A Shadow on the Glass (7 page)

“By the time they get it I will be dead,” said Karan, sagging down into the mud again, sweating with the fever. “Please help me. I have assets in Bannador. I can pay whatever you ask.”

The unfortunate were everywhere, but something in the girl’s face moved Maigraith, for she too had borne cruelty in silence. “How much is your indenture?”

“Ten silver tars,” said Karan.

Maigraith said nothing for such a long time that Karan began to wonder whether she begrudged her generous impulse, or even had the money.

Finally Maigraith spoke. “For a bit of gruel? You could eat it off gold plates for less. Very well, I will pay it. And in return, if I ever need help you will repay the obligation.”

“I will do anything you ask,” said Karan.

That night Karan was overcome by the fever and lay near death for days. Maigraith nursed her tirelessly, but finally, feeling that Karan was slipping away, she took her to her liege Faichand, a small woman with translucent skin and ageless eyes. Karan’s memories of her illness were hazy, but she knew that there had been trouble between Maigraith and Faichand over her. As soon as Karan was well enough, Maigraith had taken her back to Thurkad, a month’s journey, and made sure that she had a safe escort home to Gothryme…

Karan had returned home to find that, despite Rachis’s best efforts, Gothryme was sinking under years of drought and bad seasons, and her four years of travel had used up all its reserves. In spite of her land and her manor, she was now a
pauper. Only the most rigid economies had allowed her the trip to Chanthed, the only indulgence in the last two years. Unless a miracle occurred, the autumn festival would be beyond her. Now Maigraith was here. What did she want? The ten pieces of silver had been sent back long ago but the obligation was a tremendous one and could not be denied.

“Maigraith!” said Karan, suppressing the memories. “Welcome. Come down.” She held the bridle while Maigraith dismounted.

Karan examined her enigmatic rescuer. Maigraith was of middle height and slender, with silky chestnut hair caressing her shoulders. Her oval face was striking, only the tenseness of jaw and the unhappy curve of mouth spoiling the perfection of her features. Her eyes were blue, but a strange blue that looked as though it was hiding something. Her clothes were somber, concealing; her only ornament an ebony bracelet, a plain, beautiful thing. Her every movement was deliberate, restrained.

“You took a lot of finding,” Maigraith said. Her accent was flawless, yet she spoke with a certain formality that suggested it was not her native tongue.

“My family has dwelt here for a thousand years,” said Karan, feeling as though Maigraith reproached her for living in such an out-of-the-way place. “Come in. I’ll get you some cider.”

“Water will do just as well,” said Maigraith. “I like to keep my wits about me.”

Karan recalled that Maigraith was abstemious and controlled in all her habits. She fetched a pitcher of water and two drinking bowls.

“Are you planning to stay long?” she asked, leading her guest through the keep and out into a yard enclosed by verandas on three sides. The posts were festooned with elderly vines, though this early in the season the grapes were like
hard green peas. Karan offered Maigraith the best chair, an old cane seat that groaned embarrassingly under her slight weight.

Maigraith sat bolt upright with her knees together and her hands in her lap, inhibiting Karan from her normal careless posture. “No! I came to ask you to repay your obligation. Do you still hold to it?”

“Of course. Whatever is in my power.”

“You are a sensitive!”

“How did you know that?” asked Karan, alarmed. If Maigraith could tell, maybe other people could too.

“Don’t be afraid, Your secret is quite safe.”

“How?” cried Karan. “I must know.”

“In your fever two years ago you unconsciously made a link to me.”

My first big mistake, Karan thought. And it tells me something about you too. Who
are
you, that you understand such things?

“Can you control it?” Maigraith continued.

“I beg your pardon?” Karan said.

“Can you deliberately link your mind to another, so as to send messages and receive them?”

“I have done it,” she said in a tiny voice, “though my talent is seldom reliable.”

“That is good,” said Maigraith, ignoring the qualification. “I have a job to do and I need your support while I do it. That is how you will repay your obligation.”

