

She put her lips to his ear. “The Mirror!” she hissed.

Llian pretended not to understand.

“The Mirror!” she repeated.

Llian grinned smugly. He looked at her, then reached into the inner pocket of his coat. The smooth lining was cold to the touch. The Mirror was not there.

He frowned. He searched carefully through his pockets, then frantically, over and over again. Uncertainty, consternation, finally a sick despair washed over him as he scrabbled through his pack, through the bag he had carried, his pockets again, knowing that he had never taken it out of the secure, deep inner pocket, realizing that the Mirror was gone and he had no idea when he had lost it.

“It’s gone,” he said, crushed.

Karan frowned. “What’s gone?

Llian looked at her. “The Mirror!” he groaned. “I went back to the campsite and found it. And now it’s gone!”

Karan stared at him. “You found it, and you’ve lost it al ready?” her voice rising.

Llian sank his head in his hands. “I had it in my cloak and now it’s gone. It must have fallen out under the house.” He felt like leaping over the side.

O
h, Llian, you’re such a fool,” said Karan, suddenly realizing what had happened.

Llian looked up sharply. Karan could not control herself; her face dissolved in a gale of laughter. “Such an absent-minded fool,” she repeated, kissing him all over his face, laughing until the tears ran down her dirty cheeks. Hassien looked across at the noise.