Will repay!
Karan thought. You might at least do me the courtesy of framing it as a request. Already she felt dominated and overwhelmed. “What do you want me to do?”

“My liege Faichand requires me to recover something that she lost long ago. I cannot complete the task without the aid of a link,” Maigraith said. “That is why I need you.”

“Well, that seems simple enough,” said Karan, and, having
agreed, she wanted to get it done as soon as possible. “We can begin right after breakfast if you like. Where would you like to work?”

Maigraith laughed humorlessly. “It’s not so simple. Nor can we do it here.”

“That’s all right. Wherever you want to go!” Surely it would take only a few days, or at most a week’s trip to Thurkad and back.

“We have to go to Fiz Gorge.”

“
Fiz Gorgo!
But that’s all the way across Meldorin—150 leagues at least!”

“At least,” said Maigraith.

“I can’t leave Gothryme for months at this time of year! Isn’t Fiz Gorgo Yggur’s stronghold?” She pronounced the name
Ig-ger
. “It would take an army to get past Yggur’s guards.”

Maigraith did not speak for a minute or two. She was deep in thought, remembering what had happened and sorting through which parts of it Karan could safely be told, if any.

Just a week ago Faichand had appeared in a dreadful flap and ordered her to go straight to Fiz Gorgo to recover a relic that she needed urgently. Maigraith had gone all cold inside. She knew enough about Fiz Gorgo and about Yggur to realize that without help the task was impossible. But Faichand did not accept excuses—if something had to be done it must be done. Even at the best of times she was impossible to satisfy.

Maigraith knew that she would need a sensitive, to get into such a well-guarded place and out again. She had mentioned Karan’s name but her mistress had grown furiously angry.
Go alone! Whoever heard of a sensitive that could be relied upon?
Maigraith knew it too: sensitives jumped at shadows, broadcasting their every fear to the world.

She had been in despair. Without time to plan and spy out the defenses, without assistance, the task was impossible. Using a sensitive was a chancy business, but what choice did she have? And Karan was the only one nearby.

Karan cleared her throat, waking Maigraith from her reverie. Maigraith looked her in the eye. Little of that she could tell Karan.

“I have to take back a relic that Yggur has. It… belongs to my liege and she needs it urgently. Once we get to Fiz Gorgo you will make a link to support me, so that I can get inside the fortress, and find my way out again.”

Karan could not believe it “But Yggur is one of the most powerful warlords in Meldorin, and a mancer as well!”

“My liege is stronger yet,” said Maigraith, “and I have a certain mastery of the Secret Art too. It will be difficult for me, but there will be no danger to you. You need not come within a league of the walls of Fiz Gorgo.” She looked troubled. “Please, you can never know what it is like for me. Nothing I do is ever good enough for Faichand. Failure is unthinkable.”

The plea touched Karan’s soft heart in a way that Maigraith’s arrogance could never have, but she resisted. The very idea was like a nightmare. “I have no stomach for spying and stealing,” Karan said, “nor any skill at it. You’ll have to find someone else.”

“So!” Maigraith said coldly. “Honor and duty mean nothing to you. I had thought differently. Well, you have no choice. I don’t know of anyone else.”

“What you ask is out of proportion to the service you rendered me,” Karan said desperately. “Name another task and I will render it faithfully, no matter what it takes.”

“That’s what you said before, as I recall.”

“But all it took was silver, and that I have repaid. You ask me to risk my life.”

“All it took was silver!
I saved your life. I nursed you back from the grave at the risk of the fever. I carried you all the way to Thurkad. I put coin in your pocket and made sure you were escorted safely home. You paid back the
least
of the debt.”

Karan felt trapped. She had not thought that her promise would be so taken advantage of. “I have to go to Chanthed at the end of autumn,” she said, trying everything she could think of.

“Do you put pleasure before duty? What odd folk you are here in Bannador. Anyway, we will be back by then.”

“I can’t! I have a duty here.”

Maigraith was relentless. “You have a steward—you had been traveling for years when I met you.”

“He is old now. Besides, I don’t have the money. We have had four years of drought and every grint is precious.”

“You can afford Chanthed though! Of course, I will pay all your expenses, and a handsome fee, double the normal rate for a sensitive.”

“A fee?” said Karan, feeling her last resort stripped away.

“Four silver tars a day for sixty days, to be paid in Sith on the way back. I repeat, do you honor your promise?”

Karan was amazed into silence. Money had always been scarce in her life. The figure mentioned was a fortune, enough to get her estate out of trouble, though she would rather have gone without and stayed at home.

After years of travel Karan had grown to love the tranquillity of her home, the solitude that she could find in the mountains at her back door, the knowing that she had no one to answer to. Maigraith was selfish and unfeeling. Even without the perils of Fiz Gorgo, months in her company would be almost unbearable. But she knew Maigraith would
not give way, and fee or no fee, in the end it was impossible to refuse her. The debt was a duty, and duty was sacred.

“I will do it,” Karan said, reluctantly and with a deep foreboding.

“Then swear, by what is most sacred to you, that you will serve me faithfully until it is done.”

Her beloved father, Galliad, had been killed in the mountains when she was eight, beaten to death for a few coins. He was her most sacred image. “I swear by the memory of my father that I will do this for you,” said Karan, feeling crushed.

So it was settled. Karan had a long talk to Rachis, who was not at all pleased. She put her affairs in order and the next morning they left Gothryme at dawn.

T
he valley of the Ryme was a meandering line of fog as they set out. Maigraith skirted Tolryme town, heading south-east toward Sith. Karan followed her glumly. She was normally good-humored, but Maigraith intimidated and inhibited her. They rode in silence along the dusty lanes of Bannador, between hedges that afforded rare glimpses into stony paddocks where even the weeds were wilting in the drought.

At noon, with the sun blasting down on her old felt hat, they stopped briefly by a pebbly creek for a drink and a crust of bread. Karan headed down toward the water and began to take her boots off to soak her hot feet.

“No time for that,” Maigraith said curtly. “We’ve got to be back in Sith in sixty days.”

“Sixty days! Impossible!”

Maigraith had taken out a small map on parchment. “The roads are good for much of the way. A king’s courier would do the distance in thirty days. Surely we can in twice that.”

“A courier changes horses every day.”

“And so will we, if we have to, but these were the best beasts in Thurkad. Come on.”

Karan was left wondering just how much gold Maigraith carried in the wallet inside her shirt. Surely more than she, Karan, had seen in her life.

It was a long time since Karan had ridden a horse, and at the end of the day she was so bruised and sore that she could hardly walk. She sat by the fire, rubbing salve into her chafed thighs while Maigraith cooked dinner.

Maigraith handed her a bowl of something that looked like multi-colored gruel. “What’s this?” Karan laughed. “Glue to stick me to my saddle?”

Maigraith frowned. She was quite lacking in a sense of humor. “It’s your dinner.”

It was horrible—mashed grain and dried-up bits of smoked meat and leathery dried vegetables boiled together into a gummy mass. Karan ate it without a word, then hobbled over to her sleeping pouch and pulled it over her head. This was worse than her worst imaginings, and it was only the first day.

They rode hard across the fertile meadows of Iagador onto the High Way, the main north–south road, and raced down that to Sith. Maigraith avoided everyone on the road and no one troubled them, for she gave off such an air of deadly competence that even the roughest villains kept their distance.

The city state of Sith was a trading nation built on an island in the middle of the mighty River Garr, and it was a clean, orderly place where law was law and life was devoted to business. Sith was a beautiful city built of yellow stone, entirely covering the slopes of the island. Here Maigraith bought supplies for the long trek south, exactly the same
food as before. Karan’s heart sank further. They had been six days on the road, and Maigraith’s cooking was by now unbearably tedious, the same every night and cooked without any herb or spice or condiment. She did all the cooking